[Half/Time 01] Half Upon a Time

by James Riley

  Thankfully, the hallway outside looked deserted.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Jack said. “Remember, quietly. We don’t want anyone to hear us.”

  May nodded, so he pushed the door open the entire way …

  And almost ran into a short, fat goblin guard.

  “I heard ya,” the goblin said. “Too bad for you, eh?”

  Jack froze. Instead of a sword, this guard held a battle-axe in its stubby fingers, the blade covered in what looked like blood. Jack knew he could attack the goblin empty-handed, but that wouldn’t end well. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything else in the room other than a desk and a frail-looking chair behind it—nothing to use as a weapon….

  And then he saw his sword and his grandfather’s bag sitting on top of the desk, along with some random items from the bag. Apparently the goblin had been looking for loot. Maybe Jack could make a grab for—

  “Excuse me,” May said, stepping past Jack. The princess threw her nose into the air and glared down at the goblin. “I’m ready to see Malevolent now,” she said. “Be a good little monster and fetch her, will you?”

  “We’re trying this again?” Jack whispered, but she ignored him.

  The goblin snorted. “You’ll not be seeing anyone. How did you get out, anyway? I bet you found that imp, right? I’ve been after him for months. You’re the fifth group he’s let out this year.” The guard looked them up and down. “Though you’ve emerged with considerably more limbs than the others.”

  “I need no impish-type creature to free me!” May exclaimed haughtily. “I am a princess. I demand to see Malevolent!”

  Jack desperately wanted to stop her, considering how well this act had played out before, but he couldn’t think of anything to do that wouldn’t make things worse.

  The guard laughed. “Get back in your cell, and maybe I’ll let you keep your hands!”

  May laughed back. Then she kicked the goblin in the stomach as hard as she could.

  The goblin doubled over, and May grabbed his axe from his hands, then bashed him in the head with the flat of the blade. The goblin dropped to the floor, unconscious.

  “See?” she said to Jack. “That’s what they get for not listening to me.”

  It took Jack a minute to catch up, but when he did, he still couldn’t think of anything to say. May just smiled sweetly at him. He shook his head, then grabbed his sword and opened the bag to see if anything was missing, beyond what had been thrown on the desk.

  The only thing he could find in the bag was May’s fairy, who apparently had hidden herself deep in its recesses. She seemed a bit disheveled but otherwise okay as she climbed up May’s shoulder and back into her spot in May’s hair.

  Between the items on the desk and the now empty bag, something rather important was missing. “No Mirror,” Jack said, feeling a chill. “That’s not a good sign.”

  May scrunched up her nose, then paused. “Hold up a second,” she said. “Why wouldn’t Phillip be put in a cell with us? Maybe Malevolent recognized him somehow, from his father or something. She’s a fairy queen after all, right? And we have to assume she would have recognized the Mirror, too. If we find Phillip and Malevolent, we’ll probably find the Mirror, right?”

  Jack slowly nodded as he tossed all his grandfather’s prized magic items back into the bag. “Maybe,” he said. “So you’re saying that instead of searching through the rest of the castle, we should just save ourselves some time and fight our way through the thousands of goblins to wherever Malevolent is?”

  “Pretty much,” she said, “though I think you’re getting cynical in your old age. We probably won’t have to fight more than a hundred or so.”

  “Old age? I’m fourteen. That’s barely middle age.”

  “Funny.”

  “There’s nothing funny about the life expectancy of male peasants, Princess,” Jack said, trying hard not to smile. “But fine. We’ll fight our way through. They’re probably in the throne room, right?”

  “You’re the expert.”

  “You’re the princess!”

  “You act like that should mean something.”

  “I’m starting to wonder about that myself.”

  “Funny,” she said again, then punched him hard enough for him to think it wasn’t that funny at all.

  “Can we just get on with this?” Jack said, rubbing his shoulder.

