Little Red Cinderella and the Three Beanstalks

I don’t remember staggering down the seemingly endless spiral staircase to the foot of the tower.

I must have though, because the next thing I was aware of was Prince Justin, Alfred, the Huntsman, and Jameson dragging me out of the dark stairway through the hole in the thorny vines they had managed to cut away around the tower door.

“Are you alright? Are you hurt? Is the witch dead?” they were all asking simultaneously, in one fashion or another.

“Ezu,” I mumbled, trying to push my way past them. “Ezu.”

My friends help me around the base of the tower, to the main part of the courtyard where the battle had raged.

It was over by now, the last few twitching bones being happily gnawed on by wolves in various states of dress.

Before I could get much further, the old man ghost, axe in hand, appeared in front of me with appropriately ghostly suddenness.

“The debt is paid,” he growled.

I waved him aside. “Go, then.”

He, and all the other spirits, vanished into thin air, retuning to wherever it was that they went when they weren’t being pains in my ass.

Jack hadn’t come to find me in the tower with the others, because he was busy pulling Ezu’s body out of the thorn bushes.

I gave a whimper when I saw Ezu laid out on the ground, Jack kneeling above him, and Justin and Jameson had to grab me by the arms to keep me from collapsing.

Somehow I found my strength again and I shook them off, half stumbling, half running to Ezu’s side.

I fell to my knees next to him, on the opposite side from Jack.

Jack looked up at me with pained eyes, his face ashen.

“Rikki, I’m so sorry,” he said. “For everything, I never should have left back there. When I came to my senses I tried to get back to you, but I didn’t know where you guys had gone, so I doubled back and got all the help I could find… If I’d just been a little faster-”

Ezu was covered in blood, and I could see the deep cuts where the huge thorns had torn into his flesh. I reached out to touch him, but my hand stopped a few inches above his face. His eyes… his beautiful eyes, bloody and punctured and unseeing. Tears fell onto my cheeks, and dripped off my nose and chin. My head dropped onto Ezu’s chest as an indescribably pit of helplessness opened up inside of me.

And then my breath caught in my throat.

I sat up, rubbing away my tears furiously with my hand, my other moving to the side of Ezu’s throat.

“He’s alive!” I shrieked, and everyone standing nearby jumped in alarm. “He’s not dead, he’s still alive! Quick, someone help!”

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There wasn’t much that could be done for Ezu, or the other wounded, in the middle of the Grimm Woods. They were patched up as well as could be provided, and then the whole mis-matched lot of us had to start the long walk home.

On the way, Jack filled me in on what he had been up to after he left that day after finishing Snow White’s quest.

He had almost immediately regretted abandoning Ezu and me, but by the time he’d returned to where we had parted, we’d gone, and he had no idea of how to find us again.

It had taken him some convincing, but he was eventually able to convince Snow White and her Prince that it was vitally important that he get back to me, and that if they could spare a few soldiers, it would probably go a long way to keeping the world from ending.

The Prince wasn’t exactly eager have another fight like the one with Ravena ahead of him, but when Jack insisted that it would happen eventually anyways if I failed, he agreed to lend his aid. With that agreed upon, Jack had requested a messenger be sent back to Prince Charming and Cinderella’s kingdom, requesting whatever aid they could offer as well.

Still grateful for our help, Charming had immediately set out with a small army of his own. It took a long while for them to reach Snow White’s castle, and by then other messengers had been sent out as well. Everyone we had befriended on our journey rose to the challenge, including the Black Thief and his band of thieves (who agreed to fight in return for a royal pardon for their crimes), and Alfred’s entire Big Bad Wolf Liberation Front coalition, who were eager to prove their willingness to be one of the good guys.

After that, Jack and the others followed the same steps of logic that had led Ezu and I in the right direction of the Grimm Woods. Still, they might never have found us in time if it weren’t for Prince Justin.

I had told Justin a bit about the Snow White Adventure, enough that he knew exactly what kingdom I was talking about. Almost immediately after I had set out from Sleeping Beauty’s castle, he had set out as well, heading straight for Snow White’s kingdom. He ran right into Jack and the two armies, and correctly assumed that this Jack and the one I had mentioned were one and the same. Justin told him that he knew where I had gone, and that he thought I would be in dire need of help. Justin sent Jack and the two armies ahead to Sleeping Beauty’s castle, while he himself rode hard all the way back to his own kingdom, to bring back his father’s army as well.

