Cinder Ellie (Faraway Castle)

by J. M. Stengl

  Afterward she couldn’t quite remember how she had excused herself from his presence, but no further clumsiness had occurred, for which she was deeply thankful. Soon the speeches and toasts began, and she eagerly moved to the outskirts of the room with the other servers, relieved to set down that traitorous pitcher. She leaned against the wall between Ben and Kerry Jo, hid her shaking hands behind her back, and replayed the entire scene in her mind. Her face and body burned with conflicting emotions as she tried to process the shock of having her most-embarrassing-moment-ever be followed by events so thrilling that her memories went soft and blurry when she tried to recall them.

  Above all, it was undeniable fact that her own detestable clumsiness had sparked her first actual conversation with Prince Omar. Anyone would have expected him to be the one to cut her with angry words, but he’d seemed irked with the princess and overjoyed to have lemonade poured down his back. When he returned the towel he’d even thanked her! This memory triggered a giggle, drawing irritated glances from Ben and Kerry Jo. She tried to cover with a cough, but they didn’t buy it.

  While the groom finished his emotional toast to his bride, Ellie smiled and sighed. Instead of nightmares of spilled lemonade, she would float away that night in dreams of Omar’s frankly delighted smile and the heart-melting expression in big dark eyes framed by the thickest, longest black lashes she had ever seen or imagined.

  She caught only distant additional glimpses of Prince Omar before the bridal party and guests moved on to the ballroom, but she’d collected memories enough to buoy her spirits for weeks to come. With unnatural energy she helped clear tables and return the dining hall to its normal arrangement before breakfast the next morning. The brownies took over from there, and Ellie was not among the servers assigned to stand behind refreshment tables in the ballroom.

  All thought of cinder sprites had fled her mind until Sten caught her arm as she passed through the lobby after delivering a message to the director’s office. He usually worked at the front desk, the only dwarf to work exclusively inside the castle, and Ellie knew him best of the dwarfs. Like the others, he wore a glamour to conceal his true nature from guests. Ellie could see through the spell if she tried but found it disconcerting to view her friend in two forms, so she focused on the fake, human-looking one.

  “News for you,” Sten whispered. “Meet you in the service staircase, second level. Five minutes.”

  Ellie made her way to the meeting place, trying to look innocuous but feeling as if suspicious eyes followed her. The service staircase behind the kitchen and laundry area was the narrowest in the castle, but on this night the upper flights would be lightly used. Sten waited for her on the landing, his dark eyes fiercely intent, his black beard bristling. “Kai, our messenger, is back. He had to relay the story to a pooka, who should reach the Gamekeeper by morning, and with any luck the Gamekeeper will come straight here. We’ve got to protect the sprites until he arrives.”

  Ellie nodded agreement. “I’ll do everything I can.”

  “I hear you’ve got a spray ready for experiment. If you see an embered sprite, don’t hesitate to use it. You can’t make things worse and might actually save a life.”

  Ellie, Jeralee, and Kerry Jo were all sleeping soundly when a disturbingly familiar clanging began again. Ellie sat straight up in bed, her heart pounding. The fire alarm. It had to be another cinder sprite. She was dressed and out the door, spray bottle in hand, almost before the other two set their feet on the floor.

  As she passed the kitchen, three brownies working there all spoke at once: “The cottages!” Ellie set off at a run. The tiny cottages occupied by senior members of the staff lined the perimeter service road along the east side of the garden, shaded by a grove of tall pines. Taking a back door, Ellie rushed out of the castle into darkness and found her way to a side garden gate. From there she could see those pine trees silhouetted against flickering orange light. As she heard the confusion of shouts from rushing dark figures, her pace slowed and she shifted her gaze from side to side, searching for anything unusual—anything magical.

  A tiny shimmer of magic brought her focus to a slender pine on the far side of the service road. Seated on one of its lower branches, nearly hidden by twigs and needles, perched a pixie. It was swinging its legs and humming happily, a tiny sound Ellie heard not with her ears but with that extra sense she couldn’t define.

