“Don’t think I’m finished with you yet.”
She said the words simply, almost in a monotone. The weight of her threat was enough to make most people shrink. But not me.
I opened the door and stepped out, turning around to face her before closing it. “Funny. I was about to tell you the same thing.”
s I entered the lobby I was greeted by the disapproving gaze of the Fairy Godmother known as Coco La Rue.
Excellent. One more person who hates my guts.
The receptionist (whom I’d met when my friends and I had broken in here the first time) was sitting at her donutshaped desk tapping on her holographic keyboard. I ignored the stink eye she gave me and kept moving. Daniel was waiting with Debbie next to the building directory. They rushed over the second they saw me.
“Knight, what happened?” Daniel asked.
“What did she say?” Debbie pressed.
“I’ll explain later.” I waved them off. “Now that we’re clear of Lenore and free to get out of here, there’s not a moment to waste. Daniel and I need to find the others.”
“Others?” Debbie asked.
“Our friends,” I clarified. “We got separated on Adelaide.”
“You mean you ditched us on Adelaide,” Daniel corrected.
I felt a sting of bitterness within me, but swallowed down my guilt and nodded, accepting the truth.
“Yeah. I did and I’m sorry. But at least doing so led to only you and me being captured. Last time you saw SJ, Blue, and Jason, they’d gone to collect the Pegasi we left in the Adelaide Castle stables. They are out there somewhere right now.” I turned to Debbie hopefully. “I don’t suppose you could zap us to them?”
“I could if you knew where they were.”
Daniel scoffed. “What good does that do us? You’re a Fairy Godmother. Don’t you have some sort of crystal ball or something we can use to figure that out?”
Now it was Debbie’s turn to scoff. “Danny, we’re Godmothers—not psychics, fortunetellers, or soothsayers.”
“It’s Daniel.” He scowled. “So how do you suggest we find them then?”
“Maybe they’ll find us,” I interjected. “I know those guys, and there’s no way after everything we’ve been through they would just call it quits and head back to school when they couldn’t find us on the beach. My guess? They’ve probably continued on to our next destination, hoping to find us there.”
Daniel raised his eyebrows. “So you think they’re headed to the Cave of Mysteries?”
“That’s what we decided at Ashlyn’s, isn’t it?”
Back on Earth, when we’d been staying with the Lost Princess, my friends and I hadn’t spent a lot of time together. They were angry with me for how I’d been acting, and I was too stubborn and afraid to admit that they had every right to be. The only times when we’d really talked were when we needed to discuss aspects of our mission and the part of our journey that came next.
Emma’s instructions said that the third item we had to get to break the In and Our Spell was “A Mysterious Flower Beneath the Valley of Strife.” Between Blue’s unparalleled expertise (and arguable obsession) with fairytale history and the knowledge Daniel and Jason brought to the table from their classes at Lord Channing’s, we figured the clue had been alluding to the Cave of Mysteries.
The Cave of Mysteries was one of those delightfully unexplainable enchanted hootenannies of fairytale lore. While it contained a myriad of magical, super powerful objects, it was most famously known as the place where Aladdin had found his genie lamp. This cave was located somewhere beneath an enormous desert known as the Valley of Strife. It had to be the location of the object we were after.
“Yeah, that’s what we decided,” Daniel said. “But do you really think they’ll be able to get across the Valley of Strife? We hadn’t finalized our plan yet, and it’s in Alderon.”
I sighed, thinking on the main obstacle that stood in our way to finding the Cave of Mysteries. The desert it was buried under was indeed in Alderon, which meant that an untold number of antagonists, monsters, and dangerous circumstances stood between us.
“How can you be so sure they’ll make it?” Daniel asked.
“One, Arian was after me,” I said, ticking off the reasons on my fingers. “Once he caught us in the lamp he would’ve been on his way back to Nadia. So that takes care of that threat. Two, the In and Out Spell surrounding Alderon isn’t an issue because it prevents people from getting out of Alderon, not in. That’s why Aladdin had to use one of his genie wishes to escape the cave and kingdom in the first place. And three, like I said, I know those guys. So believe me they’ll make it. I know it in the same way that I’m sure they know we’ll find a way there too, and that we’ll all find a way back to each other.”
“That’s a lot of faith for a girl who until recently was refusing to trust anyone,” Daniel commented—not condescendingly.
“That was never about not having faith in them,” I said with an honesty that slid out of me so easily it was surprising. “It was about not having faith in myself. But that’s over now. And I think that I—that we—can do this. Don’t you?”
Daniel’s mouth curved into a small smile—reserved but impressed. “I guess we’re headed to the Cave of Mysteries then. No going back and all in.”
“No going back and all in,” I agreed. I turned to Debbie. “Deb, the Cave of Mysteries is a specific location. How close can you get us?”
“I can zap you to an area of the Valley of Strife near where the Cave of Mysteries is supposed to be located, but you’ll have to get in on your own. The Cave is tricky to enter. If it wasn’t then anyone could get in and take advantage of its magic knickknacks.” “I know,” I said, thinking back to warnings Blue had mentioned. Then I grinned and gave Debbie a hug. “Thanks for everything, Deb. It was great to see you.”
