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agreement arose from the men. Lucy was grand. Her
saddle was unusual.
    I reached to wipe blood away from my eye.
Several soldiers flinched, emitting a collective “huh!”
    “Do not move!”
    I froze.
    “Arms to your sides! Slowly.”
    In slow motion, I brought my bloody fingers
away from my face and lowered my hands to my sides.
    The group had grown to about a dozen men.
The gorgeous one stepped out from the rear. In an accent stiffer
than that of the others he said, “The king ordered me to deliver
you to him.” He sounded French, but his speech was more guttural
than the French accents I knew from Los Angeles waiters.
    “Do you go willingly?” asked Jeep.
    “It is not her choice,” said Gorgeous.
“Chain her.”
    The men shifted uneasily.
    “I’ll go.” I figured my other options were
to run and be caught, or fight and fail.
    “She’ll go,” said Jeep.
    “We cannot chance it, Bedwyr,” said
Gorgeous.
    Jeep nodded in acquiescence, so I guessed
that made him Bedwyr.
    “Let us finish then,” Gorgeous ordered.
    Let us finish? What did that mean?
Upon hearing his ominous proclamation I clutched Lucy’s reins and
clung to my tree with all my strength, which wasn’t much. How had I
ended up in that forest? Why had I run away from Hollywood? Who
were these creeps? If they were some sort of medieval warfare
aficionados they were taking the game too far.
    Jeep/Bedwyr called to the broad, sad one,
“Help me, Sagramore.”
    Someone pulled my fingers open one by one,
taking Lucy’s reins and leading her off into the blue-black woods.
The warriors shuffled after her. Bedwyr gripped my left arm. His
nose came only to my chin, but what he lacked in height he made up
for in daunting presence. Sad Sagramore joined us and, taking solid
hold of my right arm, sighed a breath that stunk of something dead.
They unstuck me from the tree like a child from her mother’s leg. I
had no power to resist either of them.
    We waited for the line of soldiers to pass,
then the two men ushered me into the woods, them marching, me
stumbling. Moonlight found its way through the upper leaves,
dusting a silver glow onto ghostly trunks. Already frightened into
hiding by the chaos of battle, not one animal chirped or scrambled.
I heard, more than saw, soldiers fanning out among the trees. When
I tripped over a body lying sprawled against a tree, I jumped and
gasped. My captors gripped harder.
    “Sorry,” I whispered.
    I tried staring at my feet but it was too
late. I’d already seen what I didn’t want to see: the aftermath of
a blood riot, tinted blue with moonglow. In the shadows away from
the path, soldiers labored over corpses in the underbrush, making
soft, clinking sounds while stripping the dead of their weapons.
Torn muscle and viscera dripped purple from between armor plates
and shreds of cloth.
    Perhaps I was safe until they delivered me
to their leader. Then they’d have to kill me, because I’d seen. I
had to do something, and fast. My mind raced in all directions.
Birds must have sung. Twigs must have cracked beneath my silly
boots. Surely the air smelled of oak or underbrush or blood. But I
was aware only of the fear ringing in my ears, drowning out the
questions. My head pounded from where I’d struck the dark thing,
but the fear was worse. It gripped me like a hand, clutching my
heart and squeezing the blood from it.
    At the forest’s limit we climbed a short
rise to an unpaved country lane, where men loaded booty onto a pair
of wooden wagons parked near the trees. Late fog clouded the dark
lane. No street-lamp lit the way, no farmhouse slept alongside the
road where it snaked off through the mist, no cars came, their low
beams searching for a way through the earth-borne cloud.
    “Climb up,” said Bedwyr, offering me a seat
in the nearest wagon, the bed of which was so full of booty it
didn’t rock with my weight. If I wanted the piled swords to point
away from me, my only option was to sit behind the driver