Jackie the Beanstalk
Chapter 7
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
DINNER WAS GOOD, but not nearly as extravagant as the night before. I had a nice stuffed porkchop with cornbread dressing, roasted vegetables, and rice pilaf. Yummy, but lots lighter than the two-pound porterhouse I had the night before. Misty had some kind of fish dish of unknown origin. She said she really needed to watch her weight if she wanted to keep fitting in the skin tight leather pants and bra top. I think the ‘sexy quotient’ of the outfit was much higher on her list of reasons to wear it than the fact it would protect her legs when we were in rough country.
After dinner, we sat at the table with coffee that Suzy kept filled while we went over all the documents included in the new packet. Mostly, these were documents legitimizing our quest. Assignment of temporary guardianship, for example. That way, if we were stopped after rescuing the kid, we had proof signed by the Sovereign that we were the proper caretakers. There was also a rolled map. Unlike the TripTik, however, this map had no roads or highways marked on it. It was a general map of the Land of Victoriana that showed the relative positions of major features, like half a dozen towns, a mountain range, a big river, a lake, and scribbled notes that were hard to read. After deciphering one of the notes, I wasn’t sure I wanted to figure out the others. ‘Here be the untamed land of man-eating giants.’ I wondered exactly how old this map was.
The most useful note on the map, however, was one that circled ‘The Dragon’s Lair.’ It said this was the last known location of young Baron Federico Rex. It looked like that was the direction we would be heading in the morning.
We finally left the restaurant, cheerfully waving and saying we’d see them in the morning. I was bushed. I got out of my robe and washed my undies before taking a shower and pulling on my nightshirt. Heaven knew when we’d be able to get another hot shower. I was asleep by the time Misty managed to wiggle out of her leathers.
The knock on the motel room door heralded the arrival of the court’s short messenger. He was not alone. I think he brought an entire kitchen with him. First, breakfast was served. Basic, but hearty—ham and eggs, dark toast, lots of coffee, and orange juice. They also had food to pack in our car. I opened it up and waited while they loaded more stuff in the back of the car than it could possibly hold. Misty and I left the car doors open so the animals could get themselves arranged when they’d done their morning business. They looked so sharp in their new clothes. I think Shasta was practicing walking on just her hind legs in her new boots. The spotted tabby actually looked quite dignified.
We looked at the map and compared it to the next batch of instructions on the TripTik. The cooks closed the hatch. The little messenger man saluted us, and spoke loudly so that all the four or five people within hearing distance could understand.
“The Sovereign of Victoriana prays good speed and a safe journey to Jackie, the Warrior Wizard and her companions. May you return to us with the jewel of our crown that the Sovereign Line of Rex may be continued and Victoriana may live in peace and glory.” He saluted again and jumped in his golf cart. A panel van full of cooks followed out of the motel parking lot. He headed toward town and by the time he was a block away, the van lit up with fireworks shooting from its roof and a dark car pulled out to follow it. Oh, yes. A diversion.
“Mount up,” I said. “It looks like the adventure has begun.” There was a bark from the back seat. Misty bucked herself in and Shasta bounced into her lap. I turned the ignition and felt the big engine rumble to life. “Which direction, Misty?”
“Right, and straight ahead for a long way.” The opposite direction of the fireworks. Of course.
“Here we go!” I admit to showing off a little when I peeled out of the parking lot.
Mile 499
“How can you possibly say none of this is real?” Misty complained. We’d been arguing all morning. She started it by stupidly asking if I believed now. I’d just as stupidly said, ‘No!’
“It can’t be real. It defies logic,” I said.
“But you’re still wearing your graduation gown and it has pockets! I’ve got a gorgeous new red leather suit on and a bobcat kitten sitting in my lap. We met the Sovereign and have packed more stuff in the back of the car than there can possibly be space for. It has to be magic! We must be in a different dimension.”
“No,” I responded. “I must be dreaming. That’s the only logical conclusion. I fell asleep—maybe during the commencement ceremony; it was boring enough. And I am sitting there happily dreaming along as if I’m in a LARP. And as for the robe, the pockets, the leather, the kitten—they are all evidence that I’m dreaming. Even the car. Pop would never give me his precious ’68 Fairlane. And it was such a gas hog I couldn’t have made it to the hardware store gas pumps on a single tank of gas. The bridges we’ve crossed have all been identical. Same type of construction, same streetlights—even in the wilderness. Like I’m projecting an archetype of my ideal bridge whenever there is one to cross. Towns come up when we want them to. Distances are meaningless.”
“Then wake up!”
“No way! This is the most fun I’ve had sleeping since Dan Blackwell took my cherry. Just gonna sit back and enjoy the movie.”