Only a few days behind Ezu and I, the entire lot of them set out into the Grimm Woods in the hopes of catching up with us in time to help.

They rode harder than we had, and on that last day finally caught up, thanks to Alfred and his friends who were astounding trackers with those wolfish senses of smell. That had been the sounds Ezu and I had heard in the forest behind us; not some huge evil beast, but the obviously pretty loud sounds of three armies, one band of thieves, and a wolf pack blundering through the forest as quickly as they were able to.

By some miracle, they had arrived at the tower less then half an hour after we had, providing us with an extremely helpful distraction.

The journey back out of the Grimm Woods was uneventful. I doubted anything unpleasant would be likely to attack a group as large and well armed as ours, but I got the sense that even if it had just been me all by myself, the woods would have remained quiet.

I didn’t know if it was because I knew the witch was dead behind me, but somehow the Grimm Woods didn’t feel all that grim anymore. I even swore, once or twice, I heard birdsong in the trees.

We had left the witch there in the tower. After checking and double checking that she really was dead, of course. No one want to bother to take the time to bury her body, so it was agreed without discussion to just let her rot there, good riddance.

Storm Cloud and Ezu’s mare were found nearby to my relief, and I chose to lead both horses myself. I spent most of that first day walking and talking with Alfred, catching up with what he had been up to since we’d last parted. Thanks to meeting us and helping us rescue Cinderella, Prince Charming had made the Big Bad Wolf Liberation Front into a royal society, complete with funding and an official meeting place in the town square. Alfred had plans for establishing a rehabilitation center for wolves who wished to change their antisocial behavior, as well as a wildlife center where the non-talking wolves that made a bad habit of killing local livestock could be relocated to, rather than being hunted down by angry local farmers.

He had a lot to say on the subject, and I was grateful for the chance to only half-listen, letting him talk on and on while my mind drifted in and out of the largely one-sided conversation.

It wasn’t until that night that Ezu regained consciousness.

“Rikki!” Jack pushed up through the back of the crowd of marching men, shoving people out of his way to get to me. He had been walking at the back of the grim parade, where the wounded were being carried along on stretchers. “Rikki, Ezu’s awake!”

“What?” I gasped, dropping the horses’ reigns. Alfred caught them.

“He’s awake, and he’s asking for you. Hurry!”

I rushed alongside Jack, fighting against the tide of weary soldiers like a salmon trying to swim upstream. Before we reached Ezu, Jack stopped me.

“I have to warn you, he’s still pretty out of it. It was a bad fall, he’s really hurt, Rikki. And his eyes… don’t tell him if he asks, not yet. It’s best not to panic him while we’re still so far from proper medical care.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Where is he? Let me see him.”

Jack led me over to a stretcher that was being carried by two strong young men, soldiers from Justin’s army. They brows were beaded with sweat, and they seemed only too glad to take a brief break to give me a chance to talk to Ezu. They laid the stretcher down carefully on the ground and I knelt in the dirt by Ezu’s side.

“Ezu, can you hear me? It’s Rikki,” I said quietly, taking him by a heavily bandaged hand.

“Rikki?” he repeated in a vague, thick voice, turning his head from side to side as if coming out of a bad dream. Almost his entire face was wrapped in white bandages as well, well on their way to being soaked through with blood, only his nose and mouth left exposed.

“Don’t move your head,” I told him, blinking back hot, painful tears. “We don’t know how bad you’re hurt yet, you need to try to keep still, especially your head.”

“What happened? Are you—and you hurt? Why can’t I see?”

“I’m fine, I’m okay. The Sorceress hit me with that electric blast thing and it shook me up for a bit, but I’m okay. It probably should have killed me, but I got lucky. But while I was down, the Sorceress knocked you out of the tower. It was a huge fall, it’s a miracle you survived.”

Ezu’s cut up lips twitched into something resembling a grin. “Got lucky, huh?”

A lump rose in my throat, but I swallowed it. “Yeah. Pretty lucky.”

