May Bird, Warrior Princess

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  May moved about with a spring in her step and a song on her lips, watching with a secret smile as Somber Kitty and Legume bounced about the tunnels of the colony like twin rubber bands, leaping out at each other from hiding places, biting each other’s ears, tapping each other’s faces lovingly with their paws. Somber Kitty had never looked less somber. Only occasionally would he deign to leap onto her lap anymore, and when he did, May would scratch his ears and think to him: This is what it feels like to really belong.

  Somber Kitty, fearful of being made into a sacred idol, studiously avoided the Egyptians, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible by holding his paw up to cover his face whenever they drifted past him. Always eager to learn something new, he had inexplicably apprenticed himself to the North Farm spirits to learn carpentry. Whenever he could tear himself away from Legume, one would find him in the workshop, using his mouth and paws to assemble tiny wooden toys in record speed, despite his lack of opposable thumbs. As a gift for Legume, he even made a tiny rolling mouse—a mini replica of one he had seen outside the city of Ether. Legume purred in admiration.

  Each night May, Bertha, and Lexy climbed to the Colony roof and surveyed the scene below, and every night the great shadow hand crept closer to the Colony, reaching and grasping. Finally, one night, when the hand seemed to be only a few miles away, Bertha let out a smelly sigh.

  “Well, girls,” she said, “if we’re gonna go, we gotta go now.”

  They leaned on the railing and stayed quiet for many minutes afterward, watching the last of the free land of the Ever After slip away.

  That night, though she didn’t know exactly why, May asked Pumpkin to cut her hair.

  “I never liked it, you know,” she said.

  “Too fussy for you,” Pumpkin agreed.

  “Yeah.” May swallowed. She nibbled her lip nervously. She had been working up to something for many days now, and this was the perfect time to say it. Her heart fluttered with shame.

  “Pumpkin,” she told him, “I’m sorry for what I said, before, during the meteor shower.”

  “It’s okay,” Pumpkin said, looking down at his feet awkwardly, then sitting beside her on the bed. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Well.” May kicked her own feet in the air, back and forth. “It kind of is a big deal. It was a really horrible thing for me to say.”

  Pumpkin shrugged. “It was the truth.”

  “No, it wasn’t!” May gushed, grabbing his cold fingers. “How can you say that?”

  Pumpkin, tugging at his crooked bottom lip thoughtfully, appeared to be unswayed. “It’s okay. I mean, I wish it was different. You know.” He waggled one hand in the air helplessly. “The spirits of Risk Falls are good at taking risks, and the Egyptians are good at building. The undead are good at surviving.” He hunched his shoulders forward a little bit, sinking. “House ghosts aren’t good at much. That’s just the way it is.”

  May felt a thick knot in her throat. How could she tell him how much he mattered? “I don’t see any other house ghosts but you, Pumpkin. Who else would have been brave enough to come this far?”

  “Even the Shakespeare Song & Dance Revue doesn’t want me,” he said, and sniffed. They were both silent for a while.

  “I was good at something once,” he finally said.

  “What’s that?” May asked.

  “Watching over you.” He looked at her, and a tiny, sad smile played on his white lips. “When you were just a baby, and a little girl, living in White Moss Manor.” He nodded, his eyes wide and sad. “I was really good at that.”

  May squeezed his cold hand again.

  “But you’re not a little girl anymore, I guess,” he whispered.

  May didn’t know how to answer. “I’ll always need you,” she finally said. “Please don’t give up on watching over me.”

  Another sad smile spread across Pumpkin’s big mouth. But it was one that, May could tell, was only meant to make her feel better.

  Somber Kitty had taken to sleeping on the easy chair, curled up with Legume. And so May and Pumpkin fell asleep with May’s head on Pumpkin’s shoulder, like two peas in a pod. Like two spirits who could never be separated.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The Beginning of the End

  The next day a ragtag group of about twenty Live Ones and thirty spirits—some drifty, lopsided ghosts, some somber-looking specters, a gaggle of luminously glowing boys, a dimly lit, pumpkin-headed house ghost—set off across the Nothing Platte, headed northeast.

