The squires thought the punishment would make the rumors finally die down, but over the next few days, reported sightings kept cropping up one after the other. After a full month, more than half the dorm had suffered the sand punishment, which began to present a problem for those involved with carrying out said punishment.
“At this rate, we’re doomed” The leader of the punishers moaned to Fie and her friends. He had invited them to his office (by which he meant a lunch table in the mess hall). “There’s bound to be a revolution any day now.”
“Sounds to me like an abuse of power,” Fie pointed out.
“Hush!” he said. “You’re just as guilty as they are because you never stop their deranged raving! If this keeps up, we here in the SMSWDBIUL (Somewhat Mature Squires Who Don’t Believe In Urban Legends) faction know that our day of defeat is close at hand!”
For some unknown reason, a group of boys sat on the floor in one corner of the mess hall as they ate their lunches. Flags hung above them which read, “Down with the abuse of authority!” and “How dare you be a nonbeliever!” They were, Fie realized, going on a chair strike.
Seeing this, the squires neutral to either side made a show of proclaiming their pity in lofty tones.
“Oh,” cried one, “what poor souls!”
“This,” said another, “is true oppression! You have our support, brave heroes.”
The boy, who had summoned Fie’s gang for help, looked at them and trembled. “They’ve been doing nothing but criticizing me since day one!” he complained. Oh, the selfish masses, only thinking of themselves! “We’re doomed.” He moaned. “The situation is truly dire.” Oh, so dire!
Yet while the boy thought Fie and the others empathized with his terrible plight, Fie had her own reasons for coming over to “help”—namely, that she was interested in making a business proposition. The boy was clearly in deep distress, and if there was one rule of thumb Fie had learned from all her time as a squire, it was that being in trouble made for good opportunities.
“If you end up dying in the revolution, I’ll make your tombstone for you,” she offered. “If you’d like a wooden tombstone, I’ll give it to you for the reasonable price of twenty percent off. But if you insist on having a stone one, it’ll require a lot more labor on my part. Ooh, this is cutting my own throat, but I’ll give it to you for three percent off!”
Capitalizing on her natural dexterity, Fie had taken up construction work for the boys in order to counteract the drain on her funds that her snacking habits caused. She had the basics of woodworking down and, when it was needed, could manage stonework as well. She also ran a pretty brisk business doing portraits, thanks to her skills in drawing mugshots of criminals. For this enterprise, Garuge lent her both the workshop and appropriate tools.
“I don’t want that!” the boy cried. “Besides, that’s a rip-off! Is that what you call a discount?”
“Then what’d you call me over here for?” She pouted at his rejection of her kindness (and the lost business opportunity).
“Not for a tombstone maker, that’s for sure!”
“Then for what?” the tombstone maker wanted to know.
“You guys are my friends, right?”
“Hmm.” Not exactly, Fie thought, but the boy certainly seemed to think so.
Incidentally, Fie had already been approached by the anti-SMSWBIUL faction with a nonaggression pact which read, “Please, everyone (and by everyone, we’re mainly referring to you, Heath)—don’t get involved in this, and we won’t bother you,” and responded to it with, “Sure, why not?” That meant that when the revolution came, he alone would be denounced—but was there any need to tell him that? Not exactly. So she didn’t.
“I want you to do something for me,” the boy said. “I want you to find out the truth for me. There’s no Bruce M’chouchouteman, and even if there was, purely for argument’s sake, then it must be someone or something else being mistaken for Bruce M’chouchouteman. I want you to find them and figure out who they really are.”
“Hmm,” Fie said. There was no harm, she felt, in letting things run their course, but she was admittedly curious as to why the rumors hadn’t died out yet.
“If you help me, I’ll give you ten coupons for a free meal at Bello Bello, that pasta restaurant with the big servings downtown.”
“Anything to help a friend!”
In the light of his passionate feelings of friendship and camaraderie, who was Fie to say no?
Remie, silent up until now, suddenly broke in with, “Wait, hold on. If we want to find him, that means we need to be able to go into town after nightfall.” He felt sympathy for the boy’s imminent execution, but after watching his conversation with Heath (Fie) take this wild turn, he felt the need to speak up and put a stop to it.
Leaving the castle at night was not expressly forbidden; however, the guards at the gate turned the squires away every time they tried, which made nighttime excursions off-limits in a practical sense. They might have been able to leave if they had an older knight with them, but there were no other ways to slip past the watchful eyes of the guards. The issue with that idea, though, was that Heslow would blow a gasket if he found out.
However, Fie had already anticipated this level of opposition and slipped the coupons into her pocket. She said, “You would desert your friend in his time of need, Remie? We can’t abandon him! We’re his only hope!”
The boy she had tried to sell a tombstone to put on a showy display of pitifulness. “It’s true,” he cried. “Please, help me!”
Remie groaned. As the most sympathetic of the group, this strategy worked wonders on him. He slumped forward and sighed. “Fine, if you insist.”
And with that, there were no more dissenting opinions. Fie and her friends were going to sneak into town at night.