The Medievals 2 Page 8

  The image of the burning shell calls forth Vladeen’s warning in the Council Room on what would visit them if the staff were to fall into the wrong hands: “An evil that will have the power to turn the entire Realm into an empty husk.”

  As the insect carcass disappears into the smoke-filled air, the flames jump to the curtains, then the tapestry beside the window, then the canopy over the bed. The fire is ravenous; and it spreads with haste until, within only moments, Richard is surrounded by an untamable blaze.

  With the windows blocked by burning curtains, Richard has no choice but to escape through the door that leads into the hallway. He retrieves a sheet from the bed before it, too, catches fire. And then he moves to the door, where he wraps the sheet around his hands several times, protecting his palm as he grabs the scorching handle.

  The door opens with a gust of hot, smoky air attacking Richard’s eyes, mouth and nose. He coughs, the smoke finding the insides of his chest. Then, he covers his mouth with the sheet, defending against the smoke as he pushes down the hallway, blind to what lies ahead of him.

  He reaches the steps with a speed he had not predicted, and he stumbles down the short stone staircase before regaining his balance.

  “Mother! Father!” Richard cries out as he races toward the Royal Bedchamber.

  “Is anyone in there!? It is Richard!” he shouts through the door as he bangs on it.

  As Richard listens for a response, he hears the faint sound of his mother singing: “Fire fairies coming out, fire fairies dance about, bringing us your light.”

  “Mother!” he shouts, hoping that she will hear him.

  With no reply from within, Richard once again wraps the sheet around his hand and then grabs hold of the handles. The doors do not immediately open, so Richard leans into them, shouldering his way into the Royal Bedchamber.

  Inside, the room is an inferno, the heat from the savage flames forcing Richard to shield his face with his arm.

  “Mother!” he shouts again. “Are you in here?”

  While she does not answer him, Richard can still hear the distant, disembodied sound of his mother’s singing, her voice eerily calm for the peril of the moment. Richard turns his head, hoping his ears will guide him in the direction of the singing, but his mother’s lullabye seems to be everywhere at once.

  “Tell me where you are!” he begs, desperation stabbing through his voice.

  “I am right here, young Prince,” someone responds from behind the flames.

  But that someone is not his mother. Instead, it is the voice of violent purpose.

  It is Waldron.

  Richard’s heart quavers as the fearsome Rune ghosts from the fire, the flames flickering against the steel of his mask, his cloak impervious to the blaze.

  “I have been waiting for you,” Waldron says, his voice dripping with an evil pleasure.

  “Where are my mother and father?” Richard asks, although he dreads the answer.

  Waldron’s pulsing red eye seems to speak the answer Richard does not want to hear.

  “If you have hurt them--” Richard begins to threaten.

  “Then what?” Waldron asks mockingly. “What will you, the one they call the Poet Prince, do about it?”

  Hearing his unwanted sobriquet stings Richard’s pride and weakens his muscles.

  “Where are they?” Richard asks again, his voice shaking with his bruised confidence.

  “These are the final hours of the kingdom. And without a kingdom, there is no need for a King,” Waldron responds suggestively. “Or a Queen.”

  “No!” Richard cries out, a morbid image of his parents squeezing his heart.

  Then, in his left hand, the Rune reveals a long wooden staff.

  The Sorcerer’s Staff.

  “It seems you have failed your quest,” Waldron says with a sense of amusement. “And now mankind will truly know fear.”

  This truth bores a hole in Richard’s chest: he has failed.

  “Your friends, the girl, your parents: they have all succumbed to the Last Fate,” Waldron muses. “As you now will.”

  Then, Waldron seems to channel all of himself into the wooden staff. And as he points it at Richard, a pulse of flaming energy surges from the crooked timber. The preternatural blast hits Richard all at once, and he feels his body and mind being swallowed whole.

  ◆◆◆

  Richard’s eyes crash open.

  Waldron is gone. The fire is no more. It was a dream. A nightmare.

  But his heart trembles as though it happened. And his muscles are still paralyzed by the fear of experiencing his own death.