His weak smile vanished, and though the top half of his face was concealed, I knew that he was furrowing his brow. “Can’t see,” he muttered thickly. “Why can’t I-”

“The thorns at the bottom of the tower cut you up pretty badly too. Landing on them probably cushioned your fall, that probably the only reason you survived, but they did some real damage. You’re bandaged up, practically from head to toe, until we get out of the woods.”

“The Sorceress-”

“I got her. I got her, Ezu.”

His clumsy, bandaged hand twitched, and I held it tightly.

“It’s over, it’s finally over. No more princesses, no more daring rescues and life-threatening adventures. Life can go back to being nice and safe and boring, exactly the way it should be. And Ezu, Jack’s here. He came back, do you remember? He brought everyone to come and help us.”

“Jack?” Ezu murmured.

Jack, who had been hovering awkwardly nearby, came over and squatted down on Ezu’s other side.

“I’m here. I’m… I’m sorry I left. I didn’t want to leave you guys to face all this on your own, I should have been more loyal.”

“You were so much help,” I said to Jack. “If you hadn’t come, all of her attention would have been on us, and she probably would have just blasted both me and Ezu straight to hell immediately. And even if she didn’t, even if I somehow was able to stop her, I would never have been able to get Ezu out of these wood on my own, not with him this badly injured. We both would have died in here if it weren’t for you.”

I looked back down at Ezu, but his head had fallen to the side again, and his breathing was slow and even. He had passed out again.

“We have to get him help,” I said, my hands clenching into tight fists in my lap.

“We will,” Jack assured me. “He’ll be okay.”

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Ezu’s wounds became badly infected before we made it out of the Grimm Woods, and we ended up staying at Sleeping Beauty’s castle for several days while we waited for the fever to break—or for him to succumb. He didn’t regain consciousness again during that entire time, and I never left his side, alternating between crying until I exhausted myself to the point of collapse, and keeping long vigils all night, afraid that if I fell asleep, I’d wake to find him dead.

But then, a week after we had killed the Sorceress, the fever broke and Ezu finally woke.

Breaking the news to him that he had been permanently blinded by the thorns he had landed in was left to me, and… well, he didn’t take the news as badly as he could have, but I’d be lying if I said he took it well.

It took him days after he was otherwise physically healed to actually leave his sick bed, but I couldn’t blame him for that. I spent the time reading to him from the Book, which had returned to its normal state of a mere book of fairy tales with the death of the witch. All the stories had returned, and they were all the ones I had grown up knowing.

I read him every single one, only stopping each day when my voice grew too hoarse to continue, and he just lay there staring up at the ceiling with scarred, sightless eyes.

I finally reached the final story in the book, just a paragraph long, on the last page.

“The Golden Key,” I narrated. “Once in the wintertime when the snow was very deep, a poor boy had to go out and fetch wood on a sled. After he had gathered it together and loaded it, he did not want to go straight home, because he was so frozen, but instead to make a fire and warm himself a little first. So he scraped the snow away, and while he was thus clearing the ground he found a small golden key. Now he believed that where there was a key, there must also be a lock, so he dug in the ground and found a little iron chest. "If only the key fits!" he thought. "Certainly there are valuable things in the chest." He looked, but there was no keyhole. Finally he found one, but so small that it could scarcely be seen. He tried the key, and fortunately it fitted. Then he turned it once, and now we must wait until he has finished unlocking it and has opened the lid. Then we shall find out what kind of wonderful things there were in the little chest.”

I closed the book and laid it in my lap, looking up at Ezu. “That’s the end,” I said.

He heaved a heavy sigh, and then pushed himself up into a sitting position.

It was the first time he had moved so much in weeks, and I leapt to his side to steady him as he teetered dangerously on the edge of the bed.

“Well,” he grunted, trying to use my shoulder to lever himself up onto his feet. “It’s time to get going then.”

“Going? Going where? Sit back down!” I wrestled briefly with him, trying to force him back onto the bed.

