The Guardian by Diana Knightley
Twenty-three - Kaitlyn
The weather continued to suck.
Magnus and Quentin ran daily exercises among all the men: guarding, fighting, protecting. They target practiced, they fenced, they sparred.
Three times a week the women were run through exercises too. We trained in marksmanship, hand to hand combat, daggers.
Quentin, becoming very bored during these long cold days, invented long elaborate training exercises and ran the whole castle through them. More elaborate than fire drills, we knew we couldn’t predict what might happen, but we tried to come up with some examples anyway — like drone army attacks from the woods, or mounted army attacks from over the mountain.
One day, after going through exercises, a few of us had been battling in the Great Hall and Hayley scrambled up on the big long wood table, facing me, and drew her wooden blade. “Draw!”
“Shit, that’s cool, it’s like Harry Potter.”
She said again, “Draw!”
“Okay,” I climbed up on the table and we stood across from each other, our wooden blades up.
She said, “Damn, this is really cool, we look just like we’re in Harry Potter, we need robes, and I wish I could remember what they say.”
“Snape says something awesome, definitely.” I put my hands on my hips. “But you know what really bothers me?”
She shook her head.
“That it took so long to climb up here, that was just embarrassing.” I climbed off the table. “What we need is to practice getting up onto a table fast, and sliding down, or rolling across, all these are highly necessary skills.”
“True, every movie has to have a lunge-across.” She climbed off the table.
I said, “Hold my blade so I don’t poke my eye out.” By now the rest of the women and a few of the boys had joined us.
I pushed a heavy chair up beside the table and grinned at Archie and Ben. “For the shorties.”
I stepped back, positioned myself, raced forward, slammed my hand down on the table, propelled myself up to the chair, swung myself around, and slid forward on the table by about one inch.
“Okay, that sucked, but you get my point, let’s all try it...” A line formed behind me and we spent a few hours that day and many days after, teaching each other how to do a stunt-slide down the table. Like we were in a movie.
This was how bored we were.
* * *
Quentin ran through the courtyard.
Hayley said, “Uh oh, here we go, another drill.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Crap, they really scare the kids.”
“Necessary though, want to beat our last time?”
“You’re on.”
He began ringing the bell, clang, clang, clang. Men raced toward the gate to close it. More men rushed up the steps to the high walls.
Magnus’s voice on my walkie-talkie, “Are ye with the bairns?”
“Not yet, headed that way.”
Hayley and I raced to the armory, jumped ahead in line, and were passed guns.
Then her job was to race up the far steps to the Great Hall to see if there were any women or children stragglers, while my job was to run up the front stairs picking up women as I went, and getting them to the nursery. We would meet Emma and Beaty there, and help corral the children into the back room.
When Hayley arrived we were to build a barricade against the door, calm the children, and wait.
She called over her shoulder, “First one to the nursery, wins!”
I took off like a bolt. I passed one of the maids on the steps, “Come on, come on! We have to beat Madame Hayley.”
She raced after me to the floor and then we rushed along the hall, but could see Hayley running from the opposite direction, holding the hand of one kid, urging on one of the maids. My hand touched the doorframe first. “Me!”
She laughed, as we all pushed through the door.
Beaty pushed Isla into my arms and I rushed through to the back room where Archie and Ben and Emma with Zoe in her arms were sitting with about twenty other kids along the walls. Beaty and Hayley and a few of the younger maids helped push chairs and tables in front of the door and then we all sat down on the ground.
I called Magnus on the walkie-talkie. “Done.”
He said, “Och, ye went fast this time.”
Hayley, armed, standing near the door, called over. “Tell him it’s our personal best.”
I said, into the walkie-talkie, “Tell Quentin that was our personal best and we want extra dessert tonight.”
“Aye.”
I looked over at Archie and Ben, their eyes wide. “But also tell him the kids are frightened, that he can’t keep doing this.”
“I will tell him, but ye ken we need tae practice.”
I sighed. “I know, I know. Just tell him we get extra dessert.” I put out my arm for Archie to tuck under while we waited for the guards to come collect us from our hiding place.
* * *
Isla had a swing outside. Every day she would center her hands on my face, look into my eyes, and say, “Swing?”
I would say, “It’s too freaking cold outside, Isla, too cold and raining.”
Sometimes she would frown, sometimes she would cry, most of the time she would wriggle down off my lap, “Go find da!”
And would toddle away. I would peek from the stairwell to see her on the swing in the courtyard with Magnus pushing it, frosty puffs forming with every breath. It would last for about two minutes before she would say, “Cold!” and Magnus would bring her inside.
I asked Magnus why he agreed to go out there with her if he knew it would be too cold and he said, “Och, tis just a wee bit of weather.”
