"Ah, yes, I can see it!" the princess interrupted. "We'll have the next poor fool who wanders into the kingdom perform some incredible feat, like touch his toes twice or balance a book on his head for seven seconds, or maybe we can pose him a riddle, like asking what's his name and where he's from—and if he answers correctly, then he's got to marry me."
"Well," agreed the king, "more or less."
"No," the wizard said firmly. Then he repeated it for emphasis. "No." He looked directly at the princess. "That would be demeaning."
Now she looked away.
"Trust me. All you need to do is generate a little enthusiasm. You don't need to resort to trickery."
She ran her hand through her hair, trying to force it into some sort of manageability. "All right," she said softly. "I agree. I will marry the man who can pass the test you devise. Now, what shall it be?"
The wizard was struck by inspiration. "We will ask the suitors to present you with three golden cucumbers from the secret garden of the dwarf Maximilian. That way, if you don't like a particular suitor—if he's too young, or too silly, or too whatever—all you have to do is refuse to accept the cucumbers from him, and the quest isn't considered fulfilled."
"Cucumbers?" the king said. "Cucumbers? Isn't one usually sent in quest of golden apples?"
"Anybody can do apples," the wizard scoffed.
"Oh, well, thank you very much!" Teddy said. "But I've heard about this dwarf Maximilian. Funeral arrangements to be handled by the family. Calling hours, eight to ten. No flowers, please."
"Now, see here," the wizard said. "It's hard, but not impossible."
"'Not impossible,'" Teddy repeated. "Maybe not for a wizard." She started biting one of her fingernails.
"Really," he assured her. Then, ignoring the little voice inside his head that warned he was about to go too far, he said, "Look. I'll prove it can be done. I'll do it."
"Without magic?" Teddy asked.
The wizard nodded, but she continued to look worried. It wasn't fair, he thought. After seeing how princesses like Rosalie and Gilbertina could attract royal suitors, the wizard felt it just wasn't fair that a sweet girl like Teddy couldn't, if that was what she wanted. His sense of outrage prompted him to say, "Well, my goodness, if you don't trust me, if you want to come along to check up on me—"
"Oh," she said. "What a fine idea! Thank you."
The king leaped to his feet to shake the wizard's hand.
"Well, that's settled then." The queen stood up and smiled. "Have a nice trip."
The wizard took a deep breath and wondered how he got himself into these things. Maybe he could blame this on that witch he'd met in the blacksmith's shop—the one who may or may not have cursed him.
He was to wonder about that many times in the three days it took to reach the island ruled by the dwarf king Maximilian.
They had to travel by horse, for Princess Teddy insisted that even the wizard's transporting spell, being magic, was not fair.
"But there's nothing here," the wizard complained as their horses plodded along the dusty trail, which caused him to alternately cough and sneeze. "There's just plains and meadows and small towns until we get to Maximilian's lake: no danger, nothing interesting."
"Still, you never know," Teddy kept saying.
So they rode, and they camped out, and the wizard volunteered to do all the cooking. Still, the time passed quickly, for Teddy was good company and knew or made up all sorts of exciting stories.
After three days had passed, quicker than the wizard would have thought possible, they came to the edge of the lake that surrounded the dwarf king's forbidden island.
Princess Teddy looked from the dwarf king's walled garden, which they could see from the far shore, to the water that separated them from it. "What kind of fish are those?" she asked apprehensively, pointing at the large, dark shapes that watched them from the water.
The wizard studied them warily. "I don't know, but they certainly have a lot of teeth, don't they?"
Teddy pulled him back from the edge. "Careful. That one was licking its lips when you leaned over like that."
The wizard didn't think fish—even hungry fish—licked their lips, but he decided to keep his distance, just in case. He said, "Dwarfs are nothing if not practical. And casting a spell each time they come here from their kingdom beneath the mountain would be an awful waste of magic. So we can assume there's a nonmagical way to cross." He began walking along the edge, peering at the water. The shadowy creatures in the lake stared back at him.
