The Grimm Chronicles, Vol. 4

by Isabella Fontaine

  On the other side of the tree was a pool of water about the size of a small car. The stout tree’s roots emerged from the ground and slipped into the pool, disappearing beneath the reflective surface. I stepped closer, curious about the shadows hiding underneath the reflection.

  A little hand grabbed my arm, pinching my skin. I turned—Tom was looking at me with a grave face. He slowly shook his head. “Stay away from the pools.”

  “Yeah Alice. Didn’t you learn anything from Lord of the Rings?” Seth asked.

  I stepped away from the pool, following Tom. He hopped over an exposed root. Sam kept pace beside me, with Flick and Seth bringing up the rear.

  There came a moan from somewhere in the forest. Soft, slow, so deep that it reverberated inside my bones.

  “What’s that?” I asked, drawing my sword.

  Tom stopped, cocking his head. “Wraiths. They move between the trees, searching.”

  “For what?” Seth asked. “Please don’t say human brains.”

  Tom shrugged. “They speak to the trees. I heard them sometimes while I was inside that blasted cage. Never heard them before Agnim spread Corruption across the land. Look.”

  He pointed over my shoulder. I turned quickly, sword raised. At first, I didn’t see anything except the thin trunks of pine trees. Then something black slipped between them. A shadow of a woman with red eyes and long flowing black hair. She wore jewelry on her shadowy fingers, and a necklace that seemed to hang over darkness.

  She turned and looked at us, her eyes burning hotter. But she wasn’t looking at me—she was looking at my sword. I took my eyes off her for a second—just a second—to make sure my blade was still glowing blue. When I turned back, she was gone.

  “How do we kill em?” Flick growled.

  “Not sure you want to,” Tom answered. He began moving again. “Not sure they’re evil at all. They seem more concerned with protecting the forest than anything else. They were the ones who told me about the wolf.”

  “Tell us what else you know,” Sam said.

  “I don’t know anything, dwarf. I merely hypothesize. Haven’t had enough time to test. And therein lies the key to discovery, no? One must test one’s ideas. Hold them up to scrutiny! So many wasted years on earth convincing myself I was right about everything, never bothering to test. And what happened? I turned into a bloated, terrible giant who was rightly killed.”

  “Then tell us what you hypothesize,” Sam said.

  Tom clicked his tongue, sidling around a bare tree that had begun to tip. All of the trees around us were tipping, some just a bit while others were hanging on for dear life with only a few roots still in the ground, the rest lifted up and exposed with dry dirt clinging to them. The ground was more uneven here. Moss-covered rocks and boulders kept the undergrowth at bay but made walking a slow process.

  Unless you were a tiny man who could hop from spot to spot.

  “Up here,” Tom said. “The entrance.”

  We could see it: a hole in the earth where the ground gently sloped upward. Definitely big enough for us … but how deep could we go once we were inside? How would we see?

  “Tom … we can’t go in there without a torch. Or something. We’ll be blind as bats!”

  “Oh, bats are hardly blind, hero.” Tom stopped at the entrance, waiting for us to catch up. I tripped on one of the rocks—the fault of my uncomfortable shoes, FYI—and caught his smile. “Bats see with sonar. They use echolocation to visualize the world around them by distinguishing between their outgoing calls and the echoes. So when the sound of their call bounces off their prey, they can locate the prey and gobble it up. They even know how to prevent their own calls from deafening them. And they do have eyes, just poorly developed ones.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Sam sighed. “He means to say we’ll be stumbling around in the dark.”

  “Just give me an hour,” Flick said. “I’ll have some torches ready. No need to stub our toes if we don’t have to.”

  “Oh, that’s a great idea!” Tom said with wide eyes. “Let’s tear the limbs from these dying trees! That way, we can have two sets of enemies: Agnim’s forces and the angry wraiths!”

  Flick pointed his pickaxe at the little man. “Listen, you piece of—”

  Sam held up a hand. “There’s no time left to bicker. Alice? Make your choice. Either we go in now or we find another way without Tom’s help.”

