by Tom Percival
Rufaro did not look happy.
‘Wait!’ called Red. ‘If you’re all by the book now, show me the document that proves you changed your name to Nigel!’
‘I, er, don’t have it on me. I dropped it earlier. In a river, by accident, and a fish ate it, then the fish got caught and cooked, so there’s . . . um . . . no way you can see it now – sorry!’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Red, walking up so she was standing nose to nose with ‘Nigel’. ‘And that means this –’ she snatched the contract out of his hands and ripped it up – ‘doesn’t mean anything!’
‘Well, you can’t blame me for trying!’ protested Rumplestiltskin limply.
‘I don’t know . . .’ said Rufaro crossly. ‘I think I definitely blame you.’
Rumplestiltskin stared up at the tall, angry troll who towered above him.
‘Look, no hard feelings? How about I do you a favour and then we call it quits?’
‘OK!’ said Red, her eyes lighting up. ‘I know just what you can do. Have you got your spinning wheel?’
Rumplestiltskin nodded grumpily.
‘Good!’ replied Red as she looked round at her friends. ‘Now we need to find as much straw as we can. Our good friend Nigel here is going to spin us a golden hot-air balloon. Right, Nige?’
Back in Tale Town, Ella, Rapunzel and Wolfie were looking in the window of a pop-up shop that had opened that morning. It only sold glass slippers, and you couldn’t even get a pair. You had to buy one and then wait until someone with the other one wanted to come along and marry you.
‘Glass slippers!’ said Ella with a snort. ‘Have you ever heard of a more ridiculous thing? Imagine how uncomfortable they’d be? What if they broke? Besides, who’d marry someone just because of the shoes they have?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Wolfie, his nose pressed up against the window. ‘I think it’s romantic . . .’
‘We haven’t heard from Red and the others yet,’ Rapunzel interrupted with a worried frown. ‘You’d have thought they’d have some news by now.’
‘Exactly!’ said Ella. ‘But we’ve heard nothing! What if Fitch’s men have got them? Anything could have happened!’
‘I’m sure they’re fine,’ said Wolfie soothingly. ‘They’re probably still trying to find the troll boy’s home, but even so, perhaps we should do a little –’ he lowered his voice – ‘spying? You know, see if Fitch does know anything? If we can get into his office without being seen, then we might find out something useful.’
‘Great idea!’ exclaimed Rapunzel. ‘That sounds like a job for Hansel and Gretel.’
As a patrol of Fitch’s guards filed out of the Town Hall, none of them noticed the two dark figures that clung to the shadows behind them. That’s because they were too busy noticing the noisy (but rather ineffective) fight that was happening between a scruffy young girl and a much neater young wolf.
‘Help!’ squealed Rapunzel, in her best I’m-a-princess!-What-are-these-ruffians-up-to? voice. ‘They won’t stop fighting!’
As the guards rushed over to break up Ella and Wolfie, Hansel and Gretel slipped out of the shadows and crept into the Town Hall.
One good thing about having been left on your own in the woods a lot is that you get extremely good at looking after yourself.
Hansel and Gretel could hunt, climb, swim, run and do pretty much anything that they needed to do, silently and without anyone noticing. They could also communicate just by looking at each other, which was very handy on occasions like this.
Hansel twitched one eye slightly and waggled his left ear.
Gretel nodded. Of course it was going to be easy! All they had to do was get past Fitch’s guards, sneak into his private office, find evidence of his evil plans and then get out again without being seen. She moved her jaw in a small side-to-side motion to say, ‘And if we see any guards?’
Hansel narrowed his eyes, which Gretel knew could only mean: ‘Sleep on sight!’
Lily the Sea Witch had given them some tiny magic capsules containing the concentrated essence of ‘It wasn’t like this when I was young!’. This powerful spell was made up of the complaints of older people, who were always moaning that ‘It wasn’t like this when I was young!’. It was one of the most boring things you could ever hear and would make anyone fall asleep immediately.
