Possessions: An Axe, This Page, Giant’s Blood, Bottled Fire, A Cow

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There wasn’t any doubt in my mind that the Giant’s Blood and Bottled Fire would get a listing. If my axe made the cut, then of course items that were actually magic would make the cut too. The cow getting a listing was the only thing I wasn’t sure that was going to happen.

It was odd to see it listed amongst the objects in my Possessions sections, but I did own it and I couldn’t say I had a relationship with it like it was my dog that I’d list in Relations.

The fact that it was even listed at all was the most important part. It was the first concrete clue I was getting to the purpose of the two versions of Jack and the Beanstalk listed in my story’s description. After all, Jack and the Beanstalk usually begins with a widow, a Jack, and a cow all living together and both versions of the story my page presented followed that pattern. My story, however, was missing one of three key starting ingredients.

Until now that is. The cow showing up probably had some implications about certain things being destiny, but that was beyond me at that moment. What I was interested in going forward was finding out other similarities us three Jacks shared and what similarities they shared that I didn’t.

After setting up a few connecting ropes and overlapping trait circles in my head, I moved onto my next project. With a spark, I lit a rushlight, so I could see the small pot of giant’s blood I had placed in Andrew’s room earlier.

Taking my quill, I dipped it in the blood, then pushed my page against the wall, so I could write. The page had basically swallowed the ink I had used on it before and vanished it out of existence, but what would it do when I wrote on it with something magical instead?

The answer was swallow, then vanish it out of existence again. It did, however, do so much more slowly this time. And that was only if I just let the ink sit there with no purpose. If I wrote words—odd feeling doing that with blood—then they'd crack and tear then turn into the dust just as fast as normal ink would be sucked into the page.

I tried crossing out words too, but the blood wouldn’t even leave a mark on the page. When I looked close and brought the quill to it slowly, I realized the ink was actually vanishing before it could even touch the words.

Seeing that definitely got a couple things across to me. The first was that writing on the page was something firmly beyond me for now. Second was that if there were such great measures against writing on it, then figuring out how to do so would be well worth the reward.

Stuffing my page back under my pillow, I put out my rushlight, hid the giant’s blood, then jumped into bed. I tried falling asleep, but judging by how I was feeling, it appeared that it wasn’t something that would be coming easy for me that night.

Images of flaming giants and red-eyed wolves made of mist and oil plagued my mind. Thinking about them made me wonder how I’d ever convinced myself to ride out into such a dangerous situation. The person I was or at least the person I remembered being, definitely wasn’t who I was now.

Riding out to fight monsters two and half my size in a body one of them had personally murdered three days ago? Was I insane? Probably not, but I think the other guy must have been pretty close to it for me to be acting this way.

I was going to have to get his impulsiveness under control. More than anything, this encounter with the giants proved that intelligence was needed far more than aggression when dealing with them. It also managed to prove that I was going to need magic far more than either of them. That bottled fire had done more than I could ever hope to do with a spear or an axe. Hopefully, I could find something more potent in the future.

With the slight fear that the giants actually would show up for revenge in the middle of the night, I eventually did fall asleep. Starting from the next day, Hailee, Agatha, and I carried on with the common tasks around the house, staying mostly indoors and waiting for market day to come. We never said it out loud, but I think we were all waiting for a giant’s foot to come through the ceiling too.

As Agatha had instructed me to do, the day before the market, I borrowed Hailee’s father and a cart from the hamlet, filled the cart with lumber, and took the wood with him to Milaway to sell it. Henry was able to back me up when bargaining with the merchants and thanks to him I was able to match the price Agatha told me she thought the wood would be worth.

Though bush wood was abundant around the kingdom, the stuff you’d want to build homes and furniture out of was owned and managed by the nobles. What was harvested never met demand and forest being the best terrain to fight giants, harvesting had fallen even further short of where it was before the war. Thanks to that, we received quite the hefty earning between a cart of wood and a promise to deliver more.

The next day was my first market day. With a good few from the hamlet, Agatha and I went out to Milaway in hopes of carting back enough food to stave off hunger for the summer season. From the start Hailee split off from us to shop with her family, but she’d return now and then to put the things she brought to our cart. Her doing that definitely gave the feeling that she was planning to stay for more than a week, but there was no point in saying anything since it was nice to have her.

