Little Red Cinderella and the Three Beanstalks

For two days Ezu rode deeper in the forest, riding his horse as hard as he dared, only pausing to rest or to check his ever more unhelpful map when he felt he absolutely had to. His horse was growing more uneasy by the hour, made unsettled by the things it sensed in the forest with them, things that Ezu couldn’t see or hear or smell, but that he knew were there from years of experience.

Yet he was never bothered once by wild animals. During the nights he heard no wolves, though only a few days before he had hardly been able to sleep through their howling. He disturbed no rabbits or foraging squirrels, who should have been busy starting to bury their nuts for the approaching winter. There were no glints of reflective eyes in the darkness of night, no fox cries—there wasn’t even any bird song, which he realized when he awoke to dead silence the morning of the second day. The animals were there, he knew that much. He saw the tracks, the paths of deer and foxes through tall grasses. He just never saw them, never heard them, and it made him nervous. But he had no choice but to press on; he had to find Rikki, before it was too late. If she walked into some sorceress’s lair and something happened to her because she was alone with no one to watch her back, because he had abandoned her…

He squeezed his horses sides with his knees, urging it faster.

On the third day he hit a river, and knew he must be heading in the right direction. With the density of the tree growth, it couldn’t have changed course much even after a century. The banks were too rocky for him to follow alongside it while mounted, so he stuck to the more level terrain beyond the tree line, following the river’s progress by the sound of the rushing water.

And then suddenly something—several somethings—came bounding out of the shadows ahead directly towards him and his horse with frightening speed.

His horse whinnied in sudden panic and reared up, throwing Ezu off its back. He landed hard on the ground, the back of his head hitting the forest floor with enough force to make his vision go dark for a second. He blinked several times, dazed and gasping, trying to catch his wind, and he saw four blurry shapes leap over and past him, sprinting away through the forest in a mad dash. It took him several more seconds to realize that they had been deer, a family of deer, running in mortal fear from… something.

With a constrained effort, Ezu pushed himself up, looking around for his horse.

All he saw of it was its rear end disappearing into the trees ahead of him as it fled.

He spat a desperate curse with what little breath he had, and then staggered to his feet. His anger and fear of losing his mount overcame the pain that wracked his body, and he chased after the creature, calling out to it and stumbling through the woods as fast as he could manage, desperate not to lose sight of the horse.

Quite unexpectedly he broke through the trees into a wide meadow, where the bank of the river had eroded away to the point where the water had soaked the ground to the point where it had almost become a small marsh, treeless but full of reeds and autumn wildflowers. He saw his horse several hundred yards away, struggling to its feet from where it had evidently slipped on the muddy ground. Ezu called out to it again, rushing forwards and immediately almost losing a boot as it was suctioned from his foot by the squelching mud. By the time he’d yanked his foot free, the horse was up and had crossed the meadow, vanishing into the woods again beyond it. He kept sprinting after it anyways,too panicked to try to think of what else to do. The deer, he belatedly realized, must have been grazing here, and the sound of his approach had startled them, causing them to nearly collide with him and his horse.

He skidded to a stop, nearly slipping in the mud.

But if the deer had been startled by him and his horse, wouldn’t they have run away from him?

A shadow suddenly passed overhead, a huge one, but only for a brief moment. Ezu looked up, confused, expecting it to have been a cloud—what else could have been huge enough to block out the sun?—but clouds didn’t move that fast.

He froze as his eyes tracked the dragon circling the meadow like a vast bird of prey.

It had seen him, too.

It gave a screeching roar and tucked its wings in, plummeting towards the earth, towards Ezu.

Transfixed in disbelief and sudden, primal terror, Ezu barely managed to take a single, halting step backwards. His heel slipped, he lost his footing and he fell back onto his ass in the mud.

That was enough to startle him out of his daze. He scrambled to his feet, spun around, and began to run across the meadow, back the way he had come, desperately trying to reach the relative shelter of the trees before the dragon landed.

He hadn’t made it very far before he heard the enormous thud of the ten thousand pound reptile hitting the ground, and the ear shattering roar that followed a moment later. Ezu looked back over his shoulder as he ran, and saw it charging him down, covering fifteen feet of ground with every stride. He looked back at the edge of the clearing ahead of him, and realized he would never make it in time.

