Little Red Cinderella and the Three Beanstalks

We found ourselves in the castle courtyard, facing an all together unnerving sight.

Huge swaths of the grass and moss were replaced by dead and blackened scorch marks, and more bones littered the ground here too. It only took a few seconds for me to realize that these weren’t human bones, though. I stared uncomprehendingly at a huge bovine skull, framed by heavy, curved horns. Empty eye sockets stared sadly back at me.

“Are those… cow skeletons?” I asked Justin in a hushed whisper. He nodded. I looked around the courtyard, which stretched in ahead of us across what must have been at least an acre or two, probably more. It was full of cattle bones. “That’s a lot of cows.” Justin nodded again. “I don’t suppose you think they just… wandered in here and died on their own, do you?” Justin shook his head.

I looked around again, but we appeared to be quite alone. I edged forwards, and stooped to pick up what appeared to be a femur. I didn’t know exactly what tooth marks on a bone looked like, but I would have bet an awful lot of money that it was something like the markings on the bone I held. I dropped it, and shuddered.

“I don’t much fancy the idea of being out in the open when whatever did that to these cows comes back, do you?” I hissed at Justin.

“Let’s see if we can get inside, quickly,” he replied. Hugging as close to the edge of the outer wall as we could, we tentatively started making our way across the courtyard, towards the castle proper. It loomed dark and tall, the grey stones marked by black soot and deep gouges, like claw marks that had cut through stone like butter.

“Those aren’t necessarily claw marks, are they?” I asked Justin with affected casualness, as the shadow of the castle fell over us. He looked up, and swallowed a little.

“I’m sure those could have been made by plenty of things. They could even be from natural weathering. It has been a long time since anyone has maintained this place, after all,” he replied, but without a trace of real conviction.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I lied.

A moment of grim silence passed between us.

“Where is it we need to be going, anyways?” Justin asked. I glanced back up at the castle before us. Turrets and towers sprouted from its ramparts like weeds, and my eyes slid over them until my gaze landed on one tall, peaked tower than reached just a little higher into the quickly darkening sky than all the others.

I pointed to the tallest tower. “There.”

“Are you sure?” asked Justin.

I nodded. “Positive.”

After what felt like a million years crossing the dangerous open territory, we finally drew up to the side of the castle. We weren’t out of the woods yet though, we still had to find a way in.

“The servant’s quarters will probably be the easiest way in,” Justin whispered, as if he had read my mind. “The front doors will likely be so large and heavy that they would have required several men to open them. That was the fashion in the era this castle was built, at least. There will probably be an entrance into the kitchens around the back, that should be unlocked, and will lead right into the main dining hall. We’ll be able to find our way from there.”

It was like having a bipedal GPS. At this point, this quest would be more likely to get completed if I just turned the whole thing over to Justin and let him have at it. Actually, that wasn’t too bad of an idea…

“Rikki, are you coming?” he interrupted my wandering thoughts.

“Right behind you,” I started guiltily.

I followed him around the edge of the castle, all the while keeping our eyes and ears peeled for any sign of movement, for any distant sound. But the castle grounds were deserted, dead. It seemed as though there were no one in the entire world but us.

Us and the grim remains of about a dozen herds of cattle, anyways.

It took a while to find the entrance to the kitchens. The doorway was small, and set in a deep recess that was concealed by dark shadows at this time of day. The door itself looked… well, it didn’t look as if it had been sitting there through wind, rain, sleet and sun for a hundred years. After a moment’s hesitation and an exchanged look of caution between us, Justin reached out and turned the handle. The door swung open without so much as an ominous creak.

We slunk into the darkened room beyond, me with my little sword drawn, Justin with his hand on his bow.

It took several seconds for our eyes to adjust to the dim light, and when they did, we both gave sudden cries of shock and nearly jumped out of our skins.

There were several people in the kitchen, all apparently in the middle of various tasks, in complete silence. It took another second of panic before we realized that none of them were moving.

There were several women sitting in chairs around a table, slumped over into the piles of half peeled potatoes before them. Two young girls were learning against a counter piled with rags and dishes. A man in a snappy servant’s uniform had slid down against a wall by another door that he had leaned or fallen against. For a wild second I thought that they were all dead, but then I remembered that it had been the entire court of the castle, everyone within its walls, who had been placed in an enchanted sleep, not just Briar Rose herself.

Still, it was creepy as heck to see them all laying there, utterly comatose, more dead than alive.

“Wow,” Justin whispered, as if he were afraid that the sound of his voice might wake the enchanted sleepers. “They are just as they were, over a hundred years ago?”

“Yeah,” I replied, just as quietly. “Everything, every person and animal, was enchanted too.”

“Look at the potatoes,” Justin pointed. “Hundred year old potatoes. They look as fresh as if they’d just come right out of the ground.”

“Those potatoes are… well, small potatoes compared with what we’re here to find. Come on, let’s get out of here. This room if giving me the heebie jeebies.”

Despite not having the slightest inkling what “heebie jeebies” were, Justin followed me to the other door, that would lead us deeper into the bowels of the castle. I gave the slumbering servant as wide a berth as I could.

Fortunately, the hallway beyond was devoid of enchanted victims, and we hastened down it.

“Which was now?” I asked Justin. We checked a few of the doors that led off the passageway, and it wasn’t long before we found the one that led to the banquet hall.

