The Stroke of Eleven

by Kyle Robert Shultz

  “See?” I said to Crispin as we ran. “We young folks have good ideas too, once in a while.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Logic and Proportion

  Ella and Matteo led us to a camp on the edge of Talesend. It was a collection of tents set up in what had once been the city airfield. The broken-down remains of old zeppelins littered the edge of the enclave. Crispin informed us that hundreds of people displaced from the city by Lara’s invasion had settled there too. Unlike the rest of Talesend, this place was a bustle of activity. Also, it wasn’t nearly as bleak. Everyone was grimy, pale, and thin, but all the same, there was a constant buzz of friendly conversation and laughter. There were even children chasing each other between the tents and playing with handmade toys.

  I tried to press Ella and Matteo for more information about how they’d wound up in this place. “So…I take it you two got married?”

  “Yes,” said Ella.

  “You must get along really well to still be happy together after two-thousand-odd years.”

  Ella smiled and linked her arm with Matteo’s. He kissed the top of her head.

  I’d hoped this would lead to further conversation, but unfortunately, neither of them volunteered any more details.

  Crispin had been looking more and more uncomfortable the closer we drew to the camp. Now that we were here, he seemed a complete nervous wreck—far from the self-assured hero I’d first met in Basile. As we walked, I moved over to him and whispered, “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. You’re still keeping secrets from me. You didn’t explain about Lara before, and I think there’s still something else. That Alice person in the photograph.” I laid a hand on his back. “Whatever happened, Crispin, no matter how bad it is…you can tell me.”

  He dropped his head. “Nick, it’s not something bad, it’s just…hard to explain.”

  A couple of kids ran between us. They only cast a brief, mildly interested glance in my direction. I assumed they’d seen plenty of monsters in their time, so they probably didn’t find me all that exciting. “How about you try to explain it? Might make you feel better.”

  He heaved a sigh. “All right. Here’s the thing. Speaking of getting married—” He glanced at Ella and Matteo, who had moved a few feet ahead of us. “While Molly and I were together in Warrengate, before…everything happened, we, ah…did that.”

  There was a moment of silence. “You got married,” I finally said.

  “Yes.”

  “At Warrengate.”

  “Yes.”

  “While you were prisoners and so forth.”

  “Well, after a while, they allowed us to move freely around the campus, and they did have a functioning chapel there, and we’d become very close, so…”

  My heart ached for him. “Crispin, I’m so sorry. To lose her this way, after that—”

  “That’s actually not what I’m talking about. Something happened after we got married.”

  Everything suddenly made sense. “You fell in love with this Alice girl.” I’d been suspecting this. I put my arm around him. “Crispin, you don’t have to feel guilty about that. Like you said, Molly isn’t alive anymore. She’d want you to be happy. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Crispin pulled away from me in frustration. “Nick, will you shut up? You don’t understand!”

  “You’re back!”

  A young woman ran toward us from between two of the tents and flung her arms around Crispin’s neck. She gave him an enthusiastic kiss on the cheek. “I missed you so much!” Her chestnut-brown hair was cut short, and she wore a light-grey jacket and trousers. She barely looked any older than she had in the photograph.

  “Alice.” Crispin’s voice cracked as he held her close. He closed his eyes, and tears ran down his cheeks. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  I winced. “All right, now I get it.” I gave Crispin a reproachful look. “I don’t begrudge you falling in love again, Crispin, but still…you’re old enough to be her father.”

  Crispin turned his tear-stained face away from the girl to give me a withering glare. “You big, hairy idiot,” he said, in a hoarse voice. “Don’t you get it yet?”

  Realization dawned on me. “Oh, my God.”

  Alice finally let go of Crispin and smiled at me. “Hello, Uncle Nick. I’m so happy to finally meet you.”

  I looked at Cordelia as she were an anchor in a raging storm. “He—she—how—”

  Cordelia was equally astounded, but she deals with sudden shocks a lot better than I do. She reached up, pinched my ear, and used it to steer me toward Alice. “Stop babbling and give your niece a hug.”

  “I have a niece,” I gurgled, as Alice embraced me. “Crispin has a d-d-d-”

  “Daughter,” Cordelia sounded out, very slowly. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

  One realization after another slammed into me, like waves against the shore. “This is why you were acting so strangely in Basile,” I said to Crispin. “Why you didn’t want to talk about undoing the—”

  “Yes, well, we can discuss all that later,” Crispin interrupted. “Right now, I need to catch up with my daughter—”

  “Daughter,” I echoed.

  “—and you,” Crispin went on, “need to talk to Ella and Matteo here.” He gave them a suspicious look. “I’d very much like to find out how they took over my rebellion while I was away.”

  “I’ll tell you everything,” said Alice. She took Crispin’s hand and led him away. “Come on, Dad.”

  “Dad,” I choked.

  Cordelia shook my arm. “Pull yourself together.”

  I tried. But it wasn’t easy.

  “Come,” said Ella, beckoning to us. “There’s a tent for camp meetings where we can talk.”

