Return to the Nine Kingdoms

35

Rose
Mom was in trouble and it was all my fault. She was practically dead on her feet, cold as ice, and only had some kind of nasty old sheet wrapped around her.
"Roselyn."
Mom insisted on calling me that only when I was in deep trouble and hadn't called me by my full name in years. But now, in just the span of a few days, she'd used the name so many times that I'd been reduced from a grown adult into the little kid who'd stolen an extra bowl of ice cream after dinner.
We were still piled into the center of the room and just below the portal Mom and Dad had created from Gretel's Vault. It hung in the air above the ground by a few feet and was frameless on our side. I kept catching glimpses of it over the top of their heads but neither of them would let me go long enough to get a great look.
"I'm okay, Mom," I tried to tell her. Dad's squeeze around both of us choked the air out of me for a moment. "Really, I'm okay."
Queen Bea cleared her throat behind us. "I believe that we should be asking you, that question. Virginia, is it?"
I wasn't sure if I'd told the Queen who my parents were—being summoned by Mom through the Traveling Mirror had left me a bit fuzzy before and after—but when I finally managed to pull away just so from Mom and Dad, I turned to see Ferd standing next to the Queen and King. At the very least, I figured that Ferd had shared some of his intense fascinations of Virginia and Wolf, two of the saviors of the Nine Kingdoms. Queen Bea and King Gerard had been asleep, then, and they didn't seem impressed by the two bedraggled bodies that had fallen into their hall.
"Are you alright?" King Gerard reiterated as he took a step forward.
Dad picked himself up from the ground and stood at attention, but kept one hand tucked into Mom's and one hand grasped around my shoulder. I thought that he looked tired as well, though with Dad I could never tell. A wolf always looks either hyper-alert or secretively aware—I didn't think that I had inherited that quality but I knew Dad's expressions well.
"Your Majesty," Dad said. He addressed the King only, practically ignoring the Queen who was, by all rights, the primary royal in the room.
The King dipped his head and gestured to the floor to Mom and me.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," Mom said. Her voice was weak and shaky. She was definitely not fine.
"Orchid, Daffodil," the Queen announced. "Get some fires going, wouldn't you? Do something good for once."
Ferd's eyes went wide and he moved aside as the two Fairies flitted by him and aimed for the hearth. Each of the Fairies had recovered well enough from the shock of realizing where Mom and Dad were summoning from but only Primrose seemed to be locked in her tiny fury. She hovered near Ferd's shoulder and rocked her head back and forth on her small shoulders as if she were arguing with a devil on one side and an angel on the other.
"Honeysuckle," Dad said, pulling up on my hand. I was still holding onto Mom so I didn't understand at first, but he wanted me to move so he could scoop up his wife.
"Wolf!" Mom said at once. "Put me down!"
He ignored her and headed straight for the hearth where Orchid had already lit a small flame with the tip of her wand. The old, dry firewood there caught instantly and the orange and blue flames licked all over its surface.
"Oh," Mom sighed.
Dad eased her down onto the brick and pulled her hands closer to the fire.
"When you say mostly dead," I asked, remembering the movie quote Dad had used.
"I'm just a little cold," Mom explained through chattering teeth.
Ferd pressed forward slowly, first toward me, but then eased, not so subtly toward the fireplace. Although a light stubble had sprouted over his jaws and his height had him towering over most people, he looked like a little boy who had just met his heroes.
"Primrose," the Queen commanded. The little Fairy still appeared to be arguing with herself, but the Queen's use of her name brought her out of the argument. "Food. Make yourself useful and find some food."
I opened my mouth to say something about mistreating the Fairies, but the King caught my eye and shook his head once. The Fairies had watched over them for seven decades but it was not in the Queen's patience to allow them any further power over her. The Fairy, Primrose, looked beaten, but began to flit about the walls of the hall as if she were searching for some secret store of supplies.
"No," Mom said, her voice still shaking. "We have to go. Right away."
