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  To Robert C. O’Brien,

  Samuel Shellabarger, Stephen King,

  Susan Fromberg Schaeffer,

  Lee Smith, Marge Piercy,

  George R. R. Martin,

  and all the other writers

  who have held me enthralled.

  FROM THE FAN PUBLICATION THE WORLD OF SWORDS AND SHADOWS

  R. M. HALDON RELIES ON TEENAGE RESEARCHER AS HE WRITES EYES OF THE FOREST

  Have you ever loved a story so much that you dreamed of becoming part of it?

  For Bridget S. (she asked us not to use her full last name), what for most people is just a dream has become her reality. The now-seventeen-year-old was only twelve when she met R. M. Haldon at a signing, where she impressed him with her encyclopedic knowledge of his series. Haldon hired her to create a database containing Swords and Shadows’ myriad details.

  When Haldon recently mentioned Bridget at a fan convention, ardent aficionados wanted to know more about her work with the master.

  We reached out to Bridget by email to talk about her collaboration with Haldon, how she keeps track of all those details, and why she thinks the books are better than the TV series.

  What’s it like to work with R. M. Haldon?

  It’s pretty much all done by email. He sends me questions, like asking if he’s mentioned any heraldry with nine-pointed stars, or what he’s written about a particular king. Sometimes I ask him questions, too. Like when one character’s death was not depicted on the page, I asked if he was really dead.

  And what was his answer?

  I’m afraid my lips are sealed.

  How do you keep track of all the details?

  I approach it one page at a time, sorting out where everything belongs.

  How many times have you read the books?

  To be honest, I’ve lost count.

  Is it hard juggling your work for Haldon as well as schoolwork?

  I’m a good student, and I’ve kept up my grades. That’s one of the agreements I made with my dad before he let me do this. I have to maintain a 3.5 average. I’ve never gotten below 3.8.

  What do you think of the TV show?

  The TV show’s good, of course, at times even great. But because of the limitations of TV, they’ve had to compress storylines or even cut entire subplots. And for me, it’s the details that make the books so good.

  When do you think we’ll finally see Eyes of the Forest?

  He’s doing the best he can, but it’s a huge task. I’m sure when we finally see it, it will be amazing.

  I don’t understand fans who have turned against him because the last book will publish later than originally planned. Even if there’s never an end to the series, I don’t care. It will never take away those hours of pleasure the books provided for all of us. I’m just thankful he’s given us what he has.

  BOB

  The Gun

  The gun looked real. No orange tip, no obvious seams where molded plastic pieces had been glued together.

  Although who was Bob kidding? He could tell a dirk from a stiletto, but modern weapons were a mystery.

  Besides, the important thing about this gun was that it was pointed at his chest. The end of the barrel was just a few inches from his heart. Adrenaline jolted through him.

  “Get in the trunk,” the young man ordered.

  Bob raised his hands in a placating gesture. “Please, Derrick. I just—”

  “Shut up,” Derrick barked. “I don’t want to hear another word out of you, understand?”

  “But—”

  The word hadn’t even left Bob’s mouth before the butt of the gun connected with his temple.

  Bob’s last, half-formed thought was that the gun certainly felt real.

  BRIDGET

  Compelled to Change by an Outside Force

  “Queen Jeyne regarded the assassin,” a voice murmured in Bridget’s left ear. “‘You must find the babe, and you must kill it. Or you and your family will die screaming.’”

  Belatedly, Bridget realized Mr. Manning was eyeing her. She straightened up and looked at him attentively. She resisted the urge to check if her hair completely covered the single earbud and the short stretch of wire that disappeared under the collar of her shirt. Normally it wasn’t hard to listen to an audiobook and a teacher simultaneously, but physics was sometimes challenging.

  “While it’s true that a falling apple got Isaac Newton thinking about gravity,” Mr. Manning said, “there’s no evidence one hit him on the head. But he did start wondering why apples always fall down, rather than sideways or even up.”

  He still seemed focused on Bridget, so she tried to look intent as he explained how Newton had postulated that everything in the universe was attracted to everything else in the universe. Calculating the degree of attraction required a complicated formula, but it basically depended on how far apart the two objects were, as well as their mass.

  Walker’s stage whisper came from the last row, perfectly pitched to reach the other students but not Mr. Manning. “If that’s true, then how come I’m not attracted to fat girls?”

  As the offensive comment earned him a few snorts, Bridget exchanged an eye roll with Ajay, one row over.

  Sensing trouble, Mr. Manning began to roam the aisles as he talked about mass and universal gravitation. Bridget’s attention soon returned to the fine thread of sound connecting her to another, far more interesting, world.

  The audiobook’s narrator had moved on to the hunt for the baby. In her mind’s eye, Bridget was beside the assassin as he snuck down an alley. Together they looked up, trying to spot foot- and handholds in the rough wall. Once he climbed into the attic room, the assassin planned to kill Jancy, the newborn baby now lying in the arms of her mother, a serving girl named Margarit. It was Margarit’s misfortune that one night, nine months ago, she’d caught the king’s eye. And that a seer had prophesied one of the king’s children would grow up to overthrow him.

