Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sometime after Wilde left, the inn reverted to its old state of decay.
I stepped carefully across the wooden floorboards, glad they only creaked slightly in protest. The stairs were another matter, since saplings grew out of every step, taking up most of the space and creating dozens of tripping hazards.
I pressed my back firmly against the wall and felt around with my foot before proceeding, and I still tripped over a root on the last stair.
Maximus caught me before I faceplanted on the ground. “Are you alright?”
I nodded and shrugged him off, but he grabbed my arm as I tried to pull away, glowering down at it.
“What did he do to you?”
Still a little groggy, the snarled question confused me.
After Wilde left, I’d tried to sleep for a few more hours, but the old man’s plans gummed up the gears in my brain.
A hundred ideas raced through my head, too fast for me to catch and analyze the possibilities.
I stared at my arm for a long moment before registering a red, swollen cut.
“The librarian,” I reminded Maximus, twisting my arm out of his grip and rolling my sleeve down.
Guilt flashed across his face, and he quickly tucked his hands behind his back. “Sorry.”
“It’s not that bad, but I wouldn’t say no to a health potion.”
He nodded eagerly and moved to the center of the room. Instead of trusting the furniture, he’d laid out a bedroll and used his pack as a pillow. Knowing his dislike for Wilde, I wondered if Maximus had gotten any sleep, or if he’d stayed awake to keep watch.
Maximus handed me Angelica’s pouch so I could search through it. I found one of the green bottles, popped the cork, and drank the whole thing in one gulp. The cinnamon taste lingered in my mouth as the scattered papercuts smoothed over and vanished.
“Why didn’t Will heal you?” Maximus asked, his guilt souring back into a glower.
I ignored the angry undertones and treated the question like genuine curiosity. “He doesn’t practice healing magic.”
“What kind of magic does he practice?” He waved around at the inn’s front room.
The cozy sitting area had turned into a graveyard of broken furniture.
The check-in counter had collapsed again, sloping backwards, and buckling under its own weight.
The rug was so dirty that my inky footprints disappeared into the rest of the grime.
“The inn was perfectly fine last night, and now it’s rotted faster than meat left in the sun. ”
“I guess the bubble popped.”
Before Maximus could ask what I meant, a loud yelp drew his attention upstairs. While he was looking away, I quickly shoved Angelica’s pouch into the bottom of my pack.
Fitz soon followed the yelp, stumbling down the stairs. His tawny hair and clothes were rumpled, and his eyes shifted behind his glasses in wild agitation. “I woke up in a rat’s nest,” he whispered with a deep shudder.
“Me too!” Delilah announced with much more enthusiasm as she jumped past the last two stairs, landing with a wide grin, her arms spread wide like a gymnast.
Fitz eyed her warily. “Please tell me you didn’t eat any of them.”
Delilah licked her sharp teeth and giggled. She skipped across the front room, gracefully hopped over a rotten section of the floor, and sidled up next to me. “Why did Will leave? Is he mad at us?” she whispered.
Maximus muttered something I couldn’t hear. If I had, it probably would have just started an argument. The old man would love it if I sowed discord throughout the group, but I didn’t want to pit the royal champions against each other. They still needed to work together, now and in the future.
“He returned to his master,” I explained. He’d want to help the Lord of Grimnight prepare for our arrival.
“Damn, I’d thought of a few more questions for him—” Fitz stopped as we all glared at him for different reasons. He held up his hands in surrender and forced a smile. “Which we can figure out on our own!”
Maximus nodded. Now that he knew Wilde wouldn’t be joining us again, his expression softened, and his stance relaxed.
Fitz straightened and announced, “Today, we will finally break the decades long curse on the Grimnight Forest, freeing Traumstead from an evil mage. In this, we honorably serve and protect the Desolated Lands.” He paused, waiting for someone else to say something.
When no one did, he asked with less confidence, “Does anyone have any ideas on how to accomplish that?”
“We’ll need to scout the lair first,” I said. “Figure out what kind of defenses we’re up against and identify the anchor before stumbling into a fight.”
“Angelica’s already inside,” Fitz said. “Maybe she’s learned something?”
“How would we get that information from her?”
“You have a mirror that lets you talk to Will, don’t you? Can you use it to speak to Angelica?”
