Half Upon a Time

by James Riley

  “May, you don’t know—,” Jack said.

  “Shut up!” May shouted. “I’m not going to let you two fight over something this stupid! Phillip, you can’t blame Jack for something his father did. Jack, stop trying to work out your father issues through Phillip.”

  “Wait, what?” Jack said, but May didn’t let him continue.

  “My grandmother needs our help, and this is how we’re going to do it!” May said, handing Jack the last of his father’s magical beans. “Now, help me dig a hole; we’re going to need to aim this just right.”

  Chapter 31

  It didn’t very take long for the bean to take root in the sand below Malevolent’s castle. It took even less time for the first sprout to break through the dirt with a loud pop, startling a nearby blackbird from its sleep.

  “Wow!” May said as she bent over to stare at the sprout. “That was quick! How long do you think it’ll—”

  A second sprout interrupted her, popping up right between her feet. “Whoops!” she yelled, jumping backward. Jack and Phillip both stepped back a few paces as well, giving the plant more room. That turned out to be a good thing, as five more sprouts immediately broke through the sand where the teenagers had just been standing.

  “How many shoots will it grow?” Phillip asked suspiciously. “The bean did not appear to be that large….”

  “Four beans went all the way into the clouds,” Jack said, eyeing the shoots. “One bean should be plenty to get us up to the castle.”

  “I’ll never get used to this,” May said as the sprouts grew under the moonlight. “I mean, shouldn’t it need sunlight? Right, sorry. Magic.”

  As the first bean sprouts grew larger, more and more popped up through the sand, each one inching up toward the sky. Proving it was only a matter of time, the first sprout tipped over and curled right into its neighbor. Without even pausing, the two sprouts spiraled around each other, then branched off together in a third direction.

  It didn’t take the other sprouts long to push their way into the mix as well, and soon a relatively thick vine made up of dozens of smaller shoots rose into the sky. Other individual sprouts still grew on their own, but most seemed to gravitate toward the larger vine.

  “Maybe we should give it more room?” Jack said nervously, glancing down at the ground beneath them. There was no telling what was forming underneath the sand and might burst out at any second.

  “It’s not that big,” May said, reaching out to touch a leaf on the larger vine as it rose quickly beyond her grasp. “Do you think we should grab on at some point?” she asked. “It’d save us the climb.”

  “Perhaps we ought to wait until it has finished growing?” Phillip asked nervously, looking a bit green himself as more and more shoots twisted and wrapped themselves around the larger vine, moving like the grotesque tentacles of some foul squid.

  “Why wait?” Jack said. “You’re not scared of a little plant, are you, Phillip?” He tossed a challenging look back at the nervous prince.

  Phillip just glared at him. Jack smiled in response. “Fine, you wait down here,” he said. “I’ll go save Merriweather.” Quickly checking to make sure his bag and sword were secure on his back, Jack readied himself, waved to Phillip and May, then took a running jump straight at the vine.

  He slammed into the plant a bit harder than he would have liked, considering he was going for an impressively easy sort of look, but at least he managed to find a fairly secure shoot to grab ahold of before he lost his grip. Jack’s feet kicked around for a brief moment before finding a shoot strong enough to stand on, but that was all he needed to hold himself up.

  By the time Jack secured himself and looked back down to the beach, he found himself ten feet above May’s and Phillip’s heads. “Come on!” he shouted down to them. “You’ll miss your ride!”

  May shouted in excitement, then took a running leap onto the beanstalk as well, landing much more gracefully than Jack had. Phillip hesitated, then took a deep breath and followed the princess. Jack noticed with more than a little annoyance that the prince landed on the rising vine absolutely perfectly, as if he did this sort of thing every day.

  “Should we have told the wolf what we’re doing?” May shouted up to Jack.

