White Collar Fic: The Princess Bride, by R. Child, Part 5
Title: The Princess Bride, by R. Child, Part 5
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Neal/Elizabeth/Peter
Spoilers: You kidding?
Content Notice: It’s White Collar vs. The Princess Bride (film). With many apologies to William Goldman…
Word Count: 3,400
Summary: Part the fifth, in which we delve into the Fire Swamp…
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
----
Prince Adler and his men rode up on horses to the clearing where, earlier, the Dread Highwayman Caffrey had defeated Jones. He slid from the back of his steed and closely inspected this latest site in his pursuit of the men who’d kidnapped the Princess Elizabeth. He got to his knees, inspected the displaced soil, got up and followed the various footprints, the broken twigs and tamped-down grass, seeing all the telltale signs of a fight.
“Someone has beaten a giant!” he pronounced to his assembled men, who made appropriately impressed faces.
Count Keller, for his part, sat serenely atop his own horse and raised an eyebrow. “You don’t say.”
“I do, indeed. But what to make of it? When added to the evidence of the great sword fight we saw earlier, it makes for a most baffling chain of events.”
Keller raised his other eyebrow and yawned. “Indeed.”
“One I’m determined to get to the bottom of. Come, we ride!” Adler said, leaping dramatically back into the saddle. “There will be great suffering in Jardin if she dies!” he said, making sure that that his best side was facing his men, and that his voice cracked with just the right amount of emotion.
----
Elizabeth struggled to keep up with Caffrey, but being knocked unconscious, nearly drowning and being eaten, the loss of sleep, and constant, abject terror of the last 24 hours had begun to take a toll. The man seemed to take pity on her when he saw her stumbling, and called a halt to their flight across the plains of Jardin. He shoved her to the ground, where she landed gracefully. “Catch your breath,” he ordered.
She peered up at him, her eyes squinting from the glare of the bright sun overhead. “If it’s ransom you’re after, whatever it is, I promise you’ll get it,” she informed him gravely.
Caffrey snorted bitterly. “And what is that worth, the promise of a woman? Don’t make me laugh.”
Elizabeth’s eyes flashed angrily at his mockery. “Whatever - I was just trying to give you a chance. In the end, it won’t matter where you take me, because there is no hunter greater than Prince Adler. He can track a falcon on a cloudy day, he’ll find you, mark my words.”
“You think your dearest love will save you?”
Elizabeth recoiled. “I never said he was my dearest love. But he will save me, that I know.”
“So you admit you do not love your betrothed?”
“What of it? He knows I don’t love him.”
“Are not capable of love, you mean.”
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes and could not keep the contempt from her voice, despite the fact she knew antagonizing this man would not be wise. “I have loved more deeply than a murderer such as you will ever understand.” She flinched as he raised a gloved hand against her, but did not turn away. He stayed his hand, but she could see that he was shaking with barely controlled fury.
“Consider that a warning, Highness,” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “Next time, I won’t be so merciful. Where I come from, there are consequences when a woman lies.”
----
Adler stood beside Taylor’s dead body and toed at it with disgust, then leant over and took up one of the wine goblets that remained on the table. “Iocaine powder - I’d stake my life on it.”
“Do tell,” Count Keller said with a bored tone, removing a glove to inspect his fingernails.
Adler met his eyes and then looked away with a smirk. He clenched his fist in front of his face and made sure he trembled with emotion just a little. “She was alive - or was an hour ago. If she is otherwise when I find her, I shall be very peevish.”
----
Elizabeth was surprised when Caffrey once again stopped; she nearly ran into the back of him. She’d fallen into a desperate rhythm of laying one foot in front of the other and was utterly exhausted, and hadn’t expected him to pay much attention to her comfort. She raised her head and saw that they had come to the edge of a steep gully.
“Rest,” Caffrey said to her, and she sank gratefully to the ground.
“I know who you are, you know.” He turned to face her. "You’re the Dread Highwayman Caffrey - your cruelty confirms it.”
Caffrey bowed. “At your service. What can I do for you?”
“You can die a thousand times, in anguish and alone!”