I’d never tried to use the mirrors to talk to anyone except Wilde and the old man. I didn’t even know if the enchantments allowed that. “I can try, but no promises.”
The compact was buried at the bottom of my pack, tucked between clothes. As my hand closed over it, I chanted in my head: Please don’t be black, please don’t be black. I sighed in relief when I saw the shiny gold outside. No messages from Wilde I would have to hide.
Hopefully he wouldn’t answer a summons that wasn’t meant for him.
I opened the compact and said, “I seek an audience with Princess Angelica Calamitous.”
We waited a few minutes. The mirror only reflected my own image back at me.
“It didn’t work—” I started to close it, only to stop when the reflection changed.
Dark brown lips and the bottom half of one tusk appeared in the mirror. Then the image shifted to a large, black eye. The eye blinked, showcasing long and delicate lashes. A loud voice shouted, “Hello? Who is this?”
I looked around at the others, too baffled to answer him immediately. Fitz mouthed “tell them”, so I told them. “My name is Trey. I’m looking for Angelica.”
“Dirk, dearest, I believe that’s for me.” Angelica’s usually acidic voice was now sweet enough to use in your coffee.
“Here you go, Your Highness,” Dirk replied and passed the mirror.
Angelica’s face appeared in the reflection.
There were bars behind her, confirming she was in a dungeon cell.
Half of her long golden hair was braided, and after a few seconds, a strong pair of brown hands slipped through the bars and began braiding the other half. “As you can see, I’ve been captured.”
“We figured.”
“Yet none of you look concerned.” Her lips pressed into a displeased line. “You could at least pretend that my absence bothers you.”
“Only if you want us to lie.”
She scowled. “You know, Trey, the orcs have been very kind to me since my arrival.” To prove her point, she picked up a plump, ripe strawberry and bit into it. Red juice stained her lips. “I can’t guarantee the same will be true for you. Isn’t that right, Dirk?”
“The master asked us to treat you with hospitality,” Dirk replied promptly. “He hasn’t given us any orders for the other champions.”
I rubbed a hand down my face. That sounded like something the old man had probably said sarcastically, forgetting that orcs had their own version of ‘hospitality.’ Their culture centered around fighting, and they wanted their opponents in peak condition.
That included feeding them well and providing them comfortable accommodations.
Fitz took the mirror from me and shouted into it, “We are glad to see you safe, Angelica, but can you—”
“Fitz, if you continue shouting at me, I will be forced to stuff this mirror under my pillow,” Angelica snapped.
He blinked owlishly, then cleared his throat and said at a more normal volume. “Sorry. How many people are guarding you?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“You mean you don’t know, or …”
“If I answer that, they will add more guards,” she explained through bared teeth. “This obviously isn’t a private conversation, Fitz.”
I looked over Fitz’s shoulder to ask, “Dirk?”
The hands braiding Angelica’s hair paused. A large head landed on her shoulder. “Yes?”
“What information are you willing to share with us?”
Deep furrows formed in his brow as he considered. “We’re in the dungeon.”
“Where is the dungeon?”
“In the lair.”
I pinched my thigh, trying to keep a straight face. “Do you know anything about an anchor?”
He grinned and nodded eagerly. “Anchors hold ships in place.”
Wrong question. “Do you know anything about the curse?”
“It made the trees grow big and fast.”
I should have known he would take the questions literally since that’s how he’d treated the old man’s orders. “Thank you, Dirk.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied with a solemn nod, then returned to fussing over Angelica.
“What’s this about an anchor?” she asked.
“It’s part of the—”
Heavy footsteps cut me off. Someone appeared behind Angelica and said, “Excuse me, Princess.” Then a large green hand reached through the bars and plucked the mirror from her hand. “I have to confiscate this.”
A new orc stared back at us. “We will see you soon, champions.” The next thing we saw was the stone wall rushing toward the mirror. Then the reflection shifted, showing Fitz and I once again.
“Well,” Delilah huffed, hands on her hips. “That wasn’t helpful at all.”
“We know Angelica isn’t hurt,” Maximus offered.
“And that she’s in the dungeons,” I said.
“Why does a city hall have dungeons?” Delilah asked.
Fitz pulled out his notebook, flipping through the pages.
“The library had a book on city hall with old maps. Since I couldn’t take it with me—” he held a deeper grudge over not being allowed to check out the books than being devoured by them—“I drew what I could from memory.” He found the maps and pointed at a section.