“You too, Crisa,” she said, hugging me back. “Good Godkids are hard to come by and you always keep it fresh. So try not to get killed, okay? I’d hate to be reassigned.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Static suddenly filled the area, coming from the intercom. “Attention staff . . .”
Oh, what is it now?
“All Godmothers are to report to their emergency stations immediately. We have a code ninety-seven in progress. Closing in on the red zone.”
Another Fairy Godmother—short and stout with glasses and gaucho pants burst out of the side door and came rushing into the reception area. “Debbie! There you are! I saw you on the security cameras. Come on, we need all hands on deck.”
“Crisa, Danny, this is my friend Sonya July. She works in Security and Surveillance, and she’s my emergency buddy.” Debbie turned to Sonya. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a dragon inbound for Headquarters,” Sonya replied. “He just appeared on radar and we have about five minutes to teleport the entire compound before he collides with us.”
Sonya gestured to Coco, who responded by pressing a few buttons on her holographic keyboard. A screen made of light appeared in the center of the room, projecting a real time image of what was going on outside.
Piercing the sky at top speed was a silvery dragon. He beat his wings mightily, cutting through the clouds. Despite his speed and distance, I could see the golden, glowing eyes set into his skull. They were bright and fiery like miniature suns.
Daniel and I looked at each other. It couldn’t be the same dragon we’d come across twice before, could it? That creature had chased us like a hound dog out of Century City and then appeared again when we were exiting the Forbidden Forest. But the odds of it finding us a third time . . .
“All right, you two. I’m needed elsewhere so we’ve gotta do this fast,” Debbie said. She whirled back to us and transformed her wand from its hairpin state. With a wave it began releasing a flurry of red sparks. “A couple of one-way tickets to the Cave of Mysteries coming up. BTW, I should probably mention that I can totally get you into Alderon, but the kingdom’s In
and Out Spell might throw me off with the specific location. Those magic force fields can really do a number on your aim.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Wait. What?”
ne bright, scarlet flash later and Daniel and I were surrounded by oppressive sunlight.
We were standing in the sand. I couldn’t see a single other living thing in the area. Everywhere we looked sand dunes rolled into the endless horizon, creating a blurry line that blended the rich cream color of the ground with the robin’s-egg color of the sky.
A moderate wind caused my skirt to rustle and my hair to blow around my face. I held up a hand to shield my eyes from the sun.
So this is Alderon.
First impressions: Dry, and the air tastes like . . .
I swallowed.
Salt crackers.
“I think she missed,” Daniel commented. “Your Godmother, I mean. Jason and I took a Magical Geography class this semester. This looks like what I was expecting for the Valley of Strife, but if we were near the Cave of Mysteries the sand would be a reddish color, getting more crimson the closer we got to it.”
I nodded. “While we were at Ashlyn’s House Blue sketched us a map of Alderon based on her fairytale history research in between watching those Die Hard movies she was obsessed with. I remember the Cave was by the Weser—the big river that runs through half the kingdom.”
“I’m beginning to see why your Godmother is still in training then. There’s not a river in sight. We’re nowhere near where we’re supposed to be.”
“Give her a break. She said the magic of In and Out Spells can mess with aim.”
I trudged up the closest dune. Daniel followed. When we reached the top I was taken aback by how big the desert was. Barren as a classroom on a Saturday, I could understand why it’d been named the Valley of Strife.
After squinting past the glare I spotted a sliver of hope. Several miles in the distance I could see the speck of a town. From here it looked like a beauty mark on the desert—a dark bulge sticking out of the otherwise smooth, beige terrain.
“Someone there might be able to point us in the direction of the river,” I said.
“Think it through, Knight,” Daniel responded. “We don’t exactly look like villains or desert rats, no thanks to your Godmother’s little makeover. The antagonists who live here are not this clean cut or fitted with fancy, magical clothes. They’re going to know we don’t belong. And while they don’t have gilded schools like we do, they’re not stupid. I’m sure even the ones born here have read fairytale books. So eventually someone will figure out we’re main characters and I don’t want to know what a bunch of antagonists will do to a pair of lone protagonists that were dumb enough to cross onto their turf.”
“Well what would you suggest then?” I replied. “It’s got to be late afternoon by now, which means the sun will be going down soon. We need to get out of this desert and I don’t exactly have a flying carpet on me.”
“I say we aim for the area past the town,” Daniel said, pointing.
I hadn’t noticed it before, but past the camouflage of distance I began to make out the outline of mountains. “Oh.”
“Agreed then?”
“Agreed,” I said. Then I couldn’t help but smirk a bit as we descended the dune.
“What’s that look for?” Daniel asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just . . . I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
By the time we made it to the mountains the sun was choking the horizon.
Night was coming quickly and the temperature had started to drop. Daniel and I were running out of time to find cover. The blue sky was now streaked with gold, red, and gray. The wind had also picked up. Between that and the clouds rolling in, I began to wonder if a storm was imminent.
The two of us would have made better time if we had gone through the town. But Daniel was right; we looked like protagonists and we couldn’t risk being spotted.