And he had his own way of beating the boredom now, puzzling.
Emma, having guessed we would grow bored, had asked Quentin for jigsaw puzzles last time they traveled, and he and James had brought her three, big ones, with thousands of pieces. She spilled one out on one end of a long board table in the corner of the Great Hall and sat there when the light was good during the day, picking up pieces and figuring out where to place them. It was a puzzle with a picture of a castle on a green hill.
On the second day, Magnus sat down at the table across from her. “How do I do it?”
She looked surprised. “I thought you were watching yesterday!”
“Aye, but I canna make sense of it.”
“So first you find the flat edge pieces and you try to build the edges, that’s what I’m doing now.” She slid about fifteen pieces toward him. “These are all edges and they’re all blue for the sky, so put those together.”
Magnus tried to smash two together. Emma giggled. “That’s not quite right.”
“Aye, they daena fit.” He grinned. “I might need m’dirk tae force them.”
“That is not how it works, try those two.”
He moved both of them around five different ways before getting the pieces together, then said, “Och, it fits, I see it now.”
After that he was there for at least an hour a day as long as the light was good, sitting across from Emma putting together puzzles, until he was pulled away to run through military exercises, or do the other duties that we needed the lord to do.
But sometimes I would tease him, when he was in other parts of the castle, doing other things, and I’d see he was distracted, his mind wandering, and I would ask, “Are you thinking about your puzzle?”
“Och aye, ye ken, tis verra complicated, and we are close tae finishin’. I hae tae get back tae the Great Hall or else they will finish it without me.”
The puzzling corner was often crowded with people watching the puzzlers puzzle. Or joining them to chat while they worked on their own hobbies. Fraoch would often sit beside Emma and Magnus, with his knitting needles click-clacking. Hayley had taken to spinning yarn, so she pushed her spinning wheel beside their puzzling table and with clatters and whirs would spin skeins for Fraoch.
Quentin and James sat and watched one day and James asked, “Are you sure, really sure, that I can’t plug in an Xbox? I mean, we have the electricity from the pump, right? Just one plug? We could have it up in Quentin’s room.”
Magnus pressed a puzzle piece in position. “Nae, we talked on it, we can hear the buzzin’, everyone would ken and where would it end?”
Quentin said, “I agree with Boss, believe me, I want electricity too, but one day in we’d all be there, on the couch, staring at the screen. Ben and Archie would be there, too. There’s no way to keep it hidden. Then the guards would hear about it and then the outer villages and then the king and then there would have to be an invasion. The king of Spain for sure wants to play Xbox. Then Wikipedia has a post about it, the Xbox Wars of 1706, and guess what...? We are found.”
James said, “Fine. I think we could win the Xbox Wars of 1706 though, just saying, and if they’re coming we ought to practice by playing more Xbox.”
My hobby was drawing. I sat beside the puzzle station and drew the scene, the people, their hands, an eye, one of the sleeping dogs, anything that caught my fancy, with a pencil set that Quentin had brought. The only downside was that I could never sit there for too long before one of the bairns would need me.
* * *
Zach planned a Thanksgiving dinner for all of us, but he was surly and irritated because he didn’t have some of our traditional foods with us, like cranberry sauce, or pecans for pie. We had enough food on hand, it just wasn’t special, but no one wanted to risk time traveling for ‘special’.
Zach also complained endlessly about Eamag, that kind of obsessive coworker complaining. He would not stop bitching about her — Eamag bossed him around too much. Eamag wouldn’t leave him alone to cook. Eamag didn’t like any of his ideas.
I sat down beside Emma at the puzzle end of the table. She had little Zoe in the sling, and blew her bangs from her forehand. “What the heck, my husband is going to drive me crazy.” She wrapped her Fraoch-knitted scarf tight around her shoulders.
“Eamag?”
“How’d you guess?”
“He was just here telling us that she burned some sauce. I stopped listening because it’s so common.” I puffed breath on my fingers. “Man, it’s cold as shit in here. How are you doing puzzles? This is our life now? Just a cold dark dank castle. We need central heat and your husband needs his own kitchen where he’s the boss.”
“He needs her though, he doesn’t want to cook for seventy-five people or however many there are, he wants to cook for ten, with no one else telling him what to do.”
She sighed.
I sighed.
Magnus came up and sat down, his eyes admiring the half-done puzzle, three thousand pieces, with every single marvel superhero. He rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Madame Emma, what hae ye done so far?”
“Not much Magnus, my fingers are cold.”
He blew on his fingers. “I was thinking on Captain America’s shield, that red, I think I ought tae be able tae find it easy enough...”
I said, “We need Fraoch to knit us mittens.”