House of Secrets

by Chris Columbus

  Krom swung a metal cage over the cart, trapping the Walkers inside, before he and the other warriors pulled them down the dock. Slayne and Tranquebar parted ways with the group and headed toward the Moray. Inside the cart, Brendan called to Krom, “Hey, how long are we gonna be locked in here?”

  “Until we arrive at Castle Corroway and you meet Queen Daphne. Two days.”

  “Two days?” asked a worried Eleanor. “How are we supposed to use the bathroom?”

  “That’s what the hay’s for!” cackled Krom. The other warriors laughed with him.

  “No way am I peeing in front of my brother,” said Eleanor. “I’ll hold it.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Krom. “Bad for the kidneys.”

  “What about food?” asked Brendan.

  “We’ll be slaughtering goats along the way,” said Krom. “We’ll be cookin’ the meaty parts for us. You lot can feast on the kidneys, intestines, and all the other wet, dangly bits.”

  At the end of the dock, the Savage Warriors put the cart down and attached it to a horse. Then they mounted their own steeds. Within minutes the group was off.

  It was a sight to silence the peaceful town of Tinz. Krom and his companions’ shining weapons discouraged onlookers from coming to the rescue of the kids in the cart, who clearly were being held against their will. At first, Brendan and Eleanor called for help (Cordelia was still in shock), but after Krom gave them a few smacks with the butt end of his ax, they stayed quiet.

  “What do we do?” Eleanor whispered. She couldn’t see her brother, because their backs were facing, but his angry breathing gave her hope.

  “Roll over,” Brendan said. “I need to get a good look out of this thing.”

  Eleanor turned into the hay, yelping as stalks went up her nose. Cordelia did the same but stayed quiet. With his two sisters facedown, Brendan could see through the cart’s bars, and just in time . . . because they were passing through the market.

  “Where are you, where are you?” Brendan muttered to himself.

  “Who?” Cordelia finally asked.

  “Deal! You’re talking again!” Eleanor said.

  “I want to know who Brendan’s looking for,” Cordelia said.

  “Honestly? It’s this girl I met.”

  “A girl?” said a surprised Eleanor. “You like a girl?”

  “Well . . . ,” Brendan said. “I’m more interested in making sure she saves us. Cordelia, you remember Celene from Savage Warriors?”

  “Sure—she’s brave and smart,” Cordelia said. “Let’s try not to get her killed, too.”

  “Shut yer traps!” Krom yelled from in front of the cart.

  Celene was standing in the market, staring at the hay cart in as much disbelief as all the other townspeople, many of whom had the hard look of Resistance fighters. She got even more surprised when she recognized Brendan and when he mouthed, with all the desperation he could convey in silence, Help us!

  Two days later, the Walkers looked a lot worse than they had at the start of their journey. Hard travel through a pine forest under the cruel eye of Krom (not to mention a steady diet of goat parts that wouldn’t make it into a sausage) had given them a sunken, bloodless appearance. They rarely spoke, and when they did, it was to share hopeless insights like, “Bren, I guess your girlfriend from Tinz isn’t going to save us.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend, Deal.”

  “And we’re probably going to die in this cart.”

  “No, we’re probably going to die once we meet Queen Daphne. . . .”

  But then they saw Castle Corroway—and went silent.

  It sprang up from the forest like a massive stone tree, made of gray limestone that resembled birch bark. The far side of it was perched on a bluff overlooking a gorge, which held the river that Krom and the warriors had been following on their journey. The near side had an enormous black gate, affixed with rows of sharp metal spikes, set up to impale anyone who attempted to charge it. And the castle had four circular towers, but instead of ending in a parapet, each one split into four smaller towers. These narrow towers rose high above the trees like clustered smokestacks, with a purple flag atop each.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Brendan asked.

  “It’s Sixteen Flags, the archduke’s castle in The Fighting Ace,” Cordelia said. “Will would recognize it. He bombs it. But of course . . . ”

  “Quiet! Don’t make me beat you before we meet the queen!” Krom ordered. He didn’t need to. Cordelia was already trailing off, thinking about Will and how there was no way his knowledge could help them now.

