The Unready Queen

by William Ritter

  Fable took hold of Tinn’s arms and dragged him out. It took Evie a moment to realize that Cole had let go of the beam as well. He stood back, gaping at her. She, alone, was holding the heavy beam aloft.

  “How?” Cole managed.

  The timber thudded like a falling tree as Evie dropped it.

  Evie looked from Cole to Fable to Tinn. Tinn was lying flat on his back. He was starting to look green, but she couldn’t tell if this was from the pain or if his goblin blood was kicking in under the strain. Finally she looked down at her own hands again. She felt queasy. “I—I don’t know,” she mumbled.

  “Seriously?” said Cole. “So, does everybody get to have amazing powers except for me?”

  “Nice job,” said Fable. “Is magic strength a princess thing?”

  Evie’s insides were twisting in knots. “What’s happening to me?” she said.

  “Grind his . . . bones,” mumbled Tinn, “to make . . . my bread.”

  “Is he delirious?” said Cole.

  “No—listen.” Tinn pushed himself up to sitting with great effort, wincing as the weight on his leg shifted. “Kull told me . . . giants used to have this tradition . . . of eating the bodies of their dead . . . so their essence could live on. They literally ground their bones to make bread.”

  “That sparkly stuff on the drill,” said Cole. “You think that’s dead giants?”

  “I rubbed my lip,” said Evie, blinking. The wooziness was beginning to wear off, but her stomach was still rolling. “I was bleeding.”

  “I think maybe,” Tinn grunted, “you got some giant . . . in your bloodstream.”

  “I don’t feel good,” said Evie. “I think I might be sick.”

  “No wonder they’re so angry!” blurted Fable. “It was never about the tree at all! Spriggans aren’t tree spirits, they’re the spirits of giants! That’s why they protect these parts. It’s their burial ground! Holy heck. Are all the Grandmother Trees growing on top of dead giants?”

  “Hill wasn’t just taking soil samples,” said Cole. “He was robbing a grave, and he didn’t even realize it. That’s why giants destroyed his pump.”

  “And why the spriggans have been going around the forest trying to get everyone all jumpy about humans!” Fable clenched her fist. “I told Hill this was his fault!”

  “I think we just figured out the secret ingredient to Hill’s ‘fortifying elixir,’” said Evie with a shudder. Her head was clearing, and she once more felt as if she had run a marathon. “Ugh. My dad’s been drinking diluted giant corpse for days.”

  “This is it!” Cole said, his eyes alight. “This is how we stop the fighting!”

  Three sets of eyes turned toward him.

  “Hill might not have known what he had, but he knew it was special. He saved all the soil samples. He still has them stashed somewhere. His golden goose, remember? We just need to get him to return what he stole so the spirits of the giants can be at peace. Peaceful giants, peaceful spriggans, peaceful forest. We can all call off the attack.”

  “You really think it’ll work?” said Tinn.

  “I think it’s better than waiting for everybody to kill each other,” Cole said. “You think you can walk?”

  Tinn pushed himself up. His face contorted and he collapsed back to the ground immediately. He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he grunted.

  “I’ll stay with Tinn,” said Evie. “Go. You two will be faster without us.”

  Fable looked at Cole. Cole nodded.

  “Okay,” Fable said. “All we have to do is find a guy in the middle of a battlefield and convince him to give his golden goose to a bunch of monsters.”

  “Preferably before anybody murders him,” said Cole. “Or us.”

  “Right,” said Fable. “Here goes.”

  Twenty-Eight

  It took three tries, but the wild-wall finally parted in response to Fable’s urging. The knots unfurled reluctantly in front of her, unraveling and reshaping until they formed a narrow, arched opening.

  “Good luck,” said Evie.

  “Keep Tinn safe,” said Cole.

  Evie gave him an earnest nod, and Cole returned it.

  “Stay close,” Fable said.

  “Right behind you,” Cole promised.