  Richard’s vision is blurry, and so he does not immediately recognize where he is. All he can see are gauzy lights floating somewhere out there above him, shimmering against a curtain of night.

  And he can still hear the gentle lullaby that must have seeped into his dream: “Fire fairies coming out...Fire fairies dance about…”

  The song curls around his ears and he is reminded of his mother singing him to sleep so many years ago. But now it is not the voice of his mother.

  Instead, it is Wendolyn.

  “You are awake,” Wendolyn says, interrupting her sweet song as she leans over Richard.

  In her voice, Richard hears relief.

  Richard’s vision recaptures its focus, and Wendolyn’s features become clear. Her hair is wet, and she is wearing fresh clothes since he last saw her in the dark corridor.

  Her violet eyes are wet with tears, and she wipes them away with one hand. Meanwhile, Richard realizes that her other hand is holding his, her warmth transferring to him. He also realizes that he is shirtless, his hair damp, and he is cradled in a hammock made of vines as he looks up at Wendolyn.

  As Richard and Wendolyn hold each other’s gaze, the moment is intimate in the glow of the floating lights around them. And with his hand in hers, he feels linked to Wendolyn, much like in Master Cheng’s tale of the two lovers connected by the invisible twine.

  “You done napping, Young Blood?” Richard hears the familiar voice of Loxley quip, breaking the intimate spell between Richard and Wendolyn.

  Richard turns to see Loxley and El Cid nearby, drying their wet clothes next to a fire. Behind them, off on his own, he can see Ivanhoe sharpening his battle axe against a stone.

  “El Cid is happy to see the Prince alive and well,” the Spaniard remarks, his sincerity contrasting the thief’s wit, and his large face holding an equally large smile for Richard.

  “Sure, me too,” Loxley says. “The King would’ve had our heads if we brought his son back without a heartbeat. And as I’ve said, my neck and my head prefer not to be apart.”

  Richard slowly sits up, propping against his elbows as he looks around.

  “Where are we?” Richard asks.

  “Troll village,” Loxley answers.

  “We are beneath the Tree of Ten Thousand Roots,” Wendolyn clarifies.

  Richard looks up and recognizes the yawning cavern above him, the system of massive roots hanging down from the earthen ceiling. He sees the vine ladders and root bridges, the waterfall foaming into the underground river. Around him, Truscans move about, through homes and tunnels that have been hollowed out in the rootlets.

  And all of it is lit by the Fire Fairies floating high above, and the dangling luminescent vines that magically glow. If he had not seen this place before, he would believe he has not yet woken from his dreamstate.

  “I do not understand,” Richard says, puzzled by the great distance between the Cloudlands and the Tree of Ten Thousand Roots, a distance that took Richard and the others weeks to travel. “How did we get here?”

  “El Cid still does not understand this,” the giant confesses.

  “The Lady of the Lake,” Wendolyn explains. “She controls water, and she can travel wherever water goes. She brought us here.”

  As Richard tries to comprehend her words, Wendolyn points to the river. There, he sees the glassy image of a woman standing in the middl
e of the running water. No, not standing, but floating, weightless and beautiful, her body seeming to grow out of the water itself.

  The Lady of the Lake, as Wendolyn calls her, is speaking warmly with someone that Richard recognizes: Lemlee, the Truscan King.

  And not far from her and Lemlee, Richard sees the large statue carved from wood, the one he believed to be a tribute to Vivienne and her tale of woe. But to Richard’s surprise, the woman made of water shares a likeness with the statue she now floats near.

  “That is Vivienne?” Richard wonders aloud.

  “Indeed,” Loxley responds. “Although, fair warning, she’s a bit touchy about that name.”

  Richard struggles to grasp the presence of Merlin’s wife, the woman that the sorcerer betrayed some three hundred years ago; the woman whose tears created this very tree above him, which then gave birth to the Eternal Forest.

  And Richard wonders how, as he was unconscious, the Lady of the Lake found them.

  “How did she--?” Richard begins to ask, but he is interrupted by Mulan, who joins the group along with Ivanhoe, just behind her.