  The only solution seemed to be to order the murder of his own offspring, but the king had balked. When it came to his illegitimate children, Queen Jeyne was not nearly as squeamish.

  “Newton began developing the laws of motion when he was only twenty-three. Just six years older than you guys,” Mr. Manning said. “Derrick, can you tell me the first law of motion?” He liked to randomly call on students.

  Derrick, a tall, skinny guy with a bad complexion, straightened up. Bridget had never talked to him, but she knew who he was. Everyone at school did—for all the wrong reasons.

  “Basically, it says a body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion, unless they are compelled to change by an outside force.”

  Walker made a sotto voce comment about bodies in motion, but Bridget paid no attention. The book was approaching one of her favorite scenes. The voice in her ear painted a picture of a cramped room, barely big enough to hold a straw-stuffed mattress. The low ceiling
forced the assassin to stoop as he crept forward. The image was so vivid that Bridget reflexively hunched her shoulders. On the bed a sleeping Margarit lay curled around her baby. She was a long-legged, milk-white girl of some six-and-ten years. A healthy wench, to look at her. At least, the narrator warned, she would be until the assassin’s dagger entered her heart.

  A dagger. Was this dagger in the database? Bridget jotted in the notebook hidden under her classroom notes. R. M. Haldon’s fantasies were famous for the wide variety of weapons the characters wielded, from dirks to double-bladed axes to the misericorde, a long narrow knife used to deliver a merciful death to gravely wounded knights.

  Even though she was focused on the details, the overall story still enthralled Bridget. It didn’t matter that she’d heard or read it more than a dozen times before. That she knew how the assassin’s mission would fail, or how the blind seer’s prophecy would come true in surprising ways.

  Bridget was so enraptured that she didn’t notice Mr. Manning had stopped speaking. Didn’t glimpse him creeping up behind her. Didn’t hear Ajay’s frantic throat clearing.

  And then the teacher’s fingers plucked away her earbud. She let out a shocked bleat as he held it out of reach, the wire stretched tight.

  “Hand me your phone,” Mr. Manning ordered.

  She slipped her phone from her pocket. In order to give it to him, she had to pop the earbud wire from the jack. When she did, the narrator’s plummy tones suddenly filled the classroom.

  His dagger was poised to plunge into the sleeping girl, when to his surprise, he saw a knife glinting in her left hand. The blade was as thin as she was. Then the point was under his chin, pressing his head up.

  “Drop it,” Margarit said calmly. When he did not comply, she twisted her own blade. The babe whimpered as a trickle of blood, looking more black than red, dripped onto its skin. She whispered, “Sleep, Jancy.”

  The assassin—

  Mr. Manning stabbed a button on her phone, and it mercifully fell silent. “Was that King of Swords?” he asked, incredulous. It was clear he’d expected to hear a popular song, not a book published before Bridget was born.

  Its age didn’t stop anyone from enjoying it now. Haldon lived in a Portland suburb, but people all over the world had read King of Swords, its sequels, or the graphic novel adaption, or at least seen the spin-off TV show.

  Bridget nodded. Her cheeks were on fire. She cursed her redhead’s complexion for betraying her. She’d been caught on her phone before, but at least then no one had known exactly what she was listening to. Were people now going to lump her in with Derrick, known school-wide as the weird loner who spent his weekends live-action role-playing—LARPing—in a game inspired by Swords and Shadows? Because while it was mostly fine to be a fan, there was an unspoken line, and once you were perceived to have crossed it, you became a socially inept, geeky pariah.

  Behind her, Walker was saying something about “queen of kooks,” but Bridget ignored him.

  She sat in miserable silence until class ended and Mr. Manning handed her phone back. As she gathered her things, Ajay leaned over.

  “All that trouble just for a book?” He raised one eyebrow, but his dark eyes were friendly. Whenever Mr. Manning or Walker was being unbelievably annoying, they would trade glances and the occasional whisper.

  “It’s not just a book.” She lowered her voice as Derrick walked by. She was relieved that he wasn’t seeking her out. “It’s King of Swords by R. M. Haldon.”

  “Those books always look so thick.” With his fingers, Ajay measured a space about four inches high. “And I’m not a big reader.”

  “You haven’t even seen the TV show?”

  He shrugged.

  “You have no idea what you’re missing.”

  “Want to fill me in over lunch?”

  For a moment, Bridget forgot about the assassin, Margarit, and Jancy. She forgot to think at all. There was only Ajay, standing close enough she was aware of the warmth emanating from his skin and the faint smell of ginger on his clothes. Ajay, with his thick black brows and friendly dark eyes. Ajay, who had been whispering little asides to her all fall. Ajay, who was now shifting from foot to foot, waiting for her answer.

  If she were a character, what would she do? Simper? Flirt? Turn down Ajay and leave him disconsolate? More than nearly anyone in the world, Bridget could imagine how she might handle this situation if it were fictional.

  But it wasn’t. And she wasn’t a queen or a peasant girl or a courtesan. She was just Bridget. And all she could think of to say was a faint, “Sure.”

