Once upon a time, two children owned the night. They slithered through fields. They tapped at windows. They whispered under doors. They led sleepy and bewildered kids out of their houses and into a redwood forest.
At dawn the next morning, twelve dazed children sat around a little fire under towering pines. Soft ferns grew up from the pine needles that lined the ground. Birds dove and zipped between the enormous trees. The twins’ mother prepared warm milk in a pot over a fire. She served it in cracked mugs to each of the shivering children. Jorinda and Joringel stood, surveying their work.
“How many kids are there in Grimm?” Joringel asked.
“I think about a thousand,” Jorinda replied.
“How many do we have here?”
“Twelve.”
Joringel scratched his head. “Huh. Not quite a majority.”
“No.”
“How are we going to get the rest?”
Jorinda crouched before the other children. “Two kids freed twelve,” she said. “Now we’re fourteen. So fourteen could free . . .”
Across the fire, a small boy’s eyes lit up. “Eighty-four!” he cried.
“Wow!” Jorinda exclaimed. “That was impressive.”
The boy was missing his two front teeth. He spoke very quickly. “You just assume a constant rate of six children per rescuer, and then you multiply—”
Joringel interrupted him. “How many kids could eighty-four free?”
“It’d be ninety-eight, including us,” the gap-toothed boy reported. “And ninety-eight could free five hundred and eighty-eight!”
“So in three days, we could have all the kids in Grimm here,” Jorinda said.
“Easily!”
“Not easily,” their mother objected, pouring more milk into a child’s cup. “But it is, theoretically, possible.”
A little girl with curly black hair and freckles and a cut on her chin stood up. “What are we going to do out here? Once they’re all freed?”
“We’re going to start our own kingdom. A kingdom of children,” Jorinda replied.
A smile slowly stretched across little Eva’s face. “Then we’ll help.”
Their calculations were wrong. Fourteen children did not free eighty-four. They freed a hundred and fifty-eight—for each pair focused on their friends and relatives, who needed far less convincing than strangers did. And, the next night, in one of the most astounding covert operations since the horse at Troy, a hundred and fifty-eight kids, plus the original fourteen, guided every remaining child in Grimm—all nine hundred seventy-seven of them—to the red-wooded forest on the farthest edge of the kingdom. There, before an enormous bonfire of pine needles and fallen branches, the entire population of Grimm between the ages of four and sixteen spread out on the ground (they’d had to leave the toddlers—for sake of speed and stealth; toddlers aren’t very good at either). The children talked animatedly, finding friends and hugging them, rubbing their ankles or their wrists where the shackles had dug into their skin.
Jorinda climbed up onto an enormous fallen log. “Attention!” she cried. She was inaudible over the thrum of a thousand children’s voices. “ATTENTION!” she cried again. No good.
“Shhhhhhhhhh . . .” Joringel whispered. Children love nothing more than to shush other children. So the syllable was taken up first by those in the front, and then spread, like a blanket, all the way to the rear of the group. But then the children took to shushing the shushes, until a veritable shush-war had broken out. Jorinda put her hands on her hips. “This is going to be harder than I thought,” she whispered. “Adults are much better at following directions than kids.”
“That’s why adults stink,” Joringel replied.
Their mother, sitting beside them on the large log, said, “May I?”
Her children shrugged.
She stood up beside them. The children of Grimm continued to shush each other lustily.
Very quietly, she said, “The first one who’s quiet gets cake.” The shushes died away.
Jorinda’s mouth hung open. “Thanks,” she muttered.
Her mother nodded and got down, muttering, “Now I’ve got to find some cake . . .”
Jorinda gazed out over the thousand-plus heads staring back at her through the night. She took a deep breath, and then bellowed, “I AM JORINDA.”
A wave of whispers rushed through the group. “You’re dead!” someone shouted.
“Clearly, I’m not!” Jorinda cried.
Children leaned forward, straining their eyes against the darkness to see the little girl who stood in the dancing light of the great fire.
“The king lied to you!” she shouted. (He hadn’t, of course, lied to them. She had indeed been dead. But that was too hard to explain right now.) “I have returned! With Joringel!” She gripped her brother’s hand and raised it.
Disbelief gave way to a sudden wave of tension. The children’s faces no longer looked happy and free. They were concerned. Was this not what the adults had predicted? Was this not the reason for the laws in the first place? The children began to shift uncomfortably.
“We are not here to rule over you again,” Jorinda announced.
Strained murmurs echoed in the firelit night.
“We were really bad at that.”
Some of the children chuckled. Others murmured.
“Terrible.”
More chuckles than murmurs.
“Joringel and I have brought you here to free you. To resist the rule of the king. To start a kingdom of no kings or queens at all. To create a kingdom of children.”
In all the dark pine forest, there was not a single sound save the hot roar of the bonfire and the breaking of pine needles under hundreds of shifting, nervous children.
“Some of you will watch while some sleep. Some will gather food and cook while some care for the smaller ones. We will stay here as long as we have to. As long as the adults are crazy.”
Murmurs and scattered laughter.
“What if they find us?” someone cried out. “What if they send the soldiers to get us?”
“We will build a fortress!” Joringel cut in. “We will defend ourselves!”
“We are just children!” the voice cried.
The forest grew deathly still. They were, indeed, just children.
But then Jorinda said, “There is a power in children. There is a belief. A strength. A joy that makes just about anything possible.”
I don’t know if you know it, dear reader. But this, without any doubt, is true.
Indeed, something hummed among the children of Grimm. No one said a word, and yet there it was. Belief. Strength. Excitement. Joy. Humming and thrumming through the darkness.
“Will you stay?”
Some heads nodded. Many hesitated.
“Will you?” Joringel cried.
And some children, quietly, said, “Yes.”
