Fare thee well.
Wow! So there you go. Well, we all know what happened to Dazene in the last book; defeated by Pete McGee, he is no more. Pete got the flower too and used it to bring his mother back from the dead. Everything seemed hunky dory. But now it looks as though there are going to be some sort of zombie knights coming out of the ground to get the flower back. I guess ‘uh oh’ would sum up what that means. Zombie knights, man! Zombies are full on enough, but if they’re knights as well? That is intense.
Let’s return now to Pete McGee, because it’s his time to shine. A year has passed since he returned with the Wilderene Flower. It has been a quiet year, but that is all about to change.
Read on.
PS I’ve blabbed on a lot already. Twice now, and the book has just started. So you won’t hear from me for a while.
PPS I hope you enjoy the story.
PPPS Okay, this is the last thing I will say for a while. I love zombies, so I’m very excited that they’re in the book!
Okay. That’s me done. I’ll be back later.
PPPPS There is no PPPPS!
The McGee household had changed a lot in the year since Pete had returned with the Wilderene Flower. For one thing, his mum was back and she wasn’t sick and confined to bed, unable to do anything let alone have fun. She was like the mum Pete remembered from when he was young, a mum he had almost forgotten existed through the hard times of her illness.
She was back now though, and the place had picked up her energy.
Marloynne and Ashlyn also lived with the McGees. Pete and Ashlyn had become instant friends from the moment Pete stood up to King Cyril the Dead-and-Buried’s guards. The friendship had grown, and was solidified when Pete saved Marloynne from the King and reunited him with his true love, Ashlyn.
Both Marloynne and Ashlyn had worked in the castle. With the death of King Cyril the Exploding-Head, a new King had been inaugurated. His name was King Rayon, which Pete thought was extremely kingly sounding, a much better name for a king than Cyril.
King Rayon had reinstated Ashlyn and Marloynne to the castle. The jobs didn’t pay much, but with Mrs McGee also back to full health and able to pick up some work here and there, it meant more money than the McGees had seen in a long, long time. The extra hands around the house also meant that the crops they tended flourished, the house was cleaner, they had healthier animals and were even able to get another chicken.
Things were good.
Things were, in fact, AWESOME! It was the day of Pete McGee’s fourteenth birthday. This was the age that young men were eligible to train with a mentor, to learn and to grow so that they may one day become a great knight. This was, and had always been, Pete’s dream. Sir Pete McGee. Imagine. Sir Pete McGee. He dreamed it for himself and he dreamed it for his mother, who had always told him he could be anything, that he would show the world just how great a man with one arm could be. He wanted to prove her right again and again.
Not that he thought about it a lot anymore, but at times like this it struck home … he only had one arm. No other knight had any disability of any kind. They were like the perfect humans. Tall, strong, muscular, skilful. They had it all. Perfect hair. Perfect stance. They even all had that chiselled jaw that made them look like their parents hadn’t had a baby the normal way, but had got a huge rock, chiselled away at it for nine months, and made a rock baby that grew into a looked-like-he-was-carved-out-of-rock man.
Pete didn’t look like he had been carved out of rock. If he had been, his parents mustn’t have been great stone masons. There was his missing arm, for starters, which made it look like they’d begun chiselling too close to the edge.
He was skinny too, although extra money meant extra food, and Pete was starting to bulk up a little. Only a little though, and he still looked like he would blow away in a strong wind.
His hair was messy, like they had gotten bored with chiselling, and it was also a little long, probably because there had been some spare rock at the top.
In a small way it bothered Pete, being who he was. Mainly though, he just wanted to be a knight. His mum believed in him, he knew that, and that was what had seen him through his last quest. So knights were usually big and strong and broad-shouldered and chisel-jawed … so what? No-one had ever gotten the Wilderene Flower either, and he did that, so ner!
That’s what he thought … so ner. Yes, sometimes Pete McGee could be as mature (not!) as anyone else.
But now he was fourteen. He had a chance to become a knight by name. He knew there were rules, things he should have already done, certain families he should have been born into. He knew these things stood in his way, but he was determined to overcome them. He knew he could overcome them. His mum always told him to abide by rules, but come on! These rules were like three hundred years old and rules could be bent and King Rayon was kind of cool and Pete was sure … he stopped thinking about all of that. He would deal with the rules when it was time.
Right now, even though he was fourteen and aimed to be a great knight, there was still plenty of time to be a normal kid. This meant he needed to wake up his mum, Ashlyn and Marloynne. It was present time!
King Rayon stood in his chambers. He was not an overly tall man, yet he seemed tall. It was in the way he carried himself, his aura. His broad shoulders looked as though they could support any weight placed upon them, although his skinny little legs looked as though they could be snapped like a toothpick.
The King walked around his room, his thoughts turning to the events of the day. A speech; a meeting with rich people who wanted lower taxes so they could have more money; lunch; another meeting with the same rich people who, along with wanting the lower taxes, also wanted better roads.
After that was what King Rayon looked forward to. Meeting the future knights of the realm and attaching them to the knight who would train them. This really was a great day. Any lad who had turned fourteen during the past twelve months could apply, although, even as he thought this, he knew it wasn’t true.
There were limited spots for new trainee knights. Those who had served as a page in a lord’s castle; those who had money; they were the ones who were chosen.
He would not even see many of the down-and-outers, for they knew how things worked. They knew which boys would
