Polly Shulman - The Grimm Legacy

The fountain filled the air with the scent of water. Water and autumn leaves. Water and autumn leaves and lilies of the valley. And earth. And snow . . . Suddenly I recognized this place: the scenes from the Tiffany windows! I stood up straight and spun around slowly, looking. The frost-rimed rocks to the north, the blossoming trees to the east, the thick, bird-spangled greenwood to the south, the sunset-red forest to the west.

“You came straight from where ?” said Jaya.

“Nowhere—that’s where we wound up when I ran away from Mr. Stone. The homeless woman who hangs out in the Main Exam Room lives there. Grace.”

Andre plopped down next to me and started playing with twigs and pebbles, making them walk around and talk to each other. “It’s sparkly in Nowhere,” he said, looking up. “I made a sun.”

“Where’s Mr. Stone?” asked Jaya. “Is he still chasing you?”

I shook my head. “I left him in Nowhere. I think he’s stuck there for good.”

“I made a sun, ” insisted Andre.

“Yes, you did!” I said. “And the stars turned into flowers, and now it’s summer and it’s daytime too. Did you do all that?”

“Yeah,” said Andre proudly.

I mussed his hair, which had a few leaves and petals in it. “You’re a pretty powerful young man, then, Andre,” I said. But maybe he was right—maybe he did do all that. I couldn’t say for sure that he hadn’t.

“So where’s the flower, then?” asked Jaya.

“What flower?”

“The one the mirror said would be here when we met you. The one that’s going to disenchant Dr. Rust.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“The mirror said we’d find you here with a flower.”

“What? Back up. What happened after I left?”

“The enormous dog flew off somewhere,” said Jaya. “I don’t know where he went. The gigantic bird was in pretty bad shape. Doc was still stuck in the crystal ball, and it made a blinding light whenever we touched it, and that made the bird screech, so I shut my eyes and put the ball in the bottomless box. Then we went back to Aaron’s and asked the Snow White mirror what to do.”

“What did it say?”

“It told us to meet you in the Garden of Seasons. It said we needed a flower to break the enchantment. Meet Betty in the magic bower and break the prison with a flower. We figured it meant here.”

“ Betty? My name’s Elizabeth! Someday I’m really going to smash that wretched thing.”

“Sorry. I’m just telling you what it said.”

“I wonder what flower it’s talking about. Could it be the one from ‘Jorinda and Joringel,’ in Grimm?” I said.

“Remind me,” said Aaron.

“It’s the one where a witch turns Jorinda into a bird, and Joringel finds a magic flower. When he touches Jorinda with it, she turns back into a girl.”

“That sounds useful,” said Aaron. “Maybe we could use it on Anjali and Marc. Where is it?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“It must be here somewhere,” said Aaron. “The mirror never quite lies. We just have to find it.”

“What does it look like, then?”

Aaron shrugged.

“Is this it?” asked Jaya helpfully. She plucked a dandelion from the lawn.

“Of course not, that’s a dandelion,” said Aaron.

“How do you know it’s not a magic dandelion?”

“What makes you think it would be?”

“What makes you think it wouldn’t? Anything could be magic here,” she said.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “Test it. Get the globe with Doc in it out of the bottomless box.”

Jaya opened the box and stuck her arm in up to the shoulder—which looked strange, since the box was only three or four inches tall—and fished around. “Hey, this feels like Anjali.” She hung her from her strings on a bush and tapped her with the dandelion. Nothing happened.

“Just find Doc,” said Aaron impatiently.

Jaya went back to fishing in the box. “I’m looking—there’s a ton of stuff in here. Wait, I think this is Merritt . . . No, here he is,” said Jaya. She pulled out the brass figure of Marc beating a gong.

“It’s my butter!” shouted Andre, dropping his leaves and pebbles. He grabbed the figurine from Jaya and kissed it again and again. “You found him!”

Jaya went back to fishing around in the box.

“Please get on with it, Jaya,” said Aaron. “We need Doc. ”

“Calm down! It’s not so easy. There’s a lot of stuff in here and it’s all tangled up,” said Jaya. “Okay, here we go. I think.”

A blast of white light, like concentrated moonlight, shot upward from the box as she lifted out the globe. Dimly through the light I could see what looked like Doc, still in the globe.

I heard a screech overhead and something huge came plummeting down from the heavens and fell heavily at our feet.

Andre ducked behind Jaya. “The birdie that got hurt,” he said, pointing.

He was right. It was the bird from Mr. Stone’s. Its throat had stopped bleeding, but blood stained its feathers and its wing still lay at an impossible angle. It shrieked and shrieked.

“Put down the globe, Jaya! I think that’s what’s making the bird scream,” I said.

She dropped the globe on the grass and the light went out. The bird stopped shrieking, but it went on making soft growling noises.

“Do you think touching the globe summons the bird?” Aaron asked.

“Must be,” I said. “That poor bird looks terrible!”

The bird was trembling. “The birdie got a big ouchie,” said Andre, still keeping Jaya safely between himself and the bird.

I dipped my bandana in the fountain and used it to wipe away some of the blood.

“What are you doing that for? It tried to kill us, remember?” said Aaron.

“Can’t you see it’s in pain?” I rinsed the bandana and dabbed at the wound in the bird’s neck. It growled, but it didn’t bite me. “Nice birdie. There, there,” I said, washing its wounds.

“Nice birdie? Way, way, way too nice, Elizabeth,” said Aaron. “Never mind the bird, let’s find that flower and disenchant Doc.”

“Okay, here goes,” said Jaya. She flourished her dandelion like a stage magician’s wand, then tapped the globe with it.

Nothing happened.

“I guess it wasn’t a magic dandelion,” said Aaron.

“You don’t know that,” said Jaya. “Maybe that’s just not what its magic does.”

“Whatever,” said Aaron. “Let’s go find more flowers.” He walked off around one side of the fountain.

I filled my water bottle at the fountain and poured some in the bird’s beak. I found an orange left over from lunch in my backpack and put it near the bird’s head. The bird snapped it up in three bites, peel and all, spurting juice on the grass. I shuddered to think what that beak might have done to my hand.

“Hang in there, I’ll be back soon,” I told it.

“Bye-bye, birdie,” said Andre, putting Marc down in Anjali’s shadow and taking my hand.

The fountain spouted in four directions; each spout let out a torrent that turned into a stream. Ducking under the first one before it hit the ground, we went into the woods. It was fall there, like in the western Tiffany window—the perfect, peak-leaf October moment when every maple tree is aflame with orange and red. We found purple asters, and Indian paintbrushes with tall, fuzzy black stems that hurt my hands to break, and a rose. It smelled wonderful, but it didn’t disenchant Doc when we got back to the fountain and tried it. Neither did any of the others.

The bird had gotten up and was perched on the edge of the fountain, its head tucked under its good wing. It seemed to be sleeping, which I took as a good sign.