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“Quiet, you idiot.” Evil Robin Hood shot him an annoyed look. “We don’t share our secrets with Apprentices.”

I looked up at the buildings all around us. I didn’t recognize any of them. “Am I still in the Fortress?”

“Of course,” laughed the talkative bandit. “This spell can’t move between realm—” He snapped his mouth shut when Evil Robin Hood gave him a seething look.

But I needed to know more. “What district are we in?”

“That’s none of your concern,” Evil Robin Hood drawled from behind his drawn bow. “Now hand over the bag,”

I clutched the paper-thin shopping bag to my body. I wasn’t sure how valuable the magic ingredients were, but they were certainly worth a lot to me.

“You can’t have the bag,” I shot back. “This is my Quest. If I can’t even go shopping without failing, then I will never accomplish anything. I will never be a great Knight.”

“Stop talking and hand over the goods,” Evil Robin Hood demanded, impatience straining his voice.

Obviously, he didn’t care about my troubles.

This Quest was a disaster. First, the bandits in the mall. And now this band of armed supernatural thieves.

It was a testament to how terrible today was going that I was feeling almost nostalgic about the good old days of facing the Cursed Ones. At least there was a Handbook that told me what to do when I met the Cursed Ones. I had no Handbook on bandits.

“Hand over the bag, you say?” I laughed. At least the nausea was fading. “Do I have ‘newbie’ stamped on my forehead?” I demanded, trying to buy a little time so I could think up a way out of this disaster. “Am I wearing a t-shirt that says ‘mug me’? Did someone write ‘gullible’ on the ceiling?”

The bandits looked at my forehead, at my t-shirt, at the sky that wasn’t a ceiling. They frowned in confusion.

“Stop stalling,” Evil Robin Hood growled at me.

I still had no idea how to get out of this mess. Fighting seemed foolish; the bandits had weapons. And they had me surrounded, so running wouldn’t work. If only I could trick them into leaving.

The question was how to do that. Sure, I had a few wild ideas, but none of them would work given my total lack of useful spells.

“Time’s up.” Evil Robin Hood waved his hand, and one of the bandits rushed toward me.

I managed to evade him, but the movement put me off balance. I tumbled into a group of people who’d gathered here, probably to watch me get mugged. Maybe that’s what people did for entertainment around here. Wherever ‘here’ was.

The crowd pushed me back toward the bandits.

“She moves pretty fast for a little girl,” one of the bandits laughed.

“I think we were doing this all wrong, boys. We shouldn’t be stealing from her. We should be stealing her. A cute little firecracker like that girl must be worth something.”

“She’d make a decent serving girl to an Elven princess.”

“Or a tasty snack for a vampire.”

“I’m standing right here, you know,” I told them, annoyed. “So stop talking about me like I’m not.”

I’d had quite enough of that before I became an Apprentice. But I wassomeonenow.

“I’m not invisible or irrelevant, and I’m not going to let you treat me like I am either of those things,” I scolded them.

The bandits stopped laughing. They looked at me in surprise, as though they’d actually forgotten about me. Which was pretty stupid. How could you possibly forget about someone while you’re talking about them? Then again, these bandits didn’t look like the sharpest tools in the shed.

Low chuckling drew my attention to a teenage girl who stood away from the rest of the crowd. She looked even younger than I was, though maybe that was because of her skinny pigtails and round face. She even had dimples.

“Sothisis your strategy for dealing with the bandits?” the girl asked me.

“I don’t suppose you have a better idea?”