by Nia O’Reilly Amandes

(fiction)

Eleanor’s first mistake was thinking that the snow would make her harder to find.  She had hoped for a blizzard, a powerful flurry of flakes that would instantaneously fill the deep footprints of a person in a hurry.  Instead, the snow stopped just as she began to run.

Deep into the first night, she stumbled on tracks she had never seen before.  They were big ones, tall and wide, which worried her a little but did not stop her from walking alongside them for a while.  They seemed old and were mostly covered in the flakes from earlier that morning.  Besides, she could not change course so early in her journey.

So far, Eleanor had slowed down but never stopped moving.  Maybe on day three, she thought, there will be enough distance between us that I might stop to sleep.  In the meantime, she was eating the nuts and dried fruits she had packed in her deep pockets, drinking from a bottle attached to the bag on her back, and alternating between walking and running at all times.

Though she had done nothing wrong, she knew they would come for her.  It was an unjust system, and the word of a girl was a whisper against a symphony of accusations.  Her baby brother had disappeared three days before.  He had been suffering from a mysterious illness that not one of the seven doctors called in to see him could diagnose.  When the last to visit left the room to speak softly and politically to her father in the hall, she had snuck in to see her young brother and found an empty crib.  It had only been a moment since the doctor had left, and within that short time, the sickly three-year-old had vanished.  

When Eleanor could offer no explanation to her father, she was locked in her own room, questioned every few hours by some members of his staff and then left alone to stare out the window.  She asked to see her mother each time a new stranger entered the room to attempt to bribe her with candy and baby animals, but no one would send for her.  In the end, it was a tiny note slipped under the door written quickly in her mother’s script that urged her to go.  On the ground beneath her window, hidden in the leafless rose bushes, was a satchel and several small bags of food.  All she had to do was climb down the uneven stones of the castle wall at a time when her father was otherwise occupied, a time her mother had identified in her note.

Eleanor’s life had changed so suddenly and there was so much unknown that she focused on the large animal tracks as something she might properly identify if she focused hard enough.  They were bigger than a dog’s paw prints, she assumed, though she had never spent much time around animals.  Smaller than a bear’s, she hoped, as she had never met a bear but feared it might not end well for her.  As the snow began to glow pink with the early dawn, she concluded it was some sort of lynx.  

By then, she could hear the pounding of horses and a good deal of yelling some distance behind her.  

Eleanor wondered if her mother had stolen her little brother, and why.  She wondered if his illness had been real.  She thought she knew why no one had told her anything, though she did not feel any safer knowing nothing.  She knew her mother disagreed with her father’s plans to start another war with their neighbors to the north, while continuing to fight their neighbors to the west and urging those in the east to surrender to him without a fight.  There was no one to the south.  Maybe her mother was saving her little brother from his inevitable role of filling the shoes of a leader whose country would soon fall apart.  

The thundering of hooves shook the ground now and Eleanor heard men’s voices above the sound.  She looked for a place to hide.  There were not many in this sparse forest, with all the leaves gone and the ground frozen solid.  She summoned what little strength she had left and ran faster, pulling her satchel to the front of her body and digging through it, hoping to find some answer inside.  She feared her fingers would reach a weapon of some sort, which she did not know how to use.  Everything she found- a compass, an extra pair of mittens, some rope- seemed useless now.  The last thing she reached for was soft and light, and as the pounding approached, she dropped to the ground between four tall trees and covered her body with a snow-colored blanket.  The shock of the frozen snow all around her, the ice in direct contact with her face and neck, was canceled out completely by the heat of adrenaline and the rapid beating of Eleanor’s heart.  She lay as still as possible.

The galloping slowed, and though she could not see it, she heard that what had been a dozen horses at least was now just one.  The horse was breathing heavily, and Eleanor pictured the steam escaping its mouth in great bursts.  Her own breathing sounded like a tornado and she tried to quiet her heart.  

The horse stopped and two human feet hit the ground.  They were so close, Eleanor wondered if she should jump up and try to use the element of surprise as a last effort to escape.  She knew she’d have to decide in mere seconds, but right then she felt so cold and tired that she wondered how bad it would be really just to submit and go back to her father’s castle.  Then she heard a voice she recognized, soft and warm, as she felt the blanket being lifted from her shivering body.  

“You were wonderful,” her mother said.  She knew it was her, though she was dressed like one of her father’s soldiers.  “None of those men could believe a little girl would follow a bear’s tracks into the woods.  They are headed north and will be for some time.”  Eleanor turned and saw her brother, sleepy but looking quite healthy, sitting in the saddle of a large gray horse.  She allowed her mother to lift her to join him and, warmed between them, wondered where they would go next.