Nebulae: One-Shots Compilation

The Cell

Redvers hit the floor, his shirt tearing at the shoulder as he skidded on damp flagstones. Bryn slumped onto his knees by the cell door in a fit of coughing. The thick oak door slammed behind them. A key creaked in the rusty lock. 

Despite the damp air, the cell was relatively large, around twenty feet across. Bryn remained crouched next to the door, his eyes tightly shut and his body jolting with cough after cough. Between Bryn's fits of coughing, Redvers could hear the clink of mail and the grind of stone, as the guard outside the door began to sharpen his sword.

Redvers turned his attention to the third occupant of the cell, whom he had caught a glimpse of as he was tossed in. The woman was sitting on the long bench that hugged the cell's far wall. Dark eyes looked up from where she had been rummaging through a woollen bag. She sighed in frustration when her eyes alighted on Bryn and Redvers, as if they had been sent to further inconvenience her.

Her loose clothes were southern and well-made, if a little dirty from being in the cell. She had a Southerner's straight hair and nut-brown skin, and sported the silver nose-ring and heavily kholed eyes of the merchant classes. Silver bracelets tinkled as she searched her bag. She was perhaps forty years old, but as with all southern women, her age was difficult to determine. 

She turned her attention to Bryn, who was still kneeling pale and trembling on the flagstones. No sooner had Redvers breathed a sweet exhale of relief that Bryn had stopped coughing, than Bryn began to mutter to himself, sparking a fresh wave of worry.

"The boy is terrified. Help him," the woman proclaimed with an imperious tone, as if she were totally indifferent to Bryn's plight. She waved a slender arm in the general direction of Bryn.

Redvers rushed to Bryn's side and whispered into his ear. "Stay calm, mate. They'll let us out soon."

Bryn's muttering and shivering slowly abated, and he allowed himself to be walked to the bench where he sat down heavily next to the Southern woman. Redvers clamped right fingers onto Bryn's shoulders as another coughing fit began. 

"It's all right, mate. They know who we are. We'll easily bribe them and get out. We'll easily bribe them." He repeated the words, as if chanting a mantra that would right Bryn's tormented mind and lungs.

The woman's bracelets tinkled as she continued to rifle through her bag, removing small objects that Redvers couldn't identify from where he was sitting. Redvers was keen to ask how a southern lady had come to occupy a dusty cell, given that southerners only came to Vala for trade. But the woman had her own questions. 

"Why did they imprison you boys?" 

Redvers sat up tall on the bench. "We are Guardians of Vala," then, under his breath, "in training."

It struck him then that he shouldn't be divulging Guardian business to a complete stranger, but he concluded that the woman was also imprisoned, and was therefore certainly less of an enemy than the Sheriff's guards.

"We were trying to stop the smuggling of beetle root to the villages." He turned to watch Bryn, who was now shivering and hunched against the prison wall. "Weren't we, mate?"

"Good boys. Beetle root is terrible stuff. My father was addicted. He couldn't work and died too young."

She sat silently for a long moment, as if revisting thoughts that had lain undisturbed in her mind for a long time. She shook her head as if tugging herself away from her memories.

"How did you try to stop beetle root smuggling? Kill the Sheriff himself?" she asked challengingly, thick eyebrows raised, as if preventing drug smuggling in Vala was an impossibility.