The detective pulled a couple chairs off the stack and placed them before Daniel and Freya. “Please, take a seat,” he said, taking a chair for himself.
“It’s hard to sit with my hands cuffed,” Daniel said.
“Don’t be a baby,” the detective said. Daniel sat.
“Isn’t this odd?” the detective asked. “All these sorts of buildings have odd little rooms like this. Would’ve been an office, in more prosperous times, or more likely a break room for the ticket tellers. But money gets tight, ticket telling becomes automated, and the room is forgotten about. I blame the Tories. Socialism is a small price to pay to keep everyone fed. What use is the free market economy if children go hungry? Economists don’t know a thing about economy. Economy is feeding three children on the dole.” He sniffed and looked around him. “Funny thing is, they can’t even use this space for storage. Regulations only allot a certain percentage of space for storage and janitorial. If they wanted more space to store things, they’d have to build an extension or get an act of parliament. Isn’t that mad?”
Daniel and Freya just sat looking at him blankly, Daniel sitting forward slightly in his chair.
“Sorry,” the presumed detective said. “I do tend to rattle on when I get nervous. Gotta bit of Irish in me. Do you two still not recognise me?”
They stared harder at him.
“Are you a . . . detective, or something?” Freya asked, his face not even vaguely familiar.
“Ah, no, there you have me. I’m not a detective, but then I never said I was. But I am a policeman. Just a little outside of my jurisdiction. Ha, that sounded very Hollywood. But seriously . . . ,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket. He produced a flat black wallet and showed them the silver badge that displayed a thistle, which was clipped to the outside. “Here’s my badge and my ID, which is going to give the game away, unless you have any more guesses.”
He seemed to want an answer, so Freya shook her head.
The “detective” flipped open the wallet and held his identification card up close to them. They peered forward and read his name. “Think back, about eight years ago . . .”
“Alex Simpson,” Daniel said. “Yes . . . yes! Of course! You!”
“Aye! I only bloody found you, didn’t I? Wandering in our backfields, covered in dirt . . . the famous lost English schoolchildren. We all had to sit through a forty-five minute talk by a policeman about stranger awareness because of you two. I wasn’t much older than you, so I’m not hurt that you didn’t recognise me.”
“But what are you doing here?” Freya asked.
“Been looking for the two of you, haven’t I? And it’s-here, Daniel, stand up; I can take those off of you now.” He fished a key ring out of his pocket and unlocked Daniel’s handcuffs. “Next time an officer of the law asks for a word, don’t take a swing at him, alright? As I was saying, it’s been bloody hard tracking you both down. Daniel, you were off the grid, naturally, but, Freya, you were in the system, but unlocatable. A week we’ve been hunting for you. I’ve managed to keep it quiet, but your parents are beside themselves. What happened to you?”
Daniel and Freya looked at each other.
“I’m sorry,” said Freya, “why are you here, again?”
Alex slapped his head. “I’m sorry, I forgot. Ni?ergeard. I’m here about Ni?ergeard business.”
“How do you know about Ni?ergeard?” Daniel asked, agog.
“It’s a long story. I’ll fill you in more later, but for now, suffice to say, I’m one of those above ground that exist to look after and care for the knights. I’m picking up where my father left off-like he did with his. It’s one of those generational things. Goes right the way back to the Forty-Five.”
Daniel and Freya’s mouths hung open.
“Yes, secret society and all that. Well, it’s a little more complex than that, but more about that later. First, I need to tell you that things are . . . developing. Listen,” he said, and told them about Dunbeath, Morven, the trolls, and the dragon.
“That . . . sounds bad,” Daniel said.
“It’s worse than you think,” Alex said. “Dragons . . .” He puffed out his cheeks and blew his breath out, shaking his head.
“Anyway, what’s happened with you?”
“Actually,” Freya said, bracing herself. “There’s something I need to tell both of you-”
“No, hold that thought,” Alex said. “We should push on. You can tell me in the car.”
“The car?”
“Aye. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us. Come with me. You’re not under arrest, just ‘helping me with my enquiries,’ if anyone asks.”
They left to find the two police officers still in the hallway. The security guards and the nervous man in the shirt had wandered off somewhere.
“Thanks, chappies,” Alex said to the officers. “They’ve agreed to come with me and my associate. I owe you one.”
The policemen just nodded and walked away. Alex shook his head. “The English . . . ,” he muttered under his breath.
He led them out of the train station. They spotted the police car as they started down the steps. There was a man inside of it, in the passenger’s seat, who made to get out when he saw them. The door opened and he stepped out, and as he did so, the car rocked with him-he was evidently very large. He straightened up to his full height, about seven feet tall, and looked at them from over the car’s roof. Daniel and Freya stopped and looked at the man, hardly believing their eyes.
Alex flashed a smile. “Let me introduce my associate,” he said. “Or have you met him already?”
“It can’t be . . .”
“It’s not . . .”
“Hello, young Daniel and young Freya.”
“Ecgbryt!”
It was indeed the knight, but now dressed in a blue uniform and with a much tidier beard and closely trimmed hair that stuck out from a policeman’s hat.
“Swa swa, it’s Ecgbryt. Just so,” he said, grinning. “What say you? Are you ready to rejoin the battle?”
2
Two Weeks Earlier…
Gad gazed down at Robin Ploughwright from the throne he sat upon. He didn’t like elves, as a rule, and had plans to be rid of them for good. Although they could be relied upon, they were unpredictable. He had overcome his antipathy because they were perfect for just these sorts of jobs-distraction and detention.
Gad made a gesture, permitting him to leave.
Robin had walked a few steps when he turned.
“With respect,” he said, twitching, “I know I shouldn’t question- never have before, but I must ask . . . why not simply kill them, or detain them in a more conventional manner?”
Gad rose a hand to his chin. Kill Daniel and Freya? The thought truly hadn’t occurred to him any more than removing chess pieces from his own side of the board halfway through a game. He liked them-they were so . . . manipulable . . . malleable.
“Really, Robin,” he said, grinning. “Is that any way to treat a friend?”
A Short Note About Language
When the British monks first started to record the history and literature of their land, they wrote them in the Old English language but used the Latin alphabet instead of the pagan one. This was mainly for practical purposes, since Latin was spoken in nearly every European country at that time, usually by other priests and monks. The Roman system of writing was convenient, economical, and comprehensible to foreigners.
The problem, however, was that a few sounds used in English as it was at that time didn’t exist in Latin and therefore had no letters to express them. To fix this, they decided to use the letters for those sounds that they already had, which came by way of the Scandinavians. A few of these letters and sounds were:
?, ? -called “thorn” and pronounced like the “th” in “thin”