  “Of course!” May said in that high-pitched voice she used whenever she really wanted to be irritating. She batted her eyes at him, then led the way down the stairs that the goblin had been guarding. Jack watched her go for a second, then shook his head and followed the princess.

  Fighting hundreds of goblin guards would still be easier than figuring her out.

  Chapter 35

  Fortunately for Jack and May, there weren’t actually hundreds of guards. Really, there couldn’t have been more than three dozen or so, and even then, the hallways were so narrow that the creatures could only attack two or three at a time.

  Of course, the goblins found it hard to attack when Jack and May kept running off in the opposite direction. After sprinting through the halls and opening random doors to escape the goblins, Jack and May also managed to find themselves completely lost.

  “You have … a sword … you know!” May huffed at Jack when they stopped to catch their breath. “You could … use it!”

  Jack shook his head. “I’m not … gonna kill them! Even if I … could … they’re still almost … people, just … shorter. They’re not that different from us.”

  “They want to eat us,” May said, pushing herself off the wall she’d been leaning on. “Do you want to eat them? That makes them different.”

  “I think you’d be surprised how rarely monsters actually eat people,” Jack said, standing up as well. “It’s mostly a myth. Besides, I don’t know that I trust the sword.”

  The princess stared at him for a second. “Trust the sword, huh?” she asked. “The strangest stuff upsets you, you know that?” She glanced around the hallway, trying to determine where they were, something Jack had stopped bothering with. All the halls looked exactly the same to him. In fact, the only reason he’d felt like they were on the right track was due to the obscene amount of guards they’d found. And now the complete emptiness of the halls just reinforced his belief that they were going the wrong way.

  He started to say that out loud, but May held up a hand for him to be quiet. She cocked her head to one side, apparently listening intently … to what, Jack had no idea. He tried copying her, straining to catch whatever she was listening to, but he couldn’t hear anything.

  “What—,” he said, and she shushed him. May slowly took a step, then two, down the middle of the hallway, followed by a step to the right, then two back to the left. She nodded to the left, then went for the closest door.

  May didn’t seem to care that the door’s rusty hinges shrieked as she opened it, but Jack winced, waiting for the guards to come hurtling down the hall at any second. May didn’t bother waiting for them. Instead, she grabbed Jack and pulled him through the door, then quickly shut it behind him.

  Inside, he tried to speak again, but May shushed him one more time. “Stop doing that!” he whispered. Without even glancing his way, she reached out and covered his mouth with her hand.

  Of course, this irritated him even more, but for some reason, despite his annoyance, he found himself a bit preoccupied by the smell coming from the skin on her hand. Jack would have thought after all these days on the road, the princess wouldn’t exactly smell very pleasant. But there she was, giving off a fragrance that smelled like a breeze on a spring day. Probably some kind of natural magic that girls were just born with.

  Jack inhaled deeply just as May dropped her hand, leaving him sucking air loudly through his nose. This got the princess’s attention, at least enough for her to raise an eyebrow at him. Jack coughed to cover it. “Dust,” he said, glad the room was dark enough to hide his face, which was on fire again. It was d
oing that far too much lately.

  May looked at him oddly for a second longer, then motioned him over to an enormous fireplace easily twice as tall as Jack. The fireplace was made of some kind of shiny stone, and a large iron grate lay in its very center. To the left, a metal basket for firewood lay on its side against the edge of the fireplace. It looked as though none of it had been used in years.

  And yet, voices wafted up through the grate.

  May pointed down, then knelt next to the fireplace. Jack joined her on the floor and put his ear next to the grate. He could clearly make out words now—a woman was speaking to someone, her voice resonating with power, much like Merriweather’s had.

  “She never could stay out of my affairs,” the woman said. “Always interfering where she wasn’t wanted. And now, look at her. I could help her, of course. It would be easy. Therefore, it gives me no small amount of pleasure to refuse to do so.”

