The Guardians

by William Joyce

  “Our bear has gone mad!” one of the children told him breathlessly.

  “Our Ombric,” came the teary voice of a young girl, “has been eaten!” She choked on the words, struggling, he could tell, to contain a sob.

  “Then he’ll eat no more,” replied North, and braced for the bear’s attack.

  The bear rose to his full height, casting a shadow over the bandit and the children. His claws were ready. His teeth were bared. He let out a growl so low and ominous, North could feel it in his bones.

  For once, North did not laugh in the face of danger.

  With blinding speed, he threw six daggers, three from each hand, and riddled the bear with knives. Then he redrew his sabers and attacked. The bear struck back. But North was at the ready. In an instant he’d sliced off the deadly tips of the bear’s claws. The bear surged forward; North, both sabers in hand, plunged.

  Rare two-handed Polish Keep Sweeper

  But the bear was not done. He tossed North to the ground like a rag doll. The bandit, stunned, could not get up. The bear lunged at him, his full weight bearing down. But North was not finished either. He would not let that monster have the children. With what little strength he had left, he raised both sabers just as the beast’s massive body slammed on top of him.

  The bear landed with the violence of a meteorite. The ground shook for miles. A cloud of dirt and earth mushroomed up, turning the morning sky ashen.

  In the silence that followed, the children looked out from the splintered gashes of Big Root. They could just make out the bear’s huge shape through the haze of dust. He shifted and lurched, trying to get to his feet. His breathing was labored and short. With one long, mournful groan, he slowly rolled over and moved no more.

  As the air began to clear, the children gasped. The man with the swords lay on the bear’s chest. Both sabers were jammed to the hilt in the black fur just above the behemoth’s heart. The man lay unmoving as well; he looked so small and ragged, like a toy. In a daze the children crept forward to stare at the valiant swordsman. Their world was shattered. Their beloved bear had turned into a monster and destroyed everything they held dear. But they wanted, somehow, to help this man who had so courageously saved them. Ombric would know what to do, but Ombric . . .

  Some of the children began to cry softly. Others kneeled, reaching out to touch the crumpled man. And as they did so, a dark, shadowy mist began to rise up from the mouth of the bear. An inky mass began to form. It grew larger, sizzling and writhing in the morning light. Then it sharpened into a shape that towered above them. The children drew back. They’d seen this face before—in the story Ombric had showed them of the Golden Age.

  Looking down on them was Pitch himself. In his hands was Ombric’s carved staff, broken in two. “This is all that’s left of your precious wizard,” he sneered.

  CHAPTER TEN

  In Which a Great Many Things Occur Swiftly

  WITH NO ONE TO protect them, the children were certain they were doomed. Pitch leaned down closer. The children backed away. His face! His awful face was a nightmare in itself—not so much ugly as haunted, cold, without a hint of kindness. Centuries of cruelty reflected from his piercing stare. Yet there was a magnificence about him like that of an approaching storm. The children had never beheld any being that seemed so powerful. Not Ombric. Not their bear. They were frozen in a sort of mesmerized, terrible awe.

  Pitch leaned closer still, but as he did so, the children noticed something. Pitch seemed to be fading, growing dimmer as the morning sun reached past the trees. And then dimmer still. The children could barely believe what was happening. They didn’t dare move.

  “In time . . . ,” Pitch whispered, wincing in the sunlight, “in time you’ll be mine.”

  And in eerie silence Pitch began to seep slowly into the ground. He tried desperately to hold on to the two halves of Ombric’s staff, but as he became more and more translucent, the pieces slipped through his hands and fell to the grass. Then, in a dank, smoky mist, Pitch dissolved into the earth until there was no trace of him at all.

  The terror gone, the children scrambled out of the remains of Big Root. They looked about wildly, and there, running toward them, flooding around them, enveloping them in their arms, were their parents.

  “You’re safe, you’re safe!” one mother called out, tears falling onto the head of the small boy she clutched.

  “I’m so sorry,” cried a father. “He trapped us in our sleep!”