Dad sat on the hearth next to Mom and pushed a hand through her hair. If she wasn't so pale and beaten, the glow of the fire would have made her natural beauty shine and she would have been stunning, as always. But the various bruises and her general look of infirmity made her look small, weak, and tired.
"Virginia," Dad tried. "We're all safe, now. We're all together."
She looked at him and although they were physically sitting so closely that their noses almost touched, I thought for a moment that I'd never seen them like they were then. Dad's gaze into Mom's eyes was focused with worry and the growing flames seemed to show a line of grief in his brows. Mom's look into Dad's eyes was thankful but pleading. She unfurled a hand from where she clutched the curtain tightly to her chest. She dropped it a bit, weaker than she might have expected herself to be, and then lifted it to run it through Dad's hair.
"Is your hair a little grayer?" she asked.
Dad's jet-black hair had acquired a lot of gray over the years, his face had a few wrinkles, and the skin around his neck might have sagged a bit more than when Mom met him, but he had always maintained a youthful look. It might have been the three-piece suits he constantly wore that helped to make him appear polished and youthful, but Dad had always sworn when the topic came up that he was just now entering his middle-age as a wolf.
"She's right," I said, stepping closer toward them. I'd thought to give them their space for a few moments, but the light kept dancing on a particularly white patch of hair that streaked through the left side of Dad's normally salt-and-pepper coif. "It's almost white!"
Dad chuckled nervously and pulled a hand away from Mom to run it over the same patch where her hand was. He entwined his fingers with hers and pulled both of their hands away to rest over his heart.
"The Water of Life is what brought you back," Dad told her.
Queen Bea, the three Fairies, and King Gerard all gasped simultaneously. Ferd was closer to Mom and Dad than I was and he plopped down at Dad's back beside him on the hearth.
"The Water of Life," Ferd said, sounding stunned.
"What...what is that?" I asked the room.
Mom looked instantly concerned and tried to take her hand back from Dad's chest, but he wouldn't release it. He looked toward me and tossed his head to gesture me to come closer. I stepped up next to them and placed a hand on each of their shoulders.
"The Water of Life is a test," Queen Bea explained. "Only the worthy may use it and only when his or her trust is absolute."
"The story goes," Dad began without taking his eyes from Mom, "that the Water of Life could revive anyone from the brink of death. But some clever schemers, some nasty little jealous brother, stole the Water from the story's hero and replaced it with Swamp Water."
Mom rolled her eyes and looked from Dad to me. "Swamp Water. I remember that. Your grandfather and I almost died from it."
Dad bounced his head playfully and smiled. "Well, it wasn't just the Swamp Water. And had I not come around..."
Mom smiled and Dad allowed her to take her hand back to his cheek. She caressed it and the stress in her heart over getting back to home seemed to melt away a little.
"Whoever finds the Water of Life must drink from the source first," Queen Bea continued the story for Dad. "And if it be Swamp Water, he or she would fall into never-ending sleep forever. If it be the Water of Life, however..."
"Then the Water will take years of life from the drinker so that the next person to take a sip will be snatched from Death," Ferd finished.
Mom looked back to Dad, the panic that I'd thought had subsided returning in an instant.
"Oh, don't worry, my sweet," Dad cooed.
"'Don't worry?"
Mom's cheeks had turned pink with the warmth from the fire and her perfect eyebrow went up in the arch that I'd so feared as a child. Mom was getting back to normal.
"It's just a few years," Dad said. "Thirty, forty...I'm not too sure."
"Forty of your years for me?" Mom pulled back from him and I could see that she'd started to cry.
I felt the tears coming to my eyes too. If Dad had sacrificed forty of his years for Mom, how many did he have left?
"I'm barely eighty!" Dad said with some disdain. "Come on, now, I'm not at Death's door!"
Mom punched her other fist weakly into Dad's chest.
"Girls," Dad cooed. He allowed a moment for Mom to refasten the curtain around herself. "I'm just going to live a more...human lifespan, that's all."
Ferd slumped in his position and Dad turned slightly, as if noticing my companion for the first time. Puzzled, Dad switched around so that he could see all three of us at the same time. Queen Bea, the King, and the Fairies hovered, some of them literally, near us, but none of them offered any further explanations regarding the Water of Life and the sacrifice Dad had made.
