Caroline was sprinting as quickly as she could between the trees, the dry branches scratching along her exposed calves. She had cupped her hands around her siblings and was holding both of them closely together. She hated to have to do it, knowing it would get hot, muggy, and cramped between her fingers after not very long, but it was necessary to ensure she could move at full speed without fear of losing either one of them. Dropping either of her siblings would spell instant death for them, and as she couldn’t actually see them or even her own limbs, she couldn’t afford such a risk. The princess was beginning to grow tired, but didn’t cease her incredible speed, moving at nearly one hundred and thirty miles per hour, smacking her gargantuan feet against the ground and making craters with each landing, sending dirt and rock spraying behind her. But she was unmindful of this. She had to keep moving. She found herself exiting the forest in a surprisingly short amount of time, and after a couple minutes more, reached the gorge.
Still in full sprinting mode, she took a flying leap and landed safely with plenty of extra space behind her on the other side, not even stopping to catch her breath. She quickly parted her fingers as she began running again, though.
“Are you all right, both of you?” she asked downward into the warm pod her hands had created, despite the fact that she couldn’t actually see it. They nodded, unseen, hanging tightly against her soft palm flesh for balance as they were rocked against her fingers before speaking up.
“We’re fine.”
“Can you breathe all right?”
“Yes, Caroline. But… but where are you taking us?”
“We’re going to see someone who might be able to help us.”
“Who?” asked Phillip.
“An old woman. The one who gave me the ring that allowed this… strange magic to take place.”
“What was her name?”
“I… I do not know.”
“How do we know she can be trusted, then?” piped in Anne.
“I’m afraid we can’t know that, little sister.”
“But, Caroline…”
“Her ring led us safely from the palace. Clearly, she intended for us to use its magical properties and escape. Someone with this sort of ability must have some way of helping us.”
“How? Caroline, all we need is YOU! You can stop all the bad men!” chimed Phillip.
“Perhaps, Phillip. I’m sure I could stop all the bad men for you. But… there is one I cannot…”
“The woman, isn’t it?” asked Anne, sniffling. “The one who killed Father…”
“Yes. She is powerful, far too powerful for an attack. We shall have to find alternate methods than physical force, and I believe our best option will be to investigate the location of the house of this old woman. She tells me she lies precisely two miles west of the entrance to the Black Mountains…”
“T-t-the B-Black Mountains?” sputtered Phillip.
“Rest assured, Phillip, we shan’t be re-entering the mountains or caves themselves, simply using them as a guide to find her home.”
“Okay…” he mumbled uneasily. “This is… kind of scary. I think I’m flying…” he said, looking out at the endless expanse of forest that was laid far below his perch in his sister’s gigantic, invisible hand.
“Just shut your eyes, Phillip, and use your sense of touch. I’ll keep you safe in my hands, you don’t have to worry about anything,” answered the princess. “Try to relax. Maybe you should get some sleep, I know we had a rather restless night this last eve…”
“Yes…” cried Anne. “C-Caroline?”
“What is it, Annie?”
“How do you suppose mother is doing?”
Caroline swallowed hard, very glad that her sister couldn’t see the worry stretched across her face. “I’m sure she’s doing just fine.”
“Why?”
“Because… because she is a very strong woman. She is wise, and she is brave, and she will seek a diplomatic solution to the conflict; I’m sure of it.”
“But… what if they…”
“She won’t have been harmed, Anne,” said Caroline, wondering what was causing her to make such blind assumptions. She herself was so desperate to believe them, it seemed, she was trying to instill the idea into her impressionable younger sister just to drive the point home. This last phrase seemed to satisfy Anne sufficiently for the moment to get her to leave Caroline alone about the matter, which the monumental monarch was glad for. She knew she had no sure answers, and she could only repeat the same wish that her mother was all right so many times before she started to question its validity. “I’m going to close my fingers again so I can run again and not worry about the pair of you. Are you comfortable? Secure?” asked Caroline.
“Yes!” shouted Anne, her voice cracking a little.
“Very well,” nodded Caroline. “Hang on tightly.” Resealing her siblings in the warm, invisible pocket of her finger flesh, she began sprinting through the forest toward the Black Mountains.
Catherine pushed the doors open to the Great Hall with a regal flourish, sauntering down the same steps that Caroline had stepped humbly down not long ago at the party the witch had so fatefully visited. The room was scattered with resting Others, cleaning their armor from the fight and regrouping for the next plan of attack to take on the reinforcements all around the provinces. Daniel estimated that they would be attacking the walls of the palace by mid-morning to try and retake it in a last resort for victory.
In the center of the room sat a row of ten of the king’s closest advisors, and finally a stoic Elizabeth. A pair of Brute Others stood by her side to ensure she didn’t try to run off. She sat in a golden dining throne Catherine had fetched specifically for the duchess. Stepping toward her, Catherine extended her arms as if wanting a hug.
