by Adam Gidwitz
New laws had been introduced. Children were not allowed out of their houses alone. Any children on the streets had to be attached to an adult by rope or chain. Children found alone out of doors were to be arrested. Children who fled were to be killed.
Some parents went easy on their young ones: they obeyed the law, for fear of the soldiers, but treated their young ones with secret kindness. But others needed very little convincing to fear their children. They chained them to posts and beat them in the streets for the least infraction. They locked them in basements at night, to prevent their escape. They cursed them. They neglected them.
It was a very grim kingdom indeed.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, How, how could the prince do all this? He seemed like such a nice boy! Maybe a little stupid. Well, maybe incredibly stupid. But not cruel. Not like this.
Right you are. The prince, stupid and self-centered as he was, was no tyrant.
No. Captain Herzlos, of the scarred face and long, black hair, was the tyrant.
For the cunning captain had whipped the subjects of Grimm on Jorinda’s behalf. He had betrayed the castle into the prince’s hands. He had murdered her in the Kingswood. And finally he had locked the weak-willed prince in his room—with only his colored blocks to play with. For the good of the kingdom, Herzlos said.
Now the ruthless and efficient King Herzlos sat on the throne of Grimm.
He was the cruelest tyrant the land had ever known.
* * *
Jorinda and Joringel traveled a dusty road into the kingdom. On either side of them lay dead fields, tramped into submission by a thousand boots. Widowed houses with black, empty windows peered over the once green farms. A goat’s skull, half buried in the loose dirt, smiled at them as flies seethed over what little flesh remained. The whole kingdom rotted—field after field, house after house, goat’s skull after goat’s skull.
(Okay, there was only one goat’s skull.)
“Who did this?” Joringel asked, bewildered. “Who sacked the farms? Who ruined the land?”
Jorinda sighed. “We did, Little Brother. We did.”
Joringel hung his head.
It was true. After all, Herzlos had only continued what Jorinda and Joringel had begun.
As Jorinda and Joringel got closer to the center of the kingdom, fewer houses were abandoned. A few shops were open. They saw people on the road. One noticed them and stared. Jorinda and Joringel, for fear of being recognized, slid into the shadow of an abandoned home. There, they rubbed dirt on their faces and into their tattered clothes.
When they emerged from behind the house, their eyes fell upon a small girl with black hair and a spray of freckles across her nose. She was crouched in the dirt, peeling potatoes with a dull blade. The rinds fell into a small, cracked bowl. The potatoes she threw in a pot.
The little girl looked up to see Jorinda and Joringel emerging from the shadows, and she gasped. Her knife slipped, cutting her thumb. Red blood fell to the dusty ground. “Ow!” she cried.
“Eva! What’d you do?” bellowed a voice from inside.
The little girl’s eyes were wide and frightened. Not of the voice, though. Of Jorinda and Joringel. “What . . . where are your chains?” she whispered.
Jorinda and Joringel were confused.
The little girl motioned down at their ankles. Then she stood up. A shackle was buckled around her little heel, and to the shackle was clamped a heavy iron chain.
Jorinda demanded, “Why are you chained like a dog?”
The little girl didn’t know how to answer her.
“Eva!” a woman’s voice bellowed. It was coming closer.
“You should run,” said the little girl, glancing behind her. “If my mother sees you, she’ll call for the soldiers. She’s on their side.”
“On whose side?” Joringel asked.
“The king’s! The adults’!”
“EVA!” Suddenly, the little girl’s feet were jerked out from under her and her chin slammed into the bowl of potato skins, breaking it in three. Jorinda fell to the girl’s side.
“Hey! Who are you? Where are your parents?” a voice bellowed. Standing in the doorway of the house was a round woman with a red face and oily red hair. In her hands, she held the other end of the little girl’s chain. She yanked it again. Eva slid back toward her house, leaving two trails of blood in the dirt—one from her thumb, and the other from her chin. The fat woman’s beady eyes did not leave Jorinda or Joringel. “Where are your chains?”
Jorinda and Joringel stared, uncomprehending.
“SOLDIERS! HELP! SOLDIERS! CHILDREN ON THE LOOSE!” the woman’s sharp, nasal voice rattled the windowpanes in the nearby houses. Doors flew open. Shutters clattered and heads emerged. “CHILDREN! CHILDREN!”
Little Eva gazed up desperately at Jorinda and Joringel. “Go!” she whispered. “Go!”
They ran behind the abandoned house, sprinted down the dusty roadway, and then crawled through a barren field until they could no longer hear the people shouting. At the edge of the field they found a broken-down toolshed. They pushed in the rickety wooden slats of the door and crawled into the darkness.
“What was that?” Jorinda asked.
“No idea.” Joringel heaved.
“What is going on?”
Joringel shook his head.
The children sat in the damp cool of the shed until their breath returned to normal.
“We should figure it out,” Jorinda announced.
“I think, maybe, we should just leave,” said Joringel.
“It’s our kingdom.”
