Mordrid Usurpateur (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
momemordrid) wrote2010-08-18 09:52 am
momemordrid) wrote2010-08-18 09:52 am
Entry tags:
Stiltskein and the Miller's Daughter, part 2
More Stiltskein and Dulcie! ^_^
~
“Wake up!” a harsh voice roused her.
“What! Who!” She flailed around on the floor of her cell for a moment before she remembered where she was. It was morning. The duke was back to check on her progress! She glanced quickly at the hole between the cells she and Stiltskein had made the night before. The bricks were still loosely restacked. It didn’t look too bad. Hopefully the duke wouldn’t notice.
Sure enough, the duke did not notice. He didn’t even notice her. He was too surprised that some village girl had spun a pile of straw into gold. Of course, that was exactly why he had kidnapped her to begin with, but hearing something and seeing it with your own eyes was something else entirely. He stood open-mouthed in the cell doorway, just staring at the filled bobbins. Then he turned to the guard and ordered more straw brought in.
Dulcie was horrified. She should have expected it, of course, but she had really hoped he’d let her go. “No!”
The duke turned to her for the first time that day, his expression ugly. “No?”
Dulcie felt weak but stood firm. “Not unless you marry me,” she said in a flash of inspiration.
The duke looked at her scornfully.
“If you marry me, I’ll spin you gold every day, in gratitude for taking me away from the mill,” she continued, not entirely certain where this story would take her.
“Girl, I could kill you where you stand, and no one would dare question it,” he said coldly.
“Then I hope that’s enough gold to last you a lifetime, because if you kill me I can’t spin you more,” she pointed out.
The duke thought about this. He stared hard at Dulcie, and noticed she was actually quite beautiful. Her lips were full, her lashes were long and she had good childbearing hips. Her long hair glinted in the sunlight that filtered through the small barred window, and reminded him of the gold she promised to spin for him. “Very well,” he agreed sourly. “Guard, bring her to my housekeeper, and have her prepare the girl for the wedding.” He turned and stalked off to the interior of his castle.
Dulcie breathed a sigh of relief. Then the guard prodded her with the butt of his spear.
“Come along,” he said, “let’s not keep his grace waiting.”
~
Despite being exhausted, Stiltskein awoke fairly early. He sat in his cell, worrying over what Dulcie would when the duke checked in on her. It was obvious that the duke would never let her go now, but there was a chance that she could talk her way out of her cell. The goblin didn’t have great hope of that, but it was the only possibility he saw of escape. The magic dust he kept in his pouch couldn’t carve very far through the bricks of the dungeon, and the window was too small even for a goblin to fit through. His captor would never free him, not after the con had gone so wrong. He still couldn’t figure out how the duke, who fell for con after con, had suddenly gotten wise to him of all people. Perhaps someone else had already run that particular game on the duke. Or maybe the duke hadn’t seen through him at all and just hated goblins. It happened, sometimes. “Jealous of our beauty and intellect,” Stiltskein finally decided, just as he heard the door of his neighbor’s cell open.
“Wake up,” he heard the guard order, and then heard nothing but silence for several minutes. What was going on next door? He listened intently at the hole they’d hastily refilled as the sun rose.
The conversation he heard surprised him. Well, well! Apparently the girl was not completely useless. He waited for a few minutes after he heard the guard lead her away, and was relieved to not hear anyone relock her cell door. He swallowed a grain of magic powder, murmuring, “Make me invisible.” He waited for it to take effect, and then pushed through the loose bricks into the other cell. Unfortunately, he was unable to take any of the bobbins. The dust wouldn’t automatically make them invisible when he picked them up and he didn’t have the time to fumble for his pouch and magic them individually. He didn’t know when the guards might be back. He left the bobbins regretfully and crept out.