“Elizabeth, my darling…” she cooed. “I know we didn’t have time for a more formal greeting at my last visit. I was busy with certain matters, as I’m sure you’re aware…” she giggled, studying Elizabeth’s unflinching face, frozen like stone. “But let us not allow any bad blood between us. After all, I’m going to owe you a very large thank you very soon…”
“For what?” hissed Elizabeth. “If you’re looking for groveling, you’ll find none. Your animals here will have to beat me into the ground.”
One of the Brutes grumbled, clearly insulted. “Now, now, Elizabeth, dear… I’ve spent a lot of time around these fellows. Much more than I’d care to remember. And I assure you, when they are angered sufficiently, there is very little that can stop them in their tracks.”
“Stop all this, Catherine. What is it you’re trying to achieve?”
“Achieve, dear? ACHIEVE? Why, I suppose nothing particularly unique from your husband, or…” she said, correcting herself, “… LATE husband. It is power. The desire to be above my lessers, to control their fates, to force them from my sight and from my mind. You would not argue Richard possessed these qualities, will you?”
“It was for a greater good, Catherine, he did what he had to.”
“Oooohhhh…” sighed the witch deeply, pretending to understand at long last. “The… what were your words? The GREATER GOOD… I see, I see entirely…” hummed Catherine, biting at her nails in feigned nervousness. Taking a few more steps, she stood right in front of Elizabeth, within reaching distance.
“It’s nothing someone like you would ever understand, or hope to understand.”
A hard slap cracked across the duchess’s pale face from Catherine’s swiftly moving hand. “Do not underestimate what I understand, dear, dear, Elizabeth, do not ever… EVER… pretend you understand more about the world than me. Although, it wouldn’t be an implausible guess, considering your looks these days,” she chuckled, indicating toward the middle-aged woman. “Be a little nicer to me, tell me all I’m interested in hearing, and perhaps I’ll share a few of the secrets that help me stay a bit younger looking than my actual age would normally indicate,” smiled the strikingly youthful looking witch.
Elizabeth rubbed slowly at the red, raw spot on her cheek where she was struck, her eyes unblinking at the woman. “You still don’t understand, do you, Catherine?”
“What, Duchess, understand WHAT?”
“You’ve come all this way, thinking you’ve won, crushing us in a terrible moment of weakness…”
“Weakness, my dear? Perhaps you will remember it was us who brought on all your troubles, and rightfully so. Think of it not so much as a cheap shot, but more as brilliant and devious tactical planning.”
“But it doesn’t MATTER!” smiled Elizabeth, feeling self-assured now. “No matter what you do or try, no matter how many tricks you whip up, you shan’t ever have what it is you really want.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to tell me it’s “love,” dear, because I do believe this conversation is over if that’s what you’re going to say next.”
“Well…” laughed the duchess. “That would have been my second option. But no, what I refer to is your beloved keyhole.” Catherine had started pacing, but turned slyly to face Elizabeth, squinting at her.
“Then… you are aware of…”
“Yes, I am.”
“Perfect. Then you shall tell me how to get through. How convenient for you to have been here at my party, Elizabeth. How… how… fortunate…”
“You can save your breath, you…”
“You what, Elizabeth, you WHAT?” asked Catherine harshly, rushing at her and clutching her chin in her fingers. She poked painfully at Elizabeth’s neck with her long, sharp fingernails, causing her to flinch. “Finish that sentence, dear, go on. In fact… I ENCOURAGE you to finish it.” But Elizabeth said nothing, choosing instead to glare at the murderer of her husband with everything she had in her. “No, dear, nothing? Nothing at all? Very well,” said Catherine, releasing her chin and continuing to pace. “EVERYONE!” she bellowed, getting the attention of the roughly one hundred Others hanging around the room. “Stand BACK!”
There was a great rumbling across the floor as the Others shuffled to take their places against the walls, dragging weapons, armor, and wounded brothers back out of the witch’s way. Once they were all back, the witch balled her hand into a fist and plunged it into the air, holding it over her head. After a moment of this, her fist began to glow with bright blue light and crackle with swirling electricity, engulfing her arm. With a piercing shriek from the energy, a bolt shot up toward the ceiling. Instead of smashing against the stone carvings and sending a rain of dust down, though, it instead began to fill across the ceiling, as if the energy were inversely relative to gravity. It began to pool like water along the ceiling, filling it several feet downward along the carvings, before Catherine clenched her fist, stopping the stream of energy. It remained clumped heavily against the ceiling, swirling about in blue clouds. She pointed directly at the center of the floor, clawed her fingers, and twisted her wrist sharply. Instantly, all of the energy began flowing downward in a twirling tornado of rippling navy and silver, shredding directly into a spot in the ground. Marble was shorn away in large shards that sprayed across the room, hitting the stained glass windows and shattering them. Once all the marble was torn away, leaving a hole roughly thirty feet wide, the whirlwind continued digging, tearing through rock and soil underneath. This went on for several minutes until all the crackling energy from the ceiling had been poured out and expended into the ground. Catherine and a few of the Others stepped forward, peering into the deep pit. The witch gasped with pleasure and success, and several more Others dashed forward to look inside as well at whatever wonders were held within. The Brute Other standing directly behind Catherine nudged her roughly in the small of her back, nearly knocking her over, to tell her to get moving. She did, and soon everyone in the room was tightly packed around the pit for a closer look, some of the Others crawling onto the short shoulders of one another to see better.