“It used to be our kingdom.”
“This is all our fault.”
“It isn’t.” Joringel’s face was scrunched up. “We didn’t ask to be born, remember?”
But Jorinda replied, “Just because that isn’t our fault doesn’t mean nothing is.” She gestured at the ruined field through the broken slats of the shed. “This is our fault.”
Joringel didn’t speak for a moment. They could hear the wind eddying over the dusty field. The little shed creaked.
“I don’t want to walk away again,” Jorinda whispered. Her words hung in the damp darkness.
Joringel sighed. At last, he said, “Then there’s only one place to go.”
Jorinda nodded. The dusk collected over the barren field. “But not now,” she said.
“No?”
“No. Tomorrow.” Jorinda drew her shirt tight around her and dropped her head onto her brother’s shoulder. “Tomorrow, we can go home.”
Dear Reader,
I have some advice for you. And, being much older than you (probably), and much wiser than you (just take my word for it), I recommend that you listen to it.
If you are trying to keep all your feelings smothered down and stamped out and choked back—and I’m not saying you should, I’m just saying maybe you are—do not do what Jorinda and Joringel are about to do.
Do not go home.
If you have a stone that you have smothered under mattresses, and you hope to keep it smothered, do not go home. If you have weeds that you have stamped upon and stamped upon until they withered and died, and you want them to stay dead, do not go home. If you have tears locked inside your stomach, churning around like some tempestuous inland sea, and you cannot bear to let them out, do not go home.
For home is the quarry that the stone was cut from. Home is the wild field that blew the weeds into your yard. Home is the wellspring of all your salty tears.
Two children stood beneath a juniper tree.
The sky was inky and full of stars, but the horizon was a smudge of cream-like gray with hints of blue. Above their heads, in the fragrant, piney juniper branches, a little bird announced that the morning was near. The little house in which Jorinda and Joringel had grown up was dark.
And then
a candle flickered to life in a windowpane on the first floor. The scene suddenly looked like a painting: one window, a rectangle of buttery yellow, framed by the gray and black landscape. Jorinda reached out and took her brother’s hand.
“She’s awake,” the little girl whispered. Still, the children stood there, like deer at the edge of a strange field—tense and alert. They had not come home once since the day they had left. Though they lived in Grimm for a year and more—in the castle, no less—they had never done it. And their mother, closed as she was in her study every morning and every evening, had never come looking for them, either.
Finally, the children took hands and crossed the space between the juniper tree and the door to their childhood home. The grass was sodden with dew. The little bird in the juniper tree raised its voice so the whole countryside could hear. The stars overhead were fading.
Jorinda was the one to open the front door—unlocked, of course. For who, now that their mother lived alone, would remember to lock it? Joringel led the way through the foyer—where he had sat, long ago, his head unnaturally leaning to one side, his face pale, his eyes wide, a handkerchief reddening around his neck, an apple in his hand.
The door to her study was closed. A bar of guttering light crawled out from beneath it.
Jorinda glanced at her brother. His jaw was moving side to side in his head. She raised her eyebrows. He nodded. Jorinda reached out her hand and knocked a hollow knock on the old pine door.
The children waited. There was the dull thud of a book being dropped to the floor. Pages rustled like dead leaves in autumn. The seconds crawled by.
At last, the door swung open, and Jorinda and Joringel saw their mother, blinking at them through her reading glasses, her limp brown hair folded up in a messy bun.
For one second, no one spoke. They just stood there.
Then their mother said, “Hold on. I’m at an important part. I’ll be right out.” She pushed the door of the study closed.
Jorinda and Joringel stared at the worn wood of the pine door. They knew every knot in it, every whorl. Closed. Just as it had always been.
And then, very slowly, it opened. Their mother leaned against the old, warped wood. A crooked smile jagged its way across her face. Her eyes were bright with tears.
“Sorry,” she said. “That was my poor idea of a joke.”
And then she reached out and pulled her children to her and wrapped her arms around them, and as they held her, Jorinda and Joringel inhaled the scent of their mother. After a minute, Jorinda and Joringel tried to pull away. But their mother would not release them. They laughed—and then their eyes brimmed, and overflowed. Slowly, the sky began to brighten in the study window. Streaks of pink illuminated the morning. The minutes passed. And the tears continued to course through their lashes, fluently, endlessly, as if all the water that had ever sloshed around in the children’s stomachs was now pouring from their eyes—and still their mother clutched them. And she whispered, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming home.”
* * *
The kitchen clattered with plates and forks and pans and glassware. Eggs sizzled in butter, and a loaf of bread browned in the oven, lacing the air with its yeasty scent. The children ate hungrily. Their mother watched them, grinning like a fool.
After breakfast, the morning was bright and warm. Jorinda and Joringel went out and sat with their mother beneath the juniper tree and watched a doe rabbit nose her kittens across the short grass, nibbling clover. The children were exhausted, but they were happy to lean their heads against their mother’s soft shoulders and stare across the distant rolling fields.