Ezu darted to the right, making for the river’s edge. It was difficult to draw his sword while he sprinted but somehow he managed it, though it gave him little comfort. His normally trusty blade felt horribly inadequate in his hand, with the monster bearing down on him.

He stopped at the river bank, wondering how long it would take him to cross it. He spun around, and knew he would have to face the dragon.

It thundered up to him, thirty feet long from its horned snout to its spiked tail, its massive wings unfurled to help it balance as its taloned feet slid unsteadily beneath it on the marsh. Ezu grit his teeth, planted his feet firmly in sandy rather than muddy river bank, and held his sword high.

To his immense surprise, the dragon came to a rumbling halt as he prepared to stand his ground, stopping a mere thirty feet from him, and stared at him with huge, evil yellow eyes.

Ezu waited, not daring to make the first move, waiting to see what the dragon would do. The dragon, for its part, seemed to be appraising him, sizing him up.

The dragon was an old one, and had been around long enough to have faced its fair share of knights and princes in its day. It had carried off princesses, raided villages, hoarded treasure, and done all the things that dragons were supposed to do. In the end, it had decided to settle down for a quiet life—that is, quiet for a dragon. It had found a nice abandoned castle deep in the woods, there were a few farming villages only a day or two’s flight away that had plenty of cattle to carry off for a light meal, and the ample supply of animals in the forest filled the rest of its diet, along with the occasional witch, woodcutter, and orphaned waif.

It was a good life in the dragon’s opinion, and it didn’t particularly want to mess up a good thing. It had seen the deer in the clearing below, but they had seen it too and fled into the forest, where it was more difficult for the huge creature to hunt among the densely packed trees. But then only moments later, the horse and its rider had appeared. At first the dragon had assumed it was just another woodcutter, there were always so many of them this time of year. It wouldn’t be as filling as four deer would have been, but it was better than nothing.

But now, now the human boy had stopped to face it, and had drawn a sword, no less. That wasn’t something woodcutters did. And knights, knights could be dangerous, even for a dragon. This dragon hadn’t lived as long as it had by rushing hastily into potentially dangerous situations, and now it paused to think rather than just running down the human and swallowing him whole, which would put itself in stabbing range.

Ezu realized what the dragon was about to do a moment before it happened. The beast seemed to swell, gathering itself up like an arching cat, and its fanged snout opened wide. Ezu threw himself backwards just in time, hitting the water with a splash and sinking below its surface just as the dragon unleashed a gout of flame that reached clear across the thirty feet between them, turning the grasses and wildflowers into flaming torches, which quickly fizzled out as they burned down the the wet earth leaving smoke and ash behind.

Ezu’s eyes were open, and he could see the orange jet of fire through the water as it passed over where he would have been. He watched it disappear, his heart pounding, and waited one heartbeat, two, three…

The dragon was clearly surprised when he surfaced. He would have tried to swim away down river before it realized he hadn’t been burned to a crisp, but the water here was so shallow that he had been incredibly lucky that there had been enough to cover him at all. Escape that way was out of the question.

Ezu pulled himself out of the river, water streaming into his eyes and mouth and weighing down his clothes. He still had his sword held firmly in his hand and he raised it again, trying to look as threatening as he could.

The dragon roared again, darting forward with a snap of three inch teeth, its tail swinging behind it like an armored club. Every instinct in Ezu’s body urged him to jump back, away from those vicious jaws, but he forced himself to remain standing where he was. The dragon’s teeth clashed together in the air fifteen feet from him, close enough that he could feel its hot, rancid breath hit him full in the face, but leaving him unscathed. It evidently still didn’t quite dare come within stabbing distance of him, and while Ezu couldn’t even begin to guess why a dragon would be wary of the likes of him, he wasn’t about to pass up the advantage. He took a quick step towards the dragon, slashing his sword at its snout as he bellowed the fiercest cry he could muster. The dragon flinched and pulled back, but Ezu’s swipe didn’t come close to making contact. Ezu pressed forward, jabbing his sword again, and the dragon took a retreating step. It looked at him sideways through one narrow eye, hesitating, as he came at it again. Every step he took away from the river bank took him further from the relative safety of the water, and if the dragon decided to breath fire at him now, he very well might not be able to dodge the blast this time. He didn’t let his fear, his doubt, show on his face, though. He kept after the creature, trying to force it backwards, force it away, make it think that he wasn’t worth the fight.

