“Unless?” prompted Wish, ever-hopeful.
“Unless… you are the people we have been waiting for, which is terribly unlikely, considering the amount of people there are in the wildwoods, and how surprising it would be if they were to accidentally make their way here,” said Eleanor Rose. “Which is the reason we have been waiting such a very, very long time. So, who are you?”
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
They had to hope the Spelling Book had not tricked them. They had to hope that their names would be good enough.
“Tell the truth,” Eleanor Rose advised them.
“I am Xar, son of Encanzo, boy of destiny,” said Xar. “And this is Wish, daughter of Sychorax… and this is Bodkin, Assistant Bodyguard.”
There was a long, long silence, and Eleanor Rose was still enough for Squeezjoos to see her clearly for one, tantalizing second, and for Squeezjoos to say with a sigh, “Oh! How pretty you are!”
“Beauty is not everything,” said Eleanor Rose, on the move again, “but the universe has found that, sometimes, it helps. And impossibility isn’t everything either, but it is surprising, particularly considering the nature of impossibility, how often the universe is depending on one…
unlikely…
chance…”
Bodkin and Xar and Wish had been holding their breaths, but now they let them out again with relief.
“Of all the numberless names of people in these wildwoods, you ARE the right ones,” said Eleanor Rose.
“Thank goodness for that,” breathed Bodkin.
“At last!” said the giant. “Are they worthy?”
Eleanor Rose hovered in front of all of them, and touched them one by one—Xar, Bodkin, Wish, and finally Caliburn—testing them for worthiness. Each of them cried out at the moment of contact, as if they had been hit by a sharp electric shock.
Eleanor Rose circled the room twice before she gave her pronouncement.
“There is room for improvement,” said Eleanor Rose. “Particularly in the one who calls himself the boy of destiny… but what can you expect from the humans? However, when it comes to the worthiness of the bird, why the bird…”
Caliburn ruffled his feathers, preparing to make modest protestations. This was his moment.
“The talking bird is the least worthy of all,” said Eleanor Rose.
“Oh!” cried Caliburn, very offended. “I think you must have mistook me! I am Caliburn, the raven-who-has-lived-many-lifetimes, and I have been put in charge of Xar, precisely because of my wisdom and my worthiness!”
“Yes,” said Eleanor Rose, with an audible, dismissive sniff that still managed to sound affectionate, “and perhaps you might like to think, why, after all those lifetimes, you have ended up as a bird? I know perfectly well who you are, raven, and age is no proof of worthiness, or indeed of wisdom. We’ll just have to make do, Proponderus, and hope for the best, as is often the case with the humans. We can’t wait any longer. I am finding it harder and harder to slow down the dying process, and those are, after all, the right names.”
The giant snorted with relief.
“So,” said Eleanor Rose, “you have come here to steal something? Don’t bother lying, just tell me what it is.”
“We have come to take the Giant’s Last Breath,” said Xar defiantly. “We need it as part of our spell to get rid of the Witches.”
“Ahhhh…” breathed the giant with desperate satisfaction in a great wind above them. “They are the right ones.”
“That is precious, very precious,” said Eleanor Rose solemnly. “It is not something the likes of you could steal from a giant of the ancient lines, but luckily for you he will give it to you willingly. I presume you have come prepared?”
“We have,” said Xar promptly. “The Once-sprite here is a great spell-raider. He will catch the breath, and Tiffinstorm will shrink it, and between them they will put the breath in this collecting bottle here…”
Eleanor Rose laughed again. “Oh, you humans! You’re so funny! Your plans are so inadequate and yet you keep making them! You hadn’t a hope of doing that on your own, but I will help you.
“You shall have your wish,” said Eleanor Rose, “and maybe, as is the way of things… a little more than you wished for, as well. Settle down, everyone, make yourselves comfortable.”
Eleanor Rose did not bring out a wand or a staff or make any sort of movement that could be interpreted as spelling, but the fork lifted itself off Xar and Bodkin, and the cup tipped over gently, depositing Wish on the table.
“The giant is going to tell you a story, and I am going to help…”
Way above them, the not-quite-dead giant’s words came booming out with such loudness, they had to put their hands over their ears.
“LET ME TELL YOU A STORY!” said the giant.
“A story???” said Xar, between clenched teeth, for the words really were very, very loud.
“You don’t like stories?” said Eleanor Rose in surprise.
“I love stories!” said Xar. “But what is the giant doing, telling us a story? This is supposed to be his last breath! Surely you can’t tell a whole story with one last breath? And we’re in a bit of a hurry here… It’s complicated, but the Droods and the Wizards and the Warriors and the Witchsmeller and the Witches themselves are all chasing after us, and they could be here any moment… And my companion, Wish here, has lost her Enchanted Spoon, and we have to find him…”
“Have you seen him?” said Wish anxiously. “My fork and key are convinced he’s in here somewhere. He’s about so high, made of iron, and—”
“What did I say?” interrupted Eleanor Rose. “Plenty of room for improvement. You need to learn patience, boy and girl. There is always time for a story. The giant will give you his last breath and in return you will listen to his story, patiently, quietly, and humbly, for those are all things you need to learn. That is your payment, if you will.”
