We’re just about to the halfway point of the ongoing serial story. If you want to start from the beginning, the first chapter is here, and you can find the previous chapter here.

Chapter Ten

            Sebastian and Lord Argus squared off, both of them holding swords ready. Lord Argus looked as amused as his scarred face allowed, like he didn’t see Sebastian as much of a threat. Lucy didn’t know how good Sebastian really was with a sword, but he was half a head taller than the other guy and considerably younger. Unless Lord Argus had mad skills, she’d bet on Sebastian. The problem was, there were a lot of other men there who were probably on the other side.

But that wasn’t the only problem. The witch was also there, and she was the one who had it in for Lucy. “It would appear that you disliked your accommodations at my castle, your highness, given your haste to leave.” the witch said with an icy smile.

Lucy supposed she should have been utterly terrified to face the woman who wanted her dead, but she was completely calm, in a weird sort of way, so that the rest of the world seemed to slow down, giving her plenty of time to think and react. “Um, hello! It wasn’t exactly the Ritz,” she said. “There was mold on the walls! And, besides, I got a better offer.”

By this time, all the men in the room had moved toward the door, their weapons out. Fortunately, their weapons were more of the pointy kind than the shooty kind, so they’d have to get close to Lucy and Sebastian to do any damage. Lucy knew they’d have been sunk if their enemies had guns or even bows and arrows.

Time slowed to a total standstill as Sebastian and his former master stood glaring at each other and all the other men surrounded them. Lucy took Sebastian’s knapsack off his shoulder, since it would probably make it harder for him to fight. Sebastian shouted, “Your highness, run!” and things started happening very fast.

Lucy rushed for the door, and there was a clang of swords next to her as Sebastian lunged at Lord Argus, which freed up a space for Lucy to duck through as Argus parried the blow and stepped forward to counterattack. The witch grabbed Lucy’s arm, and Lucy spun, swinging Sebastian’s knapsack. It connected with a dull thud and the witch went down, spewing curses. Swords continued to clang, and as Lucy caught her bearings to find the door again she saw Sebastian holding off two men while even more moved in on him. No matter how good a swordsman Sebastian was, he couldn’t fight all of them at once. Only in movies did the gang of bad guys conveniently attack the hero one at a time.

Forgetting momentarily about escaping, Lucy grabbed a handful of straw from the floor and threw it in the faces of the nearest men. That distracted them for a moment. Then the witch shouted, “Get her, and I want her alive!” That took a few of the men out of the fight with Sebastian but, unfortunately, it sent them after Lucy, who didn’t have a sword to fight them with.

Before they could get to her, Larkin howled and jumped at the neck of one of the men. Lucy clocked another upside the head with her backpack, grateful for her heavy history textbook. The household dogs got into the mix after Leila barked at them, not really fighting, but getting in the way so that some of the men couldn’t get to Lucy or back to the fight with Sebastian. Their howls and barks made the scene even crazier.

Sebastian was still fighting and doing quite well, as far as Lucy could tell. He still had all his limbs, which she thought was pretty good in a swordfight. “Highness, now!” Leila barked. The dog herded Lucy toward the door. She didn’t want to leave Sebastian, but then she saw that he was already backing his way to the door. She wasn’t sure he could hold off all those men long enough to make it. A couple of the men she’d hit with straw were hampered by sneezing fits and watery eyes, and that helped some. That reminded Lucy of her pepper spray.

She dug into her backpack as the witch regained her footing, her arms raised and her red-painted lips forming words. A glowing wave came toward Lucy, who couldn’t help but flinch, but it parted and went around her. At the same time, Dawn’s necklace grew so hot against her chest that she was sure it would cause a blister.

The witch screamed in frustration and raised her arms again. Fingers fumbling in haste, Lucy groped for the spray can. She found the slim cylinder in her backpack’s side pocket, made sure she was pointing it in the right direction, shouted, “Sebastian, duck! And close your eyes!” She sprayed for all she was worth, hitting the witch square in the eyes just as she started another spell. Melantha’s black eye makeup streamed down her face as she clawed at her eyes. Lucy turned to Lord Argus and kept spraying until the canister sputtered and gave one last, feeble “pfft,” then she threw it at the nearest man, hitting him in the temple, before running away.

