How to Break an Evil Curse

by Laura Morrison

  Outside the nearest cobbler’s store, Warren peeked into the pouch of money Julianna (or Jennifer) had given him; not for stealing reasons, but so that he could have an idea of how nice a pair of shoes he could get before going into the store and being harassed by the sales clerk.

  His jaw dropped.

  He blinked and peeked into the bag again.

  A hoarse sort of gurgle escaped his mouth, and his eyes bugged out.

  “Are you having a stroke?” Corrine inquired from where she stood looking at shoes in the window.

  “Garg!” he spluttered and shook the purse in her direction. He cleared his throat and said, “Look in here!”

  She walked over, glanced in the purse, and gasped, “What the what?”

  “Right?”

  “There’s gotta be—I don’t know how much!”

  “Those are some huge monetary denominations in there,” Warren said dazedly.

  It occurred to them both at the same moment that if they kept on gaping and exclaiming while staring into a heavy money pouch, they were going to end up getting mugged, thus leaving them with no money, no new shoes, and maybe no life if the mugger wasn’t good at his job.

  They simultaneously began to try to play it cool.

  Warren leaned nonchalantly against the wall of the store, Corrine leaned nonchalantly against a lamppost, and they both tried to think of something nonchalant to say.

  But they couldn’t get that vast quantity of money out of their heads.

  Julianna had had no idea that she was carrying around an insane amount of money—more than enough to keep an entire city block fed for a year. Warren and Corrine were both having trouble processing things, but after a few moments even honest and honorable Warren was considering taking the money and running.

  He met his sister’s eyes and whispered, “We can’t.”

  “Can’t what?” she asked all fake-innocent, her eyes on the pouch in his hand.

  “We can’t steal it. I know that’s what you’re thinking.” He decided it was okay to risk talking about the money as long as they didn’t do anything to make themselves look weird or suspicious. If they just acted natural no one would have a reason to eavesdrop.

  “I was thinking no such thing,” Corrine lied.

  “Were too.”

  “Well, so what if I was? You must have been too,” she whispered.

  “Of course I was thinking of stealing it,” he whispered back. “But that doesn’t mean I think we should. Morality aside, it would be dumb simply because a person with that much money must have connections galore. Connections that could easily track us down and kill us or land us in the Forest of Looming Death21.”

  “You think she really has connections?” Corrine asked. “She’s a maid.”

  “You still think she’s really a maid? Why on earth would she need to work cleaning rooms at an inn if she’s got this kind of money?” he asked, shaking the purse at Corrine.

  “Maybe she’s a nobleman’s daughter who likes mingling with the rabble in order to remain grounded?” Corrine suggested.

  “Hmph,” he answered, unimpressed with her theory. “I’m going to go buy her some shoes. How about you go pick up the provisions and meet me back here in an hour?”

  She sighed and said, “All right. But you know, if we just took one of those coins, I bet she wouldn’t even notice it was missing. Think about it.”

  “No, Corrine, we’re not stealing from her,” he said and, without another word, turned and walked into the cobbler’s shop, thinking what a good thing it was that they’d cut ties with the pirates, because his sister was starting to think in rather piratical terms.

  The bell above the door jingled when Warren walked in, and immediately the shopkeeper swooped over. He was just getting started on his sales pitch when suddenly there was a trumpeting sound from the road outside. Then, the sound of a slew of horses approaching at a fast clip, shortly followed by the sound of someone announcing something that they couldn’t hear. It all sounded quite official and royalty-related, so Warren and the shopkeeper hurried to the door and peered down the road in the direction of the hubbub. Sure enough, there were a cluster of horses and riders all wearing the royal colors of puce and tan.

  At the head of the group was a fellow who was just taking a deep breath in preparation for conveying again the message that he had been hollering all morning as they made the rounds through the city streets. “Every citizen will gather, NOW, at the nearest fountain for a very important message from the King and Queen.” This was the usual way that official information was conveyed to the population. Everyone gathered at the nearest watering hole and listened as one of the King’s soldiers imparted the message.

  Behind the horses, a crowd of people was scurrying along.

  Warren and the shopkeeper gave each other puzzled looks and, once the horses had passed, they joined the throng. After a few minutes, they reached the local fountain and everyone gathered around, jostling and bumping shoulders and pushing for a good spot. Announcements like this were quite rare, and usually conveyed bad news, so naturally everyone wanted to hear. Was the King dead? Was there some unfriendly army approaching from a neighboring kingdom? Were they going to have to donate another kid to the Crown?

  The guy at the head of the soldiers dismounted his horse and hopped up on the edge of the fountain.

  “Can you all hear me?” he asked. Everyone stopped jostling and got very quiet. “The Princess has been taken!” he said without preamble.

  Gasps and murmurs.

  “Soldiers will be searching every building. Make sure that every door, cupboard, or space of any nature at all that could fit a person is unlocked and open when the soldiers come through so that we can streamline the process.” He paused here and looked around at them all with a stony sort of expression. When he was sure they were all looking at him, he said, “Argue or resist in any way and we kill you.”

  More gasps and murmurs.

