FLOOD

The Safehouse

            It began to get steadily darker as we made our way through the forest, towards the mountains looming in the distance. We kept to the trees, even though Eli kept looking longingly towards the road that wound through the smaller hills, and every time a car would come by, and the headlights would flicker through the trees, he would sigh heavily.

            “We can’t get a ride, do you know how strange that would look?” I glanced down at myself again. A tall, blonde woman in a slinky gown and a dirty, half-mad looking human with a bag of seaweed would certainly raise questions. And when we asked them to drop us off in the middle of the rocky mountains, in front of an invisible house, they would certainly wonder what was going on.

            No, we had to walk, and stay away from the road. There was no other option.

            “I know,” Eli said, and I could hear him chewing on a piece of seaweed. “These are surprisingly not disgusting,” he said a moment later, and I bit back a smile.

            We were both already so tired, half dead from being dragged around the ocean and chased through the forest, so it took longer than I would have liked to find the safehouse. It was nearly pitch black, and the only thing that kept us from becoming permanently lost in the dark woods, was the light that suddenly flickered, barely visible through the thick trees.

            “There,” I said, and let out a sigh of relief. “There it is.”

            Eli sighed too, trudging behind me, his steps clumsy and loud in the silence. “Thank god.” He looked surprised when I rounded on him.

            “Listen to me carefully. We’re about to enter a safehouse. These Jotun are not servants like me, they’re warriors. They’re bigger and meaner, and their job is to keep people out and report suspicious activity. They’re looking for a fight. Understand?”

            Eli blinked at me. “But you’ll tell them what happened and it will be okay, right? I mean, they’re going to want to help you.”

            I was thankful that the darkness hid my face from him, because my cheeks began to grow hot. The truth was that not one guard had ever looked my way twice. I was smaller than them, weaker than them. They were a class above the servants. So there was no guarantee they would listen to me, or even let me in. I had no guarantee they wouldn’t throw me out of the safehouse and laugh. The king and queen didn’t hold for that sort of thing, they treated everyone the same, which is why we loved them. But Queen Megan couldn’t be around all the time. She couldn’t manage each individual guard to make sure none of them were ever mean to servant girls.

            “We’ll see,” was all I said to Eli.

            I made sure we approached the safehouse openly. The last thing I wanted to do was to look like we were sneaking up to it. There would be guards outside the doors, and they had sharp ears. We stepped through the trees, and the house finally came into full view. It was a tall, skinny mansion, something that looked like it was right out of the spooky stories my mother used to read me as a child. The windows were mostly shuttered up, and the paint was peeling, but there was a single flickering lantern hanging from the front porch, to guide you through the woods if you were lost, and you were sharp-eyed enough to catch the glimmer through the trees.

            Sure enough, there were two guards on the porch, one on either side of the door. They were easily three or four feet taller than I was, and each one was incredibly beefy looking, the one on the left especially, looked like he might crush me as soon as look at me, and I bit the insides of my cheeks so hard I tasted copper.