The Unready Queen

by William Ritter

Evie shuffled to a halt on the side of the road, looking utterly lost. Tinn and Cole gave up their own efforts and joined her.

  “They aren’t listening,” Fable growled. “I think these are the bad men my mama taught me about.”

  “They’re not bad,” Evie said, miserably. “They’re just . . . scared.”

  “If they’re not scared, they should be,” said Tinn. “Things are going to get scary real fast if they start attacking the forest.”

  The kids watched wretchedly as a parade of towns­people marched past.

  Fable shook her head. “I need to warn them.”

  “Warn who?” said Tinn.

  “Them,” said Fable. “My them, the oddlings and the forest folk. They need to run before the humans show up with their axes and their guns.”

  “And what if they don’t run?” said Tinn.

  “I don’t know!” Fable moaned. “I don’t know what I’m doing—I never know what I’m doing! But I have to do something!” And with that she spun away from the road and began to wade into the bracken.

  “Wait!” yelled Cole.

  Fable paused. She looked like she wanted to cry. “I have to go,” she said. “Mama was right. I should never have come here. Those are not my people.”

  “But we are,” said Cole.

  Fable glanced up. Her eyes were heavy with shadows.

  “We’re coming with you.” Cole looked imploringly at Tinn and Evie. “Right?” They both nodded.

  “We’re in this together,” said Tinn.

  “This isn’t your forest.” Fable shook her head. “The oddlings aren’t your people. None of this is your responsibility. Just go home.”

  “Of course it isn’t our forest,” said Evie, crossing over the tall grass that lined the road. “But it’s your forest. And we’re your friends. Like it or not, we’re not letting you deal with this alone.”

  Fable managed a weak smile. “You would make a fierce princess,” she told Evie. “Predator for sure.”

  “Let’s go,” said Tinn. He and Cole bounded into the underbrush together. “And this time how about we don’t split up?”

  The queen ran, the forest flowing past her with every step. She did not vault over troublesome rocks or duck awkwardly under branches. It had been many years since she had found the need to do anything like that. The forest moved for her—with her. They had come to know each other like limbs on the same body. If she ever stumbled, the forest would catch her on instinct, and if the forest ever needed her, she would be its hands. At least, that was how it used to be.

  She had long since lost sight of the glimmering pixies, but she trusted the pull of the Wild Wood to guide her. She could no longer hear Chief Nudd or his scouts scrabbling along in her wake, but they would not be far behind. Goblins were nothing if not resourceful.

  There were other movements in the underbrush. The queen could feel creatures all around her. Now and then she caught a flutter of wings or a furry flank sliding between the bushes. The forest was always teeming with wildlife—but not like this. The whole forest hummed with an electric energy, like the air before a lightning strike.

  She was not far from the human village when she drew to a halt. Muffled voices echoed through the trees ahead. She tensed.

  “If Mr. Hill wants to find a monster, he should look in a mirror,” grumbled a familiar voice. “At least the monsters in the forest don’t spend all their time pretending to be nice and then suddenly turn out to be horrible.”

  It was Fable. The queen’s heart ached. The last time they had spoken, she had told her daughter that she had no friends. She winced at the memory. Of course, Fable was with them now.

  “What about kelpies?” asked another voice. One of the twins.

  “Well. I mean, sure. There’s kelpies,” conceded Fable. “Pretending to be nice and then being horrible is basically all kelpies do, yeah. But that’s why nobody likes kelpies.”

  The queen suppressed a smile. Her daughter had listened to a lesson or two after all. She veered toward the voices.

  “And changelings?” sighed another voice. “Pretending to be human so my kind could steal babies is apparently what I was born for.” That would be Tinn.

  The queen kept herself to the shadows as she neared. She peered around a tree trunk. Fable was a dozen paces away, accompanied by both twins and the girl from the village—Evie. They crossed a fallen log together.

  “Well, true,” Fable admitted. “But you’re no good at being horrible. And my mama says Chief Nudd put a stop to all that, anyway. Mama wouldn’t be friends with goblins if they were bad. She always does what’s right for the forest. She’s a good Witch of the Wood.”

