Little Red Cinderella and the Three Beanstalks

It turns out that fate seems to be doing its best to balance out all the crap it throws at me by at least making it easy to get to the places where I’m about to suffer immeasurably.

About an hour and a half after finding the witch’s gingerbread cottage, we stumbled across—or rather, into—a small creak.

Absolutely parched by this time—the roof cake was pretty dry, and I was making a concerted effort to save what was left in my water skein in case of emergency—I gave a cry of relief and dropped to my knees at its small bank, scooping up handfuls to clumsily drink. I paused for the briefest of moments before it touched my lips, thoughts of tapeworms and dysentery and other water born pathogens leaping to the forefront of my mind. But then I shrugged, thought, oh, eff it, and drank anyways. If I was going to be done in by some obscure disease I caught from contaminated water out in the middle of a forest, well, it would probably be a better way to go than the violent death that probably awaited me at the end of this quest, when I would inevitably find myself seriously outmatched by the super witch.

Justin stopped to refill his own water skein, but he seemed distracted, looking along the length of the creak in both directions.

“What are you look at?” I asked him, wiping my dripping chin once I’d thoroughly sated my thirst.

“I’m wondering if this creak gets any bigger upstream,” he said. I looked at the water. It wasn’t deep, but it was fairly wide. It was late summer, but still had plenty of water in it, so this was probably as low as the water level ever got. I figured it must get nearly a foot higher during the average rainy season.

“It might, why?”

“Because if this creak is a river further upstream, then it could be the key to finding Rosenberg.”

“What do you mean?”

“The River Wessen runs between my kingdom and Alberny, and into the Enchanted Forest from there,” he explained. “If this is part of it, or an offshoot of it, it might lead us to Rosenberg too. The castle would have been built close to the river, where they could have constant access to fresh water. The river could be diverted to build a moat, it offers an easily accessed and traveled trade route right into other kingdoms, things like that. I would be willing to bet my crown that Rosenberg was on or near the river.”

“And you think this could be part of it?” I said with growing hope.

“I don’t know, but I don’t think it would hurt to follow it for a while to see. Even if it isn’t the right river, we won’t be able to get lost as long as we follow it. We can always just turn back around and return to this spot. We can even mark one of the trees so we know exactly where we turned off course to follow the creak.”

I gave a laugh and clapped Justin heartily on the back. “You’re down right useful! I’m regretting letting you come along with me less and less!” I said cheerfully.

“Erm… thank you?” he replied uncertainly.

“Keep up the good work, and I might have to revise my opinion of princes all together!”

“I’m certainly revising my opinions on damsels trapped in towers,” he replied, a little grimly.

We followed the creak upstream, which promisingly led in a meandering but over all north-easterly direction. It was tough going for Justin’s horse—whose name was Caesar, by the way, a bizarre anachronism that I attempted to get Justin to explain but he only looked at me blankly when I went off on etymologies of names and why the name Caesar made no sense in the context of a post-Renaissance western European based culture—so we had to travel slowly. Tangled thickets of bramble and bushes grew denser along the creak’s edge, and the horse was obviously wary of the uneven footing beneath its hooves. We walked beside Ceasar, trying to lead him on as best we could, but we weren’t faring a whole lot better. A couple of times we had to walk around huge patches of shrubbery that we just weren’t able to force out way through, losing sight of the water for several minutes at a time. Fortunately we were always just able to hear it, so we could keep close enough that we were able to find it again once the bushes cleared.

Sure enough, after nearly an hour of walking, the creak began to widen, to deepen, and the water ran a little faster. The banks became lined with huge stones, and we were forced to give the river a wide berth to find flat enough ground for Caesar, but we weren’t in much danger of losing the water again now. It wasn’t a creak anymore, it was definitely a small river. And the further up it we went, the thicker and more powerful it became. Within another hour’s walking, it was a daunting force, full of miniature waterfalls and white foam, roaring in our ears. I would have been giddy with excitement if I wasn’t so tired from stomping over such difficult terrain. It had been slow going, and it was late afternoon now. We still had hours of daylight, but it was impossible to guess whether we’d make it to Rosenberg Castle before night fell.

If Rosenberg castle had been built with its back to the Enchanted Forest, then the town that grew up around it would have spread outward from there, but not into the forest. That would mean that the rest of the town that had been swallowed the the forest’s swift growth in later years would be on the eastern side of the castle, whereas, if we were still on track, we would be coming up to it from the south west. We probably wouldn’t have any clue that we’d reached the place until we actually stumbled into the castle itself—and that was assuming we actually were on the right track.

And then, less than two hours before the sun would set and leave us in darkness, the river split in two.

We stopped in our tracks, and I stared open mouthed at the fork.

“I—what—how—” I stammered, and then in a sudden fit of frustration I tore off my pack and threw it onto the ground. “No! This isn’t fair! How are we supposed to know which fork to follow? We don’t have time to waste by taking the wrong route! God damn it!”

But while I was throwing a little temper tantrum, Justin had walked up to the edge of the river, careful not to slip on the wet rocks, and was staring hard at both forks.