  With a sudden sense of urgency, she ran beneath that tree toward the fire and the chaos. The windows of the burning cottage glowed orange, and one of them shattered with a muffled roar even as Ellie watched. Someone threw a bucket of water onto the flames, and others trained the spray from garden hoses onto the roof and through the front door. She gathered from shouts of the firefighters that the cottage had been vacant, which was a relief.

  A separate glow caught Ellie’s eye. She watched in fascination as a shimmering ball of fire seemed to roll through the front door right through the shower of water, tumble down the steps, and bounce down the walkway toward the road. She didn’t have to take a step but simply raised the spray bottle and aimed it at the approaching fireball until it came in range.

  One squirt, and the fireball stopped with a whistling hiss. A second squirt and its flames seemed to freeze in place. She could see two brighter spots that might be eyes, but otherwise its appearance was indistinct.

  Worried, Ellie spoke aloud: “It’s all right. We know you didn’t mean any harm, little sprite. You can relax and cool down now, and you’ll be fine by morning.” She put plenty of magic into her words but wasn’t sure the immobilized creature even heard them. It didn’t seem to be dead . . . but then again it showed no signs of life.

  Suddenly it collapsed in on itself, and Ellie stared in horror at a puddle of black goo. She nearly choked as a sulphurous stench rose to her nostrils, and tears of disappointment and sorrow rolled down her cheeks.

  Then a tiny voice sang out above her head. “It’s dead! It’s dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it! Ah-hahahaahahaha!”

  Ellie’s chin jerked upward, but the pixie flitted into the night, still laughing.

  Ellie felt as gray and doleful as the morning sky. Other staff members had already cleaned up the scene of the fire when she arrived after her extra duties inside the castle, which was filled to capacity with wedding guests. But she hoped to take a closer look at the melted cinder sprite and maybe gain some clue into what she had done wrong while mixing that potion.

  But when she walked toward the cottage, keeping her eyes on the side of the path where the fireball had dissolved, she found nothing. “Chuck?” she called to the dwarf still raking up blackened shingles. “Did you or anyone else find a blackened thing . . . like a pool of melted tar here by the path?”

  Chuck hurried toward her, his boots crunching on the gravel. “I haven’t seen anything like that . . .” He sounded hesitant and curious. “The cinder sprite?”

  Giving a quick nod, Ellie again scoured the area. “I was standing right here, I’m positive. And I sprayed . . .” She squatted, and Chuck went down on one knee beside her.

  “Right here,” he said. “This looks like sprite footprints leading toward the road.” He stood up but remained bent over, following a trail that was invisible to Ellie’s straining eyes. She followed him. He lost the tracks on the gravel road but picked them up again in the soft dirt on the far side.

  “I had planned to see what was left of the embered sprite and maybe bury it,” she explained. “Do you think another sprite might have come to carry it away?”

  Chuck looked up long enough to give her a wry grin. “If you had ever seen a sprite, you’d know the answer: impossible.”

  “Then . . . what do you think we’re following?”

  “My guess is that your spray worked and the sprite recovered.”

  Ellie stopped in her tracks, her mind whirling. Then she trotted to catch up with Chuck. “But it dissolved into goo. Seriously. There was nothing left but slimy-looking muck.”
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br />   “So it reformed in the night and walked away. Ellie, you need to start believing in yourself. You’re no hembez like you seem to think. You figured out a way to save a cinder sprite gone ember, an extraordinary magical feat!”

  Chuck followed the tiny tracks, and Ellie followed Chuck, through an ornate wrought-iron gate into the castle gardens. There he finally lost the trail when the creature’s tracks led to a broad lawn. “I think we can safely say that the cinder sprite is in reasonably good health, since it ran this far at a good clip with no sign of a limp or of pauses to catch its breath.”

  Ellie could hardly breathe. Had she really done it? On her very first try, she’d concocted a formula that brought back cinder sprites from the brink of death! What would Arabella say? Would she be proud?

