by Temre Beltz
Birdie’s head lifted up. “‘We’? You mean, you do want to help?”
“Maybe,” Ralph said.
“I knew it!” Birdie said, with her eyes shining. “I knew it.”
“MWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!” the Blue Dragon roared from somewhere off in the Deepest, Darkest Bog.
“I’m going to act like that’s his can’t-wait-to-see-us sound, especially since Francesca’s letter makes it pretty clear we’ve got to get a move on,” Ralph said.
But Birdie shook her head. “I can’t come with you, Ralph. If I arrive too late, nothing we do here will matter. I have to leave now. And that means you have to go see the Blue Dragon on your own.”
“By myself? But I don’t even know what I’m supposed to ask for. I thought the plan was for the Blue Dragon to make your witch good enough to brew a laughing potion. What’s he supposed to do for me?”
Birdie tried to smile, but her expression was wan. “Turn you into a Triumphant, maybe?” Ralph lifted his eyebrow, and Birdie continued, “Honestly, I don’t know. But I do know we’re going to need something. Something probably only a Blue Dragon can do. And you grew up in a pet shop full of dark creatures. If anybody can convince the Blue Dragon to help us, it’s you.”
“I . . . well . . .” Ralph paused. He nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”
“You just have to promise that if it’s looking bad, if the Blue Dragon’s not willing to cooperate or if he’s just plain nasty, you’ll get out before you get hurt.”
“That sounds like an awful lot of ifs,” Ralph said.
“Yes, but did you ever imagine we’d be where we are right now? If we’ve made it this far, we have to find a way to believe we’ll make it one step farther.”
“I believe in you,” Ralph said.
“Because that’s what good friends do,” Birdie said. “And that’s who you are.”
With that, Birdie swirled the purple Council cloak around her shoulders and shouted out, “Foulweather’s Home for the Tragical!” while Ralph took off through the Deepest, Darkest Bog as fast as his feet could carry him.
Birdie should have, apparently, used a more specific term, such as “the children’s dormitory in Foulweather’s Home for the Tragical” or “Sir Ichabod’s kitchen in Foulweather’s Home for the Tragical,” because the Council cloak sent her tumbling straight into the dungeon of Foulweather’s Home for the Tragical. Birdie crashed against the brick wall of her familiar locked cell with an “oomph,” “umph,” and an “ugh!”
Birdie blinked her eyes. As murky as it was in the bog, it was infinitely darker in the dungeon. She rubbed her head where a red bump was busy swelling, and she stumbled to her feet. She shook out the long folds of the Council cloak, and she tried again.
She was careful to enunciate her words. “The children’s dormitory in Foulweather’s Home for the Tragical!”
There was no puff of purple smoke. There was no impressive boom. In fact, other than a meager bit of dust that rose into the air, not a single thing happened. Birdie hip-hopped a bit. She secured the Council cloak more tightly around her shoulders because what was wrong with it? Had she broken it? Was it angry at her for flipping it inside out at the Witches’ Ball? Or was it much worse than that—had Mistress Octavia alerted the Council about Birdie, and had the Council somehow suspended the cloak’s magic?
Birdie swallowed the knot in the back of her throat. She tried one final time. “The children’s dormitory in Foulweather’s Home for the Tragical, please!”
But the only answer she received was from the Drowning Bucket, groaning and jerking about on its metal chain outside the dungeon as if it were simply famished.
Birdie slid down to the floor. She had been in the dungeon enough times to know that no matter how loudly she screamed, whooped, or bellowed, no one would hear her. It could be days—maybe even a whole week—before Sir Ichabod happened to poke his head in and find her. By then it would be hopelessly too late.
Birdie laid her head in her hands.
She was tired.
And her heart was weary.
So weary that when the loose brick in the wall began to shift, she did not hear it. She did not hear it until it had wriggled free and fallen onto the floor of her cell with a dull thud.
Birdie didn’t dare to breathe. Birdie didn’t dare to hope. Birdie drew up against the hole in the wall and saw—
Not Cricket.
“Sir Ichabod?” Birdie said. “What are you doing in there? Has Mistress Octavia punished you again?”
