It hardly mattered. The veils themselves were almost more horrible than anything they might hide.
When she stood within touching distance of King Pintamore’s statue—Roselee might have reached out and passed a ghostly hand through her shoulder if she dared—Lady Mara raised one arm and spoke a word of command. The iron gates creaked open.
The two former heroes dragged Franz into the yard. He tripped over his feet and certainly didn’t look prepared to make a sudden burst free. That was the trouble, Roselee reflected, with picking a Chosen One based on potential heroism rather than actual mighty deeds. He lacked the practice necessary to get on with things.
Poor Franz! He’d been through so much in the last week since she first began appearing to him in Mr. Teabody’s office. But she knew, she just knew that he possessed every quality of an honest-to-goodness True Hero!
If only he could realize that potential . . .
The poor lad could hardly lift his head as the two former heroes pushed him to his knees before the Lady. When he did manage to look up, he averted his eyes almost immediately, trembling with dread at the sight of those awful veils.
The Lady loomed over him, silent as death. At last she said, “What is the nature of your malady, poor boy?”
The sweetness of her words merely underscored the poison in her voice. Roselee ducked her face into stone King Pintamore’s shoulder and shuddered. The Lady could neither see nor sense her, but not even five hundred years had helped Roselee overcome her dread of the sorceress.
But would Franz be taken in by that honeyed tone? Others had been . . . two heroes and many, many more besides!
Though she hated to look, Roselee forced herself to peer over the king’s shoulder again to see what took place. So much rested on these next few moments. If the Lady believed that this new human inmate was merely a lunatic sent to Briardale for health and healing, she would simply put him in with the other inmates. There were no chains or complex locks to those rooms, and even an unpracticed hero like Franz should be able to figure out a way to break free, with a few helpful hints from a ghostly friend.
But if the Lady realized who he was, if she realized who had orchestrated his coming to Briardale . . .
Franz tried again to look up at his strange hostess. This time he maintained his gaze. “I . . . I . . .” he stammered, trying to figure out how to answer the question put to him.
And Roselee could only whisper into the stone fabric of Pintamore’s tunic, “Don’t tell her. Don’t tell her, Franz!”
Though she knew the Lady could not hear her, she dared not call out; for if the Lady saw Franz suddenly perk up as if listening to a voice no one else heard, she would know at once! Roselee urged him in whispers, her whole spirit begging him to heed her. “Don’t tell her that you can see me!”
Perhaps he understood her even across the distance, because not another word crossed his lips. He simply knelt there gaping like a codfish on market day. Roselee could have kissed him in relief.
Her relief was short-lived, however. For the golden-haired former hero cleared his throat and said, “I believe, my Lady, that he’s been seeing . . . her.”
Batwings and bug shells! Roselee pounded an insubstantial fist against Pintamore’s shoulder. How had she ever been stupid enough to choose that one as her True Hero?
The Lady’s silence was weirdly expressive even without a glimpse of her face. At last she said, “This one? A hero?”
“Well,” said the former hero with a nervous shrug, “the news from Yoleston is that he sees ghosts. And they’ve got to be pretty desperate by now, with the Magic Cycle almost complete.”
“Desperate, yes,” the Lady whispered. “But I didn’t think they’d be . . . idiotic.”
Simmering with wrath, Roselee narrowed her eyes at the sorceress. Franz wasn’t as terribly unheroic as all that! Maybe no one else saw in him what she saw, but that didn’t mean . . . didn’t mean . . .
Drat. The former hero was correct. She was desperate. At her wits’ end, in fact.
The Lady tilted her head as if to look down upon Franz. She folded her arms, the sleeves of her midnight cloak wafting like a rook’s wings. “Tell me, boy, and tell me truthfully,” she said. “Are you a hero?”
Franz gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing impressively. Then he shook his head and pushed a few frightened words from his throat. “There aren’t any heroes anymore . . . are there?”
“Let us hope not,” the Lady replied. Her interest in Franz used up, she addressed her two henchmen. “My army is big enough. One more lunatic won’t make a difference, and we’re so close to the end that it’s best to take no chances. Send him to the dungeon and lock him away with the other two. Come sunset tomorrow we’ll deal with all of them . . . once and for all.”
