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“You are about to step on a snake nest.”
I froze, a chill going down my spine. I glanced down at my foot to see the head of a black vicious-looking snake.
“Oh, God!” I stood as still as possible. “What do I do? Can you kill it?”
“Why would I kill it when you are in its home?” he asked, and it was just then I realized whose voice it was.
I glanced back, and sure enough, it was him. Iskandar: backcountry forest edition. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him outside of his uniform. Even in Seattle, he was always dressed formally. Now he stood dressed in jeans, brown boots, and a dark shirt with a light jacket over top of it.
Calmly he walked over to me, grabbed my collar, and pulled me back. “What in the world are you doing?”
I took several more steps back and looked around my feet carefully before focusing on him. “What am I doing? What are you doing! Why are you in the woods? Why in the world would you quit?”
“The correct terminology is retire,” was his only reply as he walked farther up the trail, not at all phased by the snake nest.
“No, I used the correct term! It’s quitting because the first guard of the king never retires unless they are severally injured, incapacitated, or are no longer fit to hold the position!” I called up, trying to keep up with him while also watching where I stepped.
“Exactly. I am no longer fit to hold the position,” he replied, going off the trail once we reached the fork in the road. Instead of going either right or left, he went straight down the center, through the bushes.
“Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer.
Sighing, I marched after him, smacking the leaves from my face. I hated to say it, but it was very obvious: I was a city guy. I hated saying it because it made me sound…I don’t know, wimpy? Either way, the forest was not my friend.
“Iskandar, the queen ordered me to bring you back. You spend all this time telling me to focus on my job and not care what other people say for you to retire? What about all the people that want your job?”
“Next in line after me for the first guard is Layland. He’s honorable. I don’t mind him having my job,” he said, and I felt like that wasn’t true.
I knew a lot of honorable people; that didn’t mean I wanted them to have my job.
“Iskandar, I’m sorry this stuff is happening to you. But it will pass. You don’t have to choose the nuclear option. It’s been days already. This is—ah…” I tripped over the root of a tree, slipping down the slide of the hill I didn’t realize we were on, tumbling until I landed with a loud thud. On the forest ground.
“…Hmm.”
From upside down, it looked as if he were frowning, which meant he was smiling…no, correction, he was laughing at me.
“Haha,” I snapped, picking myself up off the ground, dusting off my shoulder to see a tiny cabin in the center of a clearing. But it wasn’t an old-fashioned type of cabin. But a sleek, modern one with solar panels on the roof and the front lined with tinted glass. The cabin had a rocky stream on the other side.
“You live here?” I asked him.
“Sometimes,” he said as he walked to the door. “Wolfgang, go home.”
“Not until you return with me.”
He turned back to me. “I am not going to do that.”
“Why?” I hollered. “I don’t understand. How can you walk away from everything you’ve worked for? Don’t give me some bullshit about the rules! You are human, too, right? You wouldn’t have worked so hard if you didn’t love or believe in what you do. So how can you let some stupid rulebook written generations ago—”
“It’s not stupid to me!” he screamed back…which threw me off because he almost always kept his cool. “The code you keep talking about makes sense to me. When I was younger, the world at large did not make sense to me, people did not make sense to me. But that did. Understanding the purpose of protecting someone made sense to me. How can I do it? Because being in the public eye is dangerous to the king, and if it is a danger to the king, it is dangerous to the country. I truly believe that. I worked hard—you are right—but that is not a good enough reason to endanger the country.”
He annoyed me.
“I never realized your ego was so damn big. You think all this news about you is big enough to bring down the king or even the country?” I asked.
“A single pothole ruins a mile of road.”
Truly this man annoyed me.
