Slippers

Flushed with humiliation and angry surprise she silently berated herself for taking them too lightly, for taking *him* too lightly. He was next to her now, hand around her arm, she burned with resentment as looked up at him to see a smug smile breaking through his otherwise grim expression. Emy imagined that it was rare for anything else but grim arrogance to fall on his face. She lifted her chin, refusing to at least appear bested,

"You know," she said in her most defiant voice " If I had known you were a snake, I would have been ready and you would fallen as easily as the others".

She waited and after some moments more of silent procession, she glanced at him to see his smug look now a grin - not the warm kind though, this one urged onlookers to worry not joy, for it didn't touch his cold eyes. When she looked into them she felt like the smile was more of a wolf bearing his teeth than a man with a jovial expression.

"You are a mouse pretending to be a lion, to the snake you are just an easy snack", he was a smug bastard for sure.

The rest of the journey was quiet, the company picked up a few horses, though it took some convincing to get her own mount, she was *not* riding with the Snake. The men exchanged few words and at first she attempted to get answers out of them but soon found that useless, receiving mostly silence or at most single word answers. She wondered at where they were going, having expected the trip to the main capitol to have ended at least an hour ago. The undisturbed rolling hills bespoke nothing of inhabitation, the only trace of man was the cleanly cut path they traveled now. Her sense of direction was nothing to brag about , but she thought they traveled East, and as time continued to pass and their route stayed she began to worry. The only thing East was the Kayrock Kingdom, a military kingdom with a towering black obelisk of a castle. They were her own kingdom of Isenera's most complacent audience, taunting their broken army, raiding towns, stealing food to point of almost starving, almost killing, and almost destroying them. Emy had no real loyalty to Isenera but that didn't mean she didn't hold seething hatred for Kayrock either. A disturbing thought came to her,

"Are you Kayrock spies?" She didn't know what plot they were pursuing but the Snake's attitude was what she imagined their people to be like. He laughed, not the wicked one of before but a real one, his eyes flashing with sardonic humor.

"Quite the opposite, lovely," There was no making sense of what was going on, Emy let her mind be numbed by thumping sound of horses and men for the rest of the journey.

It was during sundown when they finally arrived in a clearing in the middle of a woodland , at first Emy thought was just a resting point as there were only a few tents scattered around. All small except for a slightly larger one in the center. They were colored shades of green, no allegience to any kingdom at least showing from the outside. If these men were not Kayrock, then what were Isenera soldiers doing here? Especially in such small number, there was nothing they could possibly hope to be doing. Her thoughts were interrupted by him,

"We are going to be here for a few days, the commander will give you more information regarding your task tomorrow." He looked tired, black hair falling onto his face and his posture stiff from riding. He still managed to smirk though when he caught her looking at him. She looked back down and thought at the way he had said *commander* with some sort of resentment. Though she was not much aware of the political leaders in her nation, she wasn't surprised at bad leadership. What task did this commander want of her? Questions and proddings got her nothing but annoyed looks and she eventually became too tired to continue so she followed their lead, into the tent she was apparently sharing with a few others in her same category of what the soldiers called "slippers".

"Like the shoes?" She had asked incredulously.

"You will understand it soon enough".

Her fellow Slippers she learned through clipped introductions, April, Maven, and Trent were all from different towns across Isenera. They didn't seem to share anything in common except hardened wary gazes. Like her it seemed they knew nothing of what was going on and were not about to start sharing the information they had.

The tent was sparse, empty actually would be a more fitting word - the only item for them were a few straw blankets to be worn on the hard ground. After the hours of riding though.. it might as well have been the feathered mattress of the king himself! Emy noticed simmilar expressions of tiredness on Trent and Maven, but April seemed alert. Maybe she's been here longer than them, maybe she could at least say something about what on earth was going on here. That idea perked Emy up a bit and as Trent and Maven fell asleep, she scooted towards April.

"April, right?" She knew it was ofcourse, just needing a way to start conversation. April nodded, looking wary. "I'm-"

"Emy, yes I know." Her tone was outright hostile and Emy's surprise was followed by a rush of annoyance. If these people were all prisoners like her, they should be working together not not pushing eachother away. Maybe she thought, they weren't prisoners, maybe somehow these three were loyal Isenerens and perhaps taking her was a mistake all along. That would at least explain why nothing was making any sense, she wasn't supposed to be here! Hope sruged in her for a moment and then April spoke again,

"If they brought you here, you're going to be stuck the same as me", she seemed to have read Emy's hope... which promptly dropped back into despair. Well, she figured after a moments thought, not being meant to be here was probably worse anyways, having no use of her she had no doubt that her only fate would be death. Desperate for any useful information, she asked bluntly,

"Do you have any idea of what's going on?", April sighed, adjusted herself on the dirt and straws for a moment before responding

"I got here a couple days ago, some men put a bag over my head when I was at the village market. It was a day's journey East and I've been up in this place since then", she gestured, resigned to the mess around them. So April was just another village girl, probably in a near one too. Again reading her confusion April said,

"I think they want us for some mission into Kayrock, we are a few hours journey from their outer gates." A mission into Kayrock. What were they going to do? Spy? It seemed like the only reasonable answer given their current resources. That made her very nervous, but also hopeful - it would be easy to slip away from the grasps of either kingdom and this madness into a safer corner of the world.