  “Your questions will have to wait,” Mulan says tersely, before turning her blindfolded eyes to Wendolyn. “As you requested, we have waited until the Prince awoke and you were assured that he is well. But we can wait no longer.”

  “Wait for what?” Richard asks, seeming to be the only person that is unaware of the urgency of the moment.

  Wendolyn looks to Richard: “The Sorcerer’s Staff. We believe it is hidden here, somewhere within the Tree of Ten Thousand Roots.”

  {Wendolyn}

  Wendolyn follows the Truscan as he leads her up the stairs that are made from vines and thick bark. The Truscan’s name is Larkspur, a foot soldier for King Lemlee; and the diminutive creature is guiding Wendolyn and the others to the surface, where they hope to find Merlin’s Staff hidden somewhere within the Tree of Ten Thousand Roots, as the mark on her shoulder intimates.

  As she climbs the stairs, Wendolyn’s mind is still attending to the journey that has brought her to this wondrous, dreamlike place, with its glowing vines and its shimmering Fire Fairies.

  Back in the impossible room at the bottom of the ocean, the Lady of the Lake recognized the mark on Wendolyn’s shoulder as a vague rendering of the Tree of Ten Thousand Roots. The watery woman was dryly amused by the secret location, musing that Merlin had long ago hidden the staff in the very tree that her tears had borne.

  Then, the Lady of the Lake used her magical touch to form a portal within the wall of water that surrounded them. It was a round hole, with the water beyond it seeming to fall sideways into a bright tunnel.

  Wendolyn and the others had to shield their eyes from the blast of light that emanated from the hole, and Wendolyn was reminded of the blinding reflection of the midday sun hitting the snowy ground in the Cumbrian mountains.

  As the Lady of the Lake instructed, Wendolyn entered the bright portal, trusting herself completely (and perhaps foolishly) to this watery woman, who claimed to be her ancestor.

  She moved deeper into the opening until Wendolyn’s nose broke through a curtain of water, then her face and hair and body. The water within the portal filled her mouth, and she wanted to turn back. But just as she thought she would drown, she was suddenly breathing the water as if it were air, as if she were a fish now able to survive deep within the ocean.

  The bright light and the water consumed her for only the briefest of moments before she found herself surfacing in the River of Tears that flows beneath the Tree of Ten Thousand Roots.

  All around her, Wendolyn saw the tiny tree creatures among the system of roots and the hanging vines. There was surprise and concern on their faces as they turned to see Wendolyn and the others coming from the underground river; a surprise that, without doubt, matched the look on Wendolyn’s face.

  As the wetness and the shock dripped from her cheeks, Wendolyn stood there in the middle of the gentle river and stared at the elfin creatures. While Wendolyn did not have a name for them until they provided one, she did recognize the diminutive tree people from the last time that she found herself in the Eternal Forest -- when she was fleeing Waldron and the saurians.

  She remembered hiding behind the massive tree trunk with its red bark, and the burl she had put her hand on that had suddenly come to life and then scurried away just as Waldron had revealed himself among the gigantic trees.

  But standing in the river with the others, El Cid carrying Richard’s limp body in his arms, Wendolyn did not know what to expect from the creatures. Yes, they were small, but there were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, depending on the depths of the shadows. And their visages could have been interpreted as threatening.

  However, Wendolyn’s worry swiftly subsided as the Lady of the Lake surfaced in the River of Tears and the Truscans expressed awe at the sight of her. The hundreds of Truscans took to bended knees, and King Lemlee -- the most ancient among them -- scuttled across the moist earth to reverently greet the Lady of the Lake.

  Wendolyn could see in their esteem that, to the Truscans, this watery woman was a deity. And the tribute they paid her extended also to Wendolyn as they soon learned that she was the Descendant of Merlin.

  Within moments, the Truscan King had his people serving Wendolyn’s every need: a dry frock woven from the soft silk of a soapworm’s cocoon, and a belt made of a thin vine; a fresh meal of berries and unusual, but delicious, purple herbs; and a fire to warm her bones.

  After days upon weeks in Waldron’s Memory Chamber, where she endured a cold stone slab against her back and soiled clothes that clung to her skin, Wendolyn could feel energy returning to her body and mind.