  And then Fable and Cole were through the gap and back into the field of battle. The screams and shouts and snarls hit Fable like a charging bull. The air tasted like spent matches. The smoke had only gotten worse, and it made her eyes water as she and Cole pressed forward. A gun went off so close Fable’s ears rang.

  Cole put a hand on her shoulder and pointed.

  Thirty feet ahead, Jacob Hill stood atop the wide stump of the Grandmother Tree. He held his iron rod in both hands as he peered through the fog.

  “Don’t let them get around you!” he shouted over his shoulder at the ragtag battalion of farmers, carpenters, and grocery clerks who formed his motley front line. “Hold! Hold there and wait to advance together! We will finish this as one!”

  Hill’s perch was in the eye of the storm, a no-man’s-land between opposing forces. It gave him a view overlooking the melee, but it also made him the clearest target on the field. He swung the rod at a throng of brownies as they buzzed around his head, and the swarm scattered, chittering angrily.

  “Mr. Hill!” Cole cried as they neared the stump. “Mr. Hill, we know how to end the fighting!”

  “What in blazes?” Hill’s eyes widened as he locked on to them. “Get behind the line! You kids are going to get yourselves killed! Hurry!”

  “You don’t understand,” Cole called up to him. “Listen!”

  “I said fall back!”

  On their right, a troll let out a bellow—something between the roar of a lion and the rumble of a rock slide—and then broke into a run toward the human forces. To the left, the humans answered with a cry of “Attack!” and the whole line charged forward.

  “Please!” Fable yelled. “We know how to stop this!”

  “You think you can stop this?” Hill looked incredulously down at her. “Little girl, you can’t. Now fall back!”

  Fable’s fists clenched. “It’s no use,” Cole said, tugging her arm. “Come on!”

  You can’t. To the right, more forest factions had joined the charge behind the lumbering troll, and to the left, humans were pouring out of the hills. You can’t. Great waves of combatants were now closing in on either side of them. You can’t. Every you can’t Fable had heard over the past frustrating week echoed back at her. You can’t have a foot in both worlds. You can’t attend people school. You can’t have human friends. You can’t make the world what you want it to be. You can’t compel people.

  Fable felt the tingling pressure building inside her skull again. “No,” she said aloud. The word was quiet but firm, and it cut across the smoky air like a blade. “Everyone else can fall back.”

  The universe, which had been listening in the background like a patient hound, responded to her command without hesitation.

  Reality lurched. The charging troll felt it first. Not pain—which was surprising, given his understanding of how war was supposed to feel—but tightness. The sensation wrapped itself around his bones and lifted him off his meaty feet. The naga, nixies, and nymphs all felt it, too, a gentle yet inescapable grip as the universe pulled them backward toward the forest’s edge. The centaurs’ hooves dug deep grooves in the soil as they were dragged away. On the human side, several fighters dropped their pitchforks and cleavers in alarm as the invisible cords of Fable’s will drew townspeople up into the hills.

  In a matter of seconds, the battlefield was empty, still, and quiet.

  Fable could hear her heartbeat in her ears. She swallowed.

  Jacob Hill’s eyes were wide as he stared down at her. “You have my attention,” he managed.

  Silence h
ung over the empty field and clung like dew to the hillside. The queen felt her feet slide to a halt in the damp pine needles, her eyes still fixed on Fable in the foggy distance. She wanted to race across the desolate field toward her daughter, but her body refused to respond.

  “Yer Majesty.”

  The queen’s eyes flicked to her left. In the underbrush beside her, a drab green face peered up at her from beneath a weathered top hat.

  “Thief King,” she acknowledged drily. “Have you been hiding in the bracken this entire time?”

  Chief Nudd gave an unapologetic shrug.

  The queen rolled her eyes and turned them back to her daughter. “So glad you’re here to help with all those small things,” she said under her breath.

  “Otch. Small things is easy. Anyone can handle a small thing. Right times is harder.”

  “You keep waiting for your right time, then,” the queen growled. “The rest of us will have to do what we can with the time we’ve got.”

