Page 19

19

T ess

Wednesday: Wedding minus 3 days

Fifteen minutes till midnight

J ack gave us one crucial piece of advice that made us believe we might navigate a magical maze faster than a team of three immortal Fae:

The Fae weren’t team players.

“They all want to be in charge, and none of them trust any of the others. Without the queen there to give them direct orders, they’re likely to squabble amongst themselves.”

I was skeptical about the “squabble” part, looking at the two stern men and one woman facing us. But … if there were more team members, wouldn’t that make them even more likely to fight with each other over who was in charge?

I stepped forward and bowed to the queen. “Your Majesty. We couldn’t live with the dishonor of putting four people against only three. Please choose another member of your team.”

She gave me a cold, considering stare, clearly trying to discern my motivation. But I was pretty good at hiding my thoughts, and I even had a trick or two up my Dead End Pawn long-sleeved shirtsleeve.

“This is unnecessary.”

“It is for our pride,” Aunt Ruby said, following my lead.

“Fine.” Viviette waved a hand, and another female Fae joined their team.

Squad.

Gaggle? No, that’s geese. Crows are a murder. I wondered what you called a group of Fae?

Pay attention, Tess.

“The first team to reach the center together will prove their Alliance is the stronger and win this Trial,” the queen proclaimed.

I was so tired of proclamations.

She held up a slender hand. “Three, two, one … go!”

We gestured to the Fae team to go ahead of us, which they didn’t understand, and openly mocked us for.

“You know you have no chance, so you’re giving up this fast?” one of them said with a sneer.

“Sure,” I said cheerfully, which made them suspicious, but after a heated, whispered debate, they ran through the entrance and into the dark passageway of the maze.

“Ready, ladies?” Lorraine, our team leader, pulled out her flashlight. “Lights on!”

We each switched on our lights and followed her into the hedge.

I could almost hear the voiceover saying, “ to their doom.”

The instant we crossed over the threshold, all sounds from outside the maze vanished. It was spooky.

“That’s spooky,” Aunt Ruby said, shivering.

“Did you bring a sweater?” Eleanor asked. “I have an extra one in my backpack.”

“No, I’m fine. It was more a ‘this is creepy’ shudder than an ‘I’m cold’ shudder,” Aunt Ruby said. “Which way?”

“If only we had a magical map,” I said, casting my light over our choices. The maze split immediately into three directions. We hadn’t seen which way the other team had gone, and we couldn’t hear them, either.

“Either they’re running on silent mode, or the maze cancels out sound,” Lorraine said, sounding resigned. “Either way, let’s get going. I say left, because most people go right when confronted with forks in the road. Maybe the queen counted on that.”

“Left is fine, but we should tie ourselves together,” I said. “I didn’t like the way she said ‘together,’ as if dangers in the maze will try to split us up.”

“I have a twenty-foot-long bungee cord in my backpack,” Lorraine offered.

I blinked. “Why do you have a twenty-foot-long bungee cord in your backpack?”

“She always carries it,” Aunt Ruby said.

“Since that incident in 1968,” Lorraine said.

“Ohhh. Right,” Eleanor said.

“Do I want to know … you know what? This is like Jack and flying monkeys on Mt. Fuji. I do not want to know. Let’s just run the cord through one of each of our belt loops, just in case.”

So, we did. And then we started down the left pathway, which was more like a tunnel, because the greenery grew in a curving arch overhead. We started off at a trot, eager to beat the other team to the center, but we’d only traveled twenty feet when the path disappeared into a wide pool of inky dark water.

“That’s a good eight feet long,” Aunt Ruby said. “There’s no way we can jump over it.”

“We’ll have to go back,” Eleanor said, turning around.

“Wait,” Lorraine said. “I have an idea.”

She put her backpack down on the ground, reached in, and pulled out a pocket-sized pair of pruning shears, which she waved in the air, grinning at us. “Nobody said we couldn’t use these.”

“They didn’t say we could,” Eleanor gasped.

“Ask forgiveness rather than permission,” I said happily. “Hand those over. I brought my gardening gloves.”

I gloved up and took a stab—literally—at breaking through the hedge on my right, calculating that the hedge on our left was the outside of the maze. I didn’t want to look through a hole in the shrubbery to see the queen’s outraged face looking back at me.

The shears broke on the first try, snapping back against my hand. “Ouch!”

Aunt Ruby put a hand on the vine and pulled at it. “This is like steel wire. We’re not going to cut through that.”

“Then let’s go back!” Eleanor, now in the lead since we’d reversed course, trotted back toward the entrance where we’d come in.

Which was no longer there.

We stopped to decide what to do next, and a baby goat came out of nowhere and raced down the path toward us. The goat took a sharp right turn and went down what had been the middle path before.