Sebastian had hit the ground the moment Lucy shouted, and he crawled out of the room under the cloud of stinging gas. Anyone who ran into that cloud ended up coughing and hacking. Sebastian, the two dogs, and Lucy made it out the door, then ran at full speed across the courtyard. The guards at the gate looked like they were going to put up a fight, but Sebastian’s sword convinced them otherwise. Lucy didn’t pause in her running to see exactly what he did, but she thought she saw blood on his blade.

It wasn’t long before there was a noise behind them as all the conspirators and the witch came out of the house. They were still coughing and choking, but that wouldn’t stop them for long. “This way!” Larkin called out, and Sebastian, Lucy, and Leila followed him off the road and through a field. He and Leila jumped easily over the fences, while Lucy was able to slip between rails. Sebastian had to climb over.

Some of the pursuers were running on foot, while others paused to mount up. The mounted pursuers caught up quickly enough, but chose not to risk injury to their horses from jumping fences in the twilight darkness and had to look for a gate.

They weren’t quite at the real forest, but there was a small cluster of trees nearby. Larkin ran them right into it, down a hill to a stream. They ran along the stream bed until they reached a hollowed out space where the roots of a huge tree had been exposed. It was on the side of the hill that wouldn’t be immediately visible to their pursuers, and Lucy was pretty sure they were far enough ahead that their pursuers hadn’t even seen them go into the trees.

Sebastian shoved Lucy into the hollow and came in after her. The dogs crept back through the shadows, keeping watch. Lucy wanted to hold her breath to stay as quiet as possible, but she was breathing too hard to do so. She wasn’t used to running like that. Sebastian was breathing pretty hard, too. He not only had been running, but he’d done all that fighting before they escaped.

He kept his sword across his knees, ready just in case. The space was cramped, so Lucy was pressed up so tightly against Sebastian’s chest that she could hear his heart pounding. He was also shaking a little. Or maybe that was her. It was hard to tell when they were so close together.

The sound of barking dogs came nearer. The pursuers were right on top of them. Lucy closed her eyes, as if not being able to see them would make them unable to see her. It was childish, she knew, but at that point, she was willing to do anything to be safe. Soon, she could feel the hoofbeats as the riders went past. The pounding was louder and felt almost closer than Sebastian’s heartbeat. Lucy buried her face against his shoulder and prayed for all she was worth that they wouldn’t be discovered.

***

            Jeremy had planned on a hike that day, but this wasn’t the hike he’d planned. Instead of a troop of eager nine-year-olds learning the basics of woodcraft, he was with an odd assortment of minstrels and entertainers. They were armed, and they did seem to know where they were going, but they didn’t know much about navigating a forest, and their brightly colored clothes meant they didn’t exactly blend in. He could only hope the group that had taken Dawn was just as clueless. He couldn’t help but imagine a fierce rumble between the drama club and the choir.

It turned out that stealth wasn’t necessary, as they found the other group lounging in a small clearing and singing drunkenly. The worst tracker in history could have found them, and a small army could have crept up on them unnoticed. “So, Bertram,” Huw said wryly, “have you sunk so low as to have to kidnap new members? The rest of us hold auditions and must turn away far more than we take.”

Bertram jerked so suddenly at the sound of Huw’s voice that he fell off the log he was sitting on. “Ah, but you notice, we’re the ones with the secret weapon, and we’ll be the ones who perform at the coronation.”

Jeremy got the feeling the banter could go on all night, and he didn’t really care about minstrel politics. “Where’s Dawn?” he demanded.

“You must mean the secret weapon,” Bertram said. “You’ll not take her from us, Huw.”

Jeremy scanned the clearing, but there was no sight of Dawn, and in that scruffy bunch, she should have stood out. “What did you do with her?” he shouted, lunging at Bertram.

Huw held him back as he said mildly, “You seem to have misplaced the young lady.”

“Good riddance,” muttered one of the men. “She wouldn’t let us sing the bawdy songs, and she wanted us to bathe.”

Bertram staggered to his feet and reeled around the clearing. “She was just here. Where did she go?”

