“Something is coming,” he said. “It smells horsey.” I stopped singing and looked, but as soon as the tune died in my mouth, the cyclops turned and growled at me. “Sing more!”
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I sang again. The moment he took his foot off my dress I planned on bolting through the forest. Hopefully he would be more interested in catching the unicorn than pursuing me. And hopefully the unicorn would stab him with its horn and then run away.
“TUV,” I sang, but then I stopped. A bright light pierced through the darkness, a beam from a flashlight.
It went directly into the cyclops’s large eye, blinding him. Unable to shut his eye, he turned away in pain, moaning, stumbling with both arms flung in front of his face.
“Run here!” Tristan yelled, but I was already on my feet, heading in his direction. When I reached him, he barely looked at me, just thrust the flashlight into my hand and said, “Try to keep this trained on his eye.” I had expected the cyclops to flee from the light into the darkness of the forest, but he didn’t. He stayed where he was, roaring in anger. I shone the flashlight beam directly at his head, but he’d turned his face backward and tried to walk toward us while keeping his eye away from the light. One of his arms swung out in our direction as though trying to scratch us.
The cyclops, I realized, was not used to running away from people and didn’t plan on doing it now.
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Tristan walked toward him, a spear in one hand and an object I couldn’t discern in the other. Some sort of cylinder.
“Don’t get so close, don’t get so close,” I repeated, even though I knew Tristan couldn’t hear me over the roars of the cyclops. Tristan walked around to the cyclops so that he faced the monster. I was afraid the cyclops would lunge at Tristan since he no longer stood in the protection of the flashlight beam. But before the cyclops could take a swipe at Tristan, Tristan held the object up and squeezed it. A stream of liquid shot out from the object and went directly into the cyclops’s eye.
The monster screamed again, louder and fiercer this time. So loud that the forest seemed to shake. He clutched at his eye with his clawed hands and stumbled backward, out of the beam of my flashlight.
The cyclops’s screams suddenly stopped. I searched for him with the flashlight, and when I found him, I understood why. He lay motionless on the ground.
Tristan’s spear stuck out of his chest.
It was only then, after I knew the danger had passed, that I began to shake. My hands trembled so much that the flashlight beam jumped up and down. Tristan walked toward me, appraising me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
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He reached me, and once he was satisfied that I wasn’t injured, the concern in his expression turned into anger. He put one hand to his temple, then held it out in my direction. “Okay, is there some reason you keep trying to kill yourself, some sort of death wish I should know about?”
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” I said, my words tumbling together. “Sir William told everyone in the inn that he was going to kill the ogre tomorrow, and I didn’t think you’d make it back in time, so I had to try and take care of it myself.”
Tristan looked at me like I’d lost my mind, then walked past me. I swung the flashlight beam after him to see what he was doing. A few feet away from me, his sword stood upright in the ground. He pulled it out with one hand, then strode past me to the cyclops.
“I was trying to help you, you know,” I called after him.
“And I’ve had enough of your help. If you ‘help’ me any more you’ll get us both killed.” I took two steps toward him. “I know you don’t believe me, but I have an invincibility enchantment. I fought off three thieves on the way to the inn with nothing but a riding crop. How do you explain that if I’m not invincible?”
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He’d reached the cyclops, but turned back to face me.
“Three thieves?” A look of frustration crossed his face.
“Did it even occur to you before you took off from the castle that it wasn’t a good idea to go running around the forest by yourself?”
“The point is,” I said firmly, “I beat them off, which proves that I’ve got an invincibility enchantment.” He put one foot on the cyclops’s chest and tugged at his spear, trying to remove it. “Men here aren’t used to ladies who fight back. You probably just took them by surprise and spooked them off.” He gestured toward the cyclops as if presenting me evidence. “You weren’t invincible against this thing.”
“I didn’t take into account that the cyclops wasn’t human.”
“Yeah, well, once again, that’s where paying attention in school could have helped you.” I put one hand on my hip in disbelief. “Oh, you mean back in health class when they taught us what to do in case of a cyclops attack?”
“World Lit. The Odyssey.” The spear broke instead of coming free, and Tristan tossed it aside in disgust. He wouldn’t be able to reuse it.
I didn’t say any more about being enchanted. What was the point? He refused to take what I said seriously.
“Hold the beam on the cyclops’s head,” he told me.
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I did, but couldn’t watch when I realized what Tristan was about to do. I heard the thwack of his sword and shuddered. A minute later Tristan walked back to me carrying the cyclops’s head by the hair.
He handed me his sword to hold, then took the flashlight from me and strode into the forest. I walked beside him, keeping my gaze averted from what he held in his hand. We walked for a few minutes in silence, following the beam from the flashlight. With more stiffness in my voice than I’d intended, I said, “Thanks for saving my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
We took more footsteps in silence. I tried to match Tristan’s quick pace without tripping on any rocks or tree roots. “So how did you find me?”
“When I reached the inn, I asked the innkeeper’s wife where you were. She didn’t know, but said you’d questioned her about the location of the cyclops’s caves.
After that, it was just a matter of hurrying as fast as I could to get things ready, cursing a lot, finding your horse and your sword along the way—did I mention cursing a lot? And then I followed the sound of your voice.”
“What did you squirt into his eye? Acid?” He shook his head. “Acid is hard to come by in the Middle Ages. It was actually watered-down shampoo. I’d 282/431
forgotten how much it can sting your eyes until you brought it here.”
So that’s what he’d been holding. My Pantene bottle.
“You mean you shampooed the cyclops to death?” The shock of the evening had taken its toll on me and I laughed out loud. “Well, that should make for an interesting story to tell at the king’s table: Tristan and the Shampoo Bottle of Death.”
He grinned, but didn’t look at me. “Don’t make me laugh. I’m still mad at you.”
“I know you are, Tristan. You’ve been mad at me for the last eight months.”
He didn’t answer me. For the rest of the way to our horses, we didn’t speak at all.
• • •
We rode slowly back to the inn. Tristan rode in front of me, doing his best to light the way with the flashlight while my horse followed his. I spent a lot of time shivering and looking up at the sky, heavy with stars. How in the world could they be the same stars I’d seen back in my world? Everything else had changed.
Once we’d arrived at the inn, the priest rang the church bell to let the villagers know there was important news. Several of the men made a bonfire in the middle 283/431
of the street. Then everyone crowded around for warmth while Tristan told them of my rescue and his daring triumph over the monster. In the story, Tristan said I’d gone to the forest searching for him because I thought he went to fight the cyclops. I had been worried when he hadn’t returned and feared he might be lying wounded somewhere. Which I suppose sounded better than saying I went because I was foolish.