The Princess, the Crone, and the Dung-Cart Knight Read online

  "You mean you really do know Sir Kai and the queen?"

  "Yes ... no, not that, exactly ... I mean, I liked Sir Kai, but that's not..." Sarah trailed off in confusion, not sure what she could tell this girl and what she shouldn't. All those weeks living alone with her secret hatred had seemed hard, but it was harder still to keep a secret from people whom, at heart, she liked.

  "Is there another reason you wanted to go with Gawain and Terence?" Ariel asked.

  Sarah nodded.

  "Do Gawain and Terence know?" Ariel asked.

  Sarah shook her head. "No," she said softly. "I wasn't sure I could trust them."

  Ariel's eyes grew round. "You weren't sure you could trust Terence?" she said with an expression of incredulity.

  "Why should I? He didn't trust me, either," Sarah said defensively. "When I asked him simple questions, he told me all sorts of wild stories in order to keep from answering me."

  "What sort of wild stories?"

  "About a World of Faeries and magical places that you can't get to from this world and things like that."

  Ariel nodded seriously. "Yes?" she said. "And then what?"

  "Don't you think that's enough?"

  Ariel looked confused. "What's wild about that?"

  Sarah let out an exasperated sigh. "Don't tell me you believe in faeries."

  Ariel giggled suddenly. "Believe in faeries!" she said. "You silly! What do you think I am?"

  "What?"

  "I'm a faery, you goose."

  "You're a ... a what?" Sarah stared at her.

  "I'm what the people in your world used to call a water nymph. So is my mother."

  "My world?" Sarah said faintly.

  "Well, of course. Where do you think I went last night after I left you?" Sarah shook her head, and Ariel continued. "Back to my own world, of course. There's a spring just past that oak that's a door between the worlds."

  This was going too far. Sarah snorted in disbelief. "You almost had me believing you for a moment," she said.

  Ariel only smiled. "Look, Sarah, why do you suppose Gawain was willing to leave you in my care? You don't think he'd trust you to a human girl my age, do you? He knew that if you were in trouble, I could help you."

  "What would you do?" Sarah demanded. "You don't even have a sword!"

  "I don't know if I should show you. I'm not really supposed to do anything out of the ordinary in this world unless I have to," Ariel said, hesitating for a moment. Sarah raised her eyebrows mockingly, as if to say, "Of course you aren't," and Ariel said, "But maybe this is necessary, after all. I could hide you where no one could see you, like this."

  And then Ariel disappeared. One moment she was there, and another moment she was gone, just as the crone had disappeared the other night. That disappearance Sarah had been able to convince herself was a trick of the darkness, but here in the morning sun there was no mistake. Ariel reappeared. "Like that," she said.

  Sarah stared, her mouth open but unable to speak. Ariel hurried forward and laid her hand on Sarah's shoulder. "I didn't mean to frighten you," she said anxiously. "I wanted to reassure you, but I haven't at all, have I? I shouldn't have done that."

  Ariel's hand was comfortingly solid, and after a moment Sarah lifted her own hand and rested it on top of Ariel's. "Then there really is a different world. And Terence knows about it, doesn't he?"

  Ariel's cheeks dimpled, but she didn't smile outright. "Yes. Terence is a faery, too. Part, anyway. In our world, he's the Duke of Avalon, a very great man."

  That explained the crone's respect for him. Sarah said faintly, "And in this other world, you have magic and enchantments and all the things that Mordecai said were wicked. But you aren't wicked, and neither is Terence." Sarah felt as if she needed to sit down, or perhaps to wake up.

  "I think our world is more like yours than it seems," Ariel said pensively. "I mean, yes, we have what you call magic, but in that world it isn't magic, if you know what I mean. It's just the way things are. And we have good people and wicked people, just like here. We have mothers and fathers, just like you have..."

  Ariel trailed off suddenly, looking at Sarah. Sarah met her eyes and saw in them a glimmer of the same acuteness that made Terence's gaze so disquieting. But Ariel's eyes didn't disturb her.

