[Half/Time 02] Twice Upon a Time

by James Riley

  “Nope, I really didn’t,” Jack said, holding up his hands in surrender. “Seriously, I don’t want to hurt you. We’re not going to duel.”

  “Challenge accepted!” King Pan said, laughing with a touch of the crazy as the children-adults separated, forming a circle around King Pan and Jack, Phillip, and May.

  “Why don’t you put the knife away before you hurt yourself?” Jack said gently, putting a hand out to reach for it.

  Immediately the boy lunged, stabbing at Jack’s hand. Jack quickly yanked his hand away, glaring right back at the boy now. “Oh, really?” he said to King Pan.

  “Jack, I’m scared,” May said, grinning at him. “I don’t want the ten-year-old to hurt you!”

  “I won’t hurt him,” King Pan said, smiling widely again, this time pointing all his teeth at May. “I’ll just kill him. Don’t worry, however. He won’t suffer.”

  “How about we don’t go that way,” Jack said, not liking the look in the crazy kid’s eyes. “Why don’t we do a different kind of challenge?”

  This seemed to confuse the boy. “Different than a duel to the death? What else could there be?”

  Jack sighed again. “How about a challenge of wits?”

  Pan brightened. “YES! We shall do exactly that. A challenge of wits. Agreed?”

  “Uh, yes, I just suggested it, so agreed,” Jack said. “Whoever loses has to do anything the winner says. Agreed?”

  King Pan’s eyes lit up like someone had poured lamp oil onto a candle in a fire. “Agreed! The challenge shall be that we each declare three rules. Then, restrained by those rules, we shall fight to the death!”

  “Wait, that’s not—”

  “The first rule!” King Pan interrupted. He glanced slyly at his adult followers, then turned back to Jack. “The first rule is… in this duel, you will not have your right hand to use your sword. Instead, you’ll have a HOOK!”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “Wow, you’ve got a real thing for hooks, don’t you?” He glanced down at his right hand, only to lose all sensation in his stomach.

  At the end of his arm was a black iron hook.

  “MY HAND!” Jack screamed, holding the hook in horror.

  “Grab them!” King Pan yelled, and the adults locked their arms around Phillip and May as the other two surged forward at Jack’s cry. “You agreed to the duel! You have only yourself to blame, pirate spy!”

  Jack’s mouth dropped open, and he just stared at the boy. How had Pan done such powerful magic? This was no ordinary kid! And seriously, what was with his fascination with hooks?!

  King Pan turned to his silent followers. “Well?”

  Another round of ragged cheering, and the boy’s smile grew wider, if that were possible. “Now, your first rule for me?”

  Jack gritted his teeth, staring at his missing hand, then at the boy in front of him. “My first rule is that I have my HAND BACK!”

  “Ah, no canceling out other people’s rules,” Pan said, shaking his head with the same creepy grin. “As forgiving as I am, however, I will give you another chance to make your rule. But that is your only warning!”

  “I… I want to consult with my… with my fellow pirate spies about my first rule,” Jack said, still not able to get past the fact that his hand was gone!

  “No,” the boy said. “Permission denied. Unless… unless you want to use a rule?”

  “Yes,” Jack said quickly. “My first rule is that I get to talk to a friend before making any further rules.”

  “So be it!” King Pan declared, and Jack stepped over to May, shaking his new hook at the adults holding her back, until they let her go and retreated a small distance so as to not overhear. He whispered something to her, gesturing at his bag with his hook hand, then returned to the center of the circle.

  “Now, on to my second rule!” the boy declared. “For this duel you shall… BE BLIND!”

  Instantly, all the light emptied out of the world like water pouring out of a glass. Jack gave an anguished cry, and threw his non-hook hand up, feeling around for something to orient himself, but the mocking laughter seemed to come from all around him.

  “NO!” May yelled. “Pan, we forfeit! Put him back to normal!”

  “No backing out!” King Pan shouted joyfully, his voice coming from somewhere to Jack’s side. “Now, your second rule?”

  “My… second rule,” Jack said, his heart racing. Was he really going to be giving up his life for some kid’s game?! “My second rule is that this duel isn’t to the death!”

