Rosemary Serf folded her arms under her bosom and said, “Well, shit.”

  “Mind your language dear,” her husband said.

  “Charlie, our house is gone.”

  The two of them were standing in a burnt circle where the hovel owned and inhabited by five generations of Serf families had once stood. If ever there was a time for oaths, it was now.

  “Shit. You’re right,” Charles said.

  Rosemary sifted through the ashes. A handful of pots and mugs had survived the arson, but her favorite cookpot was half-melted and the chest with their spare clothes and other incidentals was a pile of smoldering wood.

  “Not much you can do when it comes to adventurers,” her husband said, joining her in her search. “The Earl will send someone to rebuild though, I’m sure.”

  “And what do we do until then?”

  “We’ll make do. Speaking of, where’s that fool boy gone off to? Better not be with no adventurers!”

  John answered this question by running up the hill.

  He swallowed a gulp of air and said, “That knight took Jessica!”

  “Does he think she burnt the place down?” Rosemary asked, wiping her ash-covered palms on her apron.

  “I don’t know! Everyone saw the adventurers doin’ it, but he dragged her off like she was a mule.”

  Charles rubbed his neck. “Was she doin’ more alchemy? The knight said somethin’ ‘bout that, I think.”

  “Either way, we’ve gotta do something!”

  Rosemary would never have told Jessica this, but she’d had misgivings about the reincarnated woman after the knight pawned her off on them. Nonetheless, Jessica had done everything to prove those misgivings wrong. She worked hard and without complaint, protected the family from micro-demons, and even helped develop a cottage industry for extra income. By all accounts, Jessica had been a model member of both the Serf family and Barleyfield.

  There was just one problem.

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do for her, Johnny,” Rosemary said. “The king’s orders are the king’s orders.”

  John knew his mother was right. Saving Jessica was impossible. But if he knew anything, it was that ‘impossible’ didn’t mean ‘not possible.’ With this in mind, John sprinted off to go speak with the only person who might be able to help.

  “We doubt there is anything to be done,” Morkal said after he explained the situation.

  “There’s gotta be something! Every time I thought we were totally screwed, Jessica did some crazy alchemy and solved the problem. Now, I’m not especially smart, Ms. Morkal. In fact ma’ says I’m darn foolish. But you and Jessica are smart, and I know you’ll come up with something! I’ll be the muscle and you’ll be the brain.”

  Morkal shut her scary red eyes for a moment and made a croaking sound like a toad.

  “There was something she discussed with us. A plan to make special medicine for the queen…”

  “Well, hell! You make the medicine and I’ll deliver it!”

  “The difficult part is not brewing the medicine. We understand the recipe she provided and we possess the equipment and ingredients. The challenge, little one, will be in getting an audience with the Queen of Elsifeya to offer her a strange potion which at high enough doses is indistinguishable from poison. Jessica warned us of an ‘opioid epidemic’ which slays even those who need the medicine. Recommending such a thing to royalty will not be a simple task, if one were even to obtain an audience,” Morkal said.

  “I’ll worry about that part. You just need to make it,” John said.

  Making the potion took longer than he would have liked. In his mind, alchemy was nothing more than throwing things into a bubbling liquid and stirring. Whatever Morkal was doing took hours and involved waiting for bricks to dry. Only at this stage did Morkal mention it was an overnight process.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Perhaps you should go home and rest,” Morkal said.

  “Don’t got a home at the moment,” he replied. “Here’s as good as anywhere.”

  He did need to tell his mom and dad he was staying elsewhere though. He thought about telling them where and why, but doing so would cast Jessica in a bad light by association. Not that her reputation mattered much now.

  Or did it?

  He, a humble serf bearing a strange potion, would be turned away at the castle gates. But what if an entire hamlet traveled hundreds of miles, just to announce their support of Jessica? A hundred serfs demanding an audience was a different matter. That was enough to raise an eye or an ear, and the right one might make the case for trying the medicine.

  John came down the hills in the purplish darkness of dusk toward the cluster of torchlight that now constituted all of Barleyfield. Along the way he stumbled on his cousins, the Stevenson-Serfs.

  “Oi! Violet! Bobbin!” he called out to them, interrupting their game of ‘chase the morkal.’

  “Whosat? Oh! Cousin John! Your parents’re worried sick ya know,” Bobbin said, for once not dripping snot.

  “Yeah, yeah, I figured. I need ya to grab your parents for me. And tell ‘em to round everyone else up too. I gotta tell ‘em all something.”

  The tightly-strung fibers of Barleyfield’s community thrummed and within five minutes everyone had gathered around John Serf, awaiting his pronouncement.