  “No log will remain unturned. Any person who has any knowledge of the Princess and does not convey it to a soldier ASAP will be thoroughly and completely killed. As a reminder to any potential kidnapper who may have forgotten, the Princess is cursed, and if sunlight touches her, she will die. If you have anything to do with her kidnapping, be aware that if she dies through exposure to sunlight, or of course through any other means, you will die as well. Slowly and unpleasantly.”

  Warren had known that the Princess was cursed since it was common knowledge throughout the land, but he had never known the particulars since he had been at sea his whole life and hadn’t kept up with the court drama the way that the citizens of the city did. So, when he heard the bit about not being able to be touched by sunlight, he gave a hearty gasp as the puzzle pieces fell in place: an insanely rich girl who couldn’t be exposed to sunlight. A maid who obviously wasn’t really a maid but someone with a big secret.

  The girl Warren was buying shoes for was the Princess.

  She had to be.

  * * *

  21After Julianna’s birth had necessitated a repurposing of the dungeon, Conroy had decided that instead of building another dungeon (which would cost tons of money that he figured would be better used buying dogs and horses for hunting, and for building a new, state-of-the-art croquet field) they could instead send all the criminals to The Forest of Looming Death, and if The Forest got too full they could just start executing folks.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  So, Jennifer was really the Princess Julianna. And the King and Queen thought she had been kidnapped.

  But she certainly didn’t appear to Warren to have been kidnapped, which led him to assume she must have left of her own accord. It was a good thing that the soldier had stopped talking, because Warren was already stumbling backward through the crowd, anxious to get back to the cobbler’s shop in order to meet up with Corrine
and talk to her. After about a minute of walking down the street listening to his own clamoring thoughts in his head, he realized the shopkeeper was still at his side and was talking. “—believe that? It just isn’t possible! I mean to say, how could kidnappers have gotten all the way down there to that dungeon and then escaped again with her? It just doesn’t make sense! Maybe that wizard Farland found a way? But Wendell has that castle packed with anti-magic stuff...”

  “Mmm,” Warren said, still deep in thought. “But all the same, they say she’s gone, so she must be gone.”

  “True enough. I pity whatever poor souls are in any way involved with this. They’re going to end up deader than dead when they’re found out.”

  Deader than dead. Aw, man. Were he and Corrine going to get dragged into this? He needed to talk to his sister. He looked up to see that they were back at the cobbler’s shop. And the cobbler was holding the door open for him, now talking about shoes instead of the Princess thing. “Were you coming in, sir?” he asked.

  “Oh, er, yes,” Warren said. He supposed he still had to buy the shoes, even though it felt really weird to do so now that he knew he was buying them for a runaway princess.

  “What kind are you looking for? Fancy? Casual? Boots? Tap shoes? We’ve got everything. You’ve come to the right place.”

  “Er, they’re not for me. They’re for a friend. A lady. I guess some boots or something?”

  “Size?” the shopkeeper asked.

  “A little smaller than mine,” Warren said. “Need me to take one off so you can compare?”

  The shopkeeper nodded and held out a hand. Warren untied his boot and handed it over, then limped around waiting while the shopkeeper rustled around in the back room. Warren was looking at a shiny pair of boots covetously (his boots were about ten years old) when the door opened and Corrine swept in, staring at him with a wild look in her eyes that showed him that she’d also heard the news about the Princess and had drawn the same conclusions that he had. Warren shook his head sharply at her when she opened her mouth to speak, and he pointed at the back room.

  She nodded and said in a strained voice, “Hi Warren! Buying shoes, I see?”

  He answered, “Yes, for my friend, Jennifer.”

  “Yes. How nice. That will be nice for her. To have new shoes.”

  Warren winced at her stilted delivery.

  She saw the wince and nodded her understanding, then made a motion which indicated she was zipping her lips. They browsed the showroom for a bit, and the guy came out with a few pairs. Warren bought the most princessey looking ones, and the siblings set off to interrogate their new acquaintance.

  Meanwhile, in a barrel bobbing along in the Bay of Fritillary, a very angry Farland was waking up feeling cramped, damp, confused, and quite groggy from the few days he had passed in a medically-induced coma.

  “What in blazes...?” he grumbled as he felt around his barrel. “Not cool,” he concluded after he had deduced what was going on; he knew he was in a barrel (a grog barrel by the smell of it) and could guess by the rocking motion that he was in the ocean.

  He was so disoriented from the drugs that it took him a few tries to magic himself back to his evil lair, but at last he finally managed it, and a few moments later appeared in his living room. His cape was wrinkled, his hair needed a reapplication of pomade, and he needed a change of clothing like nobody’s business if you know what I’m saying. He was very glad that the only witness to his current state of filthiness was the magical pool of raven blood, which was shimmering away in its stone basin.

  It took Farland a moment to realize that the board he’d put over the top of the basin in order to create a makeshift table had been removed and was now leaning against the wall.

  “Cripes!” he exclaimed and looked around wildly at his ransacked abode. “What happened here?” he asked the magical pool of raven blood.

  A voice cawed in his head, I dunno. I was sleeping.