  The queen felt a lump in her throat and her chest tightened. Her daughter thought she was a good witch.

  “The point is,” Fable added, “Mr. Hill is a butt.”

  “He’s actually been really nice—especially after the accident,” Evie said. “He helped my dad get settled in at home and he paid for all his doctor bills. He’s come by every day to check up on him and bring him soup and other stuff to make him feel better. He even stuck around to keep me company while Dad was resting. He says my drawings are really good. Today, though—he’s like a whole different person.”

  “He isn’t even supposed to be here anymore,” Cole said. “After the giant, he said he was done trying to find oil and was going to go back to selling tonics in the city. I wish he had.”

  “I don’t think he’s actually bad on the inside,” Evie said. “His tonic really works, did you know? He gave my dad this ‘fortifying elixir’ he made himself. He calls it his golden goose. Said it was supposed to boost Dad’s strength, and it did! Yesterday my dad even felt good enough to try walking a few steps. Mr. Hill was really proud of him.”

  “That’s great and everything,” said Fable, “but a spoonful of medicine isn’t gonna protect all the innocent forest folk about to get killed.”

  The queen straightened.

  “NOT KILL FOREST FOLK!” thundered a voice like a wet avalanche.

  The queen froze. Ice ran through her veins as a nearby boulder unfolded itself with a grinding noise and a spray of dirt and dry moss.

  “FOREST FOLK KILL YOU!”

  Twenty-Four

  As one, the children skidded to a stop.

  In front of them loomed a figure made of living rock. The brute was nine feet tall and almost as wide across from shoulder to shoulder. Stony fists clenched and unclenched with a grinding crunch. Each one of the creature’s massive hands looked as if it probably weighed as much as all four children combined. The troll’s eyes glowed a soft orange within their granite sockets.

  “HUMANS BAD!” Stony muscles flexed with a sound like shifting bricks as the granite goliath stomped forward. Cole stood frozen directly in its path. “HUMANS WANT KILL FOREST FOLK.”

  “Th-that’s a rock troll!” Evie stammered. “I have a whole page about them.”

  “Hey!” Cole yelled. “We’re not trying to kill anybody!”

  The troll raised its fists over its head—but before it could bring them down on Cole’s skull, a hillside of fur and muscles erupted from behind a nearby tree and slammed into the boy, rolling with him out of the way of the rocky fists. The troll’s blow left a deep divot in the soft earth, and sent leaves spinning down the forest floor.

  A few feet away, the furry shape unfurled to deposit Cole back on his feet again, confused but unharmed. He looked up to find himself face-to-face with a grizzly. The bear huffed and Cole’s hair fluttered.

  “Mama?” Fable said. The bear-queen met her gaze.

  “SMALL ONES WARNED TROLLKIN ABOUT HUMANS,” the troll growled, taking a second wide swing, this time for Fable. She dodged narrowly out of his reach. “HUMANS BAD! HOLD STILL, HUMANS! BE DEAD!”

  In one fluid motion, the bear stood up on her hind legs, th
rew back her head, and spun, her thick hide becoming a cloak once more. The queen stood before the troll, her face a mask of royal fury. “Nobody is killing anybody!” she declared.

  “HUMAN NOT TELL TROLL WHAT TO DO.” The brute’s glowing orange eyes focused on the queen. “NO MORE.”

  The queen held her ground, locked in a battle of wills as she faced down the troll—but Fable could see that the creature was unmoved. If anything, his stony expression only grew angrier.

  “Wait!” Fable yelled. She threw herself forward between her mother and the troll just as it raised its fists again. The troll did not wait.

  The troll swung. Fable threw her hands in front of her face, a futile defense from the mountain of rock descending toward her.

  “No!” the queen cried.

  And then the universe hiccuped.

  There was a crack, like the snapping of a thick rubber band, and then a whoosh of air, as though someone had opened a door in the middle of a storm. Fable’s insides felt like soap bubbles in a whirlwind and she fought back a tingling pressure inside her head.

