I shook my head. “He belongs with me.” Hudson nodded then turned to my family. “Nick, do you want to go?”
Nick looked at Sandra and my dad. “Not without the rest of my family.”
My dad put his arm around Sandra. “We go as a family or not at all.”
Tears welled in Sandra’s eyes, but she didn’t let them fall. “We’ll make do in this century if we have to.” Hudson turned back to the wizard, keeping the branch close. “If you want the Gilead, it has to be all of us.” The wizard grunted, and a sneer curled his upper lip. “You’ve wasted enough of my time. When you decide who to send, you’ll find me in the carriage. But be quick about it. Once the horses are rested, I’ll leave.” He turned so quickly that his cloak spun around his feet, and he stalked off down the trail to the carriage.
My father rubbed the three-day beard on his chin and glanced over at Hudson. “Are you sure you want to stay? Your family is back in the twenty-first century.”
Sandra shushed my father, but he ignored her. “Hudson shouldn’t give up his trip home without thinking about it.” 319/356
Hudson fingered the Gilead, turning it over in his hand. “I’m beginning to wonder if this plant might be more useful than a trip back home. Just imagine the things we might need to fix: leaky roofs, swords, broken arms …”
Hearts, I thought. Could the Gilead fix the gold enchantment that hurt my heart so badly? Could it fix the sadness I felt about never seeing my mother or sister again? Could it fix Hudson’s pain?
Hudson raised his voice as though talking to someone besides those of us standing on the trail. “We might even be able to make some good changes to the Middle Ages. With twenty-first-century knowledge, unlimited wealth, and a bit of magic to fix things, we’ll be able to accomplish anything we want.”
I realized what he was doing and raised my voice too. “Right—we could raise armies, create new countries. Do you think the fairies will mind if we take over, say, Belgium?” Chrissy popped up in front of me, her wand visible in her crossed arms. Her glow lit the area so brightly that the flashlight beams seemed to dim. She wore modern clothes again: a white miniskirt, a polka-dot blue halter top, and rhinestone-embedded flip-flops. A pair of white sunglasses sat atop her deep blue hair, and a purse with pictures of little beach umbrellas hung from her shoulder. “It’s not nice to threaten fairies,” she told Hudson and me pointedly. “I was going to come talk to you just as soon as my pedicure was over. Look—” She put out her foot to show us her toenails. All but one were painted baby blue with fluffy white clouds swirling all over them. “I had to leave before my last toe was done. I suppose Belgium can thank me later.”
“The story is over,” I said. “You said you would take us back to our time period.”
She sniffed and tossed her hair off one shoulder with a hand that featured the same blue-polish-with-clouds manicure. “In the original 320/356
contract, I was to take you back once Tansy defeated Rumpelstiltskin, but as you pointed out, you changed things. Now you’ll get back when Tansy writes down the moral of the new story in the magic book.” She looked at me and sighed in exasperation. “Really, the outfits you keep showing up in. My ball-gown professor would fail me for that dress alone.” She flourished her wand in my direction, and my brown dress turned into a slim-fitting golden evening gown.
I ignored the change, picked up the magic book, and showed it to her. “I wrote down the moral that Clover told me to. It still didn’t work.”
Chrissy took the book and flipped through the pages, checking on the story since she’d seen it last. “He probably told you the moral of the story is that leprechauns are awesome, didn’t he?” I nodded. “Something like that.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s the moral he takes from every story, but this isn’t his story. It’s yours, Tansy. You need to write your moral.” She reached the page where I turned Rumpelstiltskin into a golden statue, and a smirk stole across her lips. “That’s what he gets for un-derestimating women. I bet he wishes he’d gone off on that cooking spoon now.”
She handed me back the book, but I could only grip it in frustration. “I already wrote every moral I could think of.” She tilted her chin down. “Yes, but you wrote them before the fairy tale was finished. For a moral to be accurate, you need to know how the story ends.” She waved a hand at me. “Now then, what did you learn?”
So much that I couldn’t answer right away. It seemed I had learned more in the last few days than I’d learned in all the years before. My family and Hudson were staring at me, waiting for some gem of wisdom to fall from my lips. Instead, I fingered the pen.