The Brave Apprentice

by P. W. Catanese

  Patch looked over Gursh’s prone form and saw Milo and Addison’s group running across the courtyard. It seemed to Patch that their number had shrunk a little. Five trolls were in pursuit, and Patch’s heart twisted in his chest when he saw more trolls coming at the men from the other direction, cutting off their escape.

  Patch stared at Gursh, willing the creature to die soon. Gursh tried to lift his head off the ground, but it dropped again a moment later. The black dots in his silver eyes had been focused on Patch, but now they wandered across the orbs.

  Patch took another cautious step forward, but the eyes suddenly revived and locked onto him again. It was no use; he needed to find another way out.

  The wooden bar that braced the door was thick and heavy, but he was able to shove it up and out of the way. It fell to the ground with a thud. Patch pulled the door open a crack, and cursed when he saw yet another obstacle immediately before him. How could he have forgotten? “Hey, up there!” he cried, toward the winch-room above.

  The stomping and celebrating slowed overhead, and the same happy face peeked down. “What is it, lad?”

  “I need you to lift the outer portcullis—just enough for me to crawl under.”

  “Well raise it so you can walk tall, troll killer!”

  A different set of chains rattled and the portcullis, groaning, began to rise. Just on the other side was the drawbridge, raised up to form a vertical wall of wood. There was enough room to squeeze his thin body through on one side. Patch looked out into the fields, and his fists tightened as he saw Giles Addison out there, just beyond the range of arrows, with Murok pacing back and forth nearby. Coward, Patch thought. The sound of the rising portcullis seemed to have caught Giles’s attention. He had been sitting idly on the cask of poisoned wine that he meant for Patch and Milo to drink, but now he stood and directed his gaze Patch’s way.

  Patch headed for the collapsed portion of the wall. Giles’s head was inclined to one side as it turned to follow him.

  The undermined wall looked like the entrance to the underworld. The smoke of the smoldering fire still seeped up through the blocks of stones and the mortar, flint, and rubble that once filled the walls. Patch picked his way up and over the pile, back into the courtyard.

  He ran as fast as his wounded stride would bear him toward the kitchen. There were urgent cries on the walls above from the archers. Patch glanced up and saw that a troll had somehow climbed to the top of the outer walls and was stalking along the parapet, whipping his club through the air and driving the men before him. Ahead of the archers was the gap where the walls had tumbled down, and nowhere else to run.

  Milo and Addison’s group faced an equally grave plight. The trolls had spread into a half circle and were driving them toward the wall of the keep. The men walked backward, with their long pikes radiating out like the spokes of a wheel. As Patch hobbled by, he saw the grim look on Milo’s face and the resolute glare on Addison’s as he called out instructions to the rest. More trolls were coming from other corners of the courtyard to join in the slaughter. One of them, Patch realized with a shudder, was the towering red-brown monster that had killed Gosling.

  Patch ignored the mayhem. The kitchen was drawing near and he kept his eye fixed on the door, hoping Cecilia would emerge. He was not even certain she’d made it that far—but he refused to entertain that thought, not after everything they had gone through.

  So many fates unknown, Patch thought. Ludowick and Simon, somewhere in the fields, alive or dead. Mannon, last heard bellowing on the wall. And what about all the others Patch had seen and met since he’d arrived at Dartham?

  He and the queen nearly collided as he arrived at the kitchen door. Her cheeks were flushed and her wide eyes glittered with hope as she thrust the skep into his arms.

  “Oh Patch, listen,” she said. And he could hear it well: a frantic humming from inside the woven dome. The skep was as warm as a new loaf of bread, and he could feel the tiny insect bodies inside pelting angrily against the walls of straw. Cecilia had stuffed a rag into the hole at the base of the skep that the bees used to enter and leave their hive.

  “Pray it works,” Patch shouted, and he ran back toward the trapped group of men.

  The trolls could have killed them by now, Patch realized as he came closer, but the soulless creatures were taunting their prey first. They tightened the circle, laughing and jeering. The soldiers and peasants stabbed at them, but the trolls reached out and plucked the pikes from their grasps one by one and snapped the shafts over their knees. Addison had lost his spear and had drawn his sword. Some of the men began to weep.

