From Fear to Fury

Scarlet is captured! What will she do now? How will she fare against the harsh treatment by the raiders? Is escape a possibility, or too out of reach?

The next morning, Scarlet was awakened by shouting and shuffling as three men burst into the tent. All of them were armed, sharp axes in their hands and evil grins across their faces. One of them took her by her wrist. The men dragged her and two of the other children through the camp into a huge tent nearby. 

The tent was blood red and banners with a severed deer head hanging from a burning tree adorned the flaps. They were tossed in with force, barely able to keep their feet underneath them. Confused, they all looked around the tent. Scarlet recognized one of the girls, Jemma, the baker's daughter. The girl was no more than six, terrified out of her mind, fat tears streaming down her cheeks. They were forced to their knees as a man stood up from a table in the corner of the room, stabbing a knife into the wood as he came to his feet. He wasn’t a particularly large man, but muscular all the same, with runic tattoos covering his arms and bare chest. He had piercing blue eyes and a mane of braided red hair that covered the edges of his face. There was a strange air about him, as if he weren’t all there. Something about him made her uneasy, more than just the way the other men had.

Jemma and the other girl began sobbing profusely as the man approached, screaming for their mothers. He knelt down in front of the three of them, his face without expression. Blank, as if the world around him barely existed. He looked at them for a long second, almost as if he were looking beyond them. The girl Scarlet did not know had stopped crying, but it seemed Jemma couldn’t contain herself. Tears flew from her face as she shook her head and screamed. 

The man’s expression suddenly turned to anger as he slapped her across her face, hard. The force knocked her to her rear while she cupped her stinging face, sniffling,then silent. Scarlet wanted to turn to help the girl, but she was frozen in fear. He turned his attention to her, so close she could smell the wine on his breath. The man let out a frustrated, yet almost bored sign as he stood up. He turned his back to them for a moment, walking to the table and sitting back down.

 

“Girl,” He called out, pointing at Scarlet from across the tent. “Come.” She paused for a moment, the paralyzing fear she felt still gripping her. “I will not repeat myself” He said with a slight growl in his voice. The fear released her as another took its place in her mind. Scarlet stood up quickly, awkwardly, and moved over to the table where the man sat. She met the man’s eyes for a second before quickly looking towards the ground. He watched her closely, his expression unreadable. 

“Fill my cup Child,” he demanded, holding out a small metal cup and gesturing to a pitcher of wine at the edge of the table. She quickly did as instructed, struggling to keep her arms from shaking. He held a hand out to tell her to stop before he spoke again. “Good, child, good. Glad to see you aren’t completely useless.” He drained the cup, wine spilling over the corners of his mouth into his beard. He instructed her to pour again and drained the second cup before standing again. He gestured for Scarlet to return to the other terrified girls before speaking. 

“You are all slaves now. Your old lives are gone. No one’s looking for you, not that they’d dare. Whatever my men demand, you will do without question.” He wiped his mouth with his forearm and moved around the table to Scarlet, ignoring the eruption of sobbing from the other girls. She kept her head pointed to the floor, fearing his gaze. His hand grabbed her chin, forcing her to look up at him. He stared blankly into her eyes, tilting her head to each side. 

Letting her go, he pointed at the men that had brought her inside. “All of you, let it be known that no man in this camp is to harm this child. She is needed.” He paused. “Any man who disobeys me will die, and the gods will piss upon his grave, as will I. So says Ragni, son of Ran.” They all nodded in agreement, panic blatantly on their faces. Ragni then instructed them to remove the children from his sight. 

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To say that the next days were hard for Scarlet would be an understatement. She was expected to bring food and drink to the bandits, all the while helping the other slaves clean the many cups and plates used by the camp. The men in the camp treated her harshly no matter the situation. Many times some reached to grab at her but were stopped by others, remembering what was said by Ragni on the day of Scarlet’s arrival.

 Despite this, they still treated her as less than human in all instances, yelling at her for something as minor as not filling their cups fast enough. 

Every night she was exhausted, running all over the camp in every attempt to keep from being threatened by the murderous heathens. They even went as far as punishing the other slaves for her mistakes, mostly Elira. It only made her feel more hopeless about her already terrible situation. She hated that this life was thrust upon her and felt like there was nothing that she could do but just barely survive to the next day. 

