Gretchen sits at Rumple's table with a cup of tea, now cold, before her. Her eyes are swollen and she's shaking, because next door, her daughter is packing a bag to go—who knows where—and her husband is hunched over a map at their kitchen table, studying a route to the next county, where he plans to hide Morraine. It's been four days since the "recruiters" arrived; they will be leaving in two more, with teenagers in tow.
Gretchen and Rumple have talked themselves hoarse. All that is left now is to drink tea and wait. The cat sits on the table, her paws stretched across Gretchen's arm, her head resting on those paws. She's never sat on the table before; she knows it's not allowed; but as Gretchen scratches the cat's ears, Rumple remains silent.
Suddenly Morraine and Lucas appear in the open doorway. Lucas looks stunned. As Morraine rushes in and kneels at her mother's side, Lucas steps aside to reveal a tall, muscular man in a red uniform standing behind him. The soldier's brass buttons gleam in the sunlight as he removes his metal helmet and waits politely outside. "Gret, Rumple," Lucas announces in a hushed tone, "this is Lieutenant Fendral of the Royal Home Guard."
Rumple fumbles for his cane and stands. "Bae's Fendral?"
The guardsman grins now, his body relaxing as he steps inside, assured he's welcome. "Aye. Bae's Fendral. You must be his father." He offers his hand and Rumple shakes it. Then the knight says something that sets Rumple back on his heels: "I appreciate you allowing your son to join our ranks. He's a hard worker, a fine lad and a credit to this village. Thank you, sir."
Sir! Rumple finds his voice. "Uhm, would you care for a cup of tea, Lieutenant?"
The knight accepts the mug and drinks deep. "I'm sorry it took me so long. His Highness sent me out on the same day he received your letter, but I rode first to Faysea to deliver messages to Duke Cedric and his successor."
"Successor?" Gretchen echoes. "Has the Duke died?"
The guard dimples. "Let's say he took an early retirement for the good of his health. The new Duke's first act was to update this duchy's conscription law, to bring it into compliance with the kingdom's. No one under the age of eighteen will be drafted."
As Morraine and her parents cheer, Fendral fishes a scroll from his pouch. "This one," he unrolls the scroll to show them, "the sheriff will be ordered to post in the town center. It's a declaration of the new law, signed by His Majesty and His Grace." Fendral drinks his tea as he gives Rumple and Morraine a chance to read the scroll before he rolls it back up and replaces it in his pouch. He glances at Lucas. "If you'll point me to the sheriff's office?"
"Gladly."
Fendral fishes a sealed envelope from his pouch and presents it to Rumple. "This is for you, sir."
Rumple recognizes the handwriting on the front of the envelope; he doesn't need the royal seal on the back to inform him of the sender's identity. He touches the ink that bears his scrawled name—spelled correctly. He barely hears the knight bid him and the ladies farewell, nor Gretchen invite Fendral to return after his visit to the sheriff. "You'll be hungry and tired, I'm sure," she suggests. "Let us make you comfortable tonight."
"Aye," the knight agrees. "My horse needs rest. But at first light I must return to Avonlea. Our scouts report the ogres at the edge of the border."
Rumple gathers his wits and bows. "Thank you, Lieutenant Fendral."
The guard returns the bow. "It's been an honor, sir."
As Lucas leads the knight away, Gretchen leads her daughter away. "We have a supper to cook. Bring that leg of mutton up from the smokehouse, and I'll need to send your father to the Hog's Head for a small keg of ale. . . . You'll come to supper, Rumple. I'll send Morraine over when it's ready."
The guests gone, Rumple carries his letter to the rocking chair at the hearth. Midnight hops down from the table and assumes her usual position sleeping on Rumple's feet. He opens the envelope with care not to rip it, because paper is scarce and Belle fills all available space.
"Dear Rumple." For months now, she's begun her letters this way. "As you can well imagine, I was shocked—horrified—furious! To learn what Cedric has done in my father's name. Please believe me when I say with all my heart that His Majesty did not authorize, would never authorize, this 'emergency conscription' law and had no knowledge of it. Why, he would rather pick up a sword himself and run to the front lines before he would allow children to be drafted! As soon as I received your letter, I took it to him and he immediately summoned his generals, instructing them to search their ranks for any underage recruits, and pay them a gold coin each and send them home. Whereupon my father then summoned his legal counsel, instructed them to draft an ironclad new law prohibiting any county within the kingdom from altering the draft law in any way, at penalty of deposing. And then His Majesty sent a small party from the Home Guard to Faysea, to enforce the new law. By now you will have heard the outcome.