So in the heart of Castle Death, Wish and Caliburn and Xar and Bodkin and the snowcats and the sprites and Crusher the giant sat down cross-legged or put their shaggy heads on their paws or folded their wings or lay on their backs with their eight legs in the air depending on what or who they were. All of them listened quietly, obediently, and even Xar tried to be as patient and respectful as he could as they listened to the story.
Now, the last words of anyone who is dying have a magical power.
But the last words of a giant of such extraordinary immenseness… why, those have more power than most.
In real life this story was being told by a great giant the size of a small hillside, in the last stages of dying, crumbling at the edges and a trifle fly-infested, in a voice that was sometimes louder than the loudest thunder and at other times breaking and wheezing and barely there, and when his voice broke at the edges, like the crumbling of his fingers, and became so faint that you could hardly hear it, the story was taken up by the Frost-sprite, who was the absolute opposite, tiny and ever-moving, with a voice like the never-heard music of the universe and turning stars and the tiny bell-like chime of time…
But if I tell it like that it will make it hard to concentrate on the story, and the story is important. So I will speak it in my own voice, the voice of the unknown narrator.
This was the story the giant told.
It was “The Story of the Giant’s Last Breath.”
Once upon a time, there was a ferocious young Warrior princess, as wild as any werewolf. She was afraid of nothing, this Warrior princess, and her hunting skills were the talk of the Empire. All alone, she fought the Frost Giants of the frozen north, all alone she captured the dreadful Grim Annis of the west, all alone she scared off the Rogrebreaths that were raiding the Warrior villages in the south.
The Warrior princess did not believe in love.
“Love is weakness,” said the princess.
“I’m really, really hoping this isn’t going to be a LOVE story!” said Xar in disgust, before remembering he was supposed to be quiet and r
espectful and hurriedly shutting his mouth again.
One day, the princess was riding alone and free through the wildwoods, in the depths of midwinter, when she realized that she was being chased by a couple of snowcats. She shot arrows at the snowcats, and two of them hit their targets, but still the snowcats pursued her. Eventually she realized they wanted her to follow them, and she was so impressed by their bravery, that this she did.
The snowcats led her to a clearing where there was a circle of gigantic wolves waiting patiently at the bottom of a tree. There was a young man up in the tree, and the wolves were waiting for him to grow so tired he would fall out, like a large ripe apple. Two days he had been up there, and he was dropping with hunger and thirst and fear.
At the bottom of the tree lay the young man’s Wizard staffs, for he had climbed the tree to rescue one of his sprites.
The young man (whose name was Algorquprqin, but that sounds like someone choking on a walnut, so everyone called him Tor) was singing a very stupid song in the princess’s opinion, which went something like this:
“I am young, I am poor, I can offer you nothing,
All that I have is this bright pair of wings,
This air that I eat, these winds that I sleep on,
This star path I dance in, where the moon sings…”
Now, the princess knew that she should have ridden on at that point. This young man was clearly a Wizard, and Wizards were the Warriors’ deadly enemies.
And he was also clearly a very silly young man.
But there was something so human about the silliness of this song that it made her pause.
The princess loaded her bow and shot an arrow toward the Wizard, not to hit him, exactly, but just to see if he would flinch.
He didn’t… even though it passed so bitingly close that it grazed his left arm. The princess was impressed, for she admired bravery, even in Wizards.
The wolves got to their feet and snarled warningly at her, padding restlessly around the tree. The princess loaded her bow again, pointed it at the wolves, and called out sneeringly: “What are you doing, talking to trees, you stupid Wizard?”
“I’m not talking to trees,” said the Wizard. “I’m talking to YOU.”
He carried on with the song:
“See the swifts soar, they live well on nothing,
You are young, you are strong, if you’ll give me your hand,
We’ll leave earth entirely and never go back there,
We’ll sleep on the breezes and never touch land…
“I promise you gales and a merry adventure,
We’ll fly on forever and never will part…
I am young, I am poor, I can offer you nothing,
Nothing but love and the beat of my heart.”
And then he just said, “Help me…”
“What will you give me if I rescue you, Wizard?” called the princess.
There was silence from the treetops, and then the Wizard replied, “What do you want most in the world?”
The princess replied, swift as one of her own arrows: “I want to be the Warrior queen of this whole forest.”
The princess, you see, was always MEANT to be the queen of the whole forest, but her throne had been stolen when she was a baby by one of her evil cousins, so she was wishing for something she had wanted her very whole life.
The Wizard called Tor looked down at her.
“All right, I can’t make you a Warrior queen,” admitted Tor, “but I CAN give you a horse. A queen needs a good horse.”
“I already HAVE a horse, stupid!” said the princess, laughing. “I’m riding it!”
“Back at home in my Wizard camp, I have a horse far better than that horse you are riding, a horse as black as night and as swift as spell-raiders… I will give it to you if you rescue me,” said Tor. “It isn’t Magic,” he added hastily. “It’s just an ordinary horse. You’ll like it…”
So the princess, who was really just looking for an excuse to save this silly young man, shot her arrows at the wolves, and the wolves began to chase her.
