by Temre Beltz
Pippa swallowed, and a shy smile curved on her lips. “I wonder if we should return to the castle now? I hear an outstanding feast has been prepared, and we wouldn’t want to miss out.”
“Especially not with so very much to celebrate,” Maisy said, while leaning into Pippa and laying her head on her shoulder. Oliver quickly scooped up the magician’s hat that lay at his feet. He ran to the edge of Triumph Mountain, and tossed it jubilantly over the side, where it was swept up by the Sapphire Sea, never to harm anyone ever again. Despite all of the magicians’ planning, despite their desire to be rid of Oliver in time for their new beginning on Triumph Mountain, it turned out he was the only one who belonged there after all.
As Ms. Bravo led the way toward a radiant Castle Cressida, her loyal companion, Dynamite, swooped overhead like a banner. Pippa, Ernest, Maisy, and Oliver locked arms with one another, and the Winds of Wanderly swirled behind, tossing emerald strands of grass in the air like confetti because at long last, the wait was over. The Triumphants of Wanderly had returned.
Epilogue
Bravo!
I knew the moment you picked me up that you would make it this far.
But that doesn’t make me any less proud.
I know this is not the traditionally Triumphant tale you assumed you were picking up, that it is full of stumbles, mishaps, and setbacks, but in the telling of Pippa’s real story, I have come to the rather shocking conclusion that this is what makes it so grand.41 Not because I enjoy airing the Triumphants’ dirty laundry (I am a Triumphant book, don’t forget), but because a very, very good ending is ever so much more satisfying when it is born out of very, very difficult circumstances.
It is precisely in Pippa’s being the “least” Triumphant that she has proved to be one of the greatest, and I remain convinced that eliminating some of her and her friends’ more obvious disappointments would be, instead, a tragedy.
Because a hero’s tale is not simply a means of rote record keeping, or a personal trophy to brag about, but a means of inspiring others to action. And if there is one thing I have come to learn it is that, whether in your world or in mine, there will always be a need for heroes.
If you have not figured it out by now, I am looking at YOU.
Are you surprised?
You shouldn’t be. I sensed it in you the moment you first flipped through my pages or I wouldn’t have bothered to tell you this story at all.
If being a hero is not the sort of role you have ever imagined for yourself, let me assure you: I am not the sort that tends to be wrong. I am patient, however, and if you simply turn back to the page where our story first began, I would be more than happy to tell it to you all over again.42
Though it is terribly bittersweet to part with a reader such as yourself, I have stories that must be shared, and I’m certain you have work that must be done. Isn’t that always the way with heroes? And however small or big that work happens to be, however far or near it happens to take you—I am certain that it will be extraordinary.
Perhaps I shall even hear all about it in a book one day.
Acknowledgments
In the Kingdom of Wanderly, everything is always better together, and it couldn’t be more true of writing a book. My deepest thanks to my literary agent, Molly O’Neill, whose support, kindness, and knack for asking the perfect questions helped me find the heart of Pippa and Oliver’s story when I needed it most. I will forever be grateful that you pulled me (and Birdie!) out of the slush pile years ago.
Thank you to my magical editor, Stephanie Stein. I mentioned before that you just might be a fairy godmother, and now I am ever more convinced of it! Thank you for loving Wanderly and all of its citizens the way that I do, for being so patient as I dug deeper on draft after draft (after draft), and for continually lighting my way. I have learned so much from you.
My sincere thanks to the entire team at HarperCollins for allowing me one more adventure in Wanderly. Wanderly truly found its perfect match in cover designer Jessie Gang and illustrator Melissa Manwill. Your talent amazes me, and the cover exceeded my greatest hopes (again). Thank you to copy editors Jon Howard and Stephanie Evans. Thank you to Erica Sussman for believing in Wanderly early on. Thank you to Vaishali Nayak and Jacquelynn Burke for working to put this book into the hands of the readers who will love it most. Thank you to Kristen Eckhardt for overseeing production from beginning to end. Thank you to Almeda Beynon for bringing this book to life through the audio edition. And thank you to Louisa Currigan for so expertly connecting all the dots. I wish I could give a heaping platter of Maisy’s magical lemon bars to you all!
Thank you to the amazing team at Root Literary Agency and their tireless efforts every day on behalf of authors and, of course, readers. Special thanks to Heather Baror for helping Birdie, and now Pippa, find her way into children’s hands around the globe.
Thank you to authors Jessica Day George and Liesl Shurtliff. Not only have you written some of my most favorite books, but I am still pinching myself over your kind support of Wanderly. Liesl, thank you especially for your generous encouragement and advice along the way.