  “Everyone here? I don’t see the Blackhill-Serfs,” John said.

  “Aye! We’re here!” Eric Blackhill-Serf yelled from the back.

  John swallowed. He almost wished they weren’t so he could delay a little longer.

  “Great! So uh… as you all know, Jessica was taken by Sir Hayek this morning, and um…”

  There were a few sympathetic faces, mostly his parents and the Stevenson-Serfs who had known Jessica the best. The rest mostly knew her as the slightly clumsy girl who kept accidentally hitting herself with the threshing flail. At most they vaguely recalled she had come up with soapmaking.

  “I know we have a lot on our plates right now, what with Barleyfield being burned to the ground and all…” he continued, his voice wavering on the edge of cracking. “But I think we oughta follow her to Elsifeya City and say something before they execute her.”

  Murmurs spread through the crowd.

  “How’d’ya know she’s gonna be executed?” asked Erik Whitehill-Serf, who was not related by either blood or marriage to the Blackhill-Serfs.

  “Sir Hayek said if she continued practicing alchemy he’d burn her as a witch.”

  “Well, she was awfully witch-like…” Erik said to some muted agreement.

  Indignation sprung up within John that he didn’t even know he had.

  “What’d she ever do wrong by you, Erik, eh?”

  “Scalded my arm she did,” he said, raising his hand to show pinkish-orange blisters.

  “She told you not to use your hands to mix the lye and lard, didn’t she?”

  “Well… but I never woulda tried if she didn’t tell me to make soap.”

  There was another murmur of agreement from those who had suffered chemical burns.

  “Have any of you burned yourself in the past week? We got pretty good at it, didn’t we?”

  No one raised their hands. Eventually, Jenny Eriksson-Serf—whose surname did not come from Erik Whitehill-Serf but an unrelated Erik from the Blackhill-Serf side—raised hers.

  “No one asked her to have us makin’ soap! We got along just fine without!”

  “I asked her,” Rosemary replied, stepping out from the crowd. “She told us about the micro-demons what popped off the Demon King after he died and how you can kill ‘em by boilin’ your water and washing with soap. And then I said, ‘Well we oughta make sure all of Barleyfield gets it.’ So if you’ve got a problem with soap it’s cuz a’ me, not Jessica.”

  “Micro-demons!? What a load of crap!” someone yelled. “I bet she’s a witch!”

  “I tried to eat some of that soap and it got me all sick!”

  “And it’s made of stuff that burns your skin!”

  These comments were met with increasingly audible agreement. In the midst of despair over his failed gambit, John caught sight of Violet and Bobbin running around, oblivious to the grown-ups’ discussion.

  “Auntie Alice! Uncle Junior! Your kids used to have colds all the time, didn’t they?” John said.

  “Coulda filled a bucket with all that snot,” Uncle Junior said.

  “And how about since they started washing their hands?”

  “Dry as roasted barley,” Alice said.

  “And I’ll bet they’re not the only ones feeling better. Anyone else?” John asked.

  There was an embarrassed silence as everyone had to reflect on their premature outrage. Seeing no one else was going to say anything, Jenny’s husband Billiam reluctantly raised his hand.

  “I ain’t had the shits in a while...”

  John clapped his hands. “You know why? Because the boiled water and soap works! It kills the micro-demons! And not only that, we were gonna have a lot to sell next market day before the adventurers blew up the hut. Now, are you gonna tell me Barleyfielders are the type a’ folk who, after a stranger helps exorcize their micro-demons, they’ll let that person get burned at the stake? Is that who we are?”

  “But what’re we supposed to do? March off to the capital and ask nicely? King’s law is the king’s law, Johnny,” said Eric Whitehill-Serf, the uncle of Erik Whitehill-Serf.

  “Jessica left me with a medicine to help ease the queen’s pains. If we—all of us, together—take that medicine to the royal court and convince them to give it a try, I bet King Capra’ll realize he made a mistake and let her go. Can I count on Barleyfield for that? Can Jessica count on us?”

  The crowd was in unequivocal agreement until Erik Whitehill-Serf added, “But what about the Earl? We’ve still got our tributes to meet, don’t we?”

  “Nuts to the Earl!” John said, shocking himself with his own words.

  Maybe it was the state of agitation everyone had been whipped into, or simply that they had nothing else to lose, but John’s declaration resonated. Any who were still on the fence about rescuing Jessica were persuaded by the opportunity to say ‘nuts to the Earl.’ And between these two reasons, the entirety of Barleyfield was united in their quest to travel hundreds of miles to Elsifeya City and convince the Queen of Elsifeya to try a strange potion.