Twisted Tales

Jack led me out of the inn and around the edge of the building, where there were a couple of stools leaned up against the wall. He sat on one and I on another, where I continued to cram my breakfast into my mouth in a most unladylike fashion.

“So you’re leaving town, then?” Jack asked, watching me carefully, his expression still serious.

I nodded, my mouth too full to reply verbally.

“I…” Jack stopped, cleared his throat, then tried again. “I meant what I said, about not thinking that Erik is the kind of person who would do… all that stuff Hans was talking about. But… he is right that it might not be a great idea to hire him to be your guide.”

“I’ve spent the last few days with him, and he hasn’t caused me any harm so far,” I pointed out after a swallow that took some effort. “I mean, he’s not exactly the best conversationalist, or the most pleasant company, but-”

“I don’t think he’s intentionally hurt anyone,” Jack said quickly, “at least, not anyone that didn’t start something first. But… well, trouble just seems to follow him wherever he goes. You might be getting yourself into more than you bargained for by staying in his company any longer than you have to.”

I was about to protest, but then I was forcefully reminded of the freaking giant that had tried to kill us yesterday.

Then again, I have been the one to lead the pack of ravenous wolves to Erik’s door, which he so kindly killed, gutted, and skinned for me.

He had gone and gotten his ankle sprained, forcing me to carry him out of the forest; but I had been the one to accidentally lead to Rumpelstiltskin’s death, and wrangle Erik into helping me locate the castle where the miller’s daughter would be held.

Honestly, when it came to who was causing trouble for who, the score was coming out pretty even on both sides.

“Well,” I said slowly, thinking over my words with care. “That may be, but I don’t really know anyone else who could help me, and I’m kind of working on a strict deadline here, and I’ve come to learn that he’s not the kind of person who asks a lot of questions; so I don’t really think I have many other options besides let him be the one to take me to where I need to go. I can handle a little trouble now and again. Someone else’s problems make a nice distraction from my own.”

Jack didn’t seem to know quite what to make of my reply. “Where exactly is it you’re heading?” he asked.

“To…” I faltered. I didn’t actually know the name of the place we were heading, or even what it was. A town? A city? A big ol’ castle all by itself in the middle of a swamp? I was afraid to guess; I didn’t want to immediately out myself as not only a foreigner to this country, but a foreigner to this universe. Dimension? World?

Whatever.

“To… uh… the royal… tooooown… ciiiiiiiiity… plaaaaace?” I tried, trailing off vaguely at the end of each word in the hopes that Jack would fill in the gap for me with the correct option.

He just looked at me like I was a little soft in the head. “To Kingsbury?” he suggested.

“Yes, exactly,” I said quickly. Well, probably. I mean, that sounded like what someone would name the capital of a kingdom, right?

“If you leave before noon today, you could be there by tomorrow evening.”

“Tomorrow?” I gasp. I hadn’t realized it would be so far. That meant that I had an entire day less than I had originally assumed. We wouldn’t arrive in Kingsbury until the day before the King gave the Miller’s Daughter his final ultimatum.

“What is it you need to do in Kingsbury that’s so important?” Jack asked, leaning forward on the stool so that his elbows rested on his knees, and looking hard at me.

“It’s… nothing,” I lied pathetically. I could never come up with good lies on the spot, and even if I could, I have the guiltiest damn face when lying that you’ll ever see.

“Are you on a quest?” he pressed, and something like excitement flashed in his eyes.

I paused, and took a moment to look back at him as intently as he was looking at me. I could see the tension in his shoulders, the intense interest in his expression.

I was on a quest, I guess. An unofficial one, maybe, but a quest nonetheless. And quests weren’t exactly unheard of in this world, were they? They were practically a dime a dozen, falling into the laps of worthy tailor’s sons and ill-treated stepchildren.

And Jack… who was Jack?

Jack, like Hans, was an incredibly common name, used and reused in fairy tales. There was one particularly famous Jack I could think of off the top of my head.

“Do you live here at the inn with your aunt and uncle?” I asked Jack abruptly, changing the subject.

He looked surprised by my question, but answered it. “Oh… uh, no, I don’t. I live with my mother on a farm just outside of town.”