He laughed humorlessly. “Tsk-tsk-tsk, Highness, is that how a lady talks? Why unleash your venom upon me, a poor traveler?”
Elizabeth couldn’t keep the grief from her voice when she spoke. “You killed my love.”
Instead of denying it, he drew himself up and placed a hand on his chin thoughtfully. “That’s very possible - I kill a lot of people. Who was this love of yours? Another prince? Fat, smelly?”
“He was a stable boy. Poor and perfect. With eyes like the clear sky after a hurricane. He was traveling in a caravan when you and your men attacked, and the Dread Highwayman Caffrey leaves no survivors.”
Caffrey shrugged. “Well, it’s not like I can make exceptions. If word leaks out, then people start saying that the Dread Highwayman Caffrey has gone soft and then what’ll I do? It’ll be work, work, work, and I’ll probably have to slaughter whole villages just to regain their respect. And that’s so time consuming.”
“You scoundrel, you mock my pain!” Elizabeth cried, shocked.
“Life. Is. Pain!” Caffrey shouted, leaning over her menacingly. Seeing her cowering, he drew back and lowered his voice. “Anyone who says differently is selling something.” He turned and stepped away, began pacing in a tight circle. “But I think I remember this stable boy of yours. Maybe. This would be what - four or five years ago?”
Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears as he mentioned Neal.
“Does it bother you to hear?”
She turned her head but said nothing.
“He died well,” Caffrey continued. “That should please you. No attempts at bribery or blubbering like a babe like most do. He simply said, ‘Please...please, I need to live.’ It was the ‘please’ that I remember. I asked him what was so important to him. ‘True Love,’ he replied. That’s what caught my attention. Then he spoke of a girl of great beauty and fidelity - I can only assume he meant you.” He stopped his pacing and looked down on her. “You know, you should bless me for putting him out of his misery before he found out what you really are.”
Elizabeth surged to her feet and stepped up to him, face livid with anger. “And what am I?” she spat in his face.
He leaned forward, blue eyes cold on hers, and his words spilled out in a rush, hard, punishing. “Faithfulness he talked of, madam, your enduring faithfulness. Now tell me, when you found out he’d died, did you get engaged to your prince that same hour, or did you wait a whole week out of respect for the dead?”
Elizabeth saw red and could not suppress the shaking in her entire body. “You mocked me once,” she warned, her own voice low and dangerous. “Everything I was and everything I would ever be died that day! And you can die too for all I care!”
Then, without thinking what it meant or what she was doing, she pushed him, hard, with both her hands, and he went over the edge and into the gully below. As he fell, his voice carried up to her ears, “AS… YOOOUUU… WIIIIIISH!!!”
The words hit her like a lightning bolt - words she had not heard in half a decade, words that had so much meaning to her, and she realized, beyond reason or hope or sense, that the man she’d taken for the Dread Highwayman Caffrey was, in fact, her dearest love.
“Oh, Neal, sweetie! What have I done?” she said, and ran headlong down the steep slope before her.
Of course, she soon regretted her actions, for the slope was even steeper than she’d expected. Almost immediately, she tripped, and rolled painfully down several hundred yards before the angle evened out and she slid to a stop. She lay there, blinking up at the sky, with the wind knocked out of her, and a little in shock.
Moments later, however, a shadow passed over her that she realized belonged to her beloved Neal.
“My darling, are you all right? Can you move?”
“Move?” she asked, overjoyed and feeling no pain from her long fall. “If you want, I can fly!” she threw her arms around his neck and he leaned in and kissed her, sliding his arms around her waist.
After several minutes, they separated, and he leaned over her on his elbows, pushing the hair away from her face. He had at some point lost his mask, and she could finally see his face properly. His hair was longer than it had ever been, and he had it tied back with a leather cord at the nape of his neck. His face was leaner, and he had what looked like a three-day growth of beard on his jaw. But his eyes - his eyes she could see were those of her beloved Neal, as wide and as vast as the sky, and he looked down on her with such love and affection that she thought if she died at that very moment, she would be perfectly, transcendently happy.