About halfway through the trip, Hailee returned to the cart not only with food, but with news and a troubled expression. “Did you hear?” she asked, placing a few goods into a cart alongside some that I was loading in myself.

“Hear what?” I asked.

“One of the merchants told me there’s news of giants coming to the villages up north.”

“Hup,” I hoisted a large sack of grain onto the cart. “And what happened?”

“The same thing they did here. Took all the food and all the livestock except for a couple horses.”

A few more reports like that and I could definitely see the barony going through a famine in the near future. “How many of them were there?”

“Three. Two orange, fat ones and one that was gray. I’m sure they were the same ones that were here.”

I held back a sigh of relief. If it was just those three it meant we probably weren’t in for a full-scale invasion, at least not yet. Them moving north after we confronted them in the forest also meant they probably weren’t looking for revenge yet either.

“I think you’re right,” I told Hailee. “We can probably rest easy.” Though I wasn’t sure I should be letting myself feel happy that they were other people’s problem now instead of mine.

“At least until the harvest comes around,” she said.

“Let’s hope until after the harvest too.”

After hearing the news from Hailee, Agatha and I decided to stock up on more than we needed for the summer and hide it in case the giants came around for the harvest. Even doing that, though, we still had more money than we needed from selling the wood to get the repairs done for the property. Knowing that the giants were now out of the area, we felt comfortable enough to go forward with them.

When we returned from the market with the villagers, we offered some of the men work fixing our house and the barn. Just like at the funeral, some of them insisted that they do what good neighbors do and help for free, but Agatha and I insisted that they think about looking out for their family first before they did us any favors.

"If we were worried about money, then we wouldn't have split what we got for the giant's blood," I told them. That being said, however, gifts of knowledge I was much more willing to take for free. Which is how I found myself sitting in Mr. Edward’s house the very next morning.

"Would like some?" Mr.Edward asked as he poured himself a cup of raspberry juice. They didn't have fruit coming from the trees around here, but they had plenty coming from the bush. The giants hadn’t taken any. Their bags were good for storing things, but they probably didn't make the small things less prone to squishing. Besides, berries were mostly the fruits of us small men with how small and easy to squish they were. They did apparently enjoy tributes of fruit juice, however.

"I'm fine," I said, refusing the raspberry juice.

"How about blueberry?"

I shook my head and he took a drink from his cup.

"You know it's surprising having you ask me for my instruction," he said.

"I'm sorry if it's a bother."

"No, no, just has me curious for the reason is all."

"Well, I knew I forgot a lot after talking to everyone at the funeral, but I didn’t fully grasp how much that was until I went to the market. If I ever have to travel, I think I should try to learn at least as much as I knew before.” At least enough to keep me out of trouble.

"If you travel is it? I suspect we’ll all be traveling soon if things get bad enough here. But teaching what you knew before, I’m not fully sure of what you knew or what you’ve forgotten to begin with. Is there anything you'd like to know in particular or would you like me to ask you questions about what you do know until we come to a topic that interests you?"

I already had something in mind. "Ben told me the reason for the king's decree is because Jacks are good at dealing with giants?"

"A surprising few tend to be, yes."

"How come?" and how can I become like them, I thought.

Mr. Edward shrugged. "I'm sure the peoples of the kingdoms east of ours ask why their common hero name is Hans and I’m sure they are lacking an answer just as well."

"Okay, but how are heroes so good at dealing with giants? And why can't everyone else do the same?"

"That would be on account of most of them having magic."

"Most of them?"

"There's a rarer bunch who don’t, but I'd say that there’s something special about them and how they interact with the world that might as well be as good as magic."

"Special like?"

"Like something I haven't seen from you I'm afraid," he said, but I already had Luck with Giants, so maybe it wasn't so far away.

"Okay, so what about the ones with magic?” I asked. “How do they get their hands on magic?”

“Well, some find a magic item and some are given one. Others make a deal with the fey for it while an even rarer few are just born with it."

“Okay, and so how does a Jack like me get his hands on it?"

Mr. Edward chuckled. "Looks like that obsession of yours hasn’t been forgotten,” he said, before drinking from his cup again. “Like I’ve told you before, I doubt you’ll find any magic heirlooms or lost treasures around here, this place has too little history for that. You can’t expect anyone to spare you a magic item, either and if you were born with magic or a special tact for dealing with giants we would have known so by now.”

