The Wizards of Once

  “Ohhh no…” said Bodkin, shaking his head hysterically. “The snowcats were bad enough, but are you really expecting me to ride on a DOOR, like a flying carpet in a story?”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” said Xar, helping Wish up beside him. “Kind of… And the snowcats can run a lot faster when we’re not on their backs… HURRY!”

  “Come on, Bodkin!” said Wish excitedly.

  The snowcats had already jumped out of Xar’s window and climbed down the ladders and platforms, so it was too late to travel by snowcat.

  Even the Enchanted Spoon had hopped on enthusiastically next to Xar and Wish, and seemed to be looking at Bodkin expectantly, as if he had faith that Bodkin could be the kind of person who would see flying on the back of a door as an exciting opportunity rather than an act of suicide.

  Oh dear, I have to do this… I can’t be less of a hero than a SPOON… But…

  What am I doing???? thought Bodkin as he clambered onto the back of the door beside Wish and Xar. It wasn’t even an entirely complete door, for the door of Xar’s room had led a difficult life, so there were great cracks and splits all across it. “Held together by Magic… held together by Magic…” Bodkin repeated to himself reassuringly as Xar jerked the key in the keyhole frantically to the right, and Bodkin grabbed onto the top of the door only just in time as, with a sickening lurch, it flew off, up through the nonexistent ceiling, and into the night.

  For the first five minutes, Bodkin was so terrified he didn’t even open his eyes—he just concentrated on not falling off and not fainting and not throwing up because of the wild swooping motion of the flying door. And when he did eventually open his eyes, he regretted it. They were slaloming madly through the trees of the forest and, through the crazy paving of the cracks in the door, below him he could see the running snowcats and the bright little blinks of the flying sprites.

  Bodkin let out a moan of fear.

  Wish’s eyes were like stars, she was enjoying it so much. She and Xar were whooping with every swoop.

  It had to be said: Xar was an excellent, if reckless, flying-door driver. The door swayed and soared like a peregrine falcon with Xar swiveling the key in the keyhole with exactly the right smoothness and dexterity to wing its way neatly through the forest.

  “We’re going to crash… We’re going to crash…” moaned Bodkin.

  “We’re NOT going to crash,” said Wish exultantly as they swooped through the upper canopy. “We’re flying like BIRDS! And we’re going to get back before morning, and we’re going to cure Squeezjoos, and free Crusher, and get rid of Xar’s bad Magic…”

  “We’re going to crash, and if your scary mother catches us breaking into her scary dungeons, we’ll be in such trouble it doesn’t bear thinking about,” chattered Bodkin through white lips.

  “Don’t think about, it then,” advised Wish. “Maybe she won’t catch us, Bodkin… and we haven’t crashed YET, have we? Just relax and enjoy it—it’s not every day you get to fly somewhere by door. Just go with it.”

  And as they soared gloriously and recklessly through the trees on the back of the broken flying door, the night wind blowing their hair back, Bodkin found to his astonishment that if he let himself relax and go with the motion of the door, he could whoop with joy along with the others.

  Bodkin’s father would have been amazed (and not very pleased) if he could have seen him now. This is the problem with adventures. They bring out parts of you that you never even knew were there.

  12. Iron Warrior Fort

  Xar and Caliburn and the sprites and the snowcats and Wish and Bodkin were lying in the undergrowth in front of iron Warrior fort. They had a problem.

  Breaking OUT of a heavily armed Warrior fort with seven ditches and thirteen watchtowers is hard enough. But breaking IN is virtually impossible.

  And it is made even harder if you are accompanied by a Wizard with a Witch-stain and a band of snowcats and sprites.

  They could see the sentries on the battlements, pacing nervously up, down, up, down, constantly straining to see what was out there in the forest.

  They had abandoned the door in the cover of the forest, for a flying door is rather conspicuous. And then Wish led them around to the stable entrance, which was where she had sneaked out in the first place. The doors there were always opening and closing, with hunting parties going out and returning.

  Xar got the sprites to cover them with weather spells and invisibility spells so that they could sneak up on the entrance without being seen.

  “Thisss will only work until we get inside the fort. Tiffinstorm’sss Magic will not work in there,” warned Tiffinstorm. “There isss too much iron…”

  “Stop worrying, everyone,” said Xar confidently. “I’ve broken into more forts than you’ve had hot dinners.”

