The Brigand with the Beautiful Hair

Ianthe awoke with a colossal headache.

She rolled to her side and yakked into the dirt. She groaned, rolled away from the mess, and slowly drew to her feet to better examine her wounds. Her body ached, and she was covered in an impressive array of bloody cuts and scratches. But she didn’t think anything was broken, which was a mercy. Her head was pounding and her face ached, but all things considered, things could be worse.

Where was she?

She looked around and blinked, trying to get her bearings. Her vision was blurry and it was dark, but a few gentle blinks and carefully rubbing her eyes with her knuckles cleared her vision enough to see that she was at the bottom of a narrow pit.

She looked up. She had fallen a long way, and the top of the pit was well beyond her reach.

Lovely, she thought. That’s just what I needed. 

Carefully, she climbed to her feet and looked around. There was nothing to stand on for height and nothing to grab onto for leverage. Even if there had been, Ianthe wasn’t exactly strong. Her pastimes included reading and making snide remarks. There was no way she could climb out of the pit on her own.

She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Fairuza! Help! Helloooooo? Oh, help! Fairuza! I’m down here! I’m stuck in a pit! Fairuza? Anyone?? Someone please—”

“Look who’s awake!”

Overhead, a face popped into view, dimly lit by the murky twilight of the underground. The face was swollen and badly bruised but smiling. It belong to Fairuza, who waved grandly. “You get enough beauty sleep down there? Leave it to you to take a nap when there’s work to be done!”

Ianthe didn’t know whether to laugh with relief or scowl, so she defaulted to her natural disposition and huffed. “Glad to see my misfortune is providing so much entertainment!”

“Well, misfortune might be one way of putting it. That’s the negative view, of course. The other view is that you’ve done us a service.”

Ianthe rolled her eyes and groaned. “What are you talking about? You know what, never mind. I don’t care. I need you to help get me out of this…this…I don’t even know what this is!”

“That’s a trap,” Fairuza said simply. “You fell into a trap.”

Ianthe opened her mouth, intending to either object or demand an explanation, but she wasn’t sure which to try first, so she snapped her mouth shut to have a quick think. Now that Fairuza mentioned it, the pit was quite straight up and down and impressively symmetrical. It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened naturally. Maybe it could have been a well once, but she didn’t think it was deep enough. Also, it wasn’t very damp. And weren’t wells usually round? Plus, she distinctly remembered rolling down the mountain and hitting a strange pile of leaves—leaves in a place where there hadn’t been much in the way of trees.

She glanced around the pit floor. Broken twigs and branches were littered around her, covered with the same leaves. When she and Fairuza were young, they’d spent many long mornings in the sun digging holes and covering them loosely with twigs and grass, waiting for the young children from the creche to waddle into the trap and fall. The girls had waited patiently for hours for some unsuspecting, toddling rube to wander into the trap. None of the babies ever fell for it.

But today, Ianthe had.

The girl leaned her head back and cursed. “What in the blazes is this? Who would set a trap down here? Who would—”

“Hullo!”

A second face popped into view beside Fairuza’s. It was brown and slender, with high cheekbones, large, dark eyes, and a strong chin. The face belonged to a young man who stood similarly to Fairuza, hands on his hips as he gazed into the hole. A long, reddish-brown braid dotted with beads and feathers dangled casually over one shoulder. He wore a green tunic with light pants tucked into soft leather boots. But it wasn’t his clothing or his beautiful braid or his unusual skin that made the breath catch in Ianthe’s throat.

The young man had one human arm and one mechanical arm made of metal.

Ianthe gaped and backed away, pressing herself against the dirt wall. “Fairuza?”

“It’s my trap you fell into,” the young man explained with a grin that was anything but apologetic. “I didn’t set it to catch a pretty girl, though, so please accept my apologies about that.”

Ianthe blushed at being called pretty, even though she knew it to be a simple fact. She was pretty. Still, hearing him say it so matter-of-factly caught her off guard. She furrowed her brows and scowled up at the faces. “Well, why did you set it, then?”

“Had to,” the young man replied. “Part of the job!”

Ianthe scoffed, disgusted. “Well, you’re some terrible trapper if that’s the case. If you’re trying to catch rabbits or small game, this trap is far too—”

The young man barked a bright laugh. “Aw, I ain’t a trapper! I’m a brigand! This here’s a brigand trap!”

Ianthe gasped, her eyes going wide with either disbelief or horror—she wasn’t sure which, as both were equally appropriate. She pressed a hand to her mouth. “A brigand? Like a pirate or a raider?”

The young man laughed, cheeks glowing with rosy merriment as he squinted down into his trap. “Do land pirates exist? That would be new to me if they did. I guess they do—awful bastards who waylay travelers and confiscate their worldly belongings. Sure, I guess you could say I’m a land pirate! Arr! Gimme all yer gold!”

He affected a funny accent and made a hook of his metal hand before laughing again at Ianthe’s increasingly appalled expression. “Oh, I’m only pulling your tail. No, I’m just a regular brigand—a pickpocket! A rrrrregular rrrrrrrruffian!” He rolled his Rs as he said this, winking down at Ianthe, who hadn’t yet recovered and was still recoiling in disbelief/horror. She was pretty sure it was horror. For some reason, she believed this skinny young man with the lovely hair and charming smile really was a bandit.

