The Medievals 1, page 14
part #1 of The Medievals Series
“What is it my business to go against the wishes of a Prince?” Ivanhoe asks.
Loxley looks to Richard: “Does the King know you’re here?”
Richard considers lying, telling them that, yes, the King knows he has come on this mission. But Richard hesitates just long enough that Loxley knows the truth.
“Well, ain’t that a crooked shaft,” Loxley says, shaking his head.
“El Cid thinks the King will not be pleased.”
“Not pleased? We’ll be charged with kidnapping the Prince,” Loxley says.
Richard protests: “But you did not kidnap me. I came without your knowledge and of my own will.”
“Sure, you say that now. But once you’re back in the presence of your father, you might say anything to avoid reproach,” Loxley surmises. “And then it’s my word against a prince.”
“I wouldn’t!” Richard promises.
“And why should we trust you? You’ve already lied to get this far.” Loxley shakes his head. “No, the Constable will have our heads. And I don’t know about you lot, but my head is friends with my neck, and they don’t like to be apart.”
“What does the thief suggest?” El Cid asks.
Loxley pretends to think for a moment, although it is clear he already knows what he is going to say. “We make our split now. Shake hands, nice knowin’ ya, and all that.”
“We can not just abandon the girl!” Richard objects.
“What’s it to you, kid? So some girl goes unrescued. Happens every day. What’s so special about her? She got honey on her lips? How’s her face?” Loxley asks.
“What? No, she is--” Richard stops just short of revealing the truth about the girl, realizing that his father did not tell these men the whole of it.
These men know only that she is a kidnapped girl, nothing more. Among the four of them, Richard is the only one that knows the Realm’s secret history of Merlin’s staff and his descendants.
Loxley misinterprets Richard’s stutter as some sort of boyish affection for the girl. “Trust me, young friend. There’s plenty of pearls in the ocean. Especially for the likes of you. Don’t get hung up on this one.”
Loxley turns to the other men. “Now then, I’m off.”
Ivanhoe tightens his grip on his battle axe and growls at Loxley: “We press on. All of us.”
“Are you daft? I did not sign on to be some wet nurse to a Prince.” Loxley raises his bow and nocks an arrow in the blink of an eye, aiming it at Ivanhoe. “So unless you want matching eye patches, you’ll be letting me walk out of here without another word.”
“I should kill you where you stand for deserting your post,” Ivanhoe threatens.
“The great Sir Ivanhoe is gonna lecture me on desertion? That’s a laugh,” Loxley responds, and Ivanhoe flinches at the slight, but regains his composure in a blink.
Ivanhoe and Loxley stare each other down, each man waiting for the other to make a move. Richard holds his breath, knowing that this will not end well.
Then, just as Loxley takes his first step, backing away from the group…
A horse neighs and the sound of hooves sloshing in mud can be heard! Richard turns back in the way of the camp, the source of the sound.
“The horses!” Ivanhoe exclaims.
And just as the words leave his mouth, all three horses explode out of the dark and speed between Ivanhoe and Loxley, fright in their legs, and then escape into the night.
Richard, Loxley, and El Cid watch the horses disappear. Meanwhile, Ivanhoe sees an advantage and charges Loxley. The grizzly man disarms the thief, casting the bow and arrow aside. And then Ivanhoe gets his arm around Loxley’s neck, choking him.
“You loosed the horses before leaving camp?!” Ivanhoe asks Loxley, an accusation.
“Why would I--?” Loxley says through the strain of Ivanhoe’s chokehold.
“To slow us down in our attempt to find you again,” Ivanhoe reasons.
“Piffle!” Loxley responds.
But with Loxley’s response comes a maneuver that hooks Loxley’s right foot behind Ivanhoe’s left, and with a sweep of his leg and some help from the wet terrain, Loxley sends the larger of the two men to the ground. But Ivanhoe does not let go his hold, and the two men are locked in a muddy struggle, elbows and knees clashing.
As the two men wrestle, El Cid seems to consider the scene as entertainment, arms crossed as he stands there watching on. Meanwhile, Richard tries to remember back to just moments ago when Loxley snuck away from the camp.
