Knights and Kink Romance Boxed Set (108 page)

“Seems fair enough,” I offer.

“Dad tried to tell her he’d been tapped for
knighthood, and that he’d get officially dubbed by King Wurmwald at
War Court that night. But Mom didn’t even give Dad a chance to
explain. She just started screaming and throwing things all over
the encampment. She told all us kids to start packing and to help
her take all the family tents down—even the pup tent where Dad
stored his armor, which he was going to need if he was going to
fight in the Woods Battle the next day. Steve refused to help, and
then just took off. And I was so much in shock at seeing my mom
throw a lit Tiki torch at my dad that I just sort of stood frozen.
But Holly—Holly was always the strongest of the three of us
kids—she started packing everything up right away, taking down all
the tents in just a few minutes. I remember Mom threw Dad’s armor
out onto the muddy campground road that ran through that part of
the huge tent city that Pennsic always becomes by the final
weekend. Mom and Holly had the whole encampment disassembled in a
matter of minutes, without my or Dad’s help, but we still had to
get everything into the car—which is pretty tricky at Pennsic.”

“Why?”

“Well, Pennsic campground rules require you to keep
your car literally a couple of
miles
away from your
campsite, except during designated loading and unloading times. And
since Mom was trying to leave in the middle of Pennsic, we couldn’t
exactly bring our car into the campsite then.”

“What did you do?”

“We brought the campsite to the car. Or rather, Mom
and Holly did. I just sort of collapsed into a heap in the middle
of the encampment while Mom and Holly did all the work. Dad grabbed
his armor out of the mud and disappeared, and nobody knew where
Steve went. And nobody seemed to care much, either.”

“What
did
happen to Steve?” I ask. “And what,
exactly, did he have to do with—you know.”

“I’m getting to that. Like I said, while all of this
was going on, Steve just took off. Disappeared. Granted, Pennsic
wasn’t as big back then as it is now, but there were still easily
over five thousand people at the site, and the campground itself is
huge—about ten square miles. And Pennsic didn’t have all the
child-supervision rules in effect back then that they do now,
either. So it was pretty easy for a nine-year-old kid to just
vanish into thin air. And that’s exactly what Steve did. And to
this day, I know that he did it on purpose.”

“He vanished on purpose?”

“Yep. For
three days.
And mind you, Pennsic
14 had some of the worst weather in the history of the War. This
was the year of the repeated torrential downpours, high winds, and
flash floods. A couple of people drowned in the floods at Pennsic
that year, and for the life of us, we all thought that maybe Steve
had gotten caught up in one and died himself.” Syr Phillip shakes
his head in contempt. “The little bastard had all of us running all
over Cooper’s Lake Campground, trying to find him, for three days.
And when I say ‘all of us’, I mean Mom, Holly, and me. Because Dad
pretty much disappeared, too. Well, I shouldn’t say he
disappeared,
exactly. Ditched us was more like it. After he
stashed his armor and garb over at Midrealm Royal Encampment, he
went to War Court, got knighted, and then spent all of the time he
wasn’t fighting in the Woods and Field Battles off wenching and
drinking. He just left Mom and the rest of us to spend all our time
working with the local police trying to find Steve.”

A strange, distorted picture is starting to form in
my mind, one that I can’t quite make out. “So let me get this
straight,” I say. “Your mom threw a
lighted
Tiki torch at
your dad in full view of all you kids, and you wonder why your Dad
and Steve took off? I mean, I can see that your mom might be a
little upset at the situation, but throwing a lighted Tiki torch at
somebody
is
a little extreme—“

Syr Phillip puts his fist through the wall. “Goddamn
it, Lisa!”

I’m stunned silent. Now Syr Phillip is trembling and
choking back sobs. After a moment, he regains partial composure,
and exhales in shame at the substantial damage he’s just done to
his living room. “Jesus, Lisa, I’m—I’m sorry.” Syr Phillip’s voice
is barely above a whisper as he stares at the floor.

I go to him and place a timid hand on his shoulder.
“You don’t have to finish the story if you don’t want to,” I say.
“In fact, maybe I should just go home now.”