  Oh, how Ellie wanted to jump in circles and tell her friends! Jeralee would celebrate with her, but she suspected Ben and Kerry Jo would react with faint smiles and patently insincere comments such as “That’s really cool.” Since neither of them had enough magic to do much more than see brownies, they never cared to hear about Ellie’s magical endeavors. Or Jeralee’s, for that matter. But Jeralee could use magic to make internal-combustion engines run more efficiently, a talent with obvious practical value, while cinder sprites were furry hazards. Most of her human friends would find Ellie’s success laughable if not detrimental.

  But then there was Chuck, who even now beamed upon her and said, “You’re a hero, Ellie.” Her heart was full.

  “Chuck!”

  They both turned at the urgent call and saw Tasha approaching at a run from the direction of the castle. Her knitted brow warned them of bad news before she opened her mouth. “The exterminator is expected to arrive tonight. Kai and Sten are working on a plan to stall him until the Gamekeeper arrives, but we need more help. Should we ask the brownies, do you think?”

  Chuck frowned. “They will help if the exterminator enters the castle, but we would be wise to stop him before he gets that far. I think we should lay a trap on the drive, maybe even outside the gate. The exterminator will be a magical being of some kind, of course, so we’ll need magic to conceal the trap and make it strong enough to hold him. Tea and Nillie can handle that. I would feel better if the killer never enters Faraway Castle property.”

  “So would I,” Tasha agreed fervently.

  “Is there anything I could do to help?” Ellie asked.

  Both dwarfs gave her evaluating looks. “Maybe so,” Chuck said. “We’ll let you know once the trap is ready.”

  As Ellie cleaned more boats that afternoon, her thoughts constantly returned to the emergency situation, wondering if the dwarfs had completed the trap yet, wondering how they would know when the Gamekeeper arrived, wondering where the recovered sprite might be hiding . . . wondering . . . worrying . . .

  Jeralee teased her for being distracted. “Could this have to do with spilling lemonade down a certain prince’s back?” she asked.

  Ellie blushed. Somehow, word of her catastrophe had gotten around, and she’d had to relate the basic story several times then listen to her friends pass it on with embellishments. She could only hope Prince Omar didn’t hear any of these highly fictitious accounts.

  “I’m thinking about the cinder sprite situation.”

  “Sure you are. But you could take a minute to smile at a certain cute prince who keeps looking this way.”

  Ellie turned to gaze across the lake, which was glorious despite intermittent rain showers, then scanned the beach and docks. Sure enough, not far away was Prince Omar with three of his younger siblings—the two she had met in the hallway and a boy who looked about eight or nine—and a few other children. They seemed to be building a sand castle, although the youngest boy took more pleasure in destruction than in construction, causing the other children to protest and complain.

  “They’re so cute, those Zeidan children,” Ellie commented.

  Omar calmly told the little fellow to desist, then resumed forming a curtain wall with precise edges. He sneaked a glance their way, caught Ellie’s eye, and smiled with a little wave of the trowel in his hand.

  “Yeah, especially the biggest one,” Jeralee said with an evil grin.

  The words were hardly out of her mouth when the two year old dumped a shovel-full of sand over Omar’s head. Slowly Omar sat upright, his eyes closed against the coating of fine sand on his face. “Oh dear,” Ellie exclaimed, wanting desperately to rush to his aid.

  But the older boy took his big brother by the arm and led him down to the lake. Omar waded out to hip-depth before dunking his head in the water. Once he was sand-free, the children all laughed and applauded.

  “So it took a sand shower to get that boy into the water,” Jeralee commented. “I wonder why?”

  Even as she spoke, a patch of water about fifty feet offshore appeared to boil and a huge head popped above the surface. The lake serpent’s yellow eyes were two gleaming slits, and its myriad sharp teeth glittered in a brief flash of sunlight. Several of the guests, especially the visitors, shrieked in terror, and even Ellie gave a yelp. But after the first shock, she rushed out to calm the terrified people.

  “I know he looks vicious, but he won’t hurt you,” she assured them again and again. “The lake serpent has lived here for many years and has never harmed a human. He’s just showing off.” Her gently soothing power prevented a stampede, but many of the newcomers packed up their folding chairs and headed for the castle anyway. Ellie turned to look back at the serpent, which hissed, rumbled, and made little feints toward the shore with its toothy mouth agape.

