Rachel looked up from her book. Her ears perked up, and she listened to the faint voices coming from outside. Somewhere off in the distance, somebody was barking orders.
“Is this...the knight training, perhaps?” she wondered aloud.
As she listened to the voices, too far away to make out words, Rachel suddenly realized something.
“Come to think of it, it’s been a while since I’ve exercised.”
Rachel was never the type to get fired up about athletics, but between walking around the palace and keeping up with her royal instructors, she’d exercised much more then than she did now, confined to this room. Not that the lack of exercise had made her put on weight or anything.
“Maybe the lack of exercise is the reason I’ve been such a light sleeper lately.”
It was evidently affecting her rest, although all the naps probably had something to do with it too.
“Mrrgh!” Rachel puffed up her cheeks and glared adorably at the sky. “Yes, that was probably to be expected. If all I do is stay inside my cell, I’ll never get tired out, after all.”
She needed to move around more. A normal person would have been emotionally exhausted by this situation, but Rachel was perfectly fine with it, so the sedentary lifestyle was becoming unhealthy.
“This won’t do. In my time as His Highness’s fiancée, my lessons exhausted me every day. When I got in bed, I was always out in five seconds.”
That was unhealthy in its own way.
Rachel slapped her knee. “Now that I think of it, I came prepared with exercise equipment I could use inside the prison.”
Armed with a new idea, Rachel opened a wooden box and went looking for the sporting goods.
“Let’s see. I bought something because it looked interesting at the time... Ah, here it is.”
As he walked along the corridor on his way back from watching Sykes’s knight training, Elliott noticed an odd sound coming from the rear gardens.
“Hey, do you hear a grinding sound?” he asked.
Sykes and Wolanski, who were following him, listened and then looked at each other.
“I do hear something,” said Wolanski, “but what is it?”
“It’s kinda like rock being ground down,” Sykes added.
Following Sykes’s instincts, they looked for the source and ended up at the door to the dungeon. They could now clearly make out the sound of something chipping away at stone inside there.
“Oh, come on. It’s her, again?” Elliott complained.
“If something weird is happening near the rear gardens, it’s pretty much always because of Rachel now,” Sykes noted.
Sure that Rachel was up to no good, they descended the stairs and found her grinding away at the wall with a crank-type hand drill.
“Hey, Rachel,” Elliott called.
“Your Highness? Did you have some business with me?”
Rachel was at a good stopping point, so she turned around and wiped her brow. She was dressed rather scantily, her bare arms and legs visible, and she’d worked up quite a sweat drilling holes in the wall, so the men couldn’t bear to look directly at her.
“Even if there’s no one around to see, how can you dress like that?” Elliott asked.
“I simply changed into something easier to exercise in,” Rachel replied.
Elliott and the others looked at her hands.
“Hey, Sykes, has rock drilling become a sport recently?” Elliott asked.
“Miss Rachel’s doing it, so...maybe?” Sykes answered.
Wolanski interjected and asked, “Why are we learning trends from a prisoner?”
As the three of them whispered back and forth, Rachel, who’d been wiping her face vigorously with a towel, looked at them with exasperation. “Come now, this isn’t a stonemasons’ athletic meet. I’ve never heard of any sport like that.”
“Huh? But you said you were exercising,” Elliott pointed out. “What were you doing, then?”
Looking at Rachel’s hands again, Elliott watched as she laid down the drill and picked up a protruding object attached to a shaft. It was small enough to fit in her hand and looked like a stone half-buried in the dirt. He watched Rachel hammer the shaft into the hole she’d made. Looking more closely, Elliott saw a number of these stonelike objects, all in various shapes and sizes, attached to the wall.
“What are all these?!” he asked.
The wall, its stones laid in an alternating pattern, was covered in a bunch of protrusions. In a way, it resembled a big boulder awash in the waves and covered by starfish. It looked kind of creepy.
Having finished her work, Rachel answered, “Hand- and footholds.”
“Hand-...and footholds?” Elliott echoed.
Covering her hands in some chalky powder, Rachel grabbed one of the protrusions, making as if to climb the wall. “Okay, looks like it’s good to go!” she reported with a self-satisfied smile.
“I still have no idea what you’re doing.”
Rachel powdered her hands, then used her fingers and toes to climb the wall with the protrusions. Judging by the motions Rachel was testing out, this was apparently the “exercise” she’d been talking about.
“What are you doing, ultimately?” Elliott asked.
“Bouldering!” Rachel declared confidently.
Elliott glanced at Sykes. “You know what that is?”
“It’s a sport, a technique where you climb large rocks without using any tools. Not something you’d normally do in prison.” Sykes was too astonished to say any more.
Rachel nodded. “Yes, that’s right. This prison just doesn’t have the height, you see.”
“Uh, no,” Sykes said, shaking his head. “That’s not the problem here, okay?” Rachel was focused on the entirely wrong thing, but he just didn’t know where to start with her.
Ignoring Sykes, Rachel clapped her hands as if she’d just had a great idea. “I know! Would it be all right if I were to punch a hole through the ceiling, Your Highness?”
“No!” Elliott yelled. “And, hold on, don’t go putting holes in the prison walls either! What’re you going to do with all these weird things sticking out?”
“They’re not ‘weird things.’ They’re hand- and footholds.”
“‘Weird things’ is good enough! Don’t go remodeling the prison without permission!”
Rachel pursed her lips, seemingly offended by this condemnation. “But you smiled when I painted a picture...” she said, pouting.
“Who smiled?! I fainted from the wretched smell!” Elliott explained.
“Now, now. Like with the painting, if you don’t want me to do something, you really need to say so in advance. It’s too late once I’ve already done it, don’t you think?”
“Then come get permission first! ‘It’s too late’ isn’t going to cut it! Once you’re out of the dungeon, I swear I’m going to make you put things back as they were, you hear me?!”
“I’m in here until I die, aren’t I? I couldn’t care less what happens after I’m dead.”
“You can get out by apologizing, you know?!”
“I don’t want to.”
Tired from yelling at Rachel, who wasn’t paying him any attention anyway, Elliott left the dungeon feeling dejected. He gazed up to the reddening sky with a sigh.
“Hey, Sykes...” he asked.
“What’s up, Your Highness?”
“When women exercise in thin clothing...” The scenes from before were playing over and over in Elliott’s head. “It’s pretty sweet.”
Sykes, who had the same far-off look in his eyes, nodded. “Yeah. About the only time I liked Martina was when she was all sweaty.”
Beside them, Wolanski was writhing. “The way... The way she casually rubbed her face with that towel... It emphasized her lack of makeup, and that’s so hot! Yes, natural beauty really is the best!”
Three pubescent boys closed their eyes, savoring the images that still lingered behind their eyelids.