The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell (32 page)

The twins felt sick to their stomachs. It was the woman they had seen in Red Riding Hood’s castle; her features and hair color were too distinctive for it not to be.

“So… is she the Huntsman’s daughter?” Conner asked.

“She must be,” Alex said.

“I didn’t even know he had a daughter,” Conner said. “What does she want with the Wishing Spell?”

Alex thought about it. She barely knew anything about the Huntsman; she knew nothing about his daughter. While the wheels spun in her head, coming up with different possibilities, a horrifying thought came to her.

“What if she’s not collecting for herself ? What if she’s collecting for the Evil Queen?” Alex said.

Conner’s face went white, and he shook his head.

“No!” he said. “What would she want with the Wishing Spell?”

“It makes sense,” Alex said. She couldn’t deny the facts. “She escaped from prison for a reason. She has something unfinished, maybe revenge or something
bigger.
Something she can’t complete herself.”

“What if she needs it for the same reason we do?” Conner asked. “What if she’s trying to get into our world?”

The idea hadn’t occurred to Alex. She looked back at the portrait of the Evil Queen on the wall. She stared at the painted face and tried to find the answers in her lifeless eyes. What could she be planning?

The twins heard a set of footsteps outside the chamber. The door was unlocked from the outside, and someone started to open it.

“Quick! Hide!” Conner said. He and Alex jumped inside one of the bigger trunks and shut the lid, leaving it open just a crack so they could still see the room.

“Your Majesty,” said a booming man’s voice from farther down the hall, and whoever was opening the door stopped.

“Yes, what is it?” said a woman’s voice just behind the door.

“My men and I have returned,” the man said. “We’ve searched everywhere, and there is still no sign of your stepmother.”

The twins recognized his voice. It was Sir Grant, the soldier who had made the announcement about the Evil Queen in the Charming Kingdom during the ball.

“Oh?” said the woman.

“Your Highness, forgive me for asking again, but you were the last person to see her in the palace before she escaped. Are you sure there isn’t anything you can tell us about that night? Any detail or clue or something she said that would give us an idea of where she was going?” Sir Grant asked.

“I’ve told you countless times, I don’t remember anything of the sort,” the woman said. “I went to simply say a few things that had been on my mind, and once I had done so, I left.”

“Your Highness, it’s only a matter of time before she strikes, before she poisons a river and kills half a kingdom or something worse,” Grant said. “You knew her better than anyone else. For your own safety, please inform us immediately if you remember anything else.”

“You will be the first I inform if any memories surface,” the woman said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to be alone.”

Sir Grant returned down the hall. The woman slowly turned the handle of the chamber door and opened it. She was a beautiful woman with the darkest hair and the lightest skin the twins had ever seen.

“It’s Snow White!” Alex whispered to Conner, and squeezed his arm.

She wore a white nightgown and a matching overcoat. She stood in the doorway for a moment, just looking at the room before she entered it. It seemed hard for her to be in the room where so many attempts on her life had once been planned. The way she surveyed everything around her made the twins assume she hadn’t been inside this room in a very long time.

Snow White entered the room and locked the door behind her. She walked around the room and carefully went through all the things, just as the twins had done.

She went to a stack of old books. She went through the pages of one that was black and had a large skull on its cover. Snow White flipped through its pages until she let out a tiny gasp and dropped the book. The twins could see from the open book lying on the ground that she had discovered the page with the recipe for a poisoned apple.

She took a seat on the platform behind her and began crying, burying her face into her hands. The whole situation seemed to have taken a toll on the young queen.

“We should ask her where the coffin is,” Alex whispered to Conner.

“Are you sure? She seems like she needs a moment,” Conner said.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a moment to spare,” Alex said. Alex slowly stood in the trunk and pushed open the lid. “Your Majesty?” she said softly.

Snow White gasped. She was startled and embarrassed to see that she wasn’t alone.

“Who are you?” she asked. “How did you get in here?”

“Boy, if we got a nickel every time someone asked us that, we could afford our own palace to sneak into,” said Conner, standing up beside his sister.

“We don’t mean any harm, Ms. White, we just need to ask you a question, and then we’ll be gone,” Alex said.

“First, tell me how you got in here,” Snow White said.

“The portrait,” Conner said. “There’s a secret ladder that leads down to the second floor.”

“Conner, don’t give away all our secrets,” Alex said.

“I know that,” Snow White said. “I used it when I would sneak into this room as a girl. How did you know about it?”

“We read about it somewhere,” said Conner, waving his hands like the subject wasn’t a big deal.

“You seem like nice children, but you shouldn’t be sneaking into places where you don’t belong,” Snow White said. “These are very dangerous times we’re living in.”

“Tell me about it,” Conner said with a snort.

“We completely agree and promise never to do it again,” Alex said. “We were just wondering where your glass coffin might be?”

Snow White looked at them uneasily; it was such a bizarre question. “It was moved,” she said.

“To where?” Conner asked.

“I gave it back to the dwarfs,” Snow White said. “It was beautiful, but as you can imagine, it was strange to have that coffin in the palace. They keep it somewhere in their mines.”