Jeremy strained against Huw’s grasp. He was taller, larger, and younger than the old minstrel, but Huw was stronger than he looked and Jeremy couldn’t break away. “Where is she, then?” he demanded, settling for shouting if he couldn’t hit something. The thought of Dawn alone in these woods with the sun setting was utterly terrifying, but then he remembered the way the Big Bad Wolf couldn’t bring himself to attack her and felt better. Even back home, people and animals couldn’t seem to help liking Dawn, but here that effect was intensified.

“Where might she have gone?” Huw asked.

He’d directed the question at Bertram, but it was Jeremy who answered, as he remembered the way Dawn had been acting all day. “She’ll head for the river. She seems to have a sense for that sort of thing.” He didn’t know how well magical things were accepted here, so he left out the part about her having a psychic link to her necklace. He might have accepted Huw’s help, but he was reluctant to share much personal information with anyone.

Jeremy didn’t have a psychic link to anything, but he did have a good sense of direction and knew how to get around in a forest, so he had no trouble leading Huw’s troupe back the way they’d come. It turned out that he didn’t have much reason to worry about how Huw would accept magic because as the daylight faded with sunset, Huw held out his hand, muttered an incantation, and a globe of pale light appeared above his hand. “That’s a neat trick,” Jeremy remarked.

“It is but simple magic,” Huw said with a shrug. “It’s nothing like what the enchantresses can do.”

After an hour or so of walking—far longer than it had taken to walk from the river to the kidnappers’ camp—Jeremy couldn’t help but wonder if his woodcraft skills didn’t work in this world. He was usually good at retracing his steps, and Huw’s light should have made it easy, but they were still lost, and probably walking in circles. Every time Jeremy felt like he’d regained his bearings, he ended up turned around again. If he’d been on water, he’d have figured they were caught in a current that was pulling them off course, but that couldn’t happen on land, could it?

“Now I wish we’d left a trail of bread crumbs,” he muttered as he tried once more to get his bearings. His compass had worked earlier, but now when he checked it, it spun wildly. There was something powerful enough to interfere with it, and none of his Boy Scout training had mentioned the effect of magic on a compass.

The trees thinned, and he hoped that meant they were nearing the river, even though he couldn’t hear or smell it. Then they stepped into a clearing. In the middle of it stood an odd little house, and his compass needle pointed straight at it. The man next to him made a hand sign that the other men repeated. Jeremy got the feeling it was meant to ward off evil. Huw quickly doused his hand light, but the house still glowed softly under its own power, beckoning with a welcoming warmth.

Jeremy recognized it right away. It was a gingerbread house, like the one his mother ordered every year from the town bakery to serve as a centerpiece for her Christmas party. He and Lucy had teased her about using the home of a cannibal witch as a Christmas decoration the year Lucy got a book of fairy tales for Christmas. Lucy had run over that afternoon to read him the story about Hansel and Gretl and the child-eating witch who lived in a gingerbread house. The way Huw and his men reacted to this house and the way it seemed to be at the center of a vortex pulling them toward it made Jeremy suspect that this house was the home of something equally nasty.

And if it had drawn them to it, it would have drawn Dawn on her way back to the river. She wouldn’t recognize the danger. She’d never heard of the Big Bad Wolf or either Little Red Riding Hood or The Three Little Pigs, so chances were she also didn’t know about Hansel and Gretl or the dangerous allure of the gingerbread house.

He moved slowly and quietly toward the house, trying to remember how the story ended. How had they killed the witch and escaped? The men with him also moved forward. They didn’t seem to have much choice. If they tried to walk away, they’d just get pulled back here. They had to deal with whatever was in that house or they’d never get out of the woods.

Jeremy came to an abrupt halt when he heard a sound coming from the house. The man behind him bumped into him, but Jeremy was too focused on the sound to notice. It sounded like singing—Dawn singing. She was here, and she was still alive.

“That is your friend, is it not?” Huw whispered. Jeremy nodded. “We must free her. Legends have told of travelers and lost children who stray into the forest and never return.”

They edged closer to the house, and the singing became more distinct. In addition to Dawn’s voice, there was also the sound of sobbing and moaning. Another one of the witch’s prisoners?

