I let out a gasp. These horses were huge and wearing so much armor that they looked like giant robotic horses. We couldn’t outrun them. In a few minutes, they’d be on us.
Chapter 16
I looked around, searching in the dark for the Merry Men’s horses. Certainly they hadn’t walked here, but I didn’t see any sign of animals. I heard the shouts approaching, though. Yells of anger as the knights pounded the ground toward us.
Nick sprinted ahead of me, disappearing down the road into the darkness. I hoped he would get away. I wasn’t going to be able to make it as far. I had already run too much and now it felt like not just my heart was bleeding, but my lungs were too.
My pace slowed. Hudson took hold of my arm and pulled me forward. I wanted to ask, What’s the point? but didn’t. Maybe the point was that you’ve got to keep trying even when it won’t matter. I thought of Kendall and my mom, and my throat felt tight. They would never know what happened to us. That part seemed the worst of all.
New moral of the story: Not all fairy tales end happily ever after.
My father took his walkie-talkie back out of his vest. “We need help fast.”
What did he expect Sandra to do against charging knights with battle axes?
Up on the road ahead of us, lights flicked on. Headlights—two sets shooting beams of light into the dark. Nick was driving Dad’s truck and Sandra sat behind the wheel of her Honda. As they roared down the bumpy road toward us, the beams of light jumped and swayed, throwing different patches of ground into and out of focus.
I stumbled toward the car, finding more strength than I thought I had. We would make it before the horses reached us.
I heard the Honda’s locks unclick, and Sandra called out, “Get in!”
I opened the door and flung myself inside. Hudson crawled in next to me, and four men I only vaguely recognized crammed in as well.
Sandra flipped on the interior light and twisted around to check on me. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” I breathed out, panting too heavily to say more.
“We need more room,” Hudson told me, and without more instruction, I got up, he scooted over, and I sat on his lap. He wrapped his arms around my waist and leaned his head against my back, breathing hard from the run. I would have enjoyed the feeling of being snuggled into him if my mind hadn’t been so crowded with thoughts of the giant robotic horses and their ax-waving companions.
Well, actually, I enjoyed the feel of his arms around me a little bit anyway.
Three men piled into the front seat next to Sandra. She had opened the trunk so they could crowd in there too. Another set of headlights came on—Nick’s old Camry. Dad had climbed into the driver’s seat, and that car was weighed down with men too.
Our procession started down the road. We couldn’t go very fast. The road was jutted and uneven, making the car shake around like a wild bull trying to throw us.
Sandra’s hands gripped the wheel tightly, and she leaned forward in concentration. I couldn’t see anything out of the rear window because the trunk was open, but through the side mirror, I saw the knights gaining on us.
“You need to go faster,” I told Sandra.
Her voice was a forced calm. “People will fall out if I do.”
“People will die if you don’t.”
She glanced in her mirror. “We’ve thought this through.”
I felt my panic rise. I had just thought this through too and at the end of my thoughts, we all died. It wouldn’t take much for the knights’ axes to shatter the windows or slash our tires.
They were close now, almost within striking distance.
Then Sandra laid on the horn.
The sharp blare rang through the night, startling the horses. Some horses tried to stop, causing an equestrian pileup, while others bolted away from the car, whinnying and shaking their heads in distress. We continued on, bumping down the road away from them while they regrouped.
After a few minutes, the knights regained control of their horses and charged us again, but the horses were skittish now. We must have seemed like strange creatures to them—so large and noisy. When the knights got close, Sandra blared the horn again. The horses scattered away from us, like they’d done the first time.
The men sitting in the trunk of the car laughed and taunted the knights, something I thought was severely stupid. But the Merry Men understood horses well enough to know the chase was over. The horses could keep up with our speed for a few miles, but they were tiring. Slow car speed is still pretty fast horse speed if both horse and rider are wearing armor.
The knights yelled insults back at us in return, but they didn’t try to follow again and we bounced off into the night.