After one of the men took a jug from her hand and threw it, insulting her and lobbing threats in her face, Scarlet decided she could no longer take it. While she was helping wash, she took a pretty carving knife and slipped it into her clothing, later on hiding it among some of the furs they slept on inside the tent. She quietly plotted out her escape, careful not to alert her fellow slaves or the bandits to her intentions for fear the other children would be harmed on her behalf. Scarlet knew that even if things would never go back to how they were, she refused to live her life this way. She had to at least try.

That night, after she had finished serving the wretched men, Scarlet returned to the tent in which the slaves slept as if nothing were any different. Elira and the other children greeted her with a meager meal of cheese and stale bread, leftovers from the b*****d rogues' constant feasting. They ate and talked for a short while until the young ones laid down for bed with Elira. 

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Once they had all fallen asleep, Scarlet stood up slowly, picking up her hidden knife and creeping silently towards the rear of the tent. Gripping the knife firmly, she could hear the two guards talking and drinking at the front. She stopped when she heard one of them drop a bottle of mead onto the ground, making a loud shattering sound. After a few moments, nothing happened and she continued to the back of the tent.

Scarlet slipped the blade through the dry canvas of the tent, pulling down slowly to slice an opening big enough for her to slip through. The knife was not very sharp, as it tore some of the fibers instead of cutting them, making a light ripping sound but it did well enough for what she needed. As she finished, Elira caught the corner of her eye. She was standing, having escaped the pile of children sleeping with her, and stared at her intently through the darkness. Scarlet looked out through the slit she made into the night and turned back to the girl. She didn't know what to say, as the girl gestured for her to go. She stepped outside, immediately feeling the temperature change as the night air gripped her.

 

The moon was full and she used the ample light it gave off to light her way through the pitch black dark between the torches that dotted the camp. Creeping between tents, she paused by a campfire where a few drunken men has fallen pray to the sleep that drink brings. She took one of the men's packs and emptied it out except for a full waterskin. 

Next, she made her way to one of the smokehouses and stole a few days worth of dried meat, carefully wrapping it and stuffing it into the pack. She moved as silently as she could towards the edge of the camp, fresh snow and frozen grass crunching under her shoes. Scarlet snuck through some more tents, passing another campfire surrounded by a few horridly drunk men. The conversation they had was loud, despite their attempt at whispering. 

“What does Ragni care if that slave girl lives or dies?” One asked. “She’s just some girl.”

A thin man leaned forward. “Well, I heard that she’s the girl we’ve been looking for for months now. The one the wizard wanted us to take….”

Scarlet knew they were talking about her but refused to let herself stop and hear more of their conversation. If she was going to escape, it had to be now.

Once she had reached the edge of the camp, she stopped for a moment to adjust the straps on the pack, using the knife to quickly trim the extra material so it wouldn’t get caught on something. She took a knee, feeling the snow soak her pants with its cold bite. Just then, there was a snapping sound that came from directly behind her and she instinctively spun around and thrusted her knife in the direction of the sound. The steel blade sank deeply into the stomach of one of the small twisted men who had caught her in the forest before. 

The man screamed in agony, alerting the entire camp. He desperately clutched his stomach, futilely trying to quell the blood seeping from the wound the knife left behind. Scarlet flinched as she felt the warm blood upon her hand, causing her to yank the knife out, which made the man scream again. Blood gushed, filling the gap where the knife was, flooding out onto the white snow and painting it a deep crimson as it dripped out of the wound. The man fell backward, making a deep impression in the snow, and did not move again. 

Scarlet stifled a high-pitched yelp as she watched the man's blood drip from the knife, tears escaping her eyes. She heard the other bandits yelling to each other, attempting to pull their attention towards the late man's dying cries. Scarlet, wiping off frozen tears with her unblooded hand, pulling the pack onto her back and taking off towards the forest. One of the men spotted her and exclaimed, "There's that little b***h! Get her before Ragni has our heads!" She did not even look back, just focusing on the treeline in front of her and pressing forward, running as hard as she could. 

Scarlet could feel her chest tighten but the fear of being caught again after what she just did kept her from stopping. The voices of the angry men searching for her faded as she pushed further into the forest. It felt like an eternity of dodging every low hanging branch and large root without falling.

Eventually, when she was so deep into the forest that the moonlight had disappeared, her strength faded and she simply couldn't run away anymore. 

The only safe place was a hole she found in the trunk of a tree that had fallen to the forest floor. She curled herself inside the dirty space, terrified of discovery but too tired to keep awake. The memories of what she had done and the words of the men about Ragni and the wizard repeated in her mind until sleep took her.