“What are you doing?” I asked angrily. “You’re not going to figure out which way we need to go by just standing there staring at it!”

“Ah ha!” he suddenly cried triumphantly, turning back to be with a smug smile. “You really ought to give me more credit. I’m about to make you eat your words.”

I glared at him. “I’ll make you eat my foot if you don’t get on with it,” I threatened.

“Look at the banks of the northern fork,” he said, pointing at the fork on the far side.

“What am I supposed to be seeing?” I asked him, looking from one bank to another without any idea what he was talking about.

“This isn’t a natural fork, that is a man-made tributary!” Justin said triumphantly.

I squinted harder at the far side of the river. “How can you tell?”

“That side isn’t as wide as this one, which would imply that this part continues on a the rest of the true River Wessen. And you can tell if you look closely at the banks and the river bed, those stones have been placed there intentionally, and the banks have been built up higher than is natural to prevent erosion over time. It looks as though it hasn’t been maintained in decades, but if you know what to look for, you can tell this isn’t a natural tributary. It was probably built to bring a water source directly to, maybe even through, the Rosenberg castle. That’s the way it was done in my kingdom at least.”

“So, if we follow that fork over there…”

“We’ll likely reach the castle by nightfall,” Justin finished proudly.

I stooped and picked up my pack from the ground, a little embarrassed. “Yes, well,” I cleared my throat. “I must admit your knowledge set is certainly coming in useful thus far. Sp, uh, thanks.”

“Of course, my lady,” he replied with an elaborate bow that I probably could have taken as some kind of vague princely insult, but I decided to just accept with good grace. “Let us continue, shall we? As you mentioned before, we haven’t any time to lose.”

And once again, off we went.

We had to cross the river to get to the far fork, and it left the both of us soaking wet from the waists down. Caesar the horse had been thoroughly displeased with the situation, and it had taken nearly ten minutes to even put his hooves in the water, but somehow between the two of us we managed to drag him through the shallowest section we could find to the other side. Fortunately the day was warm enough still that we weren’t in too much risk of developing hypothermia from our wet clothes, but the remainder of the walk certainly wasn’t fun, as our shoes squelched and every errant breeze chilled us.

But Justin was a genius, and he had been right. I made a mental note to send him Christmas cards or something every year, if I survived all this, in gratitude.

Just as the sky was beginning to darken overhead, the horizon turning a pale orange, we came to Rosenberg Castle.

It was buried deep in the woods, so overgrown that we would never have seen it if we weren’t looking for it specifically. We could have continued following the tributary without realizing we’d passed the building. It was completely enveloped in a wall of briar bushes, so thick that the stone walls behind them were invisible. Some of the twisting roots and vines and brambles were as thick around as my waist, and were covered in thorns nearly a foot long that looked deadly sharp. The briar fortress had begun to swallow the rest of the forest as well, enveloping trees and boulders that had stood too near the creeping tendrils.

“Is this the place?” Justin asked in hushed tones.

“It must be,” I replied grimly. It certainly looked rather ominous. We drew nearer, tentatively, and started walking around the perimeter of the briar wall, to get a sense of the dimensions of the castle, but taking care not to get too close.

What we saw as we walked was not reassuring.

Justin spotted the first skeleton, stopping in his tracks and flinging out an arm to catch me as well. He pointed wordlessly, and I too saw the human skeleton impaled on one particularly large vine, scraps of fabric that had nearly rotted completely away still impaled on huge thorns. The skeleton was flung backwards, its skull positioned so that it was staring up at the sky with empty eye sockets, its jaw hanging open crookedly. He was just the first of many, and evidently one of the oldest. A few of the others still had most of their clothing largely intact, though none had even a trace of flesh left. They were all princes or knights, guessing by their fine clothes and armour. And all had failed horribly.

I couldn’t help but wonder why the later victims had insisted on approaching the place, after they had no doubt seen the evidence of the grisly ends that had met their predecessors.

But then again, wasn’t I about to go poking around here myself, with nothing more than the word of an enchanted book guaranteeing my safety? So perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

By the time we had completed a full circuit of the palace, Justin and I had fallen into a grim silence. Seeing that many dead people at one time can do that to you. Although after seeing terrible sight of the gingerbread house’s witch’s body, these skeletons lost an awful lot of their psychological power.

“How are we supposed to get past this briar?” Justin asked. “It must be a hundred feet high, and it appears utterly impenetrable.”

“Well,” I replied tentatively, “as I understand it, now that the time constraint of the curse has passed, we should be able to break it quite easily. I think if we just try to pass through, we’ll be able to.”

Justin eyed a dessicated, skeleton corpse, clad in gleaming golden armor, the faint outline of a sun stamped into the breastplate still barely discernible under the thin layer of dirt that had built up on the surface over the decades.

“And if you’re wrong?” he said.

I swallowed. “We’ll just have to hope I’m not,” I answered. I took a step towards the closest vine, reaching out my hand with more than a little trepidation. Before I could put a finger to it however, Justin reached out and caught me by the arm, yanking me back.

“What are you doing?” he asked, aghast.

“Uh, testing to see if the curse is broken, obviously,” I replied in annoyance, pulling my arm out of his grasp. “Like I literally just said we’d have to you.”

