by Kate Gragg
“You shouldn’t,” Barry said suddenly.
“Look I’m not always in the mood for pants either, but we’re going to meet up with a lot of people later and it’ll be better if you have some on,” I said.
“No, the princess… she’s not what she seems.”
“You’re going to have to give me more to go on than that,” I said.
“I… I can’t remember too well,” Barry said, clutching his head. “It feels like frog brain is bouncing around inside this big skull. There’s too much room in here.”
Just then I heard the princess calling, her lilting voice carrying on the wind, sounding astonishingly close.
“Oh, where oh where is my brave knight? Has he found my precious pearl? Has he done his good deed?”
I picked up the pearl and turned toward the hill.
“I’ll be right back.”
“Please, I’m begging you, don’t give it to her!” Barry said.
“Why?”
“I just know it was important.”
I was getting so tired of cryptic mutterings. The princess was straightforward. She wanted something, I could give it to her, job well done. Nice and simple. I made my way back through the orchard and felt around until I came upon the glass hill again.
“Is that my brave knight I see?” the princess trilled.
“Yep, that’s me,” I called up to her. “Can you come down? I really don’t want to climb that whole–”
“Do you have my pearl?” she said. Something about her voice had changed, a note of impatience maybe.
“Yeah, of course, it wasn’t even that far awa–”
Suddenly she was right beside me, standing in a patch of rose bushes.
“Then give it to me,” the princess said. Her voice was cold.
“Uh… before I do, is there anything unusual about that pearl? You have so many already, I was just wondering if it was important, or dangerous, or–”
“Give it to me, Joe,” she said. She was much closer to me now, but I hadn’t seen her move.
“Did I tell you my name?” I said. I took a few steps backward, but she didn’t get any farther away from me.
“The pearl, Joe,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Just out of curiosity, what happens if you don’t get it back?” I said.
“Oh, you wouldn’t do that to me, would you, Joe?”
The princess burst into tears, looking a lot more like her old self.
“A hoo hoo hoo! Oh, I must have the pearl, I simply must have it! Because… a hoo hoo hoo hoo!”
“Because…?” I prompted.
“It’s the only thing that can lift my terrible curse!” she sobbed.
I was starting to feel like a cad.
“Hey there, I get it. I got cursed too,” I said.
The handkerchief started dancing and climbed up on my shoulder, gesturing toward the princess.
“That’s awfully gentlemanly of you,” I said. I picked it up and reached out to dry the princess’s tears.
“Oh, that’s very nice of-OWWWW ahoo hooo hooo owww get off of MEEEEE!” she squealed.
I’d never seen a strip of cloth attack a person before. You’d think it would be an unfair fight, but the handkerchief had the element of surprise in its favor, and the princess didn’t seem to know where to attack. She was getting angrier, and taller.
“Hey uh, are you okay?” I said, backing away from her. She ripped the handkerchief off her face and threw it to the ground.
“Give it to me!” she raged, towering over me and giving me a good idea of what her terrible curse was. The top half of her was a princess all right, but the bottom half was a giant snake. A giant, angry snake slithering right at me.
I scooped up the handkerchief and ran back toward the swamp, where Barry appeared to be trying to wedge himself back into his hollow log.
“Run!” I yelled.
Barry flexed his legs and hopped, frog-style, but that move doesn’t really work so well with human legs, so he just fell over. I pulled him up and dragged him with me toward the woods.
“We have to get to where she can’t follow us,” I said.
“Do you still have the pearl?” he said, panting. He was still jumping every other step instead of running.
“Yeah but,” I panted, “I think I should hang onto it–” I grabbed Barry by the arm and pulled him under a low-hanging branch “-I’m the one with pockets.”
“Let me see it,” Barry said. I handed it to him and dragged him out of the way as the snake princess lunged at us, thrashing through the branches.
“We have to get deeper into the forest,” I said.