  It took a while for the little party of snowcats, sprites, Xar, Bodkin, and Wish to maneuver themselves into position underneath the drawbridge.

  And then the plan worked beautifully… at first.

  Xar and Wish and Bodkin and the snowcats stole invisibly into the fort, under the cloak of Ariel’s and Tiffinstorm’s spells.

  It wasn’t until they were a good way into the stableyard that it was clear the spells were being affected by the sheer amount of iron surrounding them. To Xar’s horror, he could see his feet below him, s-l-o-w-l-y becoming visible.

  Wish and Bodkin were even more obviously there already, although Bodkin was materializing the other way around, and for a second he was just a ghoulishly floating torso.

  But if we can just make it to the next building, thought Xar in a panic, maybe we can hide in the shadows there…

  “Run!” he whispered. “Run!”

  Too late.

  A sentry had turned, to see the bottom half of a gradually-becoming-visible snowcat bounding across Queen Sychorax’s stableyard.

  “MAGIC!” roared the sentry.

  They were discovered.

  Wish had to make up an entirely new plan right there on the spot.

  “HELP!” cried Wish, who was now entirely visible. “HELP! HELP! HELP!!!!! OVER HERE! WIZARD ATTACK!”

  The Warrior guards turned.

  And there was Sychorax’s weird little daughter, pointing at a Wizard, with three furious snowcats and a cloud of buzzing sprites.

  “WIZARD ATTACK!” cried the guards. “Sound the alarm!”

  The Wizards don’t often attack the Warriors, for obvious reasons.

  But Warriors, nonetheless, are always ready for any kind of attack.

  Ready in a manner that you could almost call overkill.

  From all over came the thunderous sounds of clattering armor and clanking swords and stamping iron-clad feet as the soldiers of Queen Sychorax leaped into action.

  “THE ATTACK IS IN THE THIRD QUARTER! BACKUP IS NEEDED!” roared the guards who had already surrounded them, swords and spears at the ready. “CALL OUT THE SPRITE-CATCHERS! READY THE SNOWCAT-TRAPPERS! ALERT THE MAGIC POLICE!”

  The shouting grew louder, and the Household Defender Warriors poured from all directions into the stableyard.

  Oh by the goggle eyes of the Greenbearded Greentoothed goblin, thought Xar. There’s masses of them… I never thought there could be so many Warriors IN THE WORLD.

  “Kingcat! Nighteye! Don’t you dare move!” spat Xar, for he knew that the snowcats were longing to launch themselves at the enemy, and he could see from the look in the Warriors’ eyes that if the snowcats even made one bound in their direction, the Warriors would kill them instantly.

  Xar put his hand to his belt to take out the Enchanted Sword…

  … but the sword was not there.

  He looked up. Wish was ten yards away from him now, and she had been swooped up into the arms of an enormous Warrior.

  “The princess has been secured and made safe!” roared the Warrior, and one look into Wish’s guilty eyes told Xar everything he needed to know.

  Xar was furious.

  Treachery! Betrayal!
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  Wish had nicked that sword off him.

  He had fallen into the trap of trusting an enemy, and just when he had relaxed and let his guard down, thinking Wish was on his side, she had the sheer cheek to steal it off him when he wasn’t looking.

  (Xar conveniently forgot, of course, that he himself had done exactly the same thing only a couple of hours earlier.)

  Wizards are very good at cursing.

  It was a habit that they had caught from the Droods, who used it as a way of attacking the enemy.

  So Xar cursed now, and he cursed loud and long.

  “You treacherous, shrimpy BURGLAR of a Warrior!” yelled Xar. “My father was right about you guys! You’re TRAITORS and LIARS and you, Wish, are as WICKED as your repellent, Magic-hating murderer of a she-devil-mother!”

  “He insulted the queen and he’s going for his weapon!” cried the Chief Guard. “Archers! Eliminate him!”

  The archers at the back of the Warrior ranks raised their bows, all in time with one another, with exquisite precision. They were so well trained it would have been a pleasure to admire their timing—if they were not just about to kill you.