Armed and ready to go, with their blowpipes loaded with magic capsules, the twins tiptoed through the building towards Fitch’s office. Five minutes later, having left a trail of sleeping guards behind them, they eased open the office door. No one was inside, so they slipped in to see what they could find. But there was nothing, apart from ordinary paperwork to do with the running of Tale Town. According to reports, sales of magic beans were down and a young girl with golden hair had been spotted breaking into people’s houses, vandalizing their property and eating their breakfast. But there was nothing about the troll child at all.
Gretel scratched her chin to say: ‘We know Fitch is up to no good. Where does he keep all his private papers?’
Hansel blinked twice, meaning: ‘Remember when we were here with Wolfie returning the Sacred Shiny Story-Snipping Shears and we found that secret cupboard? Let’s look in there.’
Gretel nodded. Behind Fitch’s desk was an ugly old painting.
She gently tilted it to one side and a section of wall swung open, leading into a small chamber. Inside were the two sections of the ‘Long Live the Story Tree’ poem on stone slabs, just as they’d found them before – but nothing else.
Gretel frowned in disappointment and slumped heavily against a railing as Hansel crowded into the cupboard beside her. She screwed up her nose to say, ‘There’s got to be something else . . .’ when with a sudden lurch the secret door swung shut behind them and the whole chamber began to sink into the floor.
Hansel looked over at Gretel with wide eyes that said, ‘Uh-oh!’
‘Wow!’ exclaimed Red, peering down over the side of the golden basket that Rumplestiltskin had woven for them. ‘I could get used to this!’ The ground was rushing past hundreds of metres below as they floated through the sky, hanging beneath a golden hot-air balloon. As soon as Rumplestiltskin had finished the balloon, they had decided to travel on, and now the sun was setting, throwing a few last beams of pink light across the plains below.
‘We’re going so fast!’ said Anansi. ‘We must be well into the troll lands by now!’ He looked over towards Rufaro. ‘I can’t believe that Rumplestiltskin was so helpful and told you which direction he’d seen all the trolls going in!’
Rufaro shrugged and looked a bit sheepish. ‘Sometimes all you need to do is hold someone up in the air by their ankles and they become very helpful,’ he muttered. ‘Not that I advocate that sort of behaviour.’
‘Look!’ interrupted Quartz, pointing over towards some tall grey peaks in the distance. ‘We’re coming up to the Deathrock-Skullgrind mountains.’
‘Seriously?’ said Jack, going pale.
‘That name doesn’t sound too friendly . . .’
‘Oh!’ Quartz laughed. ‘That’s just how it sounds in troll language. Translated, it would mean ‘Great towers of peace and beauty’. Wait a minute! What’s that down there?’
Everybody looked down to see long lines of trolls snaking towards the mountain range.
‘It must be all the trolls from your village!’ exclaimed Rufaro.
Quartz shook his head. ‘There’s too many – our village is only small.’
‘Then who are all the others?’ asked Anansi.
Quartz shrugged, but his eyes looked worried. The last of the sun’s rays disappeared behind the shadow of the mountains as the sky took on the cool tones of night-time.
‘Fitch must have been attacking other vill—’ began Rufaro, when a bright flash of magical light burst out from inside him. Seconds later, instead of being a big green troll, he had turned back into a human. Almost instantly there was another flash and Anansi’s mum transformed as well.
&nbs
p; ‘That still catches me by surprise!’ said Anansi’s dad. ‘You’d have thought I’d have got used to it by now!’
‘Wait a minute!’ said Anansi. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’ asked Red.
‘A sort of whistling, whooshing kind of noise . . . There it was again! Listen closely . . .’
‘Wait! I did hear it that time!’ cried Red. ‘It sounded a bit like an arrow flying past!’
‘Yes!’ agreed Anansi. ‘It sounded just like that! And wait, did you hear that big boom too? The one that sounded kind of like a cannon?’ He peered over the edge of the basket just as an arrow shot past one ear and a cannonball past the other. ‘Yeaaaarrghh!’ he yelled. ‘We’re being shot at!’
There are two main problems when you are being fired at while trapped in a small basket, hanging beneath a giant golden hot-air balloon. Firstly, you don’t have anywhere to hide; and secondly, you’re pretty easy to spot.