“My name’s Kimmerick!” he said with a wave. “I dug this trap for practice.”

“Practice!” Ianthe scrunched up her face and shook her head in confusion. “What could a scruffy, blathering brat like you possibly need to practice?”

“My clan’s at war with another clan, and my captain’s paying 10 silver a head to anyone can catch our enemies without injuring them,” the young man explained. “He’s not big on violence. From the looks of you, I might need to find another method of capture. You look pretty bloodied up, and that wasn’t my intention.”

Ianthe scoffed, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “Well, whoever you are, or whatever you are, Fairuza and I have no use for ruffians or bandits or…or…”

“Brigands,” Fairuza added helpfully. 

“Scoundrels!” Ianthe stomped a foot as she hollered. “So if you don’t mind, you must please leave us alone! Fairuza, step away from him at once! Don’t you see, he’s just as like to rob you as…as…ugh, Fairuza, just get away from him! Go away, boy! Leave us alone!”

Kimmerick crossed his arms over his chest and then turned his gaze to Fairuza. “You heard her,” he said. “She wants to be left alone. Reckon you can rescue her out of that hole by your lonesome?”

Fairuza gave a rueful shake of her head. “I’m strong,” she said. “But not that strong.”

Kimmerick clucked his tongue sorrowfully. “Well, I guess she’ll just have to die down there, then.” He peered back into the hole. “It was nice meeting you,” he called. “I hope you make it out some day!”

“Oh, wait!” Ianthe howled, the color rising in her face. “Oh, you horrible thing! You worm! You scab! You absolutely dreadful stump!”

“Oh, come on, Ianthe, he’s only funning with you,” Fairuza said. “He’s a good sort. He found me while I was passed out and patched me up good as new. Shared his water and bandages. If he wanted to rob us, we’d be robbed by now.”

“Besides,” Kimmerik added with a toothy grin, “you’ve got nothing worth robbing.”

“Oh, shut up and get me out of here!” Ianthe screamed. She was very tired of this game by now, and her cuts and scratches were beginning to hurt. “Please!”

Both heads disappeared from view, and a moment later, a rope ladder tumbled down the wall of the pit, ended a few inches above the ground. Grabbing on with everything she had, the girl made her slow, laborious climb as Kimmerick and Fairuza looked on from above, occasionally shouting words of encouragement. 

Ianthe wished they wouldn’t. She already felt a spectacle as it was, huffing and puffing and uselessly tossing stray locks of hair from her eyes as she climbed. Their cheers only made her feel like a small child badly performing some menial task while doting parents cooed obligatory praise. She might have told them to shut up if she could spare the breath, which she certainly could not, and that realization only increased her ire.

As she crested the top of the pit, Kimmerick leaned down, grabbed her by the armpits, and lugged her out. She jerked out of his grasp as soon as she was able, and as Kimmerick pulled up the rope, Ianthe threw up again.

A moment later, the lad was holding a canteen of water to the girl’s lips, and as much as she wanted to push him away in disgust, she was weak, and the water felt like a blessing. She gulped it down greedily, thin rivulets streaming from the corners of her mouth. Shen she had her fill, she took the bottle from his hands and began gently cleaning her wounds.

Fairuza offered the girl a roll of cotton bandages and a jar of salve and began tending to her friend’s injuries. “You don’t look too bad,” Fairuza said as she gently dabbed on the potion. “I was worried you’d have some broken bones.”

“Me, too,” Ianthe admitted. Now that she was out of the pit, watered, and being tended to, her anger drained away, slowly replaced by a nagging helplessness which was much worse than the anger. “Are you all right? You said you passed out.”

“I’m fine now,” Fairuza said with a shrug. “You passed out, too. You were asleep for a long time.”

Ianthe blinked. “How long?”

“A few hours.”

Ianthe cursed and leaned back into her hands, her gaze turning now to the young man who’d rescued her. She wasn’t sure how to feel about him just yet. Yes, he’d saved her, but he’d also dug the pit in the first place, so she figured the two canceled each other out. “And how about you? What’s your deal?”

Kimmerick quirked an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

Ianthe gestured with a lift of her chin. “Do you live around here or something?”

The young man laughed. “Are you serious? Nobody lives down here anymore. It’s a dead zone.”

He paused, waiting for Ianthe’s response. But when none came, the young man turned a quizzical look to Fairuza. “You did know that, right? Aside from the lightfruit trees, there’s nothing down here anymore. Well, nothing except the—”

Terrible, ear-shattering screeching from above drowned out Kimmerick’s voice as the trio looked up, their eyes widening in terror as three black shapes shot down out of the sky. They were enormous, moving with far more elegance and speed than their size should have afforded. Neither girl had a chance to get a good look at the monsters before Kimmerick shouted, “RUN!”

Ianthe screamed and darted away just as a huge shape lunged for her, one long, sharp talon catching her skirts and shredding the material. She miscalculated her dodge and tripped over her own feet, planting herself face-first in the cold stone ground. She was doing her best to scrabble to her feet when something sharp and cold bit into her clothing, lifted her up off her feet and snatched her into the air.