“But I know someone who does!” the Tradesman called after me.
“Who?” I demanded.
“I never trade for free,” the Tradesman said, and extended an open palm toward me.
I placed a few gold coins in his hand. He kept his hand extended, and I placed a few more coins into it until he was satisfied.
“Her name is Hagatha,” the Tradesman said.
“Where can I find her?”
“Take this path west into the Dwarf Forests, past the three boulders, and then follow the smoke,” the Tradesman said, and that was all the direction he gave. He took the reins of his mule and traveled away from me.
Had I been thinking clearly, I would have chased after him and asked for more instructions, but instead I took off running toward the Dwarf Forests.
I had never been inside the Dwarf Forests before. I had been told of their dangers since I was a child, and once I was there I knew why I had been warned. The trees grew so thick and close that someone could be standing three feet away from you and you would never know they were there.
It took two days to find the three boulders the Tradesman had spoken of.
They were three large rocks that stuck straight out of the ground and were tilted in a peculiar position. I thought perhaps they might have been pointing at something, so I lowered my head to look in the direction they pointed.
The boulders pointed directly between two trees separated just enough that you could see a wide patch of the sky, and in this patch I could see smoke!
I ran toward the source of the smoke. Wherever it was coming from was completely off the path, and I almost seriously injured myself jumping over bushes and tree roots as I went.
Occasionally, I could see the sky through the tree branches and could tell if I was off track. I must have traveled in circles for hours. Every time I thought I was just about to find the place from which the smoke came, the wind would shift it in another direction.
I was lost. Every way I turned looked exactly the same. I felt as if the forest had swallowed me.
The sun was setting, and the smoke became harder to see. I started to panic; there was no shelter in sight. I thought for sure a treacherous beast would find me during the night and make a feast out of me.
I started running again. I could barely see where I was going at this point. I could hear howling in the distance. I tripped and fell straight through a large thornbush.
I landed hard in the grass on other side of the thornbush. I was scraped, scratched, and bleeding.
I got to my feet and looked around; I was standing in a large, circular clearing in the forest surrounded by a large wall of thornbush. In the center of this clearing was a small hut with a hay roof and a brick chimney. And rising out of this chimney was the smoke I had been following.
No wonder it had been so hard to find! I must have been wandering in circles around it, not knowing it was hidden behind the thornbush.
I approached the hut slowly. It had one door and two windows, and that was all. I went to knock on the door, but it burst open before I had a chance.
“Who are you?” said the woman who emerged from the hut.
I knew from the second I saw her that it was Hagatha. She looked like a human tree stump. She was short and wore a brown hooded cloak. Deep wrinkles circled her face, and one of her eyes was squinted. Her nose was one of the smallest I had ever seen and was neighbored by a gigantic mole.
“Are you Hagatha?” I asked her.
“How did you find me?” she snapped.
“I tripped through the thornbush,” I said.
“But how did you know I was here?” she asked. Her squinted eye squinted even more.
“The Traveling Tradesman,” I told her. “He said you knew of the Wishing Spell.”
Hagatha grunted and sighed at the same time. Her lips wrinkled and looked me up and down. Reluctantly, she gestured me to follow her inside.
“Come in, come in!” Hagatha said.
The inside of the hut was an utter mess. There were vials of strange liquids everywhere; some bubbled, some glistened, some steamed. There were dozens of glass jars containing the strangest things: dead and alive reptiles, insects of every species, even a glass jar of various eyeballs. Even though they had been plucked out from their owner’s lids, I swear one of them blinked at me.
I was surprised to see how many animals were inside the hut as well; everything from geese and chickens to hummingbirds and monkeys all resided in cages. They were all restless, prisoners no doubt.
“Have a seat,” Hagatha instructed. She pointed to a chair at the end of a table so large that it almost took up the entire hut.
“I see you are a collector of sorts,” I said.
She didn’t welcome the conversation. She ignored me and collected a few items around the room, a bowl here, a vial there.
“The thornbush surrounding your home is very clever,” I said. “It must keep out most unwanted visitors.”
“Most,” she said, and glared at me. “That thornbush is from the Sleeping Kingdom. I planted it here and it grew around my home in a perfect circle, just as it grew around the castle while the queen was in her one-hundred-year slumber. You are the first to break through it.”
“I do apologize—”
“This will cost you fifteen gold coins,” Hagatha said, and took a seat across from me.
“For what?” I asked.
“You want to know what the Wishing Spell items are, don’t you?” she asked. “That is why you’re here, is it not?”
I reached into my pocket and laid all the coins I had left on the table. Unfortunately, doing business with the Tradesman had left me short.
“I only have fourteen coins,” I told her.
Hagatha did not look pleased. “You stupid youth and your wishes. Very well,” she said, and scooped up all the coins with one swipe.
She placed a bowl in front of her and emptied the contents of two vials into it: one red liquid, the other blue.
“One eye of an eagle, the wings of a pixie, and the heart of a newt,” Hagatha said, and added these items into the bowl. “Plus three drops of giant blood, the big toe of an ogre, and a straw of gold hay. That completes the potion.”