"I promise you, my dear Rumple, this will never happen again. Please tell your village that your children are safe—from conscription, at least. I wish I could promise the same for the ogres, but we are losing ground and lives, and I fear that the outcome is beyond our control.
"I wish you to know that whatever happens in this war, I will do all in my power to keep your son safe while he is with us. He is a favorite here and has done much good in teaching the children to read. You can be proud.
"Please write me again so that I may know the children of Ramsgate are safe, and that you are well. I shall have a new book to share with you when Baelfire visits home again next, a volume I picked up in market yesterday called Song of the Nibelungs. Quite exciting. I thank you for the Book of the Marvels of the World that you sent to me last. I have not quite finished it but am enjoying the writer's travel adventures immensely. I hope that someday we may discuss our readings by means other than letters. I find that although our tastes differ, we share the same ear for a well-turned phrase. I should also like to meet the cat of which your son speaks so fondly.
"Take care, my friend, and write soon, please.
"Belle"
His letters to her, with the exception of the most recent, bearing the news of Cedric's draft law, are never written in haste. He takes great pains with his handwriting as well as his word choice, concerned that he will overstep his bounds and offend her. But for one night only he has a messenger available, so he dashes off a short letter of gratitude (is it proper to ask her to convey his thanks to the King? Or is that too forward?) and takes it with him to the celebratory supper at Lucas'. He writes a note to Bae as well. Fendral is not at all inconvenienced to deliver two letters. His heart pounding, Rumple dares to ask the knight for his impressions of the royal family, and there's a twinkle in Fendral's eye as he relates some stories—most of which seem to feature the Princess.
Well, after all, it was probably from her own hands that Fendral received the letter that now rests in the special basket on Rumple's mantle.
Belle's letters change as the seasons do. They become more contemplative, more focused on news of the war and analyses of the books of warfare she's reading. She sends those books to Rumple to gain his impression, hoping that he'll find an idea she's missed. No human army has ever won a war against ogres, only an insignificant battle here and there.
The letters increase in frequency as they find more books, talk to more people, share even the most farfetched rumors; they study all that is known about ogre anatomy, psychology and sociology. Rumple gathers the few veterans living in the village and pumps them for information. It's precious little, of course, and mostly conjecture, since few humans have come in close contact with the flesh-eating giants.
Giants—it occurs to Rumple as he lies in his bed one night, listening to the cat prowl the house, that at one time there was a race of giants. He's seen the archaeological evidence of them in his travels while in the army. They don't exist any more; it's said that one of them once befriended a human, who then betrayed the entire race in order to steal their treasure. Rumple wonders if the ogres are deformed offspring of the giants, or perhaps a cursed band of giants. He begins to read everything he can find about giants. Again, it's little, because that race had kept themselves isolated, but they did keep records, mostly about their crops, and some of those records have been retrieved. Through her father Belle secures those records.
"The giants had two good eyes," Rumple writes. "We know that ogres can't see at all. They depend upon hearing almost exclusively; scent, to a lesser extent. That fact has saved more human armies than any act of bravery or strategy. Their hides are impervious to swords and arrows; only striking them in the eye will kill them. Unfortunately, few archers have that level of skill, and even fewer can stay alive long enough to get close enough to aim accurately."
"We know the giants looked very much like humans," Belle writes. "They were social, living in families and villages, as we do, and they wore complete sets of clothes, not the loin cloths that ogres wear. They were dedicated farmers and ate no meat—a far cry from their ogre offspring (if the species are related)." Rumple can imagine her chuckling as she wrote, "They must have had some huge farms to keep those big gizzards filled!"
"There seem to have been only male giants," Rumple writes. "No one knows how they populated. There are female ogres; they fight as viciously as the males and are just as large."
"The giants were never involved in any wars, as far as we can ascertain," Belle writes. "No weapons were found in their stores, only farming tools."
"Ogres prefer to fight bare-handed. It excites them to tease their food before they consume it." Rumple almost writes like a cat, but he refuses to dignify the ogres by comparing them to his little fluffy walking mousetrap. "When they do use weapons, it's all power-driven: boulders, fighting sticks, catapults. Or they'll just step on a human. Arrows and swords are too refined for them. Their breath alone can knock a man off his feet. Their growls are so loud they can deafen a man. The smell, too, is overpowering. They never bathe."
