Mercedes Lackey - Sleeping Beauty

It wasn't fair. And it didn't help that she knew exactly what to blame.

She cried and shivered and hiccupped and cried more, sneezed and shivered and cried. She wanted her father, but her father was back at the border with his army, having delivered his new Queen ceremoniously to the palace. She wanted her mother, but her mother was in the Royal Cenotaph, and Queen Sable was —

Was an Evil Stepmother, was what she was. She had nothing in her wardrobe but black! Oh, she said it was out of respect for the late Queen Celeste, but this was Eltaria, and someone who wore nothing but black was either a poet or an Evil Sorceress, and Rosa hadn't heard Sable declaiming any sonnets or seen her scribbling in velvet-covered journals.

And besides, not three hours after the King had left again, Rosa had gone spying on the new Queen, and had seen her actually talking to some disembodied green head in a mirror! So that pretty much clinched the Sorceress part! And who else but an Evil Sorceress would have been talking to a disembodied green head?

That had been enough for her, she'd avoided her stepmother completely after that, and lived in dread of what was coming. She avoided needles, the spindles of spinning wheels, anything sharp and pointed. She kept away from balconies and only ate what she'd seen everyone else eat. She'd locked her door at night, set traps to trip up anyone coming through the window or down the chimney and had so many charms against demons and the like hung up in the canopy of her bed that they rattled softly against one another in the darkness. She'd done everything she could think of —

But she truly had not thought that a servant, no matter how sinister, would dare to raise his hand against her.

She was so cold...so cold she ached with it and jumped every time lightning struck near, which was horribly often. And every time she thought she couldn't cry anymore, a fresh shock sent her off again.

Why had her father done this? She didn't know; at times it was as if he was two different people. There was the wonderful Father who sometimes turned up without warning to teach her how to make her nightmares stop, who gave her rare, enchanted toys, like the tiny kitten that never became a cat and would go curl up on a shelf when you told it "time for bed." Then there was the King, who was always away at war, and who treated her with the grave formality of a complete stranger.

Of course he did,said that voice in her head.If you were the beloved Princess, The Tradition would make your life, your fate, even more horrible.

Where was Godmother Lily then? She'd come to the funeral, but why hadn't she healed Rosa's mother? Why hadn't she kept her father from marrying that witch?

She could remember her old nurse saying something, though. It doesn't always take a spell to turn a man's head and wits.

Just as Rosa thought that, she felt movement at her back.

And what had been, she thought, the solid wood behind her abruptly vanished.

She squeaked, frightened, confused — had lightning knocked a hole in the tree? Had it been so rotten it was now falling to pieces?

But then she felt hands!

They were grabbing her, seizing her, hauling at her clothing, her hair, her arms!

She screamed, kicked, tried to squirm away, scrabbled frantically at the edge of the hollow to pull herself out and run — no matter that it was running into the storm. That didn't matter a bit when there were dozens of hands trying to grab her! But these hands were strong, rough, and grabbed her with grips of iron, bruising her arms, pulling her hair. She screamed again, tried to writhe, and suddenly her head was enveloped in harsh, fetid, mildew smelling cloth.

She screamed again, fought, hit, kicked, but was pulled backward and down. She continued to fight, trying to grab for things blindly, caught what felt like roots and had her hands torn away from them. Then there was a tremendous blow to the back of her head, and she saw stars and for a little while, lost consciousness.

When the stars and the dazzle cleared away, she felt herself being half dragged, half carried, and when she tried to wiggle free, knew immediately she had been trussed up like game. There were ropes around her upper arms and chest, more ropes tying her ankles and wrists together; two or three people had hold of her shoulders, but her heels were dragging along a dirt surface, and every so often one of them lost his grip and let her fall. She couldn't smell anything through the mildew of the bag, but it was cold and dank, like a cave.

A long time later, or so it seemed, as she collected a whole new set of bumps and bruises, she was summarily dropped on a stone floor, and the cloth was pulled off her head.

She looked up. She was in a rough stone-walled room, with seven people in it besides herself. Two of them had lanterns. She didn't have to look up very far, her captors were all very short and the two lanterns they had were more than enough for her to see them clearly. They were very dirty little men, with long beards of various colors, beards that had bits of stone and moss and probably food in them. Their rough clothing, made of what looked like canvas and leather, was ragged and in dire need of mending. No matter their short stature; they were all heavily muscled and looked very strong.

This was, of course, because they were indeed very strong, stronger than most human men. She knew what they were, of course. They were Dwarves.

Dwarves did a great deal of the mining here in Eltaria. They had an un canny feeling for rock and earth, where the best stuff was, and how to get it out without killing themselves or anyone else.

She had seen Dwarves before, quite a few of them in fact. When they got mining concessions, it was on the basis of sharing the wealth they extracted with the Crown as well as a tithe to their Clan, and the quarterly presentations of the Crown share were actually considered a sight not to be missed. The Dwarves would turn up in amazing outfits, entire gowns made of plates of metal scarcely larger than a head of a pin for their women, chain mail that looked like knitted silk for the men, and jewelry that never failed to make jaws drop for both sexes. Beards and hair were combed, braided, perfumed and bejeweled. They were truly gorgeous.

Not this lot. They were filthier than any living being Rosa had ever seen. They hadn't so much as a copper chain around their necks, nor a garnet earring. And they stank. She doubted that their beards had ever seen a brush.

There were, of course, renegade Dwarves; there were bad Dwarves just as there were bad humans, or virtually any other race. There were Dwarves who didn't want to hand over a share of what they found to the Crown or tithe to their Clan, and dug their hidden mines furtively. Of course, because they didn't hand over the proper share to Crown and Clan, that meant that they couldn't sell their takings in the open market, which meant they had to sell it all clandestinely. That meant they got a fraction of the price they would have gotten if they'd been honest. They also went in fear of some honest Dwarf happening upon their mine, and taking it over in a mining concession by Crown fiat.

It looked as if these seven were that sort of Dwarf.

Which, for Rosa, was good news. It meant they wouldn't immediately take her to the Queen.

And since they were men, it was unlikely that they would recognize in the somewhat battered remains of her clothing, the signs that she was at the very least, nobly born. Men didn't know much about clothing, at least, not when it was modest, and not all showy velvets and satins. She just might get them to believe —

"Help me!" she blurted, looking up at them. "I'm running away from my stepmother! She hates me! She wants to do horrible things to me! I'll do anything if you'll help me!"