  “Rule forfeited!” King Pan declared happily. “As I said, you cannot contradict a previous rule of the duel, and therefore you give up your second rule.”

  “Please, Pan, let him give up!” May shouted, her voice from somewhere behind Jack.

  “Giving up is for quitters!” King Pan declared. “Now, my final rule?” Jack could practically hear him smile as widely as was humanly—or whatever he was—possible. “My final rule… is that you shall be totally and completely paralyzed, unable to move.”

  Immediately, Jack’s entire body froze, and he toppled over onto his face, his body as stiff as a board, and just as motionless.

  Well, that was going to make it hard to win.

  “NO!” May yelled.

  From the other side Jack could hear Phillip struggling against the adults as more and more piled onto the prince. But unfortunately, hearing was all he could do at this point, and that wasn’t much help to anyone.

  “And now,” King Pan said from just above his head. “What is your final rule?”

  Jack tried desperately to say something, anything, but his mouth wouldn’t move any more than the rest of his body. He couldn’t even blink to spell it out in code.

  “No final rule?” the boy said gleefully. “Why, you’re forfeiting two rules in a row! I have to say, you’re awfully confident in your ability to win this battle of wits!”

  “He doesn’t forfeit his final rule!” May said. “He told me what it was going to be!”

  King Pan paused. “What? What do you mean?”

  “During his first rule!” May shouted. “He told me what his final rule would be!”

  King Pan sounded confused. “But, but you cannot prove what he did or did not say.”

  “Yes, I can,” May said. “Look.” Jack could hear her rummaging through his bag, and pulling out just what he’d told her to. “See? This is a Story Book. It accurately describes whatever is told to it. And Jack told me and the Book what he wanted his last rule to be.”

  “LIES!” King Pan shouted.

  “TRUTHS!” May shouted right back, and Jack heard her flipping pages before giving a triumphant cry. “HA! See? Wanna read it out loud for the literacy-impaired middle-aged children out here?”

  “‘Jack spoke to May in a whisper,’” King Pan read painfully slowly. “‘“This is crazy. What he says comes true,” Jack said to her. “And look at that creepy little smile. You know the little monster’s gonna play dirty.”’”

  Here, King Pan stopped. “MONSTER?”

  “Keep reading, you little monster,” May told him.

  “‘“Now, if he does play dirty, and for some reason I can’t give my last rule,” Jack told May and his Story Book, “here it is, and if he doesn’t believe it, just show him the Story Book. It’ll prove this is my last rule.”’”

  King Pan took a deep breath and finished reading. “‘“My last rule,” Jack said, “is that King Pan has to lose the duel of wits.”’”

  CHAPTER 11

  Light flooded over Jack, and all his limbs relaxed all at once. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, then smiled at the not-so-smug boy sitting in front of him.

  “But… but I can’t lose,” Pan said, throwing his hands up impotently. “Not Emperor Pan the First, Benevolent Ruler and Most Handsome Boy in All the Land.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jack said. “As Emperor Jack the First, Pretty Irritated Ruler but Not Too Bad a Guy Honestly, I won’t have you executed. BUT.” J
ack picked Pan up by his shirt and looked him straight in the eye. “BUT you do need to follow through on your deal. You do as I say now. To start, you’re going to end whatever magic is keeping these adults here. They’re no longer kids. They need to grow up… or at least realize that they did, like, forty years ago.”

  “But no one has to grow up in the Land of Never!” Pan whined.

  “Well, okay, then we can go to my second option,” Jack told him. “In that case, I exile you forev—”

  “FINE!” Pan shouted. “I’ll end all my spells!”

  The boy didn’t make a move, but suddenly Jack heard gasps all around him.

  “I’m… I’m old!” one of the adults shouted.

  “You are old!” another said. “Wait, so am I!”

  “And fat!” a third said. “How did we get like this?! I thought we could eat sweets all day and never change!”

  “You idiots. You think even magic can make that possible?” Pan asked them crankily. “You’re all stupid stupidheads that I didn’t have fun with anyway!”