“I know there’s something important about this,” Barry said, turning the pearl over in his hands. “Maybe you eat it?”
“DO NOT EAT IT!” the snake princess screamed.
“Yeah I hate to agree with her but probably don’t eat it,” I said. The handkerchief scrabbled down my shirt and started yanking on my belt, which was extremely distracting when I was trying to run for my life.
“Can you wait on whatever that is, buddy?” I said, plucking the handkerchief up and tucking it back in my pocket. It slipped out again and pointed emphatically at my scabbard.
Oh. Right. I had a sword!
“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” I said to the Hank. I unsheathed my sword as quickly as I could while still running and started swinging it wildly in the princess’s direction.
“How dare you!” she wailed. “As if I don’t have enough to deal with right now!”
“Well, stop chasing me, and I won’t have to stab you,” I said. I really didn’t want to stab her. I’d never stabbed anybody, and I was pretty sure it would be gross, and I doubted murdering a princess counted as a good deed even if she was half-snake.
“I definitely remember you’re supposed to hold the pearl and think something,” Barry said, holding the pearl up and squinting at it.
“That’s great but watch where you’re going,” I said, too late.
Barry tripped. The pearl went flying. The snake-princess caught the pearl.
“Ahaha yes, at long last, my curse is lifted!” she said, closing her eyes and holding the pearl up to her lips. In an instant she transformed, no longer half-princess, half-snake.
Now she was all snake.
“That’s what it is!” Barry cried triumphantly. “Shape-shifting! Oh dear, watch out!”
The snake reared up, opening her fanged mouth wide.
You notice odd things when you’re about to die, like how the snake was still wearing her tiara. Funny, right? You’d think it would have fallen off when she was crashing through the trees.
The handkerchief rattled the hilt of my sword emphatically.
“You’re right, you’re right,” I sighed.
I grabbed the sword with both hands and jammed it overhead, pushing it straight up through the snake’s jaw. It took all my strength to pierce her leathery scales, and once I did, I was showered in just a truly upsetting amount of blood. One time back in Cheapside a camel got stuck in the gears of a flour mill (don’t ask) and everybody agreed that was the most blood they’d ever seen, but this was worse. Snake blood is oddly sticky, and it reeks of fish. And there were barrels of it. Dumping on me.
Anyway, the snake writhed and squealed and cursed me and snapped her horrible jaws and gnashed her horrible fangs, but a sword in your gullet’s not good for you and it wasn’t long before the job was done.
I guess she’d been keeping the pearl in her mouth, because it fell out of her mouth as she collapsed. I caught it and thought about what a lucky catch it was, and then I saw a mouse scurrying across the forest floor.
“I hope the snake doesn’t land on that poor mouse and crush it,’ I thought.
And then I didn’t think anything.
A few thoughts popped into the void, like soap bubbles. I loved the shady grass, the tunnels it made for burrowing. I savored the creaminess of a sunbaked seed. There were footsteps thunder
ing nearby, and some hulking, wet thing I wanted nothing to do with.
But there, in a sunny patch of dirt, was a very big seed indeed. Worth leaving the shelter of the burrowgrass for? My feet were strong and my tail was sleek. I could risk a scurry for that seed, so round and white like the moon.
But there was competition! A wafting thing walked up to it, like a leaf but larger. Handkerchief, some recess of my brain told me. How did I know that?
It picked up the seed, polished it with one corner of itself, and waited. Nothing happened. I saw it wilt. It seemed so sad I almost wanted to run up to it, to invite it to share the comfort of my tall grass.
It rolled the seed to me! A friend indeed, handkerchief.
I sniffed at it. I took a cautious nibble.
Ow! Hard on the teeth! Too old, this seed. Too dry to eat.
Thundering feet. Too big, too big to hide from. Large hands took my seed. Good riddance. Maybe you can eat it with your giant teeth, giant.
The giant peered at me, its eyes too big, its teeth too many.