“Just your mom?”

Jack looked a little uncomfortable, and finally breaks his unwavering eye contact. “Yes. Just my mother. My father died some years ago.”

“And you’re… forgive me for asking, you’re very poor?”

Jack flushed, turning pink from the tip of his nose to his ears. “My aunt and uncle do all right with the tavern, even though this village doesn’t see many visitors-”

“But you and your mom?”

“Yes, we’re poor,” he said, and it came out bitterly. “My mother’s too old to work the farm, and I can’t maintain it by myself. My aunt and uncle have to spend all of their time keeping up the inn, and they have no children of their own to help them. It’s just my mother and I, and we’re losing everything. The crops won’t grow, and we’ve had to sell every single one of our cows.”

He was obviously angry, but I got the sense that it wasn’t directed towards me, even though I’d forced the information out of him. His hand went towards his pant pocket, almost unconsciously.

“I just sold our last cow today,” he said, and his tone was suddenly flat. “She was too old to give milk. I didn’t think I could get even a single copper for her.”

“But you did get something, didn’t you?” I asked, and this time it was my turn to lean in and fix Jack with an expectant stare. “You met someone, and he bought the cow off of you?”

Jack’s flush deepened, and he looked away from me, off into the distance, beyond the town proper, presumably in the direction his mother’s farm lay. “I was supposed to head home right after going to market. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t face my mother. I stopped here instead, because I don’t want to admit… I don’t know why I did it, it was so stupid. But he was talking to me, and it all seemed to make sense at the time…”

“What did you sell the cow for, Jack?” I pressed.

His hand clenched into a fist on his thigh. “Beans,” he spat. “Magic beans. Which are probably just ordinary beans, just three, not even enough to feed my poor old mother. I’m so stupid-”

“You’re not,” I said, leaning back, my mind racing. “You’re not stupid at all. Magic beans wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve seen today.” God, I itched to open the book and peruse its pages right then… but then I remembered that they had all gone mysteriously blank.

Jack dropped his head for a moment, apparently too overcome by his humiliation to look me in the face. I just sat there quietly, until he seemed to gather himself and look back up.

“If I go,” he said slowly. “If I leave to make my own fortune, then my mother doesn’t have to worry about caring for me anymore. She doesn’t have to worry about keeping me fed, or leaving me the farm to inherit. She could sell the farm, and move in with my aunt and uncle. They couldn’t afford to take both her and me on, but if it was just her…” he trails off, and leaves the question implied and hanging in the air.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t actually know this guy at all—okay, I guess I did in a way, but just because I’ve read a biography of Steve Jobs, it doesn’t make me his best friend.

Besides, I couldn’t let him come with me. If this was the day he got his magic beans, then tomorrow was the day he was supposed to climb the beanstalk for the first time. If he left his home now, he would lose all of that.

But how the hell could I explain that to him? I was terrified of ruining yet another story. I was living the butterfly effect here, every story I touched had the potential to spiral out of control with the slightest change. Who knew what damage I could do to the future Jack was supposed to live?

“Um… I think that’s something you should probably talk to your mom about first,” I suggested as gently as I could. “I mean… she’d probably be pretty worried about you if you just skipped out without even saying goodbye, wouldn’t she? And just because you think she would be better off without you, doesn’t mean she wants that.”

Jack’s expression crumpled, just for a moment. Then he gathered himself and took a deep, albeit shaky, breath.

“You’re right. Of course you’re right.” He stood up suddenly, and looked around vaguely as if he was coming out of a dream or a trance. “I’d uh… I guess I’d better get going then. I should be getting back to the farm.”

“Oh… okay,” I said, a bit taken aback by the suddeness of his change of heart.

“Well, it was nice meeting you, Rikki,” Jack said, and he stuck out his hand. I shook it, rather awkwardly.

“Nice to meet you too. And Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t worry too much. You really never know when fate will come knocking at your door.”

“Sure, sure.”

Still distracted, still hardly seeming to hear my words, Jack hurried away from the inn, into the heart of the town.

I watched him go, more than a little shocked by the extremely sudden nature of our parting.

