The Unready Queen

by William Ritter

  “Allow them to?” Fable glared.

  “Shh,” Cole whispered.

  “Allow them to?” Fable repeated at full volume. Her face was flushed as she stood upright, emerging from her hiding spot. Cole put his hands over his eyes as she stalked out from behind the wreckage. Hill jumped visibly as she emerged and nearly lost his footing. “They were here first,” said Fable. “They allow people to live so close to them.”

  Annie gaped. “What on earth—Fable?” She peered a little closer. “Cole Thomas Burton, I can see you back there!”

  Cole shot Fable a dark glance and sighed as he stood up, too. “Hi, Mom.”

  “I told you to stay put!” she said.

  “Yeah. But, in our defense, you know we never do,” he said. “So I didn’t think you really expected it this time.”

  Annie rubbed her temples. “And where is your brother?”

  “He should be here any minute,” said Cole.

  “You boys are hard enough to keep track of when you stay together,” Annie grumbled. “This is serious! You know how dangerous it can be so far from town. You are in so much trouble.”

  “You can’t entirely blame the children,” Hill said, poking about the broken pieces of his pump jack. “Nobody in this town seems to take the threat seriously.”

  “Please, Mr. Hill.” Annie turned to the man. “We take the dangers of the forest very seriously around here. There’s not a child in town who isn’t raised to respect the borders of—”

  “But you shouldn’t have to! That’s the point—it’s tragic!” Hill picked up a broken iron rod about three feet long and waved it like a baton at the surrounding forest. “The Wild Wood is a danger! What’s the point of having all this beautiful wilderness right in your own backyard if you can’t even let your children run about without fearing for their lives?” Hill said.

  “Who says wilderness needs to have a point?” Fable grumbled. “It’s wilderness. That’s the point.”

  “The man ain’t wrong,” said Old Jim Warner, coming in at the back of the group. He had a rifle over one shoulder, and a grim expression on his face. “People lose themselves in that forest. Been tellin’ folks for years. There’s some powerful dangerous magic in them woods. Things that would make grown men cry.” He shifted the rifle to both hands, eyeing the shadows of the forest soberly.

  “Do be careful with that thing,” said Annie. “There are children present.”

  “I ain’t fixing to shoot anything I don’t have to.” Jim sniffed. “Just prefer the forest to be afraid of me, and not the other way around.” He punctuated his statement by aiming his barrel steadily in the direction of the tree line.

  The Queen of the Deep Dark crossed through the woods with her head held high. She did not enjoy knowing that the ancient guardians of the forest—of her forest—were meeting in secret to discuss her affairs behind her back. It was fine, she told herself. Let them discuss whatever matters they liked with whomever they wished. When the talking was done, she would still be queen.

  As she neared the northwestern limits of the Wild Wood, she slowed. The forest ached. The sound of the mighty Grandmother Tree crashing to the earth echoed in the back of her mind. With it hummed the irritating doubt that perhaps the spriggans were not entirely wrong. Had she been neglecting her duties? She crushed the thought with a mental heel, but it crawled off into a dark corner of her mind to bide its time.

  Ahead of her, the queen heard voices. Her eyes narrowed, and she stepped closer. There were children in her forest. A boy—one of the twins that Fable was so fond of—and a girl she had never seen before. They had not yet noticed her, so she closed in on them silently, keeping to the shadows as she moved. As the trees began to thin, still more voices pierced the air. Adults this time. An old man. A woman. Was that Annie Burton?

  The queen scowled. A movement to the north caught her eye. Even as the boy and girl picked their way slowly out of the woods to her left, someone else was stomping into them to her right.

  “Watch your step, Mrs. Grouse,” a man’s voice said.

  Humans! There were humans all around her—in her forest! The audacity! The impudence! This was completely unacceptable. Didn’t they have entire cities of their own to ruin? What did they think they were doing?

  Another voice carried through the branches, and the queen halted.