It was a gloriously impressive room, obviously intended to be a blatant display of the royal family’s wealth and power. The high walls were hung with massive tapestries, intricately woven with scenes of knights in white armor going into battle, or facing off against terrible monsters. Multiple fireplaces, large enough for me to have stood in the middle of the hearth without having to worry about bumping my head on the mantle, dotted the walls at regular intervals, though they were cold and empty at the moment, filled only with the ashes of fires long since burned out. An oaken table sat in the center of the room, and it nearly ran from one end of the room to the other, which was saying a lot because the space must have been nearly as long as a football field. At the head of the massive table sat an equally massive throne, a seat of honor no doubt for the king. In the next highest ranking positions at the table were two more thrones, slightly smaller and more delicately carved, presumably for the queen and princess. Low wooden benches filled the rest of the hall, for anyone who was fortunate to find themselves dining with the king.

No one was in this room, which I was grateful for. But we were once again presented with the problem of having several other doors scattered around the room to choose from, leading to various parts of the castle that we were utterly unfamiliar with. All we knew was that we had to get to the tallest tower, which was somewhere in the north east corner of the castle, judging loosely from what we could see of its position when we were outside.

“Which door do we try?” I asked Justin, still in a hushed whisper despite myself. He shrugged, and picked a door at random. Walking across the vast, empty hall was an eerie experience in itself, with the sound of our footfalls echoing tenfold back at us off the sheer stone walls and ceiling. I kept having to remind myself that this was a slumbering castle, not a dead one, as chills ran up my spine.

Again, I made a concerted effort to not think about those very dead cows outside in the courtyard.

The door that Justin chose led to a small landing and a flight of stairs, but to our disappointment they went downwards.

“Probably a cellar,” Justin said, and we retreated, closing the door as softly as possible behind us. The sound of it shutting was still as loud as if we had slammed it.

The next door we tried led into a maze of hallways, which eventually took us to some kind of throne room or reception area. Three gilded thrones sat on a raised dais at the far end of the room, a crimson velvet carpet bisecting the room in two and leading from the thrones to the grand double doorway on the opposite wall.

While I was contemplating the practicality of a velvet carpet, Justin was nodding eagerly.

“Okay, we’re getting closer now, I’m sure of it. If this is the reception chamber, then we must be right at the front of the castle. I’m more oriented now. The tallest tower should be in that direction,” he pointed ahead and slightly to the right. “There is probably a way into it on the first floor, or maybe even the dungeons if it comes to that.”

“Oh no,” I warned him. “There will be no dungeons for this girl. No wandering blindly into mysterious dungeons; no saying ‘well, at least it can’t get any worse!’; no stopping to rest at the house of a kindly stranger who against all odds and good sense has built a deceptively cozy cottage in the deepest depths of dark and dangerous woods.”

“I know a three kings who met their wives in exactly each of those scenarios,” Justin said.

“Do I look like a prince to you?”

“I’m a prince. As a matter of fact, I met you after going wandering into deep, dark and dangerous woods.”

“And don’t you make me regret it. Just keep us out of any dungeons, okay?”

Justin sighed resignedly, but promised to keep his searching to the ground floor and above.

There was an inconspicuous doorway set into the corner of the room, to the right of the dais. We went that way, and found more meandering hallways. We took a chance with a staircase we found, but the the more we wandered around the second floor, the more we had to accept that there didn’t seem to be any way into the tower from there. Back down to the ground floor we went, and deeper into the bowels of the castle, occasionally coming across the odd chambermaid or pageboy, slumped in a heap on the ground, peacefully asleep and scaring the bejeesus out of me every time.

Eventually we hit the servant’s quarters again, full of washrooms and sleeping chambers, and Justin grew more hopeful, as this was bound to be towards the back of the castle. The more we walked, the better picture of the layout of the building I was constructing in my mind’s eye. We had essentially gone in a large semi-circle, starting in the back left corner of the castle, making our way to the center at the front, and then continuing towards the back right. No doubt there was a shorter path straight through the back from the right wings to the left wings, but that would have to be worked out later. The important thing was, we were in the right area now.

Unfortunately for us, castles tend to have a lot of towers. Especially fairy tale castles, which seem to have a fetish for the things. When we first came to a door that opened into a small, circular room with a spiraling staircase that led up hundreds of feet above our heads, we excitedly dashed up it, two steps at a time, eager to reach out destination.

When our destination proved not to be a sleeping princess, but a storage room, we trudged back down to the first floor with much less enthusiasm.

“Who in their right mind would put a storage room at the top of a tower?” I grumbled to myself. Justin had no good answer for this, and in fact spent the next several minutes discussing the designs flaws in his own castle back home, including secret chambers in his sisters’ room, under the floor, which led to another dimension where they danced themselves into a stupor every night.
He did not think this nearly as strange as I did.

The next tower we discovered was a bust as well. By now it was thoroughly dark outside, and we’d been forced to stop and light a torch that we pulled off a wall. It was eventually done, though not without much cursing and singed fingers, and we continued on in semi-darkness, the way ahead lit only by flickering orange firelight.

Eventually we had to admit that we couldn’t keep searching in these conditions. We had to be close, we knew that, but it was just too dark for us to have any idea where we were going now. I doubted we even could have recognized a tower we had already climbed at that point. If Sleeping Beauty had waited this long, she could wait one more night. Tired and frustrated, and with legs that ached so bad after two pointless climbs that I seriously doubted a third would even have been possible, we retraced our steps to some sleeping quarters we remembered passing earlier. We used the torch to light the lanterns in two adjacent rooms, said good night, and them parted company for the evening. I gratefully threw myself onto the servant’s bed, which wasn’t the most comfortable I’d even slept it, but was so much better than that stupid shelter I’d made the night before that it might as well have been the king’s own bed. I curled up under rough but warm woolen blankets, and let my thoughts drift to a boy with sandy blond hair and a bad attitude as a thankfully un-enchanted sleep crept over me.