Hudson let out a sigh. I hadn’t noticed how tense he was until he relaxed; even his hands went slack in my lap. “Those were trained horses,” he said. “At a knight’s command, they’ll kneel in battle or kick an opponent. I can’t believe a car horn scared them off.”
Sandra checked her mirror again. She was usually such a cautious driver that, I imagined, even in a medieval forest, she would use her blinkers when she changed directions. “Luckily, those knights never trained their horses not to react to car horns.” She eyed him in the mirror for the first time. “You’re not one of Robin’s men. Who are you?”
We told her, Hudson and I taking turns, although we edited our versions of the story. I said things like “Hudson is Police Chief Gardner’s son.”
And he said things like “I was an innocent bystander.”
I didn’t tell Sandra that Hudson tricked me into turning Bo and his friends over to the police. He didn’t tell her that I made out with Robin Hood in a convenience store.
She only stopped our stories once. She told Hudson, “I knew your mother from the library board committee. She was a lovely woman.”
“Thanks,” he said, but his voice sounded flat, or maybe just tired.
Little John peered at me from the front seat. “About you turning things to gold—you’re truly able? Your pa promised we’d have gold to spare if we rescued you.”
I imagined he did. The Merry Men were mercenaries at heart. They wouldn’t have risked the rescue for anything less.
“What do you want me to turn to gold?” I asked.
Little John handed me a pouch from around his waist. I took it in my palm and said, “Little John’s pouch, gold, gold, gold.” It directly turned into a useless but very shiny pouch. I handed it back to him, and he and the other Merry Men passed it around, admiring it. Then they wanted me to transform everything they had on them. I think they would have stripped naked if they’d had the room to undress. Fortunately they didn’t.
Finally, after being stuck in the car for way too long with a bunch of men who rarely bathed, we pulled off the main road and onto a narrower one. A few minutes after that, we left the road altogether and went through an opening in the forest where some trees had been cut away.
When the car stopped, I didn’t even care where we were. I was just happy that everyone piled out and I could unbend myself and breathe in the fresh forest air.
Robin Hood’s men greeted each other, laughing and slapping one another’s backs. I ran over to Dad and Nick and gave them hugs, then Sandra came over and we all hugged each other again. It was our first real family moment.
I never expected to feel like part of a family with Sandra, Nick, and Dad. But I did, and I wasn’t sure what was odder: that I felt this way or that it had taken me so long to realize a family could expand to include other people.
The Merry Men took cut tree limbs from a nearby pile and laid them across the cars to hide them from the road. Sandra and Dad went to talk to Robin Hood, but Nick stayed with me.
“I’m really sorry about all of this,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to put you in danger. Has it been awful?”
He patted me on the shoulder. “Nah, actually some good things have come from this.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, th
e way you’ve made it really easy for me to look like the good child. Because no matter how badly I screw up in the future, at least I’ve never sent the family to the Middle Ages.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I feel better now.”
“Plus, I got to use my science fair project to attack a castle. Not many people can say that.”
I remembered the smoke I’d seen. “What were you shooting out of that launcher?”
“Mostly smoke bombs. And a few explosive potatoes. You’d be surprised what you can do with stump remover, gasoline, and hair spray.” He shot a look over at Sandra to make sure she wasn’t listening. “Don’t tell my mom though. I don’t want her to ask me how I knew how to make all that stuff.”
Hudson walked over to us, and Nick did a double take. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I got dragged on the Tansy Wish Cruise like the rest of you.”
Robin Hood let out a whistle to let everyone know it was time to go. He and the Merry Men headed out through the forest. Nick had a flashlight, so Hudson and I stayed close to him. As we walked, Hudson told Nick how Clover had sent him here and what had happened since then. At least most of it.
“You forgot the parts about Sister Mary Theresa,” I said.
Hudson smirked. “I didn’t forget. I just figured I’d tell Nick those parts later.”
Nick chuckled. “A nun. She sounds hot.”