“Will you?” Jorinda cried.
And now some children shouted, “Yes!”
“Will you?” Joringel cried.
More answered, “Yes!”
“WILL YOU?” they both shouted together. And the children realized that they were being called, they were being trusted, they were being freed—freed to free themselves. It would be up to them. Together. To free themselves, and their brothers, and their sisters, and their friends.
And a roar answered Jorinda and Joringel. A roar of yes.
And so began perhaps the most amazing few weeks in the history of the Kingdom of Grimm. Out there in the forest, on the edge of the granite quarry, a thousand children began to build a life for themselves.
On the first day, Jorinda and Joringel assigned tasks. Every child was divided into one of two groups, Seekers and Makers. The Seekers were the small, swift, crafty children. They were to sneak back into the towns and houses they’d come from and steal as much as they could. No money, of course, for that was no good in the forest. Only food and blankets, tools and weapons.
Yes. Weapons. For Jorinda and Joringel did not know when the adults would find them. But they would. And when they did, they would be angry. And, perhaps, violent.
The Makers stayed in camp. They prepared the food and gathered moss for beds and built canopies of leaves and branches for when it rained.
Jorinda and Joringel’s mother had never been much of a mother at home. But here, under the towering red cedars, she watched over the littlest ones, hustling them from here to there, telling them stories, feeding them when they were hungry, comforting them when they grew homesick. Jorinda and Joringel watched her and felt a strange mixture of emotions that they could not describe. Still, they were grateful to her.
Finally, under the direct supervision of Joringel and a small boy who lacked his two front teeth, the largest, strongest, most inventive Makers built an earthworks and stockade.
Half a mile from the clearing where the children would sleep, these Makers took stolen axes and began to cut down a ring of great red pine trees. They stacked them to one side, and then, around the roots of their stumps they dug with stolen shovels, until they had piled up earth twelve feet high. They moved in a wide semicircle, directed by the brilliant little boy with a mind for figures and shapes. Each day, they strained against the heat and the soft red wood and the hard red dirt. Each day, the earthwork grew a hundred feet or more in length as two hundred strong boys and girls chopped and heaved and dug and heaved some more. Each night, they returned to camp covered in red dirt, stinking with sweat, smiling widely. At last, the earthwork stretched in a wide band between a ravine that ran down into the quarry on the right side of the forest, and a deep and swift river a quarter mile distant. Then the children hewed the ends of the felled trees into sharp points. Finally, they buried them deep in the earthwork and lashed them together with ropes.
Each night, the children would gather before the cliff that overlooked the quarry, and by the light of the raging bonfire, the children would sing, or teach each other games, or tell stories. And they were happy.
And if this seems strange to you—that, under these difficult, frightening, and outlandish circumstances, children might be happy . . . well, then you don’t know all that much about children.
On the twentieth day since the children had arrived in the forest, the wall and earthwork were complete. Jorinda and Joringel gathered all the Seekers and all the Makers before it, and there was much whooping and laughing and pointing and marveling. The little boy with the gap in his teeth strutted back and forth like a rooster before the structure, grinning comically. As much as sixty feet high in places, six feet thick all around, and a quarter mile long, this was not just a wall. The children had built a fortress. And, in the process, a kingdom.
That was the twentieth day.
On the twenty-first day, the soldiers arrived.
It is hard to hide a wall that size. It is also hard to hide a thousand children. Perhaps it was a woodcutter, come out to gather fardels. Perhaps it was a hunter, chasing game. Perhaps it was truffle farmer, loosing his pigs among the roots.
Whoever it was, someone saw the great wall in the midst of the forest. The stockade that had not been there before. The fortress that had just appeared. That person told someone else, who told someone else. Word soon reached King Herzlos.
The morning on the twenty-first day was clear, and cool. Birds sang and chattered in the swaying trees, and the fallen pine needles swept across the dry red earth like the straw of a broom.
It was not the sort of day one would expect so many people to die.
Up the long red road that led from the Castle Grimm to that forest along the quarry came a company of soldiers. The steel tips of their spears flashed in the rising sun, and the dull iron of their helmets rose and fell like an undulating metal quilt.
From the top of the fortress wall, a cry was raised. Jorinda and Joringel were called, and they came, clambering up the ladder to the small platform that served as a lookout.
“Here they come,” Jorinda whispered. She turned. Little Eva waited at the bottom of the ladder. “This is it,” Jorinda told her. “Get ’em ready.”
Joringel was peering into the distance. “It isn’t many. Maybe a hundred.”
Jorinda pursed her lips. “There’s more coming. Trust me.”
Indeed, another company of soldiers followed the first. In the distance, the children could hear the drums that accompanied the army as it marched.
“Now I see three groups of soldiers,” Joringel said, straining his eyes through the blue morning haze.
Jorinda said, “And I’ll bet you there’s a fourth behind that one. And a fifth behind that. And a sixth behind that.”
Joringel asked, “How many soldiers do you think Herzlos would send?”
“Well, I think the army of Grimm has about three thousand men and women.”
“Right . . .” said Joringel.
“So I’d expect about three thousand.”
Joringel murmured, “They wouldn’t—”
Eva’s head poked up onto the platform. She had climbed a ladder that lay against the stockade. “Three thousand what?” she asked.
“Soldiers,” answered Jorinda. “Is everyone set?”
Eva nodded. Jorinda and Joringel turned and surveyed their force. They were arrayed behind the wall. The little boy with the gap in his teeth ran back and forth, barking orders at the bigger children. Jorinda and Joringel’s mother stood near the cliff overlooking the quarry with bandages and buckets of warm water.
Little Eva had clambered up onto the platform. Her chin was resting between two sharp points of the stockade. She gazed out at the approaching army. Very quietly, she asked, “Are we going to die?”