“I told you I would always come for you. Why didn’t you wait?”
She could feel her cheeks color, but the answer was obvious. “Well, you were dead…”
“Death cannot stop True Love, Elizabeth. All it can do is delay it for a while.”
“I will never doubt again.”
“You will never need to,” he said and kissed her again.
Before long, their location and the lateness of the day necessitated that they move on. They ran hand-in-hand along the floor of the deep gully, but soon the distant sound of hoof beats descended to their ears.
“Oh no, it is Prince Adler,” Elizabeth fretted. “I knew there would be no stopping him. He gets so obsessed when he wants something - it’s so creepy!”
“Don’t worry, my darling, we will soon be safely in the Fire Swamp.”
Elizabeth stopped then, pulling at his hand. “We’ll never survive, Neal!”
“Come now, you’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
Located at the center of the Jardinian wasteland inexplicably named “The Meadowlands,” the Fire Swamp was a dark and mysterious place filled with terrors known and unknown. Located as it was at the extreme East of the populated parts of Jardin, it provided a natural defense against invasion from that direction. Its horrors approached the level of myth, to the point that Manhattanite parents used it to keep their children in line; “You’d best behave, my darlings, or they’ll find you buried in the Meadowlands,” was a frequent threat.
Neal and Elizabeth were not 100 yards inside the Fire Swamp before there was a strange, hollow thumping sound that seemed to be coming from beneath the ground. Its cause was unknown, but it made the very ground shudder. Suddenly, a flame spurt appeared at Elizabeth’s feet. She leapt back, but was too late as the hem of her gown had caught fire. Panicked, she fell to the ground, leaning forward to try to bat at the flames. Luckily, Neal thought quickly and, using his gloved hands and the remaining fabric of her garment, he quickly snuffed it out.
Elizabeth sat with her eyes wide, breathing heavily in shock.
“Well, that was exciting,” Neal said lightly, standing and offering her a hand to help her to her feet. “Singed a bit, were you?”
She caught onto his mood and, determined to make the best of the situation, shook her head. “Meh - I’m good. You?”
Neal shrugged. “One thing I will say, the Fire Swamp keeps you on your toes!”
They walked on, carefully picking their way through the swamp. Luckily, they encountered few flame spurts, but the ones they did were now easily recognized.
Eventually, something that was puzzling Elizabeth finally found a voice as they walked. “Tell me, my darling, how it is that you are the Dread Highwayman Caffrey, when he has been plaguing the countryside for nearly two decades?”
Neal thought a minute and then slipped his arm around her waist as they strolled along. “Ah, yes, I myself am often surprised at the way my life has turned out. What I told you earlier about saying ‘please’ was true. My story intrigued Caffrey, as did my descriptions of your beauty. That day, he looked down on me and said, ‘All right Neal, I've never had a valet, so you can try it if you'd like. I'll most likely kill you in the morning.’ For three years he said that: ‘Good night, Neal. Good work, sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning.’ It was a great time for me. I was learning to fence, fight, pick pockets, forge paintings, anything anyone would teach me. Caffrey and I eventually became friends. And then it happened.”
“What?”
“The most extraordinary thing. Caffrey had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. So he took me aside, and told me his secret.” Neal stopped walking then, and Elizabeth caught the light in his eyes as he recounted his amazing story. “’I am not the Dread Highwayman Caffrey,’ he said. ‘My name is Hale. I inherited the job from the previous Dread Highwayman Caffrey, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from was not the real Dread Highwayman Caffrey either. His name was Ford. Turns out the real Caffrey has been retired fifteen years and lives like a king down in Miami.
“He went on to explain that the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would surrender to the Dread Highwayman Neal. So we pulled into a town, hired an entirely new gang, and he stayed with me as my lieutenant, all the time calling me Caffrey. Once the gang believed, he left, and I have been Caffrey ever since. Except now that we're back together, I will retire and hand the name over to someone else. Make sense?”
Elizabeth nodded, but her head was still swimming - his tale would take some processing. She turned to continue on their way, took one step and felt the ground disappear beneath her feet.
