The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell (24 page)

“Alex, look up there!” Conner said, pointing to a window. On the window ledge was a shiny X-shaped object.

“What is that?” Alex asked.

“It’s a grappling hook!” Conner said. It jerked slightly in a consistent pattern. “I think someone’s climbing up!
Hide!
”

They left their lanterns on the ground and dove behind a pile of baskets.

A moment later, a figure appeared on the window ledge. It took out a sharp knife and cut out a large circle in the window and then quietly crawled into the room. It was a woman who the twins had never seen before. Her clothing was made out of plant leaves sewn together, and her hair was a shade of red so dark it almost seemed purple.

The woman scanned the room and looked cautiously at the two lanterns. Did she know the twins were in there? Like an animal, the woman began sniffing around the room. She searched through the baskets as she sniffed, discarding some by tossing them behind her.

She went around the room, using her nose as her guide, until finally she locked in on one direction. She climbed on top of a pile of baskets to reach the top of a shelf. She reached her hand to the back of the shelf and pulled out a basket. It had a rim made of tree bark.

Alex and Conner looked at each other.
There it is!

The woman carved a big chunk of bark out of the basket and then tucked it safely into her belt. She put the basket back on the shelf and climbed down the pile of baskets and headed for the window.

She was just about to climb through the window when she heard an
“Ah!”
come from the other side of the room. Conner had given himself another splinter from hiding behind the baskets.

“Conner!” Alex mouthed.

“Sorry!” he mouthed back.

The woman walked toward where they were hiding. She squinted in their direction for a moment. Alex and Conner were both too frightened even to breathe. They knew she knew they were there. What was she going to do to them?

The woman looked to the ground at one of their lanterns, and a coy smile appeared on her face. She kicked it into a pile of baskets and disappeared through the window and back down the rope connected to the grappling hook.

“That was a close one!” Conner said. “Good thing she didn’t find us, or we’d be in some—”

“
Conner!
Look!” Alex said. The pile of baskets the woman had kicked the lantern into was on fire.

“Oh boy,” Conner said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Not until I get a piece of that basket,” Alex said. She reached into her bag and pulled out the dagger. She ran up the pile of baskets to the top of the shelf just as she had seen the woman do. She wasn’t as tall as the woman, so she had to reach farther to get it.

“Alex, hurry!” Conner said. The fire was growing and spreading around the room to the different piles and stacks of baskets. He tried blowing the fire out, but it didn’t work. These were large flames, not birthday candles.

Alex had to climb up onto the shelf to reach the basket, but she finally wrapped her fingers around it.

“Gotcha!” Alex said, pulling it out. The bark around the rim had two chunks missing, one from whoever had written
the journal, and the other from whoever that woman was. Alex sank her dagger into the basket and began cutting out a piece of it.

“Alex! Unless you want to leave this place extra crispy, I suggest you hurry!” Conner yelled. Half of the room was ablaze. It was becoming unbearably hot inside the room. Dark smoke was filling the air, making it hard to breathe.

“I got it,” Alex said, and made her way down to Conner.

The flames had covered the door they’d entered from.

“How do we get out of here?” Alex yelled.

The sound of running footsteps came from the hall outside the door. Through the flames, the twins could see the faces of several alarmed guards.

“Fire! Fire in the castle!”
a guard yelled.
“Get the queen to safety! Get some water!”

Another guard pointed directly at the twins.
“You two! Stay where you are!”

“Not likely!” Conner yelled. He picked up a particularly heavy basket and threw it at a window, causing it to shatter. He grabbed his sister’s hand and pulled her toward it. They breathed in the fresh air from outside.

“Look, the water mill is right below us!” Conner said, and started climbing out of the window and down toward it. He helped his sister out of the window, and they climbed down the watermill together. Halfway down, flames burst through all the windows in the basket room; the entire room was an inferno.

The water mill began to turn from the twins’ weight,
and they fell straight into the moat, which wouldn’t have been such a rough landing if the moat had been deeper than three feet.

The twins clambered out of the moat and began running as fast as they could away from the castle. No guards or soldiers were chasing them. They all must have been inside the castle trying to put out the fire.

Alex and Conner ran out of the town and were on their way toward the eastern gate of the Red Riding Hood Kingdom in a matter of minutes. They only looked back once and saw that almost half of the castle was now on fire. A thick trail of smoke filled the sky.

“Was that the fourth or fifth time we’ve narrowly escaped death this week?” Conner asked.

“Who was that woman?” Alex asked. “And why was she looking for the basket, too?”

“Thank God she found it, otherwise we might never have,” Conner said.

The most worrisome thought came to Alex’s mind. “Conner, you don’t think someone
else
is collecting items for the Wishing Spell, do you?”

He had to think about it, but she could see it was just as troubling for him to consider it as it was for her.

“I doubt it,” Conner said. “Think about all the trouble the man who wrote the journal went through to learn about it. I’d be shocked if someone else knew anything about it.”

Alex nodded. They both knew it was very unlikely, but the possibility still lingered in their heads.

A few hours later, the twins could see the eastern gate of the Red Riding Hood Kingdom wall in the distance. The guards must have extinguished the fire in the castle, because there was no more smoke filling the air.