Soon the air was filled with arrows whistling up towards them.
‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ yelled Rufaro. ‘It’s only a matter of time before one of those arrows—’ He was interrupted by a loud hissing sound as an arrow tore through the golden balloon. ‘Hits us,’ he finished unnecessarily.
More and more arrows ripped into the balloon. For almost a minute they struggled on, but then the balloon began to sink, slowly at first, and then faster and faster until they were tumbling down towards the mountains beneath them.
‘Somebody DO something!’ shouted Anansi’s mum. ‘We’re going to crash!’
‘I can do some magic!’ shouted Quartz.
‘Brilliant!’ replied Rufaro. ‘Can you make the wind blow up underneath us to slow us down?’
‘Sorry,’ said Quartz. ‘I’m an earth troll. I could turn us all into stone?’
‘I don’t think that would help right now . . .’ said Rufaro. ‘But thank you anyway.’
‘Whatever we do, we’d better do it soon!’ shrieked Red. ‘We’re about to—’
When the tiny chamber stopped moving, the wall in front of Hansel and Gretel opened again and the twins found themselves looking out into a long, dimly lit room. It was completely empty, and there was no sound of anyone nearby. In the middle was a large table with some sort of model on it. Gretel looked over at her brother, who nodded. They both stepped out of the secret chamber, which immediately closed behind them and started rumbling back up to Fitch’s office.
The model showed the whole of the Fairytale Kingdom, including the troll lands. In the centre of the troll lands was an enormous model of a mountain. There were a series of rings marked out in string over the model, with one final ring around the mountain itself. Evenly spaced around this last ring were models of twelve machines, all connected by a confusion of pipes and wires.
Hansel glanced at Gretel quizzically.
She raised one eyebrow to say, ‘I have no idea either.’
A rumbling sound began behind them. The lift hidden in the secret cupboard was coming back!
As they looked around in panic, Gretel’s arm knocked the mountain and it moved slightly. Her eyes lit up as she lifted the edge of it: it was completely hollow – they could hide inside it. They had just squeezed in when the door to the lift opened.
‘Make sure you fire those guards!’ exclaimed Mayor Fitch as he walked briskly into the room. ‘Sleeping on the job indeed. I hope everything else is going according to plan?’
‘Er, yes, sir,’ replied another voice. ‘We’ve been burning down all the troll villages near the borders. Thousands of trolls are making their way towards the mountains – it must be where the rebels are hiding.’
‘And the machines?’ asked Fitch. ‘They’re ready?’
‘Absolutely, sir!’ replied the voice. We just need to pinpoint the exact location of the troll warlock’s secret base. We’ve sent spies out and they think that it could be either here . . .’
There was a puncturing sound as the end of a pin jabbed in through the mountain, spiking into Hansel’s bottom.
‘Mmph!’ Hansel spluttered.
‘Here . . .’ continued the voice, as another sharp point jabbed through the model, poking into Gretel’s shoulder.
‘Eep!’ she gulped.
‘Or . . .’ The voice paused. ‘Sorry, I’ve run out of pointy flags – anyway, we think it’s just here.’ Hansel felt a finger tap the model of the mountain just between his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.
‘So . . .’ said Fitch eagerly. ‘As soon as we know we have the troll leader, we can activate the machines?’
‘Indeed!’ replied the other voice. ‘They work perfectly! They strip the trolls of all their magical powers. They’ll be like giant teddy bears, completely powerless!’
‘Just imagine what we’ll be able to do with all that magic!’ exclaimed Fitch. ‘Nobody will be able to stop us!’
Gretel looked worriedly at Hansel.
He had a pained expression on his face. It could have just been because of the spike in his bottom, or it could have meant, ‘You’re wrong, Fitch! We’re going to stop you!’
The horrible sound of seven people (and one hen) screaming in terror as they plummeted towards a rocky mountain was suddenly replaced by the shocked silence of seven people (and one hen) landing with soft flumps on the suddenly pink-and-white ground.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Red as she pulled herself out of the thick, sweet, soft, sticky surface. ‘Is this mountain made out of . . . marshmallow?’