But then again, I guess our meeting had been pretty sudden too, so maybe that was just in keeping with the theme.

Either way, now there really wasn’t any time to waste.

I finished shoveling the last few scraps of food into my mouth, then got up and ran. I shoved the empty plate into the surprised hands of Hans back in the kitchen, only pausing long enough to gasp out a hasty “thank you”, and then dashed back up the stairs to the room on the inn’s second story.

I bolted into Erik’s room without knocking, to find him much the same as I had found him earlier that morning: face down and fast asleep, snoring like a summer thunderstorm.

I shook him awake, which turned out to be a mistake because I had to quickly duck to avoid the swinging fist that missed my face by inches.

“Wha’s going on?” Erik grunted groggily, sitting up with his fists raised as if expecting to be attacked.

“Jesus, it’s me! Rikki!” I said, poking my head over the edge of the bed to see if it was safe to reappear.

Erik rubbed his eyes with his fists, and blinked blearily down at me. “Oh. What are you doing down there?”

“You tried to hit me!”

“I did? Well, you snuck up on me. Don’t sneak up on me.”

“You were sleeping!”

“You’d be amazed how many things sneak up on me when I’m sleeping. What are you doing here? I thought you were going to let me have a rest.”

“Change of plans. Time to leave. So pack your things, and let’s get out of here.”

“Woah woah woah, slow down. First of all, we’re not going anywhere, or doing anything, until I’ve had something to eat. I’m starving. Secondly, in case you’ve forgotten, my ankle is still sprained. Can’t you give me at least a day before making me haul you halfway across the countryside? And thirdly, why the sudden demand that we have to leave now? What happened?”

I had to hold back a groan at this waste of precious time. “You didn’t tell me that it takes almost two full days to get to the castle!” I said. “That means that we’ll only have one day to prepare for our rescue of the Miller’s Daughter, and that’s only if we leave right now. If we wait until tomorrow, then we won’t arrive until the night before she’ll be executed if she fails.”

“Two days of travel is going to involve a lot of downtime,” Erik pointed out. “We will have plenty of time to come up with a plan on the way there, trust me.”

“But that’s assuming it doesn’t take any time at all to put the plan into action! What if we need to find supplies, or to gradually befriend the servants until they sow us a back way into the castle, or-”

Erik cut me off. “My ankle is sprained,” he said again heatedly. “I can’t walk on it, I’ll damage it worse! I could cause serious lasting harm to it that I’ll never recover from!”

“And,” I said as if I hadn’t heard him, “I ran into someone—literally, I guess—and he suddenly wants to come with me on this stupid quest—which I didn’t tell him about, by the way, I kept my mouth shut about this whole mess—but he’s gotten it into his head that I’m on a quest and he wants to come along, but Jack has his own story that will be interrupted if he leaves now, so the sooner we skip town, the less risk there is of him-”

“Did you say Jack?” Erik asked.

“Yeah, I did. Jack, the nephew of the people who own this inn.”

Erik groaned. “Okay, fine. We’ll go today.”

“Now?”

“Soon,” he growled.

“What? Why? Do you not like Jack?”

“He just—we don’t—it’s not that I don’t like him; it’s just that he pisses me the hell off if I have to spend more than five minutes in his company.”

“That’s funny, he said something about you being… what was it, a ‘right twat’?”

“Get out of here Rikki, before I change my mind and tell you to find your own damn way to Kingsbury.”

I scurried out of the room, leaving Erik to hobble one-footed out of bed.

I really did feel bad for forcing him along before he had any time at all to recover, but one person (gnome?) was already dead because of me, and another was in serious danger. I had to get out of here before my presence could cause any more harm to innocent people.

It was already too late for Erik, he’ll be doomed to suffer from my company for at least a little longer, but with luck I wasn’t pulling him away from some vital place he needed to be during the next two days. Once the Miller’s Daughter was safe, he’d be free to go back to his weird, solitary life, and I’d be free to…

To…

Well. I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. To find my way back to my own world, presumably, though how I was going to do that, I didn’t have the foggiest idea.

I shook that troubling thought away. I would cross that bridge when I came to it. Right now, I had more immediately pressing matters to attend to.

