Story's End (13 page)

He sprang to his feet, Indy beside him, and they began throwing rolled-up broadsides into the crowd. Kai hadn’t given the people any of the leaf, but his words seemed to free some of them, at least, from the enchantment they had been under.

“Who is that?” someone cried.

“What does he mean that Fidelus is our Enemy?”

“We want the truth!” the cowgirl Peter had talked to earlier yelled.

At that moment, Sam’s clowder of cats poured into the arena. Some slunk in over the top of the wall. Others galloped through the side doors. One even dropped down onto the stage. On the cats’ necks rode tiny pixies, arrows taut in their silken bows. They simultaneously released their smoldering arrows, straight up toward the sky. With a great explosion, the air filled with sparkling pixie dust, which snaked and twisted to sketch a shape Peter had seen not that long ago. He thought Elton might have recognized it, too, by the astonished look on his face. There, right in the middle of Elton’s big meeting, sprouted a huge, beautiful outline of the Kingstree.

Chapter 14

S
now rubbed her eyes and blinked up at the grubby face hovering two inches in front of her own. Beady black eyes twinkled out at her over a pointed beard. Then Snow rubbed her eyes again. She wasn’t dreaming.

The thing was shaking her by the collar. “Wake up!” it said in a thick voice. Snow sat up and saw the creature was barely a foot high.
A leprechaun.

“Best not to stay in the Red Lady’s traps,” it said.

“Where am I?” Snow’s head felt foggy. “Who are you?” Another leprechaun had a tiny sword out and was sawing Snow free from the sticky web that still bound her feet. It was all coming back to her now. They had seen Duessa in the forest and had run away— “Wait. Where’s my mother? And Archimago?” Snow tried to sit up, but only her arms were free. She kicked her legs to no avail. The rest of her was stuck fast.

How long had she been asleep? It had been night when they left the castle, and daylight filtered through the treetops now. “There were others—a tall woman with silver hair and a crazy old man.”

The leprechaun nearest her jumped back, both knobby hands outstretched. “Pull it together, kid.” He darted a look over his shoulder. “You’re making too much noise.”

Snow grabbed the leprechaun by his shirtfront. “Where is the woman who was with me?” Her legs were still trapped in the sticky web.

The leprechaun’s eyes grew wide. He kicked his legs back and forth. “Calm yourself. The Red Lady will hear.”

Snow didn’t release him. Leprechauns were tricky creatures. They could be helpful, like the kind that sneaked into houses and tidied up for the owners, or not so helpful. She hoped these were the first kind. She didn’t have time for riddles and impossible quests that always ended badly.

“There was also a man. Old and filthy.”

“Do you see any man?” This leprechaun had a nasty-looking hook, and he waved it around in the air until it pointed at her. “I don’t see anyone else. Do you, Tuck? Besides a fool human girl, that is.”

Snow ignored the barb and set the leprechaun down. She had no doubt Archimago would do anything to save his scrawny hide. But even with all her mother’s faults, Snow knew she wouldn’t abandon Snow in the Enchanted Forest, no matter what. So where was she? Could the Red Enchantress have followed them somehow? Taken her mother back to that awful castle? “Wait. You said something about the Red Lady.”

“May she sink into the bottomless swamp and burn forever.” The one called Tuck spit on the ground. “She passed this way not long ago. The whole wood reeks of her.”

Snow stopped struggling in the trap. At least the creatures weren’t in Duessa’s service. “We were running from her when we got caught in your web.”

“Not our web,” Tuck said as he sliced the last piece of web from Snow’s ankle. “
Hers
, may her food rot in her mouth. To catch unwanted visitors.”

“I was traveling with a woman,” Snow said as she flexed her one free foot. “I need to find her.” As soon as she had seen the fog, she should have known. It was one of the reasons no one ventured into the Enchanted Forest beyond the Hollow. The woods were riddled with traps. Some were set by the more sinister Villains who lived there. And some, apparently, were rigged by Duessa herself.

Tuck looked at his companion. “What say you, Tumbler? Friend or foe?”

Tumbler scratched his chin with the pointy end of his hook. “Hard to be sure. But, either way, the Warlock’s Apprentice wants to see her.” He cut the final cord on her net, and Snow was free. “You’ll have to come with us.”

