Forever and a Knight

by Bridget Essex

  Like it’s winter. When it most definitely is not. It’s a gorgeous, sweltering August night out there.

  So how is it this cold in here?

  And that’s when I hear the whistling.

  I have to tell you: there are few things more terrifying than being in an already creepy basement alone and hearing distant but clear whistling. For the second time today, the hair on the back of my neck stands up, and I straighten, glancing toward the rear of the basement. The back part of the basement that no one goes near because, of course, the one guttering light doesn’t reach back there, and some of the deepest holes in the wall are back in the dark. It’s also rumored that there’s a hole in the cement floor, like a well, but I’ve never gotten near enough to verify whether that particular story is true or not.

  And it’s in that darkest, uninhabitable, nobody-ever-goes-there section of the basement...where the whistling is coming from.

  The tune is unrecognizable but very crisp and clear. That whistle sounds almost...jaunty.

  Okay, so on a normal day, I’ll not lie: I’d already be in the elevator and on my way up to my apartment, my heart pounding hard enough to bruise the insides of my ribs, and vowing never, ever to return to the basement, not even to grab my clean underwear from the washer.

  But it’s not exactly a normal day. This has, actually, been a completely shitty day.

  So I don’t even think—my whole body begins to move on instinct. I zip up my suitcase, and I lift it up, holding it in front of me like a shield. It’s the only thing I have on hand to use as a weapon, besides my dirty clothes and the laundry basket, and I don’t think anyone ever got injured by a plastic laundry basket (though there is, admittedly, a first time for everything). I think my suitcase is the best bet: I could hurl it at my would-be murderer (because, of course, that’s where my mind is going right now: that the whistler is a murderer). It’s a very heavy suitcase, and it would probably do at least a little damage.

  At least, that’s what I’m hoping.

  I creep toward the back part of the basement. The pitch-black part of the basement. The part of the basement that the light doesn’t even try to penetrate, and—if I wasn’t completely hyped up on adrenaline—I would realize it is a completely crazy place to follow a whistle.

  But this is my basement. Or at least partially my basement. And it was supposed to be a safe place to be. And the fact that it doesn’t feel particularly safe right now has made me pissed.

  Even through the haze of anger, however, I still have my wits about me, the wits that are telling me that this is a completely crazy thing I’m doing.

  But I do it, anyway.

  “Is anyone down here?” I yell out, congratulating myself that my voice didn’t shake.

  But there’s no answer. And the whistling keeps going without even a waver, like whoever is doing the whistling didn’t hear me, even though I shouted. The whistling seems to be getting farther away now, actually...which is totally impossible. The basement’s not that big. The whistler doesn’t have anywhere else to go...

  What’s really odd is that I think I see something light and large in the darkness. Something big and white in the far shadows. That makes no sense...

  I take one more step.

  I fall forward.

  Where I’d placed my foot, where I’d expected there to be concrete floor...there had been nothing. Because my suitcase is in front of me, and very heavy, in that split heartbeat, there’s no way that I can catch myself. I fall forward, and I gasp, waiting for impact, eyes tightly shut, body completely tense and bracing for that slam against concrete that’s supposed to happen any second now...

  I hit with so much force, my middle banging against the hard top of my suitcase, that the wind’s completely knocked out of me. I roll over instinctively, onto my side, curling up into a ball, gasping and wheezing as my breath finally comes back after an extraordinarily painful moment. I roll onto my hands and knees, and I look up.

  My hands are in cold, wet mud. I try not to think about what else could be in that mud (did whatever I fall into connect to the sewers? At least it doesn’t smell like it connects to sewers) as I take a ragged breath in. It’s so damn dark that I can hardly make out anything at all, not even shadows against the black.

  I struggle to get up, my knees aching fiercely from the fall as I draw in a deep breath, putting my hands out in front of myself to steady my wobbling form. I assume that there’s a wall in front of me, but my fingers brush against nothing. I take a step forward, my hands out before me as I glance up, wondering how deep whatever I fell into is. I should see a little bit of the guttering light bulb overhead, no matter how far I fell.

