Twice Upon a Time

by James Riley

  “Dangerous?” May said, her eyes narrowing. “That sounds about right.”

  “Oh, you and the prince, you’re not a physical threat,” the girl said. “But that doesn’t make you any less of a concern. Especially if you find out who you are.”

  “Ask my grandmother how she liked me being dangerous all over her old Magic Mirror,” May said.

  “You’ve had quite the easy time these last three months,” the girl said, ignoring her. “That’s all about to end.”

  “EASY?!” May shouted. “We almost died like fourteen thousand times!”

  “That’s nothing compared to what’s coming here tomorrow night,” the girl told her. “That is, unless you help me drag Jack out of the spell and join the Queen. I know that the rest of you follow Jack’s lead, but I’m trying to appeal to you now as the voice of reason.”

  “See, there was your first problem,” May said. “Thinking Jack was our leader. If you people had paper bags, Jack wouldn’t be able to lead his way out of one.”

  The girl frowned. “I’m not fluent in whatever language you’re speaking. Anyway. As I said, you won’t have it easy. Let’s assume for a second that you can escape from me. Which you can’t. You still don’t know what this curse is, or how to end it.”

  “Like we can’t figure that out in all of two seconds,” May said.

  “Without a fairy queen to identify it?” Lian said. “Good luck. And I happen to know for a fact that eleven of the twelve fairy queens are right here. Think Malevolent’s going to be willing to help? Even if you did figure it out, you’d have to find a way to end the curse before the sun sets tomorrow night, since that’s when the dragons will arrive and burn the Homelands to the ground.”

  Dragons?! May gritted her teeth. “I’ve done more in a day and a half than most people do in two days—”

  “And third,” the girl said, smiling slightly, “there was that small matter of escaping from me.”

  May raised an eyebrow. “That was the first thing.”

  “It’s such a big one, it deserves a second mention.”

  “Fair enough. So how do you want to do this? I’ll make it quick, since there’s a time limit.”

  The girl laughed. “Oh, you’ve got no hope against me. I can move faster than you can see. And don’t even think about running. How far do you think you’d get? Ten feet? Fifteen?”

  May glanced behind her. “I’m going to go with fifteen.” With that, she turned and ran straight at the silver gate.

  “What are you doing!” the girl yelled, but May didn’t turn to stop. She could hear the girl starting to follow right behind her, so May threw herself forward straight at the gate—only to go completely limp, crashing to the ground.

  Right at her heels, the Eye windmilled her arms, carefully stopping before reaching the edge of the curse. Taking a few steps back, she shrugged, then turned to walk away. “They really should win some kind of record for most stupidity in the shortest amount of time,” she said as she used her rope to tie Phillip up, then patted his unconscious head. “Be back soon. Have to go grab a friend.” With that, she smiled and then disappeared.

  CHAPTER 4

  A minute passed, and nothing happened. Not even the wind moved through the silent, thorny vines circling the Fairy Homelands. Another minute passed, and another.

  By the end, May waited a full ten long, hugely boring minutes before slowly turning around to look.

  The Eye was gone.

  FINALLY!

  “OOOOWWWWWW!” May shouted, releasing the scream she’d been holding in ever since she’d crashed into the ground. Standing up was the next order of business, but that wasn’t quite so easy, not since both her arms had passed the invisible line of the sleeping curse and were now completely asleep. Numb, dangling arms made pushing oneself to one’s feet a bit more difficult, after all.

  Stupid magic.

  May finally managed to twist to her knees, then push up to her feet without falling over as her arms, now free of the magic, began tingling painfully. She bit her lip to keep from shouting again (though really, who was going to hear her?) and stomped on the ground a few times until feeling finally returned to her hands and arms.

  Now all she had to do was untie Phillip, then pull Jack out of the spell’s field—without being able to get in far enough to touch him. At least the horribly evil girl had left her rope. May shook her head, then smacked her fist into her palm. Next time she saw that girl, there was some definite underhanded, sneaky-type face-kicking to be done.