  Something inside told me we should find another way. Tom had already proven his deviousness in my last encounter with him, to say nothing of the fact that he trapped a giant in a cave and slowly ate him. But I had the sneaking suspicion that Tom knew even more than he was letting on, saving it so that we wouldn’t leave him all alone again.

  Maybe he realizes that if Agnim takes over this land, the mad wizard really might feed him to a giant.

  That was something I could use.

  “Lead the way,” I said.

  Sam gave me a knowing nod, as if he’d been reading my thoughts.

  “You know what?” Seth said, grabbing Flick’s shoulder as they entered the cave. “After walking through this woods, I’m actually looking forward to a pitch-black cave.”

  “After you,” I said to Sam.

  The dwarf followed Seth. I took one last look at the forest, wondering if the wraith might reappear. But the forest was empty, the trees eerily still, except for a slight shuddering of their topmost branches. As I squeezed into the entrance, I immediately felt a wave of dizziness wash over me. It was really, really dark. So shocking, in fact, that for a moment I couldn’t even move. I felt the cave walls squeeze me from every side. Memories of the underground passages in Romania hit me. The adventurers. The weird trees. The ghost princesses.

  “I have some torches in my lair,” Tom called out. His voice echoed farther ahead. Gathering my bearings, I took a few steps forward, inhaling the scent of iron-rich water that filled the cave air. I could see the soft blue glow of Flick’s and Sam’s pickaxes just ahead. My sword was glowing, too, but even all three of them close together wasn’t enough to illuminate the path.

  We could only follow Tom’s voice.

  “I had other supplies, too. Maybe a little food. No giant meat, though!” He snickered. “Bad joke, bad joke. Well, just because I’m not Corrupted doesn’t mean I’m a saint, now does it?”

  “How do you know one of these passages will lead where we need to go?” Sam called out. Judging by his voice, he was right in front of me. I lowered my sword and reached out with my hand, grabbing his shoulder. He flinched, but didn’t shrug it off.

  And then this terrible urge came over me: revenge. Right here. Right now. Just stab him with the sword and curse him for what he’d done to Seth. All the lives he’d ruined.

  But what then, hero? Why, he’ll wake up just as good as new!

  Briar’s voice. My own personal Jiminy Cricket, chirping in my ear. Trying so desperately to keep me from giving in to revenge. I missed him. I missed Chase. I wanted us to all get together just like the good old days. But the moment I pictured it, the image seemed wrong. We were all there in my mind’s eye, but something was wrong.

  It’s this place. The Corruption blights your thoughts.

  “Any food would be nice,” Seth pointed out.

  “And water, if you can spare it,” Flick added. Their voices echoed farther ahead—we were in a pretty straightforward tunnel of some kind, and it hadn’t yet shrunk to the point that only Tom Thumb could navigate it.

  … Which actually brought up a good question. And I’d been dying to ask a question if only to hear my own voice and remind myself that the blinding darkness was just that: simple, blinding, darkness. “Is this tunnel going to shrink?”

  “Doubtful,” Tom said. His voice was echoing more to the right now. I squeezed Sam’s shoulder, pushing him toward the right. He obliged, and a few steps later my left shoulder brushed up against hard rock—a fork in the tunnel.

  “How do you know you can take us where we
need to go?” Sam asked.

  “Because I was spying on them a bit before they captured me.”

  “Who were you spying on?” I asked.

  “The step-mothers.”

  “Whose step-mothers?” I asked, exasperated. He was playing coy. Drawing it out.

  Be on your guard, Alice. The ceiling behind you could come crashing down at any moment.

  No. He’s not Corrupted. If he was, he wouldn’t have fit in the cage. And Agnim needed Tom Thumb in that cage. Because Agnim wanted to set a trap for Hans in Luck.

  The logic made sense. But I wanted more answers. I repeated the question. “Whose step-mothers?”

  “All of them, I think. My home is just up ahead.”

  “How do you know?” Flick asked. “It’s all the same! We’re probably lost and you don’t even know it, you ninny!”

  “Listen.” His voice echoed. “Listen. Do you hear it?” His voice echoed again. But I could hear it: the echo didn’t travel as far. It was bouncing off a surface close ahead.

