I heard the shouts approaching, though. Yells of anger as the knights pounded the ground toward us.

Nick sprinted ahead of me, disappearing down the road into the darkness. I hoped he would get away. I wasn’t going to be able to make it as far. I had already run too much and now it felt like not just my heart was bleeding, but my lungs were too.

My pace slowed. Hudson took hold of my arm and pulled me forward. I wanted to ask, What’s the point? but didn’t. Maybe the point was that you’ve got to keep trying even when it won’t matter. I thought of Kendall and my mom, and my throat felt tight. They would never know what happened to us. That part seemed the worst of all.

New moral of the story: Not all fairy tales end happily ever after.

My father took his walkie-talkie back out of his vest. “We need help fast.”

What did he expect Sandra to do against charging knights with battle axes?

Up on the road ahead of us, lights flicked on. Headlights—two sets shooting beams of light into the dark. Nick was driving Dad’s truck and Sandra sat behind the wheel of her Honda. As they roared down the bumpy road toward us, the beams of light jumped and swayed, throwing different patches of ground into and out of focus.

I stumbled toward the car, finding more strength than I thought I had. We would make it before the horses reached us.

I heard the Honda’s locks unclick, and Sandra called out, “Get in!” 219/356

I opened the door and flung myself inside. Hudson crawled in next to me, and four men I only vaguely recognized crammed in as well.

Sandra flipped on the interior light and twisted around to check on me. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” I breathed out, panting too heavily to say more.

“We need more room,” Hudson told me, and without more instruction, I got up, he scooted over, and I sat on his lap. He wrapped his arms around my waist and leaned his head against my back, breathing hard from the run. I would have enjoyed the feeling of being snuggled into him if my mind hadn’t been so crowded with thoughts of the giant robotic horses and their ax-waving companions.

Well, actually, I enjoyed the feel of his arms around me a little bit anyway.

Three men piled into the front seat next to Sandra. She had opened the trunk so they could crowd in there too. Another set of headlights came on—Nick’s old Camry. Dad had climbed into the driver’s seat, and that car was weighed down with men too.

Our procession started down the road. We couldn’t go very fast.

The road was jutted and uneven, making the car shake around like a wild bull trying to throw us.

Sandra’s hands gripped the wheel tightly, and she leaned forward in concentration. I couldn’t see anything out of the rear window because the trunk was open, but through the side mirror, I saw the knights gaining on us.

“You need to go faster,” I told Sandra.

Her voice was a forced calm. “People will fall out if I do.”

“People will die if you don’t.”

She glanced in her mirror. “We’ve thought this through.” 220/356

I felt my panic rise. I had just thought this through too and at the end of my thoughts, we all died. It wouldn’t take much for the knights’

axes to shatter the windows or slash our tires.

They were close now, almost within striking distance.

Then Sandra laid on the horn.

The sharp blare rang through the night, startling the horses. Some horses tried to stop, causing an equestrian pileup, while others bolted away from the car, whinnying and shaking their heads in distress. We continued on, bumping down the road away from them while they regrouped.

After a few minutes, the knights regained control of their horses and charged us again, but the horses were skittish now. We must have seemed like strange creatures to them—so large and noisy. When the knights got close, Sandra blared the horn again. The horses scattered away from us, like they’d done the first time.

The men sitting in the trunk of the car laughed and taunted the knights, something I thought was severely stupid. But the Merry Men understood horses well enough to know the chase was over. The horses could keep up with our speed for a few miles, but they were tir-ing. Slow car speed is still pretty fast horse speed if both horse and rider are wearing armor.

The knights yelled insults back at us in return, but they didn’t try to follow again and we bounced off into the night.

Hudson let out a sigh. I hadn’t noticed how tense he was until he relaxed; even his hands went slack in my lap. “Those were trained horses,” he said. “At a knight’s command, they’ll kneel in battle or kick an opponent. I can’t believe a car horn scared them off.” Sandra checked her mirror again. She was usually such a cautious driver that, I imagined, even in a medieval forest, she would use her blinkers when she changed directions. “Luckily, those knights never 221/356

trained their horses not to react to car horns.” She eyed him in the mirror for the first time. “You’re not one of Robin’s men. Who are you?”

We told her, Hudson and I taking turns, although we edited our versions of the story. I said things like “Hudson is Police Chief Gardner’s son.”

And he said things like “I was an innocent bystander.” I didn’t tell Sandra that Hudson tricked me into turning Bo and his friends over to the police. He didn’t tell her that I made out with Robin Hood in a convenience store.

She only stopped our stories once. She told Hudson, “I knew your mother from the library board committee. She was a lovely woman.”

“Thanks,” he said, but his voice sounded flat, or maybe just tired.

Little John peered at me from the front seat. “About you turning things to gold—you’re truly able? Your pa promised we’d have gold to spare if we rescued you.”

I imagined he did. The Merry Men were mercenaries at heart.

They wouldn’t have risked the rescue for anything less.

“What do you want me to turn to gold?” I asked.

Little John handed me a pouch from around his waist. I took it in my palm and said, “Little John’s pouch, gold, gold, gold.” It directly turned into a useless but very shiny pouch. I handed it back to him, and he and the other Merry Men passed it around, admiring it. Then they wanted me to transform everything they had on them. I think they would have stripped naked if they’d had the room to undress.

Fortunately they didn’t.

Finally, after being stuck in the car for way too long with a bunch of men who rarely bathed, we pulled off the main road and onto a narrower one. A few minutes after that, we left the road altogether and 222/356

went through an opening in the forest where some trees had been cut away.

When the car stopped, I didn’t even care where we were. I was just happy that everyone piled out and I could unbend myself and breathe in the fresh forest air.

Robin Hood’s men greeted each other, laughing and slapping one another’s backs. I ran over to Dad and Nick and gave them hugs, then Sandra came over and we all hugged each other again. It was our first real family moment.

I never expected to feel like part of a family with Sandra, Nick, and Dad. But I did, and I wasn’t sure what was odder: that I felt this way or that it had taken me so long to realize a family could expand to include other people.

The Merry Men took cut tree limbs from a nearby pile and laid them across the cars to hide them from the road. Sandra and Dad went to talk to Robin Hood, but Nick stayed with me.

“I’m really sorry about all of this,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to put you in danger. Has it been awful?” He patted me on the shoulder. “Nah, actually some good things have come from this.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, the way you’ve made it really easy for me to look like the good child. Because no matter how badly I screw up in the future, at least I’ve never sent the family to the Middle Ages.”