Lightning sand! It was the second-best documented danger of the Fire Swamp, and she had stumbled into it. Luckily, she managed to close both her eyes and her mouth as she descended into the stuff, which seemed to be composed of silica so fine it was nearly a powder. She could feel it invading everything - her nostrils, her ears, her boots, every fold of exposed skin. Her panic ratcheted up as she realized how insidious it was - surely it would suffocate her, and still she seemed to be sinking further downward. She said a silent prayer that Neal would not fall prey to it, and hoped that her death would be merciful and swift.
But seconds later, she felt a strong hand grip her by the wrist. She struggled against opening her eyes, even as she twisted her hand around and grasped on to Neal's forearm. He pulled her closer to him, and she fumbled towards him with her other arm, basically crawling along his body upward and toward safety. Soon, she felt his arm around her waist again and he tugged and pulled her out of the sand. And it was a near thing, for she was nearly out of breath.
They lay on the ground beside the pit of sand, coughing and gagging against the fine powder that had invaded their noses and mouths. Elizabeth curled against Neal and let her fear and hopelessness overtake her, grasping desperately at his shirt and burying her face there. “We’ll never make it out of here,” she coughed. “We might as well die here.”
Neal sat up and pulled her to him, held her tight and planted tiny kisses along her hairline. When her trembling had ceased, he pulled her to her feet and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Nonsense, we have already succeeded,” he said, looking deeply into her eyes, and she knew he was trying to keep her calm. “Think about it - what are the three terrors of the fire swamp? One: the flame spurt. No problem. There's a popping sound whenever one happens, and we can avoid that. Two: the lightning sand, but you were clever enough to discover what that looks like, so in the future we can avoid that too!”
“But Neal, what about the R.O.U.S.'s?”
“Rodents of Unusual Size?” Neal scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. “I don’t think they exist!”
The words were barely out of his mouth before an enormous, man-sized rat leapt from out of nowhere, tackling Neal to the ground.
“Neal!” Elizabeth screamed as he tried to disengage the thing, punching it in the head desperately and kicking at its sides. Elizabeth scanned the area looking for a tree branch, a rock - anything that she might use as a weapon against it. She found an old, dried out branch nearby, about three feet long and as thick as her wrist. Rushing back to Neal's side, she hauled off and whacked the R.O.U.S. in the head with it.
Squealing in pain, the man-sized rat leapt from its position on top of Neal and turned on her, moving more quickly than she would have thought possible. She kept hitting it with the branch as she backed away, but she soon tripped over a gnarled old tree root and landed on her back, hard. She lay dazed for a second - but only for a second, for the R.O.U.S. was now on top of her, its slavering jaws grabbing onto her boot and holding her fast. She screamed, poking at the thing’s head with the end of the branch, but it would not be deterred.
Suddenly, Neal was there, tackling the creature off of her. The two of them rolled over and over, and when they stopped, the R.O.U.S. was straddling Neal. It reared its ugly head back and then sank its yellow teeth into the soft flesh of his shoulder. Neal cried out in anger and pain, but his cries were nearly drowned out by the popping and the rumbling of an impending fire spurt. Elizabeth leapt out of the way as Neal rolled over with the R.O.U.S., twice. When he came to a stop, he flung the creature onto the very spot where the fire spurt emerged. The R.O.U.S. screamed in agony, and Elizabeth was overcome with the urge to vomit as the smell of burnt rat flesh and fur reached her nostrils. Neal struggled away from the thing, and got to his feet. The R.O.U.S. was writhing in agony on the ground, its cries desperate and pained. Neal, demonstrating the mercy that Elizabeth had always known in him, unsheathed his sword and advanced on the animal, dispatching it with one, sure thrust to the heart.
He stood there, panting, blood streaming out of the bite at his shoulder, and then looked up at Elizabeth. His face was streaked with grime, blood, and sweat, but he was alive and he was here, and he was hers. She stumbled over to him and caught him as he fell to his knees. It was her turn to comfort him and she held his head to her chest and soothed him until the sun began to set and it was time for them to go.