  As the cart arrived at the gate, Castle Corroway loomed larger for the Walkers; if they tilted their heads back, two of the four towers marked the left and right limits of their vision, with blue sky in between. They had to roll around to glimpse the awe-inspiring sight, because they were still cruelly tied together—indeed their proximity over the past two days had made them familiar with one another in ways they would never mention again.

  “All hail Queen Daphne!” Krom called at the gate. “Krom of Slayne’s Savage Warriors, here with prisoners for the queen!”

  “Password?” prompted a guard.

  Krom cleared his throat . . . and then he started making horrible retching noises, like a cat trying to bring up a hairball.

  “Is that the password?” Eleanor asked, but then Krom said—

  “Sorry, sir! A bit of goat went down the wrong way. The password is . . . ‘Panama-Pacific’!”

  The gate ratcheted open.

  “Weird password,” Brendan murmured. He had heard it before, but he couldn’t remember where.

  After the gate came a courtyard, where the Walkers were surprised to find signs of life. Flocks of chickens ran around bwaking. Women with dirty faces had lively conversations as they hung up laundry. Fires were burning; meat sizzled on grills. Men in canvas booths shouted out, “Sword sharpening!” “Archery lessons!”

  “It’s like a village from Game of Thrones,” said Eleanor.

  “You’re not supposed to be watching that!” said Cordelia.

  “Brendan lets me,” said Eleanor, “when Mom and Dad go out on date night—”

  She went silent. There wasn’t going to be any more date night.

  “Help!” Brendan called to the women hanging laundry. They didn’t move. They didn’t react in any way. They stayed focused on their clothes as one of the warriors slapped Brendan with a spear blade.

  “Ow. Lot of help they were,” Brendan whispered, wiping his cheek against straw (which also didn’t help).

  “Maybe they’re too scared to do anything,” Cordelia said. She was scared herself as the cart rolled into a dark structure that she recognized as the castle keep. The warriors stopped and pulled the Walkers out, cutting their bonds, giving them a few moments of blessed relief before forcing them to march up steps on jellied legs, past guards who snapped, “All hail Queen Daphne!”

  In a few minutes, the Walkers were in a throne room with bright windows and intricate, lush tapestries on the walls. The guards there repeated, “Hail Queen Daphne!”

  But far across the room, sitting on a throne constructed from bone and amethyst, the Walkers didn’t see any Queen Daphne.

  They saw a ghastly bald woman in a sumptuous purple robe.

  “The Wind Witch!” Eleanor exclaimed.

  “That’s it!” Brendan said. “Panama-Pacific was what they called the old San Francisco world’s fair!”

  Dahlia Kristoff smiled on her throne and looked at the Walkers one after another—as if to see who would snap first. Cordelia obliged.

  “You killed our parents!” she yelled, surging forward—but the warriors shoved her to the ground and pushed her with her siblings to the Wind Witch’s feet.

  “Hello to you too,” Dahlia Kristoff said. She had two stumps for hands now—the arm that had been zapped by lightning was cut off at the wrist. But on each stump she sported a diamond-studded false hand.

  “Tac
ky,” Eleanor said.

  “Yeah,” said Brendan, “you think you can hide from us by changing your name and getting some bling?”

  “I’m known by many names in many places, children. More than you can imagine. When you’ve spent as long as I have traveling through the worlds of Father’s imagination, you can’t help but get a little bored. I enjoy being Queen Daphne, because she has a certain classic imperiousness. Like Maleficent. But when I travel to ancient Rome, I’m known as Paculla Annia.”

  “We’re gonna make you pay for Mom and Dad,” Brendan said.

  “Collateral damage. It’s not my fault adults are less easy than children to manipulate. We’ve taken some strange turns along the way, Walkers, but you’ve brought me what I asked you for, and I don’t know that your parents would have. I’m truly sorry that to do it I had to destroy them, and your home—”

  “And Will!” Cordelia screamed.

  “I didn’t kill Will,” the Wind Witch said. “That was your friend Slayne.”

