A Grimm Warning

  “There it is!” Alex pointed out. “Lester, circle the prison until we can see something!”

  Lester nodded, and looped the sky above the prison. There was destruction everywhere—Alex and Conner could see the entrance had been blown to bits from all the way in the sky. However, there was no trace of prisoners or soldiers anywhere.

  “I think it’s safe to get a little closer,” Conner said.

  Lester gradually descended, circling the prison as cautiously as possible. The closer they got, the more certain they were that no one was around. They looked for somewhere to land but the prison was covered in enormous spikes to prevent anyone from doing just that. Alex waved her wand at the prison’s roof and the spikes turned into tall blades of grass for Lester to land on.

  “Okay, let’s see if there’s anyone left inside,” Alex said. She pointed her wand at the roof again and a small hatch appeared. They opened the hatch and dropped inside, landing on the prison’s highest floor.

  The air inside was very smoky. All the cells on the top floor were wide open and empty. They looked down the center of the prison and saw that all twenty-nine floors below them were exactly the same.

  “I don’t think anyone’s here,” Conner said. “It’s like they had a fire drill and never came back.”

  The twins jumped when they suddenly heard a voice that wasn’t either of their own. Sitting in a cell on the top floor, by herself, was a woman.

  “Pssst!” she said. “Over here!”

  Alex and Conner approached the woman with caution. Whoever she was, she was still a prisoner and couldn’t be trusted. The woman was only a few years older than Red but wasn’t aging nearly as gracefully. Her hair was thin and messy and she had bags under her enormous eyes. She wore a plain black dress and no shoes.

  “Down here!” the woman called up to them from where she was sitting on the floor. Her voice sounded alarmed but she seemed perfectly comfortable. “You’ve got to warn someone! An army raided the prison earlier today and took the prisoners with them! They’re trying to take over the world!”

  Alex and Conner leaned down to speak with her. She stuck her head through the bars as far as it would go.

  “We know about the army and are trying to stop them,” Alex said. “We’ve come here to find out more.”

  “Were the prisoners taken captive or did they join them?” Conner asked.

  “They joined them,” the woman said. “The soldiers opened every cell and gave each prisoner the option of staying or joining their army. And as you can see, it was an almost unanimous decision.”

  “Why didn’t you leave with them?” Alex asked.

  The woman looked at them like they were insane. “I’m not going out there,” she said and shook her head. “There’s nothing for me out there. I mean, perhaps at one point there was, but not anymore. I belong right here in my cell.”

  “You’ve been in here for a long time, haven’t you?” Conner asked.

  Alex thought there was something curious about her. She saw there was a plaque on the wall next to the woman’s cell and Alex stood to read it.

  THE LADY GRETEL

  SENTENCED TO LIFE IN

  PINOCCHIO PRISON FOR THE

  MURDER OF SIR HANSEL

  Alex gestured for Conner to look at the plaque, too. “Conner, it’s Gretel from ‘Hansel and Gretel’!” she whispered to him. “She killed her brother!”

  “What?” he whispered back.

  “It’s all right, you don’t have to whisper,” Gretel said. “I know what that plaque says. I know who I am. I know what I did.”

  Alex suddenly had so many questions. “Why did you kill your brother?”

  Gretel dreamily stared off into the distance. “Because it was the only way I could be free.”

  “Free from what?” Alex asked.

  “From ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ” Gretel said.

  “The story?” Conner asked.

  “No, the label,” Gretel said. Their inquiring looks begged her to explain more. “After my brother and I survived the gingerbread house, all I wanted was to have a normal life—but that’s not what Hansel wanted; he wanted us to be heroes. He told everyone we knew about what happened to us in the woods and then those people told everyone they knew and soon word spread and we became household names around the kingdoms. We were treated like royalty; parades were thrown for us, we were honored with medals everywhere we went, they even named a holiday after us.”

  “That sounds pretty nice,” Conner said.