----
To be continued… Part 6
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Neal/Elizabeth/Peter
Spoilers: You kidding?
Content Notice: It’s White Collar vs. The Princess Bride (film). With many apologies to William Goldman…
Word Count: 3,400
Summary: Part the fifth, in which we delve into the Fire Swamp…
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
----
Prince Adler and his men rode up on horses to the clearing where, earlier, the Dread Highwayman Caffrey had defeated Jones. He slid from the back of his steed and closely inspected this latest site in his pursuit of the men who’d kidnapped the Princess Elizabeth. He got to his knees, inspected the displaced soil, got up and followed the various footprints, the broken twigs and tamped-down grass, seeing all the telltale signs of a fight.
“Someone has beaten a giant!” he pronounced to his assembled men, who made appropriately impressed faces.
Count Keller, for his part, sat serenely atop his own horse and raised an eyebrow. “You don’t say.”
“I do, indeed. But what to make of it? When added to the evidence of the great sword fight we saw earlier, it makes for a most baffling chain of events.”
Keller raised his other eyebrow and yawned. “Indeed.”
“One I’m determined to get to the bottom of. Come, we ride!” Adler said, leaping dramatically back into the saddle. “There will be great suffering in Jardin if she dies!” he said, making sure that that his best side was facing his men, and that his voice cracked with just the right amount of emotion.
----
Elizabeth struggled to keep up with Caffrey, but being knocked unconscious, nearly drowning and being eaten, the loss of sleep, and constant, abject terror of the last 24 hours had begun to take a toll. The man seemed to take pity on her when he saw her stumbling, and called a halt to their flight across the plains of Jardin. He shoved her to the ground, where she landed gracefully. “Catch your breath,” he ordered.
She peered up at him, her eyes squinting from the glare of the bright sun overhead. “If it’s ransom you’re after, whatever it is, I promise you’ll get it,” she informed him gravely.
Caffrey snorted bitterly. “And what is that worth, the promise of a woman? Don’t make me laugh.”
Elizabeth’s eyes flashed angrily at his mockery. “Whatever - I was just trying to give you a chance. In the end, it won’t matter where you take me, because there is no hunter greater than Prince Adler. He can track a falcon on a cloudy day, he’ll find you, mark my words.”
“You think your dearest love will save you?”
Elizabeth recoiled. “I never said he was my dearest love. But he will save me, that I know.”
“So you admit you do not love your betrothed?”
“What of it? He knows I don’t love him.”
“Are not capable of love, you mean.”
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes and could not keep the contempt from her voice, despite the fact she knew antagonizing this man would not be wise. “I have loved more deeply than a murderer such as you will ever understand.” She flinched as he raised a gloved hand against her, but did not turn away. He stayed his hand, but she could see that he was shaking with barely controlled fury.
“Consider that a warning, Highness,” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “Next time, I won’t be so merciful. Where I come from, there are consequences when a woman lies.”
----
Adler stood beside Taylor’s dead body and toed at it with disgust, then leant over and took up one of the wine goblets that remained on the table. “Iocaine powder - I’d stake my life on it.”
“Do tell,” Count Keller said with a bored tone, removing a glove to inspect his fingernails.
Adler met his eyes and then looked away with a smirk. He clenched his fist in front of his face and made sure he trembled with emotion just a little. “She was alive - or was an hour ago. If she is otherwise when I find her, I shall be very peevish.”
----
Elizabeth was surprised when Caffrey once again stopped; she nearly ran into the back of him. She’d fallen into a desperate rhythm of laying one foot in front of the other and was utterly exhausted, and hadn’t expected him to pay much attention to her comfort. She raised her head and saw that they had come to the edge of a steep gully.
“Rest,” Caffrey said to her, and she sank gratefully to the ground.
“I know who you are, you know.” He turned to face her. "You’re the Dread Highwayman Caffrey - your cruelty confirms it.”
Caffrey bowed. “At your service. What can I do for you?”
“You can die a thousand times, in anguish and alone!”