  She clucked her tongue. (She couldn’t very well snap her fingers.) Slayne entered the throne room, wheeling a rectangular stone casket on a wooden dolly. The Wind Witch warned him, “Keep it at least ten feet from me! If you bring it close, my father’s curse will make it disappear.”

  The throne-room guards tensed as Slayne lifted the lid from the casket.

  Inside was The Book of Doom and Desire.

  “Slayne and Tranquebar brought it up the river for me,” the Wind Witch said, shaking with anticipation. “Now it’s time for one of you to open the book . . . and slip this inside.”

  She held up a slip of paper in one of her diamond-studded prostheses. The Walkers stayed quiet.

  “Which child will have the honor?”

  No one answered.

  “Cordelia? Since you went the farthest with the book? Brendan? Since you don’t like books? Eleanor? Since you can barely read?”

  “None of us,” Eleanor spat.

  “Yeah, we’re not giving you the satisfaction, you bald bat,” said Brendan.

  “Very well. I’ll have one of my men open it,” said the Wind Witch. She turned to one of her largest guards. “You! Open the book!”

  The guard’s face went pale. He started to tremble with fear.

  “I order you to open the book!” shouted the Wind Witch.

  The terrified guard nodded and stepped forward. He reached for the book. His hands were shaking. He touched its cover . . . started to open it . . . and his hand burst into flames. The guard screamed and ran to a far corner of the room, where he buried his fiery hand in a fountain. A loud hiss and a cloud of steam rose from the water.

  The Walkers stared in horror. “You’ll be fine,” the Wind Witch told the guard, and then she turned back. “Your move, Dahlia—I mean Cordelia.”

  “Don’t you dare call me your horrid name!” said Cordelia.

  “But you remind me of myself. So smart, so driven, so perceptive. Such a little—what’s the word?—nerd! Come, now. How many more innocent guards need to burn their hands until you give me what I want?”

  Cordelia had no response.

  “You understand that if you open the book, I’ll owe you something?” said the Wind Witch. “I’ve got plenty of my own desires I want to slip between its covers, but I can make room for yours. I can give you anything you want. I can make the impossible possible. All you have to do is—”

  “No,” Cordelia said. Then, quietly: “I’d rather die.”

  “Really?” asked the Wind Witch. “Slayne!”

  Slayne stepped toward the Walkers.

  “Start with the youngest!”

  Slayne grabbed Eleanor’s pinky and pressed it against the floor.

  “No!” Eleanor screamed. She had hoped that, somewhere along the way, these people had forgotten their promise to cut off her fingers and have them deep-fried in boar batter. She began hyperventilating, shaking . . . and then she seemed to float above herself and see Eleanor Walker in front of the throne, a soon-to-be victim of the kind of torture that was only supposed to happen in faraway places.

  “Stop!” Cordelia yelled.

  “Let her go!” Brendan screamed.

  But the Wind Witch shook her head. “You’ve made your decision. After I’ve tasted that first finger, maybe you’ll have a change of heart.”

  Slayne raised his sword. But as he was about to bring it down—

  A huge bang, and then a slow creak, sounded outside the throne room. The Walkers heard shouting! Screams! Guards yelling, “To arms!” Weapons clanging!

  “What in the—?” asked the Wind Witch. “The gate?”

  A flaming arrow crashed through a window of the throne room. It pierced a tapestry on the opposite wall. Flames leaped up—

  But no one was looking at that. They were all looking out the broken window at something impossible: a giant, hairy chest that towered over the keep like another castle.

  Eleanor said, “Fat Jagger?”

  “What is that?” the Wind Witch gasped, staring out the broken window at the colossus’s gigantic gut and flowing dark hair.

  “A . . . colossus,” said a dumbstruck Slayne.

  “I know that! How did it get in my castle?”

  “I suspect it ripped the gate—”

  “Take your men and kill it!”

  Slayne nodded grumpily and left the throne room with his sword drawn. The rest of the Savage Warriors followed suit. “Not you!” the Wind Witch barked at Krom. “You stay here and watch the whelps.”

  Krom looked longingly at Slayne—the two had been killing together since they were kids—but Slayne just shrugged: Better listen to her. Krom stayed.