I half-ran into the room I’d slept in and grabbed all my stuff. Before shoving The Book into my backpack I flipped through it, only to find that the pages were still all blank, save for the rewritten tale of Rumpelstiltskin. I closed The Book without rereading it and stuffed it at the bottom of the backpack.

When I returned, packed and ready to go, to Erik’s room, he was just barely pulling on a pair of trousers.

My face red and stammering apologies, I closed the door and waited in the hall for him to finish dressing.

It took forever.

Okay, it was probably only ten minutes at the most, but it felt like an hour before he finally appeared, his rucksack slung over one shoulder, his bow over the other, and half-hopping on his good foot.

I offered to help support him down the hall, but he refused point blank. Apparently accepting my help was only acceptable in the dark, at night, while completely alone in the middle of a forest where no one could see us.

He hobbled along, wincing every time he put too much weight of his bad foot. I winced each time too—I really did feel bad, and I was already beginning to regret rushing him, even if I was doing it to avoid potentially worse fallout with Jack’s story.

He had to stop for breath on one of the stools in the bar.

“Food,” he grunted, between slightly gasping breaths. “Breakfast. Anything, please.”

Back off to the kitchen I went straight away, argument free much to Erik’s pleasure I’m sure.

I obviously couldn’t admit to Hans the cook that I was returning for breakfast for Erik, not after the doozy of a tale he had only just told me not twenty minutes before. But it wasn’t hard to fake that I was still hungry and searching for seconds, especially since I was still hungry and seconds sounded pretty damn good right then.

Hans just laughed and said something about fattening me up, and loaded another plate. I thanked him and took it back out to the bar, hoping that Hans would spend the rest of the morning in the kitchen, at least until after Erik and I had left.

Erik ate almost as ravenously as I had, and I took advantage of the five or six minutes in which I had nothing to do but wait to look at him closely.

I thought about the story that Hans had told me about Erik’s past, his family. Then I thought about the tale that Erik himself had told me, about loving parents who had watched him head off to seek his fortune with tears in their eyes and pride in their hearts.

He could have been making all that up, or something terrible could have feasibly happened between that moment and their deaths soon after, but I remembered the look on Erik’s face when he had been telling me that part of his story. I hadn’t really understood it at the time, but now, looking back and knowing what I did then, I realized it was an expression of longing and pain he had been trying to conceal.

I hardly knew Erik. I’d dated guys in the past who had turned out to be real assholes after appearing absolutely delightful for the first few months. I certainly wasn’t in any position to be making judgments on whether or not he was potentially dangerous. But I had to say, my gut feeling was with Jack on this one. Erik just didn’t seem like the kind of person who would sic a pack of man-eating wolves on his own mother and sister, and then burn down his house with his father trapped inside.

Which is an insane sentence I never thought I’d hear myself think, but I guess that was the kind of life I was leading now.

As unsettling as Han’s rumors had been, dwelling on them wouldn’t make any difference now. I pushed the dark thoughts away, and tried not to let them taint my (admittedly not exactly sky-high) opinion of Erik.

He inhaled the final sausage, set his plate on the bar, and rose to his feet. Foot.

“Finally ready?” I said, jumping up eagerly.

“No,” Erik snapped, and I deflated.

“Why not?”

“Like I said before, I can’t walk like this, at least not for long. I need a stick or something.” He looked at me expectantly.

“Well, where am I supposed to find that?” I asked in frustration.

“I can think of somewhere full of sticks and branches where you might have some luck,” he suggested.

Fifteen minutes later I was kicking at bushes a little ways into the forest, trying to find a branch sturdy and straight enough to be used as a walking stick, and grumbling under my breath about it the entire time.

It took forever, and by the time I reappeared with a suitable specimen in the Drunken Mermaid, sweaty and panting, the sun was already high in the sky and I was painfully aware of how much time we had lost.

“Here’s your stick,” I snapped, shoving it into Erik’s hands. “Can we please go now?”

Erik held the stick in both hands, testing the weight and strength. “Not bad,” he said grudgingly. “It’ll do. All right then, let’s go.”

I heaved a sigh of relief, and then practically shoved Erik out the door of the Drunken Mermaid.