Five Magic Spindles: A Collection of Sleeping Beauty Stories

by Rachel Kovaciny

  “No!” she cried even as the squirrel waved her wand.

  “I set free the spirits of those turned to stone,” declared the squirrel. “Liberated from their stone bodies, they shall live on in this world, always near. And once the curse on the princess is broken, all shall be restored!”

  So saying, she held the wand as straight upright as her little arms could manage. Instantly the wand began to burn bright until, with another ZING, hundreds of tiny lights shot up from it, flying out the window and every which way, including a group of lights that fell upon the princess like snowflakes.

  Lady Mara felt a chill clutch her heart even as she watched the glittering fall of enchantment. But she snarled through her fears, “Fool! I know how your fairy magic works! The Magic Cycle lasts only five hundred years, then all your efforts will come undone. I have only to wait until then, have only to prevent a True Hero from reaching the princess’s side in that time. Then the stone curse will come to completion, and I shall win anyway!” She smiled again, her confidence growing even as she spoke. “How many heroes will you lure here for me to kill until the Magic Cycle ends?”

  “BWAAAWK! Bwok-bwok-bwok!” a valiant voice clucked defiantly. Lady Mara turned, her lips curled in a snarl, and saw the chicken, a wand gripped in her beak, fling a stream of glittering magic directly at her. Even as she did so, the lizard, standing at her sister’s side, cried, “And we curse you, Lady Mara, to die the moment you cause the death of another soul throughout this Magic Cycle!” In a whisper she added, “That’s what you meant to say, right, Lolly?”

  The chicken ruffled her feathers in a shrug. But Lady Mara did not hear her answer, for the ribbons of shimmering light struck her full in the face, knocking her from her feet.

  Just when Franz thought he couldn’t feel any worse, he realized how foolish such a thought was. If all that had happened to him wasn’t bad enough, now he could not even comprehend his surroundings. He was vaguely aware of being dragged down a spiraling stair, of red torchlight punctuating deep gloom. His skin shivered with cold and damp. But all of this seemed to pass over him in such waves of dread that afterwards he could recall none of it.

  Awareness returned when he found himself in a gloomy corridor so cavernous that the very echoes of his breath seemed to resound around him forever. They must be deep beneath the foundations of Briardale now. If not for a bobbing sphere of lantern light approaching from the middle distance, Franz could well believe they’d done away with him, and an angel was making his way to take him to a happier place. But the thought of being dead was even less pleasant than being in an asylum.

  Come now, the reasonable side of his mind protested in the midst of this madness. Aren’t lunatics sent here supposedly to rest and recover? An actual dungeon is just a bit much . . .

  “Ho there!” boomed one of the heroic figures—the golden-haired one, Franz thought, though it was difficult to tell them apart in the dark. “Dungeon keeper! We have a new one for you.”

  The swinging lantern, now much nearer, revealed the person carrying it. Such an ungainly creature he was! A tall man, but hunched over as though the weight of gloom itself had bowed him almost to breaking point. His ears were large and pointed, and his eyes, ringed by dark hollows, bugged out from a pale face. Deep lines scored the sides of his thin-lipped mouth, though otherwise his skin was smooth, if clammy. He wasn’t old . . . but his eyes were ancient.

  He bowed to the two heroes, saying nothing. He did not even look at Franz.

  “Another hero for your collection,” spoke one of the henchmen—the raven-haired one this time, Franz guessed. “See that he’s properly restrained and all.”

  “Don’t worry, little hero,” the golden-haired man said, slapping Franz on the shoulder. “You won’t be staying here long. The Magic Cycle is almost up, and then . . .” He ended in a chuckle that wasn’t at all nice.

  The dungeon keeper blinked. He reached out his free hand, the one not holding the lantern, and took hold of Franz by a straight-jacketed arm. With a silent nod, he indicated that Franz should walk with him.

  Though he hadn’t exactly the fondest of feelings for the two traitorous heroes, Franz found himself reluctant to leave their mighty company in exchange for this miserable new companion. But it wasn’t as though he had much choice.

  So he fell into step beside the dungeon keeper, who shuffled along the dark passage. The lantern offered feeble illumination, but the dungeon keeper seemed to know exactly where he was going.

