As quietly as she could, she pulled the rough woolen blankets back and sat up. The cot creaked beneath her. She stood slowly beside the bed on bare feet, her white sleeping robe falling shapelessly to her ankles.
Tasia lifted one of the daggers from the table. It was one of Joslyn’s own; the long and weighty handle was wrapped in well-worn calfskin, the pommel was a simple ball of steel.
(“It can be used to bludgeon, if need be,” the guard had told her during one of the lessons, and the statement was followed by an additional fifteen minutes of practicing different ways to use the handle and the pommel as weapons unto themselves.)
Holding it in her right hand, the dagger seemed to whisper reassurance, seemed to nod along with Tasia and agree that her decision to seek out the latrine ditch was the right choice.
Cautiously, with dagger in hand, Tasia made her way to the tent entrance, giving the sleeping Joslyn a wide berth. She looked back once over her shoulder to make sure that the guard hadn’t stirred, then crept out, taking care to disturb the tent flap as little as possible.
She hadn’t bothered with a second robe or shoes. It was certainly not royal behavior — wandering around a camp comprised almost entirely of men in the dark in bare feet and only her sleeping gown — but she assured herself she would make it to the latrine ditch and back before anyone was the wiser.
It only occurred to her after she slipped out through the half-opened tent flap that she might have to sneak around the night watch. But that shouldn’t be hard. Each guard shift consisted of three men, and they patrolled the circumference of the camp with a steady, unchanging pace and route. She knew this because their voices had woken her up on several previous nights as they walked behind her tent. Tasia had been avoiding palace guards all her life; getting past these three soldiers without notice wouldn’t be any different.
She stood still outside her tent, listening for the voices of the guards, but all she heard was a distant coo-WAH, coo-WAH of some night animal. For a brief moment, the eerie sound made her think about Joslyn’s tall tale a few days earlier of desert hyenas controlled by sorcerers, and she shivered.
That woman and her desert wisdom. Tasia shook her head with a smile.
She heard the voices of the guards approaching and crouched down, obscured by the shadows cast by her tent. Despite being on the edge of the high desert, where the skies were almost always clear, tonight was overcast, and the moon was only a dull silver hangnail in the sky. Of all the nights to sneak around the guards to the latrine ditch, tonight was a good choice.
The men spoke and laughed in low voices as they walked their circuit, only one dim, red-orange torch between the three of them. Once their backs faced Tasia again, she stood again and picked her way across the dusty ground towards the outer edge where she’d watched the men dig the latrine ditch. Her stomach clenched again, as if reminding her to hurry, and she placed the hand that didn’t hold the dagger on her gut lightly.
She picked up her pace.
It was the smell that warned her to slow down and scan the ground. Despite its pungency, she was glad for the smell’s alert; without it, she might have tripped in the dark and fallen into the latrine face-first.
Tasia held her breath when she got closer, placing the dagger on the ground beside her right foot before straddling the ditch and lifting her night robe. She closed her eyes and willed herself to concentrate on making quick business of her task.
But before she could finish, a strangled cry — a cry that sounded like someone trying to call for help had been silenced before the call could be voiced — echoed across the quiet camp. Tasia stood up and listened, but there was nothing else.
The torch light was gone.
She stepped to the far side of the latrine, picking up her dagger and peering into the darkness. The landscape was flat in this northern sliver of Terinto; the earth wasn’t exactly desert sand, but it was dry and dusty and supported nothing except for a few twisted, stunted trees. There was no bush or boulder or high grass around her where anyone could hide behind to ambush Tasia, yet the light from the dying campfire was weak here, and the world disappeared into utter blackness only a few feet behind her.
She strained to hear the jocular voices of the three guards; she squinted towards the main body of the camp, looking for the procession of their torchlight, but she heard nothing. Saw nothing.
Maybe the sound was unimportant. Maybe it had been another animal’s noise in the night.
Yes. It was probably nothing. She was jumpy from being out here by herself, when she really should’ve at least woken Joslyn to go with her. Tasia nodded to herself. That was it — she was just jumpy. And she was close enough to finished with her business that she should head back to her tent.
She took a step in the direction from whence she had come — and heard another sound coming from the same direction as the first had. This sound was wet and hoarse — a man’s muffled scream, Tasia was sure of it this time — and it was followed by a heavy thud. The sound of something (or someone?) toppling to the ground.
Heart like a jackrabbit in her chest, and without first pausing to consider which of her options would be the most rational choice, Tasia gripped the leather-wrapped dagger hilt tightly and called into the night, “Hello? Who’s there?”
A low-throated chuckle came from behind her, and Tasia whirled.
A man stood there, nearly featureless in the dark. But there was enough light that Tasia could see he had stringy, shoulder-length black hair and a mouth framed by a thick black mustache.
“Well, well,” the man said as he gave another menacing laugh. “It’s the Princess herself, am I right? Out to take a shite in the middle of the night.” He stepped over the latrine ditch and towards Tasia in two long strides. “Never thought I’d be lucky enough to be the one to kill the big quarry, but I guess old Jack’s luck might finally be taking a turn for the best,” he said, and it seemed he spoke more to himself than to Tasia.
In that moment, with the man merely an arm’s length away, Tasia regained her senses. She turned to flee, but her sprint towards her tent only lasted a single step before Jack was on her, tackling her to the ground.
He used his weight to pin her to her stomach, clapping a leather-gloved hand to her mouth before she could scream.
“Don’t make it hard on yourself, Princess,” Jack whispered into her ear, and Tasia’s mind went reeling backwards in time, back to the night when a stranger dressed as a Wise Man had also pinned her to the ground and told her that fighting him would be a useless thing to do.
You’re only making it harder on yourself, Princess, he’d said.
Like a seedling pushing itself free from the earth for the first time, something blossomed in that moment inside Tasia’s heart. She wouldn’t be the helpless game piece of men anymore — not her father’s, not her would-be assassin’s, not the lords and ambassadors, not the Wise Men. She wouldn’t be the one who always needed saving from someone like Joslyn. She was done with that. Thanks to hours upon hours moving rocks up and down a beach, grappling, parrying and thrusting, she was stronger now; she had a power in her body she’d never had before.
And she had a dagger.
A calmness arose from somewhere deep inside her, enveloping her in its smoothness. She would survive this, she knew. And she knew it not as a hope or as a desperate wish but as a simple fact. As elementary as the truth that the sun rose in the east, set in the west, and the sea lay to the south.