Joringel turned to her. “I don’t think so, Eva. I don’t think so.”
Suddenly, Jorinda was shouting, “At arms! At ARMS!”
A thousand children gripped makeshift shields with one hand—broken chairs, or, between a few children, tables and even the wooden tops of wells—and in the other, each lifted a weapon. There were a few swords, a few spears, but mostly there were kitchen knives and shovels and broomsticks.
“My friends!” Jorinda cried. “Listen now!”
The children’s frightened, determined eyes were on Jorinda. Weapons shifted, sweaty hands gripped the handles of the makeshift shields. No other sound was made.
“We have lived here for three weeks. We have lived with no parents. No kings or queens. No adults at all, save one. And we did pretty well, didn’t we?”
Some of the children cheered. Others raised their weapons high.
“We journeyed into the wood to escape the prisons of our lives, and here we built and grew and learned. We have made lives here, in the forest. It’s the oldest story: A child flees his broken home. He comes to the forest, where he faces his gravest fears and realizes his greatest hopes. But always there comes a time to leave. When the child must take what he has learned in the wood and return to that broken home. To mend it. To save it.”
The army of children was silent. Trees creaked in the gentle wind.
“Today, if we triumph, may be that day. Today, if we resist, if we succeed, if we survive, the adults might see how they have hurt us. How they have betrayed us. How they have neglected us. We may win without shedding a drop of blood. That, anyway, is the plan.”
Behind Jorinda, the sound of marching grew louder. The sky overhead was clear and blue.
“So stand firm! Stick to the plan! And—”
“JORINGEL!”
The shout came from the other side of the wall.
“JORINGEL!”
Jorinda and Joringel turned. There, before the wall, Herzlos sat astride an enormous black steed. The scars on his face looked dark and deep with fury. He looked up and saw, above the sharp points of the stockade, two heads: Joringel’s and Jorinda’s.
Herzlos started. “How—” he stammered. “How are you still alive?”
Behind him was arrayed a line of a hundred men. Behind that was another line, and another, and another, ten deep. And behind that, more divisions marched into the forest.
“Oh, who cares?” he snapped. “SURRENDER!”
Jorinda spat back, “We won’t!”
Herzlos gritted his teeth and smiled. “I have assembled the greatest military force in the history of Grimm.”
“And you would use it to attack children?” Jorinda asked.
Herzlos smiled. “Oh, I will.”
“And your soldiers?” Joringel demanded.
Herzlos’s face was grim. “They will do as I tell them. Surrender now!”
And Jorinda cried back, “Never!”
Behind her, a thousand children roared. It was an eerie sound, the roar of children. High and fierce and wild. The soldiers shivered.
“Then you will be taken,” Herzlos bellowed up at the walls. “Alive or dead.” His eyes narrowed. “Preferably the latter.”
Jorinda and Joringel both swallowed hard.
Sorry. I need to say something.
In my first book, A Tale Dark & Grimm, there was a battle scene. Many people enjoyed it. But some did not. One person in particular did not. My wife.
I told her, “I can’t help it! There was a great battle! What do you want me to do? Summarize it?”
Well, she told me she wasn’t happy about it, but if I was sure that was really how the story went, she guessed she would deal with it.
Well, I am back to apologize to her. And to you, dear reader, if you happen to find battles upsetting and gratuitous. If you’d like, you can skip right to where the children have been bloodied and the battle is lost. It’s here.
As for the rest of you—enjoy, if you can . . .
“Soldiers of Grimm! READY!” Herzlos screamed.
The second and third rows of soldiers drew bows from their backs and nocked arrows in their bowstrings.
Jorinda’s face went pale.
“AIM!”
“They wouldn’t,” Joringel whispered. “Would they fire on children?”
“LOOSE!”
Jorinda and Joringel ducked, and Eva screamed to the children inside the fort, “ARROWS!”
Two hundred arrows drew a high arc over the children’s fortifications. Some got lost in the foliage above. But most found a clear path, peaked just above Jorinda’s and Joringel’s heads, and then began to dive directly for the assembled children.
“COVER!” Eva screamed, and hundreds of makeshift shields rose to create a solid wall of wood above the children’s heads. Arrows hit the wood with thuds and plunks, and fell away, harmless. Except for one. One arrow found a small hole between two children’s shields, and buried itself in a small girl’s thigh.
Her shriek pierced the forest. Jorinda and Joringel scanned their force for her, and found her, gripping her leg and wailing. Their mother pushed through the children, bringing the bandages and warm water. Joringel turned and peered over the wall just in time to see the captain raise his arm and cry “LOOSE!” And a second batch of arrows were loosed over fortifications.
“COVER!” Eva screamed again, and shields were gripped. Plunk plunk thunk. Screams. A large boy had moved to help the little girl, and in so doing had dropped his shield. Now an arrow was lodged in his neck, and the children around him were screaming to see blood burbling up over his shirt.
“LOOSE!”
“COVER!”
The arrows rose, found the gap between the high fortress wall and the foliage above, and fell upon the children. Plunk plunk plunk. The shields held.
Jorinda cried, “Courage!”
“They’re coming!” Joringel shouted.
Jorinda spun and looked over the wall. The first row of soldiers were running right for them. They crossed the space in an instant, buried their feet in the high, red earthwork, and threw themselves onto the wall.
The soldiers climbed a foot or two up the slick, shorn tree trunks before sliding back down again. The logs of the wall were tightly lashed together at the top, leaving no gaps for footholds or handholds. Soldiers fell, ran at the wall again, leaped onto it, and then pathetically slid to the bottom again, like cats trying to climb a window. Jorinda cocked a crooked smile at Joringel.
