The Sisters Grimm: Book Eight: The Inside Story (8 page)

Her little sister seemed thrilled with her new attire. She had discovered a sharp sword sheathed at her side. She took it out and awkwardly swung it around. “Maybe we’re in
The Three Musketeers
! I hope I’m D’Artagnan. Hey, that’s a good name for the baby. D’Artagnan Grimm.”

Daphne swung her sword into a nearby tree, where it stuck tight. As she struggled to pry it loose, Sabrina glanced around and saw they were traveling with a crowd of similarly dressed men. Each had long, shoulder-length hair and a full beard. Leading the group along a well-worn path through the trees was a woman in rich, embroidered robes. A golden crown adorned with delicate jewels rested on her head. Her face, however, was not as delicate. It was a collection of sharp features and rough lines—both gorgeous and unnerving. Sabrina feared her smile more than any weapon.

“Which story is this?” Puck asked.

Daphne shrugged. “Beats me.”

Sabrina was disappointed. Daphne had read so many more fairy tales than she had, and even though Sabrina had accepted her role as a fairy-tale detective, there weren’t enough hours in the day to read and memorize every fable, tall tale, and folk story in the family’s private library. It was at moments like this that she wished she hadn’t been so stubbornly resistant when Granny Relda had explained her family history and responsibilities. If she had been more cooperative and listened more closely, she might know more about the stories and the actual historical events they described.

“What is it with all the forests?” Daphne grumbled as she peered into the woods.

“I know! Couldn’t they set one of these stories in an icecream parlor for once? I’m starving!” Puck exclaimed. His outburst stopped the rest of the group in their tracks. Every eye shot angry daggers at the children.

“No one spoke during this part,” one of the guards whispered.

They followed the group quietly until they came to an overgrown part of the path, so faint it would have been easy to overlook it. The queen held her hand up, and her men came to an abrupt stop. As everyone looked on, the queen reached into the folds of her robes and took out a ball of white yarn. Sabrina wondered if the woman was planning on knitting a scarf when she saw the queen do something unexpected. She raised the ball of yarn to her mouth and whispered something into it. Then she set it on the ground at her feet and stood back. The ball of yarn started to twitch and hop. It bounced around like a Mexican jumping bean and then rolled into the woods with a shot, leaving in its wake a strand of yarn for them to follow.

The queen reached down and snatched the loose end of yarn and began to wrap it into a new ball as she followed the string into the woods.

“Ahhh, now I know where we are,” Daphne said. “This is one that Jacob and Wilhelm wrote about. It’s called ‘The Six Swans.’ ”

Sabrina had a vague memory of reading it, or rather, of struggling to stay awake while she read it. Clearly, she had lost the battle.

“That woman is a witch. Her husband is a king and he has seven children with his first wife. The queen wants to do bad things to his kids, so the king hides them in a cabin in the woods. She’s using a ball of magic yarn that will unroll until it takes her to where they are.”

“So the yarn is like a GPS device or something?” Sabrina asked.

A guard shot them an angry look. “Shhhhh!”

“Yes,” Daphne whispered. “In the story I read, it leads her to their cabin.”

The children trudged through the dense woods for the next hour. The men followed the queen obediently as she collected and wrapped her ball of yarn. Finally they came to a cottage built near a bubbling spring. Six smiling boys, the oldest not much older than Sabrina, raced out of the cabin toward the group. Their eyes were bright with joy until they saw the queen. When they turned to flee, the men pounced on them and dragged them to the wicked stepmother. From the folds of her dress she removed six silk shirts, and one by one she pulled them over the heads of the boys. In a flash of light, each boy made what appeared to be a painful, squawking transformation into a white swan. Legs and arms vanished. Lean bodies turned plump and sprouted feathers. Toes were replaced with webbed feet. Once each of the boys had changed, the queen’s men released the swans. The distraught gaggle took to the air and disappeared over the treetops.

“She turned them into birds!” Sabrina said. It hadn’t been long ago that she had been turned into a goose, and sometimes she still felt the instinct to shove her head into the river and feast on tiny fish. “What happens to them next?”

“I don’t remember everything, but I think their sister finds a way to break the spell,” Daphne said. “But to do it she has to keep quiet for six years.”