  But I stop dead. Because my eyes are finally adjusting to the lack of light...

  And overhead, there’s no crappy, horror-movie light bulb flickering away.

  There are stars.

  My breath catches in my throat. It’s utterly impossible, what I’m seeing. There’s no way that I fell down a shaft or a corridor or into anything that would make me land outside of the basement.

  But that’s where I am, I realize. Somehow. Impossibly.

  I’m outside.

  My fingers brush against something nubbly and ridged, something that feels exactly like the bark of a tree, and then I’m taking another step before I can think about what, exactly, is going on, my head reeling so fast I feel sick, and—again—in that very confusing instant, I’m falling forward. I stepped into mid-air because my eyes haven’t fully adjusted, but I’m not falling into a hole this time: I’m falling down the side of a hill, branches and scree rushing out away from under me as I roll against the earth.

  There’s a great oof as air is, again, knocked out of my lungs and I fall against something.

  But I didn’t fall against my suitcase this time.

  I fell against someone.

  There’s the resounding smack of two bodies colliding, and then a startled animal noise that I can’t quite pinpoint as I roll, and everything seems to roll together in that moment.

  And then finally, it all stops, and the entire world stops moving.

  Because I’ve stopped falling.

  And I’m definitely on top of someone.

  I am so far out of my element, as I push up and off of whoever it was, blood rushing to my cheeks in an instant. Because there are a lot of things I realize all at once:

  It doesn’t really matter that I have no idea where the hell I am or how the hell I got here. Because, no matter what, I’m always pretty damn adept at recognizing a woman’s body. Even in crazy circumstances, like these ones. And even in the dark.

  And I do recognize it right now.

  Because I landed on top of a woman. And this woman isn’t your average woman....not that any woman is really average, but this woman? The woman I fell on top of?

  She’s wearing metal.

  Yeah. That’s just not average in my book.

  Her clothes are made of metal.

  Before I can really register how utterly bizarre all of this is, there’s this strange sound, suddenly, like metal sliding quickly on metal, and then I’m moving again, but this time not of my own accord, as I’m shoved off of her so quickly that I can't even catch a breath before I realize that I’m on my knees on cold ground (which, thankfully, is no longer muddy), and as my eyes adjust to the dark, I realize that this woman is standing over me...

  Pointing a sword at my heart.

  A sword.

  A freakin’ sword.

  My eyes have adjusted enough for me to stare down the blade of the sword at the woman holding it. She’s tall, impressively so, but then I’m on my knees in the dirt, so my judgment of size is a little skewed. In the dark, I can see that the metal bits she’s wearing are glinting in the starlight. It looks like pretty much every part of her is covered in wrought, filigreed metal, actually.

  It’s like she’s wearing...armor?

  Her shoulder-length hair (it’s impossible to tell what color it is in the d
ark) swishes over one shoulder as she stares at me with wide, glinting eyes that begin to harden and narrow. Her mouth is already in a thin, hard line, and...well. What I can see of her is kind of scary. She’s muscular, tall, standing over me with a sword... Not exactly a favorable first impression.

  But also, in the deep, dark, instinctual back part of my brain, neurons begin to fire, or whatever the hell happens when your attraction meter shakes off some dust and starts operating again...

  Because, come on: a woman in armor is standing in front of me holding a sword.

  I...think that’s kind of hot.

  But then, of course, the rest of my brain catches up with the misfiring attraction part and slaps it silly.

  What the hell am I doing on my knees, on the ground, in front of a woman holding a sword in a threatening manner?

  And better yet: where the hell am I?

  “Who sent you?” she asks me then.

  The woman with the sword? She has the kind of voice that I could listen to all day. It’s warm and multilayered and low and velvety. If she was narrating a book, I’d have to be listening to it in bed.