But then Herzlos bellowed, “LADDERS! LOOSE!” And as another brace of arrows flew over the wall and Eva screamed, “COVER,” forty men ran forward with twenty huge ladders and laid them against the wooden wall.
“CLIMB!” the captain commanded. And the men started to climb the ladders.
“Incoming, Eva,” Joringel said, and Eva turned and screamed, “INCOMING!”
Joringel said to Jorinda, “I wish we could just push the ladders off.” But they could not. The platform only stood at one narrow place in the wall, and the ladders were far from it.
Jorinda said, “We’re ready.”
On the ground within the fort, a hundred children surged forward in pairs. One of each pair carried a shield. The other carried a sack. Eva directed the pairs to where the ladders were, while the little boy with the missing teeth watched from the shadow of the wall. The children waited.
When the first soldier climbed to the top of the wall and peered over the sharpened tree trunks, he was met with a rock directly in his face. It struck him in the temple, and he fell from the ladder and landed in a heap at the base of the wall. He did not move.
“Direct hit!” the little boy shouted. The children cheered. Those with the sacks drew out more rocks, while the children with the shields waited, lest another volley of arrows come over the wall.
Two more faces emerged above the stockade. Smack smack smack. Three stones were loosed at the two faces, and all three were thrown true. The two soldiers were both knocked off their ladders and fell to the ground, and the children could hear the snap of breaking bones. Another face emerged. Two stones were thrown at him, but the first missed, and the second glanced off his iron helmet. The soldier quickly threw his leg over the wall and leaped to the earth inside the fortress.
“INSIDE! INSIDE!” Eva screamed.
Jorinda and Joringel watched as ten of their largest boys and girls ran to the intruder. The soldier seemed to have hurt his leg leaping down from the wall. The children ran at him with clubs and swords and shovels and then pummeled him—while two kids with spears watched from a few feet off—until he was still. Two more soldiers were knocked off the wall, and one more made it inside, and another team of ten ran forward and beat him senseless.
Way up in a red pine sat three black forms. Birds, actually. Ravens, to be precise.
“Not bad! Not bad!” shouted the first raven.
“Not bad? Incredible!” cried the second.
“Kill him!” screamed the third, as the children pummeled the soldier. “Beat his brains in! Break his arms! Shatter his legs! Cut off his—”
“That’s enough,” said the first raven curtly.
Down below, Herzlos glowered at the fortifications as his men went toppling off of ladders or disappeared over the wall, never to be seen again. No one opened the gate, as they were instructed to do. There were no screams of frightened children. Nor of dying children. Dying children would have been all right with Herzlos, too. He ground his teeth in his head and barked curses at his men.
Inside the fortress, five men had made it over the wall, and the children were struggling to subdue them all at once. One of the soldiers had evaded the band of ten sent at him and had run right into the middle of the army of children.
“HOLD FAST!” Joringel bellowed at them. And, for the most part, they did. They used their weapons to bludgeon him from all sides. He struck back with the butt of his spear, reluctant to kill. Eventually, the children beat him to the ground.
“Hooray!” Joringel cried.
The battle continued like this. Five, ten, even twenty men at a time made it over the wall, only to be beaten into submission by a thousand children. Jorinda and Joringel’s mother, aided by a few older kids, tended to the wounded children.
An hour passed.
Two.
Three.
“Blast it!” Herzlos barked. He had lost two hundred men to injury or to whatever was happening behind the wall. Absolutely zero progress had been made. “Blast it, curse it, boil it!”
He didn’t actually say any of those things. He said words that I would never, ever print in a book.
Feel free to use your imagination.
The children were growing tired. But they had a burgeoning stack of unconscious men lined up along the bottom of the stockade. Occasionally, one would come to, and a kid would knock him out again with a frying pan.
The day wore on. The sun moved into the west.
Herzlos rode his black charger back and forth, back and forth before his men, cursing and scowling. And then, as the sun began to dip in the orange sky, Herzlos looked up at Jorinda and Joringel on the top of the wall at exactly the same moment as they looked down at him.
Their eyes locked.
The children smiled.
“That’s it!” Herzlos exploded. “Forget them all!” (He didn’t say “Forget them all.”) “All of them! Bring forth the machines of war!”
The call was repeated back along the lines of soldiers. “BRING FORTH THE MACHINES OF WAR!”
“BRING FORTH THE MACHINES OF WAR!”
“BRING FORTH THE MACHINES OF WAR!”
Joringel frowned. “What are machines of war?”
Jorinda’s face had gone ashen. She gazed out over the armies and murmured, “You don’t want to know.”
The ladders were withdrawn from the wall. The soldiers trapped inside fought with the children.
At last, the final soldier inside the wall fell. The children all heaved and panted, sweat dripping down their faces. Among them lay the unconscious forms of hundreds of soldiers. Their bodies lay in heaps upon the dry pine needles, dappled with the golden afternoon sun.
“Huzzah!” cried the little boy with the gap between his teeth. Soon the cry was taken up by all the children. “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”
Jorinda said to Eva, “Go tell them to dump the unconscious soldiers in the ravine. With any luck, they’ll come to in the middle of the night and just wander home.”
“Shouldn’t we keep them as hostages?” Joringel asked.
But Jorinda replied, “Herzlos doesn’t care about hostages. He wants blood.”
Eva slipped down the ladder to deliver Jorinda’s orders. Soon, the bodies were being dragged away as Jorinda and Joringel’s mother directed the care for the injured children.
The sun began to dip in the sky. Outside the walls, soldiers started to set up camp. Jorinda and Joringel watched. “They may not attack again tonight,” Joringel speculated. Jorinda said nothing. She watched the horizon.
“They’re coming,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
Jorinda swallowed hard. “The machines of war.”
“How do you know?” Joringel peered into the distance.
“Listen.”
