In the Land of Stories Old

Chapter 11

Hans was bored.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have things to do, he did. There were plenty of things for him to do. But he also felt a little bit…restless.

Maybe it was time to go truffle hunting.

Hans had been taking off to hunt for mushrooms and truffles and wild berries and such ever since he’d been old enough to venture into the woods of Holle by himself, and when he’d decided it was time to leave home he’d used that same excuse and just…kept going. He’d met Merlin, Arthur and Jack some six weeks later in a wood that was quite a long way from Holle. They’d been hunting a supposedly man-eating large serpent at the request of a nearby village, and they had come upon the serpent and Hans at basically the same time and he’d killed it before they could get close enough to help. They’d asked if he wanted to join them and he’d accepted because he’d been otherwise somewhat at loose ends, and he’d just ended up staying with them and having adventures after that. Hans was just as good with a sword in the woods as he was with his knives in the kitchen, so he was able to pull his own weight in every area…and it felt good. He’d only been able to tolerate ‘sharing’ the cooking duties for about a week, but the others had been good sports about it and had simply organized themselves to do most of the other chores that a comfortable camp required. And then they’d met the Princes Vinci and suddenly they were the Fearless Seven and had a real home and Hans had a real kitchen that he was allowed to do with as he pleased and if he wanted truffles and mushrooms there were woods all around him so he didn’t have to venture very far.

The Black Castle didn’t have that, of course. It was built against cliffs, and the courtyards and small gardens it had were rather…constrained. Merlin had already worked his magic—without using any but the smallest bits of actual magic—on the gardens, which were now trellised and terraced wonders of the gardener’s art. They also still had the gardens at their old home, which someone went back to take care of once a week while also checking to make sure no one had tried to move in and take over. But that wasn’t the same as wandering off into the woods to see what he could find, and so Hans decided that he was going to take a short excursion to refresh himself. And to collect more truffles, because he knew he was going to want them for the wedding feast to come. So he told Merlin—making a privately petty point of it, he told Merlin first—and Snow and the triplets, and then he made sure they could feed themselves to his satisfaction while he was gone and headed out with his old pack and his old cookpot and a new bedroll because for some reason he couldn’t find his old one. He had no expectations of finding anything but truffles, mushrooms, berries or roots, and he certainly wasn’t looking for adventure.

And for the first few days, he didn’t find one.

Hans came back, by himself and in his original form, just eight days after he’d left. “I still do not understand what happened,” he kept repeating to his concerned friends. “I was camping in the woods, and making myself a nice stew with some of the mushrooms which grow in that area…when a young woman came staggering out of the trees, threw herself down and attempted to eat out of the pot! With her hands! I stopped her, of course, and put some in a cup for her instead, and she drank it while I tended to the burn the pot had given her. She had most all of the pot, in fact, she seemed to be starving, and all I could get out of her was that I had saved her life. The poor thing, I thought she was…well, her clothes were fine but ragged, and there were leaves and sticks in her hair, and she was just skin and bones. I made her sleep by the fire, and I made her a hot porridge with dried rose petals and honey when the sun rose. She was so delighted with it, her face just lit up, and she apologized to me; apparently the smell of my cooking had woken her from an enchanted sleep and she had been feeling rather…feral. I told her not to mention it and asked what else I could do to help…and she kissed me! And then I exploded, and she was gone! Vanished like a ghost!”

Merlin was still trying to figure that one out days later, and finally he kissed his wife and told her he’d be back within a week. He returned grim-faced, filthy and exhausted, with blisters on his hands which he took pains to hide from Hans. “I found…the place where she’d been,” he told Snow. “Someone had cursed her with an enchanted sleep, yes…but they hadn’t bothered to do it correctly, and she…” He looked away, swiping at his eyes with the hand his wife wasn’t bandaging. “He met a ghoul, Snow, a starving, ravening ghoul. And he fed her and took care of her in spite of how she looked, and so she kissed him instead of eating him and broke his curse. I buried…what was left, and hopefully that will be the end of it. But we’ll have to keep an ear out for stories coming from that wood. It’s a dark, dark place. In fact, I suspect it might be a remnant of the cursed forest of Metra.”

“That forest was huge, according to the journal King Nicholas kept,” she said, smoothing salve over a raw sore that looked like it had blistered and burst more than once. Regular graves could be as shallow as you could get away with, but magical ones needed to contain something had to be a full seven feet deep and lined with stones and runes at each foot going back up. “And the Cataclysm made such a mess of things…it’s possible. Hopefully that’s not where the burying cave was.”

He sighed. “I hope not. I didn’t see any place where that sort of cave could be, but it could all be underground now.” He made a face. “Sometimes I feel like we’re trying to put together a puzzle that has half the pieces missing and the other half broken.”

She covered the hand she’d already bandaged with hers. “We’ll figure it out, Merlin. I know we will.”

fanfiction In the Land of Stories Old