“City hall doesn’t have dungeons, but it does have holding cells, which were on a basement level. ”
I pulled Fitz’s book toward me and scanned the outline of the lair.
It’d been fifty years since those maps were drawn, so parts of it might have totally succumbed to the forest, and the old man may have changed some things around.
It still gave us a good starting point. “It looks like there’s an entrance into the basement—or maybe it’s an emergency exit.
Do we want to rescue Angelica first, then look for the anchor? ”
Fitz shifted uncomfortably, eyes downcast. “Well, ahem, it might be … easier if we leave her where she is.”
“She looked like she was having fun,” Delilah agreed.
Maximus’ eyes darted toward the compact and away before he said the ‘right’ thing. “We should try to rescue her. We’re supposed to complete the quest together.”
“Sure,” I said, nodding along. “But”—I waited as everyone looked at me expectantly— “if we’re caught in the dungeons, we’ll have fewer chances to escape.
All they’ll have to do is open a cell door and toss us in.
If we’re caught on, say, the second floor.
” I tapped one of the potential entrances.
“It’ll take more time. They’ll have to carry us down two flights of stairs, past other escape routes … ”
Fitz glanced at the compact. “She can’t hear us anymore, right?”
“No, the connection was cut off.”
“In that case, I vote that we leave her there. All in favor?”
Delilah and I immediately raised our hands. Maximus was slower, but he reluctantly raised his as well.
“Excellent,” Fitz said, sighing in relief when we all agreed. “We’ll find the anchor first, then save Angelica while the Lord of Grimnight is distracted by the chaos of a broken curse.”
“Where do we look for the anchor?” I asked. “It could be anything. What if it’s a random book in someone’s office?”
Happy to distract himself from our decision to abandon Angelica, Fitz launched into his plan.
“We’ll split into two teams. One will enter through the back, while the other enters through the side.
” He marked both entrances with an X. “We’ll avoid the main door.
They don’t know we have a map, so they’ll expect us to choose the most obvious entrance. ”
I surreptitiously covered the compact with my hand, sliding it toward me. Had Wilde been listening to us plan? With the mirror closed, he couldn’t see Fitz’s map, but he could probably guess our route.
Did I want Wilde to know our plan? It would end my mission sooner. The royal champions would be captured, the Lord of Grimnight would win, the Kingdom Defense Spell would fall. This whole thing could end without a fight.
But I wanted the champions to succeed. Breaking the curse wouldn’t save their kingdoms, but it would save this city. It would show them that, even after an evil mage’s ‘victory’, they could still win the day. It would give them a reason to keep fighting in the future.
I stuffed the mirror back into my bag, just in case Wilde was listening. Hopefully the pack muffled our voices.
“Delilah and Fitz should take the second and third floor,” I suggested. “Fitz knows the layout better than any of us, and if something goes wrong, Delilah can jump out a window and still land on her feet.”
Delilah beamed in pride and nodded hard enough to make her collar jangle. “It’s true! I’ve jumped from lots of trees to test it.”
“Maximus and I will take the first floor. If we run into any locked doors, I’ll guard his back while he lockpicks them. If we don’t find it on the first floor, we can work our way down to the dungeons and rescue Angelica.”
Delight glowed on Maximus’ cheeks and he nodded eagerly, excited to put his lockpicking skills to work.
“If anyone finds something they think is the anchor, don’t wait for the rest of us,” Fitz said. “Stab it, smash it, whatever you need to do to destroy it. I’d rather break a hundred false anchors than miss the real one.”
“How will we know if we’ve broken the curse?” Maximus asked.
“Maybe the trees will die?” Delilah cut off a piece of vine with her claws and twisted it between her fingers. “Since they won’t have magic to sustain them anymore?”
Fitz adjusted his glasses and said, “At the very least, we’ll probably hear the angry screams of an evil mage. In which case, I suggest we all run like hell. If anyone else is captured, we can regroup and come up with a rescue plan later. Understood?”
One by one, we nodded.
“Let’s go break a curse and save our kingdoms!” Fitz declared.
Despite knowing the dangers ahead, excitement buzzed in the air. The others gathered their things and prepared to infiltrate an evil mage’s lair. In just a few hours, the royal champions would finish their quest.
And I would finish my mission.