"Ferd, is it?" Dad asked him.
"Yes," Ferd answered. "Yes, sir."
I laughed and let go of Dad's shoulder.
"So formal, yeesh," Dad remarked.
"He's your biggest fan, Dad."
"And yours, Lady Virginia," Ferd added, leaning back toward the fire so he could see her better.
Mom furrowed her brows, never comfortable with either attention or being called a Lady like that, but she shook it away with a laugh. It was good to see her laugh like that and it helped me pretend that I hadn't come so close to losing her.
"Well, Ferdy," Dad said, "don't you worry about me. I've got a whole life to live with my girls here."
Dad winked at me and slapped his free hand on his knee.
Ferd seemed both awed and annoyed that he'd acquired another nickname but then hung his head, thinking.
"What are you wearing, Rose?" Mom asked.
She tugged on the sleeve of my coat and then aggressively pulled the fabric at my side toward her.
"Is this blood?"
"I'm fine!" I said at once. "Really, I'm absolutely fine. Ferd saved me."
"The Fairies saved you," Ferd corrected.
Dad and Mom had snapped their attentions to Ferd as soon as I'd mentioned being saved. Ferd spent the better part of five minutes explaining his plan to wake the Sixth Kingdom, how I came into it, me getting nearly blown up, him getting shot, and the Fairies saving the both of us. Dad reached and pulled Ferd's shoulder toward him where the Stinging Arrow had sunk its poisonous teeth in a few hours before.
"What is this suit you're wearing?" he asked.
Ferd launched into another long explanation of what the suit was, how many times he'd used it, why he'd become an inventor, and how inspirational Dad and Mom were. Queen Bea pushed forward and gently laid a hand on Mom's back.
"I'm sure the fashion is long outdated, but I've an impressive wardrobe upstairs if you'd like to change out of...whatever this is," the Queen whispered loudly enough for Mom and me to hear but quietly enough that Dad's attention didn't drift from Ferd for a moment.
"We really can't delay..." Mom began to whisper back.
Her eyes caught on the Queen's faded but still lovely velvet gown that was trimmed with fluffy and warm fur. The Queen said something to the affect of 'Oh, this old thing?' when Mom pointed out why she was staring, before she reached to pull Mom up from the hearth.
"One little costume change so we can send you back to your home Kingdom fit and proper," Queen Bea insisted.
Dad and Ferd jumped to their feet when the Queen managed to persuade Mom off of the brick and both men moved to help. King Gerard, who had busied himself with helping Primrose look for whatever cache of food she seemed to have hidden somewhere, brought himself to full attention as his Queen moved to leave the hall.
"When I come back, Gerard, those Fairies better have a full feast on the table," the Queen warned. "I missed half of the fall harvest trying to rein them in, if you remember."
"Of course, my Queen," King Gerard said.
"Wolf," Mom called as Queen Bea tugged her away and down the center of the hall.
Dad took a step toward her but Mom shook her head.
"Keep your eyes on that Mirror," she said.
The three of us, Queen Bea on Mom's left side, holding her as she walked, and me on her right side doing the same, had to pass by the shimmering portal that led back into Gretel's Vault. Mom's eyes were trained on it when she wasn't watching Dad, and pleading with him to take us back straight away. The Queen and I weren't necessarily dragging Mom from the hall, but for a woman that had been mostly dead all day, she gave up a decent fight.
"Wolf," King Gerard called, doing his best to break Dad's intense attention from Mom. "We'll guard the Mirror, as she said. The men."
I could tell that he mockingly called attention to the fact that the women were separating from the men, but I had to work hard to push aside a roll of my eyes in contempt. I cocked an eyebrow that I knew matched Mom's and even the Queen's perfectly as we pulled ourselves from the hall to go and, as the King would probably have put it, perform our ablutions. We left the men to their duties and hoped that the two wolves and the young inventor wouldn't be completely overrun by the three Fairies that still hovered above them.