He skulked around for a while to find out where they’d taken the girl. He would have wished the duke on his worst enemy, not some girl that had literal golden hair. Beautiful gold! He knew he could make a good argument that at least half, if not more, of it was rightfully his. After he returned the girl to her father, he might even get some small reward. He found out from a pair of passing servants that she had barricaded herself into a room in the northwest tower. Apparently the guards were trying to break in the door. Wonderful. Well, he wasn’t getting to her from the inside. Maybe he could get her out a window or something. He snuck outside.
He found the northwest tower easily enough. There was more than one window, however, so he put a grain of magic powder on a leaf and whispered to it, “Go to the girl with gold in her hair.” He let it go and watched where it flew. It slapped up against a window and stuck to it. He found a pebble and threw it at the window. He’d meant for it to bounce off the window, but instead it crashed through the glass. The leaf, its path now free of obstruction, whipped inside. If the sudden yell was any indication, it hit the girl with some force.
The girl appeared at the broken window, hair disheveled and eyes wild. She looked around briefly and then turned to go back into the room.
Stiltskein remembered he was invisible. He fumbled for his pouch and called out, “Wait!”
She peered outside. “Stiltskein?” she almost whispered.
He found his pouch and swallowed a grain of magic, murmuring, “Make me visible.” This time the grain made him cough.
“Stiltskein, what do I do? I’ve got furniture against the door, but they’re going to be in here a minute!” the girl called out as soon as she had gotten over the shock of seeing someone materialize in front of her.
“Tie the bedsheets together,” Stiltskein advised once he could speak again.
“I’m not in a bedroom!” she said, panicking.
“Oh.” That complicated matters. She was in a different dress from the night before, so he had assumed the housekeeper had left her alone in a bedroom to change.
“Hurry!” she admonished him. The sun shone off her hair and reminded him of the gold woven in it.
That was it! When he was spinning it, he hadn’t been carefully using one grain per straw. There might be magic left in the thread. “Girl! Take some thread out of your hair and tie it together. Then tell it to ‘strengthen and lengthen into a rope.’”
The girl did not calm down in the slightest. “I can’t do magic!”
Stiltskein was growing concerned now. They didn’t have time for this! “Neither can I!” he accidentally let slip. “Just do what I told you!”
Up in the duke’s sitting room, Dulcie didn’t know what he wanted from her. She wasn’t a goblin or a wizard. Maybe the gold itself was magic? The guards broke through the door and started to push the armoire out of the way. She yanked out some hair and thread and hastily tied the handful to a sofa-leg. “Lengthen and strengthen into rope!” she yelled at it, and grabbed onto the end. Amazingly, it did exactly what she told it. The thread must have been magic after all. She held on and leapt out the window just as the guards managed to get into the room. Unfortunately the golden rope was only three-quarters as long as she needed it to be. She banged into the wall. She dangled, dazed, for a minute. A couple scrapes on her arms started to bleed. Suddenly, she started to go back up! The guards were pulling up the rope!
“Jump, you stupid girl!” Stiltskein snarled at her. He put out his arms to catch her, probably forgetting how much humans weigh compared to goblins.
She let go of the rope. Stiltskein barely remembered to turn his delicate nose out of the way before she crashed into him and they fell to the ground. As soon as she regained her footing she slapped him and wailed, “I’m not stupid!” Then she sunk to the ground and burst into tears.
Stiltskein hoped she was hysterical, because he was not prepared to put up with such behavior otherwise. He tugged at her desperately. “We don’t have time to do a Punch and Judy show, we’ve got to go before the guards get down here!”
She let herself be pulled up and tagged along behind him as he ran, mostly keeping up but not going as fast as he would like. “Why can’t humans run?” he lamented aloud to himself.
That seemed to wake the girl up. Despite the fact that he hadn’t even been addressing her, she appeared to take it as a challenge. She scowled at him. “I’ll show you running.”
It turned out that she could, indeed, run faster than Stiltskein. It surprised him because, as he put it, sometimes he thought he ran for a living.