Roselee’s hopes plummeted. She watched as the two former heroes dragged Franz to his feet and half carried him across the courtyard. Away from the statues. Away from the tower. Away down a winding stair into labyrinthine passages and cells where the sun never shone.
Franz didn’t make a sudden burst free. He simply hung there, suspended between those mighty arms. He cast a desperate glance about, his eyes searching for something . . . Wait, did he look for her?
Roselee couldn’t even bring herself to come out from behind Pintamore. She watched her Chosen One until he vanished through the door and down the stairs into the bowels of Briardale.
Then she twisted and looked at the tower high overhead, where three fairies and a stone princess even now awaited her return, eager for word that this time, finally, she had managed to do something right.
Heaving a sigh, she drifted up on the breeze, reluctant yet determined to admit her failure.
The atmosphere hung heavy with clouds, and streaks of lightning licked at the sky. Ignoring this threatening display, Roselee rose up and up until she reached the tower’s balcony. She peered through the window.
The same gloomy grey light that shrouded the whole of Briardale that dismal day revealed a humble chamber used only for storage back in the day. If Roselee remembered the story correctly, it had been empty when the princess crept up the tower stairs five hundred years ago . . . except for a spinning wheel, which should not have been there, standing in the center of the chamber.
The spinning wheel stood there still. Otherwise the room held only a few old crates and boxes . . . and the beautiful girl upon the floor, sleeping away the centuries. Once the stone curse struck, the princess had been far too heavy for anyone to lift. So there she remained, her hand outstretched as though she had only just dropped the spindle, waiting for her True Hero to come along and kiss her.
Roselee didn’t remember the princess from the time before she woke up and discovered herself to be a ghost. In fact, her memories were so few that she’d had to trust the three Guardians to explain events to her as best they could. She couldn’t help thinking that all of this was quite a lot of bother for one rather spoiled girl . . . however beautiful she might be!
“Roselee, what are you doing out there?” a sharp voice hissed.
Roselee looked from the sleeping statue to the spinning wheel. It stood just where it had first been discovered five hundred years earlier, its wheel now spinning in a steady, unaltered rhythm. On the floor beside it sat a tiny, fluffy-tailed squirrel . . . a squirrel wearing a dress, a mobcap, and a sour expression on her whiskered grey face as her front paws pressed and pressed at the treadle, keeping the wheel moving.
Shame filled Roselee to brimming at the sight of that cranky little face. How desperately she had hoped to return to the tower with better news . . . and with the True Hero right behind her. Instead, she floated outside the window empty-handed, as it were.
She opened her mouth . . . and closed it again.
The squirrel harrumphed and returned her attention to the wheel. “Something tells me you found a hero, but your face looks like you’ I assume you brought a new one. Where is he then? Please do not tell me that look on your face m
eans he’s already fallen prey to Lady Mara’s persuasions and betrayed us?”
“Oh no, not at all!” Roselee answered at once. She tried to rush forward, forgetting herself. As a result her nose hit, not the window glass—which she could pass through as easily as smoke—but an invisible barrier. A barrier as solid as stone; more solid, in fact, for it could keep out mortal and immortal, the living and the dead. No one passed through that boundary.
“Ouch,” Roselee groaned, and floated back again, rubbing her nose.
The squirrel continued to push the treadle, eyeing Roselee from beneath the spinning wheel. “So, our last Chosen One,” she said, the faintest trace of anxiety tingeing her dry voice. “Our final hope. A True Hero.”
The color of Roselee’s cheeks deepened to a rich emerald. “Yes, absolutely,” she said with less conviction than she should.
The squirrel narrowed her eyes. “Has he saved a kingdom?”
“No . . .”
“Slain a dragon?”
“Um . . .”
Guardian Alicia chittered, her huge front teeth rattling together. “Tell me, dear Roselee, tell me that he has, at the very least, moved a mountain!”
Once again Roselee opened her mouth . . . and closed it.
