Her Wolf and His Hawk - Chapter 1
Fandom: Frozen Crossover: Ladyhawke Word count: 3191 Ships: Revelsa (Revel and Elsa)
You guys remember a long long time ago where I talked about doing a Revelsa inspired take on the 80′s movie Ladyhawke? Well, guess who just rediscovered that infant story! Not sure when I’ll have the time to write this, but I’d like to give myself a break from editing BaT and writing Rose Garden from time to time. So here we go. A FTFTIN take on Ladyhawke staring your favorite wayward Frozen ship in an angsty, gloriously 80′s story.
“Impossible. Nothing…is impossible!” a voice grunted in the darkness, straining. There was a sense of urgency to the speaker, a sense of dread and doom as if the very mud and stone those reaching hands dug through were held aloft by words alone. “Come on, Mouse. Dig! Dig, mouse!”
Hanging day in the kingdom of Aquila was a spectacle affair for the townsfolk. Rich and poor alike came in droves to the black gates to watch those unlucky few die a slow death at the end of a short rope. Unlike the poor, the rich merely attended for sport, for who among them had ever walked through the infamous Aqualian dungeon? Who among them had been stripped, whipped, and chained to cold walls, destined to be eaten by the same rats carrying echoes of the Black Death?
Unlike the rich, the poor were there to see their loved ones. Their fathers, sons’ and brothers. Their mother, sisters, and friends. With glassy eyes, they watched lines of condemned paraded out in single file. There were hardly any tears. Aquila was a hard kingdom. Tears were a sign of readymade exploitation ripe for the picking. And where love withered hatred grew in its stead like weeds. A few dry eyes wandered towards the sprawling compound of the cathedral at their backs and the man who ruled Aquila with an iron fist. A few eyes dared to linger on the white marble structure, hate filling them like cheap ale, but the snap of a rope and the gurgling gallows-dance of a life snuffed out reminded those few brave souls the price for lingering discontent.
“Jehan,” the already drunk Aquilan guard captain slurred, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth. The subordinate next to him snapped a smart salute, studiously ignoring his captain’s drunkenness or the stains of mead on his once pristine white and black uniform. “Bring out the next three. Hurry up!”
“Sir.” The officer saluted and quickly walked through the gates, seeking the jailer waiting for him just beyond the grated iron wall. “I want Anna de’Arnadarl,” he told the thick-set man holding a ring of keys in his right hand and a wicked whip in his left.
A greasy grin cracked the goaler’s face, revealing teeth of various shades of gray and yellow. He said nothing, simply nodding for the officer to follow, grin still in place. The officer allowed the jailer to unlock the heavy iron door leading into the main body of the prison, dogging his heels as they made their way further in.
The din of incarceration echoed around them. Hundreds of voices echoed off the stone walls: talking, laughing, screaming, and sobbing all at once. Dull eyes tracked the two men. Chains rattled when bodies shrank away for fear of being chosen next. Upon reaching the desired cell, however, there was but one man waiting for them rather than one man and one woman.
“Wrong cell,” the officer grunted impatiently. The more he made Captain Adrek wait the more agitated he would become. And the world could do without an angered, drunken guard captain. “I want Anna de’Arnadarl. The one they call ‘ Red Mouse’.”
The confused jailer was about to speak when the man chained to a post lifted his head and gave the two a wide smile that spoke volumes towards his already fractured sanity.
“The Mouse?” he giggled, tapping his chin with a black-nailed finger. “The Mouse…she left our house! No Mouse today…s-she ran away! To…to escape the pain…she’s gone d-down the drain!” He pointed excitedly at a square sewage drain next to him. The top had been pried off. There was another string of barely contained giggles from the chained man, for how ironic it was and how foolish these men of privilege were that they assumed putting a mouse in a cage would keep it locked up tight. Both guard and jailer looked at a loss for words, staring at a hole hardly the width of a child’s shoulders.
Impossible.
The word touched their thoughts simultaneously. No one escaped the Dungeon’s of Aquila…no one…
The chained man’s bemused laughter died in his throat when the officer unsheathed his sword in a practiced flourish and struck the block next to him. The sharp clang of metal on metal rent the air, sparks leaping. “Where is she?!” he bellowed in the prisoner’s terrified face.
“I already told you, kind lord!” the prisoner cowered, hands raised to ward off the blows what were sure to come.
Fear flashed in the officer’s eyes. Standing, he scanned the room. Impossible. She had to be in the cell somewhere. No one could get into the sewers. But something told the man the impossible had happened today, and his stomach threatened to upheave itself. Scrambling for a solution, the officer pointed at the chained man. “Hang him. Search every cell and dungeon! Search the sewers! Every drain! Find her, or Captain Adrek will hang you in her place!”
The jailor unchained protesting prisoner, dragging him screaming and begging from the cell. The officer hung back trying to puzzle out how an oversight like this could have happened.
“Impossible,” he muttered to no one in particular.
