The Wrong Side of Magic (22 page)

The birds stretched their wings, took to the air, and flew toward the building. She watched them disappear and slowed her pace. “If they do find something, how should we fight it?”

Hudson shrugged. “With the sword. Besides that, all I've got is a penguin and a needy magnet.”

Charlotte glanced around at the forest floor. “You're good at throwing, and there are plenty of rocks here. That will help.” She paused. “Unless it's a thesaurus.”

He scanned the trees nervously, looking for anything out of the ordinary. “Uh, isn't a thesaurus like a dictionary?”

“Right,” she said. “And books can be dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?”

Charlotte rolled her eyes to let him know it was a ridiculous question. “Don't you ever read? Books can change people. You don't want to be changed into the wrong thing.”

Hudson didn't know how to answer that. “How big are thesauruses?”

“Big,” she said. “The only thing worse to run into in this part of Logos is a herd of encyclopedias. Sometimes they stampede.”

She went on telling him about several other books and their dangers until the eagle and falcon returned.

The falcon landed on her shoulder. “We couldn't see anything guarding the tower.” The bird's words floated to the ground, swishing back and forth like feathers.

“I even landed on the ground,” the eagle added, “to see if it would trigger something. It didn't. No one is around.”

“Good,” Charlotte said, but she didn't sound entirely convinced.

Was it possible that King Vaygran would go to the trouble of hiding the princess away and then not leave anything to guard her? Someone or something must be around to feed her and make sure she didn't escape. Then again, in a land full of magic, maybe the tower did that sort of thing itself.

Hudson and Charlotte picked up some rocks anyway. Neither of them spoke as they walked the rest of the way to the tower. They were too busy looking and listening for danger.

They didn't find any. They only saw book-birds sitting in trees preening their pages.

As they approached the tower, a couple of rats ran by. They had tails and noses with whiskers, but their bodies spelled the word
rats
. Charlotte's falcon swooped toward them. With squeaks of protest, they flipped around until the word
rats
became
star,
then with a poof of light they floated up to the sky.

Charlotte shook her head at them. “That's just showing off.”

After the stars had left, everything around the tower was quiet. It stood about six stories high and was made of uneven gray stones that circled the building in a jigsaw pattern. It didn't have any windows that Hudson could see, and with its pointy roof, it reminded him of a rocket that hadn't taken off. The tower had two doors, each on opposite sides of the ground level.

Still clutching her rocks, Charlotte whispered, “We'll need to go through the back door.” Her words came out as puffy cotton balls that dissolved before they hit the ground.

“Why?” Hudson whispered so softly the word was only smoke.

“Because this is the Land of Backwords.”

Hudson looked at one door and then the other. “Which one is the back door?”

“Um,” she said, looking at one and then the other. “I think it's that one. It doesn't have a doorbell.”

She was right. One door did and one didn't. What was the point of putting a doorbell on a prison? Although in a place like this, the doorbell was probably there just to show which was the back door.

“Keep watch,” she told her birds. “And warn us if anything comes near the tower.”

They both flew into neighboring trees, their gazes sweeping around the forest.

Hudson and Charlotte hurried to the back door. She tried the knob. It was locked, but they'd expected that.

Hudson pulled the sword from his bag. “We're on the backstretch,” he said, ignoring the magnet's protests that it needed to recalculate.

With shaking hands, Charlotte took the sword and fit it into the slot on the doorknob. “Do you think the princess would hear if we called to her?” She twisted the sword to the right. When it didn't move, she twisted the other way. “I want to let her know we're here, but I'm afraid someone else will hear us. Someone bad.”

Hudson glanced over his shoulder. “Your birds will warn us if anything comes near the doors.”

The sword didn't turn far enough to unlock the door. Charlotte pulled it out and tried to put it in hilt first. It didn't even fit into the lock that way.

Her voice rose in frustration. “This sword has to be the key.” She tried it blade again. The door still wouldn't open.

“That sword had better be the key,” he agreed. “We paid the Cliff of Faces a year of our lives to find out how to free Princess Nomira.”

“Let's try the other door.”

They went there, but it was not only locked; the knob didn't even have a slot for a key. The first door had to be the right one. They strode back to it.

“Maybe the sword has to be full size,” Charlotte said. “I'll change it back to normal.”

“The sword won't fit in the lock if it's full size,” Hudson pointed out.

She took the compactulator from her pack and used it on the sword anyway. It didn't fit in the doorknob. The door stayed locked.

“Maybe we're supposed to use the sword to hack through the door,” he suggested. He took several swings at the door and a few at the doorknob. Each swipe jarred his hands and arms, but that was all it accomplished. The sword didn't even leave a mark on the door.

Hudson squeezed the hilt angrily. “I'm still glad we have this sword. I can use it to hack apart the Cliff of Faces.”

With an aggravated huff, Charlotte sank down on a pile of their used words. “We came all this way. We fought King Vaygran.” Tears filled her eyes. “It has to be the right sword. The face said to use the most powerful defender, enforcer, convincer, and educator. Depending on how it's wielded, it is the righter or inflictor of wrongs. What other sword could it be?”

Hudson pushed aside the words
inflictor of wrongs
and sat beside Charlotte. “The face said something about the beginning and the end. What did that part mean?”

Charlotte shrugged. “He said, put the beginning at the end and you'll wield it well. Once the key gets you into the tower, the princess can simply walk out.”

“The beginning at the end…” Hudson repeated, watching the words tumble onto his lap.

“That's a backward thing to do, which makes sense, seeing where we are.” Charlotte laid her head on her knees with a despairing thunk. “We already tried to put the hilt in first. It didn't work.”