  “We could hear your cries, but we couldn’t move,” murmured another mother, hugging her little girl tightly.

  “Something happened to our bear!” the tallest boy told them.

  “Ombric’s been eaten!” another boy sobbed.

  “That man saved us! And he’s been killed!” a girl hiccupped, pressing her face into her father’s chest.

  “But you’re safe, you’re safe,” the parents said again and again, and the joy of that started to turn sobs to smiles, wails to grins.

  Only little Katherine stood apart, pressing her lips together until they were pale. Then, with a slight tilt of her head, she left the group to join Old William, the village elder. He stood over the place where Pitch had vanished. Only a small crack in the hardened dirt remained. He looked at the bear and the fallen hero who had defended the children. The old man shook his head. His was a sadness that was just beginning to sink in.

  Katherine took his hand, and soon one, then another, of the villagers trickled over. They looked at the broken pieces of Ombric’s staff. “How can this be?” whispered Old William.

  And the joyful clamor of reuniting families began to give way to piercing grief. Some of the children started to lean against the bear’s unmoving body, clasping and hugging his thick, black fur.

  “No! Don’t touch him!” cried Fog’s father, pulling Fog away.

  Tears welled in the child’s eyes. “But he’s our bear!”

  Another child chimed in, “He’d never hurt us on purpose!”

  “It wasn’t his fault. That bad one changed him,” said Katherine. “Think of what he’s been to us!”

  Then everyone stopped and remembered. Not the bear’s last terrifying moments of madness, but the years of devotion and friendship. The way he had protected them time and again. And what of Ombric? Big Root? Were they lost forever?

  The sorrow began to spread. First, the trees ringing the outer rim of the village began to sway, their limbs sinking toward the forest floor. Then the rest of the forest followed—every inhabitant, be it plant, insect, or animal, flooding the air with a heavy, woeful roll of sound, as if the entire world were moaning. The sky darkened. The wind began to swell. Leaves began to snap away from the trees, the vines, and the bushes. Big Root was stripped of all its foliage, the swirling leaves circling around Santoff Claussen like a tempest of tears. Through the blur, the villagers could see something moving toward them.

  It was the Spirit of the Forest. She glided to them and hovered over Ombric’s broken staff. She too was weeping, her jewels now dull, her tears falling on the staff’s broken edges.

  The village would never be the same. That seemed certain. But Ombric’s first lesson to anyone who lived in Santoff Claussen was simple: There’s a little bit of wizard in everyone. That magic’s real power was in belief. That every spell began, “I believe. I believe. I believe.” Old William picked up the two halves of Ombric’s staff and fit them back together precisely along the break. He looked at Katherine intently. She instantly understood.

  “Ombric’s first lesson,” she whispered. She ran her fingers along the break, smoothing the splinters down into the staff. “I believe. I believe. I believe,” she said. The deafening howl of the grief from the villagers did not abate. But through the tumult, that first lesson came back to everyone. Old William, then others, began to repeat the words. “I believe. I believe. I believe.” Over and over. And, powered by belief, the broken staff was made whole again.

  The atmosphere began to lighten in waves. Th
e wind slowly stilled. The air became as quiet as a midnight snow. Time itself seemed to stop. The villagers could feel magic all around them. And when they opened their eyes, there stood Ombric, looking so very Ombric-like! As if nothing had happened at all. And behind him stood the bear! His wounds were gone—vanished!—but his fur was now as white as a cloud. And in his giant front paws he held the man like a sleeping child.

  Ombric took the staff that Katherine, beaming brighter than even the sunlight, held up to him. “Thank you for remembering,” Ombric said. He ran his hands along the worn wood pensively, rubbing a thumb along the scar of the crack. Then he motioned to the man in the bear’s arms. “The wounded stranger helped save us. It would be rude to not return the favor.”