  "But you don't, do you?" Ariel said softly. "Have a mother and father, I mean."

  "Not anymore."

  "I'm sorry, Sarah. Was it ... has it been long?"

  Sarah shook her head. "That's why I wanted to stay with Gawain and Terence," she said.

  "Can you tell me what happened?"

  Sarah hesitated for only a second. "Yes," she said. "I'll tell you."

  The early morning was already growing warm, promising an unseasonably hot day, but they made a fire anyway and prepared a breakfast to eat around the flames, and Sarah told Ariel her story.

  "I don't know my father; he was gone before I was born. Mother never said where. She was left penniless, but I think she must have been a maid to a great lady once, because she taught me to speak like the nobility and to have good manners and things like that. I still don't know what use good manners are, but I have them anyway."

  Ariel nodded sympathetically. "I know just what you mean. My mother would never let me lick my fingers between bites, and now that I'm older, I find that I still don't do it, even when I'm not with Mother and could get away with it."

  "Exactly," Sarah said, insensibly comforted at finding an ordinary experience that she shared with this Other-Worldly girl beside her.

  "If you and your mother were left with nothing, how did you survive?"

  "We were found by a traveling merchant, a man who went from village to village buying and selling cloth. I lived with him all my life—except for one bit—until last February, and he was the only father I ever had."

  "What do you mean, 'except for one bit'?"

  "Not long after Mordecai took us in, there was a time—maybe six months or so—when he disappeared. We stayed with his horse and wagon and lived off the money in his strongbox. I never knew where he went. You know how when you're really small you don't understand anything that grownups do anyway, so you don't ask too many questions?"

  "My mother says that I always asked too many questions."

  Sarah nodded. She could see that. "Anyway, Mordecai came back, and was so pleased to find that we had only taken what we needed and hadn't touched his wares that he made us sort of his family."

  "His name was Mordecai?"

  "Yes," Sarah said. "He was a Jew."

  She uttered this last sentence almost defiantly, but Ariel only nodded quickly. "Oh, that's why I didn't recognize the name. So you lived with Mordecai the Merchant. Was it a good life?"

  "I guess it was," Sarah said. "It was the only life I had, anyway. There were some hard times, of course. Sometimes people wouldn't let him in a village because he was a Jew, but we would just go somewhere else. He always had good cloth to sell, and he always gave a fair price, so we were never hungry. He used to read to me at night and teach me all the rules he lived by, and he called me..." For the first time, Sarah's voice broke.

  Ariel waited without speaking. It was several minutes before Sarah could speak again. "He called me his princess. That's what my name means in his own language, 'princess.' He chose the name for me."

  "So Sarah isn't really your name?"

  Sarah shook her head. "It's my real name; it just isn't my first one. Mother didn't want to use our old names, so I became Sarah, and she became Esther."

  "So what happened to your mother and this Mordecai?"

  "We were in camp near a small village we had never visited before. Mordecai had gotten some bad directions and we were lost, you see. At camp that night, Mordecai gave me a present." Sarah gestured at her gown. "This. He had come upon the cloth months before, in Kent, and had bought it. I'm sure it was very dear. Mother sewed it into a dress for me, working a bit at a time after I was asleep, so it would be a surprise. They gave it to me
, and Mordecai said that at last his princess had a dress to befit her station. He loved giving it to me so much.

  "I was prancing around, showing it off for them both, when we heard voices. The people of the village were coming out to our camp in the woods, bringing torches and axes and scythes and pitchforks. They came to our fire, and Mordecai stood between them and my mother and me and asked what they wanted."

  Sarah felt her eyes grow hot, and she took strength from her hatred and continued with her voice steady. "I won't tell you everything that was said, back and forth, but the heart of it was that there had been a plague in the village. Some of their children had died, and they were blaming Mordecai. They said that the Jews had poisoned their well, because Jews always wanted to kill Christians like they killed Christ, and that Mordecai had come to add more poison and maybe to capture and eat some of their children in secret ceremonies."

  Ariel's face was a mask of horror, and Sarah could see in her eyes a premonition of what had happened next.

