Charlie was bored.

Being kidnapped by a dragon, as it turned out, was not nearly as exciting as she’d thought. It was actually rather cold and uncomfortable; not to mention she was starving, and had grown rather thirsty to boot.

After having her first attempt at communication so effectively quelled, Charlie had determined that perhaps discretion was the better part of valor after all, and that it might be prudent to remain silent for the rest of the journey. She just hadn’t expected the rest of the journey to take so long. Where was the stupid dragon taking her, anyway?

An interesting jagged blob on the otherwise unremarkable dull landscape below caught her attention, and Charlie squinted, trying to make it out. The dragon had been losing altitude steadily for some time now (perhaps she was heavier than she’d thought?) and so it was just possible for her to see the forbidding peaks of the dark mountain range beneath her dangling feet, the melting snow-caps, the bristling tops of tiny trees, and—were those people, milling frantically across the slopes?

Charlie stared hard. There were people, though so small and far-away they looked like ants to her bird’s—or rather, dragon’s—eye view.

She briefly considered calling out to them, but dismissed the idea after a cautious glance up at the dragon. Besides, it was unlikely that they could hear her at such a height anyway.

It appeared, however, that no hysterical screams for help on her part were necessary. At the sight of the enormous purple dragon soaring over them, the people’s activities grew even more frantic, and Charlie thought that she could see some of them pointing at it and jumping up and down. The dragon did not appear to notice; Charlie privately thought that it had been sleep-flying for hours, an idea that had caused her no little anxiety, especially as the turbulence grew worse. But perhaps now it would come in handy.

And then a boulder went flying out of the air to punch the dragon in the shoulder.

The dragon woke with a start, lost its balance mid-air, and began a sickening vertical drop towards the ground. The people on the mountain grew even more excited, and several more boulders shot up after the first, though all failed to hit. Charlie closed her eyes and wrapped both hands tight around one of the dragon’s black claws.

At the last moment, the dragon managed to somehow flip a wing and straighten itself out, turning the drop into a steep dive. It was now close enough to the ground for Charlie, peeking between lowered lashes and wisps of loose hair, to make out the strange catapult-type weapon that the people had used to fling the boulders, and then to see several arrows shooting straight towards her. She immediately squeezed her eyes shut tight. But instead of hitting her, the arrows reached their true target—the dragon. All three punched through the delicate tissue of its wings, which, while certainly not fatal, appeared to both hurt the dragon a great deal and cause it to lose the last of its control over its flight.

The dragon screamed, and Charlie instinctively flinched away from the horrifying sound, clapping both hands over her ears. A moment later she realized that this had not been the best of moves, as the dragon’s claws opened and closed reflexively, and she found herself slipping from its hold to fall alone through the air at a faster rate than ever before.

It did not even occur to her to scream.

She hit the ground with a bone-breaking thump. Completely winded and utterly stunned by the force of her impact, Charlie lay where she had fallen, trying to catch her breath.

She was alive. She was alive, right?—surely being dead couldn’t hurt this much. Every inch of her throbbed; her head alone felt as though it might burst. Charlie could vaguely recall cracking it against something hard as she’d landed, but her impression at the time was understandably somewhat indistinct. She hoped she didn’t have a concussion.

The sound of voices made her blink and open her eyes. Charlie was lying flat on her back atop the spiky green bush that had broken her fall, with one of the dark mountains she had seen from the air looming up before her. Approaching her were several tall, blurred figures—she squinted, trying to make them out—speaking together in a strange slurring language Charlie was sure that she had never heard before.

“Ah…” She licked dry lips, considering her next move. “…help?”

One of them moved forward, muttering something incomprehensible, and as she came into focus Charlie had to stifle a gasp. The ogre, tall, green, and supremely menacing, glared down at her.

Charlie stared morosely at the ground passing beneath her, wincing as the ogre on whose shoulder she currently lay slung tripped in a pothole, bouncing her painfully atop of her back. After her fall, Charlie had barely had time to voice an indignant “Hey—” before being hauled to her feet, tied up and unceremoniously tossed over the shoulder of the largest female ogre, who seemed to be in charge of the small war band.

All in all, Charlie decided, not one of her better days. She strained her hands against the coarse rope binding them uncomfortably tight behind her, before sighing and giving up in disgust; they wouldn’t budge.

She was hungrier and thirstier than ever, and her entire body was aching from the fall. The awful stench rising from the ogre’s skin filled her nostrils, making her throat tighten and her stomach turn over. Her nose itched, and her head hurt; she had never felt this uncomfortable before in her entire life. Being kidnapped was nothing like she had thought; and suddenly she wanted, desperately, to go home.

To her horror, Charlie felt her eyes begin to fill with tears. She sniffed and blinked hard, determined not to let any fall. A real princess, she told herself firmly, would never cry over something as dumb as just being scared and miserable. Her sisters had all been kidnapped before, some of them for years, and none of them had ever shed a single tear. Princesses were allowed to cry at weddings and funerals; the rest of life’s hardships were to be waited out in composed serenity.