  With a wave of his hand, Ombric started walking toward Big Root. In front of everyone’s eyes, the tree began to revive. With Ombric’s every step, new leaves budded forth and grew. With Ombric’s every step, the shattered hearts of the villagers grew stronger. Magic had indeed returned to Santoff Claussen. And all of it would be needed to heal the young stranger who had saved their day.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In Which Wisdom Is proven to Be a Tricky Customer Indeed

  DAYS PASSED AS NORTH drifted in and out of consciousness in Big Root. Am I actually inside a tree? Is it the very same tree I’d seen fighting the bear? A tree that fought a bear? North wasn’t one to believe in magic. He believed only in his cunning mind and sureness with a blade. And yet . . .

  He had allowed himself to follow a crazy dream of treasure. He had ridden over water and clouds—on a twelve-hundred-pound horse!—and had turned his back on the riches that had doomed his men. These acts defied explanation. And now here he was, in a bed that seemed to understand his every thought or need. When he was uncomfortable, it adjusted and propped him up. When his bandaged legs ached, the bed gently kneaded at them until they felt better.

  Food and drink hovered in the air beside him, though he was still too weak to even reach for them. But there was always a steady parade of three or four curious children, always bickering with one another over who got to spread jam on his toast, who got to hold a mug of hot broth or a cooling honey water to his lips, and—what seemed to cause the most heated arguments—who got to feed his horse. But the more North rested, the more his mind wondered and marveled at the many impossible things that had occurred.

  The most impossible was that the wizard, the one he’d seen the bear devour, had survived. How can this be? His name, North learned, was Ombric, and he was alive and whole. He was applying elixirs and ointments and fussing over North as often as those children did. What a yammering bunch they were. Some days—the bad days, the days when the aches of wounds healing brought on fevers—their conversation seemed insane. Messages from insects, creatures called Fearlings, and a man in the Moon.

  But slowly, North started to piece together the snatches of bizarre conversations. Then, one morning, he woke to find a little girl, the one who seemed to sit most often by his bedside, slipping a tiny, hand-sewn book of pictures next to his pillow. He feigned sleep until she left the room, then he lifted the small volume and sifted through the pages. They were filled with charcoal drawings of shadowy creatures and the black bear . . . and himself, guarding the children as if they were the tsar of Russia’s treasures. There were sketches of a baby in a ship that sailed the heavens, of a battle on the Moon, and of a great villain who brought darkness and doom.

  The tale was swirling in his head, colliding with what he remembered from that early morning duel, and filling in the gaps of what he’d once thought impossible and now believed was true. Had he really stopped that bear? The children assured him he had! The children explained that a demon named Pitch the Nightmare King had come for them, to take away their dreams. His minions, the Fearlings, hadn’t been able to sneak into Santoff Claussen; the moonbeams were too effective at stopping them during the night. That Ombric fellow had figured out that Pitch couldn’t attack during the day—since his defeat centuries ago, neither he nor his Fearlings could tolerate the light of the Moon or the sun. So Pitch had possessed the village’s bear, forced him to do whatever he commanded. It seemed a perfect choice—being inside the bear was an ideal shield against light and was powerful enough to fight Ombric. Best of all, he would be trusted by the villagers. He was their friend.

  To North it all still sounded like madness. Nightmare Kings? Enchanted forests? Then North thought more about the dream that had brought him to Santoff Claussen in the first place. It made him wonder. How could a dream show him a place he’d never seen? One day he felt strong enough to ask Ombric. The wizard’s left eyebrow rose and he tried to suppress a smile. The children had noticed that Ombric had been almost smiling a great deal as the wounded bandit’s condition improved.

  “I asked the Man in the Moon for help,” Ombric explained, lifting off then replacing a bandage on North’s shin. “He gave you the dream. He thought you could be of assistance.”

  It was North’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “Me?” He laughed out loud. “I’m better known for assisting gold pieces from a potentate’s pocket than assisting Moon men, wizards, and little brats.”

  Ombric pursed his lips in amusement. “Perhaps he thought the King of the Bandits would be a worthy foe for the Nightmare King.”