  “I think he’ll be able to figure it out!” Jack yelled. He glanced down past May and Phillip to see if he could locate the wolf from this height, but he was already higher than he’d thought and couldn’t make out much on the ground in the dark. Suddenly, Jack felt dizzy, and for a brief moment, he almost lost his grip. He quickly shook off the feeling and threw both arms around the vine, resolving not to look down again for the rest of the trip.

  Unfortunately, up wasn’t looking much better, as Jack quickly realized.

  “Uh-oh!” he shouted.

  “What!” May said.

  “I think we aimed badly!” Jack shouted back.

  “Did we miss the castle?” Phillip yelled up.

  “Oh, we’re going to hit it all right,” Jack said with a wince. “Just hold on! Make sure you’re secure down there!” Without waiting for a response, Jack quickly followed his own advice, wrapping stray shoots around his arms and kicking his legs through some other loops. It wasn’t much, but it was all he could do under the circumstances. Feeling a bit more secure, he glanced upward again.

  As they’d seen from the beach, the castle sat on an island in the sky, an island supported by a very narrow column of stone. That meant the sides of the island hung far out over the ocean and beach, nowhere close to the supportive stone column in the middle of the island. When planting the magic bean, they’d tried to aim for the very edge of the island’s overhang, considering they would have to jump from the beanstalk to the castle.

  Unfortunately, aiming a magical beanstalk wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Instead of pulling up next to the overhang, it appeared as if the beanstalk was headed straight for it.

  As Jack watched with growing apprehension, the first shoots reached the bottom of the overhang. Pushing up into the rock, the shoots curled back over themselves when they couldn’t move the stone. Fortunately, those first strands didn’t have the support of the main shoot, which itself was about two seconds away from reaching the overhang.

  “Brace yourselves!” Jack shouted down as the main beanstalk connected with the cliff. Instantly the entire stalk shuddered sickeningly, shaking and vibrating all over the place. Even worse, the shaking was soon followed by a rather horrifying cracking noise from the overhang.

  Small rocks began to tumble down all around Jack. He held on to the vine as tightly as he could, his eyes firmly closed as he desperately hoped that the beanstalk would just push up and around the overhang, leaving the rock intact.

  Instead, the overhang decided to kill Jack’s hopes by cracking right in half with a sound like thunder. The shock of the break sent the beanstalk into brutal convulsions, shaking Jack right off the plant. As he tumbled backward his eyes opening wide in shock, his heart pounded louder in his ears than the rock breaking above him.

  Fortunately, the loops around his legs held firm, and instead of falling completely off the beanstalk, Jack found himself suspended upside down over nothing. He quickly threw a hand back into the vine, grabbed the center stalk, and jerked himself back in, just as the broken half of the overhang plummeted down past him, right through the spot where his body had been a second ago.

  As Jack’s toes went numb at the thought of what had almost just happened he managed to scream out a warning to May and Phillip, knowing in his heart that he was already much too late. A second later he heard the rock explode as it hit the sand below.

  “Are you kidding me with that?!” May shouted up at him. “Could you maybe not drop anything else?!”

  “To be fair, Jack was not at fault,” Phillip said in response. “Not this time, at least.”

  “She knows that, idiot!” Jack yelled down. “Stay close to the vine. It’s not done!”

  After the largest pie
ce broke off, smaller but no less deadly bits of rock tumbled down past Jack, each one falling with enough force to split his head open. The deadly rock shower soon slowed, then stopped completely, fortunately leaving him with nothing more than some bruises. The beanstalk, though, hadn’t stopped growing, and was pushing right up through the newly created edge of the overhang. As he rose toward it Jack watched the rock carefully, making sure he knew exactly when to jump.

  “The edge of the island is on May’s side, Phillip!” he yelled down. “Both of you, watch out for it!” As he said this it occurred to him that he himself had to get to the other side of the beanstalk. Unfortunately, the thing was growing so fast, he didn’t have very much time to decide how exactly to do that. He threw a leg around to the other side of the beanstalk, quickly located a sprout that hopefully would support his weight, and stepped down.

