In which I make fun of the DMV and then Ren cooks codfish before a battle because of course she does. 

Caine, under the order of Conrad Daley, prevented the army from even considering a fight. The classified weapons were not brought out from the cases. Dale, Gabriel, and Wescott approached the Office of Sea Affairs (Office of Sea Affairs=the DMV) to seek help, having run out of options. The waiting room was tightly packed with people there to acquire and renew fishing and boating licenses, to register vessels, and to fill out traveler's paperwork. The boys jostled their way to the front. "We need to speak—" Dale began.

"Take a number," interrupted the bristling woman behind the desk.

Bullying his way to the front, Wescott said shortly, "I'm Wescott Huntian, from Leida Castle. We need to speak to someone. Urgently. "

"Take a number, Wescott Huntian," the woman replied.

Outside, Elowyn, Ren, Hollis, and Patch waited under the sultry sun. They counted colors of horses that passed, drew a maze on the ground with red bark, and were tossing rocks into a pit in the pavement like cornhole when Dale emerged out of doors. "It will be hours," he reported.

"Do they have people to help us?" asked Hollis, looking up from where he hunted for rocks.

"I don't know. They won't let us see anyone yet."

When they needed to cool off, they filed into the windowless waiting room, filled with flickering oil lamps and people coughing and murmuring. On their hard wooden bench in a corner, they cast long shadows onto the walls. "Make your hand a wolf," Patch whispered to Ren.

Ren shaped her hand into a wolf silhouette on the wall. Hollis made a bird. Patch made a rabbit. "Your turn," said Patch to Elowyn.

"I can make a rock," she said jokingly, forming a fist.

"Wescott, look," said Hollis, making a dog shadow.

Wescott, still seething over being made to wait, glanced at him, but everyone's attention was drawn to a sea affairs worker as he entered the room and called for silence. Loudly, he said, "I am sorry, but due to suspicious sightings sixty miles off the coast of the Eastern Shore, the Office of Sea Affairs will not be seeing anyone else. Come back when we reopen and take a new number."

Every adult in the room jerked into high alert. Hollis reacted to the sudden fear. "What sightings? Are they coming here now?"

Gabriel plowed through the confused crowd and made it to the front of the room. "Wait!" he yelled to the departing man. "We have to see someone."

"Everyone here needs to see someone! Come back later with the rest."

"We know something about the Bellicans," said Dale, skidding in beside Gabriel.

The man paused. He looked at the five others, crowding behind Dale and Gabriel, and he held open the front door. "You have five minutes. Now everyone else will expect this kind of treatment, too."

In the tiny office, a portly man adjusted himself behind a desk and glowered at the Dravens and Huntians from beneath bushy eyebrows. "I don't deal with children," he said, looking with particular distaste at Hollis and Patch.

"Would you rather deal with the Bellicans? Because they're coming here and no one will stop them," said Dale.

The man was unmoved. "Why don't you stop them, mate?"

"I'm a fisherman. And I've only lived here for a week."

"So what? You want to raise the alarm and then step back and let others do the work?"

"That is precisely what he wants to do," replied Gabriel, low in his chair.

"Look." Wescott rose sharply to his feet. "I'm Wescott. This is my sister Elowyn. We were the children of Gideon Huntian. I don't have a say in the castle and the army is under orders not to fight."

There he goes again, being the only likable/believable person here. Besides Dale maybe. I should have just written about the two of them and killed off everyone else. 

"Then I suppose you're on your bloody own," said the man, preparing to dismiss them.

Dale interfered. "We think the 'sightings' you mentioned might be the Bellicans. What exactly did you see?"

"It wasn't me. It was the scouts out on the beach. They saw some vessels. Could be anyone. Could be Bellicans out innocently fishing."

"The Bellicans don't do anything innocently," said Dale.

The man ran his hand over his head. "Look!" he said, frustrated. "I didn't come to work this morning to be preached at. You'll have to fight your own battle."

"We're not soldiers!" shouted Wescott.

The man reached into his desk and without warning or reason set a knife flying in the general direction of the little boys. Before Dale could think, before he even realized it had happened, he had bolted for it and grabbed it out of midair, falling over everyone. He caught it by the handle.

"Are you not?" said the man.

In the thickening silence, Dale felt seven pairs of eyes watching him. He threw the knife onto the desk. "Let's go."

