“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?”
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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.
“You can still go back,” Charlotte told him. “I’ll understand.”
“I’m not going back without you.”
She walked to the bed and let herself collapse onto it. Dust poofed upward, and something underneath the bed squeaked in protest.
Charlotte stopped crying. She looked first at Hudson and then back at the bed. “Did you hear that?”
Hudson stepped closer to the bed and mouthed, “Something is under there.” He hoped it was the princess, although he couldn’t imagine what she would be doing hiding under a bed in a dusty room. It was probably something else. The squeak hadn’t sounded human.
Charlotte slipped off the bed and lifted the dust ruffle. “Who’s under here?”
The sound of muffled whispers came from under the bed, then something said, “No one. Nothing’s here at all.”
Another voice whispered, “You can’t go saying, ‘No one.’ ’Cause no ones don’t answer.”
“We’re not people,” the first voice whispered back. “So technically I’m not even lying.”
Charlotte took the hope jar and held it under the bed, trying to see what hid below. “What are you if you’re not people?”
“Shhh,” the second voice said. “I’ll bet she has a broom.”
Hudson bent down, peering under the bed, too. He couldn’t spot what had made the noise. “Come out of there so we can see you.”
Charlotte moved her hope jar farther under the edge of the bed, and something scuttled back against the wall, away from the light.
“Do you know what happened to the princess?” Hudson demanded. “Did you make her disappear?”
This question caused one of the things to snicker. “Did ya hear that? He thinks we can make people disappear.”
There was a little rumble of laughter. One of the things deepened his voice. “Yes, we made the princess disappear, and you’ll meet the same fate if you don’t leave right quick!”
More laughter came from underneath the bed. Charlotte glared at the dark space. With one fast motion, she reached under the bed and swept her hand along the floor.
Two shrieks sounded, and the things scuffled out of reach.
“She tried to kill me!” one of the things squealed.
“Come out from under the bed right now,” Hudson said, “or I’ll send my penguin in after you.”
A moment of silence followed, then one of the things replied, “How do we know you’ve really got a penguin? You might be bluffing.”
He pulled Pokey out of his bag and set him on the floor. Charlotte turned him into his normal size. The penguin blinked around sleepily and stretched his wings.
Hudson pointed to the bed. “Pokey, go under the bed and drag out whatever is there.”
Pokey took a waddling step backward and looked at the darkness with alarm. “Bonnie says monsters live under beds.”
“No, they don’t,” Hudson said. “Monsters aren’t real.”
One of the things under the bed deepened its voice. “Yes, they are. We’re monsters and we eat penguins.”
Pokey let out a squawk and nearly fell over in his attempt to hide behind Hudson. Hudson grabbed hold of one of Pokey’s wings and pushed him forward. “Dude, can’t you tell they’re lying? Go in there and get them.”
“I’m afraid of the dark,” Pokey squeaked.
“They’re not monsters.”
“What if they’re sea lions?” Pokey’s webbed feet kept moving backward. “Sea lions have sharp teeth!”
Hudson pushed the penguin forward again. “Have you ever heard of sea lions living under someone’s bed? No, you haven’t. That’s just a ridiculous idea.”
By this time, Charlotte had pulled her squirrel out of her pack and zapped him to his normal size. “Meko, flush out whatever is hiding under the bed.”
The squirrel nodded and sped underneath the bed.
The things shrieked, “Squirrel! Squirrel!” and moments later scampered out into the light. Two little rabbitlike creatures huddled together in fear, ears trembling. Instead of proper fur, they looked as if they’d been made out of brown cotton candy. The squirrel followed them out and stood guard at the edge of the bed, teeth bared.
Hudson cocked his head at the two rabbits. “What are you?”
Charlotte sighed. “They’re only dust bunnies.”
“You don’t have to clean us up,” the smaller one said. Her ears drooped, and her whiskers twitched. “Please don’t get a broom.”
The bigger bunny wiggled his nose, then turned to the other bunny. “Don’t worry. They’re children. Children never clean up.”
Pokey waddled up to the bunnies, chest puffed up. “I knew you weren’t sea lions.” He turned back to Hudson. “Do you want me to peck them?”
“No,” Hudson said, still disappointed. “You don’t have to rough up the dust bunnies.”
“Unless,” Charlotte added, crossing her arms, “they don’t immediately tell us everything they know about Princess Nomira.”
The dust bunnies shrank together, eyeing Pokey suspiciously. “You used to be nicer,” the smaller bunny said.
“What?” Charlotte asked.
The bigger bunny gave the smaller one a quieting nudge. “Don’t mind us. In the Land of Backwords, you get a lot of backhanded compliments.” He perked an ear in Charlotte’s direction. “So no matter what everyone else says about you, I think you’re very brave.” The bunny turned to Hudson next. “And you’re actually a lot smarter than you look.”
“Stop that,” Charlotte snapped. “Tell us about Princess Nomira.”
The bigger bunny sniffed and looked oppressed. “That’s the problem with living in the Land of Backwords. People always want backstory.”
The smaller bunny took a cautious hop forward. “The wizard brought Princess Nomira here about a year ago, king’s orders. He locked he
r in the tower and stayed to guard her and take care of her. She was miserable—always sighing and crying.”
“Or moping and sniffling,” the bigger bunny added, hopping at each ing word.
“Or sulking and weeping,” the smaller put in and hopped even higher.
Which started the two of them hopping around like popcorn popping. “Or languishing and sobbing.”
“And that was only the first week.”
“On the second week, she was pining and mourning.”
“Or brooding and pouting.”
Hudson put his hands up to stop them from continuing. “We get the idea. She hated it here.”
The bunnies settled down. “The wizard tried to cheer her up,” the smaller one said. “He magicked her room to look like the one in the castle. He brought her books, made her favorite food, and told her stories of his travels.”
Now Charlotte held up her hands to stop the story. “Wait, King Vaygran’s wizard tried to cheer her up?”
The smaller bunny nodded. “Every day.”
Charlotte cocked her head in disbelief. “Why?”
The bigger bunny wiggled his nose. “He wasn’t the bad sort of wizard, the kind that yells and hurts people and cleans under the bed. He liked the princess and wanted to protect her from the king.”
The smaller bunny nodded. “He realized that what King Vaygran was doing to Logos was wrong. He and Princess Nomira talked about it sometimes.”
Charlotte narrowed her eyes in disbelief. “If he wasn’t the bad sort of wizard, why did he work for King Vaygran in the first place?”
The bigger bunny took a hop forward. “I don’t know. Maybe King Vaygran didn’t start out as the bad sort. Maybe it built up on him gradually—like snow and dust and piles of unmatched socks.”
Charlotte ran her hand across her forehead, taking in this information. “If the wizard realized King Vaygran was wrong, why didn’t he let the princess go?”
The bigger bunny’s ears straightened in alarm. “King Vaygran would have killed him if he’d done that. And besides, he had to take care of her until she was ready to rule. She didn’t have the confidence.”