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.
Chapter 9
In Which We Reach the Castle
Hero and I might have been the only ones who could read the sign welcoming us into Rona, but everyone seemed to understand what it meant. We were less than a day’s ride from the castle. Albert began to shake.
I reached down to pat his neck. “It’s just a road. L-like any other.”
Any road that leads to a dragon’s lair.
Hero was clenching and unclenching her reins. Tate had started to whistle, a very high-pitched tune that grated against my ears. I didn’t say anything to him about it. He had come all this way with me and would most likely be the one to take my body back to my family, if there was anything left.
The road dipped and turned and then passed through an archway of trees, the limbs reaching up to tangle with each other over our heads. It f
elt like we were riding through a rib cage. I couldn’t see the sky, and that bothered me for some reason.
“Tate, why don’t you tell us a s-story?” I said. Tate frowned a little. “What kind of story?”
“Any k-kind,” I said. Anything was better than the shrill whistling.
“All right.”
Tate told us about a man who was sure that there was someone at the bottom of his well staring back at him. It was the kind of story that probably would have been funny under other circumstances, but on that morning, even Tate didn’t enjoy it.
We found some berries and tried to eat at noon, but no one was really hungry. So we climbed back into our saddles and continued down the road. Less than an hour later, we came upon a man driving a flock of sheep.
“Excuse me, s-sir,” I said. My voice seemed to tremble even more than usual. “W-we are looking for the dr-dragon who lives near h-here.”
“He lives in the castle at the top of the mountain,” the man said, pointing to the north.
I had kind of hoped that he would try to convince us to leave the creature alone, to run away and save ourselves, but he said nothing else. So we started down the road the stranger had pointed out.
The path wound around the mountain like a snake. There were no shrubs or trees. The entire mountainside was bare. As the castle grew closer, we could see that all of the outside walls had been blackened with fire.
I couldn’t help but wonder how long it had taken the dragon to sear the building. Had it been a dozen breaths or just one? Had he burned the castle after he had conquered it or during the siege? What had happened to the people who had lived here? I wasn’t certain that I wanted an answer to that last question.
No one spoke as we climbed, and I was thankful for the silence. What could any of us really say? Silence was better. Even Albert had stopped moaning. The wind that howled around us seemed to have taken over that duty.
Far too soon, we reached the end of the road and found ourselves facing two enormous gates. I slid off Albert’s back and just stared. Tate and Hero came to stand with me.
“What do you suppose he has in there?” Tate whispered.
“Horses’ bones,” Albert moaned. “Hundreds and thousands of them.”
“Maidens,” Hero said quietly. “Girls he has stored away to eat later.”
“I heard that dragons keep a token from each knight who comes to try and kill them. You know, something to remember each one,” Tate said.
I wanted to tell them how unhelpful their comments were, but there wasn’t any point in stammering out the words. I had thought every single thing they said.
Standing in front of that gate, I couldn’t quite remember why I was there in the first place. It wasn’t like I had a sister in there or something. I had just been looking for a noble deed, something to prove that I was worthy. There must be some other way to do that.
And even if there weren’t, would it be so terrible to not earn a chance to go to the King’s School for the Education of Future Knights? I could just go home and be pegged with rotting fruit for the rest of my life. There were worse things. At least I would be alive. And maybe I would have some enormous growth surge and suddenly become so tall and burly that no one would dare bother me. I knew it wasn’t likely, but it was possible.
My friends wouldn’t really mind if we turned back. Hero had at least had a break from her family. Tate had plenty of stories to share. And the way Albert would tell the tale, he would most likely come out as the bravest horse who ever lived.
Just when I had decided that the only sane thing to do was turn around and go home, I heard a scream—a long, anguished scream that made all of the hairs on my arms stand on end.
What kind of knight could hear that sound and walk away?
The scream faded, but it still echoed in my ears. I was fairly certain that it would haunt me for whatever was left of my brief life. I had to go.
“I’m going inside,” I told them. Both Tate and Hero started to talk at once, but I interrupted, “I have to at least try to help her.”
“I’m coming with you,” Tate said, standing up a little taller as all of the color drained out of his face.
“No, you are going to make sure that everyone gets home,” I said.
Hero opened her mouth, but I added, “And someone is going to need to finish teaching Tate how to use a sword.”
They both looked like they were trying to come up with a new argument, but then another sound came from the castle. Not a scream this time, more a cry of despair.