“The one Fidelus is looking for?” Snow flexed her leg. Fidelus was ripping open Tales to find this guy, and the Apprentice was in Duessa’s backyard? Snow had to find her mother and tell her. She took two steps and found herself surrounded by Tuck and Tumbler’s companions. The leprechauns were filthy, their clothes hardly recognizable beyond tattered rags. And they smelled. From the looks on their faces, they had no idea what she was talking about. Something sharp pricked her in the calf.

“Ow!” Snow frowned down at the leprechaun who had poked her with his stupid hook. He held a worn net in his other fist, and his friends also wielded an odd jumble of household tools that had been fashioned into weapons.

“No need for all that.” Snow lifted up her hands. “I want to meet this Apprentice anyway.” It was a good thing, too, because the leprechauns weren’t giving her much of a choice as they herded her through the forest. With any luck, the Apprentice lived outside the woods, and, once she had talked to the Apprentice and found her mother, she could get far away from here. “As long as you’re sure the Apprentice isn’t a friend of the Red Lady’s, that is,” she added almost as an afterthought.

There was a minute when each of the leprechauns spit on the ground in turn and cursed Duessa to rot under the still water, whatever that meant. It was good enough for Snow.

“Excellent,” said Snow. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

The leprechauns were fast, and their light weight gave them the advantage as the land grew swampier. Snow had trouble keeping pace with them, and each step forward into the gooey mud took more and more effort. She had to pull hard to fight the suction against her soles, and half the time her foot came straight out, leaving a mud-clumped boot stranded in the mire. Snow wobbled on one foot and yanked hard on her shoe.
The Warlock’s Apprentice better be worth this.

The air was thick with moisture, and the stillness of the forest had been replaced with sounds of hidden life. Mosquitoes buzzed hopefully around her ears, and a chorus of bullfrogs provided a mellow background for the leprechauns’ constant bickering.

“I say it weren’t alive before, and then it was. I saw it with my own eyes.” Tumbler appeared to be the leader of the group, even though none of the others seemed to accept his word as true.

“Well, I say you had been in your cups too long,” Tuck argued. “Didn’t the missus give you a whole tankard to take with you?”

“A tankard’s nothing,” Tumbler snorted. “You’ll wish you had a whole tableful of tankards if the half-dead creature I saw comes for you. Bunch of yellow-hearted cowards.” He swiped his hook through the air. “Even
she
couldn’t make them look whole.”

“You’ve seen the Red Lady?” Snow realized her mistake as soon as she said it. The spitting ritual took even longer this time, as each leprechaun tried to trump the others’ curses. After the Red Lady had been condemned to a bath of thickest mud, sand that would come out of her nostrils, and the poison bite of the swamp rat, Snow finally got her answer.

“Aye,” Tuck said. “I did once from afar, may she rot in the fetid springs of waste.”

Snow lost her balance, and one foot landed in a soggy puddle.

“Are you mad, girl?” Tumbler demanded when Snow asked how far Perrault was from here. “You’d have to pass right by the Red Castle, and she’d see you coming a mile away. And there’s beasts and worse in her dungeons. The whole castle stinks of the Taleless.”

“Now, you never said afore that it was the Taleless you saw,” one of the oldest-looking leprechauns said to Tumbler. His floppy hat kept sliding down over one eye, and he finally whipped it off with a huff. “The Taleless are near enough the walking dead themselves, and I wouldna put it past the Red Lady to try and bring the dead to life if it served her cause.”

The other leprechauns nodded sagely, and one even went so far as to give Tumbler his net, but he shoved it away. “No need for all of that. Keep your net. And your wits about you. Dark things are afoot in these lands.”

“That’s the understatement of the age,” Snow said as her boot sank down into the muck yet again. She was putting together what the leprechauns were saying with what she had overheard when Elton was ripping open the Tale. “You’re telling me that Duessa is—”

The leprechauns hawked up their spit in preparation.

“Now cut that out, will you?”

The leprechauns watched her silently, their mouths shut tight.

Snow found it hard to stay balanced on one leg, and her stocking foot wobbled as she tried to yank the offending boot out of the swamp. “Bringing the dead to life is more than a ‘dark thing’! It’s insane!”

The leprechauns said nothing.

