An Uneasy Slumber
an excerpt

From Chapter 4

He was a boy, of course, with a round, plump nose, ears that stuck out strangely, and features that were squished together. If he was dead, he would have looked far more pleasant if his hair was gold and in beautiful little ringlets, but it was not. His eyes were closed tight, but his nostrils flared for a moment.
Rosalind Mayfield put a hand over his mouth, and felt the breath come out between his lips. Beneath his lids, his eyes moved.
She was too close to him. The vines, unable to separate her from the boy, were now seeking to suffocate her. One of the green, spiked coils threw itself over her back and pushed her down, and another landed heavily on her head. They curled, each and everyone, it felt like, around her arms and legs. Her shako fell off, and she knew she would not find it again.
The vine pressed her face to that of the boy’s. Her teeth slid against his cheek as she gasped out for air, and she saw with a little regret that she had spat upon his eye. Rosalind’s nose ground against his, her forehead pressed hard against his sleeping brow, and her mouth, briefly, briefly, brushed his mouth.
The vines stopped pressing around her. The thorns stopped driving into her clothes and flesh, and fell beside her as benign as any vine she had ever encountered. They were still heavy, however, and she was quick to brush them off, but it was a small comfort to see they were no longer fighting her attempts to gain freedom. They fell off her, loose as rope, and she was satisfied with the thought that her struggles had somehow managed to defeat them.
“Duke of Wellington would give me a medal if he could,” she said aloud, smiling though in a sad if haughty way. She touched her face, and saw if had been cut several times. The cuts stung as she touched them.
She pushed herself off from the vines and stood, finding it much easier to do than before. Something still struggled beneath her feet, however, and she stepped back.
A yell, thick as the bark of a dog, came from the vines. It spoke unintelligibly in rough tones that were not very pleasing to hear.
The boy sat up, looking quickly from this side to that. He continued to speak, but Rosalind now felt that it was no language she had heard in her lifetime, though this was unfair as she only knew English and nothing else. Perhaps it was German, she thought as she looked at the boy with his angry, red face.
The boy coughed into his hands. He continued to speak brutishly, and when he saw her, his eyes grew wide, and he began to shout. She watched him stand quickly, and fall down even quicker.
First she was afraid, but as she looked at his clothes, his hair, and his light eyes, she grew excited. He cursed in that horrible voice, and she remembered the sword, as lost as the shako in the sea of vines that surrounded them. It had been of a particular kind of sword she had seen described and sketched in a number of the professor’s books, and it was a happy accident to remember such a description at a time like this, wasn’t it?
She looked at him most enthusiastically. His tongue was sharp with curses, but to her ears, the words had suddenly become very useful if not very pretty. Why, Professor Watterman would be more pleased with her than he had ever been!
“Lord!” Rosalind Mayfield cried, delighted. “I found a Saxon!”