In Which We Are Set Upon by Bandits
We had little to eat other than turnips. I had come to despise that small, hard vegetable. Albert turned up his muzzle at them. Even Tate lost his cheerful expression when I pulled out the satchel. Hero was the only one who didn’t seem to mind. But she hadn’t been eating them nearly as long as the rest of us.
Late in the afternoon of our third day with Hero, we stopped to make camp. Once the horses were watered and the turnip soup was cooking over the fire, Hero said, “We have some time until supper is ready. How about a little sparring?”
“You mean with swords?” Tate asked. “Of course,” Hero said.
Tate and I looked at each other. From the look on his face, he had about as much experience with a sword as I did.
“W-well,” I said, for once purposely dragging out a word, because I didn’t know what to say next.
“It will be good for all of us,” Hero said. “As Grandfather used to say, ‘There is no substitute for practice.’”
Hero got Guardian out of my saddlebag and then went looking for a tree limb to serve as another blade. She gave me the sword, handed Tate the branch, and then stood back to watch.
Tate and I bowed to each other, because that seemed like the kind of thing that knights would do before they tried to cut off each other’s heads. Then we began to swing our various weapons around. Hero’s expression quickly shifted from patient expectation to confusion to revulsion.
She stepped closer and put a hand up to stop us. “What are you doing?”
Tate and I both looked slightly sheepish. I shrugged my shoulders.
“This is Guardian,” Hero said. “You can’t treat it like a stick. Don’t you know anything about swordsmanship?”
I wanted to tell her that of course I did, but it would have been a lie. And she would have most likely asked to see some specific technique that I had no clue how to do. So I shook my head, feeling like an idiot.
“N-no,” I said, and Tate nodded his agreement.
Hero frowned as she looked at me. I expected her to go on about what a disgrace I was, but instead she held out her hand. Feeling strange, I handed her the sword.
Hero walked around to face Tate. “First off, a sword is not a club that you swing. It should work like an extension of your arm.” She moved her right arm through a series of movements to show us how natural the sword should look.
Hero taught us how to thrust and parry, how to slash and block. Tate and I took turns practicing the skills with Guardian. Hero’s way certainly felt more effective. After that night, Hero gave Tate and me a swordsmanship lesson every evening while the stew cooked. Slowly, I began to feel less and less like a fool when I picked up Guardian.
The road was growing steeper and the air cooler. On occasion there would be a break in the trees, and we would get a real sense of how high we were climbing. The heights made Albert dizzy, and a wobbly horse is a danger to everyone. So we made a point of not letting him look. But one afternoon as we came around a tight turn, the forest disappeared to show a sheer drop ahead. Albert began to swoon.
I practically threw myself off his back and grabbed his reins.
“Everything’s fine,” I told him. “C-close your eyes.”
Albert cried, “We are all going to fall to our deaths!”
“No, just c-close your eyes.”
Albert begrudgingly closed his eyes.
“Now I’m g-going to lead you down the road.
His entire body was shaking. He moaned rather pitifully.
“C-come on now.”
Albert slowly lifted one hoof and then another as I pulled the reins. He followed carefully after me. When we made it around the bend and into a small clearing, I told Albert that we were safe. He opened his eyes, looked at me, and fainted, knocking me to the ground in the process. I was trapped under an unconscious pile of horse, and it took both Tate and Hero to pull me out. Albert still didn’t move. Sparkles rolled his eyes.
It was earlier in the day than we usually stopped, but we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so Hero took out Guardian and started showing us how to hold a proper high guard. Our lesson came to a very abrupt end when two men came bursting through the trees. One carried a rusty sword, the other an old spear. Both figures were thin and filthy. Their clothes were torn. Their faces and arms were peppered with scars. They were two of the meanest-looking men I had ever seen.
“Give us your gold, or we’ll take the girl and run you both through,” the man with the sword bellowed.
I glanced quickly around our group. Albert was thankfully still unconscious; this might have killed him. Tate stood in shock, with his hand gripped around the tree branch. Hero also stood still, but her eyes were narrowing.
“You will do no such thing,” she said, and then lunged toward the man with the sword.
He stumbled back, wearing a look of shock, as Sir Danton’s granddaughter came after him. In three strokes, she had knocked the rusty sword out of his hand and had the tip of Guardian’s blade pressed against his throat.
