Free Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale by Donna Jo Napoli

cracked. This crew gives wicked blows. Who are they? What right do they have to abuse us like this? My jaw clenches in anger.
    Many people in Father’s kingdom have never traveled. But I have. And all the long journeys except that one damnable trip to Dublin have been by boat. Even journeys inland, since much of our countryside is impassible except by river. I know what happens on a ship. I am blindfolded and gagged, but there’s still much I can figure out.
    I strain to distinguish sounds. Fluttering comes from two separate sources. So this ship has two sails. Two. Viking ships have one. This isn’t Bjarni’s ship, then. The other prisoners might not be from Downpatrick, after all.
    Maybe Mother and Father and Nuada are all still alive, and Downpatrick is safe. Oh, Lord, let that be so.
    Two sails. The second ship that passed us last night had two sails. A man on deck waved to us. That ship was going south.
    The motion of the waves combined with the wind tells me land is to our right—starboard; so we’re heading south.
    If it’s the same ship that passed us, it must havestopped for the night right after seeing us. Almost as though it stopped just in order to lie in wait for us.
    But that makes no sense. What kind of ship would have stopped to wait for Brigid and me?
    Someone pulls at the knot on the back of my blindfold. He yanks my hair in the process. I twist to slam my head at him, but the searing pain in my rib stops me cold.
    I blink and stare down at nothing, then up at the starry sky. It’s the middle of the night.
    The man who took off my blindfold is now untying the blindfold of a woman beside me. She must be the one who urinated. The one who wept. He’s rough with her, too. He’s short, with a dull, mean face. The woman looks at him and cries again. She gets to her feet.
    He leers at her and brushes a hand across her breasts.
    Lord.
    I haven’t cried. And now I’ll make sure I don’t. For all intents and purposes I am a boy.
    When my eyes adjust to the dark, I make out bodies farther away. Some are still blindfolded.
    Brigid! She’s but ten paces away. A mixture of sadness and gladness washes over me. I wish she had escaped. But at least we’re together.
Immalle.
    I get to my feet. Lord, how it hurts to move.
    The leering man unties Brigid’s blindfold. She blinks and our eyes meet. But she quickly glances past me.
    I slowly, carefully, sink back to my haunches. My broken rib stabs at my innards. I sit and count the others, breathing shallowly to cut the pain.
    It’s hard to be sure, because so much obstructs my vision, but by my best reckoning there are eight prisoners. Two adults—women, I think. The rest of us, children. The crew outnumber us, but not by much. They’re moving about, adjusting the sails, fiddling with gear, so they’re even harder to count accurately.
    Three of the children clustered together as soon as their blindfolds came off. They’re trying to talk to one another. The gags make it impossible, of course. But they don’t stop. Stupid peasants.
    The last child’s blindfold is now untied. The child runs and falls. He buries his face in the tunic of the other woman—not the weeping one.
    My eyes grow watery. I blink and turn my gaze to the water. A choppy, unforgiving sea separates us from the far-off shore. And, oh! It’s on the port side. What?
    I stand again—Lord, what pain—and look starboard. No land there. As far as I can see, nothing. Are we really going north again, back toward Downpatrick?
    But now I see white cliffs! My heart thumps soloud, I can’t hear anything else. What a fool I am. We’re nowhere near Downpatrick. We’ve been sailing fast. It must be past midnight. The sky is turning rosy off to starboard. It’s close to dawn.
    And the timing is right; if we went south and then crossed the Irish Sea and circled around Wales and headed back up the channel, it’s possible that those could really be the famous white cliffs I’ve heard tales of.
    This