  They dodged in and out of abandoned villages, keeping as far from the shadowy hand of Bo Cleevil as they could. As they made their way farther north, several of them kept looking back over their shoulders at the world they were leaving behind.

  Finally, after days of traveling, they came to a place where the clear dusky air of the world they knew met the thick fog that marked the beginning of the Platte of Despair. A low moaning seemed to whisper through the air. And if that wasn’t enough, a tiny green kiosk, broken and decrepit, sat at its very edge, a sign above its one window announcing WELCOME TO THE PLATTE OF DESPAIR. TURN BACK.

  May drifted to the kiosk. On its dingy front door was a wooden hand clutching a fistful of papers, a sign above reading TAKE ONE. May did, the hand loosening its grip as she slid one of the papers out, and then tightening again after giving a brief thumbs-up sign.

  Welcome to the Platte of Despair, final frontier of the Ever After. Certain doom awaits you if you continue forward. The rest of the brochure was just black, but for a pair of red eyes at the bottom of the back page. The eyes blinked at May. She shivered.

  She glanced back at the fog. They couldn’t see more than a couple of feet into it. Anything could be waiting for them in its white, drifty depths. “It doesn’t look … so despairy,” Beatrice offered, trying to sound bright. Pumpkin whimpered.

  May scanned the empty horizon behind them, as if the Lady might show up after all and tell them it was safe to pass. But there was nothing. Everyone looked to May, waiting for her decision.

  She peered back into the Platte. “Well,” she said, stepping back from the kiosk, and then stretching a foot into the fog. “I guess we—”

  “We go!” said Fabbio, raising one finger and sweeping between her and the door with a great show of bravery.

  Suddenly a loud creak came from inside the kiosk. And then the door burst off its hinges, knocking Fabbio onto the ground and landing on top of him with a thud, followed by the thuds of several spirits falling out on top of it.

  “I told ye to stop tickling me with yer mustache!”

  “I can’t help it if ye’ve got sensitive skin!”

  “Get off me! Ye’re makin’ me foot fall asleep!”

  “Mama mia! Help me!”

  The group of knaves lying on the ground in a knot looked up then and seemed to notice for the first time that they were making a spectacle of themselves. Gwenneth, Peg Leg Petey, and some other knaves slowly stood up, brushing themselves off. Fabbio scrambled out from under the door and brushed off his uniform indignantly, then looked around surreptitiously as if hoping no one had noticed. Gwenneth scooped her foot from the ground and stuck it in her pocket, giving Petey a death glare.

  May pulled her bow off her back slowly, stringing an arrow and pointing it at the knaves. “Leave us alone,” she growled. Somber Kitty, trailing behind her, leaped in front of Legume protectively.

  The knaves, eleven in all, jumped behind Peg Leg Petey, who waved his rough, calloused hands in front of his dimpled face. “It’s not like that, lass. We didn’t come to catch ye. We came to join ye.”

  “And that ain’t no way to greet a friend!” Gwenneth added indignantly. May scowled at her, and she hopped back behind Petey.

  “We been waitin’ on ye three days,” Petey explained. “’Course, Skippy is no longer with us. Ye saw the vamps nab him.” He bowed his head respectfully, then continued. “Lucky the rest of us are masters at hidin’ in even the most pressin’ circu
mstances. We figured ye’d be coming up this way sooner or later. We wants to throw in our lot with ye. Make a go of it.”

  “You’re lying,” Lucius said.

  “Mew,” said Kitty, agreeing completely.

  Petey drew circles in the dirt with his foot, sweating profusely as he looked at May’s arrow. “I can see as you might have a reason or two not to trust us.” He stuck a finger in his nose, then wiped it on his shirt. “But ye see, there ain’t nothing or nobody left in the Ever After. We’re all that’s left.” He swiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “And I says to the others, I says, we might as well go and help that little May Bird, Book of the Dead saying she’s gonna save the realm and all. We’d like to have a friend like you. And ye see …” He pulled something out from under his arms and showed it to her. It was his book, How to Win Friends, Influence Specters, Have Good Manners, and Find Buried Treasure by Duke Bluebeard, Esquire. Petey nodded to it. “It says the best way to gain a friend is to be a friend.”