They hunted her through the forest, the princess shooting back at them over her shoulder. And Tor climbed down from the tree, picked up his Wizard staffs, and followed after her on his injured snowcat. He caught up with her at just the moment when the wolf pack took down her horse.
The princess drew her sword and he used his spelling staffs, and together they fought the wolves, but there were so very many of them that they had to climb aboard the snowcat to run away, and leave the wolves with the horse.
“You’ve made me lose my horse!” protested the princess as they rode together through the forest on the back of the snowcat.
“It was the horse, or us…” said Tor, “that’s why I offered you one of my own horses if you rescued me.”
And that was the moment that the princess realized that Wizards were tricky.
The princess didn’t mind that.
She was tricky herself.
The Wizard, now that she could see his face up close in the moonlight, was a very silly, tricky young man, but undeniably a little bit handsome… and he hadn’t flinched when she shot him…
And that was how the princess lost her heart in the forest.
“It IS about love!” said Xar in disgust.
“Shhh!” hissed everyone else, because they wanted to hear the end of the story.
The Warrior princess agreed to meet the Wizard in the same clearing a week later so he could bring her the horse.
“This will be the last time I meet him,” said the princess to herself.
Tor gave her a horse called Thunderbird, which certainly wasn’t swifter than spell-raiders or darker than midnight. It was a perfectly normal horse… except in one respect.
Every second Thursday, if she happened to be riding it, it would carry her off, and however hard she pulled on the reins it would take her through the forest, back to the clearing where she first met Tor.
Tor would be waiting for her, and they would spend the afternoon being silly together.
The young Warrior princess swore that she would marry Tor. She promised on her heart that they would run away together and find themselves a world where it did not matter where they came from, where Wizards and Warriors could love and live in peace.
And then… And then… And then…
TRAGEDY.
The princess’s wicked cousin died, and that meant that SHE was now queen of the Warriors.
She had all that she had ever been wanting, for her very whole life…
And now that she had it, she found that she did not want it after all.
Oh, you must be careful what you wish for, guys…
IT MAY COME TRUE.
For here is the thing about becoming a queen. It brought with it responsibilities, duties. The new queen’s people needed her, for if she were NOT the queen, it would be one or other of the wicked cousins, with their taxes, and their wars-of-vengeance, and their endless thirst for such delicacies as blood-of-werecats as an aperitif, which may have been delicious, but was costly in human lives.
So the young princess felt she HAD to be the queen, and a queen of Warriors cannot marry a Wizard.
But how should she get rid of her love?
A true love’s kiss is the strongest thing in the world. It cannot be gotten rid of by sneezing.
So the young princess did a terrible thing.
She had heard of an extremely powerful Wizard called Pentaglion, who was living all alone, and was doing experiments into looking into the future… dabbling in that dangerous practice. She traveled to see him. They looked into the future together, and what they saw there was that if she were to marry the young boy called Tor, the Witches would return to the forest…
SO THE PRINCESS HAD TO GET RID OF HER LOVE FOREVER.
And there was only one way.
PENTAGLION GAVE HER THE SPELL OF LOVE DENIED, WHICH IS A VERY, VERY DANGEROUS SPELL INDEED.
The sprites all gasped at the
sound of the Spell of Love Denied. Squeezjoos curled himself up so tightly in Wish’s hair that she let out a small squeal. Only Squeezjoos’s eyes were peeping out, wide with alarm.
The Warrior princess drank the spell and the love died in her heart.
She wrote a letter to the Wizard boy called Tor, written in poison ink and bitterage, saying she did not love him, and never had.
Meanwhile, Tor waited many long weeks in the appointed waiting place and the Warrior princess never came. He got the letter. He read it, refused to believe it. Two years he waited. A hut grew around him, and the sprites in the forest felt so sorry for him, they brought him food and water. They called him “the Wizard-who-waits.”
Tor knew in his heart of hearts that the princess had betrayed him, and eventually he came to believe the letter. He got word that the Warrior princess had married someone else and was now calling herself the queen of the Warriors. The Wizard went so mad with unhappiness, he went to fight in the hinterlands and became a Shadow Man…
“Oh, how cool…” breathed Xar, for the Shadow Men were legendary.
“And now we reach MY part of the story…” said the giant. “You see, the castle you are standing in was once the castle of Pentaglion…”
Xar and Wish and Bodkin held their breaths. They had gotten so caught up in the story they had forgotten that it might be true. They looked at the smashed remains of the castle all around them. What had happened here?
“And the giant you are listening to is Pentaglion’s giant, and this is where I come into the story.” The giant’s voice was drenched in bitterness at this point. “Unfortunately one of the essential ingredients of the Spell of Love Denied was the tears of a Drood, and Droods don’t like having their tears taken. The Droods set about tracking the man who had taken their tears, and when they found him, they killed not only the extremely powerful Wizard Pentaglion, but they tried to kill his giant and took his little baby werewolf into captivity…
“And that giant,” finished the giant, “was ME. So many years, I have been angry, so angry at the injustice of it, that I have not been able to die.
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