When they came out into the day, Hollis burst into panicked questions. "Is it the Bellicans on the ships? Are they going to do a bomb again? How can we stop a bomb?"

"We have to talk to Caine again," said Gabriel.

Wescott shook his head. "He'll never defy my uncle. He's afraid of him."

"Afraid of what? His wine glass? His stupid sour breath? His screaming?"

"What about Elias?" Hollis stepped in front of Dale, pulling his arm, until Dale looked at him. "Can he make them stop? Can we ask him?"

Wescott stopped in mid-argument with Gabriel. All five of the older one peered hard at Hollis.

"What about Elias?" asked Gabriel wonderingly.

Edem sent carrier piegons to Elias, but there was no response. Upon saying he had another idea, he then went unseen. Winter served an early dinner on the second floor courtyard and the Huntian and Draven children ate in silence, looking out at the still-bright sky.

"I don't believe I've ever eaten before seven until now," Wescott said at length.

From the covered area on the terrace came the noise of many footsteps. The children turned to find Darius Draven and a handful of other fisherman strapping their spears to their packs. To his children, Darius said in a low voice, "We're going to sail out and stop the Bellican ships."

"What?" said Dale, getting instantly to his feet.

Darius looked down at Patch's worried face. "We won't get hurt. We'll just stop the Bellicans from coming."

"Me, too. I'm going to," Dale said.

"No!" Darius pushed him back from joining the crowd. "You stay here. Listen to me." He reached out to his other children. "You do not fight. None of you. If the Bellicans come here—I don't care how far you have to go. Just go somewhere where they can't touch you."

" Who's making you go out?" Gabriel demanded.

Darius rubbed one side of his face and glanced over his shoulder at the impatiently waiting men. He avoided Gabriel's eyes. "No one. We volunteered." Then he took hold of his son. "I mean it. Do whatever you have to do to stay out of the fighting."

And he's trusting them because.....?

He held the little boys close. He kissed Ren. Then he was gone, off to sea like so many other times.

Gabriel threw his cup and it smashed onto the courtyard. (Exactly what I want to do to off-brand Gabriel.) He stared at it breathing hard. "Is this what you wanted?" he shouted to Wescott. "Is this what you would do as king? Sacrifice your fisherman?"

"If I was king, the terrorists wouldn't even exist," Wescott shouted into Gabriel's face.

"You should be king," said Dale, coming between them slightly.

Slowly, the fight went out of Wescott. "No." He stared out into the water with a grief in his eyes that had been there for ten years. "My father should be king."

The three stood limply and watched the ships in the harbor. Darius Draven was somewhere down there, the size of a pencil tip, looking back in the direction of his children.

"I just always think....." said Wescott, with a slight shake in his voice, "the last thing he ever saw were those heads with hoods over their faces."

"Wescott," said Dale hastily, before he lost the nerve, "I truly have never believed that your father is dead."

Gabriel shrugged, unconvinced, at the ground. But Wescott turned in seriousness. "You're not the only one."

"Who else?"

"Edem. I don't think he really knows for sure, though. I think it's a hope."

Gabriel cleared his throat. "Well," he said, "when the Bellicans come, we'll have to be ready to fight."

Dale and Wescott looked at him.

"Don't tell Hollis," he said.

Long after dark, everyone but Ren, who was unaccounted for (because she's cooking codfish), sat in a row on the rooftop. There was a certain beauty in a summer night, a brief respite between the especially long, brutally hot days. Tonight the breeze carried the scent of salty fish, spreading it thinly over the town like butter. Over the black bay, the moon was a yellowed circle, as large as a fist.

"Look how big," Hollis said.

Patch, who possessed an uncanny ability to sit and contemplate, was silent. The older four were equally hushed. Over the lull of the bay they could almost hear the thunder of five thousand Bellicans.

From the stone stairway on the left came a sudden stamping and clanking. Everyone turned at once. There stood two dozen armored soldiers, brandishing swords and spears. One stepped into the moonlight and removed his helmet, revealing his pale face. He was no older than Dale. "We've come to say that we stand with you. If we perish, we perish."

"My uncle could banish you," said Wescott.

"Then he loses his bravest men."

Wescott drew closer. "What is your name?"

"Locke," said the soldier. "You're a good man, Wescott. I wish I could call you king."