With all the ingredients added, the liquid in the bowl started to smoke and glow. Hagatha leaned over it and breathed it in. She closed her eyes and lost herself in a moment of deep thought.
“Does this potion tell you what the Wishing Spell items are?” I asked her.
“No, but it helps me remember,” Hagatha said. “You aren’t the first, and you won’t be the last person to request the list. Consider yourself warned: Many people have lost their lives trying to acquire these items. They are impossible to collect.”
“I’d rather die trying than live the rest of life wondering if I could have done it,” I said.
“Then listen carefully to what I’m about to say, because I’ll only say it once,” Hagatha said.
I leaned as close to her as I possibly could. The anticipation made every second feel like an hour. This is what I had come all this way for….
“There are eight,” Hagatha said. She took a deep breath and then listed the items:
“Glass that housed a lonely soul up ’til midnight’s final toll.
A saber from the deepest sea, meant for a groom’s mortality.
The bark of a basket held in fright while running from a bark with bite.
A stony crown that’s made to share, found deep within a savage lair.
A needle that pierced the lovely skin of a princess with beauty found within.
A wavy lock of golden rope that once was freedom’s only hope.
Glittering jewels whose value increased after preserving the false deceased.
Teardrops of a maiden fairy feeling neither magical nor merry.
I repeated the list to myself the entire way home and wrote the Wishing Spell list and my journey thus far into this journal. I don’t know how I’m going to gather
these items, but my goal is to find them and then record how I managed it, in case I ever need to do it again.
If you’re reading this, I hope it means I succeeded, and if you’re reading this and are about to start a journey of your own, I wish you luck.
“Wow,” Alex said, looking up from the journal.
“You can say that again,” Conner said. “You read that much faster than I did.”
“Did you read any farther?” Alex asked. “Did he find all the items? Did he make it back?”
“I don’t know. There are a lot of pages missing,” Conner said.
Alex scanned through the list of the Wishing Spell items. She hadn’t expected them to be hidden within riddles.
“Most of these are pretty easy to figure out,” she said. “Like ‘A needle that pierced the lovely skin of a princess with beauty found within.’ That’s obviously the spindle on Sleeping Beauty’s spinning wheel.”
“And ‘A wavy lock of golden rope that once was freedom’s only hope,’ ” Conner said. “That’s totally a lock of Rapunzel’s hair!”
Conner looked around the space where he was sitting. From between two floorboards he pulled out a lock of long, golden hair.
“Found one!” Conner said. “One of the first things I noticed when I got up here was how much that Rapunzel girl shed! Now we’re one-eighth of the way home!”
Alex carefully wrapped the lock of golden hair in a tissue from her school bag.
“What do you suppose ‘Glass that housed a lonely soul up ’til midnight’s final toll’ means?” she asked. “Whose soul was covered in glass?”
“I know!” Conner said. “Cinderella’s glass slipper! That covered the sole of her foot!”
“Of course!” Alex said. “This list was spoken. Maybe Hagatha meant sole, like on a foot, but the man heard it as soul, like a person’s spirit! Conner, you’re a genius!”
“There’s an alternative spelling?” Conner asked, but Alex went on.
“I wonder what ‘The bark of a basket held in fright while running from a bark with bite’ means,” said Alex, thinking hard. “Basket, basket, basket… bite, bite, bite… Little Red Riding Hood! Her basket must have been made out of tree bark! And the bark with bite is talking about the Big Bad Wolf!”
“Okay,” Conner said. “That would make sense.”
Alex stood up and started pacing around the tower.
“ ‘Glittering jewels whose value increased after preserving the false deceased.’ That’s a tough one,” she said. “Who was falsely deceased?”
“Didn’t people think Snow White was dead after she bit into the poisoned apple?” Conner asked.
“Yes, that’s right!” said Alex, jumping up and down. “She had a coffin made of glass and jewels from the dwarf mines! That must be what it means!”
“I’m so glad Dad and Grandma read to us so much growing up!” Conner said. “Who ever would have thought it would be this useful?”
“ ‘Teardrops of a maiden fairy feeling neither magical nor merry.’ I guess we’ll just have to find a fairy who has recently broken up with her boyfriend or something,” Alex surmised.
“You don’t think we could just kick her and make her cry?” Conner asked. “That just seems easier to me.”
Alex ignored him and vigorously flipped through the journal again.
“Glass slipper? Check! Spindle? Check! Coffin? Check!” Alex said. “According to the notes scribbled in the margins, the author of the journal seems to agree with our guesses. I still don’t know what some of these things are, though, like ‘A saber from the deepest sea, meant for a groom’s mortality’ or ‘A stony crown that’s made to share, found deep within a savage lair.’ ”
“Like I said, there are a lot of pages missing,” Conner said.
Alex was disheartened by this. The items they knew of seemed virtually impossible to collect, let alone the items they didn’t know of. She walked over to the window and looked out at the view. The sun was just about to set, and, one by one, the fireplaces in the village nearby were lit and sent trails of smoke into the darkening sky.