  May untied the prince, who groaned but didn’t wake up. That wasn’t a great sign, but at least he was alive. She quickly tied a loop into the rope, then spent the next very not-quick few minutes trying to throw it around Jack’s feet. May managed to hook them a few times, but the rope kept sliding off as she pulled. Finally, when he was close enough, May just intertwined her hands, then threw them into the field to wrap around his feet, and dragged him in with numb arms.

  Now that Jack was out, May turned her attention to the little golden fairy, but there was just no way. The fairy’s flight and lighter weight had sent her way too far past the gate, and barring some kind of appearance by a cowboy with expert lassoing skills, the fairy would just have to wait until they figured out how to deal with the curse.

  In the meantime that still left her with one sleeping friend, as no amount of shaking or screaming at Jack seemed to do anything. And May tried both. A lot. And then tried them again.

  “Okay, I’m not kissing you!” she screamed finally. “I refuse to accept that kissing would take someone out of a coma! That is not legitimate medicine!”

  Unfortunately, there was a distinct lack of doctors around to agree with her, something she often had a problem with. And the longer this went on, the less time they had to wake the fairies up.

  Not to mention that sitting there alone at the outskirts of a completely silent city covered in enormous thorny vines was more than a bit creepy.

  “Okay, you did this for me,” May said to him as she bent down next to Jack. “I get that. And frankly I’m about two seconds away from going insane, trying to deal with this all alone. My grand—the Queen. She did this, all this, just to keep me from finding out which stupid fairy tale I’m from?! All this?! She’s going to wipe out an entire city just to torture me? That’s who she is?”

  May grabbed Jack’s hand and held it in hers without even noticing. “I… I just… I know I’ve said I’m okay, Jack, but I’m really not handling this. I mean, she’s my… she was my family! All the family I had. All the family I ever had! I loved her, Jack. I really did. But I can’t… I can’t…”

  A drop of water fell onto Jack’s hand, and May realized her cheeks were wet. She sniffed hard and wiped at her eyes. “I… I need you guys to help. You’re all I have right now. Remember that when you wake up, ’cause I don’t want to hear about this for the rest of our lives, okay?” She poked a finger into his chest. “Let’s… let’s just hope it works. If it does, you have my permission to mock me for as long as you want. Just… just wake up, please?”

  With that, she leaned over to kiss Jack.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jack woke up to find May’s face just inches from his.

  “AHHHH!” he yelled.

  “AHHHH!” she yelled, pulling away.

  “What were you doing?” Jack shouted at her.

  The princess blushed heavily. “I definitely wasn’t… I was… You were asleep!”

  “I gathered that part,” Jack said. For some reason his mouth seemed wet. Had he been drooling on himself? That’s probably what May had been doing so close, laughing at him. Whatever. He certainly wasn’t going to give her any more satisfaction about it now.

  “I love waking up to nothing making sense,” he said, wiping his mouth and shaking his head. “What happened?” He glanced around, then nodded at the still sleeping Phillip. “And why’s the prince so lazy all of a sudden?”

  Phillip groaned, and May blushed twice as
hard. Jack looked at her curiously. “What’s got you so red?”

  She looked everywhere but at him. “I… didn’t know you would just wake up on your own, certainly without anyone doing anything awkward and embarrassing!”

  “Well, obviously I did,” Jack said. “What happened?”

  “It’s a sleeping spell,” May told him, gesturing out at the silver gate. “Some kind of curse. And we don’t have much time to lift it, or—”

  “Or what?” Phillip asked, pushing himself to a sitting position.

  “Or everyone still asleep is going to die,” May said quietly. “The Wicked Queen has dragons on their way.”

  “How… how did you know that?” Jack asked, suddenly wondering if girls really could read minds.

  “The girl,” Phillip said, then glanced around. “Where did she go? What did she tell you?”

  “Girl?” Jack asked. “Wait, she was here too?”

  “Too?” May said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I, uh… Never mind,” Jack said, trying to hide his discomfort and failing miserably. Still, he wasn’t about to tell them that the girl had spoken to him in his dreams. One Eye was bad enough, but two? “So, um, who was this girl?”