Its great wings spread wide and flapped once, and for a moment it looked as if it wanted to fly away. Ezu took a giant leap forward and swung his sword, now near enough that the tip of his sword nearly grazed the dragon’s nostrils. It whipped its head back in sudden shock, rearing back onto its hind legs. At the same moment, its tail came swinging around, curling around its body like a cat’s, and the spiked end smacked right into Ezu. He was knocked to the side, hitting the ground shoulder first, and his sword fell from his hand. He scrambled to his knees, groping for his fallen sword as best he could without taking his eyes off the dragon, trying to ignore the sudden burst of blinding pain that had erupted in the shoulder where the dragon’s tail had hit him.

The dragon noticed that he had lost his weapon, and its eyes narrowed to yellow slits.

It roared again and came down on all four legs, slithering forward so that it stood above Ezu. Its mouth opened wide, like a snake’s unhinging jaws, and it came down at him. Ezu cried out and threw himself to the right, and the dragon’s jaws snapped closed on empty air. He kicked out at its head as he tried to roll away, the heel of his boot connecting with its eye. It howled and shied away, shaking it head in pain so violently that Ezu was in danger of being speared by a horn. He scrambled through the mud on his hands and knees as quickly as he could, before he realized he was fleeing in the opposite direction of where his sword had fallen.

The dragon snorted and huffed, and Ezu looked up at it. One eye was squinting and watering, but both were fixed upon him with bitter resentment. It opened its mouth, and Ezu sprinted directly at it.

He threw himself onto his stomach and slid in the mud underneath the dragon’s belly, between its legs, just as the second burst of flame scorched the meadow.

Ezu didn’t know much about dragons, they were endangered after all, but he knew that it wouldn’t be able to breath much more fire in such a short period of time. They needed recuperation time, so that was at least one less weapon he had to worry about. Apart from the teeth and the claws and the spiked tail and the five ton body that could crush him like an ant.

For a moment the dragon didn’t realize where he had gone, but it didn’t take it long to figure it out. It craned its neck to look beneath it and saw him flailing around on the ground, trying to get himself out from under the belly of the beast. It reacted by trying to stomp him to death.

Ezu frantically rolled and dodged and flung himself this way and that, desperately trying to avoid the huge stamping feet. The dragon whirled about on the spot, an elephant trying to crush a bothersome fly. It raised its tail high in the air and Ezu seized his chance, half running and half crawling through the sudden opening which was surely less dangerous than the one on the opposite side, guarded as it was by the dragon’s head. The next moment the dragon threw itself down completely, apparently planning on crushing Ezu under the weight of its entire body if it couldn’t catch him with its feet. Ezu escaped, but only just. Again the tail hit him, knocking him to the ground as it slammed into him. Into him, and onto him. He was thrown face down into the wet earth, and the dragon’s tail was flung across his legs. He tried to kick it off, but it must have weigh nearly four hundred pounds alone. He couldn’t even roll over, he was utterly trapped beneath the weight of the thing. He struggled, he punched and kicked and clawed in the dirt, trying to wriggle his way out from underneath the tail, but he wasn’t going anywhere.

But then he saw a gleam just ahead of him, and realized that his sword was laying there, only a few feet from where he lay trapped. He reached out for it, and his fingers fell just a few inches short of the hilt.

The dragon, for its part, didn’t realize that Ezu hadn’t been immediately crushed beneath it when it had thrown itself down. It took the creature a few seconds to realize that it didn’t feel a body beneath its belly, and a few more seconds for it to realize that the little human had, instead, been trapped under its tail. The dragon turned to look behind it, and saw the human thrashing and struggling uselessly. It barred its teeth. Very carefully, so as not to lift its tail and free the human, it began to wriggle around on its belly, curling in on itself so it could reach the human with its claws or its teeth.

Ezu saw the dragon notice him, and he saw it start to claw its way towards him, its teeth snapping and gleaming, its clawed talon reaching out for him as it strove to grab him without lifting its tail enough to allow him to escape. With a concerted effort he tore his eyes away from the approaching monster and threw every ounce of energy he still had left into trying to reach his sword. He was so close, so damn close, he could actually just barely touch it with his middle finger! It wasn’t enough to get a grip on it, or even to pull it slightly towards himself. For the briefest of seconds, he couldn’t help but wonder what Rikki would have been doing if she were there with him right now. It probably would have been her trapped under the dragon’s tail, not him.