“Do you know,” their mother murmured, “that it hurts me to look at you?”
Jorinda pulled herself slowly away from her mother and peered up into those tired, misty eyes. “It does?”
Their mother nodded.
“Because you’re still angry at us?” Joringel asked.
A shadow crossed their mother’s face. “Angry at you? When was I angry at you?”
Joringel shrugged and looked to his sister. Jorinda said, “Because of what happened to Father.”
Their mother still did not understand.
Joringel said, “He died when we were born.”
Their mother seemed to fold in on herself. Her face grayed, sagged. She whispered, “I was never angry at you. I’m sorry you thought that. You are the most miraculous children I could ever have imagined. No, it hurts to look at you because I love you so much.” She gazed at the window of her study, reflecting the warm light of the mid-morning sun. “I spent so much time away from you not because I was angry, but because I was trying not to be afraid. Afraid of how much I loved you, afraid of how miraculous you both were, afraid that I would not be a good enough mother for you. I was trying to shut out my fear. To shove it down. To forget about it.”
“To cover it with mattresses,” Jorinda said.
“To stamp out the weeds,” Joringel added.
“To choke back the tears,” Jorinda concluded.
Their mother winced. “Where did you learn that?”
“You, Mama,” Jorinda said.
Their mother sighed sharply. “No matter how many mattresses I threw on that stone, I still felt it.”
The children stared up at their mother, watching her think.
“No matter how I stamped on the weeds, they still grew back.” She paused. “And I killed the good plants, too.”
The children waited, not breathing.
“Choking back the tears just felt like choking.”
The children smiled sadly.
“Will you forgive me for being so stupid?” their mother asked them. They laughed. But the mother folded her children in her arms again and held them—held them as tightly as she had always wanted to.
Okay, I suppose there is one benefit to going home.
It’s true that home is the quarry, the wild field, and the wellspring.
But until you plumb the quarry, you will not know its depths; until you run through the field, you will not bask in its sunshine; until you bathe at the source of the tears, you will never be clean.
* * *
Then, from the road that led toward their house, they heard the stamping of feet. It came in unison, like distant drums. A cloud of dust billowed over the hill.
“Quick!” their mother said. “Get inside!”
Jorinda and Joringel were on their feet in a flash, across the green yard, and into their little house. Their mother followed close behind.
“Soldiers,” she said, watching at the window.
“Are they coming here?” Jorinda demanded.
After a silent minute, her mother said, “No. Just passing.”
Jorinda exhaled.
“Mama, we saw the strangest thing,” Joringel said. “A little girl had a chain around her ankle, like she was a wild beast. She seemed surprised that we didn’t have one.”
“The new laws,” she said. She moved the children away from the windows. They sat down at the kitchen table, and she explained the new laws to Jorinda and Joringel. The children listened in horror.
“The prince did all this?” Jorinda asked, incredulous.
“Not the prince. The new king. Herzlos.” And their mother described how Herzlos had imprisoned the prince—for the good of the kingdom, supposedly—and taken the throne himself.
Jorinda, Joringel, and their mother sat in the kitchen, looking at their hands.
“We have to do something,” Jorinda announced. “This is my fault.”
“Our fault,” Joringel corrected her. “The laws against bad parents were my idea.” After a moment, he said, “I could just turn myself in. Then they wouldn’t be afraid of me coming back to rally the children and rebel. This might all end.”
Jorinda shook her head. “You don’t believe that. It wouldn’t end.”
“No,” said their mother. “It wouldn’t.”
“We need to free the children,” Joringel asserted.
“They need a safe place to go,” said Jorinda.
“Okay,” Joringel said. “Let’s find a safe place for them to go. Then we free them.”
Their mother smiled sadly. “My dears, you’d surely be caught. And even if you did free them, would they come with you? Where would they go?”
“What about the forest next to Malchizedek’s house?” Jorinda suggested. “No one ever goes out there.”
Joringel nodded vigorously. “We could all live out in the woods, there by the quarry!”
“It would be like a kingdom!” Jorinda agreed, warming to the idea. “A kingdom of children.”
Joringel repeated that. “The Kingdom of Children. I like the sound of that.”
Their mother was looking at Jorinda and Joringel wistfully. “Let’s not get carried away, my dears. This is a very sweet idea, but it isn’t realistic. We’ve got to get you two away from here as soon as we can. Freeing the other children won’t be possible.”
Jorinda and Joringel bowed their heads. The kitchen was heavy with silence.
Jorinda stood up from the kitchen table. “Mother, have you ever ruled a kingdom?”
Her mother blinked up at her. “Well, no . . .”
Joringel stood up beside his sister. “Have you rescued a castle from an eternal sleep?”
“Of course not, but . . .”
“Have you survived a corpse trying to choke you to death?”
“What?!”
“Or scaled the walls of a castle at night?”
Their mother gaped.
“Have you ridden a unicorn?”
“Or turned into a bird?”
“Have you gone to Hell?”
“And come back alive?”