“Movie. That should be proof you aren’t dreaming. Dreams are never linear. They jump all over, sometimes back to things that already happened. This is our seventh day out, and even the odometer is ticking out the miles consecutively.”
“Speaking of which, I need to pee and the animals probably need a break, too.”
“Roadside rest and viewpoint at the top of the pass,” Misty said. “Just popped up on the TripTik.”
“Next reason I believe it’s a dream. Whenever we need something, that antique map suddenly has it marked on it.” I pulled into the viewpoint rest area. It was pretty spectacular. “Now, I’m going to try to make it to the bathroom and back without waking up.”
“Don’t pee the bed,” Misty snarked back at me.
“Come on, kids,” I said holding the door for the animals. Shasta bounced out of Misty’s lap before she could get her door open, and met Roadkill crawling over the girl on the floor of the back seat.
Girl on the floor of the back seat.
“What the ever-loving fuck is this?” I yelled. She smiled up at me and crawled out of the car with the animals. Her bright red hair was offset by the forest green of her leather clothes. They looked like they’d been made by the same tailor as Misty’s. “Princess Bridget Rex,” I sighed.
“Glad you stopped, Warrior Wizard. I have to go pee, too!”
The animals had already found a spot to relieve themselves. Misty, Princess, and I rushed to the restrooms and each slammed a stall door shut behind us.
“Okay, Princess, spill it. Why are you hiding in the back of my car? And why the hell did you wait until we were nearly a hundred miles away to tell us, so now I have a good two-hour drive to get you back home and then start all over on our quest?”
“I’m going with you.”
“No. That isn’t even an answer to my question. No one invited you along and now I’ll have half the Sovereignty out hunting me like your brother’s kidnappers. Kidnappers! Do you get that?” I shouted.
“Nobody’s going to hunt for you,” she sighed. She opened her matching green leather purse and pulled out another sheet of paper to hand me. It was handwritten and I wondered if the girl had tried to disguise her own writing.
Know all by these presents:
The Sovereign and First Lady grant their permission for their daughter, Princess Bridget Rex, to travel with the Wizard Warrior Jackie on her quest and to join in all such adventure as such quest might bring.
This further appoints Wizard Warrior Jackie as temporary guardian of Princess Bridget Rex.
Signed, Regina Elizabeth Rex, First Lady
“This is conspicuously missing your father’s signature, which I have several copies of so I could compare it,” I said.
“Mother said you wouldn’t notice that. So, please don’t notice.” I just stared at her with my mouth open.
“Why don’t you two come and join me for a mid-morning snack,” Misty said. She had a picnic basket sitting on one of the tables in the rest area and was unpacking what looked like a lot more than a snack. Now that she mentioned it, though, I was hungry. We went to sit at the table.
“Why would you want to go on a quest with us?” I asked as I took an egg salad sandwich and a cup of hot coffee from Misty. I put the question of where hot coffee came from away from my mind. It was all a dream. I was convinced.
“He’s my brother.”
“I watched you at breakfast yesterday. You didn’t seem happy that we were going to go find him,” I said. “A little sibling rivalry going on here? Are you hoping to stop us from finding him?”
“No! The little brat is a worthless dick, but he’s my brother. I was unhappy about you being offered the reward.”
“The reward? Your brother’s hand in marriage? Believe me, that is never going to happen. What is he? Ten? No way, baby,” I laughed. Even Misty rolled her eyes at that one.
“You made that clear at the table. Then Daddy dearest offered you half the Sovereignty.”
“And you don’t want me to have half the Sovereignty,” I said. “Don’t worry. Too much paperwork. Not interested.”
“Fine, but if I bring back my brother, my father has to honor the agreement. He can’t offer me the hand of my brother in marriage! Oh, yuck! So, he’d have to offer me half the Sovereignty. And I’m pretty sure I can talk my brother out of the other half.” She set her coffee mug down with a decided thump. I glanced at it and saw that she had hot chocolate. I didn’t even see a thermos around.
“So, what you want is the Sovereignty. Why don’t you just support Valentine, marry him, and become First Lady?”
“Yu-uck! And I thought my brother would be a bad deal. Valentine is a weasel. And I’d have to be installed as First Lady for at least a year before I could poison him and get away with it. And through that whole year, I’d be losing handmaidens and pages who had to taste my food for me.” The picture she painted of poisonings and attempted murders was shocking.
“Princess,” Misty said nicely, “what skills do you have that will make you a valuable addition to our quest and not just an added burden? You have to know that Jackie has all she can do just to keep me out of danger. If she has to focus on you, either I’d get left out or she’d never be able to focus on her quest.” Nicely put. I wanted to protest that Misty was no burden, but that would contradict her argument for getting rid of Princess.