  And she was grateful to the Truscans.

  ◆◆◆

  Standing beneath the towering Tree of Ten Thousand Roots, Wendolyn is awed by its magnificence.

  The radiance of the afternoon sun filters through the curtain of leaves that hangs from the ceiling of the forest and reaches all the way to the ground, turning the space around the ancient tree into a world unto itself. In the canopy, Truscans swing about on sinewy tendrils, and Fire Fairies float high above, their glow adding a golden hue to the daylight. It is a place within a dream.

  Wendolyn searches the vast area, wondering how she is to know where the Sorcerer’s Staff is located. And as she does, she can feel the presence of the others standing around her -- Richard, El Cid, Ivanhoe, Loxley, Mulan -- all of them waiting for her to uncover the location of the staff.

  “The Sorcerer’s Staff will reveal itself to you,” says the Lady of the Lake, who now floats in the current of the river, having joined them above ground.

  “Do you know where it is?” Wendolyn asks the Lady of the Lake hopefully.

  The Lady of the Lake shakes her head. “The staff will reveal itself to you, and only you.”

  “If that is true,” Ivanhoe interrupts, “If only the girl can find it, then should we not leave the staff hidden within the tree as to not risk it falling into the hands of Waldron?”

  “Pains me to say it, but Red makes a good point,” Loxley chimes, and Wendolyn notices El Cid nodding his head in agreement.

  Wendolyn looks to the mark on her shoulder, a weightless mark that holds a heavy burden. The fate of the staff was long ago inscribed into her skin, giving her a responsibility for which she did not ask. And she wonders: Could she just leave the Sorcerer’s Staff hidden forever?

  Wendolyn turns to Richard, seeking his judgment in the matter. And without voicing her question, it is clear that Richard understands her concern.

  “My father asked only that these men rescue you and bring you back to the kingdom,” Richard states, gesturing toward El Cid, Loxley and Ivanhoe. “Retrieving the staff was not part of the mission. If you wish to leave the staff hidden, I will support you in that decision. We can escort you back to the castle and protect you there.”

  “El Cid thinks the young Prince is wise in his words,” the Spaniard says, trying to
encourage Wendolyn to heed Richard’s counsel.

  “You are forgetting one thing,” King Lemlee interposes, moving between Wendolyn and Richard.

  “And what is that?” Ivanhoe asks, his one eye questioning the Truscan King.

  “Now that the Rune likely knows where the staff is hidden, he will let nothing keep him from it. Whether Waldron can ultimately find the staff or not, he will be ruthless in his search. He will destroy this tree and all that is above and below it.”

  “By the flip of a coin, maybe. But you can’t be sure of it,” Loxley argues.

  “But I am,” the elfin King responds with surety in his ancient voice. “While Wendolyn may be safe for a time -- as will you and the Realm and all of your people -- my people, these Truscans you see around you, will be wiped out at the expense of your safety. The Rune’s fight is with the humans, not with the Truscans or any of the other Beyonders. But if you leave here without the Sorcerer’s Staff, you are sentencing my people to certain death.”

  Wendolyn believes the Truscan King is right. Waldron will not hesitate to destroy anything that stands in his way of reaching the staff.

  King Lemlee looks to Richard: “Prince Richard, you stood before me not long ago and promised to return any kindness shown to you, tenfold. You gave me your word. And I expect a Prince to be as good as his word. I ask you to relieve the Truscans of such a bloody fate.”

  Wendolyn watches Richard as he seems to turn the dilemma over in his mind. He treats the matter with solemnity as he considers the request of the Truscan King.

  Then, Richard looks to Wendolyn, and she knows his answer before he speaks: “I believe what King Lemlee says is right. We cannot risk Waldron’s wrath on these people.”

  “Prince Richard, I ask you to reconsider,” Ivanhoe beseeches, his brow stitched with irritation.

  But before Richard can respond to Ivanhoe’s concern, Mulan interrupts: “Wendolyn, with the staff you will be powerful enough to destroy Waldron should he find you again.”