  “Though if the conversation is going to be about ways to defeat Beatrice,” said Matteo, “it’ll be a short one. Trust me, we’ve exhausted every option.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Cordelia. “Nick is bound to come up with a brilliant idea. Aren’t you, Nick?”

  With great effort, I tore myself away from the sight of my little brother walking arm in arm with his daughter. “Yes. Brilliant idea. Got it.”

  The meeting tent, as it turned out, had been commandeered from a circus. That brought back a few unhappy childhood memories. It was enormous, and colored with faded red-and-white stripes. There were so many holes in the fabric that it didn’t offer much privacy, but at least it was something.

  The four of us sat down at a rickety table in the corner of the tent. Ella brushed a lock of hair behind her ear and leaned back in her chair. Matteo hunched forward like a tiger ready to spring, and occasionally ran a hand over the various weapons in his costume to make sure they were all still there.

  “So,” I said, after a few awkward moments of silence. “Cinderella and Prince Charming.”

  They both gave me displeased looks.

  “What?” I shrugged. “That’s who you are, isn’t it?”

  Cinderella rubbed her eyes. “I do wish people didn’t remember me by that ridiculous nickname my stepsisters made up.”

  “And I have an actual name,” said Matteo. “Why do they never remember the princes’ actual names? Plus the fact that they made me out to be a complete idiot. How insane would you have to be to try finding a girl based on her shoe size? And they didn’t even mention Gladys!”

  “Which weapon was that?” I asked Ella, behind my hand.

  “The sword he was wearing the night of the ball. He’s still not over her.”

  “It seems they forgot quite a few details of your story.” Cordelia raised an eyebrow at Ella. “For example, the fact that your fairy godmother is actually a psychopath?”

  “She’s not ‘my’ fairy godmother. She’s not ‘my’ anything. She showed up out of the blue and offered me a chance to escape my horrible life for one night.�
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  “And you said yes.” A note of judgment crept into my tone. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that there might be strings attached?”

  “Of course it occurred to me,” said Ella angrily. She didn’t seem like an easy person to make angry, but I’d somehow pulled it off. “I’m not stupid enough to trust a random magical creature who offers me a bargain. But honestly…I didn’t care. All I wanted was to escape.”

  “You could have done that the old-fashioned way,” said Cordelia. “By running, for instance. No gaping wounds in the fabric of reality required.”

  “It wasn’t that simple,” said Ella. “Of course I could have run. But I couldn’t leave my sister.”

  “You mean stepsister,” I corrected. “And you did leave her, obviously.”

  “The story says that I had two stepsisters. That’s not quite true. My stepmother had one daughter when my father married her. A girl who was as cruel and miserable as her mother. Then, my stepmother had another child with my father.” Sadness filled Ella’s eyes. “Yvonne had a sweet nature. She could have grown up to be different from her mother and sister, with the right kind of influence. I was determined to give that to her, even though my father died and my stepmother fought me at every turn. I couldn’t abandon her to be raised by that horrible woman, and if I’d escaped and taken her with me, my stepmother would have followed and stopped me.” She bit her lip. “So I stayed.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said. “You agreed to stay stuck in that time loop, with Matteo, forever.”

  “We didn’t understand the consequences when Beatrice made us that offer,” said Matteo. “We didn’t know that the world would keep going on without us while we were inside the castle. We thought we could stay in that one evening together for as long as we wanted, and then go back to our lives later on as if nothing had happened.”

  “Beatrice revealed to us that we’d never see each other again after the ball if our lives were allowed to take their natural courses,” said Ella. “We’d die alone, Matteo in battle and me in an asylum. But even so, we were willing to accept that. We just wanted to have some more time together before then.”

  “You’d only known each other for a few hours when you made that bargain!” said Cordelia. “And you agreed to be together forever based on that?”

  “Foolish, maybe.” Malcolm took Ella’s hand. “But we do love each other, and we’ve grown closer with each passing century. We’ve had so many adventures together, lived so many lifetimes—”

  “But don’t you understand?” I jumped to my feet and started pacing, glad that Crispin wasn’t there to complain about it. “That bond between you is precisely the problem! It’s the source of the time-loop spell!” I looked at Cordelia. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  She hesitated. “It’s very unusual for an emotional connection to be used as a power source for magic…but all the same, it’s not unheard of. And with a creature like the marraine, whose very essence is based on romantic love, that sort of magic is all the more likely.”

  “Don’t you think we’ve thought of that?” said Ella. “We’ve been trying to break this curse for a lot longer than anyone else has.”

  “We tried leaving the castle, which clearly didn’t work,” said Matteo. “We tried staying far away from each other for years, but it didn’t make any difference. For the last few centuries, we’ve been traveling the Afterlands searching for a way to defeat Beatrice.”

  “I even sought out the Magic Mirror and asked the White Queen to make me forget Matteo,” said Ella. “So that I wouldn’t know or love him any more, and the story would unravel. But she couldn’t touch my memories. They’re linked to Beatrice’s magic, and even the White Queen isn’t powerful enough to challenge her.”

  “There has to be some way,” I insisted. “We have to fix this. Undo everything that’s happened.”

  Cordelia got to her feet. “Nick, can I talk to you privately for a moment?”