But there was no doubt. The dungeons of Aquila were the most secure in all the kingdoms, yet here this lowly officer sat faced with a dark impossibility made real. He was dreaded being the one to tell Captain Adrek the grim news. There was, in this kingdom, a tendency to kill the messenger.
Below the streets. Below the cobblestones streaked with horse shit and piss. Below the imposing fortress of the Dungeons and the poor unfortunate souls trapped there, a mouse found herself squeezed on all sides by a mountain of foul-smelling muck. Inch by inch, finger by finger, she pushed herself along, lost in the darkness yet knowing to the depths of her marrow freedom was simply another centimeter away.
Anna the Red Mouse they called her, or simply Mouse in certain respects. Mostly because of her size and red hair, but also because she had been born with the innate ability to squeeze out of scrapes, no matter the size. Big or small, life-threatening or mundane, Anna escaped them all…up until six months ago. Before that, her face had been sought far and wide. Her infamy almost cast as much a shadow as the Church, but one mistake, one misplaced foot during a nighttime robbery, and the damn floorboards squealed louder than a bell, bringing all manner of law down on her head. Oh, she had run. She always ran. Since the day Anna could walk, she was running. That day was no different. Only her luck reached its end, and she faced with the first predicament she couldn’t squeeze out of.
Well, so her jailors thought.
Six months in the Dungeons of Aquila rotting with the festering sick, the criminally insane, the desperate, the deranged, and impossibly stupid. Anna weathered her sentence in relative silence, all the while biding her time and planning her escape. Inescapable, the Aqualian goalers boasted. “Sealed tighter than a virgin’s legs,” they cackled to one another. As far as Anna could tell, the only thing inescapable was the lingering stench of unwashed bodies.
I’m just going to have to prove them wrong, aren’t I, Lord? Anna smiled to herself from the shadows of her cell, her eyes lingering on the square sewer drain next to her foot. You never send me a trial I can’t handle. Testing your servant, that’s what you’re doing. Well, I am as devoted as ever. You’ll see.
Three days later she was wiggling like a worm through centuries of accumulated muck. Difficult to push through, the mud slowed her progress considerably, making her fear there was no end to the madness until one final push collapsed whatever mound she’d been working through. Fingers feeling open air, Anna doubled her efforts and began to do what she always did: squeeze through tight spaces. A finger, then a hand. A wrist, followed by an arm. Then a shoulder, slow and steady, twisting and bunching at awkward angles until it slid free. Anna awkwardly wedged her head through the hole, forever pushing forward with growling grunts.
“It’s…it’s not unlike es-escaping mother’s womb,” she panted, gritting her teeth and sucking in, compressing her abdomen in order to get her chest through. “God, what a memory.”
When both shoulders emerged from the impossibly small hole, Anna took a moment to regain her bearings and breathe, but putting her faith in the structural integrity of sewer mud was a mistake. The ledge under her crumbled.
Darkness again closed over her, wet and freezing, but it was quick to abate when she came splashing and sputter to the surface, every muscle in her body tensing at once against the abominable temperature of the sewer water. Luckily, the depth here was only chest level, but with every inch of her soaked, Anna knew she needed to get dry and warm. If she didn’t, there was a good chance her legacy would end in the sewers of Aquila, and what kind of ending it that for a story?
Step by shivering step, she waded forward, using the blue-gray light filtering through the grates above to illuminate the way. It smelled. God, there was no end to the stench. Anna wondered if she would have to roll in red-hot embers and burn the stench of shit and piss from her pale, freckle-dusted skin.
“Nothing like the smell of a city. Humans are disgusting creatures. Lord, I don’t know why you let us multiply after the flood. That was a foolish errand on your part.”
Anna made it another forty yards in the stomach-churning water when her sharp eyes spotted a dark shape turn the corner up ahead and head in her direction. The fear the pulsed through her could have lit up a room. In a series of shrieks and flails, Anna flew into action and crawled atop the first ledge she could grab onto, a string of terrified curses peppered with a few ‘no, please no’ bubbling from her lips.
This was bad. This was so very, very bad.
“Lord,” she prayed, fervent in her terror and desperation, eye glued on the familiar reptilian silhouette drift closer. She hoped the Almighty was listening today. “I make a new vow. I will never pick a pocket or rob a home again, so long as I live, I swear, but, you see, here’s the problem.” The shape was drawing nearer, making her pulse slam wildly in her throat. “If you won’t let me live, how can I prove my good faith to you? If you’ve heard me, this ledge will remain as steady as a rock, and that thing coming at me won’t be what I think it is. But if it is,” she continued hurriedly, feeling the stones under her begin to shift in the worst ways, “there’ll be no hard feelings…but I will be very disappointed.”
Quivering in the damp cold, Anna the Mouse watched with growing trepidation as the silhouette continued to approach, gliding with the graceful smoothness of a natural predator. Granted, she’d only ever seen an alligator from afar, and even that was suspect at best, but there were stories. Oh, there were so many gruesome stories. People went missing in the sewers. That was a fact, and she was about to face that very real threat head-on.