‘Not usually!’ came Quartz’s muffled reply. He’d landed face first and only his feet were poking out of the soft, sweet ground. Rufaro and Anansi’s dad heaved him out and he sat there for a moment, licking his lips. ‘My earth magic can turn things into stone, or stone into other things,’ he explained. ‘So I just thought, what’s the softest thing in the Fairytale Kingdom? And I was in a bit of a panic and came up with marshmallow.’
‘Suits me!’ exclaimed Jack, taking a huge bite out of the ground.
‘Yeah, great work, Quartz!’ said Red. ‘You saved us all! Now all we need to do is work out where the – GIANT TWO-HEADED SNOW LEOPARD!’
‘What?’ asked Anansi. ‘Why on earth would we want to find . . .’ He trailed off when he noticed that everybody was staring directly behind him. Slowly he turned around. ‘GIANT TWO-HEADED SNOW LEOPARD!’ he yelped.
‘Everyone stay very still!’ whispered Rufaro. ‘What we need is to make ourselves into a small—’
‘Icicles!’ shouted Quartz exuberantly.
‘Er . . .’ replied Rufaro. ‘I was going to say a small group, and then . . .’
But Quartz wasn’t listening. He ran towards the giant two-headed leopard and flung his arms around both of its giant necks.
‘Icicles!’ he cried again.
‘Aww, who’s a good boy?’
‘Sorry . . . Do you two know each other?’ asked Anansi’s mum.
‘Sure we do!’ said Quartz.
‘Icicles is my dad’s pet snow leopard. I’ve known him since he was tiny!’
The happy reunion was rather spoilt by the arrival of around thirty huge and heavily armed troll soldiers.
‘Stay where you are!’ bellowed their leader. ‘Nobody move! Nobody even think about moving! Nobody even think about thinking about moving! Got it? Now, why were you flying over here? This mountain is out of bounds to humans!’
‘Hold on a minute!’ protested Quartz. ‘They’re not like the others – they rescued me! I was locked up in Tale Town until they saved me and they were trying to help me find my family! Which, I’ve got to say, is more than can be said for you! We could have died when our balloon crashed!’
The trolls looked at each other uneasily, and had a low, murmured conversation.
‘All right!’ said the leader. He pointed over to the torn remains of the balloon. ‘Bring that back to base, and you lot –’ he turned to face Red and the others – ‘on your feet! There’s someone who’ll want to question you.’
; ‘Can I ask who that is?’ asked Rufaro politely.
‘Sure,’ replied the troll with a not-very friendly smile. ‘It’s our leader, Hurrilan. And he just loves humans!’
Wolfie, Ella and Rapunzel had been hanging around outside the Town Hall for hours now.
‘Well that’s just great!’ said Rapunzel. ‘Now we’ve lost Hansel and Gretel too! How long have they been in there? Do you think something’s gone wrong?’
Wolfie frowned. ‘I’m not sure, but I’m fairly sure I can smell them.’ He sniffed the air carefully. ‘Hmm, yes, in this direction . . .’ He started moving towards a rusty old drain cover. ‘Yes, I’m getting definite hints of candy-cane mixed with a LOT of sewage.’ He bent down close to the drain and added, ‘Seriously, that smells disgusting!’
The cover of the drain wobbled, and Wolfie took a hurried step back as it slid out of place.
‘You are not going to believe what Fitch is planning!’ exclaimed Hansel as he poked his filthy head up out of the drain.
‘Someone’s got to stop him!’ added Gretel, scrambling up behind him. ‘He’s gone completely crazy!’
‘Yeah!’ continued Hansel. ‘Your parents are the King and Queen – right, Rapunzel? Surely they can do something?’
‘But what’s going on?’ asked Ella. ‘What did you find out? And why are you coming out of a drain?’
‘We need to get to the palace and find Rapunzel’s parents now!’ said Gretel. ‘We’ll explain on the way!’
Red, Jack and the others were led along a maze of narrow pathways beneath huge mountain peaks that scraped up towards the moonlit sky. Flurries of snow swirled around them and the air was so cold that Red could see her breath billowing like smoke from a dragon’s snout.