  Jack glanced at the boy, starting to reprimand him, then noticed that the adults weren’t the only thing that had changed. Whereas he’d been holding a human boy just moments before, now he held a half-goat, half-human creature.

  “Gah!” Jack yelled, dropping Pan to the ground.

  “Ow!” Pan said, rubbing his behind. “What!”

  “Oh wow, he’s a… whatever those things are!” May said, pointing and snapping her fingers over and over as she tried to remember.

  “A satyr,” Phillip said quietly. “Mischievous, yet usually harmless, as they are mostly too preoccupied seeking their own pleasure to cause any real trouble.”

  “I wasn’t going to hurt anyone!” Pan yelled.

  “Except ME!” Jack said, poking himself hard in the chest. A little too hard, to be honest, but the point had to be made. “ME you were going to kill!”

  “Oh, you’re fine, you big crybaby,” Pan said. “Now, didn’t you say something about having to go?”

  “I want my mother!” one of the men said.

  “Me too! I want to go home!” said one of the women.

  “NO!” Pan yelled. “You’ll all ruin everything! I need you to stay here and play with me!”

  “I think it’s about time they went home to their parents,” Jack told him. “Let them go.”

  “NO!” Pan shouted. “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO! You can’t just leave me like this!”

  “You lost,” May pointed out. “You have to do what Jack says now.”

  Pan glared at her, then back at Jack, his eyes filled with fire and hate. “Fine. Go! All of you, go!” He waved his hands, and one by one the kids seemed to fold in on themselves like paper folding in half, disappearing into thin air.

  “I don’t even care!” Pan continued, stamping his feet and waving his arms dramatically.” Just leave me here all alone! You’ll beg me to let you back into the Land of Never, but I won’t! The Land of Never never wants you back!”

  “Yeah, they’ll probably be okay with that,” Jack told him. “And you better have sent them back to their real homes. No tricks.”

  “You’re so suspicious!” Pan told him indignantly. “You won. I am honor bound to do what you say. Now you go too. I’ll send you away, just GO.”

  Jack held up a hand. “Not just yet. First, we need you to end a magic spell for us.”

  Now Pan looked at him suspiciously. “What kind of spell?”

  “The kind that puts an entire city of fairy queens to sleep,” May told him.

  Pan laughed loudly. “Next you’ll tell me to do away with the Wicked Queen! Seriously, get out of my lands.”

  “The princess is not joking,” Phillip said. “We need you to dispel a curse—”

  “You think a satyr can do that kind of magic?” Pan shouted. “If I could, you think I’d need to trick those kids into thinking they’d never aged? All we can do is illusion and some minor transportation spells; you’d learn those too if you had to walk around on these legs. But any spell that can take out a fairy queen is going to need someone equally as powerful, and there are very few of those people left.”

  “Give us names,” Jack said.

  “The Wicked Queen,” Pan said, counting on his fingers. “And… that’s it. Otherwise you’ll need a fairy queen or an Ifrit or something.”

  “I vote ‘pass’ on the Ifrit,” May said, raising her hand.

  “Looks like its Malevolent after all,” Jack said, glancing over at Phillip, who winced at her name. It’d been three months since the evil fairy queen had caused the prince so much pain, but the memory didn’t go away as easily as the wounds had under her magic.

  Pan’s look went from indignant to curious. “Why would you ever want Malevolent’s help?”

  “None of your business,” May told him.

  Pan brightened immediately. “But that sounds like an adventure!” He leapt to his feet, landing as a human boy once more. “And there’s no one as heroic and adventuresome as Prince Pan the Pantheist!”

  “I’m pretty sure that doesn’t mean what you think it means,” May told him.

  “It SHOULD,” Pan told her.

  “You’re not coming,” Jack said. “Just send us to her castle.”

  Pan laughed again. “She’s not there. No one is. No one’s heard from her in months!”

  “So we’ll find her,” Jack said, quickly growing irritated with the creature, and he’d started pretty irritated already.