“It was not Loxley!” Richard says, with Ivanhoe and Loxley pausing on the ground to look at him. “I saw him leave the camp. The horses -- they were still tied to the tree.”
Ivanhoe releases his hold on Loxley, who wriggles free.
“Off of me, you unhinged worm-eater! Have you taken leave of your senses!?” Loxley asks, spitting his words at Ivanhoe as he gets back on his feet. “Right mad, you are.”
Ivanhoe rises to his feet, wiping mud from this brow.
“It’s true then what they say, huh?” Loxley asks Ivanhoe, who remains quiet.
“What is true?” El Cid asks, his curiosity piqued.
“The King’s favorite shiny knight lost a hinge.”
Richard looks to Ivanhoe, who works his jaw to keep from attacking Loxley again. Standing there with his one wild eye and his hair matted with mud, Ivanhoe does, indeed, look crazy.
“They say Red here lost his wits, and then butchered his own wife.” Loxley seems intent on calling everyone by anything but their given names.
In a flash, Ivanhoe raises his axe and charges at Loxley. “You do not mention my wife! Not ever!”
But as Loxley dodges Ivanhoe’s swing…
Pfffttt!
Something shoots out from the darkness -- a green tendril -- and wraps itself around Ivanhoe’s axe before retreating back into the shadows, pulling the weapon with it, leaving Ivanhoe surprised and unarmed. If it were possible, Richard might think the vines of the forest had come alive.
“This isn’t good,” Loxley says, clearly familiar with whatever just purloined Ivanhoe’s axe.
“What was that?!” Richard whispers.
“Truscans,” Loxley exclaims with dismay as he keeps his voice low and searches the forest around them.
“What are these Truscans?” El Cid asks.
“Tree people,” Loxley responds. “They’re about yay tall,” he says, holding his hand three feet above the ground. “They blend in with the tree bark. Pesky little buggers.”
“We are surrounded,” Ivanhoe asserts, his nose to the air as he sniffs out the invisible enemy. His rage toward Loxley has been halted momentarily.
“Can they be reasoned with?” Richard asks.
“Nope. Absolutely not,” Loxley says, as if he had a disagreeable experience with these Truscans in the past.
“You have tried this?” El Cid asks.
“Let’s just say they have a particular dislike for me,” Loxley admits.
Richard remembers that Loxley was selected as part of the search party because of his knowledge of the Beyond. But Richard had not considered that Loxley might have enemies waiting for him in the Eternal Forest.
Then, after a pause, Loxley answers the question they all are about to ask: “I stole from them. It was an heirloom. Ugly thing, really. Surprised I got such a good price for it.”
Ivanhoe shakes his head at the thief.
“What? I didn’t suppose I’d be coming back here.”
“So, we must fight these pequeno diablos?” El Cid asks.
“Fight? No. We run. Now!” Loxley shouts at Richard and the other two men as his legs take off.
But Loxley does not make it ten feet before three more thin vines shoot out of the darkness, two of them cuffing his wrists and the other one lassoing his ankles, and he is suddenly jerked upward off the ground.
As Loxley flies up into the trees, El Cid reaches his sword into the air and, impossibly, it catches fire!
“How did you--?” Richard begins to ask, stopped by his own shock.
El Cid wields the sword like a mighty hero, and for the first time, Richard believes his tales might be true.
“This is Tizona," the Spaniard exclaims. "She is flaming sword. Gifted to El Cid by an extranjero on the island of--”
“Not the time for a story, Spaniard!” Loxley yells down at them as he hangs helplessly from his ankles, nearly fifty feet above them.
As Richard looks up, the flame of El Cid’s sword has cast light into the sky, and he can see that the upper canopy is filled with elfin creatures, hanging from limbs and clinging to the red bark, their small bodies taking on the appearance of knots and branches.
There must be hundreds of them.
And the flaming sword has riled them into a frenzy, with the trees now alive with high-pitched chatter.
As Richard raises his sword, a vine grabs his wrist. After a moment, the bright green vine -- which almost glows in the night -- begins to harden and turn brown, as if it is solidifying around his arm.