  Gretel’s eyes shot up at him. “No, it was terrible,” she said. “Because no one cared about me, they just cared about ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ I just wanted to be Gretel, just Gretel, but no matter what I did no one would let me be just Gretel. It was like my brother had become an invisible ball and chain I was forced to carry around for the rest of my life.”

  “But he was your brother,” Alex said. “Didn’t you love him?”

  Gretel grunted and stuck out her tongue like she had tasted something foul. “No, I couldn’t stand him!” she said. “Hansel may have seemed like a nice young man but all he cared about was himself and the attention he got! He used to drag me around with him just so he could get more admiration! Hansel also took all the credit for what happened in the gingerbread house—even though I was the one who tricked the witch and pushed her into the fireplace! He wouldn’t even be alive without me! Had I known then what I know now, I would have let the witch eat him!”

  “So you killed him instead?”

  Gretel nodded. “It was an accident. One day we were walking through the trees and he started mentioning all the places he had planned for us to go, all the people we would meet, and all the awards we were going to receive in the upcoming days. Well, I got so mad I pushed him—but I didn’t see there was a cliff behind him!”

  “Did you tell anyone that it was an accident?” Alex asked.

  “I was planning to,” Gretel said. “But then I realized this cell allowed me to be something that the rest of the world didn’t—just Gretel. So I pleaded guilty and have been here ever since. And so, today when the soldiers asked me if I wanted to join their army or stay in this cell I didn’t have to think twice.”

  Gretel sighed at the thought of all the peace her cell brought her. Conner looked at Alex and circled his temple with his finger. “She’s nuts!” he mouthed.

  But Gretel wasn’t finished with her story. “The worst thing one person can do to another—besides eat them, of course—is to reduce their identity to being only half of something. When someone is treated as half of or less than half of one identity, they’re not being treated like a human at all. Everyone should have the right to individuality.”

  Conner slowly stood up and walked away from the cell. “Well, thanks, Lady Gretel!” he said. “We should get going now. We need to figure out where this army went.”

  “Wait!” Gretel said. “I can tell you! The army and the soldiers went back to their camp, but the general and his men were headed somewhere else!”

  “Where?” Alex asked.

  “I don’t know where, just somewhere else,” Gretel said. “The prisoner across from me—they call him the Masked Man because of the sack he wears over his head—he was talking to the general before they let him out. He convinced the general that he needed a dragon to get rid of the fairies and take over the world! He said it was the only way the general would win!”

  Alex and Conner exchanged the same confused look. “A dragon?” Alex asked. “But they’ve been extinct for hundreds of years. Our grandmother and her friends were the ones who fought them off during the Dragon Age.”

  “Apparently the Masked Man knows where to find one,” Gretel said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. He’s a very unusual man. He’s been in that cell for almost a decade now. He likes to talk to himself at night—sometimes I swear I heard someone else in there with him, but that would be impossible.”

  Conner walked to the cell of the Masked Man and peeked ins
ide. “Hey, Alex, this guy has a lot of stuff in here.”

  Alex joined him at the cell. The door was still open and they walked inside together. Just being in it gave them the creeps. The walls were covered in bizarre carved illustrations of winged creatures, pirate ships, and animals with big ears and feet. There was a pile of coal and he had carved the pieces into the shapes of hooks, hearts, and swords.

  An oval mirror in a silver frame hung on the wall.

  “What does a Masked Man need with a mirror?” Conner asked.

  “I have no idea,” Alex said. “But we should get out of here. We need to fly by their camp and see what the army is up to.”

  They left the cell and went back to the hatch in the ceiling. Alex pointed her wand at the floor and the stones rose to form a small staircase for them to climb through the hatch.

  “Good-bye!” Gretel called out. “I hope you can stop them!”

  “Us too!” Conner said before climbing onto the roof.

  “Good-bye, just Gretel,” Alex said. “Thank you for your help.”

  By the time the twins climbed to the roof, Lester had eaten all the long blades of grass. They hopped aboard the giant goose and took off into the sky again.

