The Step Sister vs. Cinderella

Chapter 47

By rapid count, Paige guessed there were twenty guards in the doorless room in front of her. The many torches that surrounded the room and extended out to the hall not allowing her to doubt her estimate. She bit her lip as she pulled her head back slowly, careful not to make a sudden movement that would alert the men’s attention. Even the cool stone under her stomach didn’t stop the cold prickle of sweat to spread from her neck down to her back.

            She stood back up, taking the hand Axton offered her and trying not to let the worry and fear she felt show on her face. She jerked her head towards the end of the sporadically lit side hall they stood in and waited until they moved well away from the guard room before speaking. “There are too many of them. More than there were when they first attacked us and…”

            He nodded, his eyes holding steady to hers. “That went poorly for us, hence our current situation. What do you propose?”

            Paige tugged her sword belt straight again, her hand trembling only slightly. “We need out of here but the staircase and front door are no-goes. I don’t think we can afford the time it’ll take to find a side entrance, especially since we’re likely to run into someone and they will eventually discover that we escaped not to mention they might be guarding all the doors,” she said, beginning to pace, her hands clutching fistfuls of her dress. “That doesn’t leave us with much. The only other way out would be the-” Paige stopped and stared at Axton for a long moment.

            “What? Do you have a plan?” he asked, taking a step closer to her.

            She smiled slightly, feeling hope well back up inside of her. “How are you with heights?”

            “I do not understand.”

            “We can’t go out the doors but if we can find the right materials, we can go out a window,” she replied, already grabbing his hand and dragging him further down the hall. “We just need something to use as a rope and a window big enough for us to fit through. Kind of like Rapunzel but minus the hair and we’re going out, not in.”

            Axton matched his pace to hers, head swivelling as he looked around for a window that might serve their purpose. “It is a solid plan. My only concern is of the danger of falling should what we find not be strong enough for our weight.”

            “We’ll test it first,” she answered absently, opening the nearest door and then shutting it in disgust when all she saw was two broken chairs inside.

            Paige turned to the opposite side of the hall, yanking open the nearest door. She was happy to see the window, though she could tell that they wouldn’t fit through it. She dropped Axton’s hand so she could start hauling doors open, rejecting one after the other for too small windows. Already she could feel worry coming back to gnaw at her, her thoughts turning dark at the possibility of none of the windows being big enough for them.

            They had finished the first hall and were partway down another, this one without any torches, when Paige found something to send her spirits shooting back up again. The room she opened had clearly once been a very nice bedroom. The bed was still solid, despite the dirty stone and dust that spoke of long neglect. What had her smiling again were the blankets and hangings that were still there, dark with dirt.

           “Help me yank these down,” she said, racing forward and pulling the top blanket off. She coughed as dust puffed up around her. Her coughs got louder when Axton pulled the curtains off the bedposts. The velvet-like material seemed to hold decades worth of dirt inside of it, but Paige could still have kissed it, the cloth feeling still strong to her fingers.

            They heaped the lot of it into the centre of the room where they began tugging at both ends of each piece, checking for any tears as they both sat on the floor. Three sheets and the topmost blanket all had to be rejected, ripping or pulling apart under the sharp yanks they gave them. That still left them with two bed curtains and three blankets, more than enough to get them down from the third floor, Paige felt.

            She looked to the window but saw that it, though bigger than the ones she’d seen so far, was also too small for them. She concentrated on the cloth in front of them, tying pieces together to form a rope, Axton copying her movements a moment later. Only when they had one thick coil of patchwork rope did they stand.

            Axton shouldered the rope before Paige could do more than reach for it, nodding at the door. She sighed and padded over to it, listening for a moment before opening it a crack. She wasn’t about to trust that the apparently abandoned hall would stay that way. But there was nothing in the hall when she checked so she flashed a thumbs-up in Axton’s direction and slid back out into the open.

            He closed the door quietly behind him before following her as she began to pull all the doors along that side of the hall open. Despite their success at finding rope materials, the rest of the hallway proved to be a blank, forcing them down into another one, this one having three unevenly spaced torches dying out.

            The first two rooms Paige checked had no windows and she could feel the cold sweat began to bead up along her back and neck again. By the fifth door, she was biting her lip. By the eighth, the tremor had returned to her hands. And on the twelfth, she let out a faint cry. Dominating almost all of the wall facing her was a massive window, one they could both leave by at once. Better yet, this one was also once an opulent bedroom, the hole-filled tapestries on the walls and the dirty gold-leaf of the bed telling her that. But it was the solid look of the heavy bed frame that had her near to tears with relief. With that supporting the rope, she was certain they could both make it.

            “Are you ready?” she asked, reaching out a hand to Axton.

            He caught it and squeezed it gently. “Let us go home.”