“I suppose this affair has been lacking chivalry,” the elder knight said as he took one hand off the rope. The noose loosened further.
Casey cursed the extension of his embarrassing life.
“There is a scourge upon the land,” the elder knight explained, “of such grand scale that the king needs a master in the art of beast slaying. The name of this foe is exclusive information to the king and his most trustworthy knights only. We require Casey Byrne of Abernathair; only he will suffice.”
The peasants and yeomen snickered more loudly this time. The face of the elder knight grew red. He’d been called out on his lack of chivalry by a yeoman girl, and now he jabbered about a great foe that only the pitiful Casey Byrne could slay. Casey looked back at the younger knight, who shrank back in embarrassment.
Holly drew nearer and squinted incredulously. “I’ll assume you have the greatest intentions, but I still have to remark that this one—Casey Byrne—is just a baker’s apprentice, and he’s struggling to be that.”
“He burns everything he touches!” screamed a man in the crowd, and others laughed out loud.
“He’s afraid to catch the mice, even,” yelled a woman, and the laughter grew.
“He has virtues,” Holly explained, “just not the courage you’re looking for.” Her delicate tact made Casey even more self-conscious. Casey was a loser. Was it worse that Holly tried to be nice about it?
“Then why did we hear tales of the heroic exploits of this man?” the younger knight asked. “Especially the three beasts he slew with one weapon?”
Casey saw it in the younger knight’s damp eyes: the desperate need for a hero.
“It’s not true that I had a weapon,” Casey clarified.
“You used your bare hands?” the young knight asked with wonder in his voice.
“Actually, yes, and my teeth! Holly, go ahead and tell the story.” Casey rubbed his sore throat.
“Well, it began at Hog and Apple, my family’s inn and pub.”
“So many great quests begin this way!” the younger knight said.
“Last summer the pub had a promotional deal,” Holly explained, “and anyone who ate three potato cakes in one sitting didn’t have to pay for them. It drew a lot of patrons.”
“And where did the three beasts come in?” the younger knight asked.
The elder knight held his head in his hands as the story made itself evident. “You idiot,” he said to his friend, “the potato cakes were the Three Beasts of Abernathair!”
The peasants and yeomen pointed and laughed out loud at the knights, unable to contain their amusement. Their numbers made them brazen.
“To Casey’s credit,” Holly explained, “the potato cakes were as large as his head. He was the only one to eat all three, and he did tackle them barehanded.”
“Hurray!” several of the peasants cheered for him half-ironically, and the laughter of the crowd erupted to a frightening volume.
Casey knew the knights had no taste for humiliation. “Thank you, Holly, for explaining the one credit to my existence.” Casey looked back to the knights. “You may strangle me now. The potato cakes were delicious. I’m ready.”
Casey saw no humor in the faces of the knights. They’d traveled a long way to find him. Their need for a hero compelled them over dangerous terrains. The journey ended with a disappointment named Casey Byrne.
The physical distance between the knights’ homes in Cronine and Casey’s in Abernathair had given the story of his pub antics room to grow. For every step the story had traveled, it had grown into the monster it was meant to become. Desperate times in Cronine had compelled the people to sculpt the story into something grander, and so it transformed. The knights had arrived expecting to find a very different man.
Casey felt sorry to have disappointed them, but even more, he felt guilty for not having done something brave to keep Brendan safe. He wanted to be the kind of man they all needed, but as of yet, he was not. Casey saw the rage building in the elder knight and recalled the power dynamic here. The peasants and yeomen had the laughs, but the knights had all the ability to kill.
“Listen to me, peasants and yeomen,” the elder knight yelled as he shook his fist. “I’m Sir Colm Murphy of Cronine, and my companion is Sir Ryan Dowdy of Cronine. By the power invested in our titles, we will not be denied! Fanciful tales have sent us to this backwater nothing-ville in search of the hero Casey Byrne. Well, I can show you a thing of wonder: men can make a lie the truth if they so wish it. Words will craft a man just as men will craft words. The lowborn masses perfect the craft of using words to humble and break their own, but a man of noble virtue speaks good into existence. We’re the nobles, and our words are alchemy.” The elder knight grabbed Casey by the shoulders and pulled him back up onto his feet. “Today you lose a baker’s apprentice, and we gain the man who will slay the great evil, Rey Polilla.”
Urgent whispers filled the crowd, but not a single laugh emerged. The elder knight, in his fit of rage, spoke the name that no one wished to hear—the name of the great foe of the kingdom that made its home in Cronine. The story of Casey Byrne had seemed to turn from amusement to tragedy, and the peasants and yeomen dispersed.
A small boy with dark hair and huge eyes stared at Casey. “Is he really going to kill Rey Polilla?” the boy asked his mother.
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“Cú Ama will take him before he can leave the town. Come on, now. This isn’t funny anymore.”
Holly was the last of the audience to leave the scene. The wind passed through the blossoms of the tree in the center of the market.
“So that’s your plan,” Casey said to the knights, “you came here because you believe I’m a hero who can slay the dragon, the cult leader Rey Polilla.”
“Mind who hears you call him a cult leader,” the elder knight said, his eyes wide with severity. “Even his foes must give him his due.”
“Rey Polilla is enormous. No lance can pierce him. I’m bound to die. It might as well be for something absurd like potato cakes or blasphemy. And don’t you know? Cowards can’t get past Cú Ama.”
“First things first. The hour is late. Supper time is upon us. We’ve run out of food, and your family operates a bakery. You’ll quarter us tonight. We’ll set out for Cronine in the morning, eastward, over the bridge above the Rees River.” The elder knight placed a firm hand on Casey’s back, and Casey couldn’t object. He had no right. Colm placed his free hand on the hilt of his sword strapped to his belt, signaling his command over the situation. Casey began the long walk home. The younger knight whistled for his horse, and it emerged from a distant stall with a neigh. Both knights followed Casey home, where his parents would receive the news of his capture.