But Sir Ichabod’s eyes were wild. He waved his hands through the air. His medallion thumped heavily against his chest. “Go! Go, you must go!” he nearly shouted.
“I know,” Birdie said, lifting up the folds of the Council cloak. “I never meant for it to take me into the dungeon, but every time I ask to go to the dormitory, it doesn’t work.”
“No, you must leave this place entirely! Leave it while you still can, before she finds you!”
Birdie frowned. “I’m afraid the Council cloak is broken. But even if I could, I wouldn’t leave. I’ve come back for Cricket. To take my place in the Drowning Bucket so she won’t have to be my substitute. Sir Ichabod, how is that you have ended up in the dungeon?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Mistress Octavia found you in her Room of Sinister Plotting.”
“But that doesn’t have anything at all to do with you.”
“Only two people are authorized to enter that room. She assumed it was I who let you in.”
“But it wasn’t you! It was me! I used blueberries to disguise myself as you, and the snakes simply chose to let me in!”
“Yes, but Mistress Octavia would never believe that. She has convinced herself you children are capable of nothing. And so . . .” Sir Ichabod paused. He lifted up his hand, and Birdie could see the ring of dungeon keys gleaming upon his wrist. “Here I am.”
“Sir Ichabod!” Birdie exclaimed. “You have the keys! You have the keys right there! Oh, I nearly forgot that Mistress Octavia never locks us in herself. She loathes this place! She would never set foot in this place. Oh, this wonderful, wonderful dungeon!”
The dungeon walls, for once, straightened up a bit, for no one ever thinks to praise a dark and dreary sort of place.
“Now,” Birdie said, jutting her hand through the hole in the wall and wriggling her fingers about, “please pass the keys so that I can unlock my cell and save Cricket.”
Sir Ichabod sighed. He stuck his hands into his pockets. He lifted his chin the smallest bit, and with a great deal of effort, he whispered, “No.”
Birdie’s heart sank. “No? But, Sir Ichabod, why? You can help me. You can help Cricket. I won’t ask you to do a single other thing, but please, please, just let me have the keys!”
“You said you have come to take Cricket’s place, but that isn’t what will happen. Mistress Octavia will not merely switch the two of you out like a Sunday hat. Don’t you see? You won’t be able to save Cricket. Instead, she will insist on drowning you both.”
“But, Sir Ichabod, I have made it through a kidnapping, poisonous snakes, a castle full of witches, and a swampy bog! It cannot be that after all this, you would be the one to stop me. Please, Sir Ichabod, you must at least let me try.”
“Tragicals don’t try—Tragicals die.”
“But remember, you yourself told me, I am more than just a Tragical. I’m a child—”
“I was wrong to plant such an idea in your head! Look what madness it’s led to!”
Birdie’s mind raced. She simply had to get to Cricket. Even if Sir Ichabod was right, even if Birdie couldn’t save her, Cricket at least needed to know that Birdie came back. Because they were friends.
Friends.
Yes! If Sir Ichabod didn’t understand, Birdie could show him. Out of all the nothingness in the dungeon, it did hold the one something that was perhaps the only thing any of them had ever needed: a book that was different.
Birdie jumped to her feet. She scurried ov
er to the corner where she’d hidden her secret storybook. She flipped over the loose stone, pulled it free, and pressed the book tight against her chest. Since falling into Birdie’s hands, the book had been through quite a transformation. Its spine was bent, and its binding sagged in remembrance of its missing pages, but inside, the words had never rung more true. Words that did not bear heavy on her, but laid themselves down before her—stepping-stones to a way out. She only hoped Sir Ichabod would see it, too.
“What are you doing?” Sir Ichabod asked from inside his cell. “What is that you’ve got there?”
Birdie took a deep breath and slid the book through the hole.
It fell into Sir Ichabod’s open hands, and he began to shake all over.
“Sir Ichabod, it’s not just you. You’re not the only one who’s told me I’m more than a Tragical. This book has changed everything. This book has changed me. Books, it turns out, are not all terrible.”
“But how did you find this?” Sir Ichabod whispered.