“Unlike you,” Princess said haughtily, “I’m actually trained in how to use my sword and defend my person with advanced martial arts. I have twelve other weapons concealed on my person, the greatest of which is my look of vulnerability and innocence.”
Okay. That was almost too much. Maybe it’s type-casting, but I have never met a redhead I considered either vulnerable or innocent. Think about it. Redhead. Innocent. Contradiction in terms. I swallowed the remains of my sandwich which seemed to have lasted a long time while I kept eating it. Before she could move or defend herself, I whipped the gold cord off my robe and looped it around her, holding her tight.
Princess dropped her head in submission.
“Yes, Warrior Wizard?” she said meekly.
“Now you listen carefully. If you are to join this quest, you will be the lowest person among us. If I tell you something, you do it. No questions asked. If Misty tells you to wash the dishes, you do it, immediately. If Roadkill makes you lie on the floor for the whole trip, you do it. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Warrior Wizard. I’ll be good.”
“When we enter into battle, your first responsibility is to stay safe, not to engage any enemy. When we recapture your brother, you will share the space with him and there will be no squabbling. When we return, you can make up any damn story you want to about how you rescued him and I’ll support it so you get the reward. But until that time, you do what you’re told. Understand?”
“Yes, Warrior Wizard.” I removed the rope from around her and tossed it on with the other cords. “That wasn’t fair,” she whined.
“Is there a problem over here?” a voice said approaching the table. I turned and saw a policeman, complete with Smokey the Bear hat and uniform.
“No, officer,” I said brightly. “My niece and I were just having a discussion about the merits of graduating at the top of her class. You know, kids can’t get ahead unless they apply themselves.”
“Don’t I know it. Little miss, is this your aunt?”
“Um… Yes, officer.”
“Are you traveling with her willingly?”
“Definitely.”
“I have no other concerns. I just stopped to tell you that there is a late winter storm coming toward us fast. We’re warning all travelers down off the pass and blocking traffic both directions. You folks should get a move on.” He tipped his hat and turned to find other people in the rest area.
“Let’s pack up and get moving,” I said. “I’ve already had too many storms on this trip.” Gray clouds were moving in fast and turning blacker as they blocked the sun. We ran to the car and I started it as Misty put away the picnic basket. Princess got the cat in her lap in the back seat as Roadkill took up the rest of the seat. As soon as Misty was back in the car, we turned out of the parking lot to head downhill.
Mile 540
By the time we’d gone a mile, we were being pelted with ice and snowflakes the size of baseballs. Huge wet things I was afraid would dent the car. Progress slowed until we finally came out of the storm about ten miles down from the summit. I should say that we came out of the snow. It turned to rain, if not the deluge we’d experienced at Thunder Mountain, I slowed to a crawl in order to see clearly. I confess that I was subtly shifting my glance from side to side as I watched for monsters or, worse yet, snakes.
We came out on a fairly flat straight section of highway and the rain let up enough that we could get back near the speed limit in lighter rain. That lasted about twenty more miles.
“Oh, hey!” Misty said, looking at the TripTik. “Slow down. We’re approaching a frontier.”
“A what?”
“We’re crossing into someone else’s land,” she explained. “Border patrol and customs.”
“Damn. Get out our passports. Princess, do you have a passport?” I demanded as I slowed up.
“Of course,” she answered. She dug in her leather bag and came up with a red passport, different from our blue ones. I rolled to a stop at the barrier gate and a well-armed guard approached the car. I cranked down the window.
“Passports,” the guard said. I handed the three passports to the guard. He looked at them and backed away from the car, bringing his rifle down to bear. “Please all step out of the car,” he said. There were suddenly about twenty rifles pointing at us, completely surrounding the car. I opened the door and kept my hands up where they could be seen as Princess shoved the seat forward and climbed out. Roadkill followed her. Misty and Shasta got out the other side. A more officious looking fellow came out of the guardhouse next to us. You could tell he was more important than the normal soldiers because he had a white belt that crossed his right shoulder and joined the one at his waist. I think they’re called a Sam Browne belt, but basically, he looked like an elementary school crossing guard.
He took the passports as Misty and Shasta were led around the car to join us.
“You have a diplomatic passport,” he said addressing Princess. “I assume these are just your escorts with bearer passports. To what does the land Anatnomia owe your visit?”
“As you very well know,” Princess answered, “the only way to reach our southern range is through this corner of Anatnomia. Why anybody would block the road into our own land is beyond me.”