“What did you say?” the queen asked.

The girls turned to see the queen standing behind them, listening to every word.

“Did you say the king has another child?” she continued.

“Um,” Daphne said.

“I’m not supposed to know that! Now it’s part of the story. I have to go in there and turn her into a swan too. If I don’t, my motivations won’t make any sense, but if I do, how will the boys get rescued?”

“You could pretend you didn’t hear it,” Sabrina suggested.

The queen shook her head. “Guards, these three children have brought the Editor to our story. The revisers will be here at any moment.”

At the word “revisers,” the guards raced into the woods as if running for their lives. The queen followed them, dropping her end of the ball of yarn in her flight.

“We’re sorry!” Daphne shouted to them.

“Messing up these stories is kind of fun,” Puck said. “I hope we run into Ms. Muffet. I’ll give her something to be afraid of . . .”

Sabrina’s gaze fell on the queen’s ball of yarn. She snatched it up and immediately felt the uncomfortable sensation she always experienced when handling magical items. If she held it for too long, she’d be overcome with the urge to use it. So she shoved it into her sister’s hand.

“Wow! The magic in this thing is strong, even more than Dorothy’s slippers. Let’s give it a try,” Daphne said as she held the yarn ball to her mouth. “Take us to Mirror.”

At once, the ball of yarn fell out of the young girl’s hands and rolled into the woods. Sabrina watched it with amazement. “Is it possible? Could it really take us to him and our baby brother?”

Daphne shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

The children chased the rolling ball of yarn through the woods, collecting the loose strand and re-wrapping it as they went. The faster they ran, the faster the yarn seemed to roll, until it zipped down a small embankment to a dry creek bed, where a door materialized. The ball of yarn stopped in front of the door and hopped around as if eager to keep moving.

“So there are doors inside the stories.” Sabrina smiled. “We can stop worrying about going all the way to the end before we find one.”

It seemed as if something was finally going their way. She opened the door and the wind that came out smelled like burning wood and leather. It was oddly familiar. The yarn rolled forward into the void and disappeared. Sabrina took her sister by the hand and snatched Puck by the collar and together they followed the yarn.

The first thing Sabrina heard was a crackling fire and the sound of someone flipping through the dry pages of an old book. When she blinked, she found herself lying on her back in the Editor’s library. Above her, sitting in his leather chair, was the man himself. He looked down and cocked a curious eyebrow.

Sabrina scampered to her feet and prepared to fight.

“Calm down,” the Editor said.

“You sent those monsters to eat us,” Sabrina said. She helped Daphne to her feet. Puck was already behind her.

“If that were true, why would I send a door and bring you here?”

“Maybe you want to try and kill us yourself,” Puck said.

The Editor sighed. “I do not want the three of you dead. I want to hire you.”

The trio stared incredulously at one another as the Editor got up from his seat and poked at some dying embers in his fireplace. A dozen of his revisers scurried out from underneath his chair and scuttled across the floor. They clambered up the shelves like fat spiders and seemed to melt into the shadows on the far-distant ceiling.

“You want to hire us?” Sabrina said.

The Editor placed his hands together and lightly tapped his fingers as if in serious thought. “You are detectives, correct? The last member of your family I had in my book claimed it was a family business.”

“Excuse me?”

“The one who called herself Trixie Grimm,” he said.

“Great-Aunt Trixie,” Daphne said. “She was Grandpa Basil’s sister-in-law.”

“I find myself in a most peculiar situation that requires your kind of skills,” he said.

“What do you want us to do?” Sabrina asked.

“I want you to find a missing person,” the Editor said. “Detectives do such work all the time.”

“A missing person? Who?” Sabrina asked suspiciously.

“Pinocchio,” the thin man said as his face tightened into a scowl.

“Pinocchio! I almost forgot he was here,” Daphne said. “He jumped into this book right before we did.”

“And not unlike the three of you, he is causing a great deal of trouble for the Book,” the Editor replied. “While you three are running through one story, he’s causing mayhem in another. I’ve been working overtime trying to make sure these stories are put back the way they were meant to be before they can change history. Then it dawned on me—why not hire you three to chase him?”

“How does that help you?” Daphne asked warily.

