by Mark Jacobs
Chapter XXIII
Pence peeked out of the gardener’s pocket like a child hiding behind a window curtain from his rampaging father. The Prince walked to the well and stood above it, wondering how to wish for something without a penny to pay the price, and finding himself without any experience or good faith in such matters. Shoulders slouched, he kicked a stone into the abyss. If he voiced his disappointment when the stone hit the bottom, Pence could not hear.
The Prince returned to the stump. “I may not have a coin to throw in, sister, but I have you, and one Penny is much the same as another.” The Prince grabbed her by the hair and pulled her body up from its peace. “And if the well cannot tender me a wish, at least it will cleanse me of you. Come to think on it… I do not wish for you back, after all. What have you ever been to me but a curse?”
The Queen had become one at the arm with the gardener, and he was no sooner going to rise than any old man who is good and settled in his seat, no matter how he was pulled or pried. “Madness!” the Prince cried in frustration. “Must I ever and always use this forsaken axe? Must I chop your bodies apart into firewood?”
Pence heard this and bolted out of hiding, dashed across the gardener’s marble-like neck, and leapt to the stump of the White Tree, nearly fumbling away the penny as he did so. The perimeter of white bark began to glow hotly. “Unhand her!” he shouted at the Prince.
The Prince let the Queen fall back to the gardener’s lap. His brooding shadow threw the stump into darkness, which made a jagged halo out of the glowing perimeter of bark. “By gundy!” he exclaimed. “If it isn’t our recurring gentleman of fancy, returned from his voyage to sea! Had I known the old biddy–my sister, here–was going to throw you out her window, I’d have put you in a bottle with a little ship inside of it! Har! I have one in my sack, you know. Fiiiine purple sails.”
Pence’s flesh radiated brightly and his heart thumped faster than a hummingbird’s wings.
“I see you have brought my penny back, young master,” said the Prince with his teeth bared like bars on a birdcage. “Give it to me.”
Pence held his inheritance protectively to one side. His green eyes blazed with inner fire. Indeed, there was nothing green in the garden that did not now grow a fledgling light inside itself, some candle or soul of living magic awakened for the fight.
“I took you to the Princess. I upheld my obligation. Now, you conniving, edible thing, give me the penny!”
“No deal! No deal!” Pence objected like a lawyer at a closing trial. “You defrauded yourself, stuffed me in a bottle, and killed my old man’s honey-pie! You ruined my whole life, you idiot, and I only got three days! Everything has gone wrong since you showed up–how do you think that makes me feel? Cutting peoples’ heads off–what’s wrong with you? I wish I had my sword. You wouldn’t even know what hit you. It would be my sword.”
The Prince stared at Pence until he realized he was beginning to nod his head in time to the boy’s heartbeat. Sighing sheepishly, he lifted his axe off the ground with his good hand. “You are the real secret of the garden,” he said above Pence. “The seed of the White Tree gives you life–do you deny it? It is the root of life itself, is it not? I’m going to cut you in half,” he detailed without compunction, “take out your heart, and swallow it. Then I’m going to eat the rest of you, just to be sure… though I imagine I’ll spit out your brain like a cherry pit and use your eyes to buy more grog. I expect that makes you feel like you’ve greatly failed and that your three-days-life has been abundantly trivial.”
Pence’s skin was as white as the sun. All around him green mist rose from the surface of the stump like steam rising from a winter lake until the small boy in the middle was all but concealed. In his arms, the penny began to glow, too.
The Prince’s eyes bulged in dread at all the elemental power confronting him. “I shall consider it my first royal duty as the newly ascended King of this realm to put this traitor’s head–” he nodded down to the gardener, “–on a spike outside the gate and set fire to the rest before I take my leave.” He began swinging his axe in a wide circle, as if he wielded a ball and chain.
The penny suddenly burned root-white in the shadow of the shrieking dragonheads. Pence looked at the Princess’s face fondly in his last moment as he held the penny above his head for a shield. Facing the Prince, the engraved heart glowed as brightly green as the sap of the Holy Tree. “Even a cent may pull a person to the path of their destiny,” Pence whispered to himself, preparing for his end. The penny smiled.
The Prince swung the axe around once more and then he stepped into a powerful chop.
Pence put a foot back to brace himself, but he tripped over the gardener’s charred stub of a forefinger. He fell on his back in the center of the stump with the penny held above his chest. “Whoops!” were his last words before the dragonheads slammed into the penny, scoring a large cut across the green heart.
The coin remained one, deflecting the Prince’s steel. But the force of the blow was more than Pence’s matchstick arms could equal; his elbows buckled out and ruptured and the penny was hammered down onto his chest so hard that it smashed his body into paste and his legs and his head shot off like bottles out of a whale’s blowhole. Every bite of him flew in a different direction, scattered amid moondaisies and low-sweeping ferns, windbells and soggybottom bushes. The white seed was the only thing not lost to the garden–when the axe hit the penny and the penny hit the seed, Pence’s heart was driven straight down into the stump like the head of a nail. At once, the white glow and the green mist evaporated from the fence and the stump and every other living thing in sight.
The rhythm of the heartseed still could be heard, deep within the stump, strong and steady… a step slower than a walking tempo… a pace at rest.
The Prince took a step back. He raised an eyebrow and examined his axe: in the single, swift instant in which the black handle had passed over the perimeter of the stump, the green halo had cut the tar-black shaft cleanly in two. The silver dragonheads, freed of their lifelong post, had rebounded off the mystically charged penny and sailed high and away.
The Prince dropped the empty handle and moved to fetch up the penny off the stump, but hesitated. “It seems no one can keep you, Penny, without keeping a curse,” he said to the coin itself. “Then again, when has a boy ever gotten himself anything but trouble for holding a girl by the hand too long?”
Then he reached for the ancient coin, anyway, emboldened that the coin had returned to its normal color and composition and that he would only need handle it for a moment. As soon as his fingers closed around the scalding metal, he dashed back to the well.
The Prince raised his hand high. “At last! I wish that a hundred years ago, I found the garden first–” but then he heard a whistling that was unlike any bird. He leaned back. He looked up. The dragonheads were diving for him, their blurring speed inescapable.
The Prince had only time to instinctively raise his good hand over his face and gargle, “No fair!” before the blades reached him. They lopped through his wrist and the tip of his nose and his neck at a gruesome angle and then dove into the earth, buried deep out of reach. The Prince’s detached hand and his head and the knob of his pock-marked nose hit the ground at the same time. The penny broke free of his fingers and rolled away from the well like a bicycle without a rider. The Prince’s headless body teetered, his legs unconsciously pedaling, then he fell forward into the abyss and was gone.