“We’ve crossed through four… no, five kingdoms since we first met. We’ve been traveling non-stop for months. I’ve spent more time sleeping in the dirt than I have in a real bed, and even when it is a real bed, and a bed fit for royalty like this one; it still isn’t quite the same as sleeping in your own bed. We’ve been traveling for long enough, it’s time to go home. Let’s pack our things, say goodbye, and head out.”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” I protested, “You’re not in any condition to begin the journey home right now! First of all you’ve hardly moved in weeks, so your muscles are bound to be atrophied—we’ll need to get you started on a physical therapy regime, which will be hard since I know jack all about physical therapy—plus, you haven’t acclimated at all to… to, you know…” I trailed off awkwardly.

A dark cloud passed in front of Ezu’s face. “To being blind?” he supplied shortly.

“Well… yeah. You need to get used to it before we go anywhere. I mean, were you just planning on getting on a horse, pointing it in any random direction, and hoping it got you back home eventually?”

“I was assuming you could guide the way,” Ezu said, struggling to keep his tone civil.

“Since when have I ever been able to guide the way? I have no idea where we are, or how to get back to your town. Jack’ll have to do the actual navigating, and he’s a little bit busy right now anyways, so you’ll just have to wait before we return whether you like it or not.”

“What could Jack possibly be busy with?”

“He’s helping mediate negotiations between… oh man, I can never remember the names of these countries… Rosenberg and… Weissland? Between Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom and Snow White’s, anyways. Rosenberg has been asleep for a hundred years and need some serious help integrating back into society, plus most of their land has since been claimed by the surrounding countries. Weissland is a political and economic train wreck after Queen Ravena had her way with it, and pretty much needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Rosenberg of course now has an alliance with Cywith—that’s Prince Justin’s kingdom, and he’s going to marry Briar Rose—and Snow White’s new man is the prince of Lorcastle, so Lorcastle and Weissland will be allied. Still, both Rosenberg and Weissland are in pretty rough shape, and creating a partnership together could strengthen them even more. Obviously Snow White and her prince know they can trust Jack’s judgment since we all stormed the castle together, and Prince Justin and I became good enough friends that he was willing to let Jack help mediations upon my recommendation.”

“What does Jack know about mediating the political relationships between destabilized countries?” Ezu said incredulously.

“Well, everyone involved seems pretty happy by his contributions,” I said stoically in defense of my friend.

“Ugh!” Ezu groaned and let himself fall back onto the bed. “Fine, you win,” he spat. “What’s this stupid… physical therapy you were prattling on about?”

We didn’t officially set out for home for another three weeks, though we did do a lot of kingdom hopping during that time.

Eventually we said goodbye to Justin and Briar Rose, thanking them for everything they had done. They didn’t allow us to leave without a knee-weakeningly large amount of gold coins, and, to my pleasant surprise, Storm Cloud.

He was a smart, intuitive horse who was rarely startled, and the perfect horse for Ezu. Storm Cloud was a reliable enough mount that Ezu could safely learn to ride without the use of his eye sight, trusting on Storm Cloud’s judgment to navigate obstacles and keep to the generally right direction. It helped save a bit of Ezu’s pride too, since he knew Storm Cloud well, and had developed a respect for the animal during the time they had traveled together. He didn’t feel like he was being babied, being given a “special” horse the way little children are given sleepy old nags to learn to ride on. He was just being gifted my horse, because he was such a very good horse.

After leaving Rosenberg, we traveled with Snow White’s Prince to Weissland where we stayed for several days to continue Ezu’s “physical therapy” (which was more or less me just encouraging him to go on progressively longer and longer walks as he regained his strength).

After that, again being gifted despite our—okay, my protests an outrageous amount of money, plus some jewelry the dwarves had made set with precious gemstones that I would only have occasion to wear if I ever married a prince and became a queen; Ezu, Jack and I hit the road again, this time with Prince Charming and his entourage back to Cinderella’s kingdom.

That was a long journey, but by the time we arrived, Ezu seemed to have regained a little confidence with his lack of sight. He still moved slowly and cautiously, but once he got the lay of a room, he was able to navigate it without suffering a constant worry that he was going to crash into something.

His other injuries were healing nicely too. He would always have scars, but it looked as though many of them would eventually fade to just pale lines against his tanned skin.

That would be a long time from now though, and one day, soon before we left the castle, Ezu and I sat together in the gardens while he ran his fingers over his face.

“Be honest,” he said suddenly, though I had been expecting to subject to be brought up eventually. “How bad is it? What do I look like now?”