Birdie gulped. “I found it in your kitchen. I—I know you don’t read, so I—”
A sob escaped Sir Ichabod’s throat. He pressed his knuckles against his teeth. His eyes filled with tears. “You think I don’t . . . read?”
“I—I’ve never seen you read, sir.”
“That is because there is nothing to read!” he exclaimed.
Birdie gestured at the book. “You ought to give this one a try. It’s like nothing I ever imagined.”
Sir Ichabod lifted the front cover. His fingers hovered over the pages. He flipped through them and gasped. “What has happened to the ending?”
“It didn’t have an ending,” Birdie said.
“But it had pages. Where have the pages gone?” Sir Ichabod looked hard at Birdie. “Did you tear them out?”
“I—I had to.”
“But I should have been the one to finish it! I wrote this book, and I should have finished it! This book cost me everything, and now I cannot finish it!”
“You wrote this book?” Birdie whispered. “But only scribes write books in Wanderly. And you are a . . . Tragical, aren’t you?”
Sir Ichabod’s whole body was trembling. “I didn’t begin as a Tragical. I—I had promise. That’s what the Council said, anyways. They poured through my collection of scrap paper; every sliver I could find, since the time I was a wee lad, filled end to end with fantastic snippets of story. Stories that lived and breathed inside of me. And so it came to be. At fifteen years old, I was promoted to the position of apprentice scribe.”
“But, sir, I don’t understand. You are here, at Foulweather’s Home for the Tragical. How could you go from being as high up as an apprentice scribe to being doomed?”
“Simple: I didn’t want to write their words. I wanted to write my own. I was a writer! And writers write. But it wasn’t what they wanted, and what would I have without my words? If I gave my words away, what would be left? And so I refused, and after a lengthy Council detention, I was . . . sent here. They made an example out of me, and I’m quite certain no scribe has attempted such a thing since.” Sir Ichabod lifted his head ever so slightly in Birdie’s direction. His voice was thick. “Why did you have to go and tear all the pages out?”
“Because I thought the story wanted to come true. I . . . I wanted so desperately for the story to be true. True even for a Tragical. So I used the blank pages to write letters to a witch, and Cricket used them to draw pictures.”54
Sir Ichabod leaned forward. His eyes glistened. His voice was stretched thin as if it were held together by a single, frayed string. “And what did the two of you find out? Did you find the story was, after all, true? True even for a Tragical?”
The dungeon groaned. It shifted and it settled, and its dust glittered in the air. Like magic. Long-legged spiders skittered forth from the shadows, and furry dog-size rats ambled away from the walls. Everything drawing near. Everything coming to light. Everything waiting and hoping and wondering.
“YES,” Birdie breathed.
A small cry escaped Sir Ichabod’s lips. And tears rolled down his dirt-stained cheeks.
“After all these years, I suppose it was never the ending that was missing. It turns out a story is not yet a story until it has found a reader. And you, Birdie, are a very, very good one.”
“I only hope,” Birdie said with a tremble in her voice, “that you won’t change the story now.”
“Change it? But how could I do that? You said yourself there are no more pages to write upon—”
“I’m talking about the story that’s become a part of me. The one that says I am not just a Tragical, but a friend.”
“And so it is. And so you’ve said. I’m afraid I don’t understand what you are asking of me.”
Birdie’s voice was quiet. And clear. “I’m asking you to let me out of this dungeon cell. I am asking you to let me be the friend I know I’ve become. Please don’t let me be just a Tragical anymore.”
“But you’re asking me to let you die!”
“Please, Sir Ichabod. I believed in your storybook. Now you must believe in what it has done for me. You couldn’t have written those words if you didn’t think they were true, could you?”
“Wanting something to be true and believing it is true are two very different things.”
“Believe, Sir Ichabod. Please.”
Sir Ichabod licked his lips. “You are far, far braver than I,” he whispered.
“Bravery looks different on all of us,” Birdie said. “And don’t forget: Mistress Octavia may have ordered you to lock yourself in, but I bet she never said anything about how long you are required to stay.”
Sir Ichabod nodded. He heaved a great and heavy sigh.
