‘Can I have it?’ the princess asked bluntly, her hand already reaching out to pluck the shinning apple.
‘Of course,’ Jack answered, foolishly, innocently.
He wasn’t aware of the saying (or have I just made it up?) that, just because something is freely given to you, it doesn’t mean you’re free to hand it on to someone else.
For naturally, as the princess plucked the golden apple from its stem, poor Jill jerked in agony, as if her heart had finally broken.
Not that Jack noticed.
His eyes were lovingly and desirously locked on the happily glowing face of the princess.
‘Thank you!’ she exclaimed elatedly, staring at the glistening apple she now held in her hands.
Momentarily looking up, she saw Jack staring at her expectantly, a sickly, stupid grin on his face. Hesitantly, unsure what was expected of her, she leant closer to him, kissing him lightly and briefly on his cheek with lips puckered in disgust.
‘I must go show papa!’ she trilled excitedly, whirling on her feet and dashing from the room.
As she rushed down the steps leading from the room just outside the open door, the building began to shake as if she were suddenly incredibly heavy, each step making everything else around them tremble violently.
‘What’s happening?’ Jack wondered fearfully, looking about him as the wooden walls began to crumble.
At last, he saw that Jill wasn’t well.
‘Jill!’
He rushed towards her, tenderly taking her in his arms. For Jack wasn’t really a terrible man, just a fool who thinks that the better things in life are always those just out of your reach.
‘We have to get out of here!’ he gasped in fright as a wall collapsed, the large gap created revealing that whole sections of the building were now falling away.
Stairways were sliding away, plummeting through the many green leaves.
Bridges quaked, toppled, vanished in the blink of an eye.
Rooms lurched, slanted crazily, the chairs and tables inside slipping towards a wall, then hurtling earthwards when that wall too fell away.
Everywhere Jack and Jill looked, people were fleeing the collapsing building.
Jack tried to pick Jill up. But people of the same age are much harder to lift, let alone run with, than most stories would have you suppose.
‘No, you have to leave me,’ Jill insisted weakly. ‘I’m dying anyway, I’m sure of it. I no longer have the heart to continue.’
‘If you stay, I stay!’ Jack declared, recognising at last the room they were standing in. ‘This is where it all started, isn’t it? This is where it can all end!’
Jill smiled more warmly than she had been able to manage for a long time. She felt what she realised could be a last surge of energy flowing through her. She took Jack’s hand.
‘Then – let’s run! Like we used to!’
And so, hand in hand, they ran.
They ran through crumbling rooms that once held books or devices containing the secrets of the world, conjured up here by a love that knew no boundaries, no limits.
They ran across shattering bridges once strewn across the great divides by that same selfless love.
They ran down subsiding pathways that once sought out only the upper reaches, not the lows, as unconditional love seeks no reward but its own existence.
They ran down cracking steps once ascending higher and higher, as true love endlessly hopes that it will raise you both into heavenly realms.
Every creature imaginable was fleeing the great, collapsing structure with them. Men, women, children. Carpenters, judges, lost cavalry troops (but not, sadly, the poor king’s men). Tigers, elephants, unicorns. Fairies, dwarves, ogres, and yes, dragons.
It was chaos everywhere they ran, and it took a full half day to run through it all. It was late evening when they eventually reached the base of the building, the princess now only just ahead of them.
The princess leapt into the still waiting carriage, the king admonishing her for her tardiness until she elatedly cried that she had the golden apple.
Proudly, she flung aside her cloak, having protected the apple within its soft folds – and wailed in horror.
The apple was dull, no longer golden. It had also split almost completely in half.
‘We’ve been tricked papa!’ she screeched miserably.
‘Never mind that!’ the king stormed, staring out of the carriage window at the rapidly deteriorating tower. ‘We have to get out of here before that monstrosity falls down on us! Driver, ride on – quickly!’
He banged urgently on the roof. The carriage and its attendant procession instantly moved off, swiftly gaining speed as more and more of the tower crashed to the ground behind them.
The princess threw the useless apple out of the window where, striking the ground hard, it rolled a short distance before splitting entirely in two.
Jill dropped to the floor with a tortured sigh. Jack saw how limply she fell. Saw her eyes close. He crumpled to his knees beside her, cradling her in his arms.
‘Jill, don’t leave me, please don’t ever, ever leave me. I can’t live without you, I realise that now! I’ve been a fool, the most stupid fool! Oh please, please forgive me!’
He held her tight.
As his heart pressed against hers, he sensed that his was now the only one beating.
As he felt Jill go cold, he sensed too, at last, the incredible warmth that had once existed between them.
And now, now it was gone, it was nothing.
He cried.
‘Jill, you’re the real princess! Not her! You’re the truly beautiful one!’
It was true, of course.
Unfortunately, it’s also true that we only realise how much we care for someone when it is far too late to tell them.
*
Where their hearts met, and Jack’s beat so urgently it beat fast enough for both of them, a glow appeared.
Tiny, at first. But growing.
Growing golden in its gleam.
It wasn’t just any light, however.
Jack felt the glow physically expanding.
