Little Red Cinderella and the Three Beanstalks

The bed was warm and comfortable, the sheets soft and clean. Ezu didn’t enjoy them in the slightest, because he spent most of the night pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed, until the candle had burned down to little stumps of melted wax. He slept for a few hours before dawn, but was awake again by the time the early morning light began seeping through the crack in the curtains over the room’s single window. When he awoke, he knew what he was going to do. He knew what he needed to do.

He threw the rumpled blankets off himself and leapt out of bed, grabbing his pack and swinging it over his shoulder. He belted his sword sheath around his waist, his hand lingering for only a moment on the smooth, hard hilt of his sword. Then he was off, half running out of the room and down the hall, into the main room where he had had dinner and a very enlightening conversation the night before. He startled Erma and Karl, who were both already awake but obviously not expecting Ezu to be as well.

“Are you alright? You look terrible,” Erma said, dropping the cloth she was using to polish glasses with.

“I’m fine. I need to go. I need my horse, and could I buy some supplies off you? I have more than enough gold. I’ll need a few week’s worth of provisions.”

“Of course, of course,” Karl said. “I’ll fetch your horse. But what is the rush? Sit down and eat a hot breakfast, at the very least.”

“I don’t have time for that,” Ezu replied, becoming more visibly agitated by the second. He was practically dancing in place now, hopping from one foot to the other in his anxiety to be on his way. Erma came around the counter and over to his side, taking him by the arm and leading him to a chair.

“Sit down, I insist. It will take Karl a while to get your horse prepared, she must be saddled and fed. And you will have to tell me what provisions it is you need. You might as well take a moment to eat something in the meantime, and explain what it is that has you in such a state.”

Ezu gave a growl of frustration, but he fell into the chair. “Alright, alright. But be quick, please. I’ll pay extra for your haste.”

Erma disappeared into a room that he presumed was the kitchen, and came back with a bowl of curds and whey, topped with fat, shiny blackberries. She also brought him a mug of milk, still warm and a little frothy, obviously squeezed from the cow just that morning. Ezu ate with ferocious speed, wolfing down his breakfast as if it might disappear if he hesitated a moment too long.

“Now, what are you in such a rush for? Surely nothing can have happened over the night to put you in such a state.”

“I’m going back,” he said, spraying a mouthful of whey across the table, a moment before shoving another spoonful in.

“Going back where?” she asked.

“I left a… a friend behind, to do a job by herself that I’d promised to help her with. I shouldn’t have left her, but I did. I need to go back. I might still be able to catch up with her, but it’s already been three days. I can’t afford to waste any more time.”

Erma nodded. “What supplies do you need?”

Ezu bought enough food off them to keep himself from starving for at least two weeks, plus a few miscellaneous supplies. Rope, an axe, and best of all, a crude but invaluable map of the area that Karl paused to copy from a much more detailed version he and Erma had, after he came back from saddling and bridling Ezu’s horse. They followed him out into the yard, where he strapped his pack to the back of his mare’s saddle, and thought about his plan.

Rapunzel, that was the next princess Rikki had set off on her own to rescue. By now, she had either at least found where Rapunzel was located, or she had gotten horribly lost and was wandering alone in the woods—assuming she hadn’t met something large and hungry yet. Was it possible that she had already found and rescued Rapunzel? Cinderella’s step mother and the evil queen had been deadly dangerous foes, and Ezu doubted that he, Rikki, or Jack would have been able to defeat them if any of them had been on their own. That created a pang of fear in Ezu’s chest. Had Rikki found Rapunzel and confronted some powerful sorceress on her own? Would Rikki have been able to hold her own, or at least escape?

Ezu fought down the fear. It was possible she hadn’t even found Rapunzel yet. There was no need to worry until he knew for sure. But in case she had, and in case she had managed to rescue the princess all by herself, that would mean she could already be on her way to the next quest. That would be Sleeping Beauty—whoever that was supposed to be—which Ezu had spent half of the night trying to remember. Rikki had described the princess, their stories, to him and Jack a little during some of the long nights they had spent together in uncomfortable places. Sleeping Beauty was… but that wasn’t her real name, it was something about a flower. A Rose, or something like that. And she had fallen asleep, that much he could remember. No, not fallen asleep, she’d been put into some kind of cursed sleep by an evil fairy. Lord, what was it with all these bitter mothers and fairies? Didn’t they have anything better to be doing in their spare time than cursing teenaged girls?

“Before I go,” Ezu said, turning back to Erma and Karl, “Do you know anything about any… any lost princesses? Towers in the woods, or forgotten castles? Hundred year curses? Anything like that?”

