The King's Pursuit

by L. R. Patton

  But now, because the pictures have fallen from her mind’s eye, she suspects that the book holds some mysterious connection to her power. She lost her power when she lost the book. If she could get it back, somehow.

  If she could get it back.

  How might she get it back?

  Her eyes have grown dark. Aleen has grown off-center. And so it is that she searches in this one called Yerin.

  “I See us out in the yard of the castle,” Yerin says. “The sun is so bright our eyes cannot stand it. I See us eating hot bread with butter and sweet rolls and great platters of grapes and roast lamb and boiled greens.”

  The children have grown quiet in the telling. Aleen supposes most of them are asleep. It is better for them to sleep, in a place this dark, though they will wake to nothing better than this.

  Yerin’s voice grows softer, as if he has noticed, too, the change in the children’s breathing, and then the change in the other prophets’ breathing. “I See us returning to our homes and hugging the people we love most and reading our storybooks and sleeping in our own blanketed beds,” he says.

  Aleen does not know how much of this he has really Seen and how much he has said for the sake of the children. But she is overcome by such a longing for her books and her bed that she must close her eyes.

  She falls into a long, deep sleep, the kind of sleep that does not take notice of a freezing floor and the absence of a blanket or the shifting sounds bodies make or a light breaking through dark.

  Wink

  MAUDE and Arthur met when they were quite young by the standards of our world, but not so very young by the standards of theirs. Arthur was a traveling man by then who had journeyed around the farthest reaches of the seven kingdoms, selling his wood art, making fine furniture and beautifying the worlds of peasants with his craftsmanship. That’s how Maude liked to tell it, that is. And then, one day, he showed up on her father’s doorstep.

  Her father was the village leader in White Wind. The king of White Wind was a kindly man who did not get involved with the village grievances, and so it was Maude’s father who presided as judge over arguments as silly as “That child dropped an apple core on my lawn” to those more serious in nature: “My sheep wandered into his pasture and died.” The people of White Wind were not so peaceable as those in other kingdoms, so her father had quite a responsibility keeping good relations between neighbors. Maude used to sit in on some of the meetings, held in the town inn, over ale and bratwurst. Mostly the men talked, though the widows were known to put in a few words as well. Maude, for her part, hated the petty conflicts. She did not find it so difficult to get along with a fellow neighbor, if one was not constantly nit-picking about the ways others live their lives. But the people of White Wind did not seem to understand this simple freedom. She wanted nothing more than to escape this wretched kingdom.

  She was no fool. She saw her opportunity to escape when Arthur, a young, foreign, vibrant man, knocked on her door.

  He was slightly older than she was, twenty to her nineteen. She was past the wedding age for most women of her time. Plenty of the village men had asked, for Maude was considered a lovely woman, with sandy hair and shining caramel eyes, and, also, sufficient and smart. But her father needed her at home. Or so she told herself. She did not exactly know why her father had not wed again after her mother died. Maude did the best she could for him. She cleaned, but it was not a precise cleaning. She cooked, but not so very well as the widow Rayna, who occasionally brought a meal to their door. Maude had seen Rayna’s longing as she watched Maude’s father go about his business in the town. Why did her father not wed the widow, who was good and kind and young enough to bear him more children?

  Maude often wished that her father would marry again so that she could live her life as she very well pleased, traveling the lands instead of trapped in the village of White Wind, where all that happened was a neighbor stealing an apple from another neighbor’s apple tree.

  And then came the visitor who set it all in motion.

  Arthur was handsome, with ruddy brown hair that always looked as if he had just risen from his bed, as if he did not own a comb at all—not tangled, but windswept. It was understandable, of course, for he slept on the ground. Being a man of little means, he had grown accustomed to sleeping beneath the stars, for inns cost money he did not have.

  And so it was that one day Maude opened the door to the most piercing blue eyes she had ever seen in all the land, nearly glowing eyes, and there he was. He looked twice, and then he smiled, his whole face carrying the sun in it.

  “Your father around, my young lady?” he said, though she knew even then, even with only a glance at his boyish face, that he could not have been much older than she. He leaned against the doorway, crossing his arms across his chest.

  “Who might be asking?” she said. She had spirit, that was what the villagers said of Maude. It was what her mother had always said. Spirit that could run wild on a whim or be tamed with a story. The baker’s apprentice, Benny, was the first man to appreciate that spirit, but he did not suit her, though her father, at the time, urged her to accept Benny’s proposal of marriage. Benny was much too arrogant for her taste. She preferred a man who knew his worth and yet did not tell everyone about it. She preferred a man who recognized the value of women in his life, and Benny was not one of those men. He wanted a wife who was beautiful simply so he could show her off and keep her locked in a house, cooking, cleaning, caring for the children she would bear him. So she had refused to marry him. That had been a spirited argument, shaking the walls of her home, when she told her father of her decision. But he could not ask her to marry for anything other than love, could he? After all, he had loved her mother.