  “And you think Cleevil might have some treasure locked up too,” Lucius finished.

  Petey hesitated, then gave May an embarrassed, gold-toothed grin. “Maybe just a tad.”

  May and the others looked at one another. Lucius shook his head. But Bea nodded hopefully. Pumpkin gazed at the shiny spectacles hanging around Petey’s neck, spacing out. Fabbio twirled his mustache, still wearing his most common expression, indignance.

  “Oh, and we brought something we thought might help.” Gwenneth reached into a deep sack hanging off her shoulder and pulled out two overflowing handfuls of balloons.

  “What in tarnation are those for?” Bertha Brettwaller asked, emerging from the group.

  Gwenneth grinned. She reached into her sack again, this time pulling out several vials of dark, oily seawater.

  “Well,” May said, gazing around the group. “We’re not exactly in the position to turn down help.”

  Petey grinned and floated up to May, taking her hand and giving it a hard shake, his dimples sinking deep into his chubby cheeks. “All fer one and all fer oneself, hmm?” He squinted thoughtfully. “Or something like that.”

  May replaced her bow on her back. “Something like that,” she replied. She peered back proudly at the spirits behind her. And then the group, containing the very last of the Free Spirits in the Ever After—good and bad—drifted forward into the fog.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The Hole in the Floor of the World

  La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.”

  The Free Spirits had been drifting for what seemed like a day or more. With no way to see very well, it was impossible to tell if they were drifting in the right direction. Two or three hours before, they had had to change course after bumping into a large boulder, chiseled into the shape of a skull and crossbones, that they had already come across earlier in the day. It was the only landmark they’d seen.

  Fabbio zipped along far in front of the group, cutting a commanding figure and singing an old Italian army song filled with lots of la, la, la’s for all the words he didn’t remember. His singing was almost as bad as Pumpkin’s was good. Somber Kitty, lying cuddled with Legume in Pumpkin’s arms, let out meow after meow, looking like his old somber self.

  “Maybe this is what the Platte of Despair means,” Lucius muttered under his breath.

  The moan in the air, very quietly, said things like left, right, right, turn, left, so that May couldn’t think straight.

  “I think that’s something up ahead,” May said, hopeful and a little wary of what it might be.

  As they got closer, the shape took a more specific form. A familiar one. A few more seconds, and it was obvious.

  It can’t be …, May thought, her stomach churning.

  But it was. It was the same skull and crossbones from before. There, in one corner, was a place where the rock had been chipped. It was unmistakable.

  “We’ve been going in a circle again!” she cried.

  Fabbio twirled his mustache and looked about, bewildered. “This is not my fault,” he said in a low, even voice.

  Pumpkin flopped down dramatically on top of the skull. “Well, I’m not going any farther until someone figures out the right way.”

  Somber Kitty sniffed curiously at the bottom edges of the rock. Legume licked behind his ears.

  “Maybe the ‘despair’ part of the Platte of Despair is that it never ends,” Beatrice offered helpfully. But it didn’t make anyone feel better.

  “Dude, this is a total downer,” Zero piped up from behind her.

  Pumpkin heaved a dramatic sigh. He was now totally splayed across the skull, his head hanging upside down. “We’ll never even get to fight the battle we’re going to lose.”

  They were all silent for several seconds, thinking.

  “Meay.”

  Everyone looked at Somber Kitty.

  “Meay, meay, meay.”

  He flapped his tail thoughtfully, staring holes into May.

  “Dude, I think your cat’s trying to say something,” Zero said.

  May gazed at Kitty, then at the rock he’d been sniffing. She began to examine it. She examined every inch of it, for any secret buttons, or knobs, or levers. One never knew. But there was nothing. It was exactly what it appeared to be. A lifeless, dull rock. Somber Kitty and Legume looked at each other, and May could swear they were rolling their eyes.