Special thanks to bookseller extraordinaire Alexandra Uhl for always making me feel so welcome at A Whale of a Tale (the loveliest bookstore!) and for being a dear friend of Wanderly.
For Mom, Dad, and Ryan—this book is all about family, both the family that we are born into and the family that we find along the way. Thank you for giving me the most loving start. I love you all so much. Mom, my fellow bookworm, sharing this journey with you has been an extraspecial gift.
And thank you to my loves Jerad, Ellie, and Violet. Jerad, my heart found its home the day I met you, and you are my hero in the truest sense of the word. Ellie and Violet, you make every day magical and being your mama will always be the greatest role I could ever hope for. Without the three of you—your love, your patience, and your sacrifice—this book simply wouldn’t exist. I love you all dearly.
Finally, to each reader, blogger, teacher, librarian, and bookseller who has so kindly taken the time to read or recommend my books, I am deeply honored and humbled. I hope now, and always, you will find within the pages of Wanderly what I hoped from the very start: a friend you can count on.
Excerpt from The Tragical Tale of Birdie Bloom
one
Unhappy Birthday
Witches aren’t the celebrating sort.
But birthdays, as you well know, are different.
Not even a witch forgets her birthday.
And so, on September 5, as she had been doing for seventy or eighty or who really knows how many years, Agnes Prunella Crunch settled into her familiar rocking chair. She pulled the rickety table with the oozing slice of mud pie on it a bit closer.1 She scratched her favorite wart at the tip of her exceptionally large nose. She kicked off her smelly, striped socks and wriggled her bony toes in front of the cauldron that emitted a puff of green smoke every now and again.
It was time.
Oh yes. Agnes nodded. It was time.
Agnes tilted in her rocking chair. Agnes tilted so far she might have tipped right out had she not spent years teaching her rocking chair to float. She wrapped her fingers around the cover of a ginormous book and hoisted the book up off the floor and onto the squishy lump of her belly with a soft grunt. She eyeballed the cover. It gleamed back.
The Book of Evil Deeds, it hissed.
At least that’s what it would have done if Agnes or any other witch worth her salt had written it.2 In fact, if it had been Agnes, she would have thrown in a few additional perks like a front cover nasty enough to chomp off whole fingertips when properly slammed, or pages guaranteed to deliver paper cuts every single time. Imagine that!
But as the only book in all of Wanderly written just for witches, Agnes considered it better than nothing. And it did say “evil” on the front cover, which practically guaranteed that even if the other 2,793 pages had been filled with spells ranging from the embarrassingly easy (how to li
ght your cauldron without a match) to the utterly useless (how to polish your witchy boots in a snap), the last spell, the final spell, simply had to deliver.
Especially on, of all days, Agnes’s birthday.
Agnes wriggled her fingers; she squiggled her nose; she inhaled a deep, raspy breath. She turned the page and . . . her floating rocking chair crashed down against the dusty floorboards with a jarring thud. Her eyes darted back and forth across the scrawling script. She began clawing at the bottom corner of the page to see if another page had become stuck, and perhaps this wasn’t really the last page after all?
But it was.
And it contained one measly spell.
One measly, awful spell titled “How to Transform Your Hair to Slime Green.”
Hair?! The last page of The Book of Evil Deeds was reserved for a hairstyle? Day in and day out, week after week, year after year, Agnes had dutifully completed thousands of banal spells to arrive at nothing more than a hairstyle?
Agnes didn’t need a new hairstyle! Over the years, she had honed her ratty strands to a nearly perfect shade of purple and didn’t see any good reason to change it. Not to mention slime green was last popular over a century ago. What Agnes really needed—what Agnes wanted more than anything—was to find some way to make witching fun again!
It is a terrible thing to feel that one has wasted years. It is a more terrible thing to feel that one hasn’t any plan for the days to come. So, Agnes did what any respectably infuriated witch would do: she slammed The Book of Evil Deeds shut. She growled at it. She tossed it down toward her witchy foot and gave it a sharp, swift kick.
At well over two thousand pages long, however, the book kicked back.3 Even worse, as it careened off Agnes’s now throbbing big toe and boomeranged about the room, it finally landed—squish!—atop Agnes’s mud pie.
Agnes’s birthday was going from bad to cursed!
Oh sure, there had been a few bright spots, like that morning’s visit to Fairy Fifi’s Woodland Boutique, where Agnes enchanted the entire stock of ball gowns to dance the ogre’s shuffle instead of the waltz, but even that wasn’t what it used to be. It was a perfectly evil curse. It should have been glorious! It should have been thrilling! Fairy Fifi’s resulting scream had been a record-breaking eleven! But all Agnes felt was utterly and completely . . . bored.
