Sorry for the long chapter anyone who has taken the time to keep reading this. ******************************** When we arrived at camp, we could hardly see the horse in front of us. “Get off,” commanded Isaac. Obediently we followed his command. “Take them to my tent, search them and post guards. I’ll be there soon.” He ordered as he stormed off to do some other thing. We were taken the second largest tent at the center of camp. Glancing around, I saw no hope of escape nor rescue by stealth. If we were to be rescued it would not be without bloodshed. We were shoved apart from each other and searched fairly violently. “Do you mind,” growled Jane as she shoved at her captors. “I’m a lady. Why would I carry a blade?” blushing, the bandit shied away; while the rest of us were very closely searched. All of our bags were taken, as were our swords and bows. We were then all shoved into the tent and were forced to wait for Isaac. While we sat, I knew that we were all thinking of any possible way to escape from the camp. “So, uh, Jane you have your knife right?” asked Barton. “Of course, I’m not stupid enough to let them take my weapons,” replied Jane with a cocky smile on her face. “That’s great,” said Cample. “Cause we’ll need them if we’re ever going to get out of here. King Brenton would be crazy to...” “Quite down in there!” came a voice form outside our tent. “Haze doesn’t like to be woken in the middle of the night for uncooperative prisoners.” This was going to be a very long night. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “We have to save them” said the man sitting at the end of a long table. He looked to be in his later forties but his face was creased with stress lines and his hair was a light grey, almost white. A man stood next to him wearing dark green robes. “We have been scouting the camp for three weeks now. It is too well guarded for us to attack when we have so little extra men to spare,” replied the man in the robes. “If we’ve been watching them for this long then surely we can figure out a way to be in and out quick enough to avoid a major battle, correct?” said the first man. “Possibly,” replied the second. “Then go, Xavier. I trust you will not let me down” “I will not, my King” ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We didn’t sleep. First off, the bandits had kindly put us right top of a nice hard boulder, and it felt like the bandits had thrown all the pebbles and sticks in the area into our tent. And second, Cample was the only one who could seem to fall asleep. Yay for us. Figuratively speaking, He sounded like the stomach of a starving dragon. The bandits would keep kicking our tent and yelling for us to shut up. We couldn’t hear them half the time over the sound of Cample. In the morning Isaac came to question us. The smirk on his face told us that he heard about our little predicament with Cample and his sleeping habit. “Well, now that we’ve all had a good night’s rest, we may be able to have a nice chat. Cample, you can start by telling me why you are traveling with a bunch of children.” The look on the general’s face was of pure terror. We had not thought of an excuse for why one of the most famous generals would be traveling with a group of teenagers. “Um, they’re my brother’s kids,” said Cample “Sure they are,” agreed Isaac sarcastically. “I’ll squeeze the names out of them by the end of the day, and then I can find out who they really are. I have a feeling we can get a pretty good ransom from you four.” He then stood up and walked away. “He’s mad.” I proclaimed. Everyone else nodded in agreement. The rest of the day went by extremely slow. We weren’t allowed to talk so we communicated by making pictures with the sticks and rocks. Our plans to escape would never work, there was no use for Jane’s smuggled dagger, and my but was getting extremely sore from sitting on the rocks. I couldn’t see how anything could get worse. Or at least until Isaac came back. We had given up trying to make pictures and given into each sitting in to a corner staring at each other. So for the first time we were almost happy to see him. “Alright prisoners, who wants to be tortured first? Cample, thanks for volunteering.” Isaac clapped his hands and two very large bandits came and dragged of our general. “Don’t worry,” said Isaac. “I won’t break your uncle to badly.” Later when Isaac left we all went to the corner of the tent farthest away from the door and whispered very quietly to each other. “What do you think they’re going to do to Cample?” “Do you think he’s going to give anything away?” “How are we going to get out of here?” “When will Demitri be back?” Which was pointless because none of us had any idea. It was getting late when Cample was finally thrown back into the tent with the rest of us. He was bloody, bruised and unconscious, but hey, he was breathing. We had all fallen asleep this time because Cample apparently didn’t snore when he was out cold. Witch was a cool fact to know in case I ever had sleep with him in a tent ever again. But we were woken in the middle of the night. Sleeping beauty had awoken and a had a scroll in one hand and a chemical lamp in the other. I assumed I was dreaming and started to fall back asleep when Cample hit me in the head with a scroll. Realizing that this was for really I quickly rubbed the drowsiness out of my eyes and was read to listen about the sudden turn of events. After listening to a brief summary, I learned that one of the guards was on our side. Also, Cample had read the scroll already, saying that a group of the king’s royal guard was going to be here tonight to rescue us. Wow, I could hardly believe that a horse could even move that fast, much less convince the king himself to send his personal guard to rescue us. “So, when should they be here,” whispered Jane. She was answered by huff beats outside our tent. We rushed out of the tent and a man on horseback pointed to four empty horses. We all jumped on a horse and followed the man out of the clearing, with two more of the royal guards following behind us. The last guard dropped a box near the edge of the clearing and followed behind us. Just like that we were safe from the bandits. When we reached the road I head a huge boom from behind us. I turned to look at the guard behind me. “The box?” I asked. He nodded his head in confirmation. Well, i thought to myself at least we wont be seeing anymore of the bandits.