  Well, North thought, that’s an answer worth considering. “King of the Bandits” had a pleasing ring to it.

  Then Ombric added, “But I suspect it was more than that.”

  North was puzzled by the remark. “And what in all these crazy worlds could that be? I’m a thief.”

  Ombric rubbed at the jagged crack in his staff. “Face the facts, my young friend. The forest that surrounds our village can clear a path only for the good of heart. You alone rejected the gold the Spirit of the Forest offered you. That never would have happened with a real bandit.”

  Not a real bandit? North thought angrily. Why, I am the greatest thief alive! Perhaps in all of history! But these thoughts felt, suddenly, hollow and somehow false. What was happening to him?

  “You, or this place, or that Spirit have bewitched me!” he bellowed. “I am Nicholas St. North, the Bandit King! Nothing more or less!”

  “No wizard or spirit has the power to change the human heart,” Ombric replied with great calm.

  “Liar!” shouted North.

  Over the angry exchange, the tiny voice of Katherine broke through. “But you were also our hero.” She looked at him with more strength and purpose than he thought any child was capable of. “We were so afraid. And then you came.”

  North looked at Katherine and the other children who’d come closer as his anger had flared. There was something in their faces that he was barely beginning to fathom. Something he had never seen before: kindness. And though he fought it, he was soothed. His pain eased. Not just the pain of battle wounds, but the wounds he’d always ignored—the deep, lonely hurt of a loveless life.

  North was quiet. Days went by without his saying a single word. The other children came and went, but Katherine always stayed. He learned she was a foundling. Her parents were trying to get to Santoff Claussen and they had become lost in a terrible blizzard outside the forest rim. They’d perished in the cold, but Katherine, just a toddler then, had stumbled to the edge of the forest. The trees took pity on her and, with their roots, lifted her up, passing her from tree to tree and vine to vine. The animals had joined in, first a band of squirrels and chipmunks, then the reindeer, and finally, the bear himself, who brought her to Ombric’s front door. From that night on, she had lived in Big Root.

  Her steady kindness to North was his greatest comfort and worst torment. He saw himself in her. He knew what it was like to be lost. And this haunted him.

  As he continued to heal, he seemed to withdraw even further. North saw within the child’s serious gray eyes a need, a hope, a wish that he’d fought since he could remember.

  To have a friend.

  His life had been so hard and r
uthless. Friendship meant trusting someone, and that was a luxury he had never enjoyed. But he slowly began to soften. What danger could this little girl possibly pose? She wasn’t a Cossack or a thief. She was just a lonely little girl.

  One morning, after Katherine had cleared a mug of elderberry soup that he had not touched, North finally spoke.

  “Thank you, Katherine,” he said, his voice a little raspy from being quiet so long.

  Katherine looked at him with that clear-eyed gaze that seemed to see right through him. “Just rest, Mr. North,” she told him, a hint of a smile curling onto her lips as she resumed her post at the foot of his bed. They didn’t need to say another word.

  Friends don’t need to.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Another Short but Intriguing Episode

  WHILE NORTH RECOVERED IN Big Root, the spectral boy rollicked across the planet as he pleased, from the wilds of Canada to the Himalayas to Arabian desert sands, riding on the wind or on fleets of clouds he’d commandeer at his whim. He could outrun any moonbeam and took prankish pleasure in hiding from them. He could never sit still for long. It was as if he’d been locked inside for ten thousand rainy days. Which wasn’t far from the truth. Being locked inside Pitch’s cold heart had been like a prison. Still, it wasn’t the dagger that kept Pitch paralyzed all that time, but the goodness of the spectral boy.

  The boy thawed the tiny fragment of goodness that still lived inside Pitch and kept his evil frozen, unable to act.

  A little bit of goodness can be very powerful against evil. But the boy needed light and warmth and life. He could not bear the burden of stunting Pitch forever. His glow would eventually weaken and die, and Pitch would have walked again. But now the spectral boy was free. He wanted, needed, to just go. To see whatever seized his attention.