But Ivanhoe is right there with a boot-knife, cutting Richard free. Richard and Ivanhoe then stand back to back, wielding their blades against the tendrils that continue to shoot out of the tree canopy.
“They are coming too fast!” Richard shouts.
“Just keep swinging that sword,” Ivanhoe instructs.
Meanwhile, the embattled El Cid is facing off against a swarm of vines. As some of the vines shrivel under the heat of the fiery sword, others get through, latching onto the giant man’s legs and arms. Although, Richard surmises, it will take more than several dozen of these vines to lift El Cid off the ground.
“How are you managing, El Cid?” Ivanhoe shouts out, his back to the Spaniard.
Richard has a view of El Cid, who swings his flaming sword.
“If El Cid can kill a pack of heothuks, he can free himself from this tiny menace!”
Then, one of the tendrils reaches El Cid’s neck, and it wraps itself around his throat. The thin strand turns brown, squeezing El Cid’s throat tighter and tighter. The Spaniard struggles to breathe, and he is forced to drop his sword, the flame disappearing as soon as the hilt leaves his grasp.
Then, the vine grows thorns, which pierce the skin of El Cid’s neck.
“Ivanhoe!” Richard says, pointing the man’s attention to El Cid, whose face is turning purple.
Ivanhoe unsheathes a dagger from his belt, then whips it through the air, and his aim proves true as the blade slices through the strangling vine.
El Cid gasps for breath, now freed.
But before he can fill his lungs properly, El Cid finds himself under attack by more than twenty fresh tendrils. They lock onto his ankles and his calves and his thighs, and El Cid is suddenly yanked skyward.
Richard watches with disbelief as the swarthy leviathan dangles high above him in the trees, looking like an upside-down marionette. And in Richard’s moment of pause, he feels the tendrils wrap themselves around his own ankles, and he is also flung into the air.
It is a strange sensation, like falling upward. Richard watches the ground as it flies away from him at great speed.
When he stops, he turns to see El Cid and Loxley to his right. And to his left, Ivanhoe. All four men are hanging by their ankles in the canopy of the Eternal Forest. A thief, an exile, a deserter and a prince. With no one left to save the Descendant.
Pffft!
Suddenly, something sharp hits Richard in the neck. A tiny dart. And within moments, his consciousness dims, his upside-down world fading to black.
{Wendolyn}
Wendolyn is looking at her own face, upside down. She is twelve years of age, and she is staring at her own reflection in the still waters of the lake.
“Hold still, Wen,” her father says.
Snip-snip.
A lock of her hair falls from her head and into the water, creating wrinkles in the lake’s surface. Her father is cutting her hair as she has asked him to do.
In her reflection, she sees the top is cropped short. Like that of a boy. But next to the birthmark on her shoulder, there is a defiant strand of hair that remains. She will keep it, she thinks.
Her father smiles in the watery mirror. “Now, you are a warrior maiden.”
Wendolyn is pulled from the memory as Waldron removes his finger from her head. Her steel-faced captor is searching her mind, as he has been doing for days now, with Wendolyn strapped to this cold stone table, her memories appearing on the Rune Stone.
Here in the Memory Chamber, as Waldron’s finger moves across the flat of her forehead, each new memory quickly replaces the last.
Usually, Waldron’s touch is insufferable as he seems to melt her entire mind, leaving Wendolyn feeling as though death would be a privilege. But unlike the other searches of her memory, this time she is left with a warmth within her chest.
“It feels nice, does it not?” Waldron says knowingly.
Wendolyn looks to Waldron, wondering how he can sense her innermost feelings.
“Do you know what my people were known for before the humans wiped us from the earth?” he asks her.
Wendolyn shakes her head.
“We were dream makers. Musicians of a sort. Only instead of plucking strings, we used memories. Wealthy men came to us from the edges of the earth and my ancestors would search their memories with the Rune Stone, gathering up the perfect notes.”
Wendolyn is enchanted by such a notion: turning memories into musical pieces.