Joringel listened. Sure enough, he could just make out a faint rumbling through the trees.
“What are machines of war?”
Jorinda didn’t answer. Down below, soldiers were clearing a path. Smaller trees were being cut down.
“They must be huge,” Joringel murmured.
And then, from out of a close of cedar, two wooden wheels appeared, and then two more. They bore a platform. On the platform was a giant arm, with a cup at one end. In the cup was an enormous boulder.
Joringel stopped breathing. “What . . . what is it?”
Jorinda felt her fingers creep to her temples. She said, “It’s called a catapult.”
Rolling on four wheels, the giant wooden catapult moved into a space the archers made for it. Behind the catapult came oxcarts—one, two, three, four . . . Each one carried enormous boulders. Six men ran around the catapult, loosing ropes and checking springs.
Behind it, another catapult appeared through the trees.
And then one more.
Joringel stared at the war machines, trying to figure out what they were for. The six men who tended the first catapult were looking at the darkening sky and discussing something furiously. A captain rode his horse up to the group and dismounted. Jorinda and Joringel watched as the six men shook their heads and raised their hands.
“What going on?” Joringel asked. Jorinda did not know. They squinted to make out the men’s faces. Darkness was falling fast. Inside the fortress, the bonfire had been lit. Unconscious soldiers were being unceremoniously dumped in the ravine that ran along the side of the wood.
Outside the wall, Herzlos spurred his horse around and trotted up to his front lines. He called up to Jorinda and Joringel.
“Surrender, blast it!” he cried. “Surrender, or we’ll bring this wall down!”
Jorinda didn’t respond. Her fingers still worked at her temples.
“You know what these can do, girl! After all, you had them made!”
“You did?” Joringel hissed.
Jorinda pressed her lips together and nodded. The sky in the west was a mess of red and orange. In the east, it was nearly black. She took a deep breath. She cried, “You can’t fire on us. Not tonight. It’s too dark.”
Herzlos squinted up at the little girl. After a moment, he glanced angrily back at his catapults, and then up to Jorinda.
Joringel whispered, “Are you bluffing?”
Jorinda’s lips were white. Joringel looked back and forth from his sister to King Herzlos, who was glaring up at them through the gathering gloom.
At last, Herzlos cried, “Boil your head!” (Or something like it.) “You have until dawn to surrender! Then we unleash a rain of fiery death down upon you and your little brats. Once we begin, we will not stop. Not until every one of you is dead.” He jerked his horse’s head back toward his troops and rode away, framed by the crimson sunset.
Joringel gazed at the machines of war, all bristling with wooden levers and twining ropes, laden with their enormous, craggy boulders. “Can we stop them? The catapults?”
Slowly, Jorinda shook her head back and forth. “No,” she said quietly. “No, we can’t.”
The children sat around the great bonfire, their faces solemn in the dancing light. No one could sleep. Fear of the morning—of machines of war and soldiers bent on bloodshed—pricked at the children’s hearts and peeled their exhausted eyelids back from their eyes. Those who tried to lie down soon sat up in a panting sweat. Tomorrow was the day of judgment. Tomorrow, many of them would be dead.
Jorinda and Joringel’s mother gazed out at the troubled faces of the children. “They need something to take their minds off the morrow,” she said.
Jorinda shrugged. “So do I.”
“Well?” her mother asked. “I’ve been trying to hold off, but I suppose now might be the time. Will you tell me where you’ve been? What you’ve done over the last year?”
Joringel’s head had been buried in his arms. He looked up at his sister.
Jorinda said, “It’s kind of a long story.”
Eva, sitting nearby, said, “That’s my favorite kind.”
Joringel smiled, but shook his head. “We just told the whole thing . . .”
“To whom?” asked their mother.
Jorinda looked at Joringel. He shrugged. She smiled. “To the Devil. And his grandmother.”
Their mother furrowed her brow. “What?”
Eva leaned over. “What?”
The little boy with the gap in his teeth said, “Well, now we’ve got to hear it.”
Their mother said, quietly, “It might lift their morale.”
Jorinda looked out over the children. They were a despondent, desultory crew.
Jorinda’s and Joringel’s eyes met.
Jorinda half smiled.
And Joringel said, “Okay.”
He pulled himself up on the great log so he was sitting beside his sister, and the children by the fire pulled their thin blankets closer around their bodies. And Joringel began:
Once upon a time, in the days when fairy tales really happened, there lived a man and his wife . . .
“Whoa!” cried Eva. “How did your voice get like that?”
Joringel grinned and shrugged. “I don’t know. It tends to do that when I tell the story.”
“Weird,” whispered the little boy.
Their mother squinted curiously at her son.
Joringel went on, and indeed, his voice was so bold and clear that children a hundred yards away from the bonfire, tossing and turning under ragged blankets, sat up and listened.
More than anything else—more than their house, their garden, their tree—this couple wanted a child. But they did not have one . . .
All night, Jorinda and Joringel told their story. The children gasped and laughed and stared at Jorinda and Joringel in disbelief. Their mother bit her lip and hung on her children’s every word. The moon dipped down in the west just as the sky in the east grew gray with dawn. Birds started to sing in the branches above the children’s heads. The bonfire guttered and died, its rich, smoky smell wafting over the little kingdom in the trees.
When Jorinda and Joringel got to the part of the story in the Märchenwald, their mother sat straight up. When they spoke, in their booming, bold voices, of meeting a man who claimed to be narrating stories from their world, their mother scratched her head. When he talked about telling his own story, and how it helped him, she started to smile.
Jorinda and Joringel told the tale through their time in Hell. Then their mother insisted on hearing what happened next.
“But you were there for it!” Joringel objected.
“Please,” his mother whispered. “I think it will help.”
So they told of returning to Grimm. Of gathering the children. Of making a life out here in the woods.
