The Bounty Hunter

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

It didn’t take long for Safita to decide that it wasn’t worth risking returning to The Flying Dagger to pack up the few of her meagre possessions that she wasn’t carrying; now that the night was over Ultuc would almost certainly be waiting for her there and there was nothing which she valued enough to risk going back. Stopping off at a small stall on the street she bought a few loaves of bread and some salted meat, wrapping them up and putting them in her pack before heading towards the end of the city and out into the wilderness.

It took her five days to reach the wall between the Outlands and the Palace and it was hard to shake the old feeling of fear which rose in her as she approached it; she hadn’t even tried to get back before, knowing that there were few ways for her to make money in the Palace and preferring to wait until she had earned enough to live on before crossing the wall. As she neared it she considered how to get over without being observed – the wall wasn’t meant to be crossed in either direction and there were only a few places where the guards were able to get through and leave any lawbreakers outside. Crossing the wall was going to be the hardest part of her journey – the guards were trained to kill anyone attempting to cross before even asking their name and it was only once she was dead that they would find out Safita was allowed to cross back.

She crept towards the wall, keeping low under the cover of the trees and sticking to the shadows; her left hand reached instinctively for her knife, tapping her boot to reassure herself that it was still there before her right hand did the same on the other side. She slunk towards the wall, her dark cloak shielding her from the eyes of the guards, and raised a hand to it. Safita had been hoping to be able to climb up it but the stones it was made of fitted together too smoothly to allow her any proper hand or footholds. Pressing herself up against it she inched her way along, heading for the guard tower; with every twig which snapped she stopped, freezing and trying to breathe as little as possible. Eventually she reached the tower and, as luck would have it, found that one of the trees in the forest had branches which stretched over towards the tower. Safita shimmied up it lithely, jumping from branch to branch, her light weight barely shaking the leaves on the lower branches. As she headed towards the upper branches she slowed down, feeling them sway beneath her while the rustling of the leaves threatened to give her away.

The branch quivered under her weight as she wriggled along it, the rough bark digging into her abdomen and clinging to the fabric of her clothes; resisting her and tugging at her, scratching her and sticking to her while small nubbins dug into her soft flesh and caused pinpricks of pain all along it. As she neared the wall the branch began to thin out and her weight made it droop inexorably towards the top of the tower; with each inch she moved forward the branch bent some more, until Safita was left clutching it, hanging on for dear life with her feet and knees wrapped around it too. She could feel the branch swaying under her weight, dropping lower and lower, and her body froze while her mind was paralysed by abject terror; had she been able to see the ground through the darkness she would have seen the way it was moving beneath her, both due to her movement and the way her head swam. Her hands burned from holding on so tightly and they burned even more when she slipped, plunging forwards; Safita caught herself just in time and the branch jerked unhappily, dangling her even closer to the solid mass of the tower. With strength of resolve she thought impossible to muster while under the grip of fear this tough she decided to jump for the wall; through the whispering of the wind and the rustling of the leaves she could hear the branches, specifically the branch to which she was now clutching, creaking and her limbs grew cold under the two-pronged attack of the wind and her dread. As she crawled, painfully slowly, towards the wall, she felt the branch slipping, heard the twigs beneath her body begin to rip from the tree and the branch’s complaints growing louder and louder; with a shock the branch jerked once more and she heard the crack which rippled through the night, loud as a thunderclap to her startled ears; she reached her hand out, hoping desperately that she would be able to reach the wall and so safety. When she could not she shuffled a tiny bit further, her right arm still outstretched while her left hugged the branch. Another snap shot through the night and Safita’s dry throat became even drier. However, her fingers were nearly at the wall; she moved forwards another miniscule increment and reached again but the wall was still out of reach.