  “What’s got him all riled up?” Jeralee asked from just behind her.

  Ellie had the strange feeling that the lake monster’s malevolent gaze focused on Omar. The prince seemed to share her feeling, for after staring for a time in frozen terror he splashed up the shore in a great hurry, collected the two youngest of his siblings and their gear, and headed toward the castle. Not once did he look Ellie’s way.

  She watched him go, feeling disturbed without quite knowing why.

  Jeralee moved in closer and muttered, “Did you really just use your magic on guests?”

  Ellie gave her a troubled look. “I did it without thinking. I’m doomed.”

  Her friend shrugged. “Somebody would have gotten hurt if you hadn’t. Ben’s car will never get another special tune-up if he says a word. Bence wasn’t near, and I don’t think anyone else noticed. But you’d better watch yourself.” For once, Jeralee wasn’t smiling.

  As Ellie and her friends headed in for dinner that evening, Sten and Nillie, his wife, deliberately crossed her path. She recognized the excitement beneath their stoic dwarfish expressions and tried to conceal her own agitation. Sten raised his thick brows, gave a jerk of his head toward a side door, and the couple moved on.

  “Ah, I just remembered something I need to do,” Ellie told Jeralee and the others. “I’ll catch you later.”

  Jeralee raised a brow but didn’t question her. “Sure. See ya.”

  Trying not to look conspicuous, Ellie slipped out that side door, and the dwarf couple met her behind some bushes. Sten’s eyes glistened. “The trap is ready,” he said, “but Nillie and Cog think you need to see it. Like, maybe you can add something more.”

  “I’m sure she can,” Nillie added. “You’ll see.” She was a sturdy, no-nonsense kind of dwarf, much quieter than her husband, but Ellie knew she could be counted on in a pinch.

  The gray sky had suddenly cleared, and the setting sun cast long late-afternoon shadows as Ellie followed the dwarfs down the drive and through the open gate to a section of the road winding down the mountainside, out of sight from any point at Faraway Castle or the recreational areas. “Here it is,” Sten told her. Three other dwarfs waited expectantly for her opinion.

  Ellie saw nothing in the road, yet she knew exactly where the trap stood. “Hmm. I can sense the concealment magic, and if I can, I expect the exterminator will too.”

  Nillie gave he
r husband a pointed I-told-you-so look then addressed Ellie. “Can you do something to make it less noticeable? I’ve never figured out how to conceal a concealment charm.”

  “I wouldn’t know either, but I can try something . . .” Ellie looked toward the invisible trap and focused on its magical essence. “Trap, you seem so confining that nothing worth catching will come near you. Try to seem more welcoming. Look vast and spacious. Then the exterminator will walk right into you.”

  She sensed the difference. That certain point in the road suddenly gave off a sense of freedom and well-being, personal power, and liberty of mind and body.

  Sten stepped forward, but Nillie caught him by the arm. “Don’t you go walking into our trap, silly dwarf.” She and the other dwarfs turned to Ellie, who didn’t need magic to sense their approval. “I don’t know how you do it,” Nillie said, “but I think this will do the trick.”

  “Everyone stay back, or you’ll end up walking into that thing,” the dwarf called Cog said, his tone mildly amused. “We’d all better get away from here. Kai will stand watch.”

  Still hungry for dinner, Ellie hurried ahead of the others, back up the road toward the castle. But some inner sense—or perhaps a whiff of smoke?—alerted her to trouble. Despite her growling stomach she took a detour near the staff cottages and saw a pixie zoom from an open front door.

  Ellie ran directly into the cottage, which she thought belonged to the lake-staff supervisor. “Hello, Bence, are you here? Fire!” she shouted. “Is anyone here?”

  Flames rose from a tablecloth in the breakfast nook, and a fiery ball raced in circles on the floor tiles, emitting hot, sizzling screams. Ellie whipped the spray bottle from its hook at her waist and sprayed the creature twice.

  Even as it collapsed into a puddle, Ellie kicked over the table, stamped on its burning cloth, then grabbed a saucepan from its hook on the ceiling, filled it with water from the tap, and dumped it over the charred tablecloth and anything else that looked warm.