“Oh, I think I get what happened,” it said. “You don’t remember who you’re supposed to be, do you? Okay one sec.”
It held the seed. It closed its terrible eyes, and pop!
A different giant. Familiar. Handsome.
It handed me the seed again.
“Focus on this face,” it said. “This is what you’re supposed to look like.”
I closed my eyes. It would be nice to be handsome.
By the time Lydia came back I was still arguing with myself.
“I’m just saying the clothes fit me too, so I don’t see why you get to wear all of them,” Barry said.
“Because they won’t fit when you turn back into you,” I said, exasperated. We’d been going around like this for a while.
“I told you, I don’t remember what I looked like!”
“Well you didn’t look like me, so just pick something!”
Lydia walked up to us, taking in the dead snake, the blood, the sword, and me fighting with myself over a pair of pants.
Barry wrested the pants from me and putting them on hurriedly. “Who’s this? Hello.”
“Barry if you’re going to talk to people you need to pick a different face. It’s just too weird.”
“Fine,” Barry said, touching the pearl to his lips and popping into the form of a gangly dark-haired youth a few inches taller than me.
“Well now these pants don’t fit.”
“Heya, Lyd. Was your day as relaxing as mine?”
“Lid, is it? What an odd name,” Barry said, hopping around trying to fasten my pants, which he’d put on backwards. “How can we be of assistance? We’re adventurers.”
“Can somebody fill me in,” Lydia said, pinching her nose.
I relayed the whole thing about the princess being a snake (“I told you so.” “I told him too!”) and my thrilling and very brave sword fight, and my brief vacation as a mouse. By the end of it all Lydia was sitting on a stump, looking pensive.
“It’s the pearl that’s the most interesting to me,” she said.
“Really? More than the frog prince?” I said.
“I highly doubt that I’m a prince,” Barry said. “And there’s still the possibility that I’m really meant to be a frog.”
“What?” Lydia said.
“Ignore that,” I said.
“I found more bodies in the woods,” Lydia said. “Last year’s competitors, all of them stabbed. Why?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it,” I said.
“We should head back home and see if anyone else found something strange today,” Lydia said.
“Absolutely, but first I need to do just one thing,” I said.
I crouched down and ran my fingers through the grass until I found a seed. I popped it into my mouth, chewed, and gagged.
“I guess a mouse’s palate is different than a human’s,” I said, spitting it out.
“Oh no,” Barry said. “I hope I still like flies.”
We all heard the screaming then.
Chapter Fourteen
“Survivors, it has to be,” Lydia said as we ran crashing through the brush. Well, she ran, I limped, since the bloodthirsty foliage of the island was murder on my bare legs, and Barry mostly hopped.
The screaming was coming from deep in the forest and high above us.
“We’re sure this isn’t just another snake, right?” I said. “That princess did a pretty convincing human impression.”
“No, she didn’t,” Lydia and Barry said in unison.
“Well, I still defeated her, didn’t I?” I sniffed.
“Yes,” Lydia said, slowing for a minute to look me in the eye. “Good job, Joe. Really.”
I would have thanked her, but suddenly the screaming was right on top of us. We came to a stop in front of an enormous tree. All the trees on Teems were enormous by the usual standards, but this one really was the size of a turret or a small hill or something. Big enough around that ten men would have to clasp hands to encircle it, with heavy vines trailing down to the ground and branches that went up higher than I could see.
And up in the branches, bound up in vines, were half a dozen man-sized shapes.
“Can you climb it?” Lydia said, but I was already testing my weight against the vines.
I’d never done too much climbing with ropes. That’s more of a cat burglar thing. As a chimneysweep, I just learned the footholds of the buildings I climbed up most often and did it freehanded. The vine gave me something to brace against though, letting me walk my way up the trunk sideways. Or trunks, I should say. There seemed to be hundreds of individual stems, like a bouquet of flowers. My footsteps made hollow, reverberating sounds as I inched my way up. By the time I got to the first branch I was higher than the canopy of most of the rest of the forest.
