Chapter Text
Emma had found the hatch three days ago, by accident as her accident-prone form had crashed into a displayed coat of armour while practicing her sword hand, alone in one of the all but forgotten armouries of the palace. After the dust and noise had settled, she had tried to manoeuvre the case back, but had found the sturdy wooden panel that had been revealed too interesting to pass up. Emma knew the palace was filled with hidden passages and pathways, and they had excited Emma to no end while she was growing up—especially because much of her life was filled with boredom and lessons she disliked. Throughout her youth, most of her joy had been found in passages much like the one the hatch had revealed, and Emma—as adventurous as she was by nature—had immediately relished the chance to explore a brand new one now she was older. Despite being eighteen now, Emma figured no one was ever too old for an adventure, especially when it was just stumbled upon.
Of course, deep down, Emma knew she was too old to childishly crawl through unexplored passageways, but the monotony of the palace life was often too boring to submit to. She wanted to be out in the world, slay dragons, go on adventures, but of course she was not allowed any of that. Instead, she was paraded around her potential suitors in the hope she would fall for one of them and get married, and she rarely left the palace at all, except for very rare hunting trips. Eighteen or not, Emma had found a chance to unwind and indulge, and she was going to take it no matter what.
Excitedly, she had submerged herself in the experience of something new, and had coasted along on the high of her imminent exploration while she muddled through her never-ending etiquette lessons and the last of the banquets with King Fredrick and his court, who had stayed the longest of all royals for the festival organized in celebration of her birthday. With so much of her time accounted for, she had been forced to delay her exploration, but now the guests were gone and she would not be missed until dinner time. She had four hours to explore, and she was going to make the most of it.
Armed with a fully filled hooded oil lamp, rope—just in case—and a birch broom, she had dropped herself down into the shallow hole. She was dressed in her favourite exploratory outfit—leather riding pants, sturdy cottons shirt, leather vest, and her curly blonde hair had been covered by a forest green hood—and the adult youth was ready to discover what lay beyond the hatch that had come to occupy her every waking thought.
The first ten minutes of slow exploration were filled mostly with spiders and rats, both of which had been conquered with her broom while she tried to quench squeals of disgust. Rats she could deal with, but she could literally feel the spiders crawling around on her back, despite the hood, and twice now, they had made her re-think this whole plan. Nothing reduced her quicker to a state of mind more befitting her ten-year-old self than spiders. Still, the allure of the slowly sloping and widening tunnel that she couldn’t even stand up straight in was too strong. There was no way she was not exploring this tunnel more—it would just take longer as she had to clear every inch of the walls and ceiling first.
She estimated half an hour to forty-five minutes had passed before she rounded another bend and caught her first glimpse of light from a source not her own lamp. Ignoring her cramped body and a good few spiders that managed to slip past her broom as her sweeps became more hurried, she quickly traversed the last few feet until she found another wooden panel, the cracks in which shone light upon the dirty princess below without revealing anything of the space above. Setting down the broom and pulling the hood up on the lamp before putting it away, Emma crouched down in the small puddle gathered on the stone and waited, listening for sounds as she caught her breath and swatted away a spider from her pant leg. She shuddered desperately. At least the world beyond the small hatch above her seemed quiet.
Emma waited a few more minutes. Being a princess meant she got away with a lot, but it also meant there were certain boundaries she could cross even less than anyone else in the Kingdom—and these boundaries had become more rigid the older she had gotten. Instinctively, she knew getting caught sneaking about in underground tunnels well below the palace’s main floor was on that short list, and she did not want to get caught. She was in enough trouble as it was because she had effortlessly beaten Prince Fredrick II at sword fighting. Her mother had done that disapproving squinty thing she did when she saw another political disaster on the horizon courtesy of her daughter, and Emma had scoffed, muttering that if she had not wanted her to beat the kid a year her junior, she should have told her in advance so she could have flaked out. Obviously, that had made her mother even madder, but behind her back, the King had given Emma one of his proud daddy-David smiles, and she knew that if she treaded lightly for a while, her mother would be just fine. If Snow could do anything to perfection, it was smooth over Emma’s unruliness with members of the neighbouring royal courts. She’d been doing it for as long as Emma had been alive, after all.