  BOB

  How Far Would He Make It?

  Bob’s eyes fluttered open. Someone had shouted.

  It might have been him.

  His head hurt. With effort, he traced the memory back. Derrick had hurt him. Derrick.

  Was his skull broken? With a groan, Bob pushed himself up on one elbow. He was in a bed in a room he didn’t recognize. He stared in horror at the stains obscuring the pillowcase’s tiny faded blue flowers. Blood. His blood.

  Gritting his teeth, he touched his scalp. The wound was about an inch long, just above his temple. He pressed his fingers on his crew cut, tacky with blood. The skin had been split, but the skull underneath seemed intact.

  A surge of relief rolled over him, followed immediately by a pulse of anxiety. What if he’d just exposed the wound to new germs? What if that half-formed scab was the only thing protecting him from a nasty infection right next to his brain? Back in the Middle Ages, you might not die from the battlefield wound, but from the infection that followed.

  His stomach roiled as he thought of something else. He’d shouted as he woke. What if Derrick came back and hurt him again?

  Bob strained his ears, but heard nothing. After pushing himself to a sitting position, he looked around. He was in a small bedroom, about twelve by fourteen feet. The walls were yellow pine, dotted with brown knotholes. The door was closed. The fir floor was bare.

  Bob still couldn’t believe what had happened. Derrick snarling at him to get in the trunk. The Is that real? gun that now seemed likely to be. The sickening crunch against his skull as he felt his bones turn to jelly. The engulfing darkness.

  Bob was trembling, and it wasn’t just from the chilly air. Things were horribly wrong.

  When he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, there was a metallic clatter. Clamped around his ankles, over his socks, was what looked like a pair of handcuffs connected with a chain. A six-foot-long plastic-coated cable had been threaded through the cuff around his right ankle. The other end was looped around the leg of a desk a few feet away. The desk, made of aluminum and plastic, looked incongruously modern in the otherwise rustic setting. Under the desk was a built-in treadmill.

  Bob was still wearing the same clothes in which he’d been taken. The same clothes he always wore. A plain black T-shirt and blue jeans. But what about his scarf? A second of panic before his fingers found it, still around his neck. No coat. His old white Nikes were nowhere in sight. Without the blanket’s warmth, the cold was already sinking into his marrow.

  In front of the treadmill desk, the single window was framed by white curtains. Outside, an expanse of white snow and massive evergreens.

  Derrick had told Bob about this cabin, tucked away in the forest. No landline. No Wi-Fi. Just electricity and running water—if a storm didn’t take them out.

  Even if Bob managed to free himself, how far would he make it without shoes? He had researched frostbite, and it wasn’t pretty. While he wasn’t a big walker, without toes it would be even harder.

  Between the bed and the treadmill desk was a nightstand overflowing with provisions. A brown Pyrex bowl filled with apples, bananas, oranges, pears. A bag of baby carrots. Six plastic water bottles. A loaf of Dave’s Killer Bread. A brick of Tillamook cheddar. But no knife to cut it with. No utensils at all.

  Nothing Bob could use to free himself. To attack someone. Or hurt himself.

  The
treadmill desk held, somewhat incongruously, a typewriter. A black Royal. Sitting next to it was a neat stack of blank white paper. The rest of the desktop was bare.

  A single sheet of paper had been folded in half and propped on top of the typewriter. On it was scrawled,

  Better start writing Eyes of the Forest. Or else!

  Bob took stock. He was in an isolated cabin, injured, shackled. No one but his captors knew where he was.

  Maybe hurting him had surprised Derrick as much as it had Bob. Or wouldn’t he have put out painkillers, antiseptic, and bandages to go with the food? Other than the furniture, the room was bare. No TV, no magazines, no books. Not even any framed posters.

  Nothing to distract him.

  Bob shifted uncomfortably. Pressure, low in his belly. He had to pee. Presumably there was a bathroom someplace. He mentally measured the distance to the door and then the cable. It didn’t seem good.

  He got to his feet, briefly closing his eyes against a wave of dizziness. The cable pulled him up short before he reached the door. Bob leaned forward. The tips of his fingers just closed around the knob.

  He pulled it open, revealing a narrow hallway and letting in air that was, if anything, even colder. From this vantage point, he couldn’t see other rooms. It didn’t matter anyway, because Bob couldn’t reach them. Even if he managed to drag the treadmill behind him, it wouldn’t fit through the doorway.

  The pressure in his bladder was worse. “Derrick!” he yelled. “Derrick!”

  No answer. The cabin was silent.

  He was turning back when he spotted it. Squatting under the bed was a white ceramic pot the size of a mixing bowl. If it had been one-fifth the size, it might have been mistaken for serving ware. Perhaps a specialized vessel for cream or gravy that would appear only on Grandma’s table at Thanksgiving.

  But Bob knew exactly what it was. What it was for. A jordan, a jerry, a guzunder, a po, a chamber utensil, a thunder pot. A potty. A well-used item for centuries, across cultures, across continents, at least until the flush toilet had been invented.