“Feels like a clue,” I said. “Instead of a white rabbit, we get a white goat.”

“This seems like a bad idea,” Aunt Ruby said, but she didn’t try to talk us out of it.

So, we followed a baby goat deep into the heart of a magical maze for a good five minutes.

And then an orangutan jumped out of the hedge, grabbed the baby goat, and raced off down a very narrow passageway on the left we would have missed if not for them.

“Okay. I went along with following the goat, but I’m drawing the line at following the orangutan,” Aunt Ruby said.

“Remember when Sherlock rescued that pair of baby orangutans and he kept calling them orangu tangs , and he didn’t believe us when we tried to correct him?” Eleanor laughed. “Then he finally looked it up, and he brought me a container of Tang as a joking apology.”

“Whatever happened to Tang?” Aunt Ruby asked. “Tess loved that stuff.”

“I did,” I said, smiling at the memory. “It’s still around, only they mostly sell it overseas.”

“It’s no wonder you win all the trivia contests,” Eleanor said. “Why, I bet?—”

“Can we focus ?” Lorraine gritted out. “Just, I don’t know. Maybe we’d be better off looking for the middle of the maze now and talking about monkeys and orange drinks later?”

“Yes. I agree,” I said quickly. “But orangutans aren’t monkeys. Technically, they’re classified as great apes.”

“What’s the diff?—”

“Later!” Lorraine shouted, cutting off Eleanor’s question. “Are we following the great ape or not?”

“You’re the leader, but why don’t we go that way?” Aunt Ruby asked, pointing.

We all looked and saw a flashing golden arrow that literally pointed down the path to our right.

“That can’t be good,” I said. “Do you really trust a floating arrow in a Fae maze? I’ve told you, they can’t lie, but it’s very rare they tell the truth. Nobody said, ‘this is the way to the center.’ They just put a wildly obvious, ‘of course the ignorant mortals will follow this,’ arrow in the middle of the path.”

“Do we follow it or not? If we use reverse psychology, then they’ll expect us to be suspicious and not follow the golden floaty arrow when it’s really the actual path,” Eleanor mused.

Lorraine groaned and rubbed her temples. “My brain hurts. Okay, we’ve been in here nearly an hour and gotten nowhere. How about we take our first water break and think about it? Maybe another clue will pop up.”

We all pulled out our travel-sized, insulated water bottles, took a drink, and thought about it. Then, I handed out cookies, so we munched on those and thought some more.

When we finished, we still didn’t have any actual ideas, but we felt better about it.

“I’m with Tess,” Aunt Ruby said. “Let’s follow the ridiculous ape carrying the goat. They’d never believe we’d be foolish enough to do that.”

“They underestimate our capacity for foolishness, then,” Lorraine said glumly, but she nodded.

Eleanor agreed, so we headed down the narrow path after the orangutan. As we traveled, the hedge encroached more and more on the path, until we had to turn sideways to fit.

“My claustrophobia does not like this,” I muttered, but I was in the lead this time, after some redistribution of the emergency bungee cord, so I was first to feel the cool breeze on my face.

“Hey, we’re almost out,” I called back, and then I stepped out of the path and almost fell into a chasm.

Lorraine, directly behind me, yanked on the bungee cord and pulled me back just in time, and then we stood there breathing hard and staring down into the enormous dark, deep hole in the ground.

“Just to be clear,” I said slowly. “There was no canyon in town square before tonight, correct?”

“Correct,” they all said.

“So, is it an actual hole, or is it possible that it’s a glamour?”

“I’m not trying it,” Eleanor said quickly. “I’m a newlywed!”

“Tess is getting married Saturday,” Aunt Ruby protested.

“I’ll do it,” Lorraine said. “Tess is the strongest of us, anyway. I’d rather have her holding the rope.”

We restructured again, and Lorraine tentatively took a step out over the darkness of the chasm.

And plummeted over the edge.

We all pulled hard, and yanked her back up with us, but it was scary, I have to confess.

“So much for that,” Lorraine said, trying to sound calm, but I could almost hear her heartbeat racing. “Back?”

“Back,” we all agreed.

This time, when we turned around, we saw the baby goat sitting in the middle of the path and staring at us. It jumped up and raced past us.

“No, little baby!” I lunged at it to save it from the fall, but the little goat trotted blithely across a stone path that now led across the dark nothingness of the chasm below it.

“Okay, that’s just ridiculous,” I shouted, and my voice echoed back at me. “ Diculous, diculous, lous, lous, lous.”

“What now?”

“I have an alliance kind of idea,” I said slowly, digging into my pack. “Hey, little goat! Want a cookie?”