  “Pretty much what you’d expect with us,” May said. “Seriously creepy, evil vibe, white circles on her armor thing—”

  “Not circles,” Phillip said, watching Jack a little too closely. “An Eye.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow, not liking the prince’s tone. “Like the kind in your head?” Purposefully playing stupid was the quickest way to annoy the prince, Jack had discovered.

  “Like the one who gave you his sword,” Phillip said. “This would make two of them that have found us. Two Eyes.”

  Jack sighed. “Yeah, your math checks out. I get it. What did she tell you?”

  “Well,” May said, “it sounded like she had orders to set off whatever this sleeping spell is. But more than that, she wanted me… us… to go back with her, back to… the Wicked Queen.” May paused and looked away, then seemed to push herself through the rest quickly. “She said that would keep us safe, but if we didn’t go with her, we only had till sunset tomorrow. After that the dragons will be here to burn the Fairy Homelands to the ground.”

  “Burn to the ground?” Phillip repeated, his eyes going wide. “But there are thousands of fairies here. They would surely perish!”

  “Hundreds of thousands,” Jack said quietly.

  “I think that’s sort of the point,” May added.

  “It must be a bluff,” the prince continued, but he didn’t look too sure. “There cannot possibly be any more dragons around. The Western Kingdoms wiped them out after the Great War.”

  “Argue that with the girl,” May said. “In the meantime we have to figure out how to unspell the spell.”

  “I don’t think that’s a word,” Jack said.

  May turned around to glare at him. “Really? That’s what you’re focusing on?”

  “I believe the proper term is ‘dispel,’” Phillip said.

  “Either way, we better get going,” Jack said. He started to move, then stopped and glanced around. “Um, where are we going again?”

  “She said we wouldn’t be able to figure the spell out without another fairy queen,” May said, looking out over the sleeping fairies. “Maybe it’s fairy magic. But if that’s the case, how did she set it off? Can Eyes do magic?”

  “No,” Jack said.

  “Of course they can,” Phillip said. “Evil magic.”

  “They’re not all evil—”

  “Or so they would want you to think,” Phillip said.

  Jack glared at the prince. “Anyway, Phillip’s bright, sunny optimism aside, Eyes can’t do magic, not like this.”

  Phillip snorted. “Eyes can take the shapes of animals, turn invisible, change their appearance entirely to look like someone else—”

  “That’s all just illusion!” Jack shouted. “If they could wipe out a city full of the most powerful fairies in the world, you think the Queen would have had to take over half the world with a goblin army? They can’t do anything even close to this!”

  “Wow, someone’s touchy,” May said. “Getting back to the topic, though. We need a fairy queen, and the girl said that all eleven fairy queens were here.”

  “Eleven?” Phillip said. “I believe there are twelve.” He cleared his throat, then began to recite, to Jack’s horror. “Once thirteen, now just twelve, the queens of fairy in secret do dwell—”

  “Oh please, no,” Jack interrupted. “Don’t tell me we’ve actually had to resort to nursery rhymes? Anyway, we do know one fairy queen who’s not here, speaking of dragons.”

  “Malevolent?” Phillip said, a catch in his voice.

  “It’s not like she’s got any kind of love for the other fairy queens,” Jack pointed out. “Maybe this has something to do with her.”

  Suddenly a fire lit in Phillip’s eyes. “Of course it does!”

  “Whoa, someone’s all of a sudden sure,” Jack said, giving the prince a confused look.

  “Do you remember the story I told you of my father’s encounter with Malevolent?” Phillip said, his voice rising excitedly. “A baby princess was born to a king, and all the fairy queens had been invited to bestow blessings on the girl, all except Malevolent. She arrived anyway, and cursed the baby girl to die when her finger touched a spindle, only Merriweather was able to modify the curse to just put the girl to sleep.”

  “Sleeping Beauty, sure,” May said, waving a hand for him to continue.

  “Uh, do you mean sleeping baby?” Jack asked her.