  “What—”

  “We’ll be right back,” she told Ella and Matteo as she took my arm and guided me to the other side of the tent.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  Cordelia kept her voice low. “Nick, do you remember when you tried to tell me it was time to give up on breaking your curse?”

  “Yeah, I do. Why?”

  “Because perhaps it’s time we started thinking along similar lines about this curse.”

  “No. Absolutely not. We’re not giving up.”

  “I’m not saying we should give up. I’m saying we should change our strategy. You want to erase everything that’s happened. Change what is now history. Because you feel guilty that Crispin spent all those years without you.”

  “Of course I feel guilty! He went through all that pain, getting tortured by Levesque and losing Molly, all because I wasn’t there to protect him!”

  “But maybe you couldn’t have prevented it! For all we know, there was nothing you could have done to change it. And you may have to accept the fact that you can’t change things now. That day when everything went wrong; it’s gone. It’s in the past. And even assuming that the past is changeable, we might not be able to make it better.” She locked eyes with me. “You can’t go back, Nick.”

  I started to make an angry retort…but then a sudden thought struck me. “No. You’re wrong. I—we—can go back.” I felt a rush of excitement as an idea began to take shape in my mind. “We can go back and fix it all.”

  Cordelia spoke sharply. “Nick, you’re not listening to me.”

  “No, I’m listening, but you’re wrong, so no offense, but it doesn’t matter what you say.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Time!” My excited shout drew curious looks from Ella and Matteo. “It’s about time!”

  Cordelia put a hand over her eyes. “Puns, Nick? Seriously?”

  “It’s all about time!” I ran back to our new acquaintances. “You said you two tried to separate, yeah?”

  “Yes,” said Matteo, “but—”

  “I know, I know, it didn’t work. But that was after you’d already left Basile, right? You were back out in the world, where time was passing normally.”

  “I suppose,” said Ella slowly. “What are you getting at?”

  “Your mistake was, you left together.”

  “Of course we left together,” said Matteo. “We were the source of the spell. We thought if we separated ourselves from it, then perhaps…”

  “But you’re not the source of the spell,” I broke in. “Not exactly. It’s your love that’s the source. It’s you two staying together, having a life together, in defiance of history itself. Nothing you do outside the loop makes any difference. So far as the loop is concerned, Cinderella and Prince Charming—”

  “Watch it,” Matteo warned.

  “—never said goodbye that night. Their last dance never ended. But if it did end?”

  “I…don’t follow you,” said Ella.

  “Here’s what I think. I think that if Cinderella flees as the clock strikes twelve, like she’s supposed to, then the spell won’t have a source anymore. So long as you separate in that moment and stay apart…maybe your lives will go back to normal, and the rest of reality will change back as well.”

  “Nick, this is all speculation,” said Cordelia. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You’re not an enchanter.”

  “You said yourself that we needed to draw on my non-magical perspective in order to solve this. You enchanters are always tripped up by the rules and regulations of magic. You never know what to do when you’re faced with something that doesn’t follow the usual conventions. I know how to think outside the box.”

  “It’s wishful thinking! We have no idea whether or not this would work.”

  “It makes sense!”

  “Nick, nothing about this situation makes any sense whatsoever!”

  Matteo raised a hand to get our attention. “You’re saying things might go back to normal. Which me
ans…all of this will never have happened.”

  “Right!” I gave him a friendly punch on the arm. “Now you’re getting it. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “So Matteo and I will just have that one evening.” Ella’s face was pale. “All those years together, they’ll be wiped away.”

  The implications of what I’d suggested finally sank in. “Oh. Ah.”

  “Would we even remember them?” asked Matteo. “Or would the memories be erased too?”

  “It’s impossible to say,” said Cordelia. “It’s also impossible to say whether any of this would work to begin with.” She turned on me. “And if you’ll be so kind as to shut up for a moment, Nick, there’s something else you’re not considering.”

  “What?”

  “Crispin may have suffered during all these years apart from you. But he also had a daughter whom he clearly adores. You’re talking about potentially destroying her. If this works, she’ll never have existed.”

  “I have considered that,” I retorted, bristling. “I’m not heartless. And I can tell he doesn’t want to lose her.”

  “So what’s your solution, then?”

  I shifted from foot to foot in discomfort. I didn’t actually have a solution. “She might still…happen,” I said at length. “In fact, her life would probably be better. We could find a way to keep Lara from taking over Molly’s body, and then Alice could have a mother and a father.”

  “What if everything changes? What if Crispin and Molly don’t decide to get married in the new timeline? Or Alice is never conceived? They might end up with a son named Irving instead!”

  I pursed my lips. “I don’t think Crispin would ever name his kid Irving.”

  “And even if Alice does come to exist in the other timeline, it won’t be the same Alice. People are largely defined by their life experiences. She’ll have entirely different memories, so she’ll be a different person. This Alice, here and now, will be gone forever. Along with everyone else who’s been born since we got stuck in Basile. And that’s assuming we can even prevent all the apocalyptic things that have happened since then. What if we manage to get back to our own time, but we can’t break out Crispin and Molly? The exact same events could take place all over again.”