  On the other side of the barren field, Annie Burton swayed as she tried to catch her breath. Even from this distance, she recognized the boy in the middle of the clearing. “Cole?” Her chest ached to run to him. That man on the tree stump—Hill—was saying something to her son, and then Cole’s hands gestured frantically as he responded. Annie’s muscles strained. Oh, why couldn’t she move?

  “Now do you understand?” Cole finished.

  Fable’s mind was still reeling from the magic that had coursed through her. She had felt connected to all of those people, all at once. For just a moment, they were her and she was them, and all of them were one.

  Hill’s eyes drifted between the two children, warily. “I believe you,” he said at last. “But they’re not getting my powder.”

  “What?” said Fable. “But you just said you believe us!”

  “I do. But do you think I’m a fool? We are in the middle of a war, and you expect me to give my enemy the means to annihilate us? You think I don’t know what you’re asking me to surrender? You think I don’t see you for what you are?”

  “For what we are?” said Fable. “We’re the ones trying to save lives here!”

  “Your own lives,” said Hill. “Yours and your kind. I didn’t recognize it at first—but after that display of yours, you can’t pretend you aren’t one of them.”

  Fable scowled, her jaw set. She was getting very tired of other people telling her which side she was on.

  “And you.” Hill turned to Cole. “I should have seen it earlier. You’re the changeling, I presume? It had to be one of you. Tinn, is it? Where is your so-called brother, now? Or have you finally shown your true colors and done away with him?”

  “I’m not—” Cole scowled. “Wait. How do you know about me and my brother?”

  Hill straightened. “I’ve learned a lot of things in the past few days. Oh, yes, I know all about Endsborough’s goblin boys. And a lot more than that. Ogres. Trolls. Spriggans.”

  Fable narrowed her eyes. “If you know about spriggans, then you should know that what you took belongs to them. You know you need to give it back. Please. Do the right thing.”

  “I am doing the right thing! Don’t try to make me the villain. I’m the good guy, here.” Hill opened his jacket and the kids could see eight shiny glass tubes poking out of the inner pocket, each stoppered with a cork. Hill plucked one out and held it in the light. It glistened blindingly, the same iridescent powder as they had seen on the drill, but without any dust or clay to dull its sheen. “Do you have any idea how many people could benefit from this powder? How many lives it could save?”

  “If you give those to us, it could save a whole lot of them right now,” said Fable.

  “This? This is hardly a fraction of what I’ve collected,” Hill said. “I’m not dumb enough to bring my entire stock into battle.” He turned the tube in his hand, his eyes glittering with bright reflections as it spun. “I was drilling for crude oil, but what I found was so much more valuable. There are people around the world who would pay anything to get their hands on my discovery.”

  “People are trying to kill each other, and you’re thinking about the price?” demanded Cole.

  “It isn’t about the money.” Hill shook his head, pulling his eyes back to the children. “I spent years peddling vitamins and elixirs—but it took giving up on so-called miracle cures for me to stumble on a real one: the most powerful cure-all known to man.”

  “You don’t know that,” Fable said. “You can’t know how it will affect people.”

  “I didn’t know,” Hill admitted. “Not at first. I didn’t understand what I had found, but then I cut my hand on a broken jar, and the next thing I knew I was smashing my desk through the side of that inn like it was made of tissue paper. It only took the faintest tap.”

  “You smashed the inn?”

  “I thought I must have imagined it. But I began to put the pieces together. The giant who destroyed my drill—the little devils who kept getting in my way when I went to rebuild it . . . Monsters don’t protect treasure that isn’t worth protecting. That powder had done something to me—it was powerful, and if this horrible forest was protecting it, then I needed to understand why. I needed more. I needed to conduct further tests.”

  “No,” said Fable. “What you needed to do was give it back.”

  “You used Mr. Warner as a guinea pig!” said Cole. “That’s why you kept hanging around them. You were testing your secret formula on Evie’s dad!”