  There was something else Maude had not told a single person, not that she had friends to tell. She had not even written it in her record book, where she penned thoughts from her days, the only real ritual that meant anything at all to her. Every night, she sat by the fireside with a quill pen and the stack of parchment bound by sturdy thread and wrote a page, perhaps two, and then stuffed the book beneath her straw mattress.

  The something else was this: Maude wanted to marry a man with magic.

  She knew the danger, of course. A man with magic was always a danger, for kings would kill to keep their thrones. She did not want to marry a magic man for the kingdom it might one day bring, as one might expect. She wanted to marry a man of magic because no one had ever taught her how to use her own. No one but her father even knew why she kept her mother’s staff, propped in a corner of her room.

  “Forget it,” he had said after her mother had died. “It is good for nothing.”

  But she knew it was good for something. It had to be good for something. It was a gift, was it not? She touched the staff every night before bed, part of a story she told herself, about how the power was in the staff, not the magician’s hands, and in order not to lose it, she must make contact with the wood every chance she had.

  Her mother’s staff was ancient. It had been passed on for generations, gnarled and rounded at the top, as if a ball lived on the end of it. A message had been etched into the ball, but she could not read the script. It looked as if it had been touched with loving hands too many times. Perhaps someday, when she unlocked the use of her magic, she would know what those words meant.

  The man at her door bowed. “I am called Arthur.”

  “And from where did you come, Arthur?” She had, of course, heard of this Arthur. He had arrived days ago, and already the people had fallen in love with his woodwork.

  “Everywhere,” Arthur said. “And nowhere.”

  “Riddles,” Maude said. “I have never liked riddles.”

  “Well then,” Arthur said. “Perhaps you will not like me.”

  Maude knew this was not true. Already she liked this man, the way he smiled as if it was the most natural thing to do. The way he leaned against a door and crossed his arms across his chest. The way he spoke and the gleam
in his eye.

  Arthur moved a hand behind his back. When it appeared again, he had a yellow rose. “For friendship,” he said, and he winked.

  And she knew. This man had magic.

  She took him in to see her father, who was not only the town leader but was also the town woodworker. She listened to their conversation, standing on her toes behind the door, learned that Arthur had traveled all over the lands but was looking for somewhere to settle down, somewhere to do his woodworking in peace, with another skilled hand, said to be the best in the land (though it was, in fact, Arthur who was the best woodworker in all the land). Maude knew her father was the sort of man who took to compliments, and so she knew that Arthur would be allowed to stay. A thrill wedged into her heart.

  Her father, of course, was pleased and said as much. He could use the help, he said. She heard a slap, which she knew to be her father’s hand on Arthur’s back, for she had seen him do it to the baker’s apprentice on occasion.

  She smiled. She would not be so keen on leaving for a while yet. First, she must learn the ways of magic. First, she must learn how to use her gift.

  When she saw Arthur out of the house, it was dark. And it was only because she was watching him that she noticed him reach beside the door and draw out the walking stick.

  No, not a walking stick at all. A magical staff.

  He turned at the edge of the yard. She could hardly distinguish him from the darkness. But she did see him reach up, tip his hat and, she imagined, wink.

  Hope

  IT might take you all by surprise to know that Arthur and Maude and Hazel and Mercy and twenty-two of the other missing children are, in fact, hiding in the Weeping Woods, closer to home than anyone dared think they would be.

  Where are the other seven missing children in our king’s register? Well, that is a mystery that will need solving, I am sure you will agree.

  Sir Greyson and his entire company of men combed through the woods early on, looking, searching, scouring, really, but they never found the hidden hideout or the haphazard garden or the sheep that had followed Hazel to her new home.

  This is as it should be, as Arthur and Maude planned it, as was best to protect the lives of the children. The woods, that day, had closed around them, concealing them from those who were looking. That is the only way they made it. The fairies did not bother them on their way through, though Hazel had watched for them at every turn. A girl of the village had once been carried off to a place called Neverland, a good name for a place where a girl would never see her family and friends again, for she had never been found.

  It is a good thing Arthur and Maude did not panic in the mayhem that painted the streets of Fairendale the eve that brought them here. The children were saved, after all, because they had the foresight to make a plan. They called to all the children who had run into the Weeping Woods, momentarily safe from the eyes of the king’s guard by the bending of the trees around them. They gathered, sharing their heaving breaths around a circle. They broke, they ran, and then, at precisely the right moment in precisely the right place, the ground opened up.

  Arthur had taught the girls well.

  Hazel had tried first to create what Arthur asked, but her power was significantly weakened by the disappearance of her twin brother Theo. Twins, you see, cannot practice their magic when separated. So it was Mercy, instead, who had created the house beneath the ground, connected to the earth above it by a tiny shoe, at the behest of Tom Thumb. (We have not yet met Tom Thumb. But his story shall be told soon enough.) Every underground house had a magical portal connecting it to the upper world, where those below could step and suddenly become those above. Tom Thumb took off his shoe, and the children could hardly see where it lay, but Mercy waved her staff anyway, and the dirt swallowed them whole. It was only when they stared at each other, in this hole beneath the ground, that they saw Maude’s frontside stuffed with bags of flour and old rags and all the items she could grab that might be turned into food. In the days since their escape, they have lived on bread and water, pulled from the ground beneath them. Mercy, in truth, did not know she had a gift so powerful. But at Arthur’s instruction, she had made water flow from the earth. The children had stared at her with gaping mouths.

