by Holly Hook
“A table,” Nori said from under the door. “I can’t get on my hands and knees, but the wand is on a table in the middle of the room.”
I walked straight through the space, kicking gems out of the way. I couldn’t care less about the treasure and neither would Candice. A square shape took form in front of me and I blinked, only to find the gnarled piece of wood on it.
My other grandmother’s wand.
The same one I had used to kill Prince Lawrence and the same one that had failed to kill Alric.
I wasn’t sure how I would feel, seeing it again, but I recoiled and backed away. Now that my life wasn’t in immediate danger I didn’t want to touch it. Even the wood it had been carved from looked evil, with faces forming in the lines and grimaces between the cracks.
“Shorty, hurry,” Candice said from outside. “Grab it and get out of there. We need to go.”
She sounded nervous.
And the air around me was getting colder.
Sharper.
It was the feel of dark magic nearby and it wasn’t from the wand. It was in the air everywhere and dread crept into my gut.
The air felt like this whenever Alric was near and I had learned to hate that feeling.
I seized the wand and turned towards the door, which was a black square on the bottom of the sky. I ran for it, but not before something fluttered into the room and hit me in the chest.
I pedaled back as the bird bounced off me and went falling into a pile of gems. The raven cawed and flew around my head, a dark shadow against the stars. I got up and slipped again. The roar of thousands of rolling gems filled the room and another shooting star zipped across the sky like it was fleeing.
The bird fluttered again I kept ahold of the wand, glad that I had it with me. I could deal with a single raven. I clutched the wand tight and relished the cold energy that thrummed through it. This was a very powerful wand. I wasn’t sure where my grandmother had gotten it and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“Where are you?” I asked, managing to stand and almost going down again on the gems. I ran words from the Old Language through my mind, the language that people said originally held Fable together. It was full of magic. I wished I had heard more of it.
“Shorty, come on,” Candice said. “Towards me.”
I whirled around, searching for the invader, but the room was too dark to see clearly.
And then I did the dumbest thing I could have done.
I uttered the Old Language word for light. "Licht."
A space around me lit in a bright glow and I winced as the gems reflected light back at me. The night sky seemed to disappear. The wand remained the same and the light came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It was enough to illuminate the whole center of the room.
"Well, this is where my mother's wand disappeared to. A nice find."
I whirled around.
Standing there was a woman in a red and black dress. She had dark hair the same shade as mine, black eyes, and skin that looked more like wax than actual flesh. She paced back and forth like a hungry predator about to strike. She'd been the raven and had followed us in here.
This had to be Alric's sister.
Annie. That was her name.
And now I had to face her alone.
Chapter Four
"How did that wand get here?" she asked me, drawing a bit closer.
I backed into another pile of gems and they fell around my feet. I had never seen this woman before but she looked so much like Alric that there was no denying who she was.
"How did you get here?"
"I walked down the hall, pulled open the door, and crawled in," I said.
"Are you a thief?" she asked. "You chose a bad time to loot this place. Or maybe you chose a smart time. I don't blame you. There is treasure here to set you for life. I followed you, by the way. I heard your footsteps going down the tunnel. I thought you were someone else. And I see you can use magic."
She hadn't seen the others in the pitch black corridor, then. As far as Annie was concerned, I was the only one here. Nori had kept the tunnels dark for a good reason. The fact that I had taken off my silver robe had probably just saved my life. If she'd seen that, she'd know that I had some status here.
"I agree," I said, hating that I was doing this. I kept the wand clutched tight because she kept eyeing it. "This is worth more than one kingdom. Do you want to split it?"
She laughed. The sound grated on my nerves and the air got colder, sharper.
"I don't have much use for treasure," she said. "I have my own kingdom and a king who does what I want him to."
I thought about the Swan Kingdom and Ignacia, who had fled from there. Annie must be talking about her father. I wondered how she had wormed her way into power.
"I was wondering if you had seen a girl with a purple ball of yarn. She is a threat to my kingdom and I need to do something about her."
"I haven't," I said. "I think everyone fled the castle. Why would someone from the Swan Kingdom be here?" I knew the answer but I had to stall Annie. She was just as dangerous as Alric, perhaps even more. I still had the wand and this woman knew I could use magic.
Would the killing word even work on her? I didn't know her story or how she was supposed to die. I had the feeling that Ignacia's tale was still in danger if this woman was pursuing her. Ignacia had come to the Star Kingdom for help.
"That," Annie said, nodding at the wand, "belongs to my mother. I would like to take it back. Give me the wand, and I will leave all of this treasure for you."
I backed away, mind scrambling for the killing spell. This woman had turned six boys into swans and forced a king to marry her from the sounds of it. Who knew what else she had done. She would kill me after taking the wand, leaving me all the treasure. It was how Alric rolled. I shook all over.
I couldn't do it, but I had to. I had to kill her before she could hurt Candice. I raised the wand, arm shaking, but she laughed again.
With a pop and an explosion of black feathers, she took off into flight, leaving my ring of light. Wings fluttered towards the back of the room right when I shouted the killing spell. Gems flew where she had stood a second before, clattering to the floor and rolling in all directions.
