Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1 WHAT I WAS AFRAID OF
ONCE UPON A TIME...
You could barely get through the day without running into a vicious, bloodthirsty creature.
The countryside was crawling with them. Literally.
And, as a member of the Knight Brigade of the Great and Glorious Kingdom of Merryland, it was my job to fend them off.
This was not easy.
In fact, it was extremely difficult. And potentially deadly. And scary. Just turn the page and you’ll see what I mean.
I’m the knight on the left. My name is Tim. The other knight is my best friend, Belinda. And that big ugly thing we are facing is a bargleboar.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Bargleboar? I’ve never heard of one of those. There’s no such thing.
Well, just because you haven’t heard of something doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.
Back in olden times, there were plenty of vicious, bloodthirsty creatures you’ve probably never heard of: bargleboars, blugslugs, bungbears, bandersplatters, boombugs, bladebeasts, bloodmongers... and that’s just the bs. I’ll admit that, even in my day, they weren’t well known. Because anyone who encountered one of them usually didn’t live long enough to tell anyone else about it.
Here’s something else you are probably thinking: Gosh, Tim and Belinda don’t look old enough to be knights.
That is true. We were quite young. In fact, we were still knights-in-training.
Even though knights have to do extremely dangerous things like fight bargleboars, we had actually volunteered for the job. Because back in our time, there were only two job options for a boy: knight and peasant. (And as a girl, Belinda didn’t even have the option of being a knight; she had pretended to be a boy to join up.) Being a peasant was boring. Do you like doing chores? Well, imagine doing chores from the moment you get up until the moment you go to bed, with only an occasional break for a bowl of gruel. That’s what being a peasant was like.
Being a knight might have been dangerous, scary, and exhausting, but it was also very exciting. Belinda and I hadn’t been on the Knight Brigade for very long, but we’d already had plenty of amazing adventures.
We weren’t the only knights fighting the bargleboar, mind you. Several others were there with us, despite the danger.
Sir Cuss was always in a bad mood and eager to stab something. Sir Mount liked to look dashing astride his horse and impress the local maidens. Sir Cumference knew that whoever killed a bargleboar got first dibs on the best parts of the animal to eat. Sir Fass looked up to Sir Cuss and copied whatever he did. Sir Vaylance claimed his job was to oversee the battle, but I’m pretty sure that was just a clever excuse to keep his distance.
Meanwhile, our leader, Sir Vyval, wasn’t even at the battle at all. Instead, he was shouting orders from the ramparts of the castle, well out of the bargleboar’s goring range. But then, one of the perks of being the leader of the knights was that you got to make everyone else do all the dangerous stuff.
“Stab it!” Sir Vyval yelled to us, as if perhaps none of us knew what our swords were for. “Stab it hard! Kill it!!!”
“You heard our fearless leader!” Sir Mount announced gallantly, nice and loud so that all the maidens could hear him. “Go kill that bargleboar!”
(It is worth noting that Sir Mount never personally followed Sir Vyval’s orders. He only repeated them bravely to us without doing any of the dangerous bits. Also, it is much easier to be courageous when you are the only knight with a horse; if things go bad, you can escape faster than everyone else, leaving them all behind to be eaten.)
As the lowest-ranking members of the Knight Brigade, Belinda and I had no one to tell what to do. Instead, we had to follow everyone else’s orders.
As I said, fighting a bargleboar is scary. They are foul tempered. They have very sharp tusks. They have gnashing teeth. They have toxic bad breath. And their favorite hobby is trampling knights into goulash.
But as scary as that was, there was something I was even more afraid of:
Having the other knights learn I was scared.
Knights were supposed to be brave. On our brigade, courage was revered and respected, while fear was looked down upon and ridiculed. Tales were told of the heroic exploits of Vincent the Valiant, Hector the Heroic, and Broderick the Bold, while jokes were made about Francis the Fearful, Thomas the Timid, and Lawrence the Lily-Livered. (Sir Render, a previous member of our brigade, had recently fled from a battle with a bandersplatter, screaming in fright; as punishment, he had been demoted to stable boy and was now routinely mocked by the other knights.)