Hudson was no good at comforting girls. When Bonnie was in a bad mood, he always cracked jokes to make her smile, but that wouldn't work this time. Soldiers were searching for them, an evil king had already tried to kill them, and they'd given a year of their lives for a useless answer.

The princess was so close. Hudson needed to figure out how to make the sword work. He turned the hilt over in his hand. Was this the most powerful defender, enforcer, convincer, and educator? If it wasn't, what sword was?

“What sword…” he said softly, and two tiny words dropped into his lap.

He looked at them, lying silver and glittery against his pants, and knew the answer.

 

13

“A SWORD,” HUDSON
said, louder this time. “We need a sword.”

Charlotte lifted her head, tears still moist in her eyes. “We have a sword. You gave your father's good-bye in order to get it. It doesn't work.”

“Not that sword,” he said so happily his words came out puffed up like bubbles. “One of these swords.”

He leaned over and picked up the word
sword
that Charlotte had just said. It was steely gray, hard with frustration.

“The word
sword
?” she asked. “You think that's the key?”

“Nope. That's not the most powerful defender, enforcer, convincer, and educator. But this is…” He snapped the
s
off the word
sword,
turning it into
word
. “Now I'll put the beginning at the end.…” He held the
s
next to the end of the word so it read
words
.

“Words!” Charlotte exclaimed, and a golden
words
fell onto her lap, shining with excitement. She threw her arms around Hudson and gave him a quick hug. Before he could think of how to respond to that, she let go, grabbed the
words
from her lap, and got to her feet. She slipped
words
into the lock.

The knob turned, and the door swung open.

Hudson had been right.

The room was empty except for a twisting stone staircase in the back that led upward. They stepped inside. The whole place was dark and smelled like stale, forgotten things. Without hesitation, Charlotte crossed the room and climbed the first few steps. “Princess Nomira?”

The question echoed up the stairs, hit the walls, and pinged the words
Princess Nomira
back onto the floor.

No one answered.

Charlotte took out her bottle of hope and shook it until light spilled around her. The two of them headed up the stairs, Hudson gripping King Vaygran's sword.

The second floor, like the bottom floor, was only a vacant room. A few torn sacks and empty crates sat in a corner. Perhaps it had been a storage room once.

They kept climbing the stairs. “Is anybody there?” Hudson called. His words reverberated off the wall and plunked down several stairs.

Only silence answered, and silence is rarely informative.

“Where could she be?” Charlotte asked.

He didn't have to see the light of her hope jar growing dimmer to know she was losing hope. He could hear it in her voice.

The third floor was also empty. The fourth held a table and two chairs—perhaps a dining room. The fifth floor had been someone's bedroom once. A simple dresser, bed, desk, chair, and wardrobe stood in the dim shadows. But no princess.

They made their way up to the last floor. It was another bedroom, also empty. This one was easier to see because a patchwork of light drifted inside from several small holes in the wall. The holes were grouped in the middle of shutters, taking the place of windows. They were too little to crawl out of, but they let in light, air, and—judging from the layer covering everything—dust.

The bed against the far wall had golden posts and a pink lace canopy, just like the princess's bedroom in the castle. Well, not exactly identical. The flowers twining across the bed had long since withered. Everything in the room looked wilted and dirty. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling. He knew they were cobwebs, because each was spun in the shape of corn on the cob. By the looks of things, no one had lived in this place for months.

Charlotte turned in a circle, gazing around the room in dismay. “Where is she?”

“Not here,” he said. Only their footprints were visible across the dusty floor.

Charlotte kept turning, searching. “The Cliff of Faces said she was here. I paid a year of my life for that answer. I lost three animals getting here! Where is she?”

Hudson didn't answer. Charlotte went back down the stairs, calling the princess's name, each time with more anger.

Had they missed something, forgotten some important clue? He leaned the sword against a chair and sat down, causing a small cloud of dust to poof around him. He coughed and waved it away.

A few moments later, Charlotte returned and then paced across the room with hands planted on her hips. “It must be a riddle. What exactly did the Cliff of Faces say?”

He had been going over it in his mind. If it was a riddle, it was one he couldn't figure out.

“We asked where King Vaygran sent the princess. They told us he sent her to the gray tower in the Land of Backwords. We asked how to get her out of the tower. They said once we had the key to go inside, she could walk outside.”

“We got the key,” Charlotte said. Her anger broke, turning into a sob. “So where is Princess Nomira?” She was crying, and Hudson had no idea how to make her feel better.

“Maybe the king moved her before we came.” He ran his finger across the dust on the chair's arm. “And then put a spell on the tower so it looked like no one had been here in a while.” Although Hudson couldn't fathom why the king would have done all that.

Charlotte wiped at the tears on her face. More tears replaced them. She kicked the words of his last sentence, sending several of them thudding into the wall.

“It will be all right,” he said. “We'll go back to Texas, tell your father what we learned, and maybe he'll be able to figure out where the princess is and how to rescue her.”

This sentence only made Charlotte cry harder. She apparently thought it was hopeless. Maybe it was. Maybe whatever magic gripped the princess was too strong to break.

“Texas isn't such a bad place to live,” he offered. “I'll help you fit in.”

She shook her head. “I can't return to your world. It takes a really powerful wizard to work that sort of magic. You can leave through an exit, but I can't go back that way. I'm from here.” She stopped bothering to wipe away her tears. They flowed unchecked down her cheeks.

“What?” Hudson stood up, the weight of her words still sinking in. “Why would you come here if you knew you couldn't go back?”

“Because,” she said in a small voice, “if we rescued the princess, I wouldn't need to go back. My father could come here, and our lives would go back to the way they were before Vaygran stole the throne.”

Hudson didn't know what to say. He couldn't believe Charlotte had taken that risk—that she'd been so sure they could free Princess Nomira that she'd strand herself here.