It was the fault of protagonists that antagonists were trapped in Alderon. Sometimes that was because a protagonist defeated an antagonist personally—like that evil witch who’d cursed Sleeping Beauty and then got defeated by the princess’s prince charming, or SJ’s wicked step-grandmother who’d been stopped by Snow White’s dwarves and her prince charming.
On other occasions, antagonists were locked in Alderon before their evil plans got that far. Fairy Godmothers, the guards of individual kingdoms, and other forms of realm security were always keeping an eye out for potential threats. And whenever they found one—whether it was a witch, magic hunter, monster, or just your run-of-the-mill person planning to murder someone or blow something up—they were arrested and tossed in here. Then it was game over. There wasn’t any known way out of Alderon, so the incarcerated would be trapped in this desolate place forever. Which meant that any children they might produce would be trapped in here too.
If I was being honest, that last part had always bothered me. If someone was wicked and got punished for it, that was their problem. They’d made a choice and had to deal with the consequences. But it wasn’t fair to any future kids they might have.
I inadvertently shuddered at the notion.
While the concept of a mommy and daddy villain making a little villain may have been an odd thing to think about, it was unavoidable. It’s not like the people sent here were going to live in solitary all their lives. They reproduced. It was human nature. Which meant that this kingdom was continuously filled with more and more people who didn’t necessarily deserve to be here. Those children and grandchildren of antagonists had never been charged with any crimes. They were just forced to live in Alderon because of who their ancestors were.
Our realm’s leaders always told us this was a necessary precaution. They insisted that antagonists had evil in their blood and that their offspring would inherit the trait. So keeping them in Alderon was a preemptive way of protecting our realm from the harm they would inevitably cause.
But our realm’s leaders had also always told us that princesses were supposed to be weak, common characters couldn’t be special, and only male protagonists had what it took to be heroes. Believing in my heart that they were wrong about all these assertions, I wondered if maybe they were also wrong about the people of Alderon. At least some of them.
I was not my mother. While I had inherited her last name and legacy, I forged my own path and was undoubtedly my own person. So why couldn’t the same be said for the children of antagonists? If my glass slipper didn’t fit, who said theirs had to?
The thought weighed on me. It was easy not to think about the antagonists when they were trapped in a contained place on the other side of the realm. But being in their kingdom—walking on their sand—made the topic about as glaring as the desert sun.
I felt vexed by the quandary. While I empathized with the whole “people judging you because of your parents” thing, I had no proof that our realm’s leaders were wrong about the antagonists. After all, dozens of them had tried to kill me since I left school to find the Author. Arian had even owned up to hunting main characters long before I came along. Plus, he had those files in the Capitol Building that marked more protagonists as possible targets.
Honestly, every experience I’d had with antagonists from Alderon affirmed what I was supposed to believe about their kind. They were vicious; they were cruel; and they threatened our realm and its people.
Like Lenore, I had no idea how they were escaping Alderon since the kingdom’s In and Out Spell had no holes. My friends and I would only be able to escape if we successfully collected all the items on Emma’s list and used them to break through the In and Out Spell around the Indexlands, which rimmed Alderon’s southeastern border.
Daniel and I weren’t being dramatic when we said “no going back and all in.”
But however the antagonists were getting out, every one of them had only added to the increasing odds of our demise. Given that, maybe it was wishful thinking to believe that they had the potentia
l to be different. I had a soft spot for people who were judged because of who their parents were, but I had also been persecuted by antagonists enough times to be unable think of them as anything but monsters.
Eventually Daniel and I arrived at the foot of the mountain range. It was a wonder that it had been so concealed by the shadows of the desert earlier. Up close it was massive. The summit was steep and far off. It would take hours of hiking to reach the halfway point. Dense woods, predominantly devoid of greenery, dotted the jagged slopes. The bark of the trees looked dangerously dry and crisp—just one match away from incinerating like a piece of decoupage paper. There was some richer foliage higher up though, causing me to believe that, despite the forsaken nature of the desert, it did rain every once in a while.
A sound like a coyote’s howl pierced the still twilight. At least I hoped it was a coyote. Alderon wasn’t just a place where the realm’s leaders stuck antagonists; they shoved monsters in here too. And in a world where magic was prevalent and heroes were a staple, the assortment of vicious enchanted creatures in Alderon was bountiful. Ogres, dragons, six-foot-tall llamas with fangs and night vision—you name it, some hero had fought it in one of Book’s forests.
You do remember how many colorful kinds of creatures tried to kill us in the Forbidden Forest, right?
I found myself looking over my shoulder at the town behind us. It was about a mile away. Although I knew we’d be at risk there, instinct still told me that journeying into unfamiliar, wild-creature infested mountains after dusk was a bad idea.
The sky grew redder. The air grew colder.
“Come on,” Daniel said. “We should find some place to make camp for the night.”
The two of us continued up the mountain. After a while we spotted a cave above us. My hands gripped the brim of the sharp stone as I pulled myself onto the wide rocky ledge that surrounded it like a loading platform.
The ceiling of the cave curled like a wave about to crash. Trees partially concealed the entrance from view. Some trees even grew through the cave, trunks and roots worming their way around the entrance.
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