He stretched a little further, prayed a little harder. The dragon’s rear end shifted, just slightly, and he was pulled a few inches to the side. Just enough for his fingers to close around the grip of his sword.

He grabbed it tightly and swung it over his head and behind him, slicing a deep cut into the dragon’s tail.

The dragon howled in pain and recoiled, its tail trashing back and forth wildly. Ezu rolled over onto his back and slashed blindly, this time connecting with a clawed hand that was reaching down to grab him. Another roar of agony, and the dragon slithered away from him, its hand and tail dripping blood. Ezu pushed himself to his feet and charged at the dragon, striking out and scaring the dragon’s muzzle. It snapped at him and missed, but then it rolled onto its back, exposing its belly, and as Ezu raised his sword above his head to strike, one of its back feet shot out and kicked him square in the chest, sending him hurtling through the air fifteen feet backwards.

He landed with a splash in the river, the air knocked out of him. He probably would have drowned there if it hadn’t been so shallow. As it was, there was no way he was going to be getting up anytime soon. With an enormous effort, he was able to lift his head just enough to see the dragon.

Its legs were flailing around in the air as it struggled to right itself, but it was eventually able to push itself back upright. It hissed and snarled, whipping its head and tail around in a rage, searching for Ezu. When it didn’t immediately see him, it spread its wings wide again and flapped once, twice, three times before its huge body lifted up off the ground. It was wounded and angry, but not stupid. This forest had been quietly knight and prince free for decades, but obviously those days were over. It thought a nasty curse in Dragonese at the wicked little human that had ruined a good thing, and soared off high into the air.

Ezu watched the dragon fly away, and once it had disappeared from view, his head dropped back down into the water. He stared up at the empty sky for a few minutes, struggling to breath. It took a while for him to realize that breathing wasn’t only difficult because he’d had the wind knocked out of him, but because he might have a broken rib or two.

It took a world of effort for him to stand up, but somehow he managed it. He used his sword like a cane, relying on it to keep him upright as the world suddenly started to spin and he almost passed out. The tip of it sank deep into the mud, and trying to pull it back out nearly brought on another fainting spell. It was then that he noticed that his right arm didn’t seem to be working right, and when he finally actually looked at it, he saw that one of the spikes on the dragon’s tail had ripped into the flesh and muscle of his shoulder. His entire right side was soaked in blood, and while the pain had dulled to a deep throb because of the numbing amount of adrenaline pumping through his veins, it was clear that he has lost a lot of mobility in that arm.

It was the work of an hour for him to tear his shirt, mostly one handed, into long strips with which he bound his chest and his shoulder. He found a stick he would use as a better cane than his sword, which helped take some of the pressure off his cracked ribs.

All the food in his pack was soaking wet after having been dunked in the river. The bread had to be thrown out for the birds, though the apples, deer jerky, and cheese were salvageable. The loss of the food didn’t bother him so much as the fact that the map Karl had made him was ruined. The ink had run in several places, and when he pulled it out to check the damage, it had torn in several places. It wasn’t completely unusable, but he would be at even more of a disadvantage now than he had been before.

But none of that mattered. If he had been attacked by a dragon out here, what kinds of things could have happened to Rikki? She still had had two princesses to rescue before she even got to the last sorceress. Anything could have happened to her while trying to rescue Rapunzel, or Sleeping Beauty. The only reason the three of them, Rikki, Jack, and himself, had managed to rescue the Miller’s Daughter, Cinderella, and Snow White was because they had been together, they had had help, and they had had each other to rely on. What the hell had he been thinking, abandoning her like that? It had been stupid, it had been selfish, and now she might be dragon food for all he knew.

He started sloshing across the meadow, back down river, where he suspected Sleeping Beauty’s lost castle must lie. Even if he never saw his horse again, even if he had to walk the entire way with broken ribs and a useless arm, he would find Rikki. He would find her, and he would apologize, and he would finally tell her the truth about how he felt towards her. And if she decided that she hated him for what he had done to her, fine. He deserved that. He could live with that. But he couldn’t live with knowing that something had happened to her because of his own arrogant stubbornness. He was going to go to the ends of the earth to find her if it meant seeing her again.