  The queen gasped. One instant, bulging rocky knuckles had been driving toward her daughter like a runaway freight train—and the next, the two of them were being showered in a deluge of tiny, glossy pebbles instead.

  Fable blinked dust out of her eyes. The troll was gone. Slowly, she lowered her arms. Her legs felt wobbly and she was dizzy. She shook her head as the tingling ebbed.

  A bulging hill of pebbles, smooth as river rocks, stood before her, tinkling quietly over her toes as it settled. The pile shifted, and the queen and all four children stared as a drab green dome rose to the surface. Gradually, a wobbling tortoise emerged from the pile. It had knobbly legs that moved uncertainly as it pulled itself through the heap of stones. It turned a pair of orange eyes accusingly toward Fable.

  “Is that . . . ?” Tinn let the question hang in the air.

  “Did you . . . ?” Cole began.

  “You just turtled that troll!” Evie finished. “That’s so awesome!”

  Fable looked sheepishly at her mother. “I didn’t mean to.”

  The queen had to remind herself to breathe again. Master-level mages in the Annwyn could not have pulled off a transfiguration like that—not with years to study and prepare.

  “Are you going to say something?” said Fable.

  The queen straightened. She glanced at the children. “You should not have brought them here,” she said.

  Fable swallowed. “I went to the people village,” she said. “I know I wasn’t supposed to. But I did—I had to. It’s bad, Mama, and it’s about to get a lot worse.”

  The queen shook her head. “Their world is not our world, Fable.”

  “It was your world, though,” Fable said. “Before the goblins took you away from it. It could be your world again. It was grandma’s world, too.”

  The queen bristled. “Endsborough turned their backs on your grandmother,” she hissed. “The world of men is monstrous, child. They drove her away when she needed them most, and she denounced them in return. I will not discuss this any—”

  “But they didn’t,” Fable said. “Not all of them. While you were gone, some of them were awful, sure, but some of them made up songs for grandma when she was all alone, and they sang them at the forest’s edge to cheer her up.”

  The queen hesitated. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Fable.”

  “I do. I met somebody who remembers her. You should meet her, too. Grandma didn’t turn her back on people. Not all of them, anyway. She left them gifts. She believed in them. There are places where the forest meets the town. What if that’s our world?”

  The queen stared at Fable, and a million melancholy thoughts played across the woman’s eyes.

  “I need you to remember that,” Fable added nervously, “when I tell you about the other thing.”

  The queen listened in horror as Fable recounted the rapidly unfolding situation. The whole of the Wild Wood bristled as she finished.

  “And the humans are on their way?” The queen looked pale. “Now?”

  Fable nodded. “They’re planning on making their stand where it all started. That’s why we need to get there first. We need to warn the whole forest.”

  Hooves pounded across the earth behind them. Beyond the bushes, a snow-white stag leapt through the trees. Lights whipped along in the branches behind it, and all around sounded the grunts and growls of countless unseen beasts joining the race in a steady current, descending on the northwest corner of the Wild Wood. A pair of beady eyes glinted in the foliage, and for a brief second the queen caught sight of a flinty spriggan looking down on them, his mouth cracked upward in a wry grimace. A moment later he, too, had vanished into the woods.

  “I think,” said the queen numbly, “that maybe the forest already knows.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Fable.

  “You are going to take these three back to their homes.” The queen took a deep breath. “And under no circumstances are you to go anywhere near that Grandmother Tree. I forbid it, Fable.”

  Before Fable could even open her mouth to protest, her mother was gone.

  The children stood in stunned silence for several seconds.

  “What happens now?” said Evie at last.

  Tinn and Cole looked at Fable.

  “She forbade us from going to the Grandmother Tree,” said Fable. She took a deep breath. “But there is no Grandmother Tree out there. Not anymore.” She looked at her friends. “Of course we’re going.”

  Twenty-Five

  The queen’s lungs burned as she burst out of the trees and into the open field. She tried to breathe evenly. This was no time to show weakness.