  He stopped suddenly before a low door with a barred window. With an old key he forced the lock open, and the door creaked on its hinges as though it hadn’t been opened in a hundred years.

  Perhaps it hadn’t.

  Total darkness waited on the far side of the door. Franz stood as though on the doorstep of Hades. Was this to be his fate? Shut away in this blind hole, lost forever, forgotten? And all for . . . for nothing?

  A hand patted him on the shoulder. Franz looked around and, to his surprise, saw real sympathy in the dungeon keeper’s gaze. With a little shake of his head, the bug-eyed fellow reached behind Franz and undid a few straps. For the first time in many hours, Franz was able to draw a full, deep breath. The straightjacket slipped off him into the dungeon keeper’s hands.

  “Th-thank you!” Franz gasped.

  The dungeon keeper shrugged. Then, with a firm push, he propelled Franz into the dungeon cell.

  The door creaked shut, slamming in its frame with a final clang. Franz felt as though he’d been shut into his tomb. Maybe he was dead. Maybe that’s what had caused all this trouble. Maybe seeing ghosts—or one particular obnoxious ghost—was a result of his fatal disease, and everything horrible that had happened to him since was only a terrible afterlife? Maybe—

  “So what’s your name?”

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Franz dropped to his knees, hands over his head. His heart pounded in his ears, and his blood raced so fast, he thought he might burn up with the pressure.

  “You’re a skittish one. Come now, there’s no need for such dramatics.”

  The voice that had spoken didn’t sound particularly threatening. Indeed, it was quite friendly, a distant part of Franz’s fear-strained mind realized.

  Then a light was struck. Its flare was so bright that Franz had to shut his eyes, and even then the glow penetrated painfully through his eyelids. But the pain soon lessened, and he found himself able to squint at the world from his crouched position on the cell floor.

  An enormously powerful person stood over him, grinning a friendly grin. He wasn’t actually any taller than Franz, but his muscles bulged beneath dark brown skin, and his shoulders, wider even than the shoulders of the two traitorous heroes, looked as though they could lift whole mountains. His arms were log-crushingly huge.

  Strangely, however, the foremost thing Franz noticed about this stranger was the gleaming pin he wore on his shirtfront, a gold pin topped in a blue gem the size of a thumbnail. Light from the newly lit lantern gleamed off this gem, making it wink like a bright little eye.

  “Blast it, Crete!” a second voice snarled, startling Franz and sending him peering into the shadows beyond the massive young man. “Shut that light off! I swear, I almost had it this time, but you threw off my concentration!”

  “I want to see the new chap,” the enormous fellow replied, still grinning down at Franz. He knelt, bringing his brown face down on a level with Franz’s freckled one. “So you’re a hero, right?”

  Franz blinked like an owl. Then he shook his head vehemently. “Of course I’m not!” he said, raising his hands as though to defend himself against these accusations, which were somehow worse than the accusations of lunacy he’d faced in Yoleston. “Why does everyone keep bringing up heroes around here? I’m a banker’s clerk, that’s all! I check lists and write on ledgers and incredibly boring things like that!”

  A stamp of feet, and the second figure stepped into the sphere of lamplight. Franz stared so hard that his eyeballs nearly po
pped from their sockets. For this person was a dwarf! Not even half as tall as Franz, broad and strong, with angry blue eyes and a bristling beard. An actual dwarf!

  Franz couldn’t help the little exclamation of surprise that burst from his lips.

  The dwarf uttered a vicious curse. “Don’t tell me you can see me.”

  Franz swallowed back further exclamations, gulping hard. “Um,” he managed. “Um . . . yes?”

  “You mean,” said the dwarf, his face darkening with an angry red flush, “I’m still visible?”

  He looked so enraged that Franz didn’t know how to answer. But, as the little man continued to steam, Franz started to piece everything together: Wait, I’m in a lunatic asylum. That’s why they’re all talking about heroes and things . . . They’re all mad!

  And this dwarf wasn’t a dwarf at all, surely! He was simply a very short man suffering from a delusion of invisibility.