  “It’s not like that.” Hill scowled and shook his head. “I didn’t give him anything I hadn’t already tested on myself. I like Oliver. I helped him. And what I learned from helping him will help so many more. Even with just a diluted suspension, Oliver has made an astounding recovery in record time. His leg was shattered. Shattered! Days later, and it’s nearly healed! You can’t begin to comprehend what that means! If only I could resume my work, obtain enough of the substance to produce—”

  “But you couldn’t,” said Fable. “You couldn’t get any more. Not with my forest getting in your way.”

  Hill’s expression darkened. “No,” he said. “That’s true. I couldn’t.”

  “You wanted this war,” Fable said. “You wanted the town to be afraid of monsters so you could have an excuse to push them away from your drill site, didn’t you? You let them think the forest started this, but it was you all along.”

  “Evie’s journals,” Cole breathed. “She told us you liked her pictures—Evie showed you her journals, didn’t she? She showed you everything you needed to know to scare the town senseless and blame the forest. Sketches of gremlin tracks, Old Jim’s tricks for catching pixies—all of it. You staged it, didn’t you?”

  Hill did not deny the accusation. He took a deep breath. “Turn their strengths into your strength, that’s what my old man said.” With a flick of his thumb, he popped the cork out of the slender vial.

  “Don’t—” Fable began, but her words were too late.

  Hill tossed the contents of the vial down his throat and smashed the glass behind him on the stump. His whole body shuddered almost at once. His eyes closed tightly and he gritted his teeth. He was breathing heavily, and the vein on the side of his neck throbbed.

  Fable stared as a vaporous double image hovered over the man, fading to wisps as it grew. Hill drew in a long, deep breath and opened his eyes. His pupils were enormous, nearly all the color of his eyes lost to their blackness. “That’s better. Just the extra kick I might need to dispose of a pair of wild creatures before you ruin everything.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Tinn leaned heavily on a slim scrap of lumber Evie had pulled from the wreckage for him. Pain shot through his ankle as he moved, but he had to know what was happening. The clamor of battle had been frightening, but the sudden and absolute silence was worse.

  “Careful,” said Evie as he hobbled to
the opening in the wild-wall.

  “I’m okay—” he grunted, but the moment he tried to put weight on the leg, it betrayed him. He stumbled, and Evie caught his arm.

  “What’s going on out there?” he managed when he was steady again.

  “I don’t know,” said Evie. “Everybody’s gone except for Cole and Fable and Mr. Hill. They’re just . . . talking.”

  Tinn peered out through the gap. “Something . . . doesn’t feel right,” he said.

  “Has any of this felt right?” Evie said. She squeezed through to see what Tinn was seeing. “Does Mr. Hill look . . . bigger to you?” she whispered.

  And then in a burst of motion, Jacob Hill reached down from the tree stump and hauled Fable up roughly by the neck.

  Evie gasped.

  “No!” Tinn yelled.

  They watched as Cole leapt up after her—but Hill batted him away with an iron rod, and Cole spun heavily to the ground.

  “We have to do something!” Evie scanned her feet and reached to pick up a sturdy piece of wood to use as a weapon. It wasn’t even half the width of the beam that had crushed Tinn’s leg, but her arms quavered as she tried to lift it. She could barely get it off the ground, and once she had, she dropped it with a heavy thud. “I . . . I think it’s wearing off already,” she said. “I’m just me again.”

  “I have an idea,” Tinn grunted.

  Hill’s fingers felt like steel around Fable’s throat. She swung and kicked, but he held fast. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cole hit the ground hard on his side. She tried in vain to force Hill’s fingers apart with her mind. She squeezed her eyes shut and struggled to summon a breeze or a web of vines, but the forest did not respond. Ugh! Why did magic have to be so difficult? She swung wide with both hands and then slapped them together beneath Hill’s arm. A spray of sparks bounced feebly off of the man’s chest.

  He shook his head, unimpressed. “Is that the best you’ve got?”