Closer and closer still. It was almost on top of her. Any second now it would glide by, sense her, and attack, dragging her into the dark water never to be seen or heard from again. Anna the Red Mouse would come to a grisly end in the sewers of Aquila, and her legend would fall to dust.
But that moment never came.
Carried by the current, the silhouette turned at the last moment, revealing itself to be merely the bleached skull of a cow. Anna stared in awed shock, unable to believe her eyes until the fear building in her chest suddenly splintered into sob-inducing relief.
“I don’t believe it,” she whispered, releasing her death-grip on the ledge and easing back into the water. Had the Almighty actually heard the cries of a lowly mouse? It wouldn’t be the first time, but He usually wasn’t so prompt. As if on cue, from somewhere above, whether it was God himself or merely the imagination of an exceptionally relieved mind, the sound of ethereal chanting drifted down into the depths of the sewer. For a moment Anna stood and listened, bliss and reinvigoration filling her.
“I believe it.” Face turned towards the heavenly sound, Anna followed the current until it ended at a tall shaft, soft light and gentle chanting drifting down from the grate above. It was a sign from God. One which Anna numbly followed, eager to see where such a fickle yet fair Lord was leading her.
“I’m coming, Lord,” she repeated excitedly several times as she began climbing the iron rungs embedded in the gray stone, water sluicing off her wet clothes. “It’s Anna, Lord. You won’t regret this. I’m a wonderful person. I’ll keep my promise. You can count on me!”
Hand over hand, Anna climbed, her face never turning away from the life-giving light. Before long the sewers were far below her, a winking ripple of liquid at the bottom of a narrow shaft, yet higher she climbed. The iron rings bearing her to her salvation were old and rusted with age, forcing Anna to use her strong, nimble fingers—so good at cutting purses from coats and working coin free from pockets—to dig into the unyielding mortar and hoist her higher. Anna didn’t honestly know why she was climbing. There was no telling where this shaft would lead to, but she had been spared by a higher power and was determined to follow its call.
But the salvations she believed awaited her at the end of her climb came at the price of a heavy iron grate barring her from freedom. Well, not necessarily freedom. Anna wasn’t stupid. A church, especially one in Aquila, wouldn’t provide her any form of sanctuary. Not with the Black Bishop helming it, but all might not be lost. If the crowd of parishioners were clustered at the front of the room, she stood a chance of slipping out without notice. If not…well…
Why Lord? I thought you and I were on better terms? Anna bemoaned. Through the grate, limited though her sight was, Anna realized the room filled to capacity with patrons and peasants ready for morning Mass, and silently cursed her abysmal luck.
Seeing no point in waiting for the service to end—her legs wouldn’t likely hold her for that long, Anna repositioned herself to start climbing down, but the moment she laced her fingers through the grate a pair of heavy leather boots crunched down on her knuckles. Started by the fierce pain, Anna cried out and lost her grip, plunging down the shaft back into the dark water. Her reconnection with the sewers left her stunned and disoriented. She struggled under the water, fighting to remember which way was up and which was down. Panicked, she picked a direction at random.
She chose wrong.
In the murky darkness, it was impossible to gauge where she was going. The water hadn’t been that deep, but the sewers were a labyrinth, and it appeared as though she swam into a drain and lost her way. Lungs burning, Anna kicked as hard as she could, following the pull of a faint current, just fighting to stay alive. Onward, always onward, arms and legs thrashing through the unyielding liquid until finally a glimmer of light above caught her attention and she pushed towards it.
Momentarily blinded by the midday brightness and choking on the water she’d inhaled, Anna allowed herself to acclimate to her new surroundings. Was there ever a feeling more sweet than the ability to breathe? She didn’t think so. Not at all. But her relief was short-lived when Anna realized she was treading water in the middle of the Aquilan moat. Sinking back down with a string of curses, eyes open for anyone who might have spotted her, Anna stealthily made for the bank, keeping her head low. It was her intention to haul herself out of the water and run like hell into the countryside, but the boisterous laughter of city guards gave her pause. Once again checking her back—one could never check it enough—Anna bobbed towards them, eyeing at least two purses hanging like overripe fruit for the picking over the water.
“I know, I promised, Lord, never again,” Anna whispered under her breath, reaching for the unattended dagger wedged into the wood next to the guard’s leg. With it she cut the strings of the same man’s purses with practiced ease. He never even felt it leave his belt. “But I also know, that you know, how weak-willed a person I am.”
Anna the Mouse couldn’t help but grin while finishing her work and sinking back into the shallows, two pouches richer and as free as a lark on the wind. Never mind a squad of city guards had just thundered past, led by a furious Captain Adrek. Never mind the city bells were tolling, announcing the impossible. Never mind Anna was soaking wet in a region that hadn’t seen its last snowfall and where nights were unforgivingly cold. Never mind all of it. Anna was free. Hands tucked into her armpits and head down, she jogged into the tree line until she was safely out of sight before bursting into a hard run for wherever fate took her next.
Fate that would take the form of a cloaked figure astride a dark mount watching closely from the horizon, a snow-white hawk balanced on his outstretched forearm.