"Ways to cross a body of water," Teddy said, and began to count on her fingers. "Boat: We don't have one. Swim: We don't dare. Jump: We couldn't. Bridge: We don't see one..."
The wizard grabbed the finger she had used for the last point. "Exactly!"
"Exactly what?"
"There has to be a bridge," the wizard said, "but we can't see it. Why? What can you see right through?"
Teddy bit at a fingernail. "Air ... water..." She studied his face for a change of expression. "Glass..."
He grinned and pointed to the water directly in front of them. To the left, a school of nasty little fish with long sharp teeth waited expectantly. To the right hovered a nasty big fish—which also had long sharp teeth. But in front of them there was a span of water that none of the creatures crossed. There was no visible boundary in the water, and the sandy bottom of the lake stretched unmarked to either side, yet for as long as the two of them looked, nothing passed through it.
"A glass bridge," Teddy whispered, "just below the surface of the water."
The wizard led the way, but Teddy followed close after. The glass bridge was narrow and slippery, and the lake creatures, big and little, swam as close to it as they could. The wizard could almost believe that he heard them grinding their teeth in frustration, but that was as silly as the picture of them licking their hungry fish lips. He and the princess made it safely to the other side.
"Whew!" she said. Then she gasped. "Look out!"
A dwarf had leaped over the wall that surrounded the garden and was now running down the hill toward them.
"I thought you said the dwarfs lived in a kingdom under the mountain," Teddy said. She took a step back as the little man approached, holding on to his crown with one hand and waving an ax with the other. "Why is their king guarding their garden?"
The wizard was confused. "He shouldn't be here. King Maximilian and his people do live under the mountain. Surely he's got more important things to do than sit here day after day protecting the vegetation."
But even as the wizard spoke, the dwarf king came to a stop just a few feet from them. Though he was short, he had very muscular arms, and his face was one even a mother would call nasty. He straightened his crown and said in a voice that was almost as much whine as growl: "You've come for my cucumbers, haven't you? Everybody always tries to steal my cucumbers. Two knights can't agree who's the best, they decide the one who can steal Maximilian's cucumbers is the winner. Prince wants to prove he's worthy of some lady's love, he steals a cucumber from poor Maximilian. Father doesn't have a dowry for his daughter, he sneaks in here, 'cause old Maximilian can be counted on to have enough gold for a hundred dowries, if you don't mind it coming in a vegetable state. I bet you have some long, sad, perfectly reasonable reason to be here, too, don't you?"
With a guilty expression, Teddy glanced at the wizard. "Well, I—"
"Ha!" Maximilian snorted. "A likely story!"
The wizard put his hand in front of his mouth and cleared his throat, then left his hand blocking his mouth to whisper to Teddy, "He shouldn't be here."
"You should be ashamed of yourselves," the dwarf king said, once again whining, "tall people like you." He held his ax higher, threatening.
Still, the wizard shook his head. "King Maximilian here? To guard a few golden cucumbers?"
Teddy leaned close to whisper into his ear, "This is not all that important, you know."
"Of course it is," he told her, tho
ugh Maximilian had taken a step closer. The wizard gave Teddy what he hoped was a reassuring smile. He said to her, "I told you, dwarfs are practical. I think Maximilian's too practical to sit here day after day on the off chance that someone makes it past the lake. This figure is only imaginary. A spirit guard." More quietly, he added, "I hope." He found himself holding Princess Teddy's hand. Even her freckles had turned pale, but he was impressed that she had neither fainted—something princesses were distressingly prone to do—nor tried to run away. "We see him, but he does not exist," the wizard insisted, partly for her benefit but also to reassure himself.
"Last chance to run away," Maximilian warned.
The wizard and Teddy stood fast.
The dwarf swung the ax.
The wizard could see the hairs in the little warrior's warts, and he could feel the rush of air from the ax, swinging to chop off his head.
But the ax passed right through him, so that the wizard couldn't even feel it, but only saw the blade again as it passed out through the other side.
The wizard closed his eyes and mentally counted to ten before he could breathe normally again. Then he walked through the image of Maximilian, who continued to swing his ax as though hewing his way through an army of wizards.
