Charming, Volume 1 Read online

  Once Upon a Rhyme

  VOLUME I OF THE CHARMING TALES

  JACK HECKEL

  Dedication

  For Isaac and Carleigh

  Acknowledgments

  WE’D LIKE TO acknowledge everyone who has helped us on this long journey to making this book a reality. Inevitably, someone will be forgotten in this list, but although this is the first book, it won’t be the last. We’ll fix it.

  First and foremost, Taba and Heather, thank you both for not only putting up with this madness, but supporting it. Without you, this book doesn’t exist. True love for always.

  To the members of the Paragon City Writers: Dara, Wayland, Brad, Anna, and Jon. You got to read the first version, and you made it better. Keep writing.

  All of our beta readers: Anthony, Bill, Cathy, Chris, Dorothy, Kayla, Kim, and Oliver. This doesn’t happen without you. Thank you so very much.

  To our families, including parents, in-­laws, uncles, cousins, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and fairy godmothers. We love you all and appreciate the inspiration, support, and understanding.

  To Liz and Sara, wish you were here. You are missed terribly.

  To the Brothers Grimm, we aren’t done with you yet.

  From Harry to Dad, you have always believed in me. Thanks for the bedtime stories.

  From John to Walt, for teaching me that purple cows really do exist.

  Finally, a big thanks to Kelly and everyone at HarperVoyager.

  Epigraph

  Beneath the dragon’s sleepless vigil

  In endless sleep shall the maiden stay.

  Awaiting there her true love’s kiss

  To sweep at last her curse away.

  —­FROM “THE DRAGON’S TALE”

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  An Excerpt from Happily Never After

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The Great Lady and the Strawman

  THE DRAGON FLEW just below the clouds. This was her first night free after a long winter’s slumber, and her hunt had been disappointing—­nothing but a few stray cows and one fat deer. In the old days, the valley had been rich with prey, both human and livestock. The villagers had grown more clever, though, hiding both themselves and their animals in underground cellars when she came, and shooting at her from their holes with steel-­tipped arrows. She had half a mind to return home, but it had been a long winter and the spring had woken in her an unyielding hunger. So she drifted south on the winds and circled hungrily over an outlying farm. What she saw was not promising. The farm looked derelict and deserted.

  A sudden chill ran along her spine. She looked across the horizon and saw that to the east the sky was beginning to lighten. During her hunt, she had allowed herself to forget her curse. Now she felt its pull. The fairy’s enchantment was drawing her back to that damnable tower and her sleeping prisoner. An uncontrollable rage welled up, and she rent the darkness with a jet of superheated ichor. The caustic liquid unique to her breed crackled with a white-­hot light as it boiled the night air.

  Even before the fireball faded, the cold night bit deeper into her bones. It would be weeks before she would be able to stoke her fires again, feel truly warm, and her skin crawled at the thought of spending it locked away with the half-­sleeping princess. Resentment hissed through double rows of ivory teeth as she turned back to the south, to the mountains that lay beyond the night-­darkened fields. She would be home in an hour, well before dawn and the magically imposed curfew. With her front claw, she unconsciously fingered the key. It was always with her—­the fairy’s little joke—­hung around her neck by a golden chain, a constant reminder of her imprisonment.

  The fairy. Her mind cast back to the night the fairy had come to her, wooed and flattered her, tricked her into this dull servitude. She felt the anger building again, then realized her talon was clutching the key violently, squeezing it, trying to crush it. She sighed and let go. The key settled against her scaled breast. As a burden it was nothing; but as a brand, it galled and irritated her to distraction.

  How pathetic I have grown, to dwell and rage at something as fleeting as a fairy curse.

  The forest at the far edge of the farm was passing beneath her when some ancient sense made her look back. Movement.

  Two figures, the heat of their bodies radiating incandescently, moved like shooting stars through the dark ocean of the night-­cooled corn. One raced ahead of the other, but then the lead figure stopped suddenly in the middle of the field allowing its pursuer to catch up. She watched as they crouched low to the ground so the cornstalks engulfed them. Hidden as they would have been to normal eyes, their bodies shone in the darkness—­a pair of flickering candles exposed by her supernatural senses. Perhaps there was time for one last kill. She smiled a predator’s grin and flicked out her forked tongue, tasting the wind. Folding her wings, she pirouetted on the misty ether and dove. The ground rose rapidly to meet her, and, at the last possible moment, she spread her great wings and immediately felt the pull, almost painful as her wings beat against the heavy air. Her body traced a soft arc through the sky and she leveled off, passing a few feet above the top of a timber fence marking the far edge of the field. Silent as the wind, only the whisper of the corn marked her passage as their tasseled tops brushed against her underbelly and bent in rippling waves before her.

  Normally, she would have tried to flush her quarry into flight to enjoy the chase, but the sky to the east was brightening even more now, and with it the invisible strands of magic that kept her tied to the black tower were starting to tighten. The kill would have to be quick. She fixed her gaze wholly on the body-­shaped embers that grew larger with each beat of her wings. She was already anticipating the crunch of the bones in her talons and the taste of hot blood in her throat.