  Admittedly, that voice isn’t so warm when it’s being directed at me full of agitation and anger, exactly as it is now.

  But I can imagine it being warm.

  Seriously, what’s wrong with me? Did I hit my head? Even though I have my arms open instinctively in the “don’t shoot” or “I surrender” pose in front of me, I still reach up and brush my fingers over my forehead, just to make sure. Okay, that’s good—I don’t feel any blood, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t clock my head terribly.

  Because this has to be a hallucination, right?

  Which would, of course, explain my attraction to the woman pointing a sword at my heart.

  “What are you talking about?” I say sharply then, staring up at her while I try (desperately) to piece together what could possibly be going on. “Nobody sent me. What’s going on? Where am I? What the hell are you doing in our basement?”

  She thankfully drops the point of the sword now, lowering the blade until the sharp part is about an inch off the ground. She holds that very heavy-looking sword, by the way, without a single glimmer of the weight showing in her stance. She stands there unwavering, her expression unchanging as she stares down at me with a hard frown.

  And then, she offers me her other hand.

  For a long moment, I don’t take it. I mean, she is still holding a sword. But then I place my hand in her gloved one, and with a single, fluid motion, she pulls me to my feet as if I have the weight of a feather, which I most certainly do not. The grip of her hand is tight and warm, warm even through the leather of her glove.

  “Where do you think you are?” she asks me then, gruffly, glancing me up and down with eyes that narrow as she gives me a thorough look-over. There’s absolutely nothing suggestive about her gaze, but like some fifteen-year-old girl, I find myself blushing.

  Me.

  Blushing.

  God, maybe this is a dream.

  “Look, this is all funny, ha, ha, look, I’m laughing,” I tell her, pointing to my not-smiling-at-all mouth. “But we’ve had our little joke, right? Are you some weird maintenance lady I’ve never seen before, doing some Live Action Role Playing in our basement? Because if you are, I mean, I don’t judge,” I tell her, putting my hands in the “surrender” position again, as I try to balance my weight on both feet, my knees aching terribly from the fall. “I just want to go back to my washer, put the rest of the load in, and go back up to my apartment,” I tell her, my voice raising as I take a step backward, while very consciously keeping the front of my body turned toward her. I dart my glance over my shoulder.

  I take a big gulp.

  Towering over me is a tree that’s about twenty feet around. It just goes up and up and up like a skyscraper, and all I can really make out is the bark and the size, but when I peer up and squint, I think I see pine branches. It’s a pine tree?

  Last time I checked, there are no ten-story tall pine trees in downtown Boston.

  Much less a forest of them.

  I’m finally beginning to realize where I am. And it’s not in the basement of my apartment building. Somehow, impossibly, I’m in a forest, in the middle of the night. A forest of gargantuan old trees...

  And I’m standing next to a woman in armor.

  “Ah, I think I...ah...hit my head,” I tell her, scrabbling sideways to the hillside that I fell down. It’s more of an angled cliff than a hillside, but I still try to climb up it, and because adrenaline is pounding through me, and even through the earth is crumbling under my hands and feet, and there’s a ton of scree, I manage to get to the top of it.

  I look back down at the woman in armor, who’s glancing up at me with her sword sheathed now on her back.

  “Wait!” she calls after me, and she sounds concerned, and that’s nice and all, but this can’t possibly be happening. It must be a dream.

  I stumble into my suitcase at that moment (because my eyes aren’t that well adjusted to the dark), and I fall over it, face first into the dirt. I’m apparently doing a lot of falling tonight. Okay, I can handle falling a lot. I scrabble up onto my hands and knees, and then I yelp, snatching back my hand as if it was stung.

  It actually felt like it was being stung, but it was a bit worse than that. As I cradle my hand to my chest, pain roars through me from the prick in my palm I got from something very, very sharp on the forest floor.

  In half a heartbeat, the woman in armor is beside me (how she bounded up that cliffside in an instant I’ll never know), kneeling down in one smooth motion as she grimaces and—none too gently—takes my hand in hers and brings it closer to her face for inspection.