  “She’s hiding from the Wolf King,” Pan said with a sneer. “If he can’t find her, then you’re less than out of luck. You’ve got zero luck. You’ve got negative zero luck!”

  “Sounds about right,” May said.

  “So find us another fairy queen, there have to be more,” Jack said. “Give us a name and a location, and we’ll leave.”

  “If something took out the Fairy Homelands, there are no more,” Pan said. “Twelve queens, minus Malevolent the Exiled, and you’ve got eleven, all living on high in their magical land, not letting anyone in who can’t hold a tune.” He kicked at the deck of the ship. “Stupid musical magic.”

  Jack’s heart sunk. “They can’t have all been there. One or two must have—”

  “Well, there’s the one who gave it all up, of course,” Pan said. “But she’s a special case. And if you want her name, you’ll have to beat me in another—”

  Before he could finish, May leaped forward and punched him in the face. Pan fell backward to sit down hard on the deck of the pirate ship, completely stunned. Finally he looked up.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Her name is Mariella, but no one calls her that, not anymore. Not since she fell in love with the Sea King and gave up her fairyness to be with him.” Pan frowned theatrically. “Now she’s the called the Sea Witch by the merfolk. Terribly tragic story. The Sea King didn’t love her in return, despite the fact that she’d turned herself into a mermaid for him.”

  “Are you sure that’s how the story goes?” May asked with a frown.

  “Yes, stupid girl,” Pan said, rubbing his cheek where she’d hit him. “The fairy queen became a mermaid. It’s the first time anyone ever actively chose to go fish.”

  May snorted, while from behind them someone stirred against the ship’s cabin.

  “What’s that ye be sayin’?” the pirate captain, Captain Sword, asked. Jack had almost forgotten the pirate crew was still tied up.

  Pan sighed. “Our game is over. Go home. These people ruined it all for you. I’ll apologize for them, since they seem to be completely without manners.”

  “What’s that about the Sea Witch and the Sea King again?” Captain Sword asked, pushing himself to his feet. Now that Pan’s magic had worn off, the man looked both older and hairier. A beard ran down almost to his waist, with streaks of darkish blue throughout. His clothes, once regal and red, now were entirely black, covered in a black coat. On top of his head sat a three-sided hat, and at his waist was a wicked-looking sword
.

  “Oh, be quiet already!” Pan shouted, not even looking at the man.

  The pirate growled, then flexed his arms, and the ropes tied around him burst, freeing him. Not a second later, the former Captain Sword held a real sword in his now restored hand to Pan’s throat.

  “Who… who are you?” Pan screeched.

  The pirate roared, and slammed Pan against the side of the boat. “I’m yer death if ye don’t answer me question! And yer death be named Captain Bluebeard! Now, where can I find the Sea King?!”

  Jack and Phillip both gasped. Captain Bluebeard, the man so wanted by kingdoms without number that he had to dye his beard blue to disguise his true identity? The pirate so evil he married, then killed dozens of women, just for their dowries? The creature so horrendous even the sea itself was said to reject him?

  If it were possible, Pan’s eyes grew even wider. “I… I know you! You’re the pri—”

  “NOT ANYMORE!” Captain Bluebeard roared, and picked Pan up bodily with one hand. “Ye’ve run out of time, little man! I’d make ye walk the plank, but it won’t be easy walkin’ with no legs to do it with!”

  “Wait, let’s talk about this!” Jack shouted. “We need him still!”

  With no warning at all the pirate’s other hand flew out and smashed Jack in the face, sending him spinning around to crash into the railing that extended around the side of the boat. Jack hit the railing hard, doubling over it to look out over the water.

  And there, staring up at him, were the three mermaids who’d given them their tears earlier.

  Except now all traces of friendliness were gone. Now they just looked hungry.

  “Grab him!” the brunette hissed.

  The redheaded mermaid exploded out of the water high enough to grab Jack’s shirt with both hands. She pulled him up and over the ship’s rail, then they both fell back to the water, disappearing under the waves.

  CHAPTER 12

  Captain!” a pirate yelled. “The boy!”

  “Jack!” May shouted, and ran for the side… only for Phillip to stop her.