  Without warning, a man wearing a battered cloth hat loomed out of a crop row ahead of her, arms stretched wide. She had a brief impression of the thing’s crude, almost grotesque, leering face before her body, reacting instinctively to the threat, rose to avoid the creature.

  Have you become a crow in your old age that you would flee at the sight of a straw man?

  With a malice born of anger, she forced her body back into the attack and down onto the top of the scarecrow, crushing it. She never saw the warning glint of steel from the pitchfork carelessly propped against its straw body. The metal fork and two feet of the handle plunged deep into her body. In an instant, she lost strength in her right side and her wing dropped, useless. She bellowed in surprise at the sudden pain and tried to slow her descent, but the tip of the crippled wing caught one of the deep furrows of the field and she cartwheeled headfirst into the ground. The wing snapped as the weight of her body crushed it beneath her, the painful sensation incidental to the burning agony in her breast.

  Unable to stand, she rolled onto her back and, clutching the shaft of the pitchfork with her talons, ripped the hateful thing free. With a glance of disgust, she threw it into the field. She sighed with relief. With nothing to seal the wound, hot blood welled out of the ragged cut and began running in great torrents down her side and onto the flattened
stalks below. She heard the hiss and pop of the corn and smelled the smoke of the fire before she felt it as the drought-­dry husks, fueled by her own superheated blood, burst into flame. Recognizing the danger, she made an effort to stand but hadn’t the strength. She collapsed back onto the ground, breathing heavily in the rising smoke. Never before had she felt such weakness.

  Is this how I am to end my days? To die in some field, like a common worm?

  She gave voice to her bitterness, screeching her hatred of the world, its echo rebounding in the narrow valley. As silence returned, her rage was replaced by a sudden and unexpected calm. She smiled. The enchantment was lifting. Reaching up, she tore the golden key from around her neck and let it drop. At long last the bond to the sad little princess was severed. With a bittersweet sigh, she stopped struggling.

  Settling her head into a fold of the furrowed earth as the fire licked around her body, the dragon gazed across the field at the edge of the rising sun. At least this moment—­this last sunrise—­would be hers alone, and she would be warm. She smiled. Flames rose up, consuming her, and spread outward through the field like a receding tide. The stars faded in her eyes, and Magdela the Great passed from the world.

  Chapter 1

  Fairytale’s End

  ONCE UPON A time in the kingdom of Royaume, a land of modest prosperity, on a hill of green, stood a shining castle of white where lived the aged widower King Rupert. Though he had been blessed with a son much admired by his subjects, he took little joy in the young man and was, in his waning years, lonely and morose. Not that he had always been so.

  In his youth, he had fallen deeply, even poetically, for Princess Rosslyn of the house Mostfair. She was a lady of rare beauty and rarer virtue. They might have made a timeless queen and king, but on the very day that they were to be betrothed, Rosslyn fell gravely ill and died. Rupert was lost, but he was also the son of a king, and being the sole heir to the throne he had his duty. After what was thought a suitable time of mourning by their parents, Rosslyn’s sister, Gwendolyn was put forward as a replacement.

  Gwendolyn was, by many accounts, even more beautiful than her older sister and, after a brief courtship, she and the King were engaged, the date of the wedding set. But Rupert was, for a second time, accursed. This time by a dragon. Driven by a petulant fairy’s curse, the Great Wyrm appeared in the sky on the eve of the wedding and carried Princess Gwendolyn off to its tower stronghold.

  The origin of the dragon is, to this day, a bit of a mystery. Though not profoundly so for Rupert’s kingdom, unlike many of its more sensible neighbors, had not yet consigned magic, or magical creatures, to the pages of fairy tale. Trolls, giants and hags were constantly lurking about in their dark forests, bashing ­people on the head and trying to devour naughty children. Most of these beasts were more nuisance than real danger, unless of course you were a greedy child or a disobedient child or a petulant child or an overly curious child or a child whose woodcutter father had fallen on hard times—­the point being that for most adults in Rupert’s kingdom, the creatures were not much of a worry. The one exception to this rule was the dragon, which, while having retired from kidnapping nobility, took to descending at the end of every winter to burn villages with an unseemly glee, gobble up cattle and peasants with equal relish, and generally make a menace of itself.

  Rupert, having a great deal more political acumen than strength of arm, never quite worked up the nerve to face the creature, and, after a long period of mourning, he married another. She bore him a son. But while this queen was fair and of high birth, she was also of poor health, and died while the Prince was in his infancy.

  The mood of the kingdom was undeniably bleak. Another lady fair had passed, the dragon remained, and given Rupert’s unwillingness to slay the beast, most of his subjects had lost hope that they would ever be freed of its scourge. Worse still, at least in the minds of the more romantically inclined, and those that lived in places far distant from the path of the dragon’s periodical destructive rage, was that the dragon still held the beloved Princess Gwendolyn captive, trapped in an enchanted, endless slumber. Then, a month after his wife’s passing, the King addressed a throng of handpicked well-­wishers in the flowered courtyard of Castle White, babe in arms, and made the startling announcement that their savior had come.