  “The forest is fine just the way it is!” Fable said. Her voice had come from just beyond the edge of the tree line. She was outside of the Wild Wood.

  Fable had left the forest. Whatever this was, her daughter was a part of it.

  That child was in so much trouble.

  Jacob Hill leaned on the iron rod like a cane and shook his head. “I’m just saying, what good is a natural resource if its resources can never be tapped?” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of local legends: former lumber workers who refuse to touch another tree, quarry workers who are afraid to crack a rock. They’re all true, aren’t they?” The sound of twigs crackling pulled Hill’s attention away and he spun toward the forest. “What was that?”

  Annie stepped in front of Cole. “Stay behind me,” she said.

  Something was emerging from the woods.

  Old Jim leveled his rifle at the noise. Gradually, two figures stepped out of the darkness. He dropped the barrel at once. “Evie?” he said. “What in tarnation?”

  “Tinn!” yelled Annie. “You kids cut through the forest? What on earth were you thinking?”

  “Sorry, Mom,” Tinn said. “It was all my idea. It’s my fault. I’m an idiot.”

  She opened her mouth to agree, but another noise brought her attention to the edge of the woods again, just a little farther north.

  Jim raised his rifle again, but lowered it almost at once. It was only Mr. Washington’s group returning.

  “Find anything interesting?” said Old Jim.

  “Afraid so,” said Washington. “The tracks are fake.”

  “What?” Hill said.

  “Either that or Hill’s giant magically flew away.” Washington shrugged. “We followed them in a ways. They just stop completely about thirty feet past the edge of the trees.”

  “You lost the trail?” Hill said.

  Washington shook his head. “Of a sixty-foot giant? My old man raised me hunting rabbits. I know how to find a trail. Like I said, it just stops.”

  “But how?” Hill put a hand through his dusty hair.

  “Why don’t you tell us?” Washington said.

  “Me?”

  “It does look awful sketchy.” Mrs. Grouse crossed her arms.

  “You think I did this? You can see what that thing did to my drill! Why would I destroy my own equipment? Hurt my own crew?”

  “Come on, boys,” said Annie. “Let’s all go home.”

  “Wait!” Hill shouted, pointing into the woods. “Look! There!”

  “Let it go, man,” said Helen Grouse.

  “No! I saw something! Just there!”

  With a sigh, Old Jim raised his rifle one more time and peered into the gloom.

  “Shoot it!” Hill shouted.

  “Shoot what?” Jim answered. “I’m not going to fire blind into the woods.” But even as he said it his eyes locked on to the faintest shudder of motion within the shadows of the forest. Instinctively, his thumb drew back the hammer. For a fraction of a moment, he saw what might have been a figure clad in a long, shaggy cloak.

  “If you won’t, then let me do it!” Hill grabbed for the rifle and tried to yank it from Jim’s grasp.

  “Enough!” cried Annie Burton. “Stop that before somebody gets—”

  The gun went off with a boom.

  A single shot of lead and brass. The queen’s eyes hung open as the echo of the gunshot faded away like ripples in a pond. Shaking, she reached a hand up to brush the spot with her fingers. Mangled splinters sp
layed around a small hole in the tree beside her as if a flower had just bloomed on its trunk.

  She took a deep breath, her whole body shaking. The queen was not hurt. She was not afraid. The queen was livid.

  Eighteen

  Fable took quiet footsteps as she eased herself back into the woods a few minutes later. Behind her, the townspeople had already begun plodding back down the human road, grumbling and whispering as they went. The sun had slid well beyond midday, but maybe if Fable hurried, her mother would still be waiting for her in the glen. She was bound to be angry that Fable was late for her lesson. Fable skipped over a patch of vines and pushed through a curtain of hanging leaves. Her mother was waiting on the other side.

  Fable blinked.

  The queen did not.

  “Hi,” said Fable. “So. You . . . saw?”

  “I saw.”

  “There were reasons,” Fable began.