“Hey, I can see the city from here!” I shouted down.
I wasn’t sure they could hear me. The screaming was deafening up here, a symphony of moans and groans and shrieks. Even though I’d just fought for my life, this was the most unsettling thing I’d done on the island so far.
I swung my way over to the first bundle, which was almost entirely wrapped up in vines except for one shiny, armor-clad toe. This one was moaning in a low, guttural way that made my bones shiver.
“Shh, easy there. I’ve come to help you.”
I pulled out my sword and cut the vines away, carefully unwinding them from the man’s helmet.
“I don’t know how you can even breathe like this–”
As I cut the last vine loose, the man’s helmet came off, along with his head.
I climbed back down as quickly as I could and explained the situation, then Barry and Lydia climbed up with me, checking each body. All dead.
We cut the vines loose and let the bodies drop to the ground so we could get a better look. Lydia objected at first, but it wasn’t like it was going to do them any more harm.
“They’ve been run through,” I said, poking my fingers through a nasty gash in the chest plate of the first man I’d found. “You think it was that beast people have been talking about?”
“This shouldn’t be possible,” Lydia said, shaking her head.
“The voices? I think it’s some kind of echo–”
I can see the city from here!
My own voice bellowed, vibrating up and down the trunks of the tree like a pipe organ. It seemed that sounds got trapped in there and just bounced around, possibly forever.
“No, the punctures. That’s not possible, not like this.”
“Clearly it is,” Barry said, drumming his fingers on a helmet that looked like it had gone through a grain thresher.
“No, no, this isn’t possible,” Lydia said again. “The games put magical protections on the competitors, limiting what the island and everything on it can do. No mortal wounds are possible.”
“What about an immortal one?”
I told Lydia about the visions I got when
I drank the enchanted water, the feeling of being in someone else’s head, someone angry. Someone evil.
“This has to have been the work of a man, not a beast. Someone used dark magic to take out all their competition,” Lydia mused. “But that shouldn’t be possible. The island rejects outside magic. It punishes cheaters.”
“Does it? Because Clifton cheated on the first day, and he’s still just fine.”
“There’s something odd about Clifton this year. He was always an ass, but now he’s different. He’s got that strange look in his eye.”
“And that chainmail he always wears,” I pointed out.
“Guys, did we count this one?” Barry said from off in the distance.
I stood up to see him standing in a clearing not far from the tree, looking at something glinting in the tall grass.
We ran over to look, already dreading what we would find, but the scene turned out to be oddly peaceful.
A man was stretched out in the grass as if he were sleeping, wearing a full suit of armor, his gloved hand outstretched.
“No stab wounds on him,” Barry pointed out. It was true, the armor looked untouched.
Lydia rested her hand on the man’s faceplate and gently lifted it up, then recoiled.
“It’s empty,” I said. I took off one of his gloves to check. “The whole suit’s empty.”
“Someone just left a full suit of perfectly good armor laid out right next to the murder tree?” Barry said.
“Not just someone,” Lydia breathed. She reached into the helmet and pulled out a length of faded ribbon. “I know who this was.”
She grabbed the abandoned helmet and stood up.
“Grab the other helmets. We need to take them back as proof.”
“And the ribbon?”
“Althea will want to see that,” Lydia said. “It was her favor.”
Chapter Fifteen
It was a slow, clanking trek to the palace. Lydia decided we should bring back the helmets of all the poor murdered guys as proof, but we didn’t have any good way to carry them. A few of them had chinstraps or cross-braces that made it possible to attach them to Lydia’s horse’s… horse clothing… but there were still a whole armful that were the easy-on, easy-off sort, just a kind of claustrophobic metal hat with no thought whatsoever put to carrying convenience. Made a man want to storm through the blacksmithing district making reforms.