Sighing with relief, Princess Teddy pulled her frizzy brown hair away from her face and followed the wizard. Maximilian stayed on the bank, still hacking away with his ax, "Now what?" Teddy asked.
"Now," the wizard said, once his voice had come back, "we get the cucumbers."
But that was easier said than done. There were pear trees and peach trees and cherry trees, and all sorts of nut trees. There were grapevines, berry bushes, tomato plants, and cornstalks. (The wizard really envied the dwarf's garden.) But there was no vine with golden cucumbers.
"I don't understand it," the wizard said.
There was, in fact, only one cucumber vine in the entire garden. It grew up and around a lattice arch, and the two travelers stood beneath it, looking up at the multitude of large, very ordinary, very green cucumbers.
"Maybe golden cucumbers are green until they get ripe," Teddy suggested without much conviction.
"Maybe," the wizard said, trying to sound more hopeful than he felt, for some of the cucumbers looked perfectly ripe to him, but there wasn't a hint of gold. "Or maybe the gold ones grow on the same vine as the regular ones, and they're hidden under the leaves."
"Maybe," Teddy agreed, but the wizard suspected she said that only to be polite.
The wizard climbed up the trellis, but after a few minutes he was all sweaty, and he had twigs and leaves caught in his hair and scratches on his arms. "That does it," he said, jumping back down to the ground. "You were right: It can't be done. We'll think of another quest to test your prospective suitors."
"You know," said Teddy, "I was just thinking. First, we came to something that we couldn't see but that was there: the glass bridge. Then we came to something that we could see but that wasn't really there: the guardian dwarf." She circled the trellis thoughtfully. "Now here we've got something that we can see, which presumably is really here, but which, perhaps..."
"...isn't what it seems to be," the wizard finished. He nodded. "Very good. Very, very good. I'm impressed."
Princess Teddy blushed. "Well, before you get too impressed, check to see if I'm right."
The wizard reached up and put a hand around one of the plump green cucumbers. He tugged it loose, and felt it grow warm and heavy in his hand. He lowered his arm, held the cucumber out before them, and was surprised that his hand shook a bit. The sun sparkled on the cucumber's smooth surface as it slowly turned to solid gold, shiny enough for him to see his bedraggled reflection. He took a deep breath and looked at the princess's face. He'd done it. He'd proved that someone—without using magic—could get the golden cucumbers. If he could do it, so could someone else, and that someone would marry Princess Teddy. The wizard's job was done. So why was he feeling so sad? He held the cucumber out to Teddy.
She made a small move as though to take it from him, then pulled back her hand. "You said three," she murmured—though, being taller, she could have reached them better than he.
The wizard plucked two more, then held all three out to her. "See," he said with a bow, "it is possible for a man to steal three of the golden cucumbers from the secret garden of the dwarf Maximilian, without magic, and win the hand of the princess Theodora."
She accepted the cucumbers with a shy smile, then said, "Gotcha!"
The wizard's smile vanished. "I beg your pardon?"
"Gotcha. And you know it: You filled every requirement of the quest." She pointed a finger with a ragged fingernail. "Right?"
"Now wait a moment—"
"Right?"
The wizard sighed, folded his arms across his chest, and sighed again. The princess was watching him with an anxious expression. But he didn't notice her frizzy hair, or her freckles, or the fact that he had to tilt his head back to look her in the eye; he thought of the funny stories she had told to pass the time on their trip, and of her cleverness and her bravery. She was, he thought, the most exquisitely beautiful princess he'd ever met. The witch had been perfectly right about true happiness. He shook his head, but he smiled as he did so. "Got me," he admitted.
Teddy looked away. "Not that I'd really force you—"
The wizard took her hand and kissed it gently. "Let's go home," he said, "my princess."
And they did.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Front
How It All Starts
The Beautiful Princess, the Wicked Stepmother, and the Ugly Stepsister
Beasts on the Rampage
To Rescue a Princess
A Wizard and Ghost
The Princess and the Quest for the Golden Cucumbers
Vivian Vande Velde, Wizard at Work
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