“You’re not going to be the one to test it!” he protested, as if I’d gone utterly mad for even thinking such a thing.

“I most certainly am! This is my quest, after all!”

“I cannot in good conscience allow you to be the one to risk your life by touching those thorns! I’ll be the one to do it.”

“You most certainly won’t! I don’t care if it’s some part of your princely moral code or whatever, but I can go around touching whatever cursed objects I want to, thank you very much!”

“And if the curse is still in place? Then what happens?”

“Then I die, probably horribly. And you get to keep following the river until you get back to your own kingdom, and presumably live happily ever after.”

“Until that sorceress you mentioned when you were telling me about this quest you are on awakens and brings a thousand years of torment to this earth, because you were too dead to put a stop to her,” Justin pointed out.

I glared at him. I tried to think of a good rebuttal, but all I could come up with was more glaring.

“…Fine,” I spat. “If you really want to risk your own life for a quest that has nothing to do with you, then by all means, go ahead. I can’t stop you from being a fool if you’re dead set on it.”

So I just stood there with my arms crossed, glowering, while Justin edged forwards, his index finger extended.

I was pretty confident that the hundred year time limit for the curse must be broken by now—the Book had said it was, and it had been in the original story as well—but I still held my breath as I watched Justin’s finger draw ever closer to the dark bramble. If he did die, I didn’t think it would be an easy death, and I wasn’t looking forward to having to witness that.

And then he sucked in a sharp intake of breath, closed his eyes, and the tip of his finger made contact with the briar.

The entire structure shuddered, as if something huge within had surged to life, and we both jumped back like we’d received electric shocks. The wall of briar trembled again, and then suddenly, on the spot that Justin had touched, a pale white bud burst forth. It didn’t stop there however, it was as if someone had turned nature onto a fast forward setting. The bud swelled and burst into bloom, darkening to pink, then a bright, vivid red as the biggest rose I’d ever seen unfolded. And then it was like he had set off a chain reaction, dozens—no, hundreds more roses began blooming across the briar, radiating out from the point that Justin had touched, until it was a mass of scarlet and the sweet scent rolling off the flowers in waves was overpowering. We watched in amazement, our mouths hanging open. And then the briar shuddered again, and directly in front of us the roses began to wither and die back, the thick vines shriveling and blackening until they snapped off like dry twigs and fell to the ground, leaving an open path about wide enough for the two of us to walk abreast through the bramble thicket. A bout a hundred feet in front of us, we could see the outer wall of a castle fortress, a huge door reinforced with iron bars set into it.

“Well,” I said, “I guess that answers that.”

We started to edge forward, along the path that had been created for us. We moved slowly, warily, watching the sides of the now rose covered briar just in case they decided that they didn’t actually want us in there after all and suddenly closed on us. But we made it all the way to the huge oak doors without incident, and we stared up at it with a new concern.

“Do you think it’s locked?” I asked Justin. He shrugged.

“There’s no way to tell until we try it.”

“What do we do if it is?”

“Let’s check it first before we start worrying about what to do then. Maybe it is open. I mean, if the curse had gone into effect during the day, the gates and doors probably would have been left open or unlocked, since so many people are often coming and going from a busy palace during the day.”

We both went right up to the doors and pushed with all our mights. They rattled slightly in their frames, but didn’t open. We tried again, pushing even harder, and while they did budge ever so slightly, it wasn’t enough to be able to tell if it was because the doors were actually unbarred or not.

“Let’s try pushing the same door together” Justin suggested. “It probably would have taken multiple guards to get these open and closed.”

So we both went to the left hand door, pressed our shoulders against it, and heaved. And heaved, and heaved, and heaved one more time for good measure.

The oak door grated against the ground, gouging deep ruts in the dirt, but it swung inward several inches. I laughed and pumped the air with my fist.

“Yes! Oh man, I can’t believe how well this is going so far! Come on, one more push ought to get it open enough for us to get through.”

We gave it another go, and the door creaked open a little further, until it was just wide enough for even Caesar the huge horse to squeeze through, albeit just barely.

Justin went over to the horse and took him by the reigns, to lead him through the now open doorway. But before he got within ten feet of the entrance, Caesar stopped abruptly short, giving a panicked whinny and pulling back on the reigns. Justin staggered and gripped the reigns in both hands, pulling the horse’s head down so he could press a reassuring hand to its forehead.

“Whoa boy, calm down! What is it?” He tried to lead Caesar forward again, but again the horse refused, this time actually pulling free from Justin’s grip and dancing back several paces, where he stood making nervous nickering noises. Justin reached out, and Caesar moved away, his eyes rolling. Justin and I exchanged a look.

“That’s… ominous,” I said.

“Indeed,” Justin agreed.

Now more uneasy than triumphant, we loosely tied Caesar’s reigns to one of the thicker vines that still remained, enough to keep him from wandering off but not so securely that he wouldn’t be able to pull free if he had to.

Then, with bated breath, afraid of what we might find waiting for us on the other side, we crept through the gap between the huge oaken doors to Rosenberg Castle.