“Nothing like that,” Karl replied, shaking his head, but Erma looked as though she were trying to recall something from years past.

“Actually, I might,” she said. “It’s been a long time, but when I was very small, I remember my father telling me a story about an old, overgrown castle. It had already been a ruin even in his own childhood, but I think his grandparents used to tell him stories about when it had been part of a thriving kingdom in their own youths. And sometimes travelers passed by that way, and would come with grim stories of the abandoned place. It’s been decades though since I’ve heard anything about it. Decades since I even last thought about it. The forest must have swallowed it by now, it is probably too deep and dense to be discovered by normal travelers.”

“Do you know where it is?” Ezu asked, excitement welling up in his chest. But Erma shook her head.

“No, I never did. All I know is that it is somewhere in that direction, far past the kingdom that was taken over by that sorceress.” She pointed to the north west. Ezu’s face fell. That would mean he had to back track across the Evil Queen’s land and then some to even be in the right general area.

“Well, that’s better than nothing. Thank you, thank you both. For everything.” He mounted the chestnut mare, and pointed her in the right direction.

“Of course. Best of luck to you,” Erma nodded.

“You’ll make it,” Karl added.

“Oh, and by the way, that evil queen has been defeated. My friends and I, with a little help from some dwarves and a prince’s army, over threw her. I suspect you’ll be hearing about it in a day or two, since the Prince and new Princess have probably reached their own castle by now. Good bye, I owe you two more than you know.” He waved one last time and urged his mare on, pushing her into a gallop back down the road towards the forest he had come from just a few days before, leaving Erma and Karl standing there with astonished expressions on their faces.



Ezu pushed his horse hard, and whenever he needed to give her a break from carrying his weight, he walked alongside her tirelessly, cutting through the dark woods in half the mount of time it had taken him at his plodding pace to get through them the first time. Before he knew it he was back in the wide green valley where the Evil Queen’s castle stood, now silent and empty. He wondered for a brief moment whether it too would be swallowed by the forest, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, forgotten and overgrown with time. But no—surely the Prince and Snow White would come and claim this castle for their own, once they were married. This land, this kingdom would be theirs, and it might thrive again.

He paused in the shadow of the castle, searching the ground to see if he could find tracks left by Rikki and her horse. But it had been, what,four or five days now since the three of them had left this place? Any tracks left were too old to track well, and he was able to follow none of them out of the valley. He pulled out the map Karl had made for him instead, and studied that.

It covered the entire kingdom that would soon be Snow White’s. To the north and west, it also encompassed about half of two more small kingdoms whose borders weren’t far off, and the kingdom of Snow White’s Prince to the East. Ezu couldn’t help but sigh. This continent was lousy with small, penny ante kingdoms who were constantly vying for land and power with each other. You couldn’t swing a cat without crossing half a dozen kingdom territories. Where could Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom have been? There was no empty space on the map, no unclaimed land that could have belonged to a forgotten kingdom.

Ezu thought about it. At some point in the past, the ruling class of a small kingdom had just disappeared. What would have happened? The neighboring kingdoms surely would have rushed into the fill the power vacuum once they realized that the land had become effectively kingless. They would have expanded their borders, snapping up as much territory as they could, absorbing the towns and villages, the fields and forests, until they hit someone else’s borders.

Ezu looked at the three kingdoms, one to the north, one to the west, and the one he stood in now. He looked at the point on the map where their borders all met.

There. It must be there, or at least nearby. This kingdom, Snow White’s, was the largest, and no doubt had been able to claim the most territory. If Ezu was a gambling man—and he was—he would bet that Sleeping Beauty’s castle would be somewhere near the northwestern border.

He smiled grimly to himself, rolling the map back up and stuffing it into his pack. He would head that way then, and if he wasn’t able to find Rikki along the way, that was where she would surely end up sooner or later. It would be okay, he told himself. He would find her, he would help her finish this quest. He would tell her how he felt. He mounted the chestnut mare, and urged her to the north.



The kingdom of Rosenberg, which had grown out of a small hamlet on the site where the castle would later be built, had never been a large or powerful one, but had been prosperous. Its subjects were few, as it lied on the edge of the Enchanted forest, in which not many dared to make their homes in. Occasionally, every few decades, a particularly ambitious king would try to clear out some of the forest to make way for more agricultural land and sites for towns full of workshops that could produce further wealth for the kingdom. The forest, however, seemed not to agree with the aspirations of petty kings, and fought back, often violently.

Eventually the king would realize that there was simply no winning and give up and the natural order of things would reign again, until one of his predecessors got too big for his britches and started the whole process over again. Every time, though, the forest won.

