I reach the top of the hill, the cottage door. A chill wind howls across me. The door flies open.
But how could it be open? It’s too easy.
I walk inside. There’s no Talia. No Talia. Instead, there’s only Malvolia, Malvolia in the flesh. I’ve never seen her, but I recognize her from her piercing, black eyes.
“Where’s Talia?” I say.
The old woman shakes her head. “She’s here, if you can get to her.”
“Get to her? I got past your never-ending hill. I answered your questions.”
She chuckles. “Mere trivia. To be worthy of a princess, one must face a dragon.”
“A dragon? I can’t…” I picture getting fried by a dragon. But then I think about it. I couldn’t answer any of those questions, either, and yet I did. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be able to walk uphill for three days, but I did. I was motivated, maybe for the first time in my life. So if I have to slay a dragon, maybe I can do that, too.
“Do I at least get a sword?” I say.
“’Tis not that kind of dragon,” she replies.
“Then what…?”
She moves aside to reveal a part of the room I hadn’t seen. It’s a sort of office setup with a desk and chair. In the chair sits my dad. He has a stack of paper about three feet high in front of him and another, marked URGENT, to the side.
“Can this wait, Jack?” He gestures toward his work. “I’m a little busy.”
“I didn’t…I came to find the princess. You know that.”
“To be worthy of a princess, you must face your dragon,” Malvolia says. “Your greatest fear.” She gestures toward my hands. I look down and see that I’m holding the notebook where I’ve been drawing my garden design. I glance at Dad, then at Malvolia. “You mean I have to show it to him?”
Malvolia nods. “Your greatest fear.”
Outside, the wind whistles through the trees. I take one step toward the desk. Then another. “Dad? I have to tell you something.”
Dad tears his eyes away from his work. “What is it?” He looks back at his papers. His phone and his cell phone both start ringing at the same time.
But I hold out the book. “I…it’s just something I’ve been fooling around with.”
Malvolia clears her throat, and when I turn, I see her disapproval.
“No, that’s wrong,” I say. “I’ve been working on this. It’s a design. My design for a garden.”
My dad opens it. For a long moment, I can only hear the pages and the wind outside. I can’t look at Dad, so I look out the window at the chestnut tree, the one I saw before with the streamer of green fabric blowing at the top. I’m sure now that Talia is here. She climbed the tree, like I taught her, and tied the green fabric to the branch, so I would see it, so I would come rescue her.
“So?” Dad says.
“So I want to do this,” I say, “to do landscape design. I’m good at it.”
Dad rolls his eyes. “You think so?”
I can tell he doesn’t, but I say, “Yeah, I do.”
And then the dragon does the thing I most feared. He doesn’t breathe fire. He laughs. Uproariously, as if he’s never heard anything more hilarious in his life. There are tears running down his face, and between gales of laughter, he says, “You, a landscape designer? You!”
“What’s wrong with it?” I fight the urge to stomp my foot. I’m reverting to infancy around my dad, but I know I have to hold my ground.
Dad clutches his sides to contain his hilarity. “I pay a guy fifty bucks a month who has more talent than you!” He holds out some brochures for business schools, brochures that seem to have materialized in a third big pile on his desk. “Here’s what you need, an education, a degree from a good school—I’ll pay someone off to make sure you get in and get through. And then, after that, I can get you a job.”
“You’ll get me a job? Why?”
“Haven’t you noticed, Jack? You’re a loser, a slacker. You’ve never succeeded in anything in your life, no matter how much we do for you. We have some hope for Meryl, but the only way you won’t be a complete embarrassment to your mother and me is if you let us control every aspect of your life.”
“That’s…” I feel wet heat behind my eyes, and I try to control it. I have to stay calm. “That’s not true.”
“Loser. Party boy. You couldn’t even get Amber to stay with you.”
“Amber?” This is so out of left field I don’t comprehend his words for a second. “I don’t even want Amber.”
“But you see, that’s what you do. Whenever anything gets difficult for you, you walk away, you give up. You couldn’t keep Amber, so now you want this girl. When you fail to save her and she dies, you’ll decide you didn’t like her, either. That’s just your way. You’ve never been serious about anything in your life. You’re a screwup.”