I did not want to be demoted. Or mocked. So when I was given the order to attack, I attacked.
Belinda and Sir Cuss and Sir Cumference attacked as well, although Belinda did it because she was truly brave, Sir Cumference did it because he was hungry, and Sir Cuss just wanted to stab something. Sir Fass probably would have attacked as well, but he had lost his sword.
However, while the others raced forward with their weapons, I had another trick up my sleeve.
There was one more member of the Knight Brigade: Sir Eberal, who was old and wise and very smart. Instead of fighting vicious beasts, he tried to learn other ways to defeat them. He interviewed village elders and travelers from distant lands and amassed knowledge.
The other knights didn’t think much of him. Most of them had joined the brigade so they could destroy things and look valiant while doing it. No one wanted to hear that the best way to defeat a blugslug was to just sprinkle salt on it and watch it dissolve.
Except me.
I spent a lot of time talking to Sir Eberal about ways to triumph over bloodthirsty beasts that did not involve stabbing. Or gouging. Or any type of messy swordplay. Recently Sir Eberal had heard from a passing horse trader that bargleboars were extremely allergic to paprika.
I know that sounds ridiculous. When I first heard it, I thought it sounded ridiculous. But then I remembered that lots of people have very nasty allergic reactions to all sorts of commonplace things. For example, my cousin Mungo swells up like a cow’s udder every time he gets near cat dander. And if my aunt Vernetta even touches flaxseed, she gets so many red welts that she looks like a giant raspberry. So it seemed possible that bargleboars might be allergic to paprika, and thus I had tucked a vial of it into the cuff of my armor. (Like I said, I had a trick up my sleeve.)
The problem was, I had to get the paprika to the bargleboar’s nose, which was at its front end, where all the other dangerous parts were, like the sharp tusks and the gnashing teeth and the toxic breath. I edged as close as I dared, doing my best to look as though I were brave and gallant and not about to soil myself.
“Stab it!” Sir Vyval yelled from the castle.
“Stab it!” Sir Mount repeated from his horse.
“Yeah!” Sir Cuss exclaimed. “Let’s do some stabbing!”
I did not follow their orders. Instead, I took out the vial, uncorked it, and poured some paprika into my hand.
The bargleboar barreled toward me, its hooves thundering on the ground, its deadly tusks gleaming with spittle.
“Tim!” Sir Vyval yelled. “Why aren’t you stabbing it?”
“Yeah,” Sir Mount seconded. “Why aren’t you stabbing it?”
“Have you lost your mind?!” Sir Cuss demanded. “It’s stabbing time!”
I ignored them and blew on the paprika. The spice flew from my hand in a great cloud of red... just as the bargleboar charged into it.
For a moment, nothing happened. The bargleboar kept coming at me, roaring and drooling, and I figured I had made a terrible mistake and prepared to be trounced into goulash.
But then the bargleboar got a very funny look on its face. It stopped charging. It crinkled its enormous nose.
And then it sneezed. A lot. Huge, earthshaking, volcanic sneezes that blasted massive globs of boar snot from its nostrils.
I tackled Belinda, knocking her out of the way of some of it.
The bargleboar sneezed violently a few more times, and then a green rash appeared on its snout. The beast no longer looked vicious. Instead, it looked ill. It quickly turned around and raced back into the forest, whimpering sadly.
I got to my feet, feeling proud of myself, and turned to my fellow knights, expecting them to be proud of me as well.
They were not.
Instead, they were quite angry.
None of them had been agile or quick enough to get out of the way of the bargleboar’s sneezes. So they were all now coated with bargleboar snot. Even Sir Vyval hadn’t been out of range.
So instead of being congratulated for saving everyone from the bargleboar, it appeared that I was going to end up in trouble for it.
But before that could happen, an even bigger crisis occurred. Which is what this story is really about.