Hudson’s smirk didn’t fade. “Nuns have a heavenly beauty.”
Yeah, I bet that’s what Hudson was interested in. Heavenly beauty.
Nick shook his head. “Man, you’ve been here too long. I’ve seen the women here. They all have greasy hair, smell bad—and dentists haven’t been invented yet. Some of them are downright trollish. Really, this place has ruined medieval computer games for me.”
Hudson and Nick went on talking. I stayed quiet and listened, envying how easily they got along. Hudson’s voice was never measured, never wary, like it was sometimes when he spoke to me.
We kept trudging around bushes and trees until we came to a clearing. Not only was Dad’s big blue tent set up, but dozens of small ones—blankets propped up on sticks—were spread around too. More horses than I could count were tethered to nearby trees, sleeping with their heads hanging low. The remains of a fire sat in the middle of the camp, along with a messy pile of logs and tinder. Boxes sat outside our tent with some of our belongings piled in them. My coat lay on top of one box. Bottles of water were stacked in another. My backpack leaned up against a sleeping bag. I hoped someone had thought to bring me a pillow, pajamas, and a toothbrush. These items suddenly seemed like the height of luxury. I realized I might be able to sleep with a real pillow tonight.
Robin Hood strode over to me wearing his usual half smile. “Now then, about our pay …”
I sent my sleeping bag a longing look. “Can’t it wait until morning?”
He shook his head. “Most of these men are mere villagers who came on this venture on the promise that they would be paid handsomely. They’ll want to leave at first light, before the king can send his knights around to enquire if anyone knows aught of the attack.”
Which meant the sleeping bag would have to wait.
I ended up changing the tinder from the woodpile. Then Little John chopped the firewood into small chunks and I changed that into gold too. Each time I uttered the chant, pain rippled through my chest. Finally, when everyone had as much gold as they could carry, they let me go to my tent. I walked there with Sandra.
“How did you guys even connect with Robin Hood?” I asked.
She unzipped the door flap. “It’s amazing what sort of messages you can pass along when you bribe people with things from the twenty-first century. It makes me wish I had bought the jumbo-sized cinnamon container at Costco. You wouldn’t believe what that stuff is worth here.”
Inside the tent, a pillow, pajamas, a toothbrush, and toothpaste waited for me. I wanted to cry when I saw them. They were better than gold.
• • •
I was the last one to wake up in the morning. The sun had already risen, and the extra men from last night had left. Only the Merry Men were around, cooking some unidentifiable creatures over the fire. Robin Hood had provided my family with medieval clothes to help us blend in. I put on a stained brown dress that was too short, too wide, and had an odd collar that I didn’t believe was ever in style. He said he bought them, but I wondered if he stole them. Perhaps somewhere out there was a short, fat, tasteless peasant woman who was missing her dress.
For our breakfast, Sandra warmed up a couple of cans of hash on a frying pan that lay over the coals. We had no way to make toast, so we put butter in another pan and fried the bread. Frying pans—not just fashionable but functional too.
We still had some leftover fruit from our fridge, and the Merry Men were so eager to have the oranges that Sandra pulled all the wedges apart and handed them out. I hadn’t realized oranges were a delicacy in the Middle Ages. It almost made me feel guilty for the way I’d always eaten them without thinking about it.
While we had breakfast, Hudson told my family about the deal he’d made with Bartimaeus.
“Will he be able to send all of us back?” Nick asked.
“Do you think he could send the house too?” Sandra asked.
Dad put a hand on her knee. “That doesn’t matter. We can always get a new house. The important thing is to get us back.”
I wondered if the neighbors had noticed that our house was gone yet. That wasn’t the sort of thing we were going to be able to explain very well. When we returned to Rock Canyon, we would probably be known as those bizarre Millers whose house up and disappeared one day. Which was one more thing that would make me stand out as the weird girl at school.
Hudson ate his hash slowly. “Bartimaeus needs the Gilead, so hopefully he’ll agree to send us all back.”