The squirrel let out a squeak that brought dust raining down from the rafters. Two lumps among the abandoned crates stirred, snorted, clucked, and two sleepy heads reared from the shadows, blinking round at the gloomy chamber.
Then, with a ruffle of feathers, a chicken jumped to her feet. She bobbed her head this way and that, the pointed peak of the elegant cap she wore fluttering with veils. She pranced out of the shadows into the gloomy light in the center of the room, leaving her companion to follow in her wake. This companion gave an enormous yawn, a long sticky tongue flicking momentarily from her open mouth and licking her eyeball. Then, with a little shake of her sinewy body, a lithe spotted lizard wearing a furry purple coat darted out after the chicken.
“What’s wrong, Alicia?” the chicken clucked, approaching the spinning wheel. She noted the direction of the squirrel’s gaze and followed it to the window. “Oh, hullo, Roselee dear!”
“Hullo, Guardian Lolly,” Roselee answered glumly.
“Roselee! Oh, Roselee!” exclaimed the lizard, sitting upright, using her tail for balance, and clasping her front claws together eagerly. “You’re back, dear Roselee! Where is the hero? Have you brought the hero? Have you found our wands?”
“Hush your babble, Viola,” snapped Alicia, pushing so viciously at the treadle that the wheel whirred in a blur. She trained a bright black eye on the glum-faced ghost. “All right, girl. Out with it. If he’s not saved a kingdom, slain a dragon, or moved a mountain”—the chicken and the lizard gasped in dismay at this—“what exactly has your hero done to make him a True Hero?”
Roselee’s ghostly form faded until she almost disappeared into thin air. How could she explain in the face of Alicia’s justifiable wrath? How could she defend her choice when she hardly understood it herself? The first two heroes she’d chosen because they’d slain dragons. But they had both betrayed the cause, joining forces with Lady Mara. Her third hero had also slain a dragon—albeit a very small one—and the fourth had moved a mountain, an actual mountain.
But while those two had remained true-hearted to the last, neither had succeeded in penetrating the tower barrier before the time was up. And with not only Lady Mara’s enchantments but also the two former heroes to contend with—not to mention the Slavering Swamp Beast, more terrible by far than any dragon Roselee had ever seen—well . . . it was a lot to ask of a fellow, True Hero or otherwise.
The point was, brawn and courage had failed. And with the end of the Magic Cycle looming and the fate of all Briardale’s inhabitants left in her insubstantial hands, Roselee had gone in search of her final Chosen One full of despair.
Until she’d seen a red-haired lad walking down the streets of Yoleston. Not an especially impressive specimen, threadbare and hunch-shouldered, hands in his pockets. Nothing for her to particularly note.
But just as she’d made ready to float on by, continuing her desperate search, she’d seen him turn off the street and enter a dank alley where a creature in rags huddled on a doorstep. A figure so smelly that everyone else who even caught sight of it hastened to the other side of the road!
Not this fellow. As Roselee watched, amazed, she’d seen the young man kneel and lay his hand on the creature’s shoulder. A wrinkled old face lifted from the rags, hideous to behold with boils and the ravages of poverty.
“Here, good mother,” Franz Happernickle had said, plunging his hand back into his pocket and pulling out every coin he owned, which were few indeed. He pressed them into the crone’s withered hand. “Have a meal and a night’s rest somewhere, for me?” And he’d smiled sweetly.
“Bless you, Franz!” the old woman had croaked, just as though she knew him. As though this was a regular part of her sad, miserable life, the one part that brought a grin to her toothless face.
“Don’t mention it,” he’d replied, and planted a kiss on that fetid, lice-ridden head.
He’d gone without supper that night.
“Maybe . . .” Roselee whispered even as the three Guardians—squirrel, chicken, and lizard—stared at her with earnest dismay, “. . . maybe there’s more to being a hero than saving kingdoms and things. Maybe a True Hero needs a true heart . . .”
Her words trailed off into the sky.
Viola blinked enormous eyes. Then she burst into tears, wailing, “We’re all doomed!”
“Come now, Viola,” Lolly clucked, putting a wing around the lizard’s back. “Stiff upper lip, what, what? We’ve faced so much already, we don’t want to lose our heads now, do we?”