Even pushing them slightly apart.
He looked down towards the glow.
It was an apple. A golden apple.
He pulled back in surprise.
The apple hung from a spindly tree growing between them.
Was it an offshoot of the great tree?
Or had it grown from one of the pips that had fallen from the split apple lying beside them?
Jack couldn’t be sure. But the tree was growing rapidly.
Its roots quickly spread, pushing up stones from the soil. Rearranging the stones, pushing them into shapes, into walls.
Its branches, meanwhile, arched over its own expertly built structure, providing a protective roof of interweaving stems and leaves.
The golden apple was left hanging inside the small room, glowing, warming, welcoming.
And naturally, Jill’s eyes blinked open.
‘Have I been asleep?’ she asked innocently.
‘No; I have,’ Jack answered honestly.
And at last they kissed.
And the apple at last glowed brighter than ever.
*
Chapter 14
‘The mirror!’ Luna exclaimed elatedly as the house finished its tale. ‘That’s what we need to find the Fay Queen!’
‘Really? Would that help, do you think?’ the house asked curiously.
‘Isn’t that why you told us the tale?’ Rouger asked petulantly. ‘Why else would you tell us such a long story?’
‘Well, because I thought you could climb to the top of the princess’s tower and see all the roads of the kingdom, of course!’ the nonplussed house replied.
‘Yes, that might work too, of course,’ Luna agreed. ‘Which direction should we take to find this princess’s tower?’
‘Ah, well now there you have me, I’m afraid. I’ve absolutely no idea!’
??
?No idea?’
Rouger was irately glaring at the house once again.
‘Then why did you bother telling us this story? This whole story?’
‘Because I’d hoped, of course, that you might pick up some clues that could lead you there!’
‘He’s right, Rouger,’ Luna pointed out diplomatically. ‘The smithy: we know that’s on the way there.’
‘So, the smithy: how do we get there?’ Rouger demanded, still glowering at the house.
‘How should I know?’
The house raised its eyebrows (the trailing stem of a climbing rose growing above the windows) in surprise that it should be asked such a thing.
‘You could climb to the top of the old tower to see if you could see it,’ he suggested brightly.
‘Then if we can do that, why do we need the princess’s tower?’
‘Because the old tower isn’t safe, of course!’
‘But if we – oh, never mind, you stupid house!’
*
The stairways and ladders of the old house were in a terrible state. Not only where they remained broken from when they had collapsed, but the weather in its turn had wracked havoc on whatever had survived.
The wood was rotting, breaking away in their hands or under their feet as Luna and Rouger attempted to climb up through the wreckage of what used to be this towering house. Stones or bricks, no longer held securely in place by their now thoroughly dried out mortar, would fall away, striking the ground with an ominous crump.
Rouger, normally so sure footed and agile, was surprisingly faring far worse than Luna.
As he placed a foot down, or grabbed at a seemingly strong balustrade, everything cracked around him as if he had been remarkably careless. Even the great tree sounded like it was groaning in agony whenever they took instead to the still-firm branches, believing this to be a safer route up through the crumbling tower.
‘I’ll have to turn back,’ Rouger finally despondently declared. ‘I’m just making things more dangerous for you Luna.’
Luna had to agree. She nodded, and Rouger sadly turned back, slowly and ever so carefully descending back through the rooms they had already managed to precariously clamber through.
The tree seemed to sigh with relief, as if at last freed from bearing a great weight.
Luna continued on her way, her thoughts more on making sure that she moved from floor to floor of the building safely than on the way Rouger had seemed so strangely inept at climbing. Was this a difference between him and the real Rouger? Yet he had earlier climbed the other tree as effortlessly as she would have expected the real Rouger to scamper up it.
Gingerly making her way higher and higher up through the soaring tower, Luna felt light-headed, as if only now realising the dangerous task she’d set herself. For the higher she went, the less of the building there remained. The upper reaches of the towering building had, perhaps not surprisingly, as the support below had collapsed, obviously suffered the most damage.
The very top levels of the tower had vanished completely. When she stood on what remained of what was now the building’s highest balcony, hoping to catch a glimpse of the princess’s own towering structure, she couldn’t see anything but the tree’s veiling branches and leaves. She couldn’t even see the smithy, which supposedly lay much closer than the princess’s tower.
She could, however, pick up the faint strains of a sadly wailing violin, flowing across the tops of the trees on a light wind.
Luna began to descend through the deserted, wrecked rooms once more. Bizarrely, heading down seemed even more dangerous that when she’d only been heading upwards, for now of course her eyes were focused on the great distance to fall. At least when she’d been climbing, she had been directing her gaze only on the sections of the tower still looming over her.
She spotted a spiralling, corkscrew staircase, the type you might find inside a plush library but here descending at least five floors through nothing but otherwise empty space. She hadn’t noticed on the way up: she must have gone astray at some point, losing her way amongst all this chaos of wreckage. It was the perfect way to get down relatively quickly.
She rushed down the stairs, regretting her haste almost immediately when she felt the whole staircase begin to rattle, then worryingly tremble. It swayed, it shook. Dust fell around her, as if she were disturbing the staircase’s supports, both above and below her.