  “There always are.”

  “Tinn and Cole were lost.”

  “Tinn and Cole”—the queen repeated the names through gritted teeth—“are trouble. You are not to see those boys again. Or anyone else from the village.”

  Fable gaped. “What?” she said. “But they’re my friends.”

  “They are not your friends,” said the queen. “People are never your friends, Fable. People don’t belong in our forest at all. They are bad men. They bring axes and saws . . . and gunfire, Fable. This is my own fault. I have allowed the humans too much freedom in our domain. I need to be more firm—and that starts with you.”

  “Mama. Please, listen . . .”

  “Did you know that they brought strangers into the forest?”

  “Who? Evie? Evie isn’t strangers,” said Fable. “She’s my friend, too.”

  “None of them are your friends!” the queen yelled.

  Fable’s chest hurt. She clenched her fists.

  “And you,” the queen continued, tempering her voice like hardened steel, “are not just some silly human girl who can skip and laugh and play whenever you like. You have responsibilities. You need to be ready. You are important, Fable. You are the future queen of this forest, and it is long past time that you began to act like it.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be important!” Fable burst. “Maybe I’d rather be a silly human girl than grow up to be a horrible, rotten queen of a bunch of trees!”

  “Fable—”

  “No! You want me to be like you,” Fable yelled, “but I’m never going to be like you! You’re awful and everybody hates you!” Fable had never spoken to her mother this way before. She felt dizzy, like she was yelling while running through a twisting tunnel. Her face felt hot—but she couldn’t stop, not now that the dam had broken. “I don’t want to be queen like you, I don’t want to do magic like you, and I don’t want to be mean and lonely for my whole life like you!” All around her, the foliage bent and leaned away. The trunks of the pine trees groaned and crackled. “I am never going to be the stupid queen of your stupid forest! You can keep it!”

  The forest was unnaturally silent as both of them breathed for several seconds, and then Fable turned away from her mother without asking permission and stalked off through the woods. She could feel her heartbeat in her ears.

  “Wait . . .” her mother called.

  “And they are my friends!” Fable did not look back.

  Fable did not speak to her mother again for the rest of the day. She did her best to avoid crossing paths, but for all the acres the Wild Wood covered, she could not seem to escape her. She caught sight of a familiar bearskin cloak watching over her as she picked berries that evening, and spotted familiar hazel eyes in the leaves as she tossed pebbles into the Oddmire.

  The following day, she glanced up from getting a drink in a stream to find the queen watching from the opposite bank, her face inscrutable as always. Fable was wearing the dress that Annie had given her, if only because she knew her mother would not approve. It had already grown dingy from wear, and it caught in the branches when she was climbing, but it was still fancier by far than her usual dust-brown canvas frock.

  “Fable,” her mother said. “We need to talk.”

  Fable folded her arms and stomped away in the opposite direction without giving her mother the satisfaction of a response.

  On the third day, Fable was sitting on the banks of the Oddmire with Squidge. To distract herself, she had invented a little game in which she poked two sticks into the thick gunk of the mire—one for herself and one for the hedgehog—and then tried to guess which one would sink or topple first. So far, both had remained upright for several minutes. The mire was especially thick today.

  Fable considered using compel to speed things along, but if one of the sticks accidentally turned into a chipmunk or something, she didn’t want to have to get her dress all mucky pulling it out.

  A boom like a thunderclap shook the air, and the trees around her shuddered. Fable’s attention snapped toward Endsborough. Over the trees, a cloud of smoke billowed into the sky.

  Fable was on her feet in a flash. “Stay here, Squidge.”

  The hedgehog watched as Fable pelted away. Behind her, both sticks sank slowly into the mire.

  As Fable neared the town, she could hear muffled shouting. Something was happening in the city. She wanted desperately to know what was going on, but she knew she shouldn’t cross the border. Her mother had expressly forbidden her from seeing anyone from town, and she had already crossed so many lines.