"So that leaves me with the fey." I could see why the other Jack was so obsessed with them now.

"Do you remember where the fey border is?" Mr. Edward asked.

"No."

"Past the mountains, past the frontlines of the war, past the lands that the giants' have stolen, and past the grasslands that blanket the eastern edge of this kingdom. The great woodlands east of that is where the fey reside.”

“But I thought there were fey in the forest here?”

“Not that I know of. The thornwoods were planted long after the giants cleared Arland of its fey-infested forest and sometime after our ancestors revolted in the first place. Though the fey could make this place their home, they rarely move through land that's not heavily wooded and there's too much of a gap for them to expect them to bother making the trip over the mountains.”

“Then what's the point of no men lay in forests?”

“Just a tradition here. Past the mountains, it’s very much still a necessity. Even more so once you get past the border.”

That surprised me. After hearing about the fey at the funeral, I assumed they had some involvement in me ending up here, but if what Mr. Edward was saying was true, maybe that wasn’t the case. That said, there was still a chance.

“So let's say that I've traveled across the kingdom and reached the fey border,” I said, “How will I find the fey once I’m there?” I wasn't about to travel a couple hundred miles or three or however many that was in leagues, but the information on finding one at the border might be useful for finding one here.

“If the few who travel back and forth across the border are to be believed, then the fey will be the ones finding you and they’ll be much more likely to be wicked rather than kind. They can steal most of your years in the blink of an eye and make you as old as I am and that’s on the more tame side of what they can do.

“Dangerous beings to deal with for sure, even for those who are prepared. I don't think running into one would do you any good.”

“If the fey are so dangerous, how did the King deal with them?” I asked, still interested in pursuing the fey. In my mind, obtaining more magic wasn’t just an option for my safety, it was mandatory.

“Well, he was a Jack of the Beanstalk.”

Ding, ding, ding! That’s important. “A Jack of the Beanstalk?” I repeated.

“So many heroes named Jack we had to give them titles so we could tell which ones we were talking about. Of course, then there comes the problem when too many Jacks do the same thing and we have to give them the same title. Jack of the Beanstalk isn’t a unique one, but the king has a title all to himself. For all his efforts against the fey at the border, he was dubbed the Jack of the Border.”

I leaned a little bit more forward in my chair. “And what got him the title of Jack of the Beanstalk?”

“Those few Jacks who manage to grow a giant beanstalk are given the title of Jack of the Beanstalk. Happens about once a century or so. Even more if you count the fellows who aren't named Jack who've managed to grow one.”

“And how did growing a giant beanstalk help him deal with the fey?” There wasn’t anything introduced in any version of Jack and the Beanstalk that I’d read where Jack takes something from the giants that could actually help him in a fight.

Mr. Edward chuckled. “It didn't help at all, at least not directly. But giant beanstalks do have a tendency to touch the parts of the sky where the giants live and the giants often have magic treasures stolen from the little people that they hoard.”

“Wait, giants live in the sky?” I wasn't surprised, I was just sticking to my amnesia act.

“Some of them do, we just can’t see it because of magic,” he pointed to his eye.

Okay, now I was genuinely a little confused. “If that's the case, why didn't the giants drop down from the sky instead of coming and going on land to steal from us? They can't get back up once they've come down?”

“That and they'd die from the fall. There's only a few safe paths down from there and it's the same case going up. When a giant beanstalk is grown, it acts as a new path.”

I asked him if that meant giants originally came from the sky, but unfortunately he didn’t have an answer for that. “So what happened when the king grew the beanstalk? Did a giant come down?”

“One tried, but the king cut down the beanstalk before he could reach the bottom.”

“Alright, so magic beanstalks let you steal treasure from giants. But how do you plant a giant beanstalk in the first place?”

“It takes a great deal of luck. After all, it’s a once a century occurrence that a Jack stumbles upon the magic beans needed to grow one. As for how the king stumbled upon his, well, he traded his cow to a man from the eastern kingdoms for them.”

“He traded a cow for a giant beanstalk?”

Mr. Edward’s smile grew wide. “Would you like to hear the whole story from the start?”

I'd been hoping that he'd ask. "If you're willing to tell me.”