The night sky was at its darkest just before dawn. As they reached the gate, they could see something moving near it. Spooked from the events earlier, Alex and Conner dove behind a bush and watched from afar.

It was a man pacing near the gate. He was tall and seemed young. There was something oddly familiar about him.

“Is that Jack?” Alex asked.

Conner took a closer look. “It is! What is he doing all the way out here?”

Suddenly, a hooded figure came into view on the other side of the gate.

“Who is
that
?” Conner asked.

Jack carefully approached the gate. There was so much tension between him and whoever was on the other side of the gate that even the twins could feel it. He had been waiting for whoever it was all night.

“Hello, Jack,” said the hooded figure.

“Hello, Goldie,” he said.

And then the twins realized who it was: Goldilocks. She was wearing the dark maroon coat they had seen her wear in the Dwarf Forests.

“How do they know each other?” Alex asked.

Conner shook his head. “No idea.”

“I saw your dove,” Jack said. “I knew you must have sent it.”

“I did,” Goldilocks said. “I knew you would recognize it. Doves are hard to train these days.”

The twins could tell from the way they were standing that Goldilocks and Jack had much to say to each other, but they said very little. Instead, they just stared into each other’s eyes with their bodies pressed against the bars between them.

“I hate these bars between us,” Jack said.

“It’s either the bars of this gate or the bars of a prison cell, I’m afraid,” Goldilocks said.

“I worry about you constantly,” Jack said.

“I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself,” Goldilocks said.

“I wish you would let me come with you,” Jack said. “You know I’d pack my things and leave right now if you would let me.”

“No sense in ruining two lives,” Goldilocks said. “You’ll find someone else someday.”

“You’ve been saying that since you left, yet here I am, year after year, meeting you in the shadows,” Jack said.

“She’s the one he’s in love with!” Alex said, putting the pieces together. “She’s the reason Jack won’t marry Red Riding Hood. She’s the girl the harp was telling us about.”

“Oh,” Conner said. “This is like a soap opera!”

Jack placed his hands over Goldilocks’s hands.

“I swear, if I ever find the person who wrote you that letter, I’ll kill them,” Jack said. “They’re the reason for this whole mess.”

“What is done is done, and it can never be undone,” Goldilocks said. She and Jack were touching foreheads through the bars.

“One day, I’ll clear your name,” Jack said. “I promise. And then we can be together.”

“Clear my name?” Goldilocks said, and backed away from him. “I’m a fugitive, Jack! I steal! I run! I even kill when I have to! No one can clear me of that; it’s who I am. It’s what I’ve become.”

“It didn’t start off as your fault, and you know it,” Jack said.

Goldilocks grew silent.

“I love you,” Jack said. “And I know you love me. You don’t have to say it back. I just know.”

“I’m a criminal, and you’re a hero,” Goldilocks said with teary eyes. “A flame may love a snowflake, but they can never be together without each harming the other.”

“Then let me melt,” Jack said. He reached through the gate and pulled Goldilocks close to him, and they kissed. It was passionate, pure, and long overdue.

Alex became misty-eyed. Conner scrunched up his face as if he’d smelled something foul.

“Good thing those bars are between them,” Conner said.

“Shut up, Conner,” Alex said.

Goldilocks pushed herself away from Jack.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have to be as far away from this place as I can get by sunrise.”

“Let me come with you,” Jack begged.

“No,” Goldilocks said.

“When will I see you next? A week? A month? A year?” he asked.

Porridge walked up behind Goldilocks. She leaped up onto the horse’s back and took hold of the reins.

“Just wait for the dove,” she said, and rode off into the night on her cream-colored horse.

Jack watched her until she wasn’t visible anymore. Suddenly, all the life in his body faded away, and he once again became the sad man the twins had met earlier. He sadly turned away from the gate and slowly headed home.

“I guess not every fairy-tale character gets a happily-ever-after,” Alex said.

Alex and Conner ran up to the gate. It was locked, so they had to climb over it, finally making their way out of the Red Riding Hood Kingdom just as the sun started to rise.

A
lex and Conner were lost.

“We’re not lost. I just don’t know exactly where we are,” Alex told her brother.

“So, in other words, we’re
lost
,” Conner said.

“All right, Conner, we’re lost!” Alex said, and hit him with the map.

They had left the Red Riding Hood Kingdom in such a hurry, they thought they might have taken a wrong path.
Alex kept looking down at the map, trying to see where they had made a wrong turn, and kept walking into bushes and trees.

“We could be in the Fairy Kingdom, or perhaps we’re back in the Charming Kingdom,” she said. “But the eastern gate of the Red Riding Hood Kingdom is close to so many borders, we could be in the Sleeping Kingdom, for all I know.”

“How is anyone supposed to find their way around this place? It’s all just a bunch of trees and dirt roads with the occasional castle!” Conner said angrily. “We’re never going to get home!”

“It’s just a slight setback. We’ll be back on track before you know it,” Alex said.

“And exactly what track are we on?” Conner asked. “I hate to bring this to your attention, but we’ve only collected three of the eight Wishing Spell items, and we have no idea what two of them are. And, to be frank, we’re not even sure if the Wishing Spell will work when and if we do collect everything.”