  While this realization did little to calm Franz’s frantically beating heart, it at least gave him something reasonable to grasp onto. “Oh, wait,” he said, speaking slowly as though to a child. “No, you’re right. I can’t see you at all. Is . . . is someone there?”

  The dwarf’s face brightened. “Really?”

  “No,” growled the muscular fellow, and smacked Franz up the back of the head. Though the blow was gentle enough, it knocked Franz forward, and he barely kept his nose from striking the floor. “Don’t give him false hope,” the big fellow said. “That’s not nice.”

  “Liars,” snarled the dwarf, flinging up his hands and stumping out of the circle of lamplight. Muttering to himself, he struck another light, and the glow of two lanterns now filled the cell. Franz, still on his hands and knees, now had a much better view of his prison.

  It wasn’t all that bad. Dark, cramped, windowless, yes; but three beds stood along each wall, the covers basically clean. Chains hung from iron rings in the ceiling, but they were rusty with disuse. On one of the beds, a thick, leather-bound book lay open to an illustrated page. On the floor near both walls sat several little bowls of milk.

  This last sight gave Franz pause. Bowls of milk? On the floor? Were they expected to eat like . . . like animals?

  The big fellow, noting the direction of Franz’s gaze, said, “For the rats, you know. Prisoners need a hobby. Like taming rats.” Franz gave him an uncomprehending look, and the big fellow shrugged his vast shoulders. “We’ve got to pass the time somehow, right? Mutey tries to help us as best he can.”

  “Who . . . who’s Mutey?” Franz croaked, sitting upright and tucking his hands under his armpits. He didn’t quite feel up to standing yet.

  “Mutey. The dungeon keeper. Don’t know his real name, so we call him Mutey on account of he can’t speak,” the big fellow replied. “He’s a good sort. Ugly as sin, sure, but a good sort. He gives us lamps and oil. Sneaks in extra food and milk for the rats. That kind of thing. He even gave us a book once. It’s got nice pictures.”

  Franz glanced at the open book on the bed again. But he wasn’t interested in literature of any kind at that moment. “And . . . and who are you two?” he asked.

  “I’m Crete,” said the big fellow, tapping a hand to his chest. “I’m from the Kingdom of Homunculi.”

  “Hom—Homunculi?” Franz repeated. “Where’s that?”

  Much to his astonishment, Crete took the pin off the front of his shirt and held it out to Franz. The bright jewel gleamed like a slice of summer sky. Crete pointed at it. “There,” he said. “Right down there. If you look really, really close, you can just make out the tallest peak, Mount Homunglous. On a clear day you can see the whole Homunglic range! My hometown is in the foothills, the king’s own city.”

  Franz blinked. His gaze flicked from the jewel to Crete’s face and back again. So this man was a lunatic too! But of course he was. They were all lunatics here in Briardale. It stood to reason.

  “It’s . . . great,” he offered weakly.

  Across the room, the dwarf snorted. “He doesn’t believe you.”

  Crete put the pin back on his shirt, patting it affectionately even as he tossed the dwarf a sour glare. “He doesn’t believe you can turn invisible either. No one does, actually!”

  “What, you can see me now?” the dwarf demanded, sitting upright on his bed, his eyebrows bristling with ire.

  “Yes, Eidor. We can see you.” Crete indicated the dwarf with a jerk of his thumb, saying to Franz, “This is Eidor. He’s a dwarf, if you couldn’t guess. Son of the King Under the Low Ceiling.”

  “Yeah. I’m a blooming prince,” Eidor snarled, crossing his arms and slumping back against the wall.

  “More to the point, he’s a True Hero,” Crete said, nodding sagely. “Moved an entire mountain overnight once, he did! That’s the stuff of True Heroes.”

  Franz gaped at the two of them, his mouth hanging open like a broken trapdoor. How had he, a simple clerk, ended up in this windowless dungeon cell, flanked by genuine lunatics? This was madness! Out-and-out madness.

  “As for me,” Crete continued, crossing the room to take a seat on one of the other beds and leaning back against the headboard, “I killed a dragon once. The Slitherer of Homunculi, as the bards named it!”

  “About the size of a speck, wasn’t it?” Eidor asked nastily.