  “Hey, you devils!” Patch shouted. A few of the trolls turned to look, and one of them stepped away from the rest, wielding a heavy club. It was the red-brown troll, Patch was pleased to see, coming at him with that chilling smile on his face. It was the same smile that had horrified Ludowick on the day that Gosling fell, a smile with one long fang jutting crookedly from the corner of his mouth. Patch pulled the top off the skep and hurled it toward the beast.

  It was only a guess, Patch thought, watching the skep break into two separate halves and tumble at the troll’s feet. A guess built on meager evidence, the word of a fool, and a leap of faith. He could very well be wrong.

  The troll looked down, not recognizing this thing, puzzled by what danger such a flimsy object could hold. As the pieces of the skep rolled to a stop, the bees flew up, lazily at first in the mild air. The troll saw them. His eyes seemed to double in size. Patch heard him gasp and watched him go rigid, paralyzed with fear for a fatal moment.

  The bees sensed something, because a humming cloud of them rose toward the troll’s head. At first they spiraled up slowly, but as they neared his face, they suddenly sped arrow-straight toward the troll’s eyes. The beast screamed and slapped his head with both hands. A hundred more of the insects flew from the skep, swarming upward. The troll staggered and dropped to his knees in front of Patch, and now he could see through the madly slapping hands that dozens of the bees were writhing in the yellow ooze at the corner of his eyes. That horrible sweet smell, Patch thought. It’s drawing the bees in, driving them mad….

  The bees were in a frenzy now, and some disappeared into the troll’s nostrils and mouth. The troll howled all the while, a more terrified and high-pitched shriek than seemed possible from such a mighty creature.

  And then there was a strange silence at Dartham. Every troll—those in the courtyard, those climbing up the keep, those on the parapet—heard the shrieks and knew something was wrong. They turned to stare at the death throes of the mud-red troll. Even the knights and soldiers and archers turned to look, as the dying troll crumpled to the dirt with a swarm of bees still orbiting its ugly head.

  Patch turned to the circle of trolls, pointed a finger at them, and shouted, “You’re next!”

  And the ground rumbled as the trolls fled, shrieking with fear. They ran across the courtyard and over the smoking tumble of rocks, climbing across each other when one of them fell in his haste. The trolls that surrounded Milo and Addison’s men went by first, and then the rest of them, climbing down from the walls and crawling out from the holes they had punched in the keep and the other buildings.

  It was quiet again for just a moment. Then the men who’d been trapped against the wall rushed at Patch, and more people spilled out of the keep and ran down from the walls. They surrounded him and pounded him on the shoulders.

  Then a tall man with a great smile pushed through the crowd. It took a moment for Patch to recognize him, but that smiling face belonged to Lord Addison. Addison laughed and seized Patch and lifted him high, and a hundred jubilant people shouted, “Troll killer! Troll killer!”

  Cecilia ran up, and she and Patch breathlessly told the king what had happened as soldiers, knights, and villagers alike strained to hear every word.

  A rumbling, familiar voice shouted, “Your Highness! Your Highness!” And the crowd parted to let a filthy, exhausted Marmon approach the
king. “I was on the walls—thought you’d want to know about Giles,” he said.

  “Of course—where is he? We can’t let him escape.”

  Mannon snorted. “No chance of that, sire. Murok was out there, keeping Giles safe. When the trolls came running out like chickens, Murok ran off as well. Except he made a point of stepping on Giles along the way. And then a few of the others trod on him for good measure.”

  Milo shook his head and smiled grimly.

  “Er—what did happen? What scared the trolls off?” Mannon asked. He looked at the prone form of the mud-red troll.

  “Ask the apprentice. He’s the one who did it,” Addison replied, gesturing toward Patch. Mannon seemed to wince as he turned toward Patch with his eyebrows raised.

  “Bees,” Patch said, grinning.