He laughed humorlessly. “Tsk-tsk-tsk, Highness, is that how a lady talks? Why unleash your venom upon me, a poor traveler?”
Elizabeth couldn’t keep the grief from her voice when she spoke. “You killed my love.”
Instead of denying it, he drew himself up and placed a hand on his chin thoughtfully. “That’s very possible - I kill a lot of people. Who was this love of yours? Another prince? Fat, smelly?”
“He was a stable boy. Poor and perfect. With eyes like the clear sky after a hurricane. He was traveling in a caravan when you and your men attacked, and the Dread Highwayman Caffrey leaves no survivors.”
Caffrey shrugged. “Well, it’s not like I can make exceptions. If word leaks out, then people start saying that the Dread Highwayman Caffrey has gone soft and then what’ll I do? It’ll be work, work, work, and I’ll probably have to slaughter whole villages just to regain their respect. And that’s so time consuming.”
“You scoundrel, you mock my pain!” Elizabeth cried, shocked.
“Life. Is. Pain!” Caffrey shouted, leaning over her menacingly. Seeing her cowering, he drew back and lowered his voice. “Anyone who says differently is selling something.” He turned and stepped away, began pacing in a tight circle. “But I think I remember this stable boy of yours. Maybe. This would be what - four or five years ago?”
Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears as he mentioned Neal.
“Does it bother you to hear?”
She turned her head but said nothing.
“He died well,” Caffrey continued. “That should please you. No attempts at bribery or blubbering like a babe like most do. He simply said, ‘Please...please, I need to live.’ It was the ‘please’ that I remember. I asked him what was so important to him. ‘True Love,’ he replied. That’s what caught my attention. Then he spoke of a girl of great beauty and fidelity - I can only assume he meant you.” He stopped his pacing and looked down on her. “You know, you should bless me for putting him out of his misery before he found out what you really are.”
Elizabeth surged to her feet and stepped up to him, face livid with anger. “And what am I?” she spat in his face.
He leaned forward, blue eyes cold on hers, and his words spilled out in a rush, hard, punishing. “Faithfulness he talked of, madam, your enduring faithfulness. Now tell me, when you found out he’d died, did you get engaged to your prince that same hour, or did you wait a whole week out of respect for the dead?”
Elizabeth saw red and could not suppress the shaking in her entire body. “You mocked me once,” she warned, her own voice low and dangerous. “Everything I was and everything I would ever be died that day! And you can die too for all I care!”
Then, without thinking what it meant or what she was doing, she pushed him, hard, with both her hands, and he went over the edge and into the gully below. As he fell, his voice carried up to her ears, “AS… YOOOUUU… WIIIIIISH!!!”
The words hit her like a lightning bolt - words she had not heard in half a decade, words that had so much meaning to her, and she realized, beyond reason or hope or sense, that the man she’d taken for the Dread Highwayman Caffrey was, in fact, her dearest love.
“Oh, Neal, sweetie! What have I done?” she said, and ran headlong down the steep slope before her.
Of course, she soon regretted her actions, for the slope was even steeper than she’d expected. Almost immediately, she tripped, and rolled painfully down several hundred yards before the angle evened out and she slid to a stop. She lay there, blinking up at the sky, with the wind knocked out of her, and a little in shock.
Moments later, however, a shadow passed over her that she realized belonged to her beloved Neal.
“My darling, are you all right? Can you move?”
“Move?” she asked, overjoyed and feeling no pain from her long fall. “If you want, I can fly!” she threw her arms around his neck and he leaned in and kissed her, sliding his arms around her waist.
After several minutes, they separated, and he leaned over her on his elbows, pushing the hair away from her face. He had at some point lost his mask, and she could finally see his face properly. His hair was longer than it had ever been, and he had it tied back with a leather cord at the nape of his neck. His face was leaner, and he had what looked like a three-day growth of beard on his jaw. But his eyes - his eyes she could see were those of her beloved Neal, as wide and as vast as the sky, and he looked down on her with such love and affection that she thought if she died at that very moment, she would be perfectly, transcendently happy.
“I told you I would always come for you. Why didn’t you wait?”