"So you do know some decent magic," the woman said from behind me. "Most people have none at all."
I turned to see her shadow standing against the stars. Coldness wrapped around me. She was thinking some spell and my legs felt heavy like the wanted to freeze, but I pulled my foot off the floor and managed to break it. I could resist some of her magic.
"Shorty!" Candice shouted from the doorway. "Come on!"
"So you also have friends," Annie said. Her hair moved as she turned her head to face Candice.
My girlfriend was poking her head through the doorway. Annie stood only feet from her.
I couldn't risk a killing spell with Candice so close. Instead, I turned and pointed the wand at Candice. I uttered the word for back and she slid along the sand, screaming. I heard a low thump as she hit something. I had no time to feel guilty. The air got cold as Annie tried some silent magic again and my limbs threatened to freeze, but I ducked down with the wand in tow emerged into the dark, leaving the stars behind. She was advanced if she could do magic without a wand and without words.
"What happened?" Candice asked. She seethed with pain, but she didn't sound too hurt. I hated that I'd done that to her but at least she seemed to understand.
I pointed the wand at where I thought the door was and shouted the word for close. "Geschlossen!"
The door screeched and thudded to the ground right when Annie pounded on the other side. She scratched at the wood like a trapped animal and I felt around for Candice, following the sounds of her seething. I found Candice's hand and pulled her up. "I'm sorry," I yelled. "She was going to kill you."
"Who's in there?" Nori asked.
"It sounded like Annie," Henry said. "Run. Don't stop. You got the wand, Shorty?"
<
br /> "Yes." I was bolting now with the others, straight ahead into the dark with my hand intertwined with Candice's. I waited for more ravens to follow, but only Annie had dared come down into the tunnels. The air got colder and more damp and I clutched the wand, holding it in front of me as Annie's scratching got more faint. We were leaving her behind but she'd break out in no time with the magic she had.
I held the wand as high as I could and yelled the word for light again. It had gone out when I'd attempted the killing spell.
It burst to life around us, coming from nowhere and everywhere, bathing the stone of the corridor. Candice cried out and squinted next to me. We were running through an ancient, wide tunnel lined with old dungeons and broken metal bars. It was as gross as it could get and out of place under the Star Kingdom's center. The light remained smooth and moved with us as we ran, and at last Annie's scratching faded into the darkness behind.
I slowed and everyone stopped around me, panting for breath. Nori was leaning on a stone pillar, one that was cracking and looked ready to come down if someone heavier were to lean on it. Behind her, an old skeleton grabbed at the bar in an old jail cell. There were things about the Star Kingdom that Nori had never told me, then. These were literally the skeletons in the closet.
"I don't hear her," Candice said. "Who was that woman?"
No one had told Candice yet. She'd been inside when Henry and Rae had told me about her. "We shouldn't stand here," I said, facing my grandmother. I had stopped because of her. She was old and running wasn't her strong suit anymore.
"Shorty," she said. "I need one more minute."
And then a cracking sound echoed down the corridor from where we had come.
Henry cursed. Rae gasped and Candice pulled on me. "Come on," she said. "She's coming."
"Come on!" I told my grandmother.
"Go on," she said, waving at me. "Go on."
I couldn't leave her even if I wasn't her favorite person.
I eyed the pillar again and then the ceiling, which was stone and more cracked than a desert in the dark region. "Move," I said. "I'll hold her back. I won't her follow us."
Candice pulled my arm again. "But Shorty, she might kill you. Alric must have sent her."
She didn't know who Annie was yet, that I had another relation to be proud of.
Another cracking sound followed with an even stronger one that told me Annie had just broken the safe room door open.
"I see you!" she called, obviously not caring that we could hear her. Why should she if she was full of dark magic? She sounded like someone talking to a little kid. "Are you going to make this easy for me or not?"
I dug through mud for the Old Language version of collapse. I'd heard my grandmother using it once on a merchant she'd stolen from, sending him falling under the floor. Annie’s footfalls approached and Candice broke away from me and pulled Nori away from the pillar. I waited for an eruption of fire to come at me, but the corridor remained dark.
“I’d like to know who you are,” Annie said, closer. "You are interesting. I can tell."
Then the word popped into my mind and I shouted it.
"Zusammenbruch!"
The corridor trembled as cold energy seethed through me. Candice kept running. Nori’s panting got farther away and Henry swore. I backed off as the column cracked and came tumbling down in a cloud of dust and debris. Annie shouted something but the noise blocked her out and roared through the tunnel. The light around me snapped off as all my magic went towards making the tunnel crumble.
Darkness snuffed out everything as the sound died.
I stood there for a moment, choking on the dust swirling through the air. My body trembled and I felt exhausted. It took everything I had not to go down to my knees.
"Shorty," Nori said like she couldn't believe what I'd done.
“Shorty!” Candice was there, grabbing my shoulder from behind. She pulled me back so I bumped into her. “We have to go. What did you do?”
“Collapsed the tunnel,” I said.
“You collapsed the tunnel? How are we going to get out?”