They came to an abrupt halt at the edge of a river. The water was high and fast from the spring thaw. Stiltskein stole a look behind them. The guards were still a few hundred yards away and weren’t running all out. “They think they have us trapped!” he declared, motioning for the girl’s benefit. “But I know better.”
Dulcie was calmer now, but still on the verge of tears. “We look pretty trapped to me,” she said. She shuddered to think what the duke would do to her after he caught them.
“Ah, but they’re all on foot. Here’s a trick I learned when I was running from a farmer who didn’t think his boots should be mine—”
“Wait, what?”
He glared at the girl for interrupting him, but she didn’t seem to care. “How were his boots yours?” she insisted.
“Well, that’s hardly the point, but I won them.”
“How did you win them? In a game?”
“A game of wits. Look, that’s not the point. The point is that men on foot can never keep up with river when it’s like this,” he tried to continue, but she interrupted him again.
“That really doesn’t sound like you won them fairly.” Dulcie didn’t know why she cared about this at all. All she knew was that she was tired and upset and she wanted to know the story of the Boots That Probably Weren’t Stiltskein’s.
“Well! I suppose if one clung stubbornly to a certain limited, repugnant point of view,” he admitted in a tone of extreme displeasure. “Look, girl, we don’t have time for this, we need to get in the water.”
She squeaked. “We’re doing what?”
“The river will sweep us away too quickly for them to keep up, and by the time they come back with their horses, we’ll be gone!” He sounded alarmingly proud of this dangerous plan. “They’ve gotten close enough, let’s go!” He grabbed her and leapt.
“I can’t swim!” Dulcie managed to blurt out just as his feet left the ground.
Stiltskein turned to her incredulously, and then they hit the water.
Dulcie immediately began struggling to keep her head above water. Her unskilled flailing was no match for the swollen river. It didn’t help that half her efforts were put into clinging to Stiltskein, who could supposedly swim but spent his time trying to push her off. The river swept them under and away.
Suddenly a huge doglike being grabbed their collars in its teeth and pulled them out of the water. It dropped them on the bank and they began coughing up water. While sputtering and gasping for air, Dulcie stared at their rescuer through bleary eyes. It was an enormous black and green mottled dog, with a long tail piled up on its back. It was a Cu Sith! Her eyes went wide and she skittered back before she remembered she was on a riverbank. The Cu Sith was a portent of death! It looked at her with its baleful red eyes.
“Took you long enough,” Stiltskein said, coughing.
It spoke in a deep voice. “You’re lucky I helped you at all.”
“And where were you when I was in prison?” Stiltskein complained.
“I am not your pet,” it reminded him with faint amusement.
“Some friend you are,” Stiltskein continued to whine.
As Dulcie watched this exchange, some of the alarm died down. Her companion was friends with a Cu Sith. Well. It was the strangest thing she had ever seen, and she probably wasn’t safe around either of them, but she was ready for the excitement to be over and just accepted the fey dog’s presence. It ignored her and laid down in the sun.
Stiltskein wrapped himself in a blanket from what she now recognized as a campsite. It looked like it had been abandoned for a week. There was an ancient kettle of stew setting in what had been a fire. Even the embers of the fire had long burned out, so Dulcie crawled under the blanket Stiltskein was using. He didn’t push her away. They sat for some minutes, trying to both huddle together and not touch each other. When Stiltskein began sniffing at the stew, Dulcie felt the need to break the silence.
“What do we do now?” she asked simply.
“I suppose I take you back to your father,” Stiltskein began, but she interrupted him.
“No! That’s the first place the duke will look for me! He thinks I can create gold, remember?”
“Oh, right.”
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a while more.
“My name’s Dulcie,” she finally said.
“Fantastic,” Stiltskein muttered sarcastically.
“Are all you days like this?” she asked after another few minutes of silence.
“Sweet Gods, no!” the goblin replied in shock.
Dulcie breathed a sigh of relief.