  Before we even reached the destination, there was a shower of sparks in front of Seth and Flick. Slowly, a flame began to catch on a little torch. Tom Thumb’s little round face was illuminated by the orange light, just enough to provide an outline of an opening only a few dozen steps ahead.

  “Come now!” He scratched his head and examined his torch. “Sorry I don’t have any bigger torches. But I wasn’t expecting any normal-sized company, you know.”

  Once we stepped into the much larger room, we all exhaled. Tom lit three more torches along the wall, each one hanging from an iron sconce nailed into the wall about waist-high. The light from the flames revealed the rest of the room: a bed made of hay in one corner, a pile of clothes on the floor, and a wooden table lined with books and little glasses of liquid.

  “It’s rudimentary, but it works.” He looked around, satisfied. “I’m just glad I emptied the bed pan before I was captured. The last thing you want to do is come home and have to take out the bedpan.”

  Seth nudged me with his elbow. “Nineteenth-century problems.”

  I shook my head, snickering.

  “I’m sure you’re very happy to be home,” Sam said. “But what we need is to find these step-mothers so we can find Agnim.”

  “Right.” Tom hurried over to his little table, pushing aside papers that looked comically large compared to everything else. He grabbed the top one, handing the torch to Sam. He held the paper up to the light.

  “A map,” Sam said.

  “And other scribblings,” Tom said. “Important scribblings. Notes.”

  “Nonsense,” Flick spat. “You’re a loon is what you are.”

  “Ignore the hot-tempered ignoramus,” Sam said, peering over Tom’s shoulder. “What did you find, little man?”

  Tom folded the paper up a half-dozen times, slipping it into his pants pocket. “Like I said, important scribblings. Come! I’ll explain on the way.”

  We followed him to the other opening in the cave just past the little toy-sized bed. This time, with Tom’s torch leading the way, we could see enough of the tunnel to ward away any fear of tripping or walking face-first into hard, jagged rocks. And it was a good thing, because now the little man was in a full-on run, and we had to jog just to keep up. He turned left and we followed; first the cave floor descended into a little pool of ice-cold water that soaked right through my shoes, then the floor gradually ascended, snaking left. The fire reflected off the glistening limestone walls, revealing a very gentle little stream of water that ran down the right side of the tunnel. Its current had carved into the floor just enough to form a small channel.

  “So before I was caught, I had been spying on these fools for a few days,” Tom said. His voice echoed far ahead of us into the darkness—the tunnel seemed endless beyond the light of the torch.

  “And?” Sam asked.

  “And then I had an epiphany! Well, to be more precise: a question. A research question. Why did Agnim arrive in this place Corrupted? I sure as heck didn’t. Nor did Snow White or a number of folk who lived in Riverend. Why Agnim?”

  “So you formed a hypothesis,” Sam said.

  “Very good!” He turned right and disappeared around a corner. We followed one at a time, squeezing between a handful of jagged rocks. There was a bright light up ahead, about a hundred yards past Tom. He waited patiently, then turned and resumed running. “My hypothesis was simple: Agnim arrived in this place with business unfinished. Perhaps part of the story that had been written for him hadn’t worked out … I don’t know.”

  “A fair bit of madness,” Flick said with a grunt.

  “Maybe,” Tom said. “But maybe, just maybe, Agnim’s story was supposed to end differently. Something in the real world got in the way.” He stopped at the bright opening. “Here we are. Oops. Well, there are a lot more of them now, it seems.”

  We reached the bright opening, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust even with the clouds covering the sun outside. Sam’s eyes adjusted quicker and he let out a discouraged groan. His brother followed up with an equally impressive grunt. “Is that all?” he murmured, not with an encouraging amount of bravado.

  Then it was my turn. Only instead of groaning or grunting or offering anything even remotely optimistic, I’m pretty sure I let out an “Eep.” Not a squeaky under-the-breath “Eep,” either … we’re talking a full-on “Eep!” complete with an exclamation point.