  “Well, if we try heading this way …,” she suggested, pointing in a random direction into the fog.

  “Meay.”

  She looked at Kitty again. He made a big show of sniffing the rock.

  May leaned on one hip and gazed at it, trying to see it in a different way. When she’d been smaller, and working on her inventions, the best way to come up with something new was to let her thinking go sideways. She tried that now.

  Skull and crossbones …, she thought, remembering old treasure maps she’d read about in stories.

  By this time, Somber Kitty had begun to make big arrows in the sand with his paws, all pointing at the boulder.

  “Maybe this is what happens when you reach the northern edge of the realm,” Lucius suggested. “You keep pushing toward somewhere but you just don’t go anywhere.”

  Pushing …, May thought. “Push,” she said.

  “Huh?” asked Pumpkin, lifting his head from its flopped-back position.

  “Let’s try pushing the rock. There’s got to be something hidden underneath. Maybe a map or … something. I don’t know.”

  Everyone looked dubious. But they gathered on one side of the boulder, and Pumpkin leaped off, and on the count of three, they gave a great heave.

  At first nothing happened. But then the boulder slowly began to move. And slowly, slowly, what lay underneath revealed itself.

  “Keep pushing,” May breathed.

  With one final heave, the boulder moved completely out of the way, and everyone fell back panting and staring at the ground.

  What lay there was a giant hole, dark and deep, but flickering with white light.

  Somber Kitty and Legume let out loud hisses. Several spirits knelt beside it and peered inside, amazed into silence. May crouched, leaned forward onto her fists, and looked down.

  The hole was in the sky. Or rather, the hole led into the air. They were looking down through a thin crust of land into a wide-open valley below—as if they were looking down on the world from the clouds. But the world below wasn’t like the Ever After, dim and dusky.

  May had seen it before. She had seen it painted in the glass in the great uppermost hall of the Eternal Edifice. And she’d seen it in her mind a million times since then. But she still wasn’t prepared for the sight. It wasn’t like anything she had ever imagined.

  The dark sky flashed with thunder and lightning. Rocky mountains rose up in all directions, glinting darkly—one peak sweeping to within twenty feet below where they crouched. A deep, wide crevice bit its way between them, far below May and her friends. And spanning the crevice was what a
t first looked like a stone castle straight from a storybook—black as pitch, its dark spires reaching into the sky, its windows flickering with yellow light. But as May looked closer, she could see that the castle wasn’t stone at all. It was carved out of an enormous tree stump, as tall as the Eternal Edifice itself, rotten and decayed, full of holes that had been turned into windows, cracks that had become doors. And at the very top, in the farthest stretch of its highest height, was one window far above all the others, glowing, not with yellow light, but an eerie red glow. A glow the color of Bo Cleevil’s eyes.

  “Dude, it’s like Dracula’s castle, only”—Zero scratched his head—“like, a million times bigger. And worse. And …”

  Beatrice nudged him. Pumpkin had begun to shake violently, whimpering.

  In the busy streets that wound and crisscrossed down the mountainside outside the castle, they could make out moving figures—and these separated themselves out into spirits, hundreds of thousands of them, many of them in chains. “It looks like every spirit in the realm is here!” May whispered, hope surging up within her. “They’re still okay!”

  Among the spirits moved darker ones, poking, prodding, herding. Dark spirits. Somber Kitty let out a low groan and looked at Legume protectively.

  Suddenly a great blotch swooped underneath them, making them all duck backward. When they crept forward again, they could see there were several dark creatures circling the air—vampires keeping watch.

  May eyed the rope tied to Peg Leg Petey’s belt. She looked down at the distance between the hole and the peak below. Then she began untying the rope and wrapping it around the skull-shaped boulder.

  “What are ye doin’?”

  “We’re going to lower ourselves down,” May said, making a knot and testing to see if it was solid.

  “Ye can’t be serious about goin’ in there,” Petey warbled, backing up.