The man’s companion, staring openmouthed at his friend, didn’t see Tate coming. Swinging his tree limb like a shepherd’s staff, Tate knocked the spear-bearer to the ground.
“Hobart, get the lead rope,” Hero said, without taking her eyes off the man who now knelt in front of her. He was easily twice her size but looked back at her in terror.
Still not quite believing what was happening, I untied the lead rope from Sparkle’s harness and brought it back over to my friends. In minutes we had both bandits firmly tied.
“You two should be ashamed of yourselves,” Hero said, once Tate’s victim seemed able to look at her clearly. “Attacking children. Don’t you have any sense of honor?”
The man who had come into the clearing brandishing a sword minutes before, began to wail.
Tate and I stared at each other. Hero continued to scowl at him.
“We never meant to be bandits!” the man cried. “We’re respectable men.”
“Respectable, my foot,” Hero snapped.
“No, really,” he said, as his friend tried to nod and ended up looking dizzy. “We were farmers until the crops failed. We never would have stooped to stealing if there were any other way to feed our families. Our whole village is starving.”
Hero’s expression softened, but her voice was still hard as she said, “Don’t move.”
Both men stared at the sword in her hand and nodded vigorously. Hero came over to confer with Tate and me.
“What do you think?” she asked in a whisper. “They look awful hungry to me,” Tate said.
I had to agree. Our would-be bandits looked like skin stretched over bone. I hated to think what the village’s children must look like.
We turned back to the men.
“W-We’ll take you back to your v-village,” I told them. “If it’s like you s-say, we’ll let you go.”
The men agreed, not that it mattered much, with Hero still holding Guardian. We revived Albert, introducing the strangers to him as fellow travelers. He must not have been in his right mind yet, because he didn’t even comment about the fact that the men were bound with rope.
“That’s a real interesting hairstyle,” one of the men said to Hero as we started into the woods.
Tate and I both held our breath. But she just said, “It’s the way all girls wear their hair at Castle Mortico.”
The two men exchanged glances.
Three hours later, we reached their village. A crowd of people came out to meet us. Hero, Tate, and I just stared.
The people were like nothing I had ever seen before. Their cheeks were hollow, their arms and legs barely thicker than twigs. They looked at us with huge, hungry, hopeful eyes, as if maybe we could stop their suffering. Hero stared at a man and a woman who stood close together with a little girl tucked into the father’s arms. Tate untied the bandits’ ropes. I did the only thing I could think to do. I walked into the middle of the crowd and set down the magical bag of turnips. The people watched me, hesitant.
“It’s a m-magic bag,” I said. “No matter how many t-times you empty it, it will always f-fill up again with turnips.”
A woman came cautiously forward and put her hand into the bag. She pulled out a turnip and bit into it. Her eyes lit up and she gobbled it down, reaching for another. The crowd started moving in. I knew the bag wasn’t big enough for them to all reach into, so I turned it upside down. Turnips spilled out, pouring onto the ground. The villagers dove for them, eating and crying and talking all at once.
It was Tate who thought to hang the bag upside down from a tree, where it could continue to drop turnips. We stood back for a while, just watching. A festival was breaking out. As people reached their fill of turnips, they began to dance and sing, grasping handfuls of the small red vegetable in their upraised hands. There was music and singing. The children started to laugh.
We walked quietly away.
No one said much for the rest of the day. When night came, we built a fire, and Hero found us some wild onions to eat. After finishing our small meal, we sat just watching the flames.
“I’ve never seen people so h-hungry,” I said. “Or so happy,” Hero added.
“It made me miss my family,” Tate said.
Which made sense to me, having met Tate’s relations. “Do you miss your families?” Tate asked us.
“Some,” I said honestly, and then looked over at Hero, expecting that anyone would be glad to be away from her family.
“I don’t miss those people back at the castle,” Hero said. “But I miss my mother and father and grandfather.” Her eyes seemed far away, as if when she looked into the flames, she saw something very different from what Tate and I saw. “When I first came to live with Grandfather after my parents died, we would spend hours together in his library, reading and talking. I miss that. I miss him.”
At her house, she was alone in a crowd of people. I guess we were alike in that way. We sat up half that night, telling stories about our lives growing up. In the morning, we passed into the province of Rona. We were nearly there.