Still, my right hand refused to obey, the muscles shivering from both the tension in my body provoked by fear and the cramps that must have been gathering for the past hours.
“Speak,” the manly voice ordered. This time the silhouette moved position enough that I could confirm it indeed belonged to a large man. Who, by the tone of his voice, wasn’t very keen on being awoken by my noise in the middle of his rest.
“I just woke up, and don’t know where I am,” I pushed through the fear and replied to the man, hoping with every shred of my being that he would be moved to aid me.
Instead, he groaned again, as if bothered by the reason I was making such a fuss. A few seconds melted in the darkness, during which my heart threatened to escape out of my chest from anticipation.
“You are in the drake camp, led by Captain Xadom, under King Thayer’s orders,” he said with annoyance, like one does a child who's been explained something multiple times but still struggles to comprehend.
The drake camp…
Thedrakecamp.
My memory helped bring back a page from one of the books I had stolen from the library when I was still at university, from that far removed shelf we were never allowed to access in the second room by the window.
‘Drakes,’the book had said,“are a type of lower faerie species belonging to the Fire Kingdom. Drake faeries are used and bred for war purposes, their life mission being that of conquering territory.”
I was in a tent.
I was taken from my home.
The guards outside were talking about striking my town.
The faeries are here, my brain sent alarm signals to every part of my body that could receive it. And I had to make an instant decision.
“Release me at once, I am not supposed to be here,” I half-pleaded, half-demanded, my tone of voice struggling to convey the two.
Another moment of silence passed me by, forcing the angst inside my throat to burn. Whoever this man was, he did notdisplay surprise at my presence. Nor did he seem to be the merciful type.
I wanted to scold myself at the ridiculousness of my request, of what I could come up with to aid my situation. My tutors would have been solely disappointed in me.
So much time passed that I didn’t think I would get a reply, that the man had simply gone back to sleep, thinking me an apparition or a dream.
“Are you from Enderflagg?” he moaned his grievance at me in the form of a question.
“I am,” I didn’t miss a beat, my response following his questions like a dog chasing a rabbit.
“Are you a young woman?” His next question followed in a split second, as though he too had become aware of this dialogue race and turned into a willing participant.
“I am twenty-six,” I said without any particular emotion, unsure if my age would become a determining factor in his decision-making process.
His willingness to communicate with me turned out to be overrated, because he once more remained silent for a long while.
I blinked around in the darkness, forcing my gaze to fixate on the point where I knew he was located, willing my eyes to adjust better so I could at least spot his facial expressions, but the thickness of the night formed a wall around us, preventing me from seeing.
“You have to let me go, I have no business here,” I started again, seeing how he had no plan to continue our conversation. I scoured my brain with enough details to blurt out in a coherent manner in the hope to plead my case. I planned to tell him more about myself, about my job, my classes and even my entire life story in no particular order, if any of it would help my case. “My name is—”
“March,” he interrupted with palpable annoyance. “Your name is March and that is all I want to hear until morning. I am tired and need rest.”
To prove a point, I heard the mattress shriek under the weight of his body and spotted his silhouette falling back with an audible thud.
Leaving me on my own.
With my worries and fears, with the shaking of my right hand which had started again.
I was in a faerie camp.
I was aprisonerin a faerie camp, I corrected myself. And by the attitude of this man, I wasn’t going to get released anytime soon.
