Not many people knew that Robert Lawless had a home. He normally spent so much time on the road or in places he wasn’t welcome. The first thing he’d actually bought with his money as a Knight Protector had BEEN the house. He’d never had a real home before. He’d bought land in the rural regions near his home town of Pickens and he would run back there when things had gotten too hot. Or things had gotten too cool. Every now and again, he’d just come back when he wanted to pretend he had a normal life. He hadn’t updated the decor in decades. He loved it.

  But then the Lingal boy had happened. The Order had called him. They’d emailed him. They’d insisted that the boy had no right or authority to do what he’d done. And that was true. But the boy had reached down into Robert Lawless and broken whatever it was that let him do the things he did. The boy HAD the authority because he’d TAKEN the authority and wielded it like a headsman’s ax. And now Robert Lawless couldn’t be Robert Lawless.

  He’d come back here again, like he always did, to Pickens. Robert had found a machine shop he could work at for the time being. He had a natural talent with metals. It gave him a way to supplement his nest egg. It gave him something to do while he'd plotted. And plot he had. He’d spent the first two weeks back home planning on finding and killing the Lingal boy, taking his father’s sword, and throwing it in the Mississippi River.

  But that was a childish, knee-jerk reaction. Robert knew that. Also, the Kaiju thing in Natchez happened and Robert realized he didn’t stand a chance of taking the boy. Not if he was fighting that far above his weight. As he’d finally started to calm down he had come up with a better plan. He’d find every skeleton in the boy’s closet and throw it out there to the world. He’d ruin the boy’s reputation. No one was innocent, he’d told himself. Everyone had a secret. Some deed they'd done that needed to be hidden. There was always a body somewhere. So every night he’d come home to his musty smelling house, turn on the local NBC affiliate, get on the laptop he’d bought, and start digging into the boy’s history. He was shocked to learn that Terry Lingal had no bodies. If there were secrets, they were well and truly secret.

  The first thing that had surprised him about the boy was just how much history there was available. His records went back to age FIVE, which was insane. The details missing from the Order were filled in by Elton Beasley, Robert's own former Troubadour. Lawless had ground his teeth over that. Elton had a gift with words and Lawless had squandered that talent. At least with Elton, he knew the information would be honest and thorough. He'd treated Elton like shit, but he could admit he respected Elton as a writer.

  Robert had read the boy’s life story and he’d felt sick. He hated feeling a kinship with the rotten boy, but the circumstances of their lives were depressingly similar. He hadn’t known Lingal's mother had died of cancer. He'd known she'd died, but not how. He and Glen had already fallen out at that point. He’d known Marie. She was beautiful, and had drank him under the table twice. He'd thought of trying to steal her away from Glen a couple of times. He knew he hadn't stood a chance though. She deserved better than cancer, and better than Robert Lawless. Robert could admit the better man HAD won.

  All he'd really known about Glen’s fate was that he had died fighting a dragon. He hadn’t realized it was on purpose. Elton painted a vivid picture of a man who’d lost every reason he’d had to live after Marie. Robert could understand that. Especially now. Damn it. He'd liked Glen. He'd always liked Glen. What had he done with his life? How had he let jealousy drive everyone away?

  Anyway, the boy had been taken in by an aunt and uncle. Lawless had lived that same history. His father had killed his mother over an affair when Robert was only a year old. Robert had seen him maybe a half a dozen times in his life on brief trips up to Parchman to see him. His father didn't know him, really, and hadn't cared about the visits one way or the other. They'd taken him to visit because that's what was expected of both of them. He’d been taken in by an aunt and uncle. Beasley painted Ernest and Dottie as loving caretakers. Lawless had hated Ernest on sight, the same way he'd started hating Glen.

  But that's where the paths forked for him and Lingal. Robert had seen the circumstances of his life as unfair. Tragedies thrown on a child that hadn’t deserved them. He’d taken knocks. He’d raged. He’d decided there was only one thing to do. Make the world pay for what had been done to him. He would charge in and take what he wanted and needed. It was only fair. The world had made Robert Lawless into what he was. Lawless by name and Lawless by nature his aunt had said. There was really no other way he could have turned out, he'd thought. He was what the world wanted him to be.

  Then he’d read about Terry Lingal. Somehow, with the same materials, the boy had come out as something else entirely. The boy had taken all the hurt and pain and loneliness life could throw at him and become something more. Something pure. Something. . .good. Something about that affected Robert so deeply, he'd stopped looking in mirrors that very night. He didn't want to meet his own eyes. He didn't like what he saw there.

  Finally, one dark night in September, Robert had read the story about the goblin restaurant in Natchez. It had gotten buried in the media because of the kaiju, but Elton gave it pride of place in the boy’s Chronicles. It wasn’t the big adventure that the boy and his party treasured the most. It was this little moment. The small act of kindness that no one was ever going to pay attention to.

  He’d driven down there. He’d eaten the food, which was actually really damned good. He’d had some beers. He’d found himself spilling his guts to a goblin bartender that had, in turn, told him about how much the goblins loved the Lingal boy. THE Errant Apprentice. They had an awkward picture of him hanging behind the bar with that bald girl he had with him. Robert had ended up crying on a bench outside with a goblinette with a mohawk telling him dad jokes trying to cheer him up. More had come up afterward. They'd all checked on him. Robert had killed hundreds of goblins. These had tried to take care of him. It made him reconsider everything he'd ever done. He liked these goblins, and they liked him. They didn't know who he was though. If they did, he'd have been thrown out.