“Come to me…” hissed Catherine into the darkness, holding out her hand to the unknown.
Completely out of breath, Caroline came to a stop in front of a tiny cottage nestled between two large black rocks, two miles west of the opening to the Black Mountains. Kneeling, she laid her hands in the lush grass, which suspiciously only surrounded the cottage and nowhere else for miles, and opened her fingers up. “Wake up, little ones. I think we’ve arrived,” she said gently. Still unable to see them, the princess heard soft groans as her brother and sister woke up, followed by the barely noticeable weight in her palms rolling off into the grass; both of them suddenly became visible again. Realizing how the magic worked, Caroline clapped her unseen hands together with some difficulty, and grasped at the ring. She popped it off and dropped it into the grass. She and the ring both returned to visibility. Her siblings turned and smiled.
“We DID make it!” shouted Anne.
“I’m glad to see you again,” laughed Phillip.
“I’m glad to see ALL of us!” smiled the taller princess. “But let us not doddle. We must…”
“Princess! You’ve come!” shouted the old hag, emerging from her house. Instantly terrified and repulsed by her visage, Caroline’s two siblings dashed over to her, climbing onto her foot and huddling themselves together.
“Forgive them, they are simply traumatized by the…”
“Yes, I am aware of what has happened to your kingdom, princess… I could see the smoke from here,” she said, pointing backward. Caroline turned around and could see a spire of black clouds formed in the far distance. Somehow, she had a feeling that those clouds weren’t simply created by fire.
“I don’t know who you are, madam,” said Caroline, slowly kneeling so she could better hear the hag, careful not to crush her siblings under her shin. “I must thank you for allowing our safe escape from the kingdom. However, you obviously have some command of the magical arts. So… I must ask, who are you?”
“Who I am is not of importance, princess… what is important is that I believe I can help you.”
“Excellent!”
“Just stand still for a moment… your brother and sister may want to move.”
“Please, you two, shoo, shoo!” said Caroline, gently tapping at her siblings with her fingertips. They leapt off of her foot, standing off to the side at a safe distance from the hag. “What are you going to do?”
“Just… remain still. It is a spell, and a very difficult one. I am not certain if I can be successful. It will require some tools, as well.”
“Tools?”
“Behind my home, princess. If you could…”
“Certainly,” smiled Caroline, dropping to her knees and crawling forward. She reached around the side of the house, and her fingers met cold steel. She gripped them and brought them into view. “Are these your implements, madam?”
“Yes, yes! They must be lodged in the ground, in a circle… like so…” said the hag, making wide circular motions with her arms. “You see?”
“Yes, I see. Stand back,” answered Caroline. The hag took a few steps back just to make sure, and Caroline separated the steel rods, six in all, into her palm. Taking each one in her fingers, she smacked them downward, driving them several feet into the frozen earth. After she had placed all of them in a circle, she sat back. “Is that all?”
“Yes, yes, that should do nicely…”
“How… will this work?” asked the princess apprehensively. Despite the seeming goodwill of the woman, Caroline decided she had had quite enough of magical people pointing their fingers and spells at her. Her current predicament, brought on by a curse, was enough to want to put her off of it for life.
“You must stand still, princess, and I shall… do my very best to perform the spell correctly…”
“What, precisely, will this accomplish?”
“I told you, princess, I shall do my best to remedy your currently… larger size.”
“You mean to say you can return me to my normal form?” asked the princess, delighted.
“Well… no…”
“Oh…” sighed the princess, somewhat dejected.
“But… but I do believe I can prevent the process from continuing… that is, if I still possess the correct power. I’m afraid I’m much older than I would care to think of.”
“Just… do your best, please, I believe you can. Your power saved myself and my siblings once, and I’m certain you can do it again. You will forever be in our gratitude.”
“I… I am not entirely certain I deserve your gratitude, princess, but your kind words are appreciated. Now…” she said, taking a steady stance in the center of the steel pole ring. “This will only take a moment.”
