The Necromancer

Chapter 1, Part 5

"Come on, just tell me." I pleaded.

"No." Skip was busy rolling up the leather tent. "Now stop asking." 

I'd been trying to get answers from her all night about how she'd been able to persuade those Paladins to just leave. She finally threatened to have Mog breathe on me again if I didn't shut up and let her get some sleep.  The massive ogre had given me a crooked smile with his gravestone-sized teeth, eager to comply with his friend's request. So I'd dropped it... until we woke up again this morning and broke camp.

"How about just a hint?" I asked.

She dropped the bundled-up tent and threw her hands in the air. "All right, if it will shut you up, I'll tell you, OK? But after this, no more questions. I want to be out of here and on our way by eight."

"Deal!" I shouted. She sat down on the tent roll and gestured for me to take a seat nearby. Even Mog stopped lifting boxes  and sacks of goods and putting them in the big harness strapped to his back. Who needed a pack mule when an ogre can carry fifty times the weight without even straining?

"Look, you can't tell anyone this," she started with a heavy sigh. "But I was born a princess." My jaw dropped, and I let out an involuntary gasp.  She just rolled her eyes at me. "See, this is why I don't tell anyone. As soon as they find out, they treat me completely differently. Instead of 'Hi Skip,' suddenly it's 'Good evening, your excellency! What can I do for you?'" She shook her head. "I just want to be Skip. Plain old Skip. And the only person I've found who doesn't freak out about my lineage is good old Mog." She gestured to the grinning ogre.

"GOOD," Mog concurred with a thump on his chest that would have shattered stones.

"I'm sorry," I told her, biting back the urge to end that sentence with 'Your Majesty. "I'm sorry, Skip. Please, continue."

"My parents are King Gregor Halberot and Lady Alisande Halberot, lords of Naitha." I'd heard of the country, but knew basically nothing about it. Geography wasn't a subject in the Necromancer Academy. More and more, I realized that school hadn't prepared me for life at all. "I am their only child, and so naturally they gave me anything that I wanted. I had minstrels sing me to sleep every night. I had whole rooms just for my toys. I had tutors in ever subject you could ever imagine. But I was just... I never had any friends. My parents didn't deem any of the peasant children 'worthy' of my company, and visits from other nobles were few and far between. The ones that did  make it to the palace with children my age were only after one thing."

Mog let out a rumbling giggle that sounded like a landslide.

Skip kind of kicked at the dirt in a bashful way. "I was too young for courtship, of course, but everyone that I met was already sizing me up, determining which of their kin could reasonably be considered a good enough match for me. They all asked how my studies were going: astronomy and medicine with my father's advisers, sewing and dancing with the ladies in waiting, manners and etiquette from Ms. Attesk... everything I'd need to be a proper queen and serve my husband-to-be. They didn't care one jot about what I thought of my lessons, they were only trying to judge which of their sons to put forth. These weren't friendly social calls: it was a meat market. And that was when I decided to run off."

"Then what?" I asked, maybe a bit too eagerly.

"Well, I was a 15-year-old girl, traveling alone with a purse full of gold stolen from my father's treasury. So naturally the first thing to happen on my voyage was getting robbed by bandits just a few miles from the palace walls. Some of them wanted to kill me, but the leader took a liking to me immediately, and when I told her that I was a runaway with nowhere to go, she invited me to join." She patted the bow on her back almost lovingly. "In addition to imbuing me with a love of ale and revelry, they taught me everything I know about archery and other forms of fighting. I can still hit a bug through the eye from a hundred yards away. But then we tried robbing a nobleman from my father's court, and he recognized me. As soon as the other bandits realized that I was the king's daughter, they decided that I made a better hostage than companion, and made plans to ransom me back to my father for a hefty sum. So, I ran away yet again. Those bastards hunted me for the better part of a year."