Syr Phillip—or just plain old Phil Dawson as he is
right now, all exposed and emotional—places his hand over mine on
his angular collarbone. “No, please, just stay a while longer.
I—I’ll get a hold of myself. You need to hear the end of this.
Otherwise, not much else of what you’re caught up in right now with
the Horde will make any sense to you.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

“Mom and Holly had already carried off the entire
encampment back and forth to the car by the time we figured out
that Steve was missing. They were both exhausted and covered with
all the mud left over from the rainstorms the night before. But
instead of getting in the car and driving home, Mom, Holly, and I
had to spend the next seventy-two hours straight searching for
Steve. My mom went without sleep for the next three days. Holly and
I managed to sleep a little, but with our encampment already taken
down and no time to build another, we pretty much had to sleep out
under the stars. It started raining on the second day, and it just
didn’t stop. Pouring rain, flash floods, and lots of violent
thunderstorms. And if that weren’t bad enough, then the temperature
started dropping. By the end of the second day, it was down to
about thirty-five degrees.”

“Really?” I sputter. “It was that cold in the middle
of summer?”

Syr Phillip flops down on the sofa. “I’m afraid so.
Central Pennsylvania has very bizarre weather in late summer. And
since we’d struck our encampment just before Steve took off, we
were without a tent and soaked to the skin from searching for Steve
in the rain. Our clothes and camping gear were all packed in the
car over three miles away, and the only way to reach them was to
wade through deep rivers of mud. The local authorities were no
help, and Pennsic still had a pretty skeletal public safety crew
back then. Now they’re much better at policing the site and
providing emergency medical care but—“

“But what?” I can tell Syr Phillip is holding
back.

“I was just thinking that this never would have
happened at a Pennsic held now. But—but I suppose I can’t change
what happened over twenty years ago. At any rate, we finally found
Steve at the end of the third day. Pennsic was officially over by
then, and a lot of people were striking their campsites and getting
ready to go home. Mom was pretty much in despair. She was
exhausted, sick with hypothermia from exposure to cold, wind and
rain, and nearly delirious with rage at my father. And with no
trace of Steve anywhere, it looked like he might have either been
abducted or drowned in one of flash floods.

“Just when we were about to give up, one of the
Cooper’s Lake campground employees showed up at what was left of
our encampment and told us they thought they might have found
Steve, and asked if one of us was willing to help identify him. The
way the guy said it, it sounded like he meant they’d found Steve’s
dead
body
. You can imagine how my mom reacted. She went
totally hysterical. Holly was numb with shock. So I agreed to do
it. The campground worker asked me to follow him into the woods. I
was dreading what I might find.

“We walked for a long time, until we finally came to
a walled encampment in the middle of the woods, a part of the
Pennsic campsite I’d never been to before. And when I say walled, I
mean that somebody had actually built a thick wooden wall around
the encampment. It was even painted to look like stone. I didn’t
know it then, but this was the Great Dark Horde encampment.

“The campground worker knocked on the gate, and the
Horde guard opened it. The Horde had already struck most of their
campsite, too, so the place was really just a bunch of muddy tarps
lying all over the place. But there was still one fancy pavilion
standing. We walked over to it and went inside.

“It was Shen Fu’s pavilion. He was Supreme KaKhan of
the Horde that year—it was his first reign. The Horde elects its
leaders instead of having them win tournaments, and Shen Fu has
always been very popular among Horde members. He’s been elected
KaKhan seven or eight times since then. Of course, I didn’t know
Shen Fu then, so to me he just looked like a weird ex-hippie guy in
Mongol dress. Shen Fu was sitting on his pile of Persian carpets
eating Pringles from a can. And Steve was sitting right there
beside him. He was in clean garb, playing solitaire with a deck of
Pac-Man cards. And he was fine. There wasn’t a mark on him.

“Lisa, I was so mad when I saw Steve I could hardly
breathe. Turns out the little shit had been hiding out in one of
the Coopers’ storage barns for the past three days, eating food
stocks meant for the Coopers’ camp store. Shen Fu found him there
when he went to pick up the industrial-sized order of Pringles
which were part of what the East Kingdom paid the Horde to fight on
their side at Pennsic that year. Shen Fu got him cleaned up and
called the Coopers themselves instead of the police, I guess to
keep Steve from getting into too much trouble.”