~
That's the end of this adventure! I hope to write more of their adventures in the future, but for now, goodbye!
(c) Mome Mordrid
~
“Wake up!” a harsh voice roused her.
“What! Who!” She flailed around on the floor of her cell for a moment before she remembered where she was. It was morning. The duke was back to check on her progress! She glanced quickly at the hole between the cells she and Stiltskein had made the night before. The bricks were still loosely restacked. It didn’t look too bad. Hopefully the duke wouldn’t notice.
Sure enough, the duke did not notice. He didn’t even notice her. He was too surprised that some village girl had spun a pile of straw into gold. Of course, that was exactly why he had kidnapped her to begin with, but hearing something and seeing it with your own eyes was something else entirely. He stood open-mouthed in the cell doorway, just staring at the filled bobbins. Then he turned to the guard and ordered more straw brought in.
Dulcie was horrified. She should have expected it, of course, but she had really hoped he’d let her go. “No!”
The duke turned to her for the first time that day, his expression ugly. “No?”
Dulcie felt weak but stood firm. “Not unless you marry me,” she said in a flash of inspiration.
The duke looked at her scornfully.
“If you marry me, I’ll spin you gold every day, in gratitude for taking me away from the mill,” she continued, not entirely certain where this story would take her.
“Girl, I could kill you where you stand, and no one would dare question it,” he said coldly.
“Then I hope that’s enough gold to last you a lifetime, because if you kill me I can’t spin you more,” she pointed out.
The duke thought about this. He stared hard at Dulcie, and noticed she was actually quite beautiful. Her lips were full, her lashes were long and she had good childbearing hips. Her long hair glinted in the sunlight that filtered through the small barred window, and reminded him of the gold she promised to spin for him. “Very well,” he agreed sourly. “Guard, bring her to my housekeeper, and have her prepare the girl for the wedding.” He turned and stalked off to the interior of his castle.
Dulcie breathed a sigh of relief. Then the guard prodded her with the butt of his spear.
“Come along,” he said, “let’s not keep his grace waiting.”
~
Despite being exhausted, Stiltskein awoke fairly early. He sat in his cell, worrying over what Dulcie would when the duke checked in on her. It was obvious that the duke would never let her go now, but there was a chance that she could talk her way out of her cell. The goblin didn’t have great hope of that, but it was the only possibility he saw of escape. The magic dust he kept in his pouch couldn’t carve very far through the bricks of the dungeon, and the window was too small even for a goblin to fit through. His captor would never free him, not after the con had gone so wrong. He still couldn’t figure out how the duke, who fell for con after con, had suddenly gotten wise to him of all people. Perhaps someone else had already run that particular game on the duke. Or maybe the duke hadn’t seen through him at all and just hated goblins. It happened, sometimes. “Jealous of our beauty and intellect,” Stiltskein finally decided, just as he heard the door of his neighbor’s cell open.
“Wake up,” he heard the guard order, and then heard nothing but silence for several minutes. What was going on next door? He listened intently at the hole they’d hastily refilled as the sun rose.
The conversation he heard surprised him. Well, well! Apparently the girl was not completely useless. He waited for a few minutes after he heard the guard lead her away, and was relieved to not hear anyone relock her cell door. He swallowed a grain of magic powder, murmuring, “Make me invisible.” He waited for it to take effect, and then pushed through the loose bricks into the other cell. Unfortunately, he was unable to take any of the bobbins. The dust wouldn’t automatically make them invisible when he picked them up and he didn’t have the time to fumble for his pouch and magic them individually. He didn’t know when the guards might be back. He left the bobbins regretfully and crept out.
He skulked around for a while to find out where they’d taken the girl. He would have wished the duke on his worst enemy, not some girl that had literal golden hair. Beautiful gold! He knew he could make a good argument that at least half, if not more, of it was rightfully his. After he returned the girl to her father, he might even get some small reward. He found out from a pair of passing servants that she had barricaded herself into a room in the northwest tower. Apparently the guards were trying to break in the door. Wonderful. Well, he wasn’t getting to her from the inside. Maybe he could get her out a window or something. He snuck outside.