***
After the drama of his parents discovering they couldn’t hide their son any longer—and a bizarrely silent dinner with two noble guests—Casey sat beside the window in his room and looked out on the nighttime landscape. The room had belonged to him and his siblings, but all of them had grown up and moved out by now. It seemed so large and empty. He felt the absence of three sisters and two brothers.
In the next room over, his parents slept. A wall divided the room from the dining room, where the knights now rested. Perhaps they slept as well. Casey was afraid to check on them. They’d gorged themselves on his family’s food. Now, they must have felt lethargic as boulders.
The open window tempted Casey. He saw the hawthorn tree in the distance. As he leaned his head out the window, the subtle breeze tickled the tip of his nose. “Come this way,” nature called to him, “and we can return to the way childhood felt. Come this way.” It had been a floral, warm spring, and the hawthorn tree stood in full bloom with white flowers, taller than five men standing upright. If he could reach the hawthorn tree, he could return to the old barn that stood in its shadow. His family had inherited it after a death in the extended family. This had been his hiding place since the letter arrived. It had taken considerable effort to open the window without it making a sound. He tasted the potential freedom and loved it.
Two thoughts trapped him in this home. He knew the awful tempers and strengths of the knights; they nearly killed him in the field today. He recalled their powerful grips and the way they nearly strangled him in front of a crowd. The knights had the kind of desperation that made good men do awful things. Casey feared that if he fled, the knights would turn their anger on his family, whom they now knew personally. There was no telling what evil those men would do if they didn’t get their way. Chivalry had its limits.
The second thought was harder to articulate. His own ineptitude and cowardliness had reached a tipping point in this community. If he did something he’d never done before—like test his bravery against Cú Ama—maybe he could amount to something half as wonderful as what Holly, Brendan, and the knights needed.
He closed the wooden shutters of the window. He did this slowly to avoid making a sound. Casey reclined in his bed and gave himself to his fate, or his quest, or his death, whichever it may become.
When the morning came, Casey joined the knights at the dining room table. His mother brought food from the scullery. She cut into vegetables and busied herself as the men talked. Father had already set out for the day’s work. The two knights ate as if they’d never seen food before.
“I’ve decided I’m going to give myself over to this calling,” Casey announced to the knights.
“Excellent,” Ryan, the younger knight, said.
“Good,” Colm agreed, and for the first time he held prolonged eye contact with Casey. “Then it will suit you to know about us. We own estates in Cronine, so the situation in that ancient city concerns us. Your commitment is appreciated. In no time at all, we’ll make you the man you must become. Now I have to ask you, Casey, do you believe the words the common people are saying about you?”
Casey searched his heart and answered, “I can’t argue with them. I haven’t shown any courage in my life.”
“Stop believing their words; it gives them power. You have to pour their words out of your soul. We have to grow what’s good in you, the good that’s there already.”
“We need you to see it,” Ryan insisted.
Casey looked at the food on the table. Bread pie stuffed with meat. He took the bread in his hands and split it open. The smell of iron struck his nose, and he realized liver filled the bread. It was his favorite meal, and one he only received on special occasions. He looked at his mother in shock, knowing that she must have arranged this. She tried not to look at him as she cleaned in the scullery, but he saw the tears in her eyes. She must have known this was the end for him. The end of something, anyway. No one could know what lay in store for him on the road, but the king called him to a task he couldn’t accomplish as a baker’s apprentice. If he returned, he would not return as she knew him. He ate as much as his stomach could hold. He worried for his mother, and then he ate more to silence his thoughts.
When the three men set out for the road, his father called out to him.
“Casey, wait!” he called out from behind them. “Casey, you forgot your walking stick.”
“I don’t have a—”
He arrived at Casey’s side with a gnarly staff. He stood there with two decades more age than Casey, and a thick mustache over his mouth. Casey saw a possible future self in his father, but he took the staff to appease him.
“I looked high and low for it, so I missed breakfast.” He reached into his satchel to pull out several coins. “This isn’t much, but you can buy something to eat, since you aren’t good at hunting. I wish I had been a better teacher.”
“I wasn’t an easy student,” Casey admitted.
“I’m sorry I don’t have an extra horse or a sword for you to take.”
“But we’re bakers, and not martial people, and not wealthy.” Casey intended his words to be an excuse, but his father was visibly pained by them, as evidenced by his frown. It occurred to Casey that his father wanted much more for his family. Casey took the generous gifts. He gave his father a final hug, “I love you. I’m going to be safe. I’ll be back to burn your loaves and spill your flour any day now.”
“I love you,” he reciprocated, even though he almost never said it before. “Come home soon.”
His mother called out from the door of the house, “Cú Ama is still on the town’s edge. He takes the fearful ones!” Her anxiety punctuated the moment; it was time to go. Casey left his father with his regrets, but he took his own with him.
The winding path of the Rees River marked the edge of the town. A stone bridge crossed it, forming the only exit going east. Casey took in the landscape. Peonies and tulips lined the road and summoned him with their pastel beauty. Several loose chickens clucked about the landscape, and a wild pony hid in the tall grasses. Long shadows of workers reached across the fields as they planted spring barley.
In the distance, he saw the stone bridge crossing the river and remembered all he’d heard about Cú Ama, the beast who emerged at the town’s end to hunt fearful men. Casey had never journeyed beyond the stone bridge for fear of Cú Ama. The fearful words of his mother stirred him; she intuited the danger of this place.