  Farland eyed the pool suspiciously, not doubting for a moment that it was lying; the magical pool of raven blood had never liked him, and its favorite pastime was lecturing Farland about how he was too mean and that he should give peace, love, and understanding a try for a change. “You were not sleeping.”

  Was so. I sleep like the dead.

  “Come on,” Farland whined. “I need to know who was here! I know you had to have been awake, at least for part of this ransacking. You couldn’t have slept through the board being taken off your basin.”

  Okay, fine, I was awake. But I am not telling you who was here.

  Farland sighed. “Whatever.” There was no convincing the magical pool of raven blood to do anything it didn’t want to do once it had put its metaphorical foot down. Another thought occurred to Farland and he gasped, “Can you tell me what the date is?” While the revenge plot he was working on regarding Warren and Julianna was something he could take care of at his leisure, the other revenge plot he had brewing with Mirabella was time-sensitive, and he had to make sure he hadn’t slept too long.

  It’s November 2, the magical pool of raven blood told him, since it saw no harm in informing Farland of something that he could just as easily have gotten the answer to by asking anyone out in the street, or by consulting his day planner.

  “Good,” Farland sighed. “I haven’t missed the hunt.” There were still a few days left before he and Mirabella carried out their plan on that front. And that meant he had a few days still to sort out this thing with Warren.

  But first thing was first. A new pair of trousers, a fresh cape, and a bit of time in front of the mirror to spiff himself up. Then, he could start asking his friends in the city’s smuggling and thievery circles about any leads on Warren and his family.

  Warren and Corrine had made it back to the inn, and were walking down the basement hallway, both very nervous because they had never addressed royalty before or accused royalty of posing as a maid.

  But they both agreed they had to do something. They couldn’t just hand the runaway princess her new shoes and then go on their way; the unanswered questions they would have had to deal with would have plagued them for the rest of their days.

  Warren eyed the door at the end of the hallway; he felt jittery and couldn’t shake the feeling that the winds of change were blowing pretty fierce, twirling into a hurricane that was going to be shortly blowing his life seriously off course.

  Corrine felt no such apprehension, because she wasn’t nearly intuitive enough in that way, so while Warren hung back and second-guessed, she plowed ahead and knocked on the door. “It’s us!” she announced.

  A few moments later, Julianna opened the door and they walked in. Julianna looked at them curiously as they stared at her. Corrine looked suspicious, and Warren looked overwhelmed, and Julianna felt a little shiver; something was going on here, and it was nothing good. She, too, felt those winds of change that Warren had just noticed.

  “So, do we call you Your Highness, Your Majesty, or what? I’m not clear on the protocol,” Corrine asked.

  Julianna squeaked and backed up a few paces, staring at Corrine with horror. Oh no! Were they going to kidnap her? How had they found out? She glanced at Dexter, who was hovering behind the siblings.

  Dexter shrugged. “Maybe try denying it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Julianna gasped, but her reaction to Corrine’s words had already convinced the siblings they were right.

  “Piffle. Let’s cut to the chase here. We know you’re the Princess. One: you gave us a downright dizzying amount of money for the purposes of buying a pair of shoes. Two: you are ‘allergic’,” Corrine said, doing air quotes, “to sunlight. Granted, those two things wouldn’t have made us suspicious on their own, but then we went out and discovered number three: the Princess went missing last night. She is nowhere to be found in the entire castle.”

  Julianna st
ared at her, unable to make a sound.

  Dexter said, “Just hear them out. Remember, you’ve got tons of money on you. You could buy their silence, easy.”

  “Imagine that!” Corrine went on. “The very night that the Princess disappears from the castle, we bump into a super-rich girl who can’t go out in the sunlight.”

  Warren had been standing by the doorway, watching the two of them. Jennifer, or rather Julianna, looked like she was going to cry; he jumped in and said, “Corrine, don’t be so mean.”

  “Why not? I’m mad! She has endangered us by associating with us and keeping such a secret. There are soldiers swarming through the city right now searching for her,” she said, jabbing a finger in Julianna’s direction. “Soldiers who will kill anyone who has anything to do with hiding her. And we hid her!”

  “She didn’t know any of that was going on,” Warren reasoned.

  “Yeah,” Julianna said, recovering a bit from the shock of this verbal attack, “and, by the way, I owed you no explanation. I had no reason to trust you. Kidnappers are a very real danger for a person like me.”

  “Well, all the same—”

  They all stopped short and froze. From the room above, they heard the sound of many heavy footsteps pounding about and lots of harsh male voices.

  “Soldiers!” Julianna breathed.

  “They’re searching the inn!” Warren whispered.

  “Let’s turn her in,” Corrine said, eyeing Warren.

  “No!” Warren and Julianna gasped.

  “Why would you want to do that?” Warren asked his sibling, staring at her with confusion.

  “So they don’t get mad at us and kill us when they find us with her, idiot! Do you think they’ll believe us when we say we didn’t know anything about it? Heck, do you think they’ll even bother asking us for our side of the story before killing us?”

  Warren was busily pushing back the stone in the wall that led to the secret room. He then grabbed the lantern and pushed it through the opening. He was too mad at Corrine even to answer. How could she be so cowardly?