“Well,” I replied, leaning back and enjoying the feeling of the last warm days of autumn in a royal garden, “you look pretty much like Ezu, for starters.”

“You know what I mean,” he growled.

“Yeah, I do, and I still stand by what I said. You look like yourself, only with a couple of scars added on top. Some of them aren’t very pretty, but it isn’t like you were going to have a career as a supermodel ahead of you anyways.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

I turned to face him, taking his face in both my hands and turning his head so that I was looking right into his unfocused eyes. “Ezu,” I said, “I know that what you’re going through is incredibly hard, and that I can’t really understand what it’s like or how you feel. But if you’re worried about being some scarred up mess, you’re not. You have scars, yes, but that didn’t turn you into some kind of a monster. Feel this?” I took his hand, and pressed his fingertips to the scar on my palm from where I had sliced my hand open after meeting the Black Thief. I made him touch the scars on my knuckles, the one on my cheek, the one above my left eyebrow where I’d tripped and hit my head on a rock in the forest sometime months before, and even the one on my knee that I got when I was twelve and rode my bike into a parked car.

“We all have scars, Ezu. It just means we fought, we fought hard and we won. I don’t care what your face looks like anyways. They could have taken your face off and replaced it with Nicolas Cage’s a la Face Off, and I’d still think it was the best face in the world.”

“I really have no idea what that means.”

“It means that it’s not as bad as I think you think it is. Personally, I think it makes you look like a badass, like you’ve faced some real shit. I definitely wouldn’t want to risk taking you on in a bar fight.”

“We have faced some real shit.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I guess we have. It’s funny, we go through so much, we do so much, and now we’re practically world famous, are fabulously wealthy, and have life long standing invitations to go hang out with royalty whenever we feel like it; and somehow I still don’t really think of us as the heroes everyone keeps calling us.”

“Prince Charming and Cinderella are throwing us a parade, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“The day before we’re set to leave. It’s going to be a whole ‘Thanks For Saving the Known World From the Tyranny of a Real Bitch of a Witch’ parade.

“I could go for a parade in my honor,” I said contemplatively. “I feel as though I don’t nearly enough parades as I deserve.”

Ezu laughed, and I laughed, and then I kissed him.

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It was another long week of travel, just Jack, Ezu, me, and a few armed guards to guarantee our safe passage, before we finally reached the small town in which Jack had grown up, just outside of which Ezu had come to live years before.

We were grateful for the entourage, since we were so heavily laden with gold and silver and precious jewels and other treasure beyond imagining. Prince Charming had also tried to gift us deeds to huge swathes of land in his kingdom, but we refused on the grounds that that little village which we were returning to was home.

Jack returned to a very teary eyed mother, who had had little warning of his going off on an adventure and received no word from her only son since the beginning of the summer. Boy, was she surprised when he showed her the pile of gold that he brought home with him. It was no geese that laid golden eggs, but nobody was complaining.

Ezu and I returned to his cottage alone, this time following the proper path.

There was dust settled everywhere inside, and a few places where water had leaked through the thatched roof and warped the floorboards below. Over all however, it wasn’t anything that a bit of an airing out and a day or two devoted to cleaning couldn’t fix.

Ezu reluctantly let me have free reign in the cleaning process, and I insisted that the entire place had to be spotless, which meant getting rid of a lot of the useless junk he’s accumulated over the years, since he needed a clean space to move around in without tripping over every spare ax or wolf pelt he had a habit of just tossing haphazardly onto the ground.

Ezu was right about no bed, not even a king’s bed, being quite the same as your own.

Admittedly, my own bed was a universe away. But Ezu’s, with his arms wrapped around me to keep me warm during the increasingly cold autumn nights, was a close second.

It was a few weeks later, and I was digging the beginnings of a crude vegetable patch along the side of the cottage, when Ezu finally asked me the question I knew was bound to come sooner or later.

“So… what about going home?”

“I am home,” I replied, turning another trowel-full of fresh earth.

“I mean… your real home.”

“This is my real home,” I said, and I saw Ezu flinch a little at the steel in my tone.

“But… your family-”

I set the trowel down and half turned to look at him. “Do you have any bright ideas about how exactly I would go about getting back to my world—assuming I even wanted to?”

