Hiding out when the rest of the room was having a great battle, sounded like a good thing, and it was safer than dodging about avoiding sharp things poking at my ribs, but it was also scary as heck, not to mention noisy because of all the excited men (and women, I think, because several voices were higher in pitch and some of the boots looked smaller with narrower widths.)
I suppose it was about twenty minutes later (or an hour, perhaps, if the kidnapping queen’s three men could engage in combat for that long against fresh soldiers who’d been waiting their turn to step forward,) when I heard the sound of the fighting growing less energetic. The grunts were fewer, the foists forward — those great leaps and charges less — and the boot action felt sparser.
Strangely, I hadn’t heard or seen any bodies falling to the ground. I hoped that when I finally rose up to view the scene, there wouldn’t be dead bodies and blood with guts hanging out of some of the lifeless corpses. I shivered thinking about that possibility.
The room had grown stinkier, so many soldiers exercising at their full activity level, and thus perfuming the air most unpleasantly. The food ladened wooden table that I was hanging out under probably had sausages and eggs that needed tossing. Although, if it had been only twenty minutes so far, and the food was fresh that morning, maybe not. But if there really were a bunch of inert bodies lying about, those which were out of my line of sight, then who would want to eat food that had been in the same area?
I was becoming morbid, I realized. But it had been a rough couple of days with dungeon taunts and performance nervousness, followed by attacking queens with their armies. I guess I deserved to be free to have such melancholy thoughts.
I could hear that at last, the fighting had completely stopped. I won’t say the air was still, with only the sound of heavy breathing from heaving chests after so much physical endeavor, but the spats had sputtered out, and then, it was only queen vs. queen screeching at each other.
“What have you done with the human girl? Where is she? If she has been injured in any way, it will be off with your head, royal blood or not.” That was Queen Moragana screaming at leaf blower, schoolyard rowdiness, or rock star concert volume.
An outpouring of yells was followed by a panicked shriek which sounded like it had been caused by a sharp pointy thing pricking an arm or a back. I knew the sound came from the unnamed queen who’d kidnapped me because she immediately started calling out for her three guards to come save her.
Whatever that queen was about to say next, I didn’t quite hear because a strange man, bending down to pick up his dropped sword, must have seen the yellow fabric of my dress. He squatted down and focused his eyes on the rest of me. At the same moment our eyes met, he called out to his queen that he’d just found the missing human girl.