Mercedes Lackey - Sleeping Beauty

Lily put the mirror down and began to pace; though her body moved restlessly, her mind was curiously calm. "I can still feel The Tradition putting pressure on the situation, so we can assume something or someone will come to her rescue."

"Or try to kill her again," Jimson said glumly.

"Well we can deal with the Huntsman — does the man have a name?" she added irritably. "At any rate I am fairly sure I can find a way to tie him up, at least temporarily... in fact, I know exactly how." She felt just a little satisfaction at that. "I'll put him to looking for her, and partner him with someone trustworthy. I'll have to do this carefully, so it doesn't look like my idea, but I think I can manipulate things in our favor." She ran over the list of Thurman's best men in her mind. "Hodges and May. They are both Captains of the Guard and technically outrank him. I can reinforce that by putting them in charge of the search effort. He won't be able to shake them, and they're suspicious of me — well, of 'Queen Sable."'

She rang for the servant again. The poor man. He was going to get a back injury from spending so much time bent over in a bow.

"I want to be informed as soon as the Huntsman returns," she said. "And gather the Guard. Princess Rosamund must be found."

This was Eltaria. Rosa was an Eltarian Princess who studied The Tradition. So Rosa had known all of her life that there were some skills an Eltarian Princess needed to have that... were not generally in the curriculum of a Royal or even a Noble.

She knew, basically, how to clean clothing and a room, how to mend garments, how to plain-sew as well as embroider, and how to cook very, very basic food. She could not make bread, but she could make griddle cakes. She could make porridge, soup and stew. She could milk a cow or a goat. She could cook game over a campfire after cleaning and skinning it herself, and she could start the campfire herself. She could spin, and in a pinch, knit and weave. She knew how to hunt, of course, and shoot; most nobles knew that. But she also knew how to set snares and traps, choose wood, find edible plants and knew a half a dozen mushrooms that were safe to eat.

In short, she had most of the skills her mother had. After all her mother had been a shepherdess before she was a Queen.

An Eltarian Princess never knew if The Tradition was going to decide to dump her in the middle of nowhere and force her to fend for herself.

And now, faced with a filthy kitchen, and seven sullen "masters," she needed those skills.

In her mind, she started giving them names. The biggest, she called "Bully," because he shoved everyone around, not just her. The eldest was "Deaf," because he was, or nearly, but since he didn't speak at all, and none of the others spoke to him, it didn't seem to matter; pushing and pointing pretty much conveyed everything that needed to be said. There was "Sly," who could never look at anyone straight on; "Surly," whose every other word was a curse; "Angry," who was too out of sorts even to curse, and just glared; "Lumpy," who, when not eating, just sat and stared into space; and "Coward," who deferred to everyone except her.

"Need meat," Bully said when they were on their second bowl of the stuff. He glared at Coward, who cringed. "Ye didn't get meat."

"'S the storm, see? Can't check the traps inna storm!" Coward whined. "What'f I get struck by lightnin'?"

"What if I shove me foot up yer arse?" snarled Bully. "Ye got one job, tha's traps. We need meat. Dwarf gotta have meat t'dig. Tha's yer job, cause yer shite at diggin', ye lazy sod."

Coward sank down in his chair and whimpered into his bowl. Bully indicated to Rosa that he wanted more by the simple expedient of flinging the empty bowl at her and grunting at the kettle.

They pretty much ate the kettle bare, left the dirty bowls and spoons on the table and shuffled off to some other part of the cottage. To sleep, she presumed. She gathered everything up and started cleaning — the two kettles first, and since it didn't seem that they minded a bit of ash in their food, the second one got filled with coals from the fire to have its insides burned out.

It didn't appear that the Dwarves cared what they ate or when, so she did what was easiest: she took the clean kettle and filled it full of water and dried peas with some salt and set it to cooking all night for pease porridge. They could eat that in the morning. Right now, she was too tired to think past morning. Her hands were a mess; she was filthy, bruised, exhausted, wanted to sit on the floor and howl with fear and grief; and at the moment, the only thing good about her life was that the Huntsman wasn't going to be able to kill her. Tonight, anyway.

In the morning, the Dwarves woke her with the sound of their thumping and quarreling. With that warning she had the bowls full of pease porridge waiting on the table for them, even though she was sleepy and muddleheaded and so stiff and sore from sleeping on the stones that her eyes leaked tears with every stab of pain. They said nothing to her about the food, which she knew wasn't particularly good, which just told her that their own cooking must have been pretty bad.

Then again, judging by what she'd had to scrape out of the bowls, it was stuff that the Palace cooks would have beaten an apprentice for making, just before throwing him out the door onto the rubbish pile. If they noticed she was crying, they said nothing about that, either.

When they were full, they stomped out of the kitchen and headed into the cellar, all but Coward, who went out the door into the forest. So their mine must be below the cottage, and they reached it by the cellar. How had they found her in that tree? Was it an extra way in that they had been checking? Did they seize her thinking she was a thief coming to loot their mine? It couldn't have been a very good one, since the really good mines were all in the mountains; she wondered what they were mining. But she didn't wonder for long; there were a lot of other things she needed to get done right now. She had to find out just what her options were, here.

She explored the cottage as far as her chain would reach, which took her just outside the kitchen door and to every room in the cottage. There had been a kitchen garden there, next to the door, once. There were at least a few hardy herbs still struggling. Mint, of course. Nothing killed mint. She could just reach a few feet away, as far as the outhouse, but at least that meant she could start a garden midden for garbage. She had the sinking feeling she was going to need it.

She quickly discovered that absolutely nothing in the cottage, not the heaviest tools or the sharpest chisel, made the faintest scratch on the loop of metal on the hearth, the chain or the manacle. She hadn't really expected them to, since she doubted that the Dwarves were so stupid as to leave the tools to free herself in the reach of their captive, but it was disappointing anyway.

They'd told her to "clean," but given the state of their house and themselves, it appeared that their idea of what was acceptable was set to a standard a lot lower than hers.

Good.

She got a stick, picked up their discarded clothing with it, started a fire in the kitchen garden with a big cauldron of water over it and boiled the entire lot. That was as much in the way of laundry as she intended to do. She did sweep, and swept everything out the kitchen door to the place where she was making a midden, because there was a prodigious amount of petrified or rotting food, bones and other nastiness. She had no intention of scrubbing the floors, or anything, unless they ordered her to, or she just couldn't stand it herself. And she wasn't using the outhouse; the stench in there was enough to knock a person over and suffocate her. Instead, she made her own place to go discreetly behind some overgrown bushes.