  The clearing bristled. Oddlings and fair folk of all sorts peered up from the tall grasses: lumbering trollkin, shifty gnomes, and solemn spirits. Skoll, the fiercest wolf of the Warg, had come from his den in the far south, flanked by the strongest of his pack. Pholon, high general of the centaur herd, stood with a spear in his hands. Even Lutin, a usually cheerful hob, had draped himself in a chain mail vest and leaned on a knotted cudgel in place of his customary cane. Hundreds of creatures crowded around the edge of the ruined field in a motley crescent, and hundreds more shook the nearby branches and rustled the ferns just inside the cover of the forest. This assembly had converged for a single purpose.

  “You would enter into battle without informing your queen?” The queen kept her voice steady and even, but she wondered if the more perceptive beasties around her could hear her heart pounding.

  A chittering, scratchy voice cut through the noise. “The queen knows all that happens in her forest, does she not?” it asked in Spriggan. A figure with a face like a broken flint emerged from the grasses and swung itself gracefully up onto a tree stump. “Does the all-knowing queen now need to be informed?”

  The queen pursed her lips.

  “A queen of almosts,” Flinty said in sardonic English, eyes fixed on hers, but his chattering words loud enough for the whole assembly to hear. “Almost fairy. Almost human. Now it is almost time. Does she know what she is, in the end?”

  “You dare?” the queen growled through gritted teeth.

  “The humans are coming,” Flinty said. “Time to make choices. Will you stand with us? Or with them?”

  Fable, Evie, and the boys raced through the forest. Now and then a fairy buzzed past their heads, and vibrant yellow eyes shot them glances through the leaves.

  “I’ve never seen this many creatures in one place at a time,” Tinn whispered. He slid across a wide tree trunk that spanned a babbling stream. They had almost reached the Roberson Hills.

  “I could fill a hundred journals with all this,” Evie said, hopping down after him.

  “We’re almost there,” said Fable. “It’s just over this ridge.” She scrambled
up a mossy embankment. “The field should be just—oh. Oh dang.” She stood up, eyes wide.

  Trolls and pixies and enormous wolves filled the field ahead. A beast with a horse’s body and the torso of a man clutched a long spear beside a woman whose lower half melted into the iridescent scales of an enormous snake’s tail. Fable knew the centaur and naga clans were anything but allies, and yet here they stood, side by side, united against a common enemy. Beasts and beings continued to spill out of the trees, the ranks of their wild army swelling.

  “I don’t think the forest needs protecting,” Tinn breathed. His face paled. “If the townspeople walk into this, they’ll be massacred.”

  A single figure detached herself from the group and stepped into the center of the clearing. Her bearskin cloak swept the dusty ground. Hundreds of glinting eyes followed the Queen of the Deep Dark.

  A series of harsh, hissing clicks followed. Fable held her breath as her mother turned to face a feral crowd.

  “I stand,” the queen declared loudly and clearly, “with the forest.”

  And then the first shot rang out.

  Twenty-Six

  Crouching at the edge of the clearing, the children watched as the puff of smoke lifted into the wind. It wasn’t a loud boom. It was hardly even a bang. The gunshot that cracked the air was no louder than a thick branch snapping off a tree. For one slow, breathless moment, silence followed—a sizzling quiet, like a burning fuse.

  Albert Townshend had been the first to pull the trigger. He was a quiet young man only a handful of years older than Tinn and Cole. Albert collected bottle caps and washed dishes at the Lucky Pig. He had never aimed that heavy pistol at a living thing before. Truth be told, he hadn’t properly aimed it this time—he had merely lifted the muzzle in the general direction of the unholy horde and squeezed. His hand was still shaking after the smoke had drifted away.

  The shot hummed over the pointy hats of the gnomes and sang over the naga’s scaly shoulder until it buried itself in the rough hide of Skoll, fiercest wolf of the Warg. Albert did not know that Skoll was the fiercest wolf of the Warg, just as Skoll did not know that Albert was the most average dishwasher in the Lucky Pig on Tuesdays through Saturdays. What they both knew—what every anxious observer around that silent clearing knew immediately—was that Albert Townshend had made a terrible mistake.