Returning to the present, Emma imprinted on herself once more that she simply could not get caught and vowed to take it slow. Another minute and then she straightened as much as the cramped space would allow. She placed her dusty hands on the wood of the hatch and pressed experimentally, finding that the hatch would not budge at all. A firmer press with her shoulders had better results, and she held back a cough as dust and sand settled on her as the hatch gave way. Letting the wood sink down again, she listened intently for anything out of the ordinary, but was again met by silence. Wherever she was, it was not well-travelled.
This time, she could press the hatch up with just her fingertips, and she lifted it high enough to soundlessly place it to the side. Again, she waited a moment, then peeked her head out, turning around rapidly to take in the space above. She was in a hallway of sorts and it was deserted. Standing up fully now, she found her head sticking out of a hole in the floor that seemed to be hewn out of rock like the tunnel she was still standing in. This hallway actually looked like a hallway, however, and was lined with oil lamps hanging off beams that seemed to support the structure. It was high enough for two broad shouldered and tall men to walk through side-by-side without having to duck or get intimately close to either the walls or each other. One side of the hallway was solid rock, the other was lined with doors, four in total, and at the end was a spiralling staircase leading up, although Emma wouldn’t have been able to guess where it led up to. Behind her was solid rock again, and Emma realized her hatch—small as it was—probably served as drainage.
Even with the lamps, the hallways were badly lid, and the small, barred, windows of the doors were dark. It smelled damp and musty, and a little like the sea. A subtle, lingering, scent of urine and faeces made Emma crinkle her nose in disgust. Right away, she wondered what kind of puddle she was actually standing in, but forced the thought aside as fast as she could. One thing was for sure, whatever this place was, it couldn’t be part of the palace.
Seeing as she was absolutely alone, Emma decided to risk further exploration. She reached up and placed the lantern on the edge of her exit before pulling herself up until she could wrestle herself on her forearms, the edge of the square hole digging painfully into her chest. This would have been so much easier when she was still ten, although she probably wouldn’t have been able to reach the edge then. Struggling, she swung her legs to get a bit of momentum and managed to push herself up onto her hands and put a knee on the cold stone below. At least her upper body strength courtesy of hours and hours of combat training was paying off.
Heaving herself up the last of the way, she managed to climb up and out, standing carefully as her ears picked up on something—a grating sound like iron on stone. Freezing, she felt her heart pounding in her throat as she waited for the sound to repeat. It didn’t. With a sigh, she relaxed her posture and eyed the hole she’d just climbed out of, located at the end of the dead-end hallway. Why on earth anyone had wanted to make an escape route out of the palace to this Gods forsaken place was beyond her.
Patting down her clothes lightly to get the dust and cobwebs off of it, she decided on a plan of action. The doors needed closer inspection, of course, and if she dared, she would see where the staircase led. It was only a quick step to the first door, and she peeked inside without preamble. It was dark—too dark. She couldn’t see a thing with the back light from the lanterns. She hurried to get her own and slid the hood to the side, focusing the beam inwards, beyond the bars of the door that was further embellished with a small door that shut at the top.
Peeking in, Emma found a barren room, mouldy straw on the ground, and a cot on the right side, against the stone wall. Rusty chains ran down over it, extending from bolts in the wall to shackles at the ends. That was all there was to the room, and Emma suddenly realized what she was looking at: a cell. This was a dungeon, and seeing as there was nothing around the palace for miles, it had to be part of it. Shivering, Emma stepped back as if stung, banging the lamp into the wall next to her arm as she did so and causing a Gods awful ruckus in the dead silence of the hallway.
Dying of mortification, Emma’s eyes widened as her breath caught in her throat. She froze and held her breath, heart pounding, as the sound she had thought she had imagined returned. Metal slid over stone slowly—hesitantly—and Emma did not have to guess what she was hearing; she now knew. Behind one of the doors further down the line, someone was chained to the wall and was now standing up from the cot, roused by Emma’s legendary clumsiness. Emma’s heart tried to pound out of her chest, and she barely contained a shriek when a voice rough with disuse—a distinctly female voice—shattered the silence.
“Who goes there?”