  More than a week has passed. Arthur and Maude and the children have made this underground house a home. The girls have used their magic to make bedrooms, girls on one side and boys on another. They had to make it a comfortable place, for while the king’s men searched the forest, they had to remain hidden where no one would expect them to be.

  And who would expect them to be living beneath the ground?

  When the ground ceased shaking from the presence of soldiers and horses, Arthur moved through the portal, surveying the ground and planning a garden that would not look like a garden at all. They needed more than bread and water, he said. They would need greens, too. A girl named Ruby did the planting.

  The sheep had appeared this morning, while Arthur gleaned what vegetables he could for their paltry breakfast. He tried shooing the sheep away, but they refused to leave the woods. Arthur slipped back through the portal miffed. Now he sits before his daughter, thinking aloud.

  “They must go,” Arthur says.

  “They will not,” Hazel says. “Not without me.”

  Arthur looks around at the underground walls, at all the children. His eyes rest on Maude’s. They cannot not do a vanishing spell to rid the woods of the sheep, for that will demand far too much strength, but perhaps they can weave another concealment spell for the time being. The children are hungry, though. Another concealment spell will not hold up for long, for magic weakens as its master weakens.

  “Ursula,” he says.

  The girl with raven hair turns to him. “Yes, Mister Arthur?”

  “I need you to do a concealment spell,” he says.

  “But I have never done a concealment spell,” she says, for she knows how advanced a spell such as this one can be.

  “No matter,” Arthur says. “I will guide you.”

  “How is it you know so much about magic?” says a boy named Chester. He has a twin named Charles, but they were both born without the gift of magic. Second and third sons. They lost their brother in their race toward the woods. The first brother had always been terrified of the Weeping Woods and the dangers within, though, the day they fled, the Weeping Woods were no match for the king’s men. They had seen their brother felled by a sword.

  Arthur brushes away the question. There is no time for explaining just yet. Perhaps there will not ever be, for this is not a story he would like to tell.

  Ursula crouches next to Arthur. He points to her staff. She raises it up. He holds it, along with her hand. The two of them disappear through the portal.

  “No fair,” cries another boy, called Jasper. “I want to go out.”

  They have been beneath the ground for eight days, reader. They have not seen the sun for eight whole days. Can you imagine? They have only sat at tables and reclined in their beds. There has been no running or jumping or laughing, for that matter. The children grow tired and cranky for spending too much time indoors.

  “Perhaps one day soon,” Maude says. Her words come out in a deep sigh. Hazel locks eyes with Mercy. “For now, we must keep you safe.”

  Truth be told, this home is better than some of their homes in the village. There is more bread than one could ever want in a day. There is a room for every two children. Some of these children have shared with four or five of their brothers and sisters, so they have more room than ever, though any space with twenty-six people in it would, perhaps, feel cramped, even a space with as many as thirteen rooms.

  Still, it is quite astounding, this little home made from a tiny shoe. No man searching the woods will ever find a shoe as small as this one. Tom Thumb is the size of a thumb, as his name suggests. His shoes are the size of a fingernail sliver. Even a seeing glass could not detect a portal so small.

  Arthur and Ursula fly through th
e portal. It is always a surprising return. One never knows where one will drop. Ursula comes in upside down, her staff wrapped around her ankle. She hits the ground with the top of her head. Arthur lands on his rump right beside her.

  “Well?” Maude says. “Did you get rid of them?”

  “It is a temporary fix,” Arthur says. “But, for now, they are concealed.”

  The children look at Ursula. Mercy, though, turns away. She is jealous of this honor. She would like to have been asked. Arthur did not ask her, you see, because she is the child who made them a home and brought forth water from the ground. Every use of magic weakens its master for a time. She is needed for water and for maintaining the connection with the portal. She must preserve her strength.

  But this is not how Mercy sees it. Hazel pats her friend’s hand.

  “The children would like to go out,” Maude says. She looks at Arthur. He looks at her. He shakes his head.

  “We must wait for a time,” Arthur says. He turns to the children. “I know you are growing restless. But we must wait for a time. We must make sure it is safe. The hour is late, and the woods grow dark.” He does not say more.

  And the children, because they love and trust this man who saved them from the king’s guard, do not say another word. They know of the dangers in these woods that have nothing to do with the men who search for them.

  Arthur holds up a thick branch. “I found this out there. I think it will serve us well. Now. Who wants to make me a proper table?”

  The girls rush toward him, and, in the end, it is a girl called Minnie who gives him a table. Arthur sets to work on the intricate designs he is known for carving in the village. He bends and carves and brushes wood away until it is time to take from the garden what is theirs for the day.

  Day and night and day and night, this is the life of the children living beneath the ground. No one knows they are here. No one knows they are alive.