  “NO!” shouted Wish from the arms of the Warrior who was carrying her. “HE’S NOT ARMED! DON’T YOU DARE KILL ANY OF THEM OR I WILL TELL MY MOTHER!”

  Now, the Warriors were not above killing an unarmed Wizard. In fact, they did it quite a lot, when Sychorax wasn’t looking. But they were, to a man and a woman, absolutely petrified of their queen, so reluctantly the archers’ arms wavered in a disappointed sort of way, but they did not let go of their arrows. They lowered their bows.

  “SECURE THE TARGETS!” shouted the Chief Guard. “CONTAIN THE REBELLION! LAUNCH THE SPRITE-CATCHERS! AND WHEN YOU’VE DONE THAT—”

  The Chief Guard sighed, then swallowed hard. “Somebody had better go and inform Her Majesty.”

  The Chief Guard’s Deputy stepped forward. “Er… do we have to?”

  “Of course we have to!” barked the Chief Guard. “In fact, since you had the cheek to question my orders, I nominate you as the lucky person to go and tell her!”

  Peeeeeoooowww!!!

  The sprite-catcher Warriors fired bows that launched nets with little iron weights attached to them into the air toward the sprites.

  Out in the open air of the forest, the sprites could fly fleet as arrows, dodging and feinting with such quicksilver swiftness that they were just a blur of energy and light.

  But here, the iron surrounding them acted like a drug on their flying skills. They bumbled about, slow and confused, shrieking madly, poor little things, as they scrambled away, trying to get far from the scary iron, but instead plummeting to the ground, caught in the nets and gasping and straining for breath, like stranded fish.

  All of them were caught except for the tiny hairy fairy, Bumbleboozle, who had crept into Wish’s pocket as soon as disaster struck.

  The guards leaped forward and Xar was bound with chains so tightly that only his head was poking out. The snowcats were chained up too.

  “TURNIPS IN TIN CANS!” roared Xar, bright red with anger. And that was how Sychorax saw him when she swept into the stableyard a little time later and found a bundle of chains with a Wizard boy’s head poking out of it, screaming insults at her troops.

  13. The Questioning of Queens

  At the entrance of Queen Sychorax, the Warriors bowed so low their foreheads nearly hit the floor.

  Sychorax was scary.

  But then she was a very great queen, and as Wish said, maybe great queens HAVE to be scary.

  There were those who said that a woman was too weak to rule a tribe of invading iron Warriors—but they said it very, very quietly just in case Queen Sychorax should hear them.

  She was lovely, all right—if by “lovely” you mean pretty.

  Hair like a golden waterfall, slim as a candle, six feet tall and most of it muscle, all the sort of stuff that comes in handy if you’re going to be a Warrior queen and you like to make an entrance.

  Whether her character was lovely, well, that’s an entirely different question, and we’ll have to see about that.

  She was dressed in white, with a single black pearl hanging from one ear.

  Queen Sychorax talked very, very softly, in a golden pear-drop of a voice that was as mild as the bite of an adder. She did not have to speak loudly, that lovely Queen Sychorax, for everyone leaned in to listen, and you could hear a pin drop in the terrified silence that followed her around like a sweeping cloak.

  Even Xar stopped his cursing for a moment.

  “So…” said Queen Sychorax, in that quiet gentle voice, as sweetly pure as the stab of an icicle. “Where is this Wizard attack that has so rudely awoken me before daybreak?”

  Petrified, the Chief Guard stepped forward and indicated Xar, the sprites, and the snowcats with a sweep of his armored hand.

  “We have contained the attack, Your Majesty,” said the Chief Guard.

  “Yeesss,” said Queen Sychorax, surveying the Wizard attack. “It’s not a very large attack, is it, to warrant waking a queen so early in the morning? I thought I was supposed to have the finest Warrior sentries in the Warrior world, and yet one small Wizard boy can still enter my fort undetected?”

  “STEP FORWARD THE SENTRIES WHO LET THE WIZARD ATTACK HAPPEN!” roared the Chief Guard.

  The sentries stepped forward smartly.

  “The sentries on watch should be locked in Dungeon 308, and as the officer in charge at the time, Chief Guard, I hold you responsible, so you can lock yourself in too, and pass the keys back through the bars,” said Queen Sychorax. “I have no need for failures in this fort.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” bowed the Chief Guard, and he and the sentries marched off to lock themselves in Dungeon 308.