He found the northwest tower easily enough. There was more than one window, however, so he put a grain of magic powder on a leaf and whispered to it, “Go to the girl with gold in her hair.” He let it go and watched where it flew. It slapped up against a window and stuck to it. He found a pebble and threw it at the window. He’d meant for it to bounce off the window, but instead it crashed through the glass. The leaf, its path now free of obstruction, whipped inside. If the sudden yell was any indication, it hit the girl with some force.
The girl appeared at the broken window, hair disheveled and eyes wild. She looked around briefly and then turned to go back into the room.
Stiltskein remembered he was invisible. He fumbled for his pouch and called out, “Wait!”
She peered outside. “Stiltskein?” she almost whispered.
He found his pouch and swallowed a grain of magic, murmuring, “Make me visible.” This time the grain made him cough.
“Stiltskein, what do I do? I’ve got furniture against the door, but they’re going to be in here a minute!” the girl called out as soon as she had gotten over the shock of seeing someone materialize in front of her.
“Tie the bedsheets together,” Stiltskein advised once he could speak again.
“I’m not in a bedroom!” she said, panicking.
“Oh.” That complicated matters. She was in a different dress from the night before, so he had assumed the housekeeper had left her alone in a bedroom to change.
“Hurry!” she admonished him. The sun shone off her hair and reminded him of the gold woven in it.
That was it! When he was spinning it, he hadn’t been carefully using one grain per straw. There might be magic left in the thread. “Girl! Take some thread out of your hair and tie it together. Then tell it to ‘strengthen and lengthen into a rope.’”
The girl did not calm down in the slightest. “I can’t do magic!”
Stiltskein was growing concerned now. They didn’t have time for this! “Neither can I!” he accidentally let slip. “Just do what I told you!”
Up in the duke’s sitting room, Dulcie didn’t know what he wanted from her. She wasn’t a goblin or a wizard. Maybe the gold itself was magic? The guards broke through the door and started to push the armoire out of the way. She yanked out some hair and thread and hastily tied the handful to a sofa-leg. “Lengthen and strengthen into rope!” she yelled at it, and grabbed onto the end. Amazingly, it did exactly what she told it. The thread must have been magic after all. She held on and leapt out the window just as the guards managed to get into the room. Unfortunately the golden rope was only three-quarters as long as she needed it to be. She banged into the wall. She dangled, dazed, for a minute. A couple scrapes on her arms started to bleed. Suddenly, she started to go back up! The guards were pulling up the rope!
“Jump, you stupid girl!” Stiltskein snarled at her. He put out his arms to catch her, probably forgetting how much humans weigh compared to goblins.
She let go of the rope. Stiltskein barely remembered to turn his delicate nose out of the way before she crashed into him and they fell to the ground. As soon as she regained her footing she slapped him and wailed, “I’m not stupid!” Then she sunk to the ground and burst into tears.
Stiltskein hoped she was hysterical, because he was not prepared to put up with such behavior otherwise. He tugged at her desperately. “We don’t have time to do a Punch and Judy show, we’ve got to go before the guards get down here!”
She let herself be pulled up and tagged along behind him as he ran, mostly keeping up but not going as fast as he would like. “Why can’t humans run?” he lamented aloud to himself.
That seemed to wake the girl up. Despite the fact that he hadn’t even been addressing her, she appeared to take it as a challenge. She scowled at him. “I’ll show you running.”
It turned out that she could, indeed, run faster than Stiltskein. It surprised him because, as he put it, sometimes he thought he ran for a living.
They came to an abrupt halt at the edge of a river. The water was high and fast from the spring thaw. Stiltskein stole a look behind them. The guards were still a few hundred yards away and weren’t running all out. “They think they have us trapped!” he declared, motioning for the girl’s benefit. “But I know better.”