  The Wind Witch turned to the still-flaming tapestry on the wall. She pointed her diamond-studded arms at it. A blast of water shot out and immediately extinguished the fire. It wasn’t like the rain the Wind Witch had conjured before; this was like a fire hose.

  “She’s even more powerful with two messed-up hands?” Brendan said. “That’s really not fair.”

  “The hardest steel is tempered in the hottest forge,” said the Wind Witch, looking at her sparkling fake hands. Then a flash of motion outside got her attention; she turned to see Fat Jagger tossing a Savage Warrior over his shoulder like a pebble. The man’s screams were drowned out by the tumult of battle in the courtyard.

  “I believe I’m needed,” said the Wind Witch. “Guards! Take the book down to the ship!”

  Two guards quickly grabbed the stone casket that held The Book of Doom and Desire, closed it, and wheeled it out the back of the room. Meanwhile the Wind Witch bent back, cracked her spine in that horrible way the Walkers had seen before, and unfolded her dirty, greasy wings to whip up a column of air. Her veins and arteries pulsed in her face. Cackling, she flew out of the broken window to confront the colossus.

  “What’s she gonna do to Fat Jagger?” Eleanor pleaded. “He came for us. He knew we were in trouble, and he must have walked across the whole ocean—”

  “Look!” Cordelia called.

  Three grappling hooks had flipped into the broken window and caught against the stone inside.

  “Intruders!” Krom called. “Get them!”

  As Krom and two guards tried to get in position to defend the throne room, three fighters in black cloaks jumped down. (Outside, the Wind Witch flew at Fat Jagger; he bellowed and swatted at her as if she were a gnat.) In a flash, the cloaked figures landed in crouches, whipped out crossbows, and—thwip thwip thwip—shot Krom and the guards!

  Brendan cheered; Krom and the guards were wearing armor, but the cloaked figures had buried the crossbow darts right in their faces. Krom was twisting on the ground, screaming, trying to pull one out of his eye. He finally managed to extract it, but his eyeball came out along with it; seeing his eye attached to the top of the dart like a martini olive made him scream at a higher pitch than anyone would have thought possible.

  “Who are you?” Eleanor asked the intruders.

  Brendan cou
ld hardly speak, but he managed to say, “Celene.”

  The cloaked figures pushed back their hoods—and sure enough, it was Celene from Tinz and the two men she had been ferrying messages for in the marketplace. The Resistance fighters.

  “Of course. The Resistance against Queen Daphne,” said Cordelia.

  The Resistance fighters strode toward the Walkers. The other guards in the room ran for the stairs, not wanting to end up on the floor with crossbow-dart piercings.

  “Brendan? Are you all right?” Celene asked.

  Brendan lurched forward and hugged her. “You saved us! Thanks!”

  “You’re welcome, but we—”

  “These are my sisters: Cordelia and Eleanor.”

  “Nice to meet you, but we need to move fast,” said Celene. “I’ve got to get back to the rest of my team; they’re out there fighting the castle guards.”

  “How did you find us?”

  “I had guessed where you were going when I saw you in the cart, and then”—Celene pointed her thumb behind her—“the big guy showed up.”

  Outside, the colossus was stomping and roaring. The Wind Witch was nowhere to be found. “His name’s Jagger,” said Eleanor.

  “Then I’ll have you know that yesterday, Jagger waded out of the sea into Tinz. And the only word he said was ‘Walk-er.’”

  “I knew he came for us!” Eleanor said. “I fed him well.”

  Celene nodded in a way that made it clear she had no idea what Eleanor was talking about. “The Resistance decided it was time to strike, since the ultimate weapon was here to help us. After we win, we’re going to elect a new leader and never live under the tyranny of Queen Daphne again. But”—she grabbed Brendan’s arm—“you need to get to the top of one of the towers, now. That way Jagger can see you and carry you away. This battle isn’t getting any stablerer.” She frowned. “I think that’s a word.”

  Outside the window, Fat Jagger caterwauled; the Wind Witch was flapping her wings and shooting bolts of lightning at him. One of Jagger’s eyebrows was singed off. His nostril hairs were on fire.