Huw positioned them all around the door, then gestured to the largest man, who kicked the door in. They all rushed inside to see an old woman sitting in a rocking chair, sobbing her eyes out, while Dawn sang sad songs of heartbreak. Dawn broke off her song in mid-word when she saw the group burst in, and she ran to hug Jeremy. “Thank goodness you’re here! She wanted to put me in a cage, so I thought maybe if I sang sad songs to her, it would make her feel bad so she wouldn’t hurt me. I got through most of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon and the sadder songs from Phantom, and I’d had to resort to whatever country music I could remember.”

“How did you know she was dangerous?”

“She has a cage in her living room, and she tried to convince me it was her guest room.”

“Yeah, I could see where that might make you suspicious.” He put his arm around her waist to guide her out of the house, but once the music stopped, the witch jerked back to life.

“What are you doing in my house?” she screeched, having to stop a time or two to sniffle as tears continued dripping down her face. She smiled a toothless grin as she saw the roomful of brawny men. “Welcome, all you big, strong, delicious boys. You must be hungry. I have cake.”

Jeremy remembered the cage from the story—the witch had kept children in there to fatten them up. And wasn’t there something about tricking the nearly blind witch with a chicken bone so she’d think they weren’t fat enough yet? He saw the huge fireplace set into the wall, with a brick oven beside it. That was it! They’d shoved her into her own oven.

“I wouldn’t mind some cake,” he said. “I’m starving.”

Dawn clutched his arm. “Jeremy, no! Let’s just get away from here.”

He handed Dawn over to Huw and moved closer to the oven. “Is the cake warm? I like it best that way.” The witch perked up and limped her way across the room to the oven. For a moment, he felt bad about plotting the death of a little old lady who lived in a gingerbread house, but he reminded himself that she was the magical equivalent of an ant lion, creating an impossible-to-escape vortex to lure unsuspecting travelers to her home, where she kept them in a cage to fatten up until she ate them. Taking her out would be a public service, and, he reminded himself, possibly their only way to escape.

“Here, young man, I have fresh cake that should just be done.” She bent to open the oven door, and he rushed to give her a good push. It didn’t go quite as easily as it did in the story because she put up a good fight for such a scrawny little thing. A couple of the other men joined him when they realized what he was doing. She screamed curses at them, and pieces of the room’s candy decor came loose and flew at them, but they finally got her into the oven and slammed the door closed. They all took refuge under the heavy wooden table until lemon drops and peppermint discs quit flying, then they cautiously eased their way out from under the table.

The men all sighed with relief, but Dawn had tears in her eyes. “Maybe she was just a lonely old woman,” she said with a sniffle. “She did weep when I sang.”

Huw put a hand on her shoulder. “Miss, that witch has been killing people for years.”

“And she uses magic to lure people here. We might not have been able to get away if we hadn’t killed her,” Jeremy added. He got out his compass and saw that the arrow was once again pointing in a sane direction. “And now we can get back to the river.”

Dawn collected her backpack and they headed out by the light of Huw’s magic. Dawn walked close by Jeremy. “Who are these people?” she asked in a whisper.

“They’re a musical troupe. Remember that girl who was heckling you in the market? The older man is her father. They knew that Bertram guy must have kidnapped you, and they agreed to help if you’d join their troupe for the coronation. I hope you don’t mind that I committed you.”

“You mean I get to be part of a real performing group?” She bounced on her toes and clapped her hands in delight. Apparently, she didn’t mind at all. Then she frowned. “Are they any good?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t heard them perform. But they do have a good-sized boat that’s part stage, so it looks like they’re a profitable operation.”

“They can’t be worse than that other group. Oh, Jeremy, they were awful.” She danced over to Huw to thank him for helping Jeremy come to her rescue. Jeremy couldn’t help but notice that the men of the troupe had surrounded them. They weren’t taking any chances on Jeremy backing out of their agreement once he’d found Dawn. It looked like they were part of a traveling performing troupe, like it or not. Dawn liked it, obviously, but Jeremy felt like he’d just become a prisoner.

Continued in Chapter 11.