Dulcie was calmer now, but still on the verge of tears. “We look pretty trapped to me,” she said. She shuddered to think what the duke would do to her after he caught them.
“Ah, but they’re all on foot. Here’s a trick I learned when I was running from a farmer who didn’t think his boots should be mine—”
“Wait, what?”
He glared at the girl for interrupting him, but she didn’t seem to care. “How were his boots yours?” she insisted.
“Well, that’s hardly the point, but I won them.”
“How did you win them? In a game?”
“A game of wits. Look, that’s not the point. The point is that men on foot can never keep up with river when it’s like this,” he tried to continue, but she interrupted him again.
“That really doesn’t sound like you won them fairly.” Dulcie didn’t know why she cared about this at all. All she knew was that she was tired and upset and she wanted to know the story of the Boots That Probably Weren’t Stiltskein’s.
“Well! I suppose if one clung stubbornly to a certain limited, repugnant point of view,” he admitted in a tone of extreme displeasure. “Look, girl, we don’t have time for this, we need to get in the water.”
She squeaked. “We’re doing what?”
“The river will sweep us away too quickly for them to keep up, and by the time they come back with their horses, we’ll be gone!” He sounded alarmingly proud of this dangerous plan. “They’ve gotten close enough, let’s go!” He grabbed her and leapt.
“I can’t swim!” Dulcie managed to blurt out just as his feet left the ground.
Stiltskein turned to her incredulously, and then they hit the water.
Dulcie immediately began struggling to keep her head above water. Her unskilled flailing was no match for the swollen river. It didn’t help that half her efforts were put into clinging to Stiltskein, who could supposedly swim but spent his time trying to push her off. The river swept them under and away.
Suddenly a huge doglike being grabbed their collars in its teeth and pulled them out of the water. It dropped them on the bank and they began coughing up water. While sputtering and gasping for air, Dulcie stared at their rescuer through bleary eyes. It was an enormous black and green mottled dog, with a long tail piled up on its back. It was a Cu Sith! Her eyes went wide and she skittered back before she remembered she was on a riverbank. The Cu Sith was a portent of death! It looked at her with its baleful red eyes.
“Took you long enough,” Stiltskein said, coughing.
It spoke in a deep voice. “You’re lucky I helped you at all.”
“And where were you when I was in prison?” Stiltskein complained.
“I am not your pet,” it reminded him with faint amusement.
“Some friend you are,” Stiltskein continued to whine.
As Dulcie watched this exchange, some of the alarm died down. Her companion was friends with a Cu Sith. Well. It was the strangest thing she had ever seen, and she probably wasn’t safe around either of them, but she was ready for the excitement to be over and just accepted the fey dog’s presence. It ignored her and laid down in the sun.
Stiltskein wrapped himself in a blanket from what she now recognized as a campsite. It looked like it had been abandoned for a week. There was an ancient kettle of stew setting in what had been a fire. Even the embers of the fire had long burned out, so Dulcie crawled under the blanket Stiltskein was using. He didn’t push her away. They sat for some minutes, trying to both huddle together and not touch each other. When Stiltskein began sniffing at the stew, Dulcie felt the need to break the silence.
“What do we do now?” she asked simply.
“I suppose I take you back to your father,” Stiltskein began, but she interrupted him.
“No! That’s the first place the duke will look for me! He thinks I can create gold, remember?”
“Oh, right.”
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a while more.
“My name’s Dulcie,” she finally said.
“Fantastic,” Stiltskein muttered sarcastically.
“Are all you days like this?” she asked after another few minutes of silence.
“Sweet Gods, no!” the goblin replied in shock.
Dulcie breathed a sigh of relief.
~
That's the end of this adventure! I hope to write more of their adventures in the future, but for now, goodbye!
(c) Mome Mordrid
no subject
Especially this line-
It happened, sometimes. “Jealous of our beauty and intellect,”
no subject