He went on introducing the soldiers, especially Wilder and Ronan, two brothers who had graduated from the Terradon military university before the place was shut down by Conrad. "Wilder and Ronan will be our strategists. We are in good hands," Locke concluded.

Wescott looked at his sister, at Dale and Gabriel, at the twenty-four soldiers standing in four rows on the balcony. "Twenty-eight against five thousand madmen?" He let out a harsh laugh. "We're in horrendous hands."

"We can find more," said Gabriel haltingly.

"We will be BUTCHERED! Every last one of us in this city!"

"Listen," said Elowyn in a penetrating voice, her sharp, pale eyes cutting her brother. "Do you think that when the Bellicans march into town, the citizens will not defend themselves?"

"Defend themselves with what, precisely, Elowyn?" asked Wescott.

"We could arm them ourselves, tonight."

"That's not enough! Conrad burned every weapon he knew existed. Half our own soldiers don't even have swords."

"Can we talk about this later?" Dale interrupted loudly.

Wescott looked at Dale. His eyes traveled to Patch and Hollis, listening fearfully.

"No," Wescott said. "They shouldn't have come. You never should have let them get in the way of what's important here."

Gabriel grabbed him by the shoulders and smashed him into the stone wall without a moment's thought. In retaliation, Wescott whipped out his sword. Dale, stronger than they were, shoved them in opposite directions. "They're not in the way of what's important," he said to Wescott, holding Gabriel back. "They are what's important."

"You don't have a brother. You can't understand," Gabriel said.

"I have a sister!" Wescott exploded at him. "And a mother! And tomorrow they'll be attacked and there's nothing I can do to defend them."

Gabriel eyed Wescott's sword. His voice was forcedly calm. "Then we'll die trying."

When they all came storming into the castle, it was quiet except for two voices. Wescott followed the sound to the kitchen, where he found Winter and Ren huddled at the stove, talking quietly amongst one another.

Remember when I said they bond over cooking. Now imagine our two Lego people around a little stove built from Lego bricks, frying up a plastic fish. 

Actually, if you imagine this whole entire story as Legos and Lego people, like in The Lego Movie, it becomes slightly more tolerable. Sliiiightly. 

"A fish is like a canvas. You can dress it up however you need to," Ren was saying.

Wescott startled them. "What are you doing?"

"Cooking," replied Ren in an even tone.

"What?"

"Cod."

"No! I meant, why? What good is this?"

Excellent question. 

"Ren knows cooking tricks I would have never dreamed up," said Winter. "Necessity is the mother of invention, I suppose."

"Get some sleep," Dale called as he passed the kitchen, not stopping.

Elowyn pushed through the doorway. "Sleeping, cooking, or fighting, what's it matter? We should all do what we prefer. According to you lot, it's hopeless anyway."

She took the plate of steaming cod her mother handed to her, but Gabriel stepped in front of her. "It's because we're letting ourselves fall into their hands!" he yelled. "You're all counting it lost! You're not even looking for weapons! If we follow your brother's lead, we might as well strap ourselves to bombs."

"Look, I could very well die tomorrow, so I am going to sit and enjoy my ruddy codfish without being shouted at," Elowyn snapped, dropping her plate hard onto the table.

An argument was close to breaking out, but Winter moved first. "We have a strong army," she said in a voice full of uncharacteristic decorum. "They will not desert us. They will know what to do."

Elowyn felt everyone watching her. She leaned over her fish and dug her palms into her eyes.

Winter sighed deeply and took a seat. "How could we give up hope? Not after all we've been through together." She cupped Elowyn's face in one hand and Wescott's in the other. "Everything will be fine so long as we are together. You two are all I've ever wanted my whole life."

Late into the night Gabriel tirelessly paced the halls, thinking himself into a fever. He was an extroverted thinker. He had to talk it out. In the past, with no alternative, he would have gone to Ren, who was just now sitting up on her bed with Sable's heavy head in her lap. But this time he thought of Elowyn. He navigated his way to her bedroom door and rapped on it.

It opened at once. She was dressed in white with her wavy hair loose. It was the most royal-looking Gabriel had ever seen her.

"I'm going to do something impossible and crazy but I need help," he said.

She came out, shutting the door behind her. "Okay."

Y'all I just hate this story so much. 

We're almost done.