“Go on,” their mother urged them.
They told of the soldiers coming, and the battle that had raged through the day.
Finally, when they spoke of the machines of war rolling through the trees, their hearts began hammering in their chests, their breath grew short, and they could not go on.
At last, the clearing was silent in the gray dawn, save for the birds.
“What happens next?” their mother asked. The children of Grimm leaned forward to hear. Mist rose from the forest floor. A bullfrog croaked in the distance.
“Nothing,” said Jorinda. “That’s it. We told you a story. Now we’re here.”
“But what happens next?” their mother asked again.
Her children shrugged. “We don’t know. It hasn’t happened yet,” said Joringel.
“The catapults fire on us, and we all die?” Jorinda muttered.
Their mother’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “You’re telling your story, right?” Joringel nodded. Jorinda watched the glowing embers of the bonfire. “So? Keep telling it. What happens next?”
Jorinda and Joringel glanced at each other, confused.
In the rising dawn outside the walls, soldiers rushed back and forth across the great camp. Men and women donned their mail and sharpened their weapons. The teams of soldiers operating the catapults tightened ropes and shouted orders at one another. King Herzlos rode his black charger back and forth before his assembled troops.
Finally, one of the technicians called out, “Your majesty! We’re ready!”
Herzlos nodded and spurred his horse. “AT ARMS!” he cried. “AT ARMS!”
Three thousand soldiers lifted their weapons to their shoulders and advanced to their places before the wooden wall. Catapult cranks whined loudly as they were turned.
“JORINDA! JORINGEL!” Herzlos cried. “THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO SURRENDER! THE CATAPULTS AWAIT!” He was answered with silence. So he leaned his head back and bellowed, “SURRENDER, OR DIE!”
Inside the walls, the children heard Herzlos. They had not prepared for battle. They still sat on the ground, half covered in blankets, listening to Jorinda and Joringel’s mother as she instructed her children to keep telling their story. A shiver of panic ran through the group.
But the twins’ mother stared steadily at her children. “Just tell us what happens next.”
“They’re about to assault the fortress, Mama,” said Joringel.
“We should be getting ready,” added Jorinda, anxiety beginning to lace her voice. “We should have been getting ready hours ago.”
“Tell us what happens next,” their mother insisted. Her voice was firm.
“Why?” Joringel asked. The children around the campfire shifted nervously, eyes darting between Jorinda and Joringel on the one hand and their mother on the other.
“Tell us,” their mother repeated. “Tell us.”
Jorinda rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she snapped. “Another great piece of advice from our brilliant mother.” Her mother winced.
Once upon a time, Jorinda began, her voice laced with angry sarcasm, a kingdom of children sat on the ground behind a great wall. They were scared.
Beyond the wall was arrayed the largest army the Kingdom of Grimm had ever seen. At its head rode a tyrant bent on murdering kids. As dawn rose, that army had prepared for battle, while inside the walls, the children sat and listened to stories.
Shivers of anxiety ricocheted among the children of Grimm.
The soldiers lined up before the wooden wall, and the catapults were readied for the assault. Technicians turned huge iron cranks to tighten the coils of rope. Soldiers dressed the enormous boulders with cloth, soaked in oil. King Herzlos cried to the walls—
“SURRENDER, JORINDA! THIS IS YOUR LAST FLIPPING CHANCE.” A shiver ran through the children. “JORINGEL! SURRENDER!”
Jorinda faltered for a moment. Her face grew longer, paler.
But Herzlos’s cry was not answered—because the children were telling a story. So he raised his arm. Three thousand soldiers stood at attention. Three catapults strained at their great, wooden triggers. Three great boulders, covered in oiled cloth, were lit with flame. They hissed in their wooden cups. Herzlos dropped his arm. Three triggers were pulled. Three flaming boulders rose on high arcs into the sky—
Children began to scream. Joringel looked at them, and then up. Hanging in the air, tracing a high arc against the clear blue sky, were three orbs of fire—like three new suns. They seemed to move very slowly, gaining altitude. The screams of the children sounded far away. As the great fiery orbs reached the top of their parabola, they stopped and hung, just for an instant, in midair. And then they began to fall. Slowly at first. Then faster. And faster. And suddenly the screams of the children were very loud, and there was a rushing, roaring sound from the fire as it tore the air, followed by a horrific crash.
One of the stones hit the wall from directly above, shearing off the top five feet of the strong wooden structure and burying itself at the wall’s base. Its flames licked the dry wood and lashed ropes. A second stone went sailing over the children’s heads. It landed with a crash on the very edge of the quarry, where the trees were thin. It scattered them like ninepins, and then went caroming over the side of the cliff. The third stone landed with a sickening thud at the edge of the group of children and came to rest on a small girl’s leg. She screamed horribly, and the children around her tried to yank her away from the stone and beat the flames from her clothes.
“Quickly,” Jorinda and Joringel’s mother said. “Keep telling the story! Now!”
Jorinda’s eyes were wide, staring at the horrible scene. She stammered. Joringel cut in.
Outside the wall, soldiers cheered.
As he said it, the children heard the sound rise up from beyond the wall.
Boulders were fetched from the oxcarts that stood waiting and were heaved onto the great wooden spoons. Herzlos shouted at his troops, “Don’t attack until my word! Wait until the catapults have done their job!”
Jorinda went on:
The ropes coiled back around the catapults’ crankshafts. The oiled cloth on the stones was set aflame. Herzlos raised his arm. He dropped it. Three burning boulders traced their high, silent arc into the air, and—
A horrible tearing sound ripped through the wood. The children saw the top of their great wall shorn clear off in three different places. The boulders went careening into the clearing. Children leaped to their feet and dove out of the way.