“What if we get some of these riddles wrong?” she asked. “What if we guess the wrong thing? What if the author guessed wrong? What if he never made it back? What if he died trying?”
“We’ll just have to do our best,” Conner said, joining Alex at the window. “Some annoying little girl told me once that optimism always pays off, and she’s usually right about things.”
Alex smirked warmly at her brother.
“Okay, then,” she said. “So far, we have a lock of Rapunzel’s hair. We still need to collect Cinderella’s slipper, Sleeping Beauty’s spindle, jewels from Snow White’s coffin, bark from Red Riding Hood’s basket, tears from a fairy, plus two other items we have no idea about.”
Conner gulped at hearing the list. They both looked out over the horizon and at the sea of trees that surrounded the tower. Somewhere out there, all of these things were waiting to be found.
“It looks like we’re going to see more of the Land of Stories than we thought,” Conner said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A HIDDEN PLACE
The northern tip of the Sleeping Kingdom was an ugly and vacant place. It was known for its bare trees, bumpy paths, and dangerously high cliffs. Small stones were scattered on the earth, making it nearly impossible to travel to by carriage. Even though it rained every so often, nothing ever grew, making it impossible for any animals to live there.
In the middle of this dry and deserted place was a small castle surrounded by a deep and empty moat. It was ancient and made of dark bricks, wooden doors, and had been through years of decay. No one knew who had built the castle or why it had been built but, then again, very few people even knew of its existence.
The inside of the castle was covered in a thick layer of dust. Cobwebs almost as old as the castle were on every windowsill, even though there were no spiders to be found. All the rooms and corridors were empty except for the occasional decrepit chair or table placed in a corner.
A great hall completed the eastern wing of the castle. Floor-length windows bordered the hall, letting in a lot of light, but they were so old that the glass distorted the outside world.
The castle couldn’t have been a less desirable place to be. But, for one woman, it was the perfect place to hide.
Somehow, the Evil Queen had escaped the dungeons of Snow White’s palace. She managed to get ahold of her Magic Mirror and traveled to a place where she knew she would never be found. The castle acted as the perfect sanctuary where she could finish the work she had started so long ago.
The Evil Queen was not a stranger to this place. Over the last century or so, many people had come to the castle, but only she and a few others were fortunate enough to have left it, including someone the former queen had not seen in a great while.
She had recently sent word to this old friend, asking him to come and aid her. And so she waited for him to arrive, knowing that he would any day now, for he owed her his life.
The Evil Queen stood facing her Magic Mirror with open palms and closed eyes. She was quite calm for being the most wanted woman alive. To her right, resting on a short stool, was the heart of stone she had always kept close.
Although it was one of the most infamous objects in all of the kingdoms, very few people had ever seen the Evil Queen’s Magic Mirror. Many believed it was made of glamorous materials, like gold and diamonds and glass so pure one would swear they could walk through it.
In reality, the mirror was tall and wide with a black frame that peaked at the top. Tangled vines made of cast iron wove through the frame. The reflection was cloudy, as if it were a glass doorway into a very cold and foggy place. Although there was very little moisture in the air, perspiration dripped down the glass.
The Evil Queen opened her eyes and gazed deep into the mirror.
“Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, how long ’til the Huntsman answers my call?” she asked it.
The ghostly silhouette of a man appeared in the reflection. It spoke slowly and softly with a low and hoarse voice.
“While my queen awaits an old friend, once dear,
The Huntsman travels very near.”
The man in the mirror slowly faded away. Within moments, three loud knocks came from the other side of the great hall doors.
“You may enter,” the Evil Queen said.
The doors opened, creaking terribly, and a man entered the hall. He was tall, broad, and just on the verge of old age. He wore a variety of animal skins and had a limp in his right leg. His beard was light brown and graying. A crossbow was attached to his back, and a large hunting knife hung from his waist.
“My Huntsman has returned,” the Evil Queen said.
The Huntsman walked across the hall to where the Evil Queen was standing.
“It’s been a long time since I last saw your face,” she said, “and I still find it hard to stomach looking at you.”
The Huntsman fell to his knees and wept at her feet.
“Your Majesty,” the Huntsman cried. “Please forgive me, for I have never forgiven myself after failing you!”
The Evil Queen looked down at him coldly. She had no sympathy left inside her for anyone.
“After all you had done for me and after all the mercy you had shown me, I could not kill the princess in the forest,” the Huntsman said. “And just look at all the pain it has caused you. Had I just done as you asked, you would still be queen.”
The Evil Queen let his pathetic sobs continue for a while longer. She showed no sign of forgiveness. He deserved to feel this way.
She stepped away from the Huntsman and peered through a window at the lifeless land that surrounded them.
“You and I were both prisoners in this castle once,” the Evil Queen said. “I never imagined that one day it would act as my only refuge.”
“You saved me,” the Huntsman said. “I surely would have died here, had it not been for you. That is why I swore to you then that I would do anything to assist you with your mission. But I failed you—”