“These musical compositions might include moments when someone felt most alive,” Waldron says as he touches his hand to her forehead and sparks a memory:
Wendolyn racing through the trees, daylight hitting her eyes, her breath puffing out in front of her as she runs for Sanctuary Rock ahead. She can feel the smile forming on her lips, and exhilaration hitting her chest as she knows that she is going to beat Galen.
The memory vanishes, but the sense of victory remains.
Waldron continues, reaching his finger out to her head: “Or when you felt most safe...”
Wendolyn’s father shoos away the bird in their cottage. Then he falls into the stack of wood. Then he is laughing on the ground. He is reaching out to her. Hugging her close to him.
She keeps her eyes closed as the memory disappears. The longer she keeps them shut, the longer this feeling of her father’s arms wrapped around her will remain.
“Or, perhaps, when you felt in love,” Waldron says.
She opens her eyes to look at the Rune Stone. And as she waits for the memory to reveal itself, she already knows what it will be.
The boy enters the King’s Market, his functionaries around him. He is important, Wendolyn can see that, but she does not know how. This is not her world. But even still, she is pulled a step forward by his blue eyes, a step beyond her control.
Waldron removes his finger, the memory gone. Wendolyn has never put a word to her encounter with the boy. Love. It does not seem possible. She has never spoken a word to him. She knows not even his name.
“Once a Rune had collected the memories, finding the warmest moments, these notes would then be arranged into a song,” Waldron explains.
Then, Waldron’s fingers dance across the Rune Stone, and the warm memories wash over Wendolyn like the sweetest song she has ever heard. The swirl of memories no longer holds the separate images; instead, her conjoined memories have transformed into a vibrant stream of colors that seem to move from her head, to her chest, and out to her fingers and toes.
She is not recalling memories; she is reliving them.
The sounds. The smells. The feelings.
When these memories are summoned by Waldron’s touch, it is as if she were experiencing them anew.
“The body believes that it is all happening again,” she hears Waldron say, although her eyes are now closed. “It feels the same pleasure. The same peace.”
Wendolyn’s body and mind relax for the first time since she was kidnapped.
“And the wealthy men would return. Again and again. Willing to pay anything to feel their finest memories. Or really, to forget their worst.”
As Waldron’s teeth seem to come down hard on ‘worst,’ his finger shifts and Wendolyn is suddenly ripped from the warm stream of color. And in the next instant, she is thrust into a nightmare:
A scimitar flies through the air and impales her father.
Back in the Memory Chamber, Wendolyn gasps for air, her wrists struggling against the leather straps that hold her down. Her heart bruises from the image of her father.
Waldron’s sharp fingernail slowly rakes across her forehead, calling forth the horrors of that night when her father was murdered:
Her father urgently whispering, “Wendolyn, you have a great weight that sits upon your shoulders. Never forget this.”
The blood coloring the snow.
His ashen face.
Each sudden flash stings the back of her eyes. But when Waldron’s finger pauses, that is when the pain is a blade stabbing into her mind.
“I can be a friend to you, Wendolyn. I would like to, if you will let me,” Waldron says, Wendolyn’s instincts testing his words for signs of sincerity.
But she finds no reason to trust him.
“You do not have to experience this awful pain. In truth, I do not wish it upon you. All you must do is tell me what I want to know. But if you refuse to tell me the location of the staff, I will be forced to search your memory for the answer I seek. In doing so, your mind will break a little each time I enter it. Likely, you will lose those memories that warm you. Slowly, but eventually, you will forget who you are beyond your sorrow and your pain. And your nightmares will become a season that lasts forever.”
Wendolyn shudders.
“I do not know where the staff is. My father, he never told me,” Wendolyn says, hoping to convey the truth of her heart to Waldron.
Waldron shakes his head, and a tisk-tisk seeps from behind his mask.
“As you wish,” Waldron says.
Again, he touches his finger to her forehead, and a new memory appears:
Now she is younger. Maybe seven or eight. She is riding in the back of a creaky wagon. Her father is at the front, driving the horses. They are leaving their home under the cover of a winter night. All of their possessions are tucked in around Wendolyn.