And then he slipped the keys through the hole in the wall and into Birdie’s wide-open hand.
Free.
Twenty
When Everything Falls Apart at the Bristles
Agnes Prunella Crunch had crushed beetle wings in her hair.
Her taffeta skirt had a big fat rip in it; she’d lost one of the hooks off her witchy boots, so the tongue of her shoe flopped about and made a slurping sound every time she stomped; three of her sharp, pointy nails were filed down to nubs (an injury incurred when they scraped against Rudey’s gnarly tooth—bleh!); and her broomstick hadn’t stopped trembling since she’d ditched Castle Matilda.
“Aiiiiiiiii!” Agnes screeched from atop her broomstick as the morning sun peeked over the horizon of Wanderly.
Pooky dove back beneath Agnes’s pinafore, winding her way around Agnes’s stomach so that Agnes looked to have some sort of monstrous growth or had eaten a meal inconveniently coming back to life.
“Oh, stop it,” Agnes said. “I’ve been through enough trouble, and I don’t need you adding to it. I’m a witch—a witch I tell you! I’m noisy and I’m stinky and I’m crude and I’m . . . evil through and through.”
But Agnes drew up a bit slower on her broomstick. She looked over her shoulder, back in the direction of Castle Matilda.
Rudey Longtooth hadn’t said any of those things.
Tabitha Toad, Peggy Goober, and Hildegarde Sniffer hadn’t either.
When Birdie and Ralph disappeared, they told Agnes she was a dimwit. They said she was a joke. They said she was a miserable excuse for a witch.
And they were right about one thing.
Agnes was miserable.
She felt lower than the crumbs she loved to smash into the ground so the overeager squirrels crowding the Dead Tree Forest wouldn’t get their hopes up.
But she wasn’t miserable about ruining the Annual Witches’ Ball. She wasn’t miserable about being chased down the halls of Castle Matilda with a mob of angry, shrieking, and (worst of all) starving witches breathing down her neck so that she was forced to slink around in the rafters until she could locate her broomstick.
Agnes was miserable for a much, much more puzzling reason.
Agnes was miserable because Birdie left her behind.<
br />
She supposed she should have been glad about it all—glad to be rid of messy things like children and do-gooding and friendship—but that didn’t help the ache of her small, stony heart.
The Winds of Wanderly swept alongside Agnes on her broomstick. They dipped near and breathed softly into her ear.
Because I like you.
“Stop it!” Agnes said.
But the Winds of Wanderly weren’t lying. Birdie had said it. Once upon a time.
Granted, since receiving that letter, Agnes had suggested a kidnapping, shown up with an entire gang of nasty witches, snatched Ralph instead, and held him suspended over a pot of boiling water as Castle Matilda’s main course, but she had an explanation for all that! If Birdie would have given her even a few moments, she could have set the record straight.
And that was why, after making a break for it in the wee hours of the morning, Agnes had commanded her broomstick to head for the Deepest, Darkest Bog. She was going to spill every last detail of being hijacked by Rudey and her gang of nasty witches to the Bird-Girl, and if she still didn’t want a thing to do with Agnes, fine. But at least Birdie would know the truth. And maybe then Agnes could get on with her life, and the Winds of Wanderly would stop stooping down to whisper bits of nonsense in her ear.
Agnes lowered her broomstick into the bog and sunk her witchy boots into the stinking heaps of mud. Pooky poked her head out from the cuff of Agnes’s bell sleeve, and cast her one eyeball on Agnes.
“Mwargh,” Pooky muttered.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. But what did you expect from a place called the Deepest, Darkest Bog?”
Slurp-slurp-slurp. Agnes lifted her boot with the flapping tongue up and out of the mud. She stooped down to grab a squishy handful in case Pooky got unruly and required a mud hat, but froze midway. From somewhere beyond the thick trunks of the mopey trees, a wave of green, smelly fog rolled near.
It caused Agnes’s wart hairs to prickle.
Agnes’s wart hairs always prickled when something was amiss. It was their best feature, really, and the only reason why she didn’t pluck ’em out because, despite what you may think, even witches have a few aesthetic standards.