“Now what?” their mother cried. “What happens now?” Children were screaming and huddling together. Suddenly, the fire from one of the boulders caught the pine needles on the ground. Flame swept out from the rock in a great wave. The children’s screams became shrill with panic.
Jorinda looked helplessly at Joringel.
“I don’t know!” he cried, his voice practically drowned by the roar of the spreading fire and the screams of the children.
“You’re telling the story!” their mother cried. “It’s your story!”
Joringel shrugged, dumb with panic.
Jorinda grabbed her hair with her hands. Children beat at the flames on the ground and screamed as the fire spread in a great circle around them.
“You’ve told your story!” their mother shouted over the roar of the flames. “Now use it. Use what you know! Make something new!”
And suddenly, they understood.
Jorinda’s eyes found Joringel’s.
Make something new.
In the midst of the fire, and the screaming, they understood.
That tears can bear a boat upon their waters. That weeds can blossom into wildflowers. That stone can be carved into art. Joringel began:
From up in a high red cedar, three ravens stared angrily at the carnage on the forest floor.
“It isn’t right,” said the first raven.
Up above, in the tree, the first raven said exactly that.
“We should do something about it,” said the second.
Up in the tree, the second repeated Joringel’s words. Then he added, “Wait, we should?”
“I’m gonna kill them!” the third raven screamed. And as Joringel described it, the raven did scream that. He began beating his wings angrily against the air. “I’m gonna beat in their brains, I’m gonna break their legs, I’m gonna tear off their—”
“We get it,” said the first raven.
“Well? What do we do?” said the second, hopping around the branch in agitation.
“Defend the forest!” the third raven cried. “Defend the kingdom! Defend the children!”
And with that, he dove from the branch. His two brothers, inspired by his courage, dove right after him.
Outside the wall, Herzlos grinned gleefully. The fortress was a ruin of fire and splinters. Soon his men would be able to pour in and take the children by storm. Dead or alive. “Catapults!” he cried. “Ready your—”
Suddenly, there was an explosion of black feathers. Herzlos went staggering backward, stunned.
A large black raven was suddenly stabbing at the tyrant with his beak. Herzlos waved his arms at it frantically, trying to beat it back. His men stared at the surreal sight. They had never seen a king attacked by a bird.
Just as he seemed to be fending the crazed raven off, a second slammed, like a missile, into Herzlos’s head. The tyrant went flying earthward. He lay on his back, kicking and flailing at the two insane, homicidal black birds.
“BLAST!” he cried (he wasn’t saying “Blast”). “BLASTBLASTBLAST! Help ME—EEEK!” This last scream came as the third raven plunged right between Herzlos’s legs, beak first. Herzlos’s hands flew to his groin, while trying to cover his face with his arms. It was no good. The ravens thrashed him mercilessly.
Inside the fortress, Joringel went on:
His soldiers stared as the great, the terrifying, the merciless King Herzlos writhed on the ground, being attacked by a storm of black feathers and sharp black beaks. Herzlos screamed and screamed and screamed.
Jorinda grinned and took over.
Still, the soldiers had their orders. As the catapults were loaded with great, flaming stones, the men readied their swords and spears and shields, steadying themselves for the final assault on the fortress of children. But before the crankshafts were set, before the men could rush the broken wall, a strange sound came echoing through the wood.
It sounded like howling and roaring and baying and barking and growling all at once. As if some horrible menagerie of beasts was about to be unleashed on the soldiers from behind. The men at the back turned to look. And indeed, they saw one of the strangest sights they had ever beheld.
Joringel knew what was coming. He bit his lip and smiled. Jorinda continued:
They saw a monster of a man: enormous, hideous, his huge body terminating at the top of his shoulders—which towered over a long scrawny neck, craning out like a vulture’s. A bald head with a great white beard, tiny black teeth, and round, red-rimmed eyes was perched at the end of the neck. This ogre held a dozen chains, and at the end of each, a black beast, huge and ferocious and slavering, bayed and cried and struggled to be set loose.
And indeed the children could, from over the wall, hear a cacophony of wild animal noises.
The soldiers who saw the beasts dropped their weapons and fled. The great ogre Malchizedek loosed the animals from their chains. The beasts flew at the undefended flank of Herzlos’s army. A great black cat landed on one soldier and broke his spine with a swipe of his claws. A dog the size of a wolf grabbed another soldier by the thigh and tore his leg clean off. A great black bear cuffed a man so hard his head crumpled in his helmet. Soldiers screamed and ran. And then Malchizedek himself pulled a great, double-headed battle-ax from his back and began swinging it. Terror swept the left flank of Herzlos’s army.
Just then, the children saw some soldiers crawling over the holes in the great wall. One man had made it over and was coming right for the children. Some of the bigger kids rushed to greet him. But the soldier, seeing them, screamed, turned to one side, and kept running. He had not been coming for them. No. He was running for his life.
Still, Joringel went on, the right flank of Herzlos’s army pressed forward, ready to assault the remains of the fortress. Three captains beat at the ravens, trying to rescue their king. “Forget me!” Herzlos cried. “Fire the catapults! Fire the catapults and assault the flipping fortress! NOW!” A raven poked him in the eye. “BLAST!”
Inside the fortress, the fire had spread. There was now a towering wall of it, running from one end of the clearing to another. It ate up the ground and licked at the frightened children.
“Hurry!” Jorinda and Joringel’s mother cried. “Finish this!”
Jorinda gazed at the carnage. Joringel shook his head. “How?”
“I don’t know.” Jorinda’s face was pale.
The children near them stared desperately.
And then Joringel said, “Eddie?”
The panic slid from Jorinda’s face. She said, “Eddie.”
Jorinda was suddenly speaking as quickly as she could, letting her voice boom out over the screams of the children and roar of the fire.