It was a logical question, and one Emma—obviously—couldn’t answer. Instead, she stood frozen to the spot as the sound of iron scraping over stone returned, and then Emma saw fingers wrap around bars of the door farthest away from her. They were dirty, and trembling, and inhumanly pale. Emma stopped breathing, eyes wide, and backed up against the wall. This time, she was careful not to bang the lamp into anything.
“I heard you. Who are you?”
There was no malice in the voice, just quiet curiosity and obvious mistrust; the voice of someone starved for connection but who never got it. Emma had to get away, she had to go. Now. She couldn’t talk to a criminal who would obviously rat her out the moment she got the chance to. She was in here for a reason, after all.
Scrambling as quickly and quietly as she could, Emma put down the lamp and sat down on the floor, legs dangling into the hole, hoping she was still out of sight of the prisoner. She cast one more look at the fingers still wrapped around the bars and lowered herself down as her quickly beating heart and frantic mind urged her into greater urgency. She reached for the hot lamp and set it down on the ground, burning herself in her hurry to get out. She silently cursed, sucking on the scorched flesh of her thumb, and flailed with the other until the pain faded enough to reach for the panel to seal the hole back up. Another scraping of iron over stone, and Emma was moved to greater urgency. She grabbed the lamp, her broom, and hurried down the passageway as fast as she could, her only thought being to get out—get away—before she was discovered and she would be in more trouble with her parents than she had ever been.
At least the voice did not return.
This time, she did not care about rats or spiders and she made it through the passageway in maybe a third of the time. Her back hurt, and her little brush with the potential consequences of her actions had left her emotionally drained. She still felt hounded, the woman’s voice ringing clearly in her ears as if she was still in the hallway, pressed up against the wall, knowing she was in for a world of hurt if she got caught; there was no excuse to be found cavorting with prisoners. Still, the emotional turmoil that had been in the woman’s words had touched something in Emma, and she felt forever changed—shamed.
Once she got to the much larger hatch on ‘her’ side of the tunnel, she forced herself to slow down and listen before pushing the wooden panel up. The practice area of the armoury was deserted, and she hoisted herself up quickly, leaving the soiled broom and the extinguished lamp behind in the tunnel. She placed the panel back quickly, pushed the display case over it, made sure the armour looked presentable, and stripped to her undergarments. With as much attention as she dared to give the task Emma washed herself with the bucket of cold water she had set out for herself, making sure her hands were clean and hoping her face was as well. It took her only a few minutes to force herself into the dress she was expected to wear for dinner and which she had stashed inside the armour on the stand for the time being.
Before long, Emma had her hair back into a presentable state and she had exchanged her dusty boots for clean ones. She quickly stuffed her clothes in the bag her dress had come from and flung it over her shoulder. Her heart was still pounding in her chest when she ascended the stairs to the main hall and slipped up the stairs to her rooms. She only relaxed when the heavy wooden door to her bedroom fell shut behind her and she could stash her bag in the back of her wardrobe where no one would care to look. Her wardrobe had been labelled a disaster zone long ago.
Falling onto the bed, panting wildly, Emma stared up at the ceiling and tried to wrap her head around what she had just experienced. Her parents—Snow White and Prince-bloody-Charming—had someone locked in a dirty dungeon far below the palace, and Emma hadn’t known. Worse yet, Emma had almost been discovered. What if the woman told the guards who visited her that there had been someone with her in the hallway?
Emma groaned, bringing an arm up to cover her eyes in an attempt to block out the entire world. She had been lucky; no one could possibly know it had been Emma—even if the woman told—but Emma knew she could never again risk a trip through the tunnel. Her parents had kept the prisoner a secret for a reason, and if they ever learned Emma knew about her, she would be grounded forever, despite being an adult now. Her parents were sweethearts, but they were also the King and Queen, and their word was law. Still, the knowledge of the prisoner below the ground had Emma feeling inexperienced and young, and she didn’t know how to handle a situation like this. This sort of thing was not covered in her lessons, and she most certainly lacked the life experience for it. This was not an adventure, this was not the quest to slay a dragon that she desperately wanted to go on. She should just leave well enough alone.
If only Emma wasn’t so damn curious now.