For a moment too, it seemed proper to Gabrielle that she should die here at the end of her quest. To come so far and fail was, in a sense, comforting. No more would be required of her, she could stop frantically planning and running about, and finally, finally! she could fall asleep—
“Gabrielle!” Dignity shouted, startling the girl out of her revery. “Stay awake and stay alive! Don’t let Lillian get to you. You are wonderful and worthwhile and worthy—”
But the rest of his message was curtailed by a white root wrapping tight around his face and yanking him towards the ground.
“You’re next, girl,” said Lillian, with more indifference than malice. “I can’t have anyone, including my silly brother and his little pet, standing in my way.”
Lillian took a few careful steps forward, taking care to walk around her fallen soldiers pinned in their traps. Jutted and twisted and quiescent, their bodies had become part of the landscape, all their energy seemingly siphoned into the roots that writhed around their mistress.
“I could strangle you,” Lillian mused, and suddenly a white root burst out of the ground to wrap around Gabrielle’s neck. She had to half-gasp to suck in enough air to breathe, and her head suddenly felt as light and empty as dandelion fluff.
“Or I could quarter you,” Lillian continued, and now Gabrielle could breathe enough to cry out in pain as her arms were yanked in opposite directions.
“But!” Lillian giggled. “That would be so crass. Where’s my hospitality? I’ll just offer you some food.”
Touching a tree again, Lillian exerted her power, and this time Gabrielle could see the way the coins around her neck glinted and shined at the magic. On a lonely, withered branch grew a lonely, withered fruit. An apple, perhaps, with skin too wrinkled and rotten to be certain.
“You must be hungry, dear, walking across all of my realm. Please, have something to eat.” Lillian plucked the fruit from the tree and handed it to a white snaking root which wriggled across the ground to Gabrielle. “Surely you aren’t so impolite as to refuse?”
Dignity made a muffled sound through his root, and Gabrielle knew she must not eat of the withered fruit.
But still, a root wrapped around Gabrielle’s left arm and moved it against her will until her hand bumped against the fruit and there was nothing to do but hold its thin and slimy skin in her hand.
“That’s right, dear,” Lillian crooned. “Just a bit further now.”
There was another moment of crooning, this one sweet and pure rather than rotten and sour, and suddenly Kismet was silhouetted against the orange moon, the curve of her wings and her long, brilliant tail feathers shining a deep purple-blue.
Then Kismet was diving, charging towards Lillian, and for a jumbled moment it seemed the pale specter had sprouted purple wings. Seconds later Kismet was flying onwards, tearing the torque from Lillian’s shoulders and dropping it at Gabrielle’s knees. But falling with the jingling coins were long indigo feathers, and Kismet’s crooning turned mournful and pained. Gabrielle could barely turn her torso to see it, but Kismet crashed into the ground far behind Gabrielle, a trail of feathers leading to her landing spot.
Lillian shrieked, and Gabrielle whipped her head back around to see spots of livid red burning across the mad woman’s cheeks.
“Mine! Mine!” She screamed, and Gabrielle had the sense to snatch at the torque, her fingers and eyes searching for the change in texture or color— there! A long white hair caught within the coins. Gabrielle wrapped it around her finger and feigned horror when Dignity, his limbs all wrapped in roots for Lillian’s dark puppetry, snatched the torque from her hands.
Something was occurring. Dignity and Lillian were speaking. Distracting. Dignity was distracting his sister. Good. Gabrielle’s mind was racing so fast she could barely taste her thoughts as they flashed by. Quick as she could, she snagged Lillian’s simulacrum and looped the white hair around its neck like a noose. Then she reached out for the pumpkin-basket, which still had Dignity’s figure enclosed inside, and gathered up her magic within her. But Lillian was pacing— bad. The magic needed her to be still to work.
“Hand over the torque, dear brother,” Lillian said, and then giggled. “Or I could just make you. Really, there’s no need to be difficult.”
“There is every reason to be difficult,” Dignity replied, affronted. “You are a threat to my realm. Your every action horrifies and disgusts me, and would you too if you had any ounce of sanity left.”
Lillian raised a clawed hand to slash at Dignity, but in a sudden moment of unprecedented grace he caught her wrist instead and pulled her into an embrace.
“Dearest sister,” he said, so low Gabrielle could barely hear. “Please forgive me.”
Then he kissed her cheek and she froze.
In that moment Gabrielle closed her eyes and concentrated with all her might. She knew her own power wasn’t enough, so she asked Harkenhilt for its aid, and the realm answered with the feel of a flame licking above her brow. She heard the rushing of water and felt the strength of Akavos, Alaethos, and Atemos in her soul. Regent, a many-tongued voice seemed to say, we answer to your rule.
With the magic of the realm flowing through her, Gabrielle reached into the swirling dark magic in the basket with perfect calm, slowly removing Dignity’s doll and replacing it with Lillian’s. When she looked up, a regal man stood by the pale specter, whose alabaster skin was turning a bruised purple as the binding magic flowed into her.
But there was more that Gabrielle could do. The strength of magic in her was unprecedented— all of a realm ready to do her will. So she let her hands be licked with flames and set the basket on fire. She could feel, far off in a distant sea, the core of the binding spell begin to disintegrate. She could watch as the basket crumbled into ashes even as the flames left the wax figures untouched. And she could see the dark magic draining out of Lillian, leaving a frail and pale woman with golden hair in her place.
And there was Lillian without any dark magic. Not cursed at all, but pitiful, limp in Dignity’s arms. Gabrielle felt tears of something— joy, sorrow, weariness— well up in her eyes, and they tasted salty on her lips as they fell.
Finally, it was over.
***
After Lillian’s cleansing, everyone ended up in the throne room. It was strange to see the nightmare specter of Lillian made into a fragile golden-haired girl, but stranger still to see the ridiculous figure of the Pumpkin Prince replaced by a handsome young man with lush dark hair and a long straight nose. Gabrielle kept expecting flames in his eyes, but instead they were a pale blue-grey tinted with sadness.
Bluer eyes, bright and mottled like juniper berries, belonged to Kismet, whose feathers had been completely shed to reveal a girl of barely more than eight summers with warm brown hair and peachy skin. She, like Gabrielle, had remained completely quiet as Dignity had carried his sister in his arms to the castle. The mouse boys had chittered among themselves and with the two willow sisters as they all marched to the throne room, where Dignity had pushed aside the flower of water on Lillian’s throne to lay the girl herself down on the seat.
“So,” Gabrielle said, unable to bear the silence, “have I restored Dignity to the throne?”
Dignity laughed, his voice’s edges a bit ragged, before smiling. “I suppose you have.”