“How long will it take to get to his village?” Sandra asked, taking small bites of her toast.
“It’s about ten miles east from the castle,” Hudson said, “but I’m not sure where we are now. How far north did we come last night?”
“About twenty miles,” Dad said.
Nick shoveled hash into his mouth. “So that’s only thirty miles—less if we can cut across the distance. We could drive that in a couple of hours.”
Hudson shook his head. “Most of the roads here are just footpaths. You can’t drive cars on them. We only got as far as we did last night because we kept to a road that wagons use to go to market. Besides, King John’s men will be watching for your cars now. They know they were used in the attack.” He looked up from his plate as though remembering something. “Did the Merry Men go brush away the tire tracks from the road this morning?”
Dad nodded. Apparently they’d discussed those details before, maybe last night while I’d been changing wood into gold. It was odd to hear my father and Hudson talking like equals. Dad usually spoke to Nick’s friends with a kind of patronizing tolerance. But Hudson had been here for months. He knew this century better than the rest of us, and my father was listening to what he had to say.
“We should still leave this campsite soon,” Hudson said. “Any of the villagers who helped last night could turn us in. Right now I bet King John would pay a lot for Tansy’s return.”
Probably true. If not to marry me, then to hang me. And he’d probably make me change the gallows to gold before he did.
Dad scooped up some hash onto his bread. “How long would it take to get to Bartimaeus’s village on horseback?”
Hudson thought for a moment. “One day if we find good trails and the horses gallop for part of the trip. Two if they walk.”
The Merry Men had horses. They were tied among the trees, munching foliage. Nick glanced in their direction. “Would Robin Hood let us borrow some of his horses?”
“We don’t have to make a two-day trip,” I reminded everyone. “As soon as I figure out the moral of Rumpelstiltskin, the story will be over and my fairy godm
other will send us home.”
Hudson sighed, giving me the kind of patient look people save for children and the delusional. He had already told my family what he thought of fairy magic. “The story probably doesn’t have a moral,” he said, “and your leprechaun pal thinks it’s hilarious that you’re racking your brain to find one.”
I ignored him, stood up, and walked over to our boxes.
Dad had included a few books with the supplies. One dealt with outdoor survival, one was about the Middle Ages, and one was a book of fairy tales. My family had read the story of Rumpelstiltskin looking for clues that might help with my rescue. The story hadn’t proved useful in that way, but I was glad they had brought it. I sat back down with the book propped open in my lap.
In the pictures, Rumpelstiltskin looked more like a friendly garden gnome than a villain. In fact, the whole story seemed deceptively tame spread out in the pages of this book. But it wasn’t a tame story. It was tense and frightening, and I was surprised it hadn’t given me nightmares as a child.
“So what’s the moral?” I asked.
My family came up with ones I’d already tried: Don’t brag about things you can’t do. The pure in heart are helped. Good triumphs in the end.
I shook my head at each one. “None of those work.”
Nick popped a piece of the fried toast into his mouth. “How about ‘Gold makes the world go around.’ ”
“Or ‘Don’t let your daughter talk to fairies,’ ” Dad added.
“ ‘Men will manipulate you to get whatever they want,’ ” Sandra said.
Dad shot her a disapproving look.
Sandra held her cup with both hands, taking slow sips. “Hey, it works in the context of the story.”
I opened my magic book. “Can’t hurt to try them.”
I turned the pages and drew in a sharp breath. The story didn’t end where it had yesterday. On what had been a blank page, there was now a picture of me sneaking up the castle stairs, hand in hand with Hudson. I looked ready to swoon. He looked strong, determined, and glowingly attractive. I flipped over the page. The next painting showed King John holding his sword across the door, blocking the way. I looked totally swoony again. Hudson stood in the background, his chain mail glinting on his broad shoulders. He seemed so toweringly handsome that I wasn’t surprised my storybook self was completely smitten.