“Oh, forget it. Go ahead with your stupid curses.” Snow managed to get her foot reshod while the leprechauns revealed the grim depth of their repertoire of curses. She hoped Tumbler had been drinking too much. Snow wasn’t all that familiar with the dark ways, and she knew even less about the forbidden magic that played with life and death, but from what Elton had said and what Tumbler had seen, she thought she knew how the Taleless were being given new bodies. She felt sick to her stomach. As much as she despised Heart’s Place and hated her aunt and uncle, she couldn’t wish that on them. She hoped they had escaped the Taleless’s clutches.

The leprechauns were moving forward again, this time with a load of harsh words for the oldest leprechaun and his choice of hat. How were they able to put aside their worry over Duessa’s minions so easily? Snow wondered if there wasn’t something to their strange ritual. Feeling stupid even as she did it, Snow spit on the ground. She didn’t feel altogether better, but some of the weight that had fallen on her since she had left the dungeon lifted, and she whispered under her breath, “May her own deeds come back to haunt her.”

The other leprechauns began trickling away to return to their own dwellings, but Tuck and Tumbler were determined to escort Snow all the way to the Warlock’s Apprentice. She was more than glad for it when she saw the piles of smoking quicksand. Snow wouldn’t be any help to her mother if she died in the Swamp before she could even talk to the Warlock’s Apprentice.

Tumbler thumped one foot on something that sounded solid. “There’s a boardwalk there.” The leprechaun’s pointed shoes skipped over the top of the grime. “Unner there, see? Just step lively.”

Snow was doing her best to oblige. She had traded conversation with the leprechauns for strategizing where to take her next step. Fireflies hovered nearby, lighting their way through the gloom, and the buzz of mosquitoes was a constant hum. Snow had never been to the Enchanted lands before.
Maybe because they’re not fit for human existence.
She slapped at a bug feasting on her arm, and the blood smeared across her skin.

Everything in the Swamp was miniature in size. Tiny rowboats no bigger than her shoe navigated the puddles of water that trickled around little mud islands. Most of these were piloted by wrinkled brownies, one of whom cut Snow off while she was busy tugging on her blasted boot. The brownie expertly docked below a hut crafted all of twigs and perched on stilts. The farther Snow went, the more such dwellings she noticed. She was encountering more of the Fairy Folk than she had seen in her whole life: the smiling sprites who peered out of mossy logs, the very ugly nix who swung wildly at her with a club, and the kelpie who, fortunately, didn’t notice her passing.

Every few feet, Tumbler turned around to wave Snow forward with his hook. “This way now,” he called out, in what Snow supposed he thought was an encouraging voice. “Just a wee bit more.”

“This is it?” Snow asked when Tuck finally stopped in front of a jumble of sticks that made a low dome over the mud.

“Aye.” Tumbler tucked his hook back into his belt. “That’s the place.”

Tuck had explained that the Warlock’s Apprentice was a person of mystery. Many underground passageways led from different districts to this secret hiding spot, and the Apprentice passed to and fro without detection. “Stealthy as a cockroach, that one.” Tuck said this as though he meant it as a compliment. “Can sneak into just about any place unseen. And darn near hard to kill.”

“Haven’t seen her in these parts in many years.” Tumbler bent down to wedge a stick under the bottommost row of branches. “But it’s good to know she’s back in the Swamp, keeping an eye on things. Seems especially keen that we don’t lose track of you.”

“The Apprentice is a woman?” Snow asked. “And she knows about me?” Snow didn’t like the sound of that.

“The Apprentice knows about all the goings-on in the Swamp,” Tuck said. “Just you wait. You’ll meet her soon enough.” He joined Tumbler, and, together, they heaved until the thatched pile folded back like the top of a trapdoor and revealed a huge stone pipe that delved down below the mud. Tumbler put two fingers in his mouth and whistled hard. A troop of lightning bugs appeared and swarmed after the leprechauns. Snow hesitated only a moment before following them inside the pipe.

“Handy little fellows, these,” Tumbler said, as the bugs busily lit up the dark passageway. The pipe snaked its way deeper and deeper into the earth, and Snow had to crawl on her hands and knees.
Why does everything have to be in some gross underground tunnel?
After some time, the pipe ended abruptly, opening out into an earthen passageway. It was so gradual Snow didn’t notice at first, but the farther they went, the larger the tunnel got. Soon she could walk hunched over, and then altogether upright, Tuck and Tumbler tripping along at her knees. As they rounded a corner, Snow saw a brightly painted green door.