Alicia ignored her two sisters. Her work at the treadle had slowed to a more sedate pace, but the wheel kept spinning even as it had for centuries now. Oddly enough, Roselee saw a considering look on her furry face.
“Tell me one thing, girl,” the squirrel said. “Is our last Chosen One . . . ” She paused as though hating to ask the question, then spoke all in a rush. “Please tell me that he isn’t human.”
Roselee didn’t answer. Which was all the answer Alicia needed.
“Batwings and buzzards!” The squirrel’s voice was more mournful than angry by now. “Bad though your memory is, you do know how susceptible humans are! Look what happened the other times you picked a human hero. At least the last two didn’t turn on us!”
“Franz won’t turn,” Roselee declared staunchly. She may not be able to promise much, but this she knew. “He’ll be true to the cause . . . just as soon as he knows what the cause is exactly.”
“What good does that do us?” Lolly demanded, the feathers round her neck ruffling. “If he’s not a True Hero, it doesn’t matter if he finds the wands, doesn’t matter if he gets through the barrier, doesn’t matter if he kisses the princess until his lips turn black and blue! Viola’s counterspell was specific: Only the kiss of a True Hero will break the curse. All of the curses!”
Viola sobbed even harder, hiccupping so violently that her tongue shot out. Alicia merely closed her eyes and muttered something like a prayer for patience before asking Roselee one last question. “So . . . where is he, exactly?”
Roselee wished she could melt away into thin air. It took all her will-power to remain visible. “Lady Mara sent him down to the dungeons.”
“Doomed!” cried Viola.
Even Lolly shook her head, clucking sadly. “Viola’s probably right. Don’t see much hope for any of us now. We’ll all be turned to dust. Without King Pintamore to stop her, Lady Mara will set upon the kingdoms with her horde of lunatics . . .”
But Alicia went right on pressing the treadle. She flicked her bushy tail, a strangely commanding gesture coming from her. “All right, Roselee,” she said. “Maybe your choice isn’t one any of us would make. But you’re our only hope now.”
Roselee dared a hasty glance the squi
rrel’s way, meeting those stern black eyes.
“Go fetch him at once!” said the fairy, lifting one paw in a sweeping motion.
Galvanized to action, Roselee offered a sharp salute and slipped away down the side of the tower. She would fetch him! Somehow! She would get him out of that dungeon, and she would help him find his way up and through the barrier! Somehow!
Franz might not be anyone else’s idea of a hero . . . but maybe, just maybe, he didn’t need to be.
Chapter 5
THE DARK LADY GAZED down upon the fallen forms of the three fairies. She laughed to see them, still recognizably themselves, yet wearing new faces, new bodies. Ah, but it was the perfect spell to deal with those meddlers!
She turned from them to survey the stone princess. The enchantment had almost completely taken her over now, her and her royal father! Their outer shapes were already hard as rock, and the spell crept now into their veins, down to their hearts.
And when their hearts were stone, they would die. No one could stand in her way to the throne then! No one would dare!
“Any moment,” Lady Mara purred, her smile ghastly to behold. She knelt, reaching out a hand to touch the top of the princess’s stone head. “Any moment now, your soul will slip away. And then—”
ZING!
The Lady clenched her hand, feeling a sting as if a needle had been plunged into it. Whirling around, she snarled as she saw . . . the impossible!
The three fairies—one a lizard, one a chicken, and one a bristling, furious squirrel—stood awkwardly on their strange new limbs. The squirrel clutched a silver wand in her dexterous little paws.
“You may change our bodies,” she squeaked ferociously, “but you cannot change what we are!”
Even as she spoke, the lizard wrapped her whole body and tail around her wand, and the chicken picked hers up in her beak. Lady Mara stared, aghast. But surely, with such altered forms, they would not be able to tame their wild fairy magic even with the wands to assist them!
She raised a hand to cast another spell, something to send all three little creatures flying across the room and out the window. But to her dismay, she realized that her powers were momentarily drained! Casting that enormous petrification curse—one that could even overwhelm her own brother—had depleted her strength.
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