She considered turning around, heading back up the stairs, but she’d reached a point where to retrace her footsteps would probably take longer than just continuing on her way. Far below her, she heard a terrible groaning, perhaps the sounds of the very base of the stairway giving way.
Above her, entire sections of the rooms were falling away, falling about her like inhabitable meteorites. The corkscrew staircase began to literally corkscrew, whirling her around.
Just a few cart-lengths above her, the central pillar of the stairs began to creak, to snap. With a sharp crack, the column shattered, the whole staircase abruptly spinning as if caught in a whirlwind, the part that Luna was still descending spinning outwards in a dizzyingly large circle.
She ran faster, hoping to reach the lower areas, where the spinning wasn’t quite so bad.
The central pillar below her was under intolerable strain.
It protested with a screech, a groan of shattering wood.
Then it too partially snapped in half. The section Luna was rushing down toppled, throwing her from the steps with a frightened yelp.
She grabbed at the hand rail, an instinctive reaction, for there was no way such a useless action would save her if it plummeted to the ground lying far below.
But the shattered section jerked to a sudden halt, the remaining parts of the pillar stopping it from completely dropping away. It hung at a crazy angle, the steps that only a moment ago were the highest ones now lower than many of those winding around the remaining pillar.
The sudden halting of the falling section had jolted Luna so hard she almost let go of the handrail – but she clung on, dangling in space with nothing but her pained, rapidly weakening hand to stop her falling.
*
Chapter 15
The broken section was hanging too far out for Luna to hope she could leap from where she was hanging towards somewhere safer. The angle it was hanging at was also too steep for her to swing her feet up and cling onto something.
She was dangling by a single, increasingly weary arm, with nothing around her to prevent her from falling to the ground lying far below. Worse still, the remaining part of the pillar holding the broken section in place was creaking under this extra strain, the surviving shreds of wood and iron connecting them snapping one by one.
The rooms lying far off to one side of her shuddered and groaned, as if they too were readying to fall away.
‘Did you throw this shoe?’ irately demanded a booming voice.
Luna had to twist in the air slightly to see who was speaking.
It was a giant, standing at the opening to a large room whose wall had fallen away. He was holding Luna’s shoe in one hand, rubbing his head with his other, as if tenderly caressing a bruised bump.
Glancing down at her feet, Luna realised for the first time that one of her shoes had dropped off at some time during her fall.
‘Oh, er; I didn’t throw it,’ Luna explained. ‘It was an accident.’
‘Hmn, I suppose as that as it were an accident, that’s as should be forgivable,’ the giant said with a doubtful frown, still rubbing his sore head.
Carefully placing the shoe on a nearby broken shelf, he turned to leave.
‘I, er, don’t suppose you could help me?’ Luna asked tentatively.
‘What?’
The giant turned around once more, his eyes opening wide as if at last seeing Luna’s precarious position.
‘Oh, course! How silly of me,’ he said, picking the shoe up.
Reaching out across the huge gap separating them, he tenderly slipped it onto
Luna’s foot.
He turned to leave once more.
‘I, er, meant – could you please get me down?’
The giant turned around again.
‘Down?’ he said, his frown now one of puzzlement. ‘I thought as you were just a playing around.’
Reaching out yet again, he carefully took Luna in one of his great hands as, with a sigh of relief, she let go of the handrail. He held her as if she were weightless as he safely brought her across the great divide, placing her alongside him on the room’s gently sloping floor.
Close up, the giant appeared even more massive than Luna had first supposed. She wondered how the wrecked rooms managed to support his great weight, while the far smaller Rouger had caused everything about him to tremble as if about to start collapsing again at any moment.
He must be very light on his feet, she supposed, thinking back to how tenderly he had fitted her shoe back onto her foot.
‘Thank you!’ she breathed gratefully. ‘I take it you must be one of the giants who originally used to live here?’
‘Still do live here,’ the giant replied huffily. ‘There’s no “originally used to” about it. And I ain’t no giant neither. As you’d know, if you’d a seen the size of the real giants as originally used to live here.’
‘Why didn’t you leave with everyone else when the tower began to fall?’
‘Not everyone left, as there’s some as still likes living here. Me, I was one of those as caught on the wrong side of the fairy portholes, when they all a started collapsing along with the building.’
‘Fairy portholes? What are those? Some doorway into another land?’
‘Ah, you see, you do know as what they are! That’s as how most of the gnomes and giants – which don’t include me, by the way: not amongst the giants, anyway – moved in here in the first place. See, as the place and tree around it grew, more and more of the fairy portholes opened up. And as it all started falling about our ears, most as could fled back through them, taking some of the human villagers with them: not against their will, mind. Some of the lands on the other side are nice places to live too, provided you make sure you pick the right doorways.’
This news of fairy portholes worried Luna; the Fay Queen would have undoubtedly used one herself to make the perfect escape. That meant finding the princess’s magic mirror was more important than ever, for it was probably the only way she would have any chance of finding out exactly were the Fay Queen had moved to.