“You… don’t want to?”

I gave an exasperated sigh, surprised that he could be this dumb. “Why would I want to go back? What do I have to go back to? How could I possibly go back to my normal life and settle for… for some desk job somewhere slaving away until I turn 65, retiring, and then dying without anything interesting happening to me every again, and knowing the entire time that I left a life with you behind?”

“Your family-” Ezu said again, his expression shockingly bare, uncertainty written over his every feature.

“I mean, I regret not having the chance to give them a real goodbye, and I’ll miss my brother of course, but… well, we weren’t like your family, Ezu. We weren’t close, and I doubt they’ll be saving me a seat every Thanksgiving in the hopes I’ll turn up one day. It would have been nice to let them know I’m not dead, but since there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m not going to let it bother me.”

“And you won’t…” Ezu was standing tensely, his arms held stiffly at his sides, and I could tell that he was struggling to have this embarrassingly honest conversation with me. “You won’t resent being stuck here after a while? You won’t resent your life with me, being so far from everything you knew?”

“Honestly Ezu, I hadn’t really prepared myself for this. I spent this entire time, all these months here, assuming that once the Sorceress was defeated, I’d somehow be magically transported back to my own world. I thought I had to accept the fact that once it was all over, I’d never see you again. And that hurt, that hurt me a lot more than the thought of never seeing my family again if I died on this adventure. As long as I’m with you, I won’t resent or regret anything.”

I saw Ezu’s shoulders untense, and his clouded expression cleared a little. He slowly shuffled forwards until he touched my outstretched hand, and he knelt on the ground beside me.

“I don’t know why you’re making a vegetable garden, we can get all the vegetables we need from the town market.”

“I am not walking all the way to town every time I want a carrot,” I said, picking the trowel back up and sticking it into the dirt. “Besides, I’ve been exposed to your eating habits for months now, I know that you don’t eat nearly enough-”

I paused mid-sentence, looking in surprise down at the small golden key I had just unearthed while digging. I carefully pulled it out of the spadeful of dirt and held it up, letting its gleaming golden edges catch the light of the late afternoon sun.

“What is it?” Ezu asked.

“I found a key. Just a little one. Are you missing a key to anything?”

Ezu’s brow furrowed. “No, not that I know of. I’ve never really had anything worth locking up before now.”

I started poking around in the dirt again, digging deeper than before. “Well, if there’s a key here,” I said, “there might be something it opens here too.” I dug around for a minute, maybe two, until my trowel hit something hard. I dug it out of the ground and lifted it up out of the earth.

“It’s a little iron chest,” I said. You’re sure it’s not yours? It’s buried behind your house, after all.

Ezu shook his head. “I’m positive I would remember burying an iron chest behind my own house. Let me feel it.”

He ran his hands over the surface of the chest, but only shook his head. He didn’t recognize it in the slightest.

“It doesn’t match the key,” I remarked, holding the dainty gold key up next to the grey iron box, “but it would be weirder if they didn’t go together, I think.” I looked all over the chest, but could find a keyhole.

After several minutes of looking, I gave a grunt of frustration, and Ezu wordlessly held out his hands. I handed the chest over and he ran his fingers over it, poking and prodding every inch of it.

“Ah,” he said finally, “here it is. It’s really small, do you see it?”

I peered at the spot he was indicating, and thought I saw a tiny hole, hardly visible.

“Let’s try it,” I said, taking the box back from him. I tried the key, and despite the fact that the key looked far too large to fit in a keyhole that small, it fit. I turned it, and felt the mechanism inside unlock.

“It worked,” I said.

“Well, open it,” Ezu replied, leaning forward in his eagerness to find out what was inside, even though he couldn’t see it.

I did, and a sudden burst of white light exploded from the box, blinding me. I let the chest fall from grasp, so I could shield my eyes with my hands.

“What’s in there?” Ezu asked. There was no response.

“Rikki? What’s in the box?”

Nothing. He reached out to touch her, but his hand met only empty air.

He felt around sightlessly, until his hands touched the chest, where it had fallen on its side in the dirt. He picked it up and felt inside, only to find it empty.

“Rikki?” he said again, his heart starting to pound a little harder. Only silence answered him, and he suddenly realized that he was completely and utterly alone.