  “Bees, eh?” Mannon said. He scratched at his beard. “Well, good work, Patch. Always knew you had it in you.”

  stood at last at the lip of a pit, in a cavern in the Barren Gray. The summer air was warm outside, but in the heart of this mountain it was cool and dry. A handful of men stood behind him. They were a curious band, all dressed in garments with broad horizontal stripes of orange and black. Their clothes had been stitched with care by a prosperous tailor from the village of Crossfield. And all of the men bore shields with the same emblem: the silhouette of a bee, with broad wings and a stinger jutting from its bottom with a teardrop of venom at the tip, against a background of yellow-brown interlocking octagons.

  Patch—or Sir Patryck the Brave Apprentice, as the king had knighted him—held a large box in his hand, a simple wood-framed cube with a handle on top and thin white fabric stretched across its sides.

  Directly before them, broad stairs were hewn into the stone, leading to the pit. Each step was as high as a man’s chest. Down there, just beyond the reach of their torchlight, dark shapes moved among the shadows. There was a new sound here as well, a wailing, high-pitched and wanting, from perhaps a dozen separate sources in the gloom.

  Patch tossed his torch into the pit. It fell like a comet through the dark and clattered onto the flat stone bottom. Some of the men gasped when they saw the creatures nearby—naked infant trolls that crawled away from the light, screeching with their eyes squeezed shut.

  “The Cradle of Trolls,” Lord Addison said.

  “Finally,” grumbled Mannon.

  Another, much larger shape skirted the light of the flame and crept toward the stairs, climbing with its hands as well as its feet, as stealthily as its bulk would allow. As it rose toward the men, its pale face came into the light, and Patch saw the first she-troll any man had seen for ages: as tall as the males but even thicker, with sharp daggers for fingernails instead of shovels, and tangled, filthy hair that swept the ground as she crouched.

  “That,” Patch said, “is close enough. Stop where you are, or I may drop this fragile package.” He shook the box, and from inside came the angry drone of bees. The she-troll stopped. Her lips curled back from her fangs and she hissed.

  “I want you to understand something!” Patch shouted. His voice echoed back from the depths of the pit. “The days of trolls prowling in the lands of men are over. We have found your weakness, and the word has been sent forth. Now everyone knows.” The pit was silent. Many pairs of baleful silver eyes watched from below.

  “If any troll ever again plagues the kingdom, we will unleash a storm of bees upon you. Now even our arrows are dipped in their venom.”

  At a signal from Ludowick, archers stepped forward and pulled back the strings of their bows, with arrows pointing into the pit.

  Patch’s voice rose. “Do you understand?”

  A reply came from below, high-pitched and shrill. “Very well,” it said.

  “Then we have met for the last time. Remember what we have said. Stay in your holes in your mountains. Or you will feel our sting. Farewell!”

  As they turned to go, an odd-looking man, tall and gangly with wild tufts of straw-blond hair jutting from under his helmet, danced to the edge of the pit. He reached into the pouch at his side. “I almost forgot—we have a gift for you.” He put a jar down at the top of the stairs. “Honey, from the royal hives. Queen Cecilia hopes you like it! Hoo ha!” And then the Prince of Fools capered away, flapping his arms and laughing, joining the rest of the brave party.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at P. W. Catanese’s next page-turner!

  Available Fall 2005

  much sunlight is left? Rudi asked himself. An hour or two, maybe. He ran down the wooded path, wondering where the girls might be. After a while, he stopped and shouted their names, but the only answer came from the birds that were startled into flight and the tiny unseen creatures that scurried in the brush.

  Farther in, Rudi decided. Agnes wasn’t kind, and she was clever. She would have lured the girls deep into the forest, where they’d have no chance to find their way home. Just like what happened to—what were their names? Hansel. That was the boy. And his sister was Gretel. They were relatives of his who lived in the same house many years ago. One day they’d been taken into the woods and told to wait by the fire for their mother and father to get them when their work was done. But their parents never came. And then it began to get dark. Like it is right now.

  He shouted again and put his hands behind his ears to listen. For a moment, he thought he heard something. But no, it was only an owl’s cry.

  Rudi ran farther and came to a stream with footprints in the muddy bank. There were two small pairs of prints among them, and they pointed in only one direction: deeper into the woods. He leaped across the water and ran on, looking left and right for a place where Agnes might have led the girls off the trail.