  It held. He sighed, then moved his other leg around. The first step had taken him halfway around, but the overhang had just passed right by him. As he frantically searched for another foothold with his right foot he watched the overhang fall away as the stalk continued growing.

  There really was no choice. Jack sighed, closed his eyes, and threw himself off the beanstalk.

  His fall ended with a shoulder-crunching landing on the overhang. The pain caused him to bite down hard on his lip, but overall, he counted himself lucky. After all, if he had missed, it was a long way down, and frankly, he had already taken far too many falls from great heights in the past few days.

  Jack pushed himself to his feet just as May’s head popped up past the edge of the overhang. She smiled as she rose up and easily stepped off the beanstalk onto the overhang.

  “That wasn’t too bad,” May said. Jack couldn’t bring himself to return her grin as he felt around his body to see if anything had broken. A few seconds later Phillip rose up past the overhang, stepping off just as neatly as May had.

  “Quite a nice way to travel,” the prince said. Jack just shook his head and wondered what kind of supreme being would allow this sort of injustice. He started to say something, then noticed that Phillip had frozen in place and was staring at something behind Jack.

  On his other side May seemed to have seen the same thing. “Yup, that’s just about our luck,” she said quietly.

  Jack whipped his head around to see what she was talking about, then sighed deeply. Six lumbering goblins covered in black armor strode toward them in the moonlight. All six held swords easily as long as the goblins were tall, and all six swords were pointing at Jack, May, and Phillip.

  Even as Jack frantically tried to come up with a plan, May clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I got this one,” she said confidently. The princess stepped past him, then raised her hand, palm out. “Stop!” she roared.

  Immediately, the group of goblins stopped in their tracks. Jack stared at them in surprise for a second, then realized that the creatures most likely didn’t know what May planned to use that hand for. After all, the goblins knew as well as anyone that palms could be awfully dangerous in the wrong hands, so to speak. If she was a witch or magician of some kind, she might be casting a spell.

  “What’re you doing?” Jack whispered out of the side of his mouth.

  “Getting us inside,” May responded in the same way. “Hear me, Creepy Little Monster-Thingers!” she shouted to the goblins. “Take us to your leader! Take us to Malevolent! We have important information for her!”

  The goblins looked at one another, then smiled. One of the larger ones took a step forward. “Gladly,” it said.

  “Well, good!” May responded. “It’s nice to finally meet some reasonable people here!”

  “But first,” the bigger goblin said, “we’ll take you to the dungeon. You’ll see our Lady, all right … in a few hundred years.”

  And then the goblins attacked.

  Chapter 32

  Jack slowly opened his eyes to find himself in a strangely familiar place. Behind him, the leaves of a large oak tree filled the sky, while golden grasses waved in the gentle wind at his feet. For the life of him, though, he couldn’t remember what this place was, or how he’d gotten here. The last Jack remembered, the goblin guards had swarmed over them from every side. One had lifted its sword and brought it down …

  Oh, right, brought it down straight onto Jack’s head.

  Jack felt around the back of his skull, then winced as he found the spot the goblin had hit. It didn’t hurt, exactly; it was more like a memory of a pain. Well, at least that explained why he had his eyes closed—the creature had knocked him unconscious. But hadn’t it been nighttime before? Here, the sun burned high in the sky, causing the grasses to glow a calming green.

  How exactly had he gotten from Malevolent’s castle to this field? And why was it so hard to think clearly?

  “I see you’ve returned,” said a man in a blue cloak on Jack’s right. As Jack turned, the memory of his last dreamlike encounter with the man flooded into his foggy consciousness. Unfortunately, just as it had the last time, the situation seemed much too surreal to take very seriously.

  “That’s right,” Jack responded, finding himself oddly happy despite a nagging feeling that something was deeply, deeply wrong.

  The knight leaned over and looked closely at Jack, as if the man were peering right into him. “Your training progresses slowly,” he said. “I assume there is no cause for worry?”

  “Worry?” Jack asked, confused. “Training?”