I can barely see his face through the clouds of anger inside me. How dare he say that about Talia? How dare he even compare her to Amber? “That isn’t true. I love Talia. I’m serious about her.”
Dad starts to laugh again, so hard I have to raise my voice to be heard over him.
“And I’m serious about this, too, about landscape design. This is what I’m going to do with my life. If I go to college, that’s what I’m going for.”
Dad stops laughing, and I think he’s finally hearing me. “Listen to me, Jack. If you’re serious, I’m going to get serious with you. To make it in a field like landscape design, you have to have talent. And the fact is, you don’t.” He reaches for my drawing, which is under a pile of B-school pamphlets. “This isn’t any good. It sucks.”
“It…” I stop. “What?”
“It sucks.”
Sucks? Dad would never say sucks.
And that’s when I realize this isn’t the real Dad. He’s just a fake thing, a test Malvolia came up with, like all the game shows. In fact, maybe this Dad is all in my head, my worst fears of Dad. In which case, the way to pass the test is by standing up to him. I take a deep breath.
“I’m sorry you think my design sucks…Dad. But that’s what I’m planning on doing with my life. And the other thing I’m planning on doing is rescuing Talia. So if you could please get out of my way, I’d really appreciate it.”
“You can’t speak that way to me. You can’t show such disrespect.” He’s tearing out what little hair he has with one hand while pushing papers to the floor with the other.
“I know you don’t really feel that way. You came all the way to Euphrasia. You wouldn’t have done that if you thought I was just a stupid slacker. And when I see the real you, I’ll be sure and show you my designs. I’m excited about them, and I bet you’ll like them, too. But now…”
I gesture toward him, and he vanishes into thin air. I was right.
I look at Malvolia, who is still there. “Did I do it? Did I pass the test?”
She gestures toward something in the corner. “Only one more.”
And then I see her. There, on a mattress on the floor, is Talia. Or, at least, Talia’s body. Is she dead? Or just sleeping? I rush to kneel beside her. I take her hand. There’s a pulse.
She stirs slightly. She’s breathing.
I shake her. Call her name. Nothing.
But then I know what I have to do. I don’t know if my kiss will be enough, if she loves me enough, too, but I need to try. I lean over and think about Talia, about meeting her, being in Europe with her, then in America, how she was with Meryl, my parents, how she actually cared about the stuff I cared about and didn’t think it was stupid. How I loved her. I love her.
“I love you, Talia,” I whisper.
I put my lips to hers.
She stirs.
She wakes.
“You are here!” Talia says. She looks around the room. “But how long have I slept? A year? Or twenty? Are you an old man? Let me see your face.”
I laugh. “It took me three days to climb the hill.”
“Days? Merely days? But where…?” She glances around. “Where is Malvolia?”
I look behind me. Sure enough, she’s gone. “She left.”
“Oh, no,” Talia says. “But she was kind to me. She showed me how to make this dress.”
“It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”
I hold my hand out to Talia. I want to touch her and not stop touching her, to prove to myself that she’s real and alive and here. “I think we have to go.”
“In a moment.” She pulls me toward her and kisses me a bunch more times, on my cheeks, my hair, even my eyes. I throw my arms around her and hold her a really long time until finally the cottage door starts banging with the wind, and the noise reminds me that everyone’s waiting for us, Talia’s parents and the people in the castle. And Dad, too.
“We should go,” I say.
She nods and allows me to help her up. With a final glance around the room, we leave, closing the door behind us.
As we descend the hill, she says, “Do you know what I was thinking, Jack?”
“What?” I stop to kiss her again. I rescued this princess, so I should be able to kiss her all I want, as long as she wants to, too. The wind, which had been roaring in our ears, has stopped.
Afterward, she says, “I think you were my true love all the time. That must be why I woke. Malvolia was wrong.”
“You think?”
“Yes, but she had her reasons. I wish I knew where she went. Perhaps if we come back another day…” She gestures uphill at the cottage, then gasps.
I look at what she’s looking at but see nothing. The cottage is gone.
“Well, that’s the end of that,” I say. “Hey, maybe we can walk a little faster? I’m hungry, and like I said, it took me three days to walk up here.”
“Yes,” Talia says. “And I need to see Father. We must talk.”
She starts to run, and because we’re holding hands, I run, too. We run down the hill so fast it feels like we’re flying.