The twins sighed at the news. The road ahead of them had just become much longer.

“What on earth would you two want with my coffin?” Snow White asked.

They looked at each other, not sure what to tell her and what not to tell her.

“We’re on a bit of a scavenger hunt,” Alex said. “And we’re in a bit of a time crunch, you see, because your stepmother may be after the same things we are.”

Snow White looked at them very seriously. “Children, my stepmother is a very dangerous woman. If she is after something and you are in her way, she won’t hesitate to kill you. She is
heartless
. If there is any possibility of you crossing paths with her, you must stop whatever you’re doing immediately.”

A loud banging came from the door.

“Your Majesty, are you in here?” a soldier asked. “The king couldn’t find you and is concerned.”

“Yes, one moment, please,” Snow White said, and then turned to the twins. “You two should go.”

The twins nodded and climbed up through the portrait.

“Promise you’ll think about what I’ve said,” Snow White said to them, just before they shut the portrait door.

“Of course,” Alex lied.

Snow White smiled with relief and left the chamber.

The twins decided to exit the palace through the main entrance since they were still disguised as servants.

“The dwarf mines are in the Dwarf Forests, which aren’t very far from here,” Alex said, looking down at the map. “Remember, Snow White ran there by foot after the Huntsman failed to kill her.”

“We’re going
back
into the Dwarf Forests?” Conner said. “Do we have a death wish?”

“We don’t have a choice,” Alex said.

The twins camped out in a safe patch of woods near Snow White’s palace and slept for the little night remaining. They hung their wet clothes over a tree branch to dry by the next morning.

They began their return into the Dwarf Forests. Alex’s bag had only one strap now, but it worked nonetheless. They walked for a good while before they found a driver willing to give them a ride.

“Are you sure you want to go in there? It’s a very dangerous place,” the driver said.

“Trust us, we know,” Conner said. He gave the driver the coins he had found in his maid’s dress the night before to further persuade him.

The cart traveled down the path, past the Ugly Duckling Pond (which Alex found incredibly amusing), and into a forest that had been logged. For miles around there were nothing but tree stumps. It didn’t make the twins sad to see
all the missing trees; they had seen enough live ones recently to make up the difference.

“I really hope we don’t run into the Evil Queen,” Conner said during the trip. “That would just suck.”

“I just hope she doesn’t already have the ‘saber from the deepest sea,’ ” Alex said. “Otherwise we may
have
to cross paths.”

“I wonder if she knows about us,” Conner said. “If she sent the Huntsman’s daughter to find Sleeping Beauty’s spindle and the Troll and Goblin kings’ crown, and they both were gone, she would realize sooner or later that someone else is collecting objects for the spell.”

“I hope she doesn’t,” Alex said, and then let out a sigh. “It seems like the longer we’re here, the worse it gets for us. Something always comes up that makes things more difficult….”

Alex’s face went pale, and her mouth dropped open. She looked as if she had just seen a ghost.

“What’s wrong?” Conner asked. “You look like you got a B on a pop quiz.”

He turned and looked in the direction of her gaze. In the distance, standing in the middle of the field of stumps was a tree that, instead of growing straight out of the ground, was curved and wound in circles like a large vine. It was unmistakably the Curvy Tree, the one their father had told them stories about seeing when he was a kid.

“You’re right, Alex,” Conner said. “Things always find a way of becoming more complex.”

T
he twins didn’t speak for the rest of the trip into the Dwarf Forests. They couldn’t. There was too much to say and not enough words to express what they were feeling. The driver dropped them off a mile or so away from the mines, and the twins walked in silence the rest of the way.

They weren’t even alarmed or threatened by the forest around them. Their minds were so full, there was no room to become nervous or timid by the thick and chilling trees around them.

“The mines are just past this hill,” Alex said, looking at the map. At least now they were speaking, just not about the subject they needed to address.

The twins reached the top of the hill, and on the other side below were several tunnels leading into the side of a mountain. They were much different from the tunnels they had seen in the Troll and Goblin Territory; they were perfectly rounded and sturdy. Dozens of dwarfs were working in them, transporting wagons of jewels and rocks from one tunnel into the next.

A loud bell rang from somewhere inside the mines, and a dozen more dwarfs emerged, carrying their lanterns and picks with them. It was the end of the day, and they all headed home in single-file lines to different parts of the forest.

The twins waited on the hill for a few moments before going into the mines, making sure no one was lingering behind. They went through the largest of the tunnels and found a row of lanterns hung low on the dirt wall just inside. They each took a lantern and walked deeper into the mountainside.

The mines were huge. The shovels were lined up against the walls and the floor was covered with tracks for the dwarfs’ mining carts, and stretched into the mountain for miles. The twins kept walking and walking with their lanterns raised high above them, being on careful lookout for anything that might resemble a glass coffin.

“Are we going to talk about this?” Alex asked her brother as they searched.

“Talk about the mines?” he asked.

“No. You know what I mean,” Alex said.

“I don’t want to talk about anything but finding the coffin,” Conner said.

“Conner, ignoring the situation isn’t going to help anything,” Alex said.