A Grimm Warning (The Land of Stories, #3)(80)

Gretel sighed at the thought of all the peace her cell brought her. Conner looked at Alex and circled his temple with his finger. “She’s nuts!” he mouthed.

But Gretel wasn’t finished with her story. “The worst thing one person can do to another—besides eat them, of course—is to reduce their identity to being only half of something. When someone is treated as half of or less than half of one identity, they’re not being treated like a human at all. Everyone should have the right to individuality.”

Conner slowly stood up and walked away from the cell. “Well, thanks, Lady Gretel!” he said. “We should get going now. We need to figure out where this army went.”

“Wait!” Gretel said. “I can tell you! The army and the soldiers went back to their camp, but the general and his men were headed somewhere else!”

“Where?” Alex asked.

“I don’t know where, just somewhere else,” Gretel said. “The prisoner across from me—they call him the Masked Man because of the sack he wears over his head—he was talking to the general before they let him out. He convinced the general that he needed a dragon to get rid of the fairies and take over the world! He said it was the only way the general would win!”

Alex and Conner exchanged the same confused look. “A dragon?” Alex asked. “But they’ve been extinct for hundreds of years. Our grandmother and her friends were the ones who fought them off during the Dragon Age.”

“Apparently the Masked Man knows where to find one,” Gretel said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. He’s a very unusual man. He’s been in that cell for almost a decade now. He likes to talk to himself at night—sometimes I swear I heard someone else in there with him, but that would be impossible.”

Conner walked to the cell of the Masked Man and peeked inside. “Hey, Alex, this guy has a lot of stuff in here.”

Alex joined him at the cell. The door was still open and they walked inside together. Just being in it gave them the creeps. The walls were covered in bizarre carved illustrations of winged creatures, pirate ships, and animals with big ears and feet. There was a pile of coal and he had carved the pieces into the shapes of hooks, hearts, and swords.

An oval mirror in a silver frame hung on the wall.

“What does a Masked Man need with a mirror?” Conner asked.

“I have no idea,” Alex said. “But we should get out of here. We need to fly by their camp and see what the army is up to.”

They left the cell and went back to the hatch in the ceiling. Alex pointed her wand at the floor and the stones rose to form a small staircase for them to climb through the hatch.

“Good-bye!” Gretel called out. “I hope you can stop them!”

“Us too!” Conner said before climbing onto the roof.

“Good-bye, just Gretel,” Alex said. “Thank you for your help.”

By the time the twins climbed to the roof, Lester had eaten all the long blades of grass. They hopped aboard the giant goose and took off into the sky again.

“The general told half of his men to set up camp somewhere in the southeast where the portal spit us out,” Conner told his sister. “I bet they’ve regrouped by now.”

Alex took Lester’s reins and steered him into the sky high above the south of the Eastern Kingdom. Alex and Conner searched the ground as they passed over it, not sure what they were looking for. However, as soon as the camp came into view they knew exactly what it was.

Hundreds of trees had been cut down to make way for the expansive camp the soldiers had built. There were dozens and dozens of large beige tents set up and the timbered trees had been used to build a wall around the camp.

There were thousands of soldiers setting up and marching around the camp and the soldiers weren’t alone. A thousand or so recruits from Pinocchio Prison were scattered around the camp as well. Giant ogres did the heavy lifting as the soldiers built the camp, witches wove broomsticks out of tree branches, and soldiers trained goblins how to fire cannons and trolls how to shoot rifles.

To Alex and Conner’s horror, their target practice was a line of wooden fairy dummies.

“Mother Goose was right,” Conner said. “They’re preparing for war.”





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN





SENDING THE SWANS


Mother Goose stood by the railing of the grand balcony and watched the skies as she waited for Lester and the twins to return. Emmerich and Bree were standing a little ways from her, having the most fascinating conversation with Froggy and Red.

“So there are six kingdoms, two territories, and one empire?” Emmerich asked, wrapping his head around the lesson Froggy was teaching them on the fairy-tale world.

“Precisely!” Froggy said. “And the leaders of the six kingdoms, including the Fairy Council, make up the Happily Ever After Assembly.”

Red cleared her throat. “There used to be six kingdoms, but now there are five kingdoms and one republic.”

Bree almost went cross-eyed from all the information. “So Red used to be the queen of her own kingdom, which used to be part of the Northern Kingdom until the C.R.A.B. Revolution, was it?” she asked.

“The C.R.A.W.L. Revolution,” Red corrected her. “It stood for Citizen Riots Against Wolf Liberty. The Evil Queen was in power in the Northern Kingdom at the time and she did nothing to stop the wolves terrorizing the farmers’ villages. So we revolted and I got my own kingdom.”