She could feel her cheeks color, but the answer was obvious. “Well, you were dead…”
“Death cannot stop True Love, Elizabeth. All it can do is delay it for a while.”
“I will never doubt again.”
“You will never need to,” he said and kissed her again.
Before long, their location and the lateness of the day necessitated that they move on. They ran hand-in-hand along the floor of the deep gully, but soon the distant sound of hoof beats descended to their ears.
“Oh no, it is Prince Adler,” Elizabeth fretted. “I knew there would be no stopping him. He gets so obsessed when he wants something - it’s so creepy!”
“Don’t worry, my darling, we will soon be safely in the Fire Swamp.”
Elizabeth stopped then, pulling at his hand. “We’ll never survive, Neal!”
“Come now, you’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
Located at the center of the Jardinian wasteland inexplicably named “The Meadowlands,” the Fire Swamp was a dark and mysterious place filled with terrors known and unknown. Located as it was at the extreme East of the populated parts of Jardin, it provided a natural defense against invasion from that direction. Its horrors approached the level of myth, to the point that Manhattanite parents used it to keep their children in line; “You’d best behave, my darlings, or they’ll find you buried in the Meadowlands,” was a frequent threat.
Neal and Elizabeth were not 100 yards inside the Fire Swamp before there was a strange, hollow thumping sound that seemed to be coming from beneath the ground. Its cause was unknown, but it made the very ground shudder. Suddenly, a flame spurt appeared at Elizabeth’s feet. She leapt back, but was too late as the hem of her gown had caught fire. Panicked, she fell to the ground, leaning forward to try to bat at the flames. Luckily, Neal thought quickly and, using his gloved hands and the remaining fabric of her garment, he quickly snuffed it out.
Elizabeth sat with her eyes wide, breathing heavily in shock.
“Well, that was exciting,” Neal said lightly, standing and offering her a hand to help her to her feet. “Singed a bit, were you?”
She caught onto his mood and, determined to make the best of the situation, shook her head. “Meh - I’m good. You?”
Neal shrugged. “One thing I will say, the Fire Swamp keeps you on your toes!”
They walked on, carefully picking their way through the swamp. Luckily, they encountered few flame spurts, but the ones they did were now easily recognized.
Eventually, something that was puzzling Elizabeth finally found a voice as they walked. “Tell me, my darling, how it is that you are the Dread Highwayman Caffrey, when he has been plaguing the countryside for nearly two decades?”
Neal thought a minute and then slipped his arm around her waist as they strolled along. “Ah, yes, I myself am often surprised at the way my life has turned out. What I told you earlier about saying ‘please’ was true. My story intrigued Caffrey, as did my descriptions of your beauty. That day, he looked down on me and said, ‘All right Neal, I've never had a valet, so you can try it if you'd like. I'll most likely kill you in the morning.’ For three years he said that: ‘Good night, Neal. Good work, sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning.’ It was a great time for me. I was learning to fence, fight, pick pockets, forge paintings, anything anyone would teach me. Caffrey and I eventually became friends. And then it happened.”
“What?”
“The most extraordinary thing. Caffrey had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. So he took me aside, and told me his secret.” Neal stopped walking then, and Elizabeth caught the light in his eyes as he recounted his amazing story. “’I am not the Dread Highwayman Caffrey,’ he said. ‘My name is Hale. I inherited the job from the previous Dread Highwayman Caffrey, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from was not the real Dread Highwayman Caffrey either. His name was Ford. Turns out the real Caffrey has been retired fifteen years and lives like a king down in Miami.
“He went on to explain that the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would surrender to the Dread Highwayman Neal. So we pulled into a town, hired an entirely new gang, and he stayed with me as my lieutenant, all the time calling me Caffrey. Once the gang believed, he left, and I have been Caffrey ever since. Except now that we're back together, I will retire and hand the name over to someone else. Make sense?”
Elizabeth nodded, but her head was still swimming - his tale would take some processing. She turned to continue on their way, took one step and felt the ground disappear beneath her feet.