Most rulers learned to be grateful for the forest at their kingdom’s back, even though its dark and ominous depths somewhat diminished the property value of the land. The forest might not have been particularly habitable for good, hard working country people, but neither did it present a pleasant walk in the park for, say, invading armies. While individual witches, woodcutters, trolls, talking animals, and victims of enchantments had managed for centuries to make homes in the forest, it usually took offense to entire battalions of foot soldiers and mounted knights tramping into its borders to attack whatever lay on the other side. If one did not watch where they were walking in the forest, one was liable to trip over ancient, rusted helmets and other bits of armor that still lay scattered across the forest floor, half engulfed by dark green, living plant matter. If you were particularly unlucky, the original owner might still be found inside it.

For most people living in the kingdom of Rosenberg, the castle and its occupants, the royal household, the king and queen, the doings of the various dukes and earls and counts and other landed gentry were of little consequence in their day to day lives. Since wars were relatively few and far between, and the land was prosperous enough that the king never had to deal with the fallout from famines or plagues, most of the common people just lived their lives as they wished, paying their taxes but otherwise affected little by, and having little affect on, the aristocracy. When the castle and everyone in it fell into an enchanted slumber, almost no one noticed. Some of the members of court who lived in mansions and villas outside the castle bounds certainly did, but once it was clear that the fifty foot thorned briar that grew overnight around the castle walls was impenetrable, they rather quickly packed up all their wealth and belongings and got the hell out of dodge, to pledge their fealty to whatever other petty kings that could be found nearby.

As for the remained of the farmers, townsfolk, merchant, and artisans whose day to day lives never even brought them within a stones throwing distance of the King, his family, or the castle, life continued on as normal. Someone might have eventually noticed that the taxes weren’t getting to the royal coffers, but nature abhors a vacuum and by the time the next round of tax collectors were sent out, the neighboring kingdoms had already swollen their borders to absorb the newly monarch-less land. Taxes were paid and collected on time, and delivered to a different set of royal coffers.

It did not take long for the forest to swallow the castle. It had always rested uncomfortably close to the forest’s border, built practically in its shadow three centuries before by a young man who had stumbled out of those same woods with a bag full of gold that could never be emptied, and two broken arms from the giant he had stolen it from. He had paid for the castle to be built right there, in the rich valley he had first seen after his daring escape, and became known thereafter as King Halford the Noodle Armed (his broken arms had never been set quite properly before healing), the first King of Rosenberg. Which at the time, as you will remember from the beginning of this chapter, was little more than a small hamlet. The people already living there weren’t entirely thrilled about having a castle thrown up in the middle of their village, nor about the upstart youth claiming sovereignty over them, but that’s politics for you.

At any rate, once the castle fell into its enchanted sleep, once the thorned creepers engulfed the castle walls and the people who still lived in the busy town that had grown out of the hamlet around the castle had fled in terror from the dark magic, it only took a decade for the forest to creep forward and claim the site. It seemed to do so with a gleeful fervor, as if eager to finally get its revenge for the many attacks made against it by the kings who sought to clear it. Soon the castle disappeared from view, and the rest of the town followed not long after. Within fifty years, everyone who had actually seen the castle with their own eyes were dead, and only the elderly had any recollection that there even had been another castle, another kingdom, in a land what was practically crawling with them. Certainly no one remembered exactly where it was, or even what had happened there, so many years before.

Occasionally, a half remembered tale about the lost castle and the slumbering treasures that waited inside would find its way to a daring youth, a prince or a knight, or the youngest son of a poor woodcutter or some such fellow, and he would set off to find the place, eager to claim the riches within for his own. But the jealous fairy who had put the curse upon Briar Rose and the castle had woven her spell well, and it could not be broken, not until the one hundred years had passed. The men who even so much as touched the great thorns that surrounded the castle—if the ever managed to find it at all—died instantly, and there was no way within the walls without passing through those briar.

At least, not from the ground.

The Enchanted Forest is home to many dangerous and magical creatures. White Stags and unicorns certainly; fairies and witches; trolls and ogres; the occasional giant; every creature that ever was could be found in the forest if one looked hard enough. And the abandoned castle now lay within its borders, protected by an impassable wall, close enough to the edge of the forest that easily raided human villages lay within easy reach, large and empty and full of turrets and towers and courtyards where nests could be built and hoards of treasure safely stored. Cattle and sheep captured from nearby farmsteads could even be kept alive in the courtyards, feeding themselves on the grasses that grew there, always fresh and ready to eat when the fancy struck. It was the perfect place for an enterprising dragon to make its home.