“Well, Miss Princess Rex, I wouldn’t know about that, would I?” he sneered. “Search the vehicle for contraband!” he snapped at his soldiers. I wondered what counted as contraband here. I was pretty sure something must. I racked my brain for some instruction for my weaponry that would be effective against twenty guards and wouldn’t result in my immediate death. Mr. Officious reached over and took hold of my sword. Before it had cleared the scabbard, Roadkill started to growl and Shasta bristled. Surprisingly, he let the sword slide back into the sheath, but didn’t let go. He looked into my eyes and I saw him begin to shrink before me.
I guess the time has come when I gotta tell you a little about my eyes. This is going to be painful because it was something my mother told me when I was little. I was in maybe second grade and the teacher was giving us a diversity lesson. She had us all compare skin color so that we could see that even people we considered to be the same color we were, weren’t. Skin tones were all over the place and it didn’t matter what race we were. And then she had us compare hair color and eye color. To compare eye color, we had to line up by eye color, blue eyes first. Then we were going to all go down the row and describe each person’s eye color with a description that wasn’t just blue. She even had a box of 120 different crayons there that we could use for reference.
I was last in line and by the time I got to the first blue-eyed person to look at, everybody was laughing and having a good time. So, I stepped up to Debbie Warfield and she grinned and looked me right in the eye. I could see her eye-color change from something that was bright sky blue to a dark stormy blue and she started crying. Ms. Tomlinson, our teacher, came running over and wanted to know what I’d done to Debbie. I hadn’t done anything and Debbie just pointed at my eyes. Ms. Tomlinson turned and looked into my eyes for a long time and I felt like I was being looked at inside. I saw her eyes were kind of greenish blue and the pupils contracted and got real small.
“I see,” she said. She stood up rather stiffly and addressed the class. Everybody but me had finished going down the line. “We need to cut this lesson a little short,” she said in her kind voice. Only it sounded a little stressed. “I’ve let the time get away from me because we were having so much fun. So, return to your seats and let’s get started on our reading assignment.”
When I got home, I ran to Mommy and told her all about the girl crying when she looked at my eyes. See this is the hard part, because Mommy was really nice to me and kind and I had no idea that one day she would kill my daddy. She got a mirror and told me to look deep in my own eyes and to describe to her what color they were. I said, “Brown.”
“Look closely, now,” she said. “Tell me what you see.” I examined my eyes pretty close and maybe I saw what Debbie Warfield did. My eyes are brown, but there are streaks of black and gold shot through the irises. And as I looked, they shifted a little. Some got longer and some got shorter and then they’d pulse and go back the other way.
I was pretty confused, because at eight years old, I hadn’t really looked deeply into that many eyes. I just assumed everyone had eyes like mine, but maybe they had different colors of streaks to match the dominant color of their eyes.
“I’ll tell you something my grandma told me when I was little,” Mommy said. “Once in every seven generations or so, a woman shows up in our family with the witch-eye. I didn’t believe any of the stories she told me about what a grandmother seven generations ago had done. But she warned me and I knew when I saw my baby’s eyes that the witch-eye was present. She said some people could be bent to the will of a witch-eye and to be careful how I used it.”
I can’t tell you how I avoided looking people in the eye after that. But after a long while, nobody seemed to interact with me any different than anyone else, so I pretty much forgot about it and it’s just one of those silly family legends that every family has. I knew a kid in fourth grade who claimed to be a distant relative of Billy the Kid, for example. We’ve all got those hidden stories that are passed down through our families.
So, I just wanted my eyes to be normal eyes with no special powers and it would be too terrible to think otherwise, because if I bent a person to my will by looking into his eyes, then that night I was making out with Dan Blackwell and I looked deep into his eyes and he took me to bed and took my virginity might have all been because I made him do it, and I couldn’t stand thinking he didn’t really want to.
“We were paid,” Mr. Official said to me in a rasping voice. “Men from Victoriana came down from the pass just ten days ago. They said to watch for anyone coming with a bearer passport and stop them until they got here. The alarm went out as soon as your passport was opened. I don’t know how soon they’ll get here. You’d better leave now.” He broke away from my eyes and let go of the sword, stepping away. “They’re clear!” he called out to his men searching the car. “These aren’t the ones we want.” He handed back our passports and waved us back to the car.
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.
We didn’t waste any time getting ourselves back in the car. I checked to make sure we had everyone and the doors were all closed. As soon as the gate opened ahead of us, I headed through it.
“Turn right at the crossroad ahead,” Misty called out as she looked at the TripTik. “Here!”
I hit the brake and we pretty much drifted around the corner. The road was straight and flat and I laid on the accelerator. First, I didn’t trust the spell on that official—or whatever it was—to hold. He could be sending his soldier boys after us already. And two, if the Caesars were headed after us, I didn’t want to wait around for them.
And I really didn’t want to contemplate the power of my eyes.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
