Free The Hostage Prince by Jane Yolen Page B

fingers through her hair nervously. And Mistress Softhands’ eyes darted around the room, as if expecting something ghastly to leap upon her from every corner.
    The questioning of the three women had not taken long, for none of them was trained in resistance.
    And now the captain looked at the two girls.
    First his gaze narrowed on Yarrow, though she was conveniently passed out, lying on the stone floor like a broken puppet with its strings cut, her swollen foot to one side. Mistress Yoke had taken a moment from her hand-wrangling to remove the gag from Yarrow’s mouth, but it hadn’t brought her around.
    The captain turned his hard gaze next on Snail.
    â€œYou. Girl,” he said in his commanding voice, the worm scar on the move again. Then he crooked his pointer finger at her.
    Snail felt her knees weaken. She stiffened and locked them so as not to fall. When she felt her hands ball into fists, she willed them to open again, one stiff finger at a time. Something sour spurted up from her stomach into her mouth. She didn’t spit it out, but swallowed it down instead. It burned hot and hurt coming up and going down, but not as much as she would be hurt if she hadn’t the right answers for Master Geck, of that she was sure.
    Realistically, she knew she had no choice but to go with the captain. But she glared at him as she went.
    Better angry than afraid,
she thought.
    The glare didn’t seem to affect him at all. In fact, he seemed somewhat amused by it.
    *  *  *
    T HEY WALKED SLOWLY down the hall. Actually, Snail would rather have walked quickly.
Get in. Get it over with. Get out.
Whatever
it
was.
She refused to think ahead because that meant thinking about the ogre, his teeth, his bad breath, his nonsatisfaction with her answers. She couldn’t think about her answers at all. She didn’t know what the questions would be.
    Instead she looked down and counted how many steps she took to get where they were going.
    Thirty-seven.
    That was all.
    Thirty-seven steps.
    Not even as many steps as she had from her bedchamber to Mistress Softhands’s, which was forty-two, counting bed-to-bed as she often had as a child waking from an awful dream.
    Thirty-seven steps.
Then she thought,
And still only sixty steps to outside.
But thinking that no longer helped.
    They turned to the right and faced a dark oaken door with a wooden latch.
    â€œAfter you,” the captain said. They were the first words he’d spoken since they’d left the dungeon room. He opened the door and stepped aside for her.
    She knew this was not from politeness. It was to make sure she had no way to escape.
    So she walked in head up, shoulders squared, through the open door, trying to keep herself calm. But at that very moment, as if it had been planned, Yarrow began screaming again, her voice bouncing off the stone walls.
    And to make it worse, all three of the wolf’s heads began howling.
    The door slammed behind Snail but didn’t cut off the sound. If anything—a trick of the dungeon layout or magic or both—the sound was doubled. Suddenly she had no courage left in her. She turned to ask the captain to stay, but he’d already left.
    She could hear him calling out to the others, “That cursed girl won’t be stopping her bloody noise any time soon. Best we eat now back at the guard station where it’s quieter. My men, you can start on the ale, and you—Red Cap—scramble up those stairs and get us some bread and cheese. Oh, and bring the wolf three bones.”
    And then with a scuffling sound, they were all gone past the dungeon master’s cell, most of the torches with them. Except for a small candle in a sconce near the cell door, she was now in the pitch black. She’d never had good Unseelie eyes to see in the deepest dark and wondered if they knew that and had withdrawn the light to make her even more frightened.
    Someone—something—huge in the small