The earth began to shake.
And indeed, the earth began to shake.
Children were thrown from their feet.
Children were, in fact, thrown from their feet.
And then there was a peal like thunder. It was so loud that everyone—children inside the wall, soldiers outside of it—bent over and grabbed their ears.
All of that happened.
Then came the sound of tearing and scraping and ripping, as if stone was being rent asunder.
Which, Joringel cut in, it was. For up out of the granite quarry that lay behind the clearing, erupting from beneath the stone, there rose an enormous creature. His skin was pink, but thin—so thin you could see his black bones through it.
As he said this, a giant, fleshy mass appeared.
It rose from behind the cliff. It was a wide, pink head, and then a black spine, a huge, pink belly, and finally a great, massive, fleshy tail.
Jorinda and Joringel were gaping and grinning at the same time. For as Joringel described it, the creature did indeed rise out of the quarry. The children said, in unison,
It was the Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende.
And they pronounced it perfectly.
And then the gigantic body came crashing down in the clearing, and children were thrown this way and that, and the creature roared—so loud and long it blew the trees backward and knocked half the wall down. The soldiers suddenly could see into the clearing. They did not like what they saw.
They saw a humongous beast—a humongous pink salamander—roaring and blowing fire from its mouth into the sky.
Then it stopped.
There was a moment of total silence, when not a soldier, not a child, not a single leaf moved, as if all were paralyzed by the deafening sound, the horrible sight, and the vomitous smell of the giant beast.
A raven landed next to Jorinda. “Eddie says hi.”
And then three catapults loosed three flaming boulders into the air.
They traced a tall arc. At their zenith, each paused, high, high above the earth, their flaming orange framed by the blue sky. Then they fell. Right for the huddled, frightened children.
Joringel bared his teeth and said,
The Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende, watched the great boulders as they screamed toward the ground. He bounded to his left and wrapped his huge, fleshy body around a thousand screaming children.
A thousand screaming children were suddenly enveloped in Eddie’s pink, foul-smelling flesh.
The fiery boulder crashed to the earth, igniting the pine needles all around the children, and then went rolling past them and off the side of the cliff. The flames raged all around the clearing. The air was so thick with smoke and heat it was getting hard to breathe. Eddie stayed wrapped around the children as the flames licked his skin.
Everything happened just as Joringel was describing it. Jorinda took over:
A second boulder, its aim perfect and deadly, fell exactly where Jorinda and Joringel had been standing a moment ago. But now, the Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende, stood there, with Jorinda and Joringel and all the other children huddled behind him.
Suddenly, a boulder slammed into Eddie’s side. The children ducked their heads. Eddie was rocked sideways. The boulder exploded on impact. Eddie began to make a sound like hacking, or coughing.
“Is he hurt?” Jorinda cried.
A raven, huddling for protection between Jorinda’s legs, said, “No! That’s him laughing.”
“Really?”
“Really!”
Joringel went on.
And then a third boulder completed its arc. This one was aimed deeper. Directly for the center of the children. Their screams became shrill. The flaming stone would not hit Eddie. It would fly over him. It would land on top of hundreds of children—
And just as the third boulder plummeted into the cowering crowd, Eddie flicked his enormous fleshy tail over their heads and smacked the boulder with it. And the stone exploded. Like fireworks. Like the largest display of fireworks you’ve ever seen. A million microscopic shards of flame flew all over the forest, and the children gaped at the most beautiful display of pyrotechnics ever witnessed in the Storied Kingdoms.
The Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende, lifted his head and opened his mouth and sprayed a column of fire, red and white and aquamarine, looping across the clearing and over the remains of the wall. The kids who had not done so already threw themselves to the ground, and for an instant it was as if they were all lying beneath one giant quilt of flame.
When it finally subsided, Jorinda said:
The Eidechse von Feuer, der Menschenfleischfressende, leaped forward, smothering the flames that raced over the clearing.
Which Eddie instantly did, extinguishing the flames with his great, pink body.
He blew another column of flame over the heads of Herzlos’s soldiers. They screamed like babies.
The soldiers duly screamed like babies.
He advanced upon them, shattering the wall under his huge frame, roaring and blowing fire into the sky. The soldiers leaped to their feet and ran for their stinking lives.
All of that happened. Joringel grinned at his sister. She looked like she was having fun. He took over.
As Eddie approached, Herzlos the oppressor cowered on the ground, unable to rise from where the ravens had beaten him. When the great salamander opened his leviathan jaws again, every remaining soldier ran—save Herzlos. And when Eddie blew his fire across the forest floor, Herzlos glowed like a red ember, and then grayed, and then blackened. And died.
It happened just as Joringel described it.
The rest of the soldiers fled, and the great salamander went loping after them, roaring and blowing fire to the heavens. The children cheered. Malchizedek wiped his brow and smiled. His creatures padded up to him, rubbing their glossy, obsidian coats against one another. And the three ravens pumped their wings and chest-bumped and spun in manic, delirious circles.
Jorinda and Joringel silently watched the celebrations. And then Jorinda reached out her little hand, and Joringel reached out his, and they held on to one another.
And then their mother came up behind them and put her arms around their small, heaving shoulders, and held on to them, too.
And as Jorinda and Joringel watched the giant pink salamander chasing Herzlos’s armies, and the children celebrating, and an ogre grinning, and three ravens dancing around like idiots, they at last understood that their problems would never have been solved by trying to cover them up or choke them back or pretend they didn’t exist. By repression.
No, their problems could only be solved by expression. By telling their tales, and by making up new ones, too.
And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s okay. I do.
Now that I’ve said it, I do.
And now, after three novels, hundreds of pages, and more death and despair than should ever be printed in books ostensibly written for children, we have finally arrived at
The End