  “The fairy queens took the baby away, to keep it safe,” Phillip continued. “Perhaps… perhaps they brought her here, and somehow the curse was set off by this Eye, and the magic was too powerful to be contained by just the princess?”

  “That’s a lot of ‘somehow’s and ‘perhaps’es, but either way, what other option do we have?” Jack asked.

  “We end up saying that far too often,” May murmured.

  “We will receive no help from Malevolent, especially if this is her spell,” Phillip said. “She despises us almost as much as she despises her sisters.”

  “She didn’t want to help us last time, either,” Jack pointed out. “So we just force the issue again. If you have a better idea…”

  “No, just a premonition of great danger,” Phillip responded.

  “So basically nothing unusual,” May said.

  Phillip smiled despite himself. “So back to the Piper, then on to Malevolent. I just—”

  Jack found himself clapping a hand on Phillip’s shoulder. “You’re just afraid. It’s okay. It happens to human beings occasionally. You’ve probably heard about it.”

  Phillip laughed, then brought the Piper’s whistle to his lips. “If we are ready, then?”

  Jack and May looked at each other, then nodded. The whistle shrieked in their ears, and again a whirlwind appeared, swirling around, making an uncomfortable amount of noise in the absolute silence of the Fairy Homelands. Finally, swirling mists pushed in all around them, and they found themselves back at the cave in front of the Piper’s stump.

  Except the Piper’s stump was missing its Piper. Instead there was just a familiar-looking knife stabbed right through the old man’s pipes.

  Jack reached a trembling hand out and pulled the knife from the stump, the pipes sliding off it with no resistance.

  “Isn’t that… ?” May asked, then gasped.

  “It’s my grandfather’s knife,” Jack said, staring at the weapon. “The one we left in the Palace of the Snow Queen.”

  He looked back down at the stump, where four claw marks had gouged four lines almost as an afterthought.

  “The Wolf King,” Jack said quietly. “He’s found us.”

  “I forgot how observant you three were,” a deep voice growled.

  Jack, May, and Phillip turned around to find the Wolf King in his animal form emerging from the mists, his teeth b
ared in a horrible smile.

  “Tell me this, children,” the wolf said. “Do your observational skills extend to counting? How many goblins, trolls, and ogres are behind me?”

  At that, hundreds of monsters stepped out of the thick mists, each of them watching the three humans hungrily.

  “I’m kicking that girl in the face SO HARD!” May shouted.

  CHAPTER 6

  Surrender,” the wolf said, tilting his head slightly.

  “I was about to suggest the same to you,” Phillip said, his sword drawn and pointed at the wolf.

  “The Queen wishes none of you hurt, if possible.” The wolf’s eyes gleamed despite the surrounding mist cutting off all available light. “Of course, if you resist, I could just tell her it wasn’t possible, that I was forced to bite off an arm here or there. She’s quite forgiving in such situations.”

  “I’m hungry, Wolf King!” one of the goblins yelled from the wolf’s side. “Can’t we at least eat one of them?”

  The wolf frowned, and his head whipped out, bit down on the goblin’s armor, and swung the screaming creature into the air and back into the monsters. Jack’s stomach dropped as the noises coming from the crowd sounded as if the first goblin wasn’t the only hungry one.

  “Now, where were we?” the wolf asked.

  Jack drew his sword out, the normal white glow flickering oddly in the fog. “You really want to do this?” he asked the wolf. “I seem to remember taking you down once or twice.”

  The wolf smiled at this. “Ah, the little fake Eye has grown a spine.” He gestured to the goblins at his side. “You five. Take them.”

  The goblins let out a howl and advanced, each wielding a vicious-looking battle-ax.

  Just as it had in the past, somehow time slowed down. Each goblin seemed to almost stop in place, while Phillip was virtually frozen as he pushed his way in front of May, despite her extremely slow protests. Jack half-smiled at that, then leapt forward, snapping the first goblin’s ax out of its hands and into the air, kicking the second in the stomach, while grabbing the flying ax out of the air and smashing the third in the head with it.