  “The general told half of his men to set up camp somewhere in the southeast where the portal spit us out,” Conner told his sister. “I bet they’ve regrouped by now.”

  Alex took Lester’s reins and steered him into the sky high above the south of the Eastern Kingdom. Alex and Conner searched the ground as they passed over it, not sure what they were looking for. However, as soon as the camp came into view they knew exactly what it was.

  Hundreds of trees had been cut down to make way for the expansive camp the soldiers had built. There were dozens and dozens of large beige tents set up and the timbered trees had been used to build a wall around the camp.

  There were thousands of soldiers setting up and marching around the camp and the soldiers weren’t alone. A thousand or so recruits from Pinocchio Prison were scattered around the camp as well. Giant ogres did the heavy lifting as the soldiers built the camp, witches wove broomsticks out of tree branches, and soldiers trained goblins how to fire cannons and trolls how to shoot rifles.

  To Alex and Conner’s horror, their target practice was a line of wooden fairy dummies.

  “Mother Goose was right,” Conner said. “They’re preparing for war.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SENDING THE SWANS

  Mother Goose stood by the railing of the grand balcony and watched the skies as she waited for Lester and the twins to return. Emmerich and Bree were standing a little ways from her, having the most fascinating conversation with Froggy and Red.

  “So there are six kingdoms, two territories, and one empire?” Emmerich asked, wrapping his head around the lesson Froggy was teaching them on the fairy-tale world.

  “Precisely!” Froggy said. “And the leaders of the six kingdoms, including the Fairy Council, make up the Happily Ever After Assembly.”

  Red cleared her throat. “There used to be six kingdoms, but now there are five kingdoms and one republic.”

  Bree almost went cross-eyed from all the information. “So Red used to be the queen of her own kingdom, which used to be part of the Northern Kingdom until the C.R.A.B. Revolution, was it?” she asked.

  “The C.R.A.W.L. Revolution,” Red corrected her. “It stood for Citizen Riots Against Wolf Liberty. The Evil Queen was in power in the Northern Kingdom at the time and she did nothing to stop the wolves terrorizing the farmers’ villages. So we revolted and I got my own kingdom.”

  “Which you just lost in the election for queen,” Bree pieced together. “But now the kingdom is a republic because the new queen changed the government. Can she do that?”

  “Evidently,” Red said, and pursed her lips at the thought of it.

  “In our country we have a Congress and a House of Representatives to keep the president from doing things like that, I guess,” Bree said.

  “Yes, well, I thought I did, too,” Red said with flared nostrils. “I hand selected representatives so I couldn’t be blamed for my biased decision making and the whole kingdom still turned on me. I don’t know where I went wrong.”

  “But who is the queen of your country now?” Emmerich asked.

  “Little Bo Bimbo,” Red replied without a hint of sarcasm. “She’s the ugliest, most horrendous creature to ever live in the Red Riding Hood Kingdom and she scared all the villagers into voting for her.”

  “Now that sounds like politics in our world,” Bree said.

  “I’ve never heard of Little Bo Bimbo,” Emmerich said, and shivered at the thought of her.

  “Then you’re a very lucky man,” Red said. A small smile appeared on her face; it was very therapeutic for her to make things up about Little Bo Peep. She only wished she had done it during the election.

  “They’re back!” Mother Goose said, pointing to the sky.

  A shadow passed over the balcony and they looked to the sky and saw Alex and Conner descending on Lester’s back. They landed on the balcony and their friends eagerly approached them.

  “Well, what did you find?” Mother Goose asked.

  “The army recruited the prisoners!” Conner said as he hopped down from the giant goose. “The soldiers were training them for combat when we flew above their camp—there are thousands of them!”

  Mother Goose placed a hand over her heart. “Oh dear,” she said. “What should we do next?”