  “Who captured the Wizard and his Magic companions in the first place?”

  “Your daughter,” said another guard, indicating Wish.

  Queen Sychorax raised an eyebrow.

  “Really?” said Queen Sychorax in surprise. “How… unusually Warrior-like of her.”

  Next she said, “Unchain the prisoner.”

  “But, Your Majesty, is that wise?” said the Deputy to the Chief Guard. “He is a Wizard, after all…”

  Queen Sychorax gave him a look.

  The Deputy undid Xar’s chains.

  The Warriors and the citizens of the fort, who had arrived on the scene, took a step back, for Wizards were known to be extremely dangerous.

  Queen Sychorax glided around Xar, looking him over as if he were an unusual type of insect that she was seeing for the first time.

  “Who are you, and what are you doing in my fort?”

  “I am Xar, son of Encanzo, the Great King Enchanter,” said Xar proudly. “And the wildwoods belong to US WIZARDS, not you stupid, Magic-less, heartless invaders!”

  Queen Sychorax sighed. “The ignorance of these poor Wizards,” she said. “We are civilization. We are progress. Look at us. Look at our weapons, our clothes, our tapestries, our furniture. You Wizards, in comparison, are barely better than animals…”

  The fort was, indeed, very dazzlingly decked out, and Queen Sychorax had a thing about tidiness, so every piece of armor and sword was polished until it shone like silver. Even the giant heads hanging in the main hall, dead as doornails though they were, had their beards brushed daily. So the whole effect was pretty spectacular and Xar was secretly rather impressed by the sophistication of Warrior weaponry and the splendidness of their clothes and fort.

  So this stopped him a moment.

  Caliburn said warningly: “Warrior stuff is dangerous… It seduces you…”

  “And why do you need these Warrior knickknacks?” hissed Ariel. “When you have the moon to dance under, and a violin to sing the tune? Are they worth your freedom, your wandering spirits?”

  “That’s right!” shouted Xar. “You Warriors have come here and stolen our forest, and one day, when I grow up to be the leader of my tribe, I prom
ise I am going to KILL THE LOT OF YOU!”

  Queen Sychorax looked at him intently. “Will you now?” she said. “Wee-ee-ell… this is interesting. I could make sure that you never grow up, couldn’t I? Or Encanzo might be willing to pay to have his son returned… or we could hold on to you in exchange for his good conduct…”

  Xar looked the queen straight in the eye.

  The thing about Xar was, he didn’t scare easily.

  “You, Queen Sychorax, are the SOFTEST pitiless Warrior queen I have ever seen!” said Xar.

  Sychorax flinched.

  The entire courtyard took an intake of breath.

  Queen Sychorax’s eyes sharpened to splinters.

  “What did you say?”

  “Evil destroyer of forest!” shouted Xar. “May you be ground by the teeth of a Rogrebreath into teeny little pieces of dust much smaller than the fleas of an Itch-sprite!”

  “Be polite, Xar!” said Caliburn in an agonized fashion.

  “Wickedness-on-legs! Pointy-ears! Hair-like-a-bear’s-bottom! Nose-like-a-pointy-potato!”

  Once Xar started cursing, he really put his heart and soul into it. It had been a difficult day, what with being humiliated by Looter and told off by his father, and he put all the fear and the fury into a long, elaborate cursing of Sychorax, queen of the Warriors.

  “Oh, Xar,” moaned Caliburn, his wings over his eyes. “This time you’re asking to get yourself killed—you really are…”

  “You can curse all you like, Xar, son of Encanzo,” whispered Queen Sychorax, her eyes like flinty arrows. “But it may not get you what you want. What do you want, by the way?”

  Xar suddenly remembered what he wanted.

  He wanted to save Squeezjoos.

  He stopped midcurse, panting.

  “I demand that you put my sprite and my hand on the Stone-That-Takes-Away-Magic as soon as you can!” said Xar.

  Sychorax looked at him in astonishment.

  She was used to prisoners who begged and prayed and beseeched and pleaded that they should never be taken to the terrible stone: “Please, please, please, Queen Sychorax, we will do whatever you want, but do not take us to the Stone-That-Takes-Away-Magic.”