I pulled out a peanut butter cookie and waved it around, hoping the scent wafted across to the goat. In seconds, the little creature stopped walking and whipped its head around to stare at us.

“Come on, sweetie,” I coaxed. “Yum, yum.”

The goat slowly trotted toward us, getting closer and closer, until he was close enough to stretch out his neck and delicately take the cookie out of my hand.

From behind us, we heard someone clear his throat.

“Did you mention cookies?”

We whirled around to see an ancient Fae man. At least, I thought he was Fae. His ears had the delicate points, but I’d never seen a Fae so old.

“Are there any chocolate chips cookies, by any chance?” he asked wistfully. “It has been a very long time since I had a chocolate chip cookie.”

“Yes!” I pulled out another bag and handed him a cookie. “And I’d like to offer this entire bag, if you will join our alliance and help us find the center of this maze.”

He blinked. “That’s all you want for the entire bag of cookies? Not a cauldron of gold or my first-born child or something like that?”

I shuddered. “Sir, I have found that cauldrons of gold bring their own problems. And, no offense, but your first-born child is probably at least fifty years older than I am.”

“Five hundred,” he said absently, licking his fingers and staring longingly at the bag of cookies in my hand.

“I’m sorry?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Why would you be sorry? My first-born son is at least five hundred years older than you are. I miss that boy. I haven’t seen him in over four centuries.”

I focused on the pertinent. “So, do we have a deal?”

“Absolutely!”

He was as good as his word, or maybe I should say as good as his longing for the cookies, because he took us on a relatively straight path—no dark pools of water and no mystery canyons—directly to the center of the maze.

Along the way, we passed the Fae team, and they were stuck in quicksand. Sure enough, instead of trying to find their way out, they were squabbling over whose idea of escape they’d use.

“Excuse me!” Lorraine shouted.

They didn’t hear her.

“EXCUSE ME!”

All four of them looked at us.

“Since this fine gentleman is helping us, I’m going to leave my bungee cord for you,” she said politely.

They looked suspicious, of course. Why would mortals help them out?

Clearly, they’d never met any Dead Enders before.

So, we did just that. Tossed them the cord and moved on before they could extricate themselves and win the trial.

“You know,” I said thoughtfully. “When I was a kid, I was sure that the perils of quicksand would be a major part of my life. All the cartoons on Saturdays always had people falling into quicksand all the time and getting sucked down to their doom.”

“Yeah. You just don’t see a lot in Dead End,” Eleanor agreed.

“Radioactive spiders or gamma radiation, either,” I pointed out.

Our guide whirled around, his expression filled with apprehension. “Shush! We see a lot of radioactive spiders in here.”

I shushed, and the old guy led us to the center of the maze, which opened up right back onto town square. I gave him all the cookies in my backpack when he toddled unsteadily into the fresh night air and the loud noise of Dead End.

When we heard horses’ hooves, the cookie guy looked up with interest, and then his face broke into a huge smile. “Vivi!”

For the first time since I’d met her, the autumn queen was stunned into silence. Then she jumped down off her horse, ran to the man, and threw her arms around him.

“Uncle Urgonth!”

When she finally glanced over at us, I raised an eyebrow. “Uncle?”

“It’s an odd business, and none of yours.”

Fair enough. “We won?”

She gave me a gracious nod. “You won.”

The Fae team hadn’t even limped out of the hedge yet, covered in mud, when the queen and her uncle disappeared.

One of the Fae group stiffly marched over to us and held up Lorraine’s bungee cord, covered in almost as much mud as he was. “Your cord, madam.”

Eleanor patted his arm. “You keep that one handy, dear. It’s always useful.”

He bowed, and we turned to go, only to see the entire town waiting for us. They broke into cheering and applause that was so incredibly loud I almost didn’t hear the baby goat cry out to get my attention.

When I knelt down, the little guy jumped into my arms.

Jack helped me up, grinning. “Aw. Is that a wedding present? For me?”

I clutched my baby goat. “Yes, but you can’t eat him!”

“Spoilsport,” Jack muttered, laughter gleaming in his eyes.

When he hugged me—and the goat, who complained loudly—I saw the troll over Jack’s shoulder, standing at the edge of the crowd. He nodded once and then walked away.

“Can we go home and get some sleep?”

“Absolutely,” Jack said. “But we need to talk first.”

“Why?”

“Because, while you were in the maze, Viviette told me the Wisdom trial is tomorrow, and maybe we should make a plan.”

“Maybe we could just give her a baby goat in trade to get out of the rest of these trials,” I muttered.

“You already gave her an uncle,” Jack said. “If that didn’t do it, I doubt a goat will.”

He was probably right.

That didn’t mean I had to like it.