At this point you may be jumping up and down in your seat, wondering why Agnes doesn’t just try something new? Perhaps apply those top-notch potion-making skills to becoming a scientist. Maybe adapt those impressive broomstick acrobatics to life as a trapeze artist. Or do something completely wild like become a schoolteacher. This would be the perfect sort of advice if Agnes hadn’t happened to live in the kingdom of Wanderly.
In the kingdom of Wanderly, stories ruled all, and the citizens were required to live “by the book.” You tell me how many witches you’ve seen waltz through a storybook in a frilly pink dress while humming a merry tune with a bunny rabbit underfoot? Considering Agnes would rather eat her smelly sock than do any of those things, that doesn’t seem significant, but it was. Very much so. Because Agnes wasn’t supposed to do anything other than what some storybook witch had already done. But what if not all witches were the same? What if Agnes were different? What if Agnes had an idea that no storybook witch ever had? Whether by accident or by calculated avoidance, those were the sorts of questions the Chancellor never bothered to answer.
Which meant Agnes was stuck.
Stuck on a rotten birthday, in a haunted cabin, all alone.
To be fair, the haunted part wasn’t all that bad. Yes, the shelves on the walls sagged with jars full of hopelessly witchy things: rolling eyeballs, venomous snake fangs, and frog legs that still twitched. Yes, the ceiling was enchanted so that, no matter what time of day, it looked to be the unsettling hour of just past midnight, and, okay, fine, the black cauldron that bubbled endlessly over the hearth was guilty of throwing out a sharp crackle of lightning and a deep rumble of thunder from time to time. Still, somehow, Agnes’s cabin oozed with its own sort of coziness.
Coziness, however, couldn’t answer prickly questions. Coziness couldn’t dole out appropriately wicked advice. Coziness couldn’t solve the fact that Agnes didn’t have anyone to talk to. Of course, Agnes didn’t want another witch’s company for some sappy, chatty-chat sort of reason. Blech! Agnes just wanted to find out if there were any other witches who were similarly stuck. If there were any other witches who had fallen into a bit of a slump. If there was some easy fix Agnes just hadn’t thought of yet.
But that was never going to happen for the simple fact that in Wanderly—unless for the purposes of hissing, cursing, or plotting—witches didn’t talk to one another. Ever.
Indeed, it was one of the ten governing provisions of the Witches’ Manifesto that all witches were bound to. Lately, Agnes found herself wishing she’d never signed the thing, but when it was presented decades ago, the provisions had seemed ridiculously straightforward.4 The brand-spanking-new cauldron and year’s worth of bewitching dust the Chancellor tossed in as a signing bonus hadn’t hurt, either.
But how to get around that aggravating rule now?
About the Author
Photo credit Kendall Haines Photography
TEMRE BELTZ used to work as a lawyer but never outgrew her childhood love of fairy tales. Temre lives in sunny California with her husband and two daughters. They love family road trips and are always on the lookout for adventure, ice cream, and books. She is also the author of The Tragical Tale of Birdie Bloom. You can visit Temre online at www.temrebeltz.com.
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Books by Temre Beltz
THE TRAGICAL TALE OF BIRDIE BLOOM
Copyright
THE TRIUMPHANT TALE OF PIPPA NORTH. Text copyright © 2020 by Temre Beltz. Illustrations by Melissa Manwill. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Cover art © 2020 by Melissa Manwill
Cover design by Jessie Gang
* * *
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019947152
Digital Edition MARCH 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-283588-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-283586-4
* * *
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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1. This is merely a fancy way of saying “hello.” Certainly I could have just said “hello,” but perhaps you didn’t notice the title on my front cover? This is a Triumphant tale, and “hello” is somewhat of an ordinary word, don’t you think?
2. Yes, I know the word “Triumphant” is nearly as big as “salutations,” but fear not, it is just as easily understood. Triumphants in Wanderly can best be equated with “heroes.” Triumphants are the ones who always win, who always come out ahead, and who always get a happy ending.
3. Do not look surprised. I knew the moment you picked me up what sort of a reader you are. An excellent one, that’s what! And do not bother protesting because then you will be questioning my judgment, which, if you haven’t already deduced, is similarly excellent.
4. The spatula wasn’t actually magical. If you find this stop a bit annoying because you have never encountered a single spatula that was magical, well, then you have never spent much time in Wanderly. The kingdom of Wanderly positively crackles with magic, which is why it is always wise to be very precise in one’s descriptions. Also, as a book, I cannot help being a bit fussy with words.
5. If you have fond memories of attending a birthday party where a magician pulled a rabbit out of his hat much to the delight of an adoring audience, you must toss this nonsense out of your head immediately. Despite the belittling things the Chancellor loved to say about them, the magicians in Wanderly were no small thing. Is that a warning? Perhaps.