  "They had come to kill us. Mordecai tried to talk them out of it. He denied that he had ever harmed a Christian, but they would not listen, so he began shouting that the woman and her child were not Jews, and that they should be spared, whatever they did to him. They didn't listen, and when they dragged Mordecai away, they took Mother, too."

  "But how did you get away?"

  Sarah shook her head. "I don't know really. When they grabbed Mordecai and Mother, I took up a branch from the ground to attack them, and then I was in the bushes, away from camp. I don't know how I got there, but standing beside me was a woman in grander clothes than I had ever seen. She was so beautiful, except that her eyes were ... her eyes frightened me. They were so angry that ... I can't describe it."

  "I know exactly what you mean," Ariel said.

  "How could you?" Sarah snapped.

  "Because that's how your eyes are frightening me right now, Sarah."

  Sarah forced herself to breathe calmly for a moment, and felt some of the redness go from her eyes. "Sorry," she said at last.

  "Go on. Did you ever find out who the woman with the eyes was?"

  "Maybe. Later, I met an old woman who said that she'd been the one who saved me from the crowd, but the woman I saw was definitely not old. Could an enchantress make herself look young?"

  "Most of them do, I think," Ariel replied. "Except for hags—that's a nasty sort of witch in our world—but I don't think this would have been a hag, since she saved your life. Hags don't do that sort of thing much."

  Sarah shrugged. "Anyway, this enchantress or old woman or young woman told me to stay where I was until everything was over. Then she disappeared."

  "You didn't stay, of course." It wasn't even a question.

  "No. I could still hear the yelling of the crowd, and I took my stick and followed the sound. I went all the way to the village square, where I hid in a shadow beside a house and saw the knight."

  "The knight?"

  "There was a man in the middle of the crowd, a man wearing chain mail but nothing on his head, so I could see his face. He stood on a stump in the middle of the square and waved a sword in the air and congratulated the crowd, as if they were soldiers who had won a battle instead of murderers who had captured an old man and a woman. Mordecai and my mother were tied to stakes on each side of him, with piles of wood at their feet. The knight shouted out that these two Christ-killers had been found guilty of murdering the children of the village and were condemned to death. My mother cried, and Mordecai held up his head and looked at the sky and moved his lips—praying, I guess. Then the people of the village set the wood on fire with their torches and burned them."

  "You saw this?" Ariel asked, her voice almost too soft to hear.

  "Most of it," Sarah replied. "I watched until they stopped struggling, then ran back into the woods to hide. That was where I lived for the next three months and ten days, watching the trails in and out of the village, looking for that knight, so I could find where he lives."

  "But how did you survive?" Ariel demanded. "A human girl your age left without food or clothing in the woods in the winter!"

  Sarah explained about the old woman who had left her the food and the cloak. "I suppose now that she knew all the time that I was in the woods and was trying to keep me alive. After a few weeks, though, I began to get my food a different way."

  "How?"

  Sarah lifted her chin. "I stole it from the villagers. I learned how to creep softly through the trees, and I used to raid every storeroom in Milrick." Seeing a small crease in Ariel's forehead, Sarah added, "I wasn't going to, at first. Mordecai had always taught me not to steal, and after he was gone, I vowed that I would keep him alive in my memory by keeping his rules, but then, as I kept watch on the village, looking for that knight, I saw something that changed my mind."

  "What was it?"

  "Mordecai's cloth. You see, when I had gone back to our wagon the day after the fires, I found only burnt wood and charred metal. I thought that they had burned everything, like they had burned Mordecai and my mother. But they hadn't, of course. They had first stolen everything of value. Within two weeks, every person in the village was wearing new clothes, made up from Mordecai's stock." Sarah's eyes grew hot again. "So you see, they were thieves, too, and no one was left to punish them but me. The only thing left to me of all that we had had was this bottle of my mother's, which I found in the ashes of the wagon."

  Sarah drew the crystal bottle from her pocket, and Ariel's eyes grew round. "That was your mother's?" she asked softly. "But ... that's a faery vial! What's in it?"