  “Please,” said a male voice that rasped just a step above hoarse. “Please,” the voice repeated, coughing. “She’s trapped—”

  “Yes, she is, isn’t she?” the woman said, then laughed cruelly.

  Jack was so intent on listening to the conversation that it took him a moment to realize that May was staring at him. In fact, it actually took her slapping him in the shoulder for him to notice. He glanced up at her with a raised eyebrow, and she mouthed something.

  “Malevolent,” her lips said. Then, “Phillip.” Jack nodded. It had to be them … only, Jack hadn’t ever heard the prince sound so beaten, so dejected. What had the fairy queen done to him?

  “The thing that most surprises me,” said Malevolent from somewhere below, “is that you would bring her here, to me! Such a wonderful present, my little human absurdity! Who could have imagined that you would deliver my greatest rival to me. You, the very boy destined to kill me!”

  Jack pushed back from the grate, his eyes wide. “Wha …?” he mouthed to May.

  May shushed him, then bent over and grabbed the grate. As she yanked on it, Jack realized what she was trying to do: If the fireplaces were connected to a common chimney, they might be able to get to the throne room through the grate.

  May pulled and pulled, but the grate never budged. Jack tapped her shoulder to let him try, and she moved out of the way and gave him a chance. Unfortunately, he had no better luck.

  “Kill … kill you?” Phillip mumbled, the sound barely reaching their ears.

  “Of course!” Malevolent said. “One cannot imagine how, and yet—”

  “But … how do you … how would you know?” Phillip stammered.

  Malevolent laughed again. “How?! I trapped an Ifrit within an ordinary mirror, you silly, pathetic creature! I, greatest of the fairy queens, created the most powerful magical device the world will ever know! While others might have sought personal wealth, I knew better. Wealth is fleeting, yet wisdom, knowledge—these are the true hallmarks of personal power! Knowing that, I used the first question I forced from the Ifrit to learn who might possibly strip my immortality from me, who in this world could possibly destroy me.”

  “That is … sad,” Phillip said, “that … you would even think … to ask that.”

  Then he screamed.

  May quickly looked to Jack, deathly worried for Phillip, and for once Jack agreed.

  “I will not take any insults from you, of all people,” Malevolent said, her voice much lower. “Believe me, I fully expected the Mirror to tell me I would never die! Yet, when I learned that you, a human, would one day destroy me, I knew that I must escape that fate at all costs. So I asked the Mirror how I might avoid my death, and it told me!”

  “Did it tell you … to talk and talk … until you kill me … from boredom?” Phillip said.

  The prince screamed again.

  “No, little human,” Malevolent said. “The Mirror told me that I will be protected from you as long as a certain princess isn’t around in your moment of need. I believe you know of this girl—you were at one point betrothed to her, after all.” The fairy queen laughed bitterly. “I tried to kill the girl, but Merriweather interfered, as she always does. And to be honest, I believed at that moment my fate was sealed.”

  “You mean … it is not?” Phillip asked.

  “The princess disappeared,” Malevolent admitted, “but I have it on good authority that she will no longer be a concern. The Wicked Queen herself promised me that.”

  “Is that what you received … for betraying Snow White?” Phillip asked.

  There was a brief pause, then Malevolent laughed. “Oh, my little prince, I have quite enjoyed our time here, yet all good things must come to an end.”

  And then there was silence.

  May jumped to her feet, then grabbed Jack and pulled him up. The princess gestured frantically, silently telling him that they had to go, they had to find Phillip and rescue him now. But how could they? The grate was just too heavy, and there was no time to search the castle for Phillip, not if Malevolent was—

  “Silly man-child,” said a musical voice right in front of Jack. “You have a key, why don’t you use it?”

  Jack’s head flew up to look for the voice, but he didn’t see anyone. May, meanwhile, looked questioningly at him. The fairy in her hair also stared at him, only the fairy was pointing at something with her little hand.

  She was pointing at his sword.

  “You aren’t very smart, are you, man-child?” the fairy said to him.