  “You haven’t been making use of your sword as you should have, Jack,” the knight said with a touch of disappointment. “That sword is a powerful tool; it can help to awaken the world around you, if you let it.”

  “The sword?” Jack furrowed his brow. “But the sword … it’s …” He struggled with what he wanted to say, but in the end just gave up and went for the obvious. “It’s bad.”

  The knight laughed. “It certainly has the possibility for evil, I’ll grant you that. And most of the Eyes did use their weapons for horrible deeds. But the sword can be used for great good, in the hands of the right person.” He glanced momentarily at Jack. “I do hope I haven’t chosen wrongly. Still, you must be careful. There are those in the world who would turn you from your path.”

  “My path?” Jack asked. Why was it so hard for him to think here?

  The knight nodded. “You walk a dangerous road, my young friend. Few have the courage to walk it, and all before you have failed, including myself. You are our last chance.”

  “Chance?” Jack asked. “It’s … hard to think.”

  “You will get used to it as time passes,” the knight said. “This is a realm of great potential, yet you haven’t reached the point where you might take advantage of it. For now it provides a convenient place for us to meet. Soon, it shall be more … when you are ready.”

  Jack didn’t even bother asking about any of that, instead going back to a previous question. “What … what is my path?”

  The knight raised an eyebrow, then leaned in close. “Why, just what you believe it to be. You are on a quest to save Snow White, are you not?”

  Jack nodded slowly.

  The knight smiled. “I cannot think of a more important one,” he said. Abruptly, his smile vanished. “However, you must heed this word of warning—”

  Before the knight could finish, a sharp pain struck Jack in the spot where the goblin had hit him. He hissed in pain, then looked to the knight. “I … I think I might be waking up now.”

  The knight looked concerned. “Oh, you are waking up,” he said. “Yet not nearly fast enough. And the Wicked Queen knows you, Jack. She has always known, and she awaits your arrival. However, she doesn’t yet realize that I have found you first. And you must keep that from her, Jack, above all else. If she learns that I am training you, all will be lost. There would be nowhere you could run, nowhere you could hide from that woman.”

  And with that, the knight sat back against the tree. As Jack tried to fight through the fog in his head to ask somet
hing, anything, about what the knight had just said, the grass and sunlight began to swirl around in front of his eyes. Faster and faster they whirled until the bright colors drained away, leaving just the dark unknown of his unconsciousness, tainted by a throbbing pain at the back of his head.

  Chapter 33

  “Jack?” someone whispered.

  Jack groaned but didn’t open his eyes. The pain in the back of his head pounded away, threatening to magnify dramatically if he so much as cracked his eyelids. And what if he did open his eyes, and he was still in a meadow?

  No, that had been a dream … but where had the dream actually started? Had he dreamed the entire beanstalk mess? Maybe he could just go back to sleep and let this whole nightmare end on its own.

  “Jack!” the voice whispered again, louder this time. “Wake up!”

  “I knew you were gonna say that,” Jack grunted, then cracked his eyes open. Instantly he closed them: Some kind of floating globe of light was shining right in his face, blinding him. More cautiously this time, he tilted his head to the side and opened his eyes again.

  Not only was there a light but bars, too. Big metal bars. They’d been thrown in jail by the goblins, as promised. At least the monsters were reliable.

  “May?” Jack asked, reluctantly pushing himself to a sitting position. He glanced around his cell and quickly spotted her staring at him from the next cell over, just to the left of the floating will-o’-the-wisp globe that eerily lit the cells.

  “About time you woke up!” she said indignantly. “I’ve been sitting here for hours!”

  “Did they hit you, too?” Jack asked, lightly rubbing the back of his head, then resolving not to do that anymore when new pain shot through his temples.

  “Well, no,” May said. “They didn’t touch me.”

  Jack nodded. That was something.

  “I’m still annoyed, though,” May said, standing up with her hands on her hips. “I mean, what kind of guards don’t take you to the person in charge?!”