“How will you get in?” Tate said. “Through the gate.”
Hero’s eyes widened. “But then he’ll know that you’re here!”
“He already knows we’re here,” I said. “That’s why the road winds around like that, so that the people in the castle can see who’s coming. There’s no break in the walls. We don’t have any siege engines. If I’m going to get inside, it’s going to be through that gate.
“Go a little way down the path,” I told them. “If I’m not back in an hour, run.”
“We are not going to leave you,” Hero said, her chin rising up.
“If I’m not back in an hour, it means that I’m dead,” I told her.
She still looked like she wanted to argue the point, but she eventually nodded. I guess she had to finally accept the truth of the situation.
I embraced Tate. “Give your family my thanks for everything.’”
He nodded, his blue eyes shining with tears.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with Hero, but she threw her arms around me. “Be careful,” she said.
I nodded as I drew back.
“We’re real proud of you,” Tate told me. The tears broke free now, streaming down his cheeks.
I waited while Tate and Hero got back into their saddles and then started down the road, Tate leading Albert behind him. And then I turned and walked toward the gate. My heart pounded out a warning, as if I didn’t know that I was about to do something really stupid. Nausea threatened to empty my stomach at any moment. My legs had turned so wobbly that I couldn’t seem to walk straight. But I still found myself at the gate long before I was ready to be there.
I lifted up one shaking fist and pounded on the wood.
One. Two. Three times.
I stepped back, hoping that nothing would happen. But I never have been lucky. Slowly, the castle gate began to creak its way open.
Chapter 10
In Which I Come Nose-to-Nose with a Dragon
I braced myself, ready for the massive burst of flame that would roast me to a crisp. But instead of steam and smoke, I found a man dressed in livery. I wanted to tell him that I was there to rescue him and all the others, but my tongue lay dry and motionless in my mouth.
“Come in, young sir. Lord Rupert is expecting you,” the man said.
Had another knight arrived before us? It really would be just my luck to come all this way only to have someone else take on the monster before I could. Or was this Lord Rupert being held captive? Or maybe he didn’t even exist. Maybe this was all some sort of trap. I wanted to confer with Hero and Tate, but if I went back down the road to where they were waiting, I would only draw attention to them.
The man stepped back and gestured for me to follow. I walked slowly through the gateway and into a garden complete with neat paths, banks of flowers, and a fountain in the center shaped like a dragon. The last owners had all but sent the beast an invitation.
We passed through the garden and came to a huge pair of golden doors engraved with the sun, moon, and stars. My guide opened the doors, and we walked into a massive hall, wide enough for a dozen horsemen to ride abreast. The ceiling soared above us.
I kept waiting for the attack, for the fl to begin vibrating under an enormous weight, or for a roar to shake the tapestries that lined the walls. But a
ll I heard was the echo of our footsteps. The waiting was its own cruel torture.
Then the liveried man stopped beside a set of intricately carved doors. Somehow, I knew that the dragon was on the other side of those doors. What I didn’t understand was why this balding man was so willingly bringing me to it. Maybe the beast had his family held captive.
The servant opened the doors and stepped back.
With a heart rate that would have been well suited to escaping a wildfire, I walked into a space like nothing I had ever seen before. It was a round room, larger than the Great Hall at Castle Mortico. The walls were covered in shelves filled with enormous leatherbound books and dozens of brass instruments. A glass dome took the place of a ceiling. In the center of the room stood a large table, and beside it, the dragon.
The beast was bigger than I had imagined. His hide was ruby red. His wings were folded against his back, but I could picture how wide they must be if they were able to lift the creature off the ground. The dragon was looking away from us, but if what I had heard of dragons was true, he could most certainly smell us.
“My lord, the young gentleman has arrived,” my escort announced.
“Oh, good,” said a deep, rumbling voice, and then the massive head began to turn.
I knew that I should draw Guardian, but my arms refused to move. It was as if my limbs had been forged out of iron.
The dragon’s head swung slowly around to face us, and I found myself staring into dark eyes that looked back at me through enormous spectacles balanced on the end of its snout.
“Welcome, young sir. I am so glad that you arrived in time,” the dragon said in his deep voice. “I had despaired that Hopkins and I would be viewing alone this year.”
I just stood staring at the beast.
“What is your name, if I may ask?” the dragon continued in what I could only call a pleasant tone.
The Legend of Hobart Page 5