  Jack’s mouth dropped open. Since when could fairies talk? More important, since when could he understand them?

  He looked from the fairy to May, but the princess just stared at him with confusion. Jack pointed up at the fairy, surprised that the princess, with her incredible hearing, hadn’t heard the fairy in her hair. May kept shaking her head, though, just not understanding.

  “Use your key!” the fairy said again, pointing at the sword.

  “All right, fine!” Jack whispered back. May’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, but Jack ignored her as he drew his sword. The room instantly lit up from the sword’s glow, illuminating what, in the past, must have been a luxurious bedroom.

  “So it’s a key,” Jack said to the fairy. “What do I do with it?”

  “A key?” May asked, but Jack shushed her.

  “Open the lock!” the fairy said, exasperated. “No wonder the Charmed One worries about you! You haven’t the brains of a worm!”

  Jack chose to ignore that last comment and turned his attention to the grate. Did she mean that maybe he could use the sword to lever the grate out? He brought the sword down and pushed it between the grate and the shiny stone of the fireplace.

  As soon as the blade touched the iron of the grate, the metal split in half with a tiny hiss. Behind him, May gasped as Jack, realizing what the fairy had been telling him, quickly cut a circle in the iron wide enough for them to fit through, then replaced the sword in its scabbard and yanked on the grate.

  The metal circle he’d cut came flying out, throwing Jack backward along with it. They both hit the ground with an ear-shattering clang, a sound that probably woke up every goblin within a hundred miles.

  May paused for a brief moment in wonder, then shook her head, smiled at Jack, and jumped straight into the hole he’d just cut, even as a god-awful howling tore up through the grate from the room below.

  Chapter 36

  Jack gave May what he hoped was enough time to get out of the way below, then took a deep breath and jumped into the hole after her. Beneath the grate was a stone vent or chimney, barely large enough for Jack to fall through; his bag wasn’t so lucky, banging back and forth against the sides as he dropped.

  He only fell for a second or two before his feet slammed into another grate at the center of a fireplace exactly like the one he’d just left. His landing sent pain spiking up through his boots, all the way to his knees, while his bag stopped its fall right on his head.

  Making things worse, he landed in a pile of soot, the remains of what had p
robably been an even deeper pile that May had landed in. Now soot completely blocked his view of the room he’d just dropped into, thrown into the air by the force of their landings.

  Though Jack couldn’t make out what was happening, he could hear Phillip screaming. “Stop, please!” the prince was yelling … but he wasn’t the only one. A woman was also shrieking, the same woman who’d been speaking just a minute before.

  Malevolent.

  Whatever was happening, Jack wasn’t helping anything just standing there, waiting for feeling to reenter the soles of his feet, so he hurled himself through the cloud of soot….

  Only to jerk to a halt barely a foot out to avoid plowing into May, who’d stopped just beyond the fireplace. Jack frantically windmilled his arms and managed to avoid knocking them both down, though he had to grab May’s shoulders to keep from falling over. The princess didn’t even notice, she was so surprised by something.

  Jack quickly stood up straight and looked around to see what she was looking at, only to have his mouth drop open—unfortunately letting in more soot.

  They were too late to save Phillip. The Wolf King had beaten them to it.

  The howling Jack had heard was the wolf, and now the animal, in his human form, was holding an unnaturally tall woman in the air by her neck. The woman, dressed all in black, had to be Malevolent—she had pupil-less green eyes, just like Merriweather’s white ones. Unconscious goblin guards covered the room’s floor in heaps, a by-product of the wolf’s entrance, most likely.

  Right behind one of the larger goblin piles was Phillip. Jack quickly ran to the prince, who was chained to the wall opposite the fireplace. Phillip, his face battered and covered with bruises, hadn’t stopped shouting since Jack jumped in. Except the prince wasn’t screaming in pain anymore; he was pleading with the wolf, begging the animal not to kill Malevolent.