“Shorty!” my grandmother said from behind us. She sounded more angry than freaked out. "You caused a cave-in?"
“Did you want to die?” I asked her, not knowing where she was. “That woman was going to murder every single one of us.”
“Or turn us into swans,” Henry added. “I’ve seen it. Well, sort of. You don't want to mess with swans, though."
“Or anyone with dark magic,” Rae added. There was more to her voice than that.
I stepped forward in the dark, stuck my foot out, and touched rubble. A stone block crumbled at my feet. This tunnel was old, all right, and I feared another collapse that had nothing to do with magic.
“We can’t go back that way, right?” Candice asked.
I moved up and down the blockage, poking with my shoe. The entire width of the tunnel was blocked off now. I kept waiting for Annie’s hand to shoot out and seize me, but it never came.
Instead, there was silence.
A very heavy, ominous silence.
I could hope that Annie was buried under that rubble, but she'd still been far away when it all came down. I was going to go on the safe side and assume she wasn’t dead.
“Shorty, you blocked the tunnel. Correct?”
I whirled around to where the Queen must be standing. I imagined her sizing me up with her hands on her hips like some schoolteacher. I bristled. “Like I said, it’s better than being dead, right?”
“It is,” she said, injecting a pause. “but not much. This tunnel was built a long time ago when a war raged in these kingdoms. It was meant for hiding in. Escape through it was a last resort even then. There is no other way back to the castle, or even to the surface as far as I'm concerned. The only way forward is through Fable’s underworld.”
Chapter Five
We all stood there in the dark, silent. Far ahead, someone shouted. Everyone who was going to escape the ravens had done so by now. No one else was going to survive out there.
Even if Annie didn't find a way around, I'd heard awful things about the underworld.
There were creepy people down here. Creepy things. Weird places. I tried to remember the stories I had read about Fable's underground area, but I had heard my nanny say that it was neither light nor dark.
"Well," I said, "I guess we need to go forward. I have light. And if Ignacia is up there with that yarn, we'll be able to find a way out of here. All she'll need to do is ask."
Rae breathed a sigh of relief and Candice did too. They must be standing just a couple of feet to my right. This dark was disorienting and worse, I had made a new enemy today.
"Light, Shorty," Nori said. "We need light."
I held out the wand. "Take this. I'm sure you know the spell. I'm tired from my saving our lives." I was ready to punch something. I didn't hate my grandmother, not this one, anyway, but the more she treated me like this, the closer it became.
Nori managed to take wand out of my hand after several tries and used it to light the corridor again. She uttered the same word I had. The Old Language worked no matter what kind of magic you possessed.
We traveled in a sphere of light and it felt safe. I rejoined Candice, who was pale with weird shadows under her eyes. We walked in silence for a long time, listening for any sign that Annie might be following us, for any fluttering of wings or footsteps. I wondered if she could turn herself into an ant and crawl through the debris or if a raven was just her specialty. Shapeshifting was hard magic and my other grandmother couldn't even do it. Most magic users had to stick with one form like some kind of trademark.
That might work in our favor.
"Shorty," Candice said. "How far down is the underworld?"
"Not sure," I told her. "It goes down at least a hundred leagues. I overheard Alric saying that Henrik's wolves all wound up falling down there when some prisoners fed them some scary, cursed apples he was growing back at the castle. It's
a long story."
"That makes me feel better."
"And me," Rae said.
"The underworld is huge," I said. "It goes under all of Fable so there's a good chance we won't run into them." We still had the wand. If I heard howling, I'd swipe the wand from Nori and kill them. We could defend ourselves down here.
"Mica has a sword," Henry said. "I think I hear him up ahead."
Henry was right. The voices were getting louder. The people ahead of us didn't have any light so they couldn't walk as fast as we could. The corridor was sloping downwards now. We must be out from under the castle, maybe even under the city. I thought about the people above, going about their daily lives, wondering why a huge flock of ravens descended on the castle.
Or what they would do without Nori there.
I pulled Candice close to me. We were headed down. A league was the distance someone could walk in an hour. A hundred of them...yikes.
I hoped we didn't have to go down that distance.
"Hello?" Nori called. She sounded old just then. Really old. "Who is up this way?"
I was shocked she hadn't had me call for the others instead. I'd been the one to do all the hard stuff so far.
"Everyone," a man called back. "When the ravens came, the servants pulled us all down into this tunnel. Who's there?"
"Queen Nori. Prince Henry of the Acorn Kingdom. A few others."
"And Shorty," I added. Some credit I was getting for saving our lives and stopping Annie. I cupped my hands over my mouth. "Who all is up there?"
"Franco. Are you there?" Candice asked.
"Yes," he called.
She sighed in relief and I felt a lot better, too, even though I never liked the guy. If Candice lost her best friend she'd be devastated. I didn't want her to go through that.
"Who else?" I called.
"King Mica of the Sun Kingdom. Ignacia of the Swan Kingdom. Most of the castle's servants and knights. Several villagers from the Fox Kingdom who were displaced from their home by the expanding darkness. Annie, Alric's brother, has been pursuing us and we were seeking help. We haven't yet been able to speak with you, Nori."
