"RUN!!"
Merchant Sam's cry penetrated through the despair-filled fog in Daenerys' mind, and the very next moment, the girl felt herself being yanked by her hand through the dense crowd without having any sense of where she was going, "Clear the way, Sam," came the muffled shout of the portly Merchant as he felt himself being bogged down.
"On it," Sam answered immediately as he ran to their front and then immediately began to utilise his size and strength to bulldoze his way through, making it much easier for Merchant Sam and Daenerys.
"Come on, hurry up," Merchant Sam urged as he ran with impressive nimbleness for his age and size, all while carrying almost half of Daenerys' weight, who, being a young girl with a small body, could not run as well as the other two, "We are not far from our ship, we can still make it."
"Stop Them!!" The guards stationed at the gates finally broke through their stupor at seeing someone daring to defy them in their city, screamed and ran towards the trio with enraged expressions on their faces. "Make Way!!" The guards hollered as they roughly pushed the crowd out of their way.
"Out of my way!! Move!" The guard who had actually let them go was more panicked than anyone else at that moment, as he knew that if he let these three escape today, then he was done for, so seeing the dense crowd becoming an hindrance between him and his target, the man unhesitatingly pulled his sword out of his sheath and began waving it indiscriminately on the innocent crowd, "GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY!!"
This recklessness almost started a stampede in front of the port entrance, as the people began screaming and running for their lives from this madman, but this tactic also turned out to be surprisingly effective, as the guards were able to move much faster towards their target.
"Good Idea." The guard from Illyrio's Mansion exclaimed loudly as he finally caught up to the others and, then, without any hesitation, pulled out his spear and copied the guard from before him, and began poking at people to clear his way, "Catch them!! Don't let them leave!"
"Which way? Which way is the boat?!" Sam asked frantically, as in his single-minded rush to move forward, he had already lost his sense of direction. He kept looking here and there, hoping to catch sight of the ship that he had been on only a few days.
"To the right!" Merchant Sam shouted in answer immediately, "It should be the fifth one to the right." The portly man from the North was now feeling very thankful for his last-minute decision to bring their ship closer to the port entrance; otherwise, they would have had no hope at all to get away.
"T-They are catching up to us," Daenerys announced in a panicked voice as her eyes looked back for just a moment, only to catch sight of the guards less than a dozen meters away from them, and they were closing that distance very quickly, because of their cruel methods.
"Don't worry!! We are not too far now," Even Merchant Sam had begun panting by now due to the exertion of running with all his might, "It should be around—There!" The Merchant's voice suddenly rose, and his eyes lit up in elation as he pointed at a distance, "That's our ship! Sam! Immediately tell them to pick up the anchor and—" the rest of the merchant's words got stuck in his throat as he caught sight of something that made his heart drop to the bottom in despair.
It wasn't known if the guards behind them had somehow managed to send a message to their colleagues or if the other were acting on their own after hearing the commotion.
But when the trio looked around, they noticed that the guards who had been stationed in various locations in the port were all currently converging towards them, and the worst part was that five of the guards were approaching them from the direction of their ship.
By this point, the crowd had wised up to the fact that these three people were fugitives and had begun actively running away from them, leaving them isolated in the middle.
And while this cleared their path open, it also lost them their last layer of protection, as, without the crowd to act as a barrier, it made it much easier for the soldiers to close the net around them.
"We can just force our way through," Sam said bravely while tightly gripping the axe in his hands, as the three of them were forced to stop just a hundred meters from their ship, "I bet I can take on at least three of them."
"Think again, boy," Merchant Sam grunted with a tense look on his face as he looked at the guards coming at them from all directions, "There are at least five of them behind us with crossbows in their hands. The moment you get entangled with the guards in the front, they will shoot at you from behind without hesitation, and just one of those bolts is enough to take you down, boy, so don't try anything stupid."
"What should we do then?" Sam asked back in frustration, inwardly cursing himself for not bringing his armour with him just to be discreet, otherwise they might already be back on the ship, "We can't really just surrender, can we?"
'Surrender? If we really surrender, then...' Daenerys' thoughts became jumbled as she realised that this might just be it for her and the other two.
Her dreams of freedom, that hadn't even had a chance to breathe properly, might just die in their cradle.
"Don't worry. It hasn't come to that yet," The Merchant answered Sam in as calm a voice as he could muster, "Because I am sure Jon must have considered that we could end up in a situation like this, so he should have some idea on how to handle it," he said turning to the rat standing on Daenerys shoulder, who at the moment was scanning their surroundings with a solemn look on its face, "You do have an idea, don't you?" the Merchant asked, unable to keep the anxious hope from his voice.
The rat contemplated something for a few moments, then it almost seemed to sigh as if it too thought that there really was no way out for them, but just as the three were about to fall into despair, the rat suddenly pointed at Sam and began gesturing towards its ears as if trying to tell him something.
"What is he saying?" Merchant Sam asked in a confused voice.
"I don't know wha—Oh, wait! I remember now! Are you talking about those?" Sam asked with a look of sudden comprehension on his face, as he immediately began rummaging through his satchel, and a few moments later, he pulled out a dozen pieces of corks, similar to the ones used to seal wine bottles, but much, much smaller.
"And what are we supposed to do with these?" Merchant Sam asked sceptically as Sam began handing out a pair to each of them.
"Um, I think we are just supposed to put them in our ears," Sam replied with an unsure expression on his face as he hesitatingly placed the corks in his ears, "I don't know how these are going to help us, but Jon told me that if there is ever an absolute emergency on this mission with no way out, then we can use them for help,"
The other two turned to stare at the rat, who immediately nodded and patted its tiny chest with a look of immense confidence on its face as if saying, 'Leave it to me.'
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