  “I’m thinking,” Alex said as she climbed down from Lester. “In the meantime, Mother Goose, please see that all the Fairy Council members gather in the hall as quickly as possible. Conner, go with her and tell the other fairies about what we’ve seen. The first thing I need to do is get the kings and queens to the Fairy Palace as quickly as possible so they can join in the conversation. This isn’t a Fairy Council matter; it’s an issue the entire Happily Ever After Assembly needs to discuss.”

  Mother Goose and Conner nodded and headed inside the palace. Alex raised her wand in the air and then cracked it like a whip six times. A series of shimmering lights flashed around the balcony and six enormous swans the size of Lester magically appeared in front of her. Alex spun the tip of her wand above the palm of her hand and a stack of papers appeared. She rolled the papers and put one in each swan’s mouth.

  “What are those?” Froggy asked.

  “Invitations,” Alex said, and handed Froggy an extra copy to read.

  To the members of the Royal Families,

  An emergency has occurred and all members of the Happily Ever After Assembly and their families must report to the Fairy Palace immediately. We will provide details of the matter upon your arrival.

  Thank you,

  Alex Bailey, Acting Fairy Godmother

  “I need you to take these to the kings and queens of the Corner Kingdom, the Charming Kingdom, the Northern Kingdom, the Eastern Kingdom, and the Bo Peep Republic as quickly as possible and bring the rulers back,” Alex instructed the first five swans, then turned to the sixth. “As for you, I have other acquaintances I’d like you to deliver this invitation to.”

  She whispered further instructions into the swan’s ear so the others couldn’t hear.

  “If they don’t cooperate, you have my permission to persuade them however you can,” she said. “Bring them back by the ankles if you must—these invitations are not optional. Now go.”

  All six swans bowed and then launched into the air one at a time. They flew off in opposite directions at speeds birds had never flown before.

  “Now what?” Red asked. “Do you think the kings and queens will take your message seriously?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” Alex said, hoping with all her heart they would.

  After a few hours of waiting, Red and Froggy took Bree and Emmerich inside to give Alex some time to think alone. She paced back and forth so many times she almost left a mark on the floor. When she was studying wars in History in
school, Alex had never imagined that one day she would be in one, let alone leading it. Was she equipped to lead the Happily Ever After Assembly into a war against a general of an empire?

  She prayed her strengths of common sense and logic would be enough to make up for her lack of battle strategy. She kept thinking about the great war heroes from her world, like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. What would they have done if they were in her shoes? What sort of plan would they have created? What would her grandmother have done if she wasn’t ill?

  Alex heard a commotion from above and looked up to the evening sky. One by one the swans came into view as they returned to the palace, bringing the kings and queens from opposite ends of the Land of Stories with them.

  Alex sighed with relief as they all glided to her—she was so glad to see none of them had rejected her invitation.

  Five swans landed on the balcony one after the other. The first swan carried King Chance, Queen Cinderella, and their two-year-old daughter, Princess Hope, from the Charming Kingdom. The second swan carried Queen Sleeping Beauty and King Chase from the Eastern Kingdom. The third swan carried Queen Snow White and King Chandler from the Northern Kingdom. The fourth swan carried Queen Rapunzel and her husband, Sir William, from the Corner Kingdom. And the fifth swan carried Queen Little Bo Peep.

  All the rulers appeared befuddled by their unexpected journey. Queen Little Bo Peep looked a tad intimidated at being among the legendary rulers on the balcony. It was the first time she had been called to participate in the Happily Ever After Assembly.

  “Hello, Your Majesties,” Alex said. “Thank you all so much for coming.”

  “Alex, I’m sure we’d all like to know: What is the meaning of this?” Cinderella asked. “And what happened to the Fairy Godmother? Why didn’t she send for us herself?”

  “Because she’s fallen ill,” Alex informed them. The royals took the news exactly as the twins had—they didn’t even know it was possible for the Fairy Godmother to fall ill. “It’s only one of many problems we face, I’m afraid, so if you please, quickly follow me into the hall so you can join our discussion.”