“What did you do?” I ask.

“Well, once Shen Fu introduced himself and explained
what happened, I basically grabbed Steve by his ears and dragged
him back to our campsite. It was all I could do to keep from
beating the living crap out of him, but I knew that Mom would want
to get him back home in once piece, so I left him alone. But when
we got back to our campsite, Mom and Holly were gone. We couldn’t
find them anywhere.”

I think back to that afternoon at the Blood and
Roses Tournament when Pegeen told me she’d heard a rumor that Syr
Phillip’s mother and sister were killed in a car accident at
Pennsic 14. Suddenly, I begin to get a very clear picture of what I
think he’s going to say next.

“I didn’t know what else to do, so I dragged Steve
back to Shen Fu’s tent. The encampment walls had been torn down by
then, and he was back in modern dress packing everything into his
U-Haul. I asked him if he could help me find my mom and sister, and
he said sure.

“Shen Fu knew all the Coopers’ Lake employees and
most of the members of the Cooper family personally. He made some
inquiries with them, and somehow they figured out that Mom and
Holly had both left in the station wagon. To this day I don’t know
why Mom left so suddenly, unless it was because she was so tired
and emotionally overwrought that she just wasn’t thinking straight.
I’ve also wondered if maybe she went off looking for Dad. There of
course were no cell phones we could call to find her or anything
else like that back then, so our only option was to get in Shen
Fu’s car and try to retrace Mom’s route back to the freeway, to see
if we could maybe catch up with her before she got too far.”

Syr Phillip pauses and starts biting his nails. I
instinctively take hold of his left hand, then his right, and pull
his fingers away from his gnashing teeth. “You don’t have to keep
going if you don’t want to,” I say, as gently as possible.

Syr Phillip looks deep into my eyes with a mixture
of passion and pain. “No, Lisa, I need to go on. I need to finish
the story. I need to say it out loud, especially to you.”

“Okay,” I reply, squeezing his hands tighter. “Take
your time.”

Syr Phillip takes a deep breath and goes on. “It
didn’t take Shen Fu too long to locate Mom’s car. She’d gone off
the road and slammed into a concrete pylon at the intersection of
Route 422 and Interstate 79. Our station wagon was an old, beat-up
1970s model with almost no safety features. The police and
paramedics were already there, and one of the paramedics told us
that Mom and Holly both died instantly. I’m sure Mom probably lost
control of the car because she was too exhausted—mentally and
physically—to drive. I’ll never know why she left when she did, but
one thing that will haunt me until the end of my life is the fact
that Mom and Holly both died thinking that Steve was dead, when in
reality he was just being a bratty, selfish fuckup who was hiding
out and screwing around. I swear, Lisa, I will never forgive Steve
for that as long as I live.”

Syr Phillip gets up and walks into the kitchen for
another beer. I can see the muscles in his back tense up between
his bare shoulderblades, tightening into scores of knotty lines
that squeeze and release, squeeze and release. I watch his Adam’s
apple bob up and down as he guzzles the entire bottle of beer in
one fell swoop. I feel like going over to him and kissing that
Adam’s apple, kissing his dimpled chin, kissing away the tears that
rest in both the corners of his eyes. But I don’t. There’s still
something else I have to accomplish tonight.

“So what happened next?” I ask. “Where was your
father? Did Shen Fu have to take care of you?”

Syr Phillip tosses his empty beer bottle into a
sleek chrome trash can. “Dad didn’t resurface until a couple of
days later. He’s always refused to talk about where he was or what
he was doing during that time. Shen Fu took us under his wing and
paid for motel rooms for Steve and me there in Slippery Rock until
the police and coroner settled things with Mom and Holly’s bodies.
Of course, Steve and I were minors, and Shen Fu wasn’t a relative,
so we couldn’t claim the bodies from the morgue and take them home
for a funeral. Only Dad could do that. And by the time the police
finally tracked Dad down to tell him his wife and daughter were
dead, Mom and Holly’s bodies were cremated by the morgue. There was
no funeral. We just scattered Mom and Holly’s ashes in
Pennsylvania, in a field about five miles away from the Pennsic War
campground.”