Caroline held her breath as the woman held her hands out, a few stray sparks shooting from her palms; her arms began to shake violently as if she was lifting something heavy. Finally, after a few minutes, a glowing white light started along her shoulders, coming out from under her hooded shawl, and moved steadily along her arms, ending at her hands. Then, the light began shooting from her fingertips, beaming into the adjacent poles. The light quickly curled in winding circles around the poles, spinning faster and faster. Caroline released her air, but quickly gasped it back in as the beams culminated in a large glowing orb the size of her own fist above the hag’s head. It shot forth, flying at Caroline’s chest. She winced, but as it made contact with her and disappeared against her body, she felt no painful force or even anything solid. A tingling sensation that gave her goose bumps flowed through her body, from her heart and into her fingers and toes. The hag collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily.
“It… it must have worked…” smiled the woman, catching oxygen finally. “I suppose I’ve still got some of it left in me.” Caroline stooped down, laying a hand gently under the hag and lifting her back into a standing position. “Thank you, princess.”
“No. Thank YOU. Now I no longer have to worry about becoming so large, I won’t fit in the kingdom anymore!” marveled the princess, accidentally reminding herself of the mission. “The kingdom… we musn’t waste any more time on my own wellbeing! Please, how can you help us? I am aware that you are not as skilled in your magical craft as you once were, but surely you have something that could aid us? Anything?”
“No magic, princess… no magic will help you now.”
“What will, then?”
“You must run! Through the Black Mountains… the great beasts that once guarded it have been felled, there is no longer anything to fear there beyond getting lost in the chasms. But… at your size, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult. You must go, quickly, using the daylight! If you are still in the mountains at nightfall, your eyes begin to play tricks on you, your…”
“No, no, no!” gasped the princess. “We have no intention of trying to leave!”
“I don’t understand, your Highness.”
“We shall not try to escape! My mother, and my…” she said, stuttering, “…my prince are there, as are the rest of the helpless citizens of my father’s great kingdom. Please, you’ve got to have some way for us to return and stop Catherine before she destroys everything!”
“Princess…” began the hag solemnly. “I know you cannot bear to hear it, I know it. But you cannot return there, no matter how desperately you wish to, no matter how many loved ones you have there. Your survival is…”
“NO!”
The yell echoed through the mountains, and Caroline covered her mouth, surprised at her own volume. She looked down at her siblings, who had flinched at her outburst. They looked at her, unspeaking; clearly, neither of them knew what to think about all of this. “Please, please, princess…” begged the hag. “You cannot hope to defeat Catherine. This spell you have just seen me perform? It was successful, but just barely, and I required tools. But Catherine? She could have done the same with a snap of her fingers in a single heartbeat of time.”
“I… I am well aware of the terrible witch’s great power. But surely there must be SOME way to defeat her… she must be stopped, the people are depending on me!”
“Princess…”
“Madam, I thank you for what you have done for me. I truly am. But if you can give me no more guidance on what to do for my people, then I have no choice but to leave now and try to help them while there is still a chance.”
“Then you doom yourself, princess. You doom yourself by the hand of your father’s love.”
Back in the Great Hall, the Others had backed up in fear as Catherine held her arms over her head, barely visible waves present between her hands and the bottom of the pit. After a few moments, though, something appeared from the darkness. It had an indefinable form, looking no larger than an average treasure chest. With a loud clomp, Catherine released her magnetic hold as the object crashed onto the floor of the Great Hall. The Others moved in to examine it, but Catherine pushed them all away with a quick swipe of her hand and a flash of pink sparks.
“Stay back! It… is… MINE!” screeched Catherine gleefully. She took a few steps forward, eyeing what appeared to everyone else in the room to be a misshapen, somewhat small boulder with various shades of charcoal and brown.
“M’lady?” asked Daniel, taking a few cautious steps forward, leaving Luke’s unconscious form lying on the ground behind him with a guard of four Others. “Are you certain that…”
“YES, Daniel, I am quite certain that this is it.”
“But it is just…”
“Daniel, I ask that you cease speaking to me immediately, lest something unfortunate happen to your vocal cords. I have never been more sure of anything in my life. Now, if you will stand back…” she hissed, turning her wide gaze back to the rock. Daniel quickly ended the conversation, shrinking back to stand near Luke, whom he greatly looked forward to brutally destroying once given the chance.
Catherine laid a hand on the rock, running her fingers along its hard grooves, and finally her fingers found a hole about ten inches deep, carved into the rock with such smooth care and precision it couldn’t possibly have been done with natural means. The witch ran her fingertip around the opening of the rock formation, beginning to giggle so deeply her whole body shook. She could still hear the battle raging outside the palace, but she cared not for this anymore. Turning to face everyone in the room, she grinned and reached into her robes, pulling out the crystal in preparation for the dark deed.
“My vengeance… is now complete…” she cackled, rattling the entire Great Hall as she poised her arms to jam the crystal into the opening.