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ALL the children, the king said. Capture all of them, for a magic boy of twelve could turn himself into a magic girl of twelve or a magic boy of seven or a magic girl of seventeen.
There are rules to magic, of course. Rules provide a framework so that one does not find oneself out of control. This rule of magic says that if one were to conduct a transformation spell, one can only become five years older or five years younger, or, perhaps, an opposite gender. One would wear the same face, though one could agree that a five-year-old face is very different from a ten-year-old face, as is a girl’s face and a boy’s face.
A transformation spell differs from a vanishing spell in its control. A magician controls a transformation spell. But though a magician calls forth a vanishing spell, magic controls its outcome.
So it is not so simple when the people find themselves surrounded by the king’s men. The magical children cannot simply touch their staffs, say the incantation, and disappear, away from the hand of danger.
No one in Fairendale is right now thinking of spells, however. The age-old debate of transformation versus vanishing has not even crossed their minds. Not even Theo’s, who knows they have all come for him.
Their only thought is, Run.
But for a moment, all activity stills. It is as if time has suspended its continuum, as if a moment of such grave danger deserves to be drawn with a slow hand. Only one man moves. Only one man speaks.
It is Sir Greyson. “Please,” he says. “Let us do this the easy way. Hand your children over to the king.”
But the people do not listen, for they love their children. If only they would listen.
The “run” in their minds becomes a run in their legs. The whole village erupts in an explosion of sound and color and action, all its people fleeing in different directions, screaming different pitches, slipping on the stones so the king’s men reach them before they can ever rise.
They run from Death and all the king’s men.
Perhaps not all the king’s men. For there is one, the one who is called Captain, who cannot trust himself to move. The rain clatters against his armor, and it mirrors so distinctly the clattering of his sorrow inside that he can only drop his head and weep. He must turn away, he must, but he is the leader of these men who slash and slay.
And what about his mother?
Death and the king’s men are quick. We could not follow them if we tried. There is a woman who searches the soldiers for her husband, for she would rather hand her daughter to him than the childless soldier who rips the girl from her grasp. There is another mother slain for holding her child close rather than letting him go into the arms of a soldier she knows lives down the street. There she lies broken and red on the ground. And there is her boy, dragged to the edge of the village as if he does not fight with all the strength his little body has, tossed into an iron cage that is waiting for all of them on the wheels of a cart.
It is the same for too many.
In all the clamor, Maude draws Hazel and Theo to her side. “Go,” she says. “Go to the Weeping Woods. Meet us there. We shall bring the other children, as many as we can.” She kisses them both on the forehead and thrusts them away from her. That is all they need to begin their flight.
But they flee in different directions.
“This way, Theo,” Hazel calls through the driving rain and the roaring wind. Her brother moves toward the thick of the battle.
“It is me they want,” he says. “I have to at least try to save them.” And he is off and away, moving toward a group of tiny children huddling beneath a merchant cart.
“Theo!” Hazel screams, but her brother has already vanished in the rain and madness.
“Hazel!” Mercy says. She is at Hazel’s elbow. “We must go. He will come.”
They point their feet toward the Weeping Woods and run as fast as they can, without looking back.
If they had looked back, they might have seen more children streaming in after them, flying on Maude’s words. They might have seen the king’s men give chase. They might have seen another of the king’s men, the leader of them all, slumped on the back of a horse.
They might have seen Theo crouched beneath the merchant’s cart with a handful of the village children. They might have seen that merchant cart move, barreling through bodies with no place to hide.
They might have seen parents falling, run through by swords and daggers and trampled by the heavy hooves of horses. They might have seen the streets run red.
They might have seen the woods closing in on the ones who made it that far.
Protecting them? Hiding them? Sparing them?
That much cannot yet be known.
***
IN the days after the roundup, the village streets grow quiet. The king has sent his royal custodian to clean them. This is no easy task. There is much blood, though, strangely, the bodies have all disappeared. The royal custodian does not question this, for he knows strange rituals exist for death. He assumes the village people have disposed of the bodies in ways only they know.
The captured children, at this very moment, sit in the king’s throne room. Most of them are weeping. Weeping because they lost their parents. Weeping because they are afraid. Weeping because they tried to run, but they were not as swift as the ones who escaped.
“Nineteen,” says Garth, the king’s page. “Nineteen twelve-year-olds.”
“And how many are there in the kingdom?” King Willis says. The number does not sound right. He thought there were more children.
“Forty-three, sire,” the royal statistician says. He is a small man, meek and timid with a black mustache that curls around his cheeks. This news of missing children gives him more reason to be meek and timid.
“Forty-three!” King Willis says. “That makes twenty-two missing.”
The statistician clears his throat. It is no easy task to correct a king. “Twenty-four, Your Highness,” he says.
“Unacceptable!” The king explodes with a violent punch to the arm of his throne. It is a wonder he does not break his hand. Perhaps he is saved by the exorbitant amount of flesh covering his bones, for any other man might have cracked bones striking a hand against pure gold. The sound is so unexpected that Prince Virgil, who sits beside the king today, startles.
The royal statistician, poor man, does not want to say more, but he clears his throat again. “Also four eleven-year-olds and three ten-year-olds.”
King Willis lets out a loud roar. The children huddle together, hiding their eyes from this angry red man with the combed over hair and fiery face and a belly bigger than any they have seen in their lives.
And then the great throne room falls silent. The children do not move or speak and barely breathe. I do not have to tell you, dear reader, that silence can sometimes be more frightening than sound.
“Where could they have gone?” the king says. His voice is much calmer now. More kingly. The children open their eyes.
“We combed the streets, sire,” Sir Greyson says. He speaks beneath a mask of armor, does not even lift the eye plate. Perhaps he knows better than any that his work is far from done.
“The woods?” King Willis says.
“The Weeping Woods are a dangerous place,” the statistician says. He appears surprised that he has spoken. He is not a man who speaks out of turn. He looks at the captain, but it is impossible to see Sir Greyson beneath all the silver.
“We will search it,” Sir Greyson says.
“I command it,” King Willis says. “The lost children must be found.”
“I might lose men,” Sir Greyson says. He does not, in truth, know if the danger is worth the risk. To find children who have disappeared? Magic children who might be anywhere?
“Do not return until you find them,” King Willis says. “Visit every kingdom if you must.”
Sir Greyson bows his head. “As you wish,” he says. He graces the king with another bow that makes his armor clank, and then he strides out the door.
Prince Virgil looks at his father. His father looks at him. “We will find them,” King Willis says.
“Yes,” Prince Virgil says. His stomach twists once, twice, and he finds that he cannot look his father in the face. He is worried. Worried about his friends. Worried about the children who stand before him. But he must not show that worry to his father, for King Willis would not understand it.
“Now,” King Willis says, as if to himself. “What shall we do with these?”
Prince Virgil looks at the children and then quickly away. Some of them are friends. Some of them are not. He does not want to know what will happen to them. He would like to leave the throne room, before this decision is made. And so our prince starts toward the door, but, alas, he is not fast enough.
“Throw them in the dungeons beneath the dungeons,” King Willis says.
The children begin to cry out. The whole room is filled with their weeping.
Prince Virgil begins to run. And he is gone before their cries turn to words, pleas, bargains for anything that might keep them from visiting a place that the tales say is a world of dark and cold and rats and spiders and stale bread and sour water and loneliness. Yes, mostly loneliness. It is everything a child hates most.
But what the children do not know is there are people waiting. People waiting to warm them, to hold them, to help them sleep.
One hundred forty-three of them.
They will rock the children to sleep tonight and every other night the dark is filled with bodies.
Even a dungeon can become a home when it is warmed by love.