  “You can’t possibly be from around here,” she says then, a bit exasperated, as she helps me stand again, her other hand at my waist.

  “Why do you say that?” I ask her, suddenly not feeling so great. The ground beneath us is beginning to buck in synchronized waves, and it feels like my heartbeat is centered in my palm.

  The woman sighs patiently as she grips my hand with a tightness that almost hurts. Then, with her leather-gloved hand, she reaches down into the palm of my hand and, with as much nonchalance as if she was picking a bit of pet fur off a piece of clothing, she removes a two-inch thorn from my skin. A two-inch thorn, I realize, that had gone completely through the palm of my hand and out the other side.

  I feel like I’m going to pass out for a full moment, as blood begins to seep out of my palm, brimming over and plinking quietly onto the forest floor at our feet. As I sway a little (I’ve always been woozy at the sight of blood), the stranger wraps her other arm around my waist a little tighter.

  “Because if you were from around here,” she replies with that same maddening patience, “you would have known that patches of poisoned thorns smell overpoweringly and sickeningly sweet, and you should avoid them at all costs. Milady.” The last is a fairly scorching bit of sarcasm.

  Now that she mentions it, I do detect a clinging sweetness to the air. It just wasn’t the first thing that had my attention in this woman-holding-sword, forest-where-there-shouldn’t-be-one scenario that I happen to be living currently.

  I really feel like I’m going to black out. I lean heavily on this complete stranger.

  “You’re going to feel a little dizzy,” she says, in a very conversational tone, as I fall backwards and she catches me with no effort at all. The last thing I remember is being lifted into her arms. “You might lose consciousness, but it’s a straightforward poisoning,” she continues and then...

  I black out.

  Chapter 3: The Bear

  I wake up with my head pounding just as badly as it does when I drink too much tequila. The crappy part is that I’m fairly certain I didn’t even get the enjoyment of said tequila. My blood roars through my brain, and I take a deep, quavering breath, feeling the world spin beneath me.

  I painfully squint, opening my eyes, and
then—like being beneath an avalanche of cold, sopping wet snow that covers (and soaks) you instantly—I remember.

  “Oh, God,” I mutter, sitting bolt upright, and immediately pressing my hand to my forehead, because everything’s spinning so badly I feel like I’m going to black out again. And I remember that. I remember blacking out before.

  And I remember a woman, covered in armor, her eyes intense and piercing as she held a sword to my heart...

  I stare up at the impossibly tall pine trees that tower around me. I’m lying on the ground, but even if I wasn’t, it’s almost impossible to see the tops of those trees: they seem as far away as a ten-story building, and some seem even taller, reaching toward the sky. I’ve never seen trees that tall, didn’t know trees could actually reach that height.

  As I stare up at the trees, I realize that my breath is coming out like smoke into the air. It’s freezing out, as cold as if winter were coming, which I know it isn’t. It’s August. I shiver a little, drawing the coarse blanket up and around my shoulders, before blinking in surprise and peering down at that blanket.

  It’s the color of earth, and roughly woven, like the kind of stuff you could get at a fair trade store. This wasn’t made by a machine; it was made by a person. I finger the fabric in my hand, then shiver a little again and pull it closer to my shoulders.

  I’m lying on the ground, on another blanket of the same stuff. To my left is a patch of dirt that’s been cleared of fallen leaves and pine needles, and a tiny fire is eating up a small tepee of sticks that’s been erected in the center of that ring of dirt. On the other side of the fire is a bedroll and some coarse-looking woven bags, and beyond that...

  Is a massive horse.

  The horse and I stare at one another, each of us utterly surprised.

  Now, when I tell you that this horse is massive, I mean utterly enormous. Even though I’m still sitting on the ground, it towers above me. I know the perspective is a little off—I am sitting on the ground—but even if I was standing upright, I’m pretty sure its shoulders would still be a full head above my head.