Then again, Charlie had never been a very good princess.

The ogres, meanwhile, continued to carry her on down the mountainside. Charlie began to feel dizzy, and closed her eyes; whether or not a few tears escaped was no one’s business but her own.

At some point, she might have passed out, because when she opened them again she was being carried through a dark stone hall.

The ogres were talking together quietly; then one of them yanked open one of the solid wooden doors lining the passageway, and the one holding her grunted something and, with no warning, slid Charlie off of her shoulder and tossed her roughly inside.

It was probably a good thing that Charlie had had no warning; without time to tense in anticipation, her muscles remained relaxed, and she landed sprawling on the hard stone floor with little additional bruising. The door slammed shut, and she was left to lie in almost total darkness.

Charlie lay there for a moment, trying to gather the strength to sit up. Moving seemed, just then, not nearly worth the effort.

As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw that she was in a small cell. The four walls surrounding her were grey and pitted, roughly cut from the original stone and never polished. There was one door and no window, and the room contained nothing but a single chamber pot in the far corner; otherwise it was utterly bare.

She took a deep breath, and, leaning against the wall, managed to push herself up into a sitting position. “Ow…”

Charlie leaned her head against her knees tiredly, thinking. She was in a tight spot by anyone’s standards. It was a well-known fact that dragons did not eat princesses, especially not those hired to do so; as her sister Adrianne had once explained to her, dragons only bothered with kidnapping in the first place in order to use their princesses as bait to draw in princes and knights, their preferred food. The more would-be rescuers a dragon defeated and ate, the higher his standing and the more respected he was among other dragons. Princesses, in turn, had their own standing increased by the strength and reputation of their dragon.

Ogres, however, were another matter entirely. None of Charlie’s sisters had ever been kidnapped by ogres—capture by them had always been considered rather unfashionable, on the whole, and not nearly as prestigious as dragons or giants. And there were all sorts of unpleasant stories about what they did to prisoners, though Charlie had no idea how true any of them were—if it was even half, then being killed and eaten could be the least of her worries. She didn’t know what these ogres could possibly want with her, but whatever it was couldn’t be pleasant.

And, Charlie reminded herself, no one would know that she had fallen into the hands of ogres. Her parents thought that she was safe in the lair of the dragon who had originally kidnapped her, and any princes or knights out to rescue her would look for her there.

Charlie sighed, realizing that her only option was to somehow escape herself. It was horribly unfashionable—even worse than being kidnapped by ogres in the first place—but then, she had never really been all that fashionable to start with. Then she could make her own way back to the dragon, wait for someone to rescue her there, and, with luck, never have to mention this unfortunate detour at all.

She glanced around the cell again, taking stock. There wasn’t much to work with. Her hands were still tied tight behind her—and, now that she thought about them, beginning to throb painfully—and there was no handy file, lock pick, or large rusty dagger anywhere in sight. Perhaps she could brain someone with the chamber pot? But that could be hard without the use of her hands.

Her hair, meanwhile, was in dire straits—the carefully crafted masterpiece of the night before had been all but demolished in the course of her adventures, and it was now hanging in disarray all across her face and in her eyes. She could barely see. Charlie would have liked to pull it back, but was again stymied by her lack of hands.

There, at least, was something could work on. Charlie clambered to her feet and, leaning against the wall for balance, carefully brought up one leg and maneuvered her foot through the small gap of her bound hands. The first leg was hard and more than a little painful, but she fit the second one through with less trouble, and soon was able to hold her tied hands up in front of her for examination.

The knot proved simpler than she had feared. Charlie, using her teeth and both knees to hold her hands steady, managed to pick it apart in a matter of minutes. After that she slid the few remaining pins from her hair and attempted, with little success, to smooth the snarled mess out. She tried to use the rope from her hands to pull it back, but it turned out to be too thick to hold it all in place. Instead, Charlie ripped off one of the many ribbons still trailing from her ruined dress and used that. Then, feeling rather liberated, she tore the rest of the frills, ribbons, and a fair amount of skirt off too—just because she could.

Then she moved on to the rest of the cell. Besides the chamber pot, Charlie discovered two loose cobblestones (neither was, unfortunately, loose enough to actually pry up from the floor, though what on earth she would have done with a cobblestone if she had been able to Charlie didn’t know), two small black spiders, one rusted nail, and a number of questionable stains and scratches across the floor and walls. She also had quite a lot of purple ribbons from her dress and a few remaining hairpins, though all of her jewelry had fallen off during the flight.

Remembering the last play she had seen, in which the brave hero escaped from the Evil Necromancer by picking the lock to his cell with a bent fork, Charlie spent some time examining the door to her own cell. But it appeared to be the kind that locked only from the outside, and there was no lock for her to attempt to pick, even if she’d known how. So instead she shoved her hairpins back into her hair, in case they came in handy later.

And then there was nothing left to do. Charlie, trying hard to feel composed and serene instead of small and lonely, returned to her seat against the far wall and settled in to wait.

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