  There they were, only a few hundred feet away: an army of Corrupted, mustered in three neat columns in an open space of ankle-high brown grass, marching east toward the dead forest. In one column were the two hundred or so townsfolk of Riverend—women, men and even children, all of them wearing burnt-black leather armor and clutching swords and spears whose steel tips were burning a fiery red. There was no fear in their faces. No worry. Only anger. Only a bloodthirst.

  “They’ve already been Corrupted,” Sam said.

  “Yes,” Tom said. “Didn’t sleep too long, unfortunately.”

  The other two columns were even more terrifying. In one column were original characters from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, characters who’d already experienced the Corruption once on earth before being vanquished by a hero. It was as if their bodies already knew how to change. A wolf with stitches along his belly. A sphinx, half-woman and half-lion. A man wearing a simple tunic and brown pants who every few steps multiplied. A very familiar fat lizard walking slowly in the back of the column.

  And step-mothers. A dozen of them or more, each one dressed in witchly robes. The step-mothers had a variety of weapons—swords, spears, axes, pitchforks—all of them rusted and nicked and misshapen. But more yet had claws and sharp teeth and razor-sharp talons, some in the process of sprouting bird-like feathers while others going for a more subtle lizard-like route right down to the slimy green scales. They don’t need great weapons … the Corruption is turning their bodies into weapons.

  “What is it?” Seth asked, squeezing beside us. He leaned over Flick to get a better view. “We’re doomed.”

  “Tom.” I licked my dry lips, steeling my nerves. My back muscles tensed and refused to let up. There was no time to be afraid. “How long will it take them to march to Snow White’s kingdom?”

  “They’ll stay to the road if they’re smart. That’ll slow them down,” Tom said. He clicked his tongue a few times, watching the column. The rhythmic pounding of their boots on the earth was like a flustered heartbeat. They left a wake of trampled grass. “I’d say five hours to march to Riverend, another twelve to get to Castle White.”

  Seventeen hours. And where was Agnim? Not here. No, he’s sending his minions. He’s somewhere else entirely. We need to find him before this army reaches Castle White. We need more time.

  “Well, do you have a plan yet?” Sam asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Does it involve running away?” Seth asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’d rather fight the lot of them,” Flick snarled. “
And I’d start with that multiplying idiot.”

  “What exactly—”

  I cut Sam off, stepping out of the cave entrance and onto the dry grass. My lungs filled with a deep breath, so deep that it hurt. I held up the enchanted sword …

  And screamed.

  I didn’t stop until every single of Agnim’s minions was looking right at us. For a moment, there was nothing but stunned silence, both from my party and the army. The nearest step-mother, only a football field away, snarled. Her gray hair—split ends and all—stood on end.

  “You march to Castle White,” I shouted, “and your army will be wiped out. I freaking guarantee it!”

  “Ooooh that would have been the perfect moment to actually swear,” Seth whispered.

  I ignored him. “My name is Alice Goodenough. I’m a hero, and I’m here to wipe out the Corruption once and for all!”

  That sent a murmur through the army. They seemed unsure what to make of that, but then the lizard creature—the very same evil step-sister of Cinderella’s who’d been lurking underneath the Orphanage of Doom—let out a raspy hiss.

  “Kill her!” the nearest step-mother screamed. Her column of Corrupted Riverend townsfolk swarmed past her. The rest of the army followed. Some took flight. Some slithered. None of them hesitated.

  “Ah, this is hardly a fair fight!” Flick shouted, stepping beside me.

  “Come on!” I said, grabbing his leather armor and pulling him back into the cave. Tom Thumb was already halfway down the tunnel, his torch lighting the way. We ran, following single-file, Seth panting for air and Flick still grumbling about wanting to fight.

  “You’re either brilliant,” Sam said between measured breaths, “or incredibly stupid.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” At the next bend, I turned back. The light from the entrance was choked off by numerous bodies of Corrupted squeezing into the tunnel. “Faster!” I shouted. “Faster!”

  We reached Tom’s little lair. Sam and Seth and Flick grabbed the other two torches. “They’ll get lost in the next catacombs,” Tom huffed. He bounced up and down, glancing anxiously at the stacks of paper on his desk. “Hurry hurry hurry! No point in getting caught now, of all times!”