Lightning sand! It was the second-best documented danger of the Fire Swamp, and she had stumbled into it. Luckily, she managed to close both her eyes and her mouth as she descended into the stuff, which seemed to be composed of silica so fine it was nearly a powder. She could feel it invading everything - her nostrils, her ears, her boots, every fold of exposed skin. Her panic ratcheted up as she realized how insidious it was - surely it would suffocate her, and still she seemed to be sinking further downward. She said a silent prayer that Neal would not fall prey to it, and hoped that her death would be merciful and swift.
But seconds later, she felt a strong hand grip her by the wrist. She struggled against opening her eyes, even as she twisted her hand around and grasped on to Neal's forearm. He pulled her closer to him, and she fumbled towards him with her other arm, basically crawling along his body upward and toward safety. Soon, she felt his arm around her waist again and he tugged and pulled her out of the sand. And it was a near thing, for she was nearly out of breath.
They lay on the ground beside the pit of sand, coughing and gagging against the fine powder that had invaded their noses and mouths. Elizabeth curled against Neal and let her fear and hopelessness overtake her, grasping desperately at his shirt and burying her face there. “We’ll never make it out of here,” she coughed. “We might as well die here.”
Neal sat up and pulled her to him, held her tight and planted tiny kisses along her hairline. When her trembling had ceased, he pulled her to her feet and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Nonsense, we have already succeeded,” he said, looking deeply into her eyes, and she knew he was trying to keep her calm. “Think about it - what are the three terrors of the fire swamp? One: the flame spurt. No problem. There's a popping sound whenever one happens, and we can avoid that. Two: the lightning sand, but you were clever enough to discover what that looks like, so in the future we can avoid that too!”
“But Neal, what about the R.O.U.S.'s?”
“Rodents of Unusual Size?” Neal scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. “I don’t think they exist!”
The words were barely out of his mouth before an enormous, man-sized rat leapt from out of nowhere, tackling Neal to the ground.
“Neal!” Elizabeth screamed as he tried to disengage the thing, punching it in the head desperately and kicking at its sides. Elizabeth scanned the area looking for a tree branch, a rock - anything that she might use as a weapon against it. She found an old, dried out branch nearby, about three feet long and as thick as her wrist. Rushing back to Neal's side, she hauled off and whacked the R.O.U.S. in the head with it.
Squealing in pain, the man-sized rat leapt from its position on top of Neal and turned on her, moving more quickly than she would have thought possible. She kept hitting it with the branch as she backed away, but she soon tripped over a gnarled old tree root and landed on her back, hard. She lay dazed for a second - but only for a second, for the R.O.U.S. was now on top of her, its slavering jaws grabbing onto her boot and holding her fast. She screamed, poking at the thing’s head with the end of the branch, but it would not be deterred.
Suddenly, Neal was there, tackling the creature off of her. The two of them rolled over and over, and when they stopped, the R.O.U.S. was straddling Neal. It reared its ugly head back and then sank its yellow teeth into the soft flesh of his shoulder. Neal cried out in anger and pain, but his cries were nearly drowned out by the popping and the rumbling of an impending fire spurt. Elizabeth leapt out of the way as Neal rolled over with the R.O.U.S., twice. When he came to a stop, he flung the creature onto the very spot where the fire spurt emerged. The R.O.U.S. screamed in agony, and Elizabeth was overcome with the urge to vomit as the smell of burnt rat flesh and fur reached her nostrils. Neal struggled away from the thing, and got to his feet. The R.O.U.S. was writhing in agony on the ground, its cries desperate and pained. Neal, demonstrating the mercy that Elizabeth had always known in him, unsheathed his sword and advanced on the animal, dispatching it with one, sure thrust to the heart.
He stood there, panting, blood streaming out of the bite at his shoulder, and then looked up at Elizabeth. His face was streaked with grime, blood, and sweat, but he was alive and he was here, and he was hers. She stumbled over to him and caught him as he fell to his knees. It was her turn to comfort him and she held his head to her chest and soothed him until the sun began to set and it was time for them to go.
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To be continued… Part 6