“Setting you on Pinocchio’s trail will mean that all four of you will be in the same stories at the same time, cutting my work in half. Plus, you can help me prevent the boy from reaching his ultimate goal, which is to change his history.”

“What does it matter, really?” Sabrina asked. “Anything Pinocchio changes you can rewrite with your little pink monsters.”

The Editor shook his head. “The revisers work like white blood cells, seeking out an infection in the body. In this case, the Book is the body and you intruders are the infection. Unfortunately, they won’t recognize him as a problem if he finds his way to his story—in some ways he belongs there. They won’t be able to tell what’s wrong and what’s meant to be. They’ll erase everything but what he changes, so I’ll have to rebuild a new story around his alterations. I fear that despite the best intentions of the Everafter who used magic to manipulate this book, the spell isn’t foolproof. Certain deleted elements struggle to make it back into her story. The slightest change could cause the whole tale to fall apart. Who knows what could happen in the real world.”

“We’re not interested in your offer,” Sabrina said. “While we’re hunting down that little traitor, Mirror might get to his story—and if what you’re saying is true, he can make whatever changes he likes in his story and there’s nothing the revisers can do. We can’t risk missing our chance to stop him.”

“Don’t be so hasty, sugar bear,” Puck said with a devilish grin. “He wants to hire us. We could use that money for the wedding. Ice sculptures of minotaurs and cyclopes are not cheap! Plus, don’t forget about the poison ivy for your bouquet.”

Sabrina scowled.

“I can assure you Mirror will never reach his story,” the Editor said. “His particular story is off-limits, bound by powerful magics few could break. He will never attain whatever goal he has, thus you three have all the time in the world to find the puppet for me. Afterward, I will take you to Mirror and help retrieve your brother.”

Daphne said. “Is Mirror’s story the one that’s falling apart? Is that the story the Everafter altered to change her history?”

“That is none of your concern. Do we have a deal?”

Sabrina looked to her sister. “What do you think?”

“If what he says is true and Mirror can’t change his story, I think we can help. It would be nice to not have to worry about those things anymore,” Daphne said, pointing to one of the pink monsters hovering by the Editor’s leg.

“Children, my revisers are beautiful creatures, but they are not immensely intelligent,” the Editor said. “They will eat everything they can get their teeth into. If you see one, it would be advisable to run in the opposite direction.”

“So you can’t stop them?”

The Editor shook his head. “When an intruder makes a change, I open a door and send them through. When they get to their destination, they do things their way.”

Daphne and Puck looked to Sabrina for guidance, but she felt too paralyzed to make a decision. Having the Editor’s help with Mirror could be just what they needed to stop him, but could they trust the Editor? She used to think she could read people, but now she wasn’t so sure. What if he was leading them on a wild-goose chase?

“I’m in,” Puck said, interrupting her thoughts. “If it gives me a chance to punch Pinocchio in his stupid, pointy nose, then I’m all for it.”

Daphne nodded. “He should be easy to find, too. We know he’s eager to change his past. He wants to convince the Blue Fairy to let him grow up. We snatch the little toad before he changes the story and bring him back here. Sounds like a piece of cake.”

“And you swear you will help us stop Mirror?” Sabrina said. She eyed the strange man closely. She wanted him to see her gaze. She wanted him to feel as if she could see through him.

“You have my word,” the Editor said. “Stop Pinocchio and I will do everything in my power to help you with the magic mirror and the boy.”

The Editor waved his hand and a door appeared. With another wave, the door opened and a gust of wind blasted Sabrina’s hair into her face. The air was sweaty and pungent, like a landmark case of bad personal hygiene.

“Use the ball of yarn to move quickly through the stories,” the Editor said, handing it back to the little girl. “When you find our enemy, shout for me. I can hear you and open a door. Don’t forget his annoying marionettes, either. They are just as damaging to the Book as their master.”

“We’ll do our best,” Daphne said.

“I’m confident. One last thing. The Munchkin told you to stay inside the margins of the story, and he was correct. Don’t run about in the parts that aren’t in the tale. The margins are filled with loose memories and things that have been forgotten by history. Something lives there that you do not want to encounter. You experienced it, didn’t you, Sabrina?”