  Somebody screamed.

  Fable’s jaw clenched. She glanced left and right into the trees around her. There was no sign anywhere of a furry brown cloak or a pair of steely, disapproving eyes.

  Fable crept to the forest’s edge and the little stream that divided the forest from the town. She could hear more voices now. A pair of men in coveralls hurried down a dusty street toward the source of the excitement. There was something else, too. She sniffed the air. It was sharp and bitter, like the smell in the air after Old Jim Warner had fired that gun. A column of smoke continued to pour upward into the sky.

  In the distance, a voice shouted: “Help!”

  Fable glanced behind her one last time, took a deep breath, and then hopped over the burbling water into Endsborough.

  Nineteen

  Tinn and Cole could feel the heat of the blaze from twenty feet away. Smoke stung their eyes. Annie Burton held the boys’ shoulders as all three of them stared, openmouthed, at the inferno. The explosion had blown out the windows in the ground floor of Fenerty’s Stationery and Paper Goods, and the flames had been quick to make their way upstairs. Bits of burning paper rained down like hellish ticker tape confetti as the fire punched through a second-story window to wave at the horrified onlookers.

  Several dozen townsfolk were already passing buckets of water from the creek that ran behind the Lucky Pig up to the burning building and back again to be refilled.

  “I’m going to help,” Annie said. “You two—stay back. I am not kidding this time.” The twins nodded solemnly as their mother fell into line with the bucket brigade.

  They could hear the fire station bell clanging away. Cole and Tinn had seen them roll out the steam pumper before. It was an impressive thing, but it took several minutes to get its boiler going and get the horses hitched up to the front. Cole peered up the dusty road, waiting to see them when they came around the corner.

  Endsborough was alive with activity. Townsfolk bustled from door to door, eager to inform their neighbors of the chaos. Albert Townshend nearly tripped over his own feet carrying a sloshing mop bucket up the road. Old Mrs. Stewart had come out to watch the excitement from the comfort of her rocking chair.

  A motion just up the street caught Cole’s attention and he blinked in surprise. The air was hot and dry, and it made his eyes water—but he could have sworn he had seen a lithe figure with a mess of dark curls
slipping along the wall.

  Fable held her breath. She had snuck into town just long enough to find out what the heck was going on, and she would sneak back out again as soon as she was satisfied. In and out. Nobody even needed to know she had ever been here.

  She quickstepped across the dusty road and ducked behind a barrel of dry goods. On the other side of the barrel, she could hear the rhythmic creak of a rocking chair.

  There was a burst of noise as a door opened across the street and a crowd of men with sloshing buckets and thick blankets emerged. Fable glanced left and right, and then hopped hastily inside the barrel to hide. Her heart pounded. She felt excited, but also silly—it wasn’t as if any of those men cared one fig about her. The hiding spot was full of hazelnuts, which rattled as she sank into them. She waited as the sound of voices faded away.

  Gradually, Fable realized the rhythmic creaking of the rocking chair had stopped, too. There was a little wooden groan and then the shuffle of footsteps. Don’t look inside the barrel, Fable thought, tensing as if sheer force of will could conceal her.

  A wrinkled face appeared in the circle of light above her. “Hello, young lady,” said the woman. Her eyes twinkled. She appeared neither startled nor angry to find a child nestled among the nuts.

  “Hi.” Fable smiled weakly up at the face.

  “Have we met?” the woman asked, squinting as she surveyed the girl in the barrel.

  “Um. I don’t think so,” said Fable.

  There was a pause as the woman considered her.

  “I’m . . . not supposed to be here,” said Fable.

  “I should think not,” the woman agreed. “You’re the wrong shape entirely for a hazelnut.”

  “I’m hiding.”

  “I won’t tell,” said the woman with a wink.

  The hazelnuts shifted slightly as Fable relaxed. “I’m Fable,” she said.

  “Hello, Fable,” said the woman. “My name is Margaret.”