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  Then there were the quotes, the videos, and the photos in the Chronicles. All the actual things the boy did every day. His lived life, as it were. Little snippets of conversation. Musings on the road. The things Robert had NEVER wanted related to the wide world of his own life. Everything the boy had represented that day in Hilochita had been real. He was knighthood personified and he made the rest of them have to look at who they truly were. What they were, was a joke. A sad joke played on the world itself. They were the comedians and the punchlines. Terry Lingal was what they had turned away from. Terry was the reminder of their failure.

  And that was what broke him, in the end. That was why Robert sat there on his 1983 Sears & Roebuck furniture in a dark house staring at his hands. He’d realized that if Terry Lingal was a beacon to guide people to be better, then Robert Lawless was the shadow that beacon cast behind it.

  He’d almost ended it several times that week alone. He worked in a machine shop. There were plenty of ways to have an accident. But he hadn’t. No, what had stopped him before, and then stopped him again this night, was one truth. If he died, no one would care. Ok, that wasn’t strictly true, actually. There were at least three towns in the southeast that would actively celebrate news of his demise.

  What he’d realized was that he’d be gone, and no one would mourn. He’d done nothing that anyone would remember. Not fondly. He’d be a footnote in someone else’s story. A speed bump on the road to glory. He didn’t want to die like that. So Robert Lawless decided that he would take what years he had left and try to change. Maybe it was too late. It was PROBABLY too late. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t let himself die without trying. If Terry Lingal could run away into the woods full of pain and loss and come back a hero, then there might be some hope left.

  He couldn’t be a knight. He knew that. Lingal had planted something inside him that forbade that to him. The idea of even trying terrified him. But there were other things he could try to be. He just didn’t know what yet. He also knew that he couldn’t use a sword any more. He couldn’t trust himself with one. He wasn’t afraid of what he’d do to other people any more. He was afraid of what he’d do to himself.

  In the end, he’d made these gauntlets. They were something he’d been thinking of making for years that would look bad-ass with his armor. Then he’d come up with his grand plan. The way he would save himself in his own eyes. He would protect people. He’d do it quietly. He’d do it without fanfare. This wasn’t about popularity and fame any more. This was about being able to look at himself in the mirror without shame again. He could do that. He could be circumspect. He’d done a lot of things on the down low for the Order. The last thing he needed was more of his own pride.

  So he’d made the gauntlets. They were leather with copious armor plates and bands. There were studs. There was a large plate on the back of either fist. They managed to look impressive and had a certain modern flair to them, not to toot his own horn for once. They matched his armor.

  After that he had gone to Cy. Cy was a disgraced member of the Circle that Lawless had worked with on numerous occasions. He was an enchanter. He’d moved to Mississippi from Kingsport to get away from his own shame. The farthest he could get from Kingsport without a boat. He was technically a wizard, but he still had mage training. Robert had never asked Cy what he’d done to get drummed out of the Circle and Cy had always seemed grateful for that. It hadn’t been hard to convince Cy to work on his gauntlets. He’d only had to say one thing and that had done it.

  “Don’t you want to do one last good thing before the end, Cy?”

  Robert stood up off of the wooden monstrosity of a couch and walked into his armory. He’d thrown almost everything out, save his armor and these new gauntlets. He’d definitely gotten rid of his tabbard. He had an idea of what to replace it with.

  He picked the gauntlets up, walked outside into his front yard, and put them on. There was a red glow to the sigils Cy had embedded on the backs of the fists. They looked vaguely like a dragon constellation surrounded by a circle. He flexed the fingers and the fit was perfect. He could acknowledge that he’d done some good work with these. That wasn’t prideful. It was a statement of fact. He had just gotten these back from Cy that morning. This would be his first test.

  He held his arms out and then brought them up in front of him. He crossed his arms at the wrists. He concentrated on the word “protect”. Cy had said it didn’t matter what the word was. It could be shield, or save, or safe, or pancakes. Any word would do as long as Robert wanted to protect something. It was the state of mind. Not the words.

  A bright and glowing blue shield formed in front of him and when he turned, the shield turned with him. It looked like a barely visible portion of a dome. A dome would have been too much mana, but this would work. Cy said it could stop a Ford pick-up at speed before shattering. It could stop quite a few spells. It could stop quite a few bullets.

  Robert smiled and realized it was probably the first time he’d smiled without malice since he was a kid. One more test.

  He lowered his arms and the shield vanished. He clenched his fists and then ran toward this one tree at the edge of his property. He’d wanted it gone but the one tree guy he knew wanted something like two grand to remove it. He might be able to take care of it right now.

  As soon as he was close enough, Robert jumped forward and swung his fist at the tree. He thought of the idea of stopping something to protect people. Cy had said it would have to be for a good reason. Robert had to pretend the tree was a threat to mankind. His fist hit and nothing happened except that Robert was going to have to take some Tylenol. He shook his hand.

  He clenched his fist again and considered that this test would help save people in the long run. That was something he could believe in. That was something true. He pulled his fist back and struck the tree head on. This time, the shield formed in front of his fist and he shattered huge chunks of bark and wood off of it. He hit it four more times and the tree started leaning toward him.

  Robert nodded, then gave the falling tree one hit on the right side. It flew to the left and missed his house, landing along the property line. He nodded and smiled again. This would work. This he could do. This would give him a chance to change. To help. To save himself.

  He hoped that one day, long after he was gone, Terry Lingal would hear that Robert Lawless had tried to be something better before the end. He just wanted someone, anyone, to be proud of him for once.

  ***

  The End of Book One of the Errant Apprentice

  For

  Robbie Joyce, Ted, and Cindi Hayman

  And for Paul Hamblin.