  Sarah blinked. "I ... don't know. My mother just kept it on a shelf and looked at it sometimes. She said it had been her mother's before her. What do the faeries use these for?"

  "Like your mother, we mostly like their beauty. But I know that in this world they are often used by sorcerers and enchantresses for their magic cordials." Sarah stared at the bottle, then hastily replaced it in her pocket. How had her mother come by such a thing? Ariel said softly, "And so you lived by taking the villagers' food."

  Sarah nodded defiantly and added, "They were the reason I was hungry, after all. Then Sir Kai and the queen came along."

  Sarah told Ariel about the events of the past week. She told about the swordplay lessons, the abduction, and her journey to Camelot, as she had told King Arthur, but then she continued, telling about her journey with Gawain and Terence and her second meeting with the crone. It took quite a long time, and all the while Ariel sat silently on the grass by the fire, hugging her knees and staring at the coals.

  "So I wonder what we do now," Ariel said at last.

  "I have to go after Gawain and Terence," Sarah said. "That's what the crone said for me to do. That's where I'll find the knight."

  Ariel nodded. "I know. And when you find the knight, you'll kill him."

  Sarah nodded, then said, almost as an afterthought, "I'd like to help Sir Kai, too."

  Ariel nodded. "Of course. But your main quest is for revenge, and that's what worries me. You see, I'm supposed to help with the rescue as much as I can—I would have gone with Gawain and Terence if he hadn't asked me to stay with you—but I don't think I'm supposed to help someone get revenge."

  Sarah's heart had warmed at the thought of traveling on with Ariel, but now she shook off her momentary weakness and said, "Then I'll have to go on alone."

  "But I promised Gawain I'd take care of you," Ariel pointed out. "And if I leave you alone, I've broken that promise." She frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then set her lips firmly and said, "I'll just have to go with you anyway."

  "Before you leave, my lady," said a polite male voice behind them, "is it possible for you to assist me?"

  Both girls jumped and whirled around. Standing on the path not twenty feet away was a tall man with broad shoulders and long brown hair. He also had a thick brown beard. The man wore a discolored breastplate, armor on his thighs, and a sword on his left hip, but no other armor. Even w
ithout it, though, Sarah recognized the knight they had passed the day before on the dung cart.

  "Oh, sir!" Ariel exclaimed. "You startled me!"

  "I am desolated, my lady," the knight said, bowing graciously. Despite his coarse appearance, he spoke in a cultured voice with just a hint of a foreign accent. He slung a bundle from his shoulders and set it at his feet. It was the rest of his armor, tied together in a neat pack. "I did not mean to surprise you," he said, his voice still apologetic, "but you were intent on your conversation."

  "Did you hear what we were saying?" Sarah demanded.

  The stained knight shook his head. "Only your friend's final words, that she would go with you. Please, my lady," he continued, looking at Sarah, "how is it that you have been separated from Sir Gawain and Squire Terence?"

  "Do you know this knight?" Ariel asked Sarah.

  "We passed him on the road yesterday. He is also looking for Sir Kai and the queen." She turned back to the knight to answer his question. "They left me. They said that the journey was too dangerous."

  "No doubt they are correct," the knight said. "But it seems an odd time to make this decision. Had that not occurred to them earlier?"

  Sarah shrugged. "They tried to make me stay behind earlier," she admitted. "I wouldn't stay."

  "It was your wish to go on this quest?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you are the girl who saw the queen captured and took word to the king, no?"

  Sarah blinked. "Yes. How do you know about that?"

  "It is of no importance," the knight said. "But since we are both determined to seek the queen and Sir Kai, may I offer myself as companion?"

  Sarah glanced once at Ariel, who was examining the knight speculatively. Ariel nodded slowly. "We shall go together," she said. "I am Ariel, sir, and this is Lady Sarah of—what was it Gawain said yesterday? Of Mil - something?"

  "Milrick," Sarah said. "But it isn't really my home. That's the name of the village, where—you know, where I've been."

  "I am enchanted," the knight said. His bow was a masterpiece of grace and courtesy. "You may call me Jean."