  He stopped at last and leaned against a tree, hugging his stomach and drawing air into his aching lungs. When he could breathe more easily again he shouted, “Lucie! Elsebeth!”

  He heard nothing. But he smelled something. He tilted his head back and inhaled deeply, turned to where the scent was strongest, and sniffed again.

  A fire. Somewhere ahead. Rudi stepped off the trail, keenly aware of how easy it would be to get lost. He’d be walking away from the setting sun, so he could find the trail again by heading back toward it, obviously. Or later, by keeping the North Star to his right. He smacked his fist against his thigh. Why hadn’t he taught the girls how to find their way through the woods? There were so many things he knew and never shared.

  The smoky scent grew stronger as he trotted east, with his shadow stretching long and thin before him. He called again and again, but still no one answered. Maybe they’re asleep by the fire, he tried to reassure himself. He saw smoke through the trees and sprinted the rest of the way, until he stood in a clearing with the smoldering embers in front of him. But the girls were not there.

  Rudi noticed something on the ground near the embers. It was a wreath made from wild vines twisted together. Lucie and Elsebeth surely made it; it was the sort of thing they would do to pass the time. Rudi picked it up and clutched it against his chest. He shouted their names again and again in every direction, until his throat was raw and his voice grew weak.

  “No,” he moaned. He kicked at the embers, and sparks flew toward the dimming sky. They were out there somewhere, sweet Lucie and serious Elsie, only six and seven years old. But which way? He was no hunter who could track their steps through the woods, reading the trodden grass or broken stems or other subtle signs. Besides, it would be too dark to see anything at all before long. He thought of them lost among the trees, holding on to one another in the black of night, and fought to push that image from his mind.

  There was one thing he could do: build up the fire again, until it roared so high it could be seen for miles in the night. Yes, they’ll see it and come back, he thought. He gathered twigs and sticks and piled them on the embers—it would be easier than starting a new fire with his flint and steel.

  The bits of wood smoldered and burst into flame under his coaxing breath, and soon a modest fire bla
zed again. He needed more fuel now, the biggest, driest branches he could find. At the edge of the clearing lay a dead branch jutting from the trunk of a tree. He seized it and wrenched it off, grunting through his clenched teeth. The branch was long, and he stomped on it to break it into smaller pieces. Somehow it felt good to break it, and he wanted to go on stomping until only sawdust was left and keep on stomping until the whole forest lay in splinters.

  “How could they do this?” he screamed. It occurred to him that people could be far crueler than he’d ever believed possible. A raw and powerful kind of anger roared inside him. He was hardly aware that he’d picked up a broken length of the dead limb and was smashing it against the tree, sending chips and bits of bark flying. And then he heard a voice from the shadows.

  “Are you looking for the girls?” It was a strange voice, thin and reedy and high.

  Rudi froze. He could suddenly hear the thump of his heart inside his ears. It was almost night now, and more light came from the fire than the sky. Between the trees, he spied a pale spectral face with dark eyes staring back.

  The voice came again. “I said, are you looking for the girls?”

  Rudi had to swallow before he could answer. “Who is that? Who are you?”

  The face vanished behind a thick tree and came out on the other side, a little closer. It seemed to float among the shadows. “You are Rudi, aren’t you? They said you would come.”

  “Where are the girls? If you have them, let them go.” Rudi opened the top of his bag and drew out a little ax.

  “Put that away. Don’t be afraid. The girls are safe.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Rudi shouted, but his brittle voice betrayed him. “You say the girls are safe? Then take me to them—please! But who are you? Why won’t you let me see you?” He squeezed the handle of the ax to stop it from shaking.

  The pale face hung in the shadows for a moment, and then bone white hands reached up and drew a hood over the head. The stranger stepped into the orange light of the fire. It was a woman, Rudi realized; he could tell from the way she moved and her slender hands, and he should have known already from her voice—it was hoarse, but still a woman’s. Her head was bowed, so that the hood concealed her features. She wore a long cloak made of deerskin-dyed dark brown, almost black. In one hand she held a bow, and he saw the feathered ends of a bouquet of arrows over her shoulder. Rudi lowered the ax to his side.