The Knight at Dawn

As Jack struggles to stay afloat, he nearly loses his glasses. Annie leaps into the moat after him and calls, “Hi! I’m here!” (43). It’s too dark for the siblings to tell which way is land, but they struggle forward. Terrified, Jack realizes that Annie is in front of him, which means that something else is making the splashes coming from behind him. 

He follows the sound of his sister’s voice to the edge of the moat, and she pulls him onto the embankment. Jack thinks that the sounds he heard in the moat may have been made by crocodiles, but he can’t see anything through his water-streaked glasses and the mist encircling the castle. He finds the flashlight in his backpack, but the batteries are dead. Suddenly, the children hear a horse neigh, and the clouds part to reveal a full moon and the knight upon his black steed.

The knight holds out his hand to the astonished children, and Annie tells Jack, “He wants to help us” (48). Jack is unsure but follows his sister. The knight lifts the siblings onto his horse, sits behind them, and rides along the moat.