  Crete gave him a withering stare. “It’s all a matter of perspective. It was big to me, I tell you! And I killed it and claimed my place as True Hero of Homunculi. It was soon after that when . . . when she showed up.”

  A little shiver raced up Franz’s spine. He pulled himself to his feet and, moving shakily, made his way to the nearest available bed, the one on which the open book lay. Pushing this to one side, he took a seat, drawing his feet up under him cross-legged. “She?” he asked. “Do you mean . . . do you mean the green ghost?”

  “Ah!” said Crete with a triumphant gleam in his eye. “See, Eidor? I told you he was a True Hero too.”

  “He doesn’t look like one,” Eidor grumped.

  “Neither do you or I to most folks in this world,” Crete answered, waving this protest aside easily. “True Heroism is about the Great Deeds, not appearances.” He turned back to Franz. “So she found you like she did us, huh? Looking for a True Hero to wake the princess.”

  “To . . . to wake the what?” Franz repeated.

  Crete went on as though he hasn’t spoken. “I saw her too . . . must be a hundred years ago now! She was pretty desperate by then and came all the way to Homunculi, looking for someone who could break the curse. I thought it would be an appropriate follow-up deed to dragon-slaying, so I agreed to try.” His cheerful face creased suddenly with sadness. “I made a good go of it. Fought through the traitorous former-heroes. Dodged Lady Mara’s evil enchantments. I even eluded the Slavering Swamp Beast! But . . . well, I couldn’t make it through the barrier. Just couldn’t do it! Roselee—that’s the ghost girl, you know—said we had to find the missing fairy wands before the barrier could be broken. I couldn’t find them in time, though. The sun set on the last day of the four hundredth year of the Magic Cycle, and my chance was gone.”

  Franz realized he’d been staring so hard that his eyes were drying out. He rubbed them with the back of one hand. He wanted to ask questions but couldn’t think what to ask. Crete sounded so . . . so sincere. As sincere as he’d sounded when pointing out his kingdom on the head of a pin.

  Eidor chuckled, twitching his mustache. “The look on your face! What? Did you think you’d do any better than the rest of us? Didn’t the ghost girl warn you what happened to her other Chosen Ones?”

  “You . . . you were a Chosen One too?” Franz asked weakly.

  Eidor nodded. “My try was two hundred years ago now, I’m guessing. It’s hard to say. Time passes weirdly here in Briardale; doesn’t feel like more than a few months. But yeah. I had the same trouble as Crete here: Couldn’t find the wands. Couldn’t get through the barrier. Then my time was up, and Lady Mara threw me in here to wait.”

  T
hough he was quite certain he didn’t want to know the answer, Franz couldn’t help asking, “To wait for what?”

  Crete and Eidor exchanged glances. Then Crete answered in a most reluctant voice: “Truth is, once the Magic Cycle ends tomorrow night, Lady Mara will have us all killed. You too, of course.”

  Chapter 6

  “WELL DONE, LOLLY. WELL done, Viola,” said the squirrel, scampering over to the fallen form of Lady Mara. The sorceress twitched, her eyes blinking rapidly, but for the moment she lay numb, the stunning force of the fairy spell flowing through her. “That’s taken care of her for the time being. Now, if we all work together, I’m sure we can think of a more complete binding to restrain her through the Magic Cycle, which should give us plenty of time to find a True Hero—”

  She broke off suddenly, and all three animals turned at the sound of footsteps on the stair. They had thought themselves completely alone in the tower. Who else could possibly be lurking nearby?

  A tall, commanding figure appeared in the doorway. He was slim and elegant yet powerful as well, and his face was beautiful beyond the beauty of mere mortals, his eyes shining with the elf-light of distant stars.

  He twisted his hat in his hands.

  “Why, dear boy!” the chicken clucked, recovering herself more quickly than the other two. “What are you doing here? As you see, we’re in a pickle, and you might want to come back later. The curse has fallen, and . . .” Her voice faded to nothing as realization caught up with her.

  The squirrel sprang forward, her front teeth chattering with fury, for she had guessed the truth a little sooner than the other two. “You!” she squeaked up at the beautiful young man. “You were our princess’s friend! She trusted you! You . . . you’re practically a member of the household!”