  The news ran like wildfire through the kingdom. Prophecy had ordained that the King’s son, Prince Edward Michael Charming, would slay the Wyrm of the South and free the kingdom from its curse. There was rejoicing throughout the land, if a bit premature, as the boy was naught but six-­months old and the dragon had on the previous evening eaten the entire town of Two Trees.

  Still, no one could be blamed for a bit of early celebration. And so it became a matter of faith that when the time was right, Prince Charming would ride forth, slay the dragon, wake the fair maiden of the tower keep with love’s first kiss, and return to claim his father’s throne.

  That at least had always been the story, told and retold countless times to wide-­eyed children around the embers of bedtime fires. But in a narrow valley of farms a week’s ride to the south of the glimmering castle, the faith of two of those formerly wide-­eyed children in the “happily ever after” part of the Prince’s story was being sorely put to the test.

  The “children” in question were Elizabeth and William Pickett—­brother and sister. And the resemblance was unmistakable. Both were tall, though Will stood a head higher than his sister. Both had thick reddish-­brown hair, Liz’s running more to red and Will’s more to brown. And both had the handsome if not exactly pretty features that always marked a Pickett in these parts—­high, soft cheekbones, a thin straight nose, and large bright eyes.

  Not that Liz and Will were still children. He was fully twenty summers, and she five years more—­old enough that he was considered a most eligible bachelor, while she was branded by the ladies of the village an old maid. To be fair, Liz had never had much time for romance. Their parents passed away when she was only fourteen. Barely out of pigtails, Liz became the young matriarch of what was left of the Pickett estate: a few dozen acres of clay-­packed dirt and the family home.

  Not that the Picketts had always been so poor. At one time, the family had enjoyed such prosperity that her grandfather’s father founded, and named, a nearby township: Prosper. A name the town had failed to live up to almost immediately.

  The demise in the family’s fortunes, though, had really begun when their grandfather became obsessed with growing oversized beanstalks. Ultimately, he lost most of his land and riches, earning the family a reputation for madness. A reputation confirmed by their father’s insistence that their fortunes would be restored as soon as his flock of geese started laying golden eggs. The towns­people took great relish in preying on his gullible nature, swindling him of what was left of their money. Destitute, the family was shunned from society, and Liz and Will, by the very fact of being Picketts, were marked as “odd.”

  And now, all that remained of the Pickett family fortune was burning before their eyes.

  Standing on the crumbling stone wall of their well, Will and Liz watched in disbelief as the flames danced and raged through the last stalks of their spring corn. Around them the field was covered in ash and a heavy choking blanket of smoke. Matching hazel eyes watered as a breeze whipped the noxious fumes around them. But what held their collective gaze was not the burning corn, or the desolation of their home—­it was instead the bulky silhouette, still rather vague in the gray light of dawn, of the Great Wyrm of the South, the dread dragon of fairy tale.

  Liz was the first to stir. She pried her slender hand from her brother’s calloused grasp, wiped sooty palms down the front of her equally sooty apron, to dubious effect, and lowered herself carefully from the wall. The smoke was heavier here. With a muffled cough, she wrapped a handkerchief about her mouth, tying it in a neat knot behind her neck. Then, gathering the length of her hair in both hands
, she twisted it into a bun and stabbed it violently into submission with a long wooden hairpin.

  She stared up at her brother with a frown. He was still atop the wall, a bucket in his hand and an all-­too familiar blank expression on his face. Gently now, she reminded herself. He—­we—­have both nearly been killed by a dragon.

  “Are you coming, Will?” she asked as evenly as she could.

  Liz paused a moment to let him gather himself, but to no effect. She pursed her lips in irritation. “I don’t think the bucket will be much use, Will,” she said too brightly, the affected sweetness sounding fake even to her. “There’s nothing left to burn, so there’s nothing much to save.”

  Still, Will did not seem to hear, transfixed as he was by the contents of his leaky bucket. Liz groaned, reached up, pulled the bucket from his hands, and dropped it down the well. Will looked at her with an expression of stunned surprise. Then she put her hands on her hips in an unconscious mimic of their mother and said flatly, “Don’t stand there gaping like the village idiot. Let’s go see what became of the bloody great beast.”

  Will mumbled something that sounded like bucket and talking frog, but Liz’s patience was at an end. She glared at him coldly until at last Will stuttered, “I—­I swear . . . I . . . I’m not making this up.”

  They both stared at each other and sighed. For twenty years, Liz had been Will’s sibling, eleven of which she had been, for better or worse, like his mother, and had still never figured out how to live with each other in peace. As usual, Liz broke the silence. “You do realize that there’s a dead dragon in our field, don’t you? I would have thought that might pique your interest.”