"Giants not only bathed, they invented a sort of tooth powder. Their dental care was more advanced than humans', even. They could read and write and fancied music, even wrote songs. We've recovered some of their written music. Interestingly, the songs contain notes that when played, produce no sound. How odd! But then, I've heard some very strange music in my travels, so no accounting for taste," Belle writes.
"Ogres don't have the intelligence for anything beyond a primitive form of communication. Grunts and gestures, mostly. Even my cat can communicate better than an ogre can."
"Did you know that ogres never fight during a rainstorm? And in fact if they're in the middle of battle and it starts to rain, unless it's just a light spring rain, they'll retreat and wait for clear skies before they attack again. Our generals think the ogres must be superstitious, believing that rain will bring bad luck, or perhaps it's part of their theology, like some of the ancient cultures who believed that weather was controlled by gods and in order to get the weather you want—rain for your crops or sunny skies for your journeys—you need to make a sacrifice to the right god. Some of our generals are superstitious themselves (I know one who wears his tunic inside out when he goes into battle).
"I don't accept either the superstition theory or the theology theory, because nothing in our troops' observations of ogres suggest that they hold any other superstition, nor have they ever been seen praying, building an altar, making a sacrifice—in fact, I doubt if ogres are even imaginative enough to be superstitious or religious. Still, I have no idea why they avoid rain. If only we could communicate with them or if they left written records. Even drawings on a cave wall would help us to understand them. They're a very curious species, Rumple, very curious."
"When I was in the army" (he wants to be completely honest with her, so his conscience demands that he add in the short time I was there or before I deserted, but enough selfishness lives in his heart that he craves her favorable opinion. Besides, if he scared her away by revealing his past to her, their correspondence would cease, and any good idea that might spring of their continuing exchange would never come to fruition, would it? So in the interest of ending the war sooner, yes, in the interest of peace, he decides to withhold his secrets from her). "When I was in the army," he writes, "we too noticed the ogres' reaction to rainstorms. But what we saw was that the rain itself didn't seem to upset them—they would retreat at the start of rain, but it was only when thunder struck that they ran for cover. If they are, as your generals say, superstitious, it must be some belief about thunder, not rain."
"Very interesting observation in your last letter, Rumple. I have been turning it over and over in my mind; something about it makes my thoughts itch. One of my mother's maids is terrified by thunder (not that she resembles an ogre in any other way!) and will bury her head beneath a pillow at the first boom, no matter how distant and faint. There is no rhyme or reason to it, but she trembles so you'd think she had seen a demon. We have tried to cure her with warm milk and soft music, but to no avail. Not that I would want to offer warm milk to ogres! Let them continue to quake, if indeed thunder causes them irrational dread. We need any advantage we can get. It's a pity we can't harness thunder like the gods of old and drive the ogres from our lands with it, but I suppose if we could, we would drive ourselves insane in the process.
"All this itching is annoying!
"When your son goes home next, I shall send along a book about ancient beliefs. I don't suppose it will reveal anything we can use against the ogres, but you may find it entertaining. Baelfire did when he read it. Have I mentioned what a fine lad he is? You have every right to be proud. But it's not surprising, I think, because whenever he speaks of you, it's obvious he has a fine papa.
"But as I was about to say—isn't it interesting? Even though we have only paper and ink passing between us, I often feel as though we are speaking. As I was saying, it's revealed a flaw in us humans that we know so little about ogres. We seem to know far more about unicorns than we do ogres! Is it, I wonder, because of our attraction to what we think beautiful and our suspicion of what we find ugly? Or is it that we study the things we can overpower?
"We can't overpower them, even our superior minds and weapons are not enough to overcome their size and their viciousness. We can't even negotiate with them or buy our way out of this war. Rumple, do you think it's hopeless? Is the only answer to run?"
"Sweetheart, please don't lose—" he starts to write, then he draws back in horror. Gods! What's wrong with him that he dares, even if it's just in his thoughts, to refer to her so familiarly? He tries again. "To run has been the response of other kingdoms to ogre threats. The problem with that solution is that ogres are not apparently after land—they build no homes. They're not particularly interested in resources, other than water and livestock. They don't farm and they don't value gold. They come after us for one reason only: as a food supply. They pursue us just as we pursue fish and venison. We are, apparently, a delicacy. In fact, a successful ogre war party will save the youngest human captives to be served to the biggest ogre." Should he be writing so frankly to a princess? He tears up his letter and starts again, then changes his mind and returns to the frank speech. Open and direct communication is necessary if they are to uncover a solution.
"Do not give up hope, Belle."
"Don't stop searching, Rumple. We'll find a way."