Going Places Is Bad, and You Shouldn’t Do It
The thing you’re never told about traveling is that it’s horrible. Uncomfortable, dangerous, smelly, and itchy.
My pumpkin turned carriage lurched violently, jouncing its way over another bump. A freezing draft whistled straight through the unglazed window, the cold air numbing my face. I shivered in my cloak and drew up the riding hood. It was a good cloak, my favorite—thick wool dyed a cheerful scarlet—but it didn’t do much to ward off the chill.
When the weak late-autumn sun bothered to peek out from behind the clouds, little of its light filtered down to the forest floor. The road wound through a dense wood. Dark, gnarled trunks rose from a thick mat of dropped needles and dead leaves gone black with damp. Occasionally one of the great trees Liam had spoken of drifted by, an enormous tower of shaggy red bark that rose above the forest canopy like a pillar holding up the sky. We had to be in Tailliz now, or close to it. A solid month after setting out from Skalla, we were finally nearing our destination.
A drizzle started pattering down from the gray clouds. Again.
Leaning toward the window, I tried for the fourth time that day to begin a conversation. “How much longer until we get to the castle, do you think?”
The unconvincing facsimile of a guard riding alongside the carriage stared off into the middle distance, while his (much more convincing) facsimile of a horse plodded stolidly onward. Only a few telltale signs, like rounded ears, gave away that the horse wasn’t really a horse, but no one would mistake the enameled flesh and rough-hewn features of the guard for anything human. His face looked like someone had attacked a chunk of ivory with a chisel.
For a full minute, the guard remained as speechless as the scrimshaw carving he resembled. Then at long last he muttered, “Don’t know.”
I made another attempt. “I’m looking forward to a warm bed. And a bath. I know you don’t sleep, but do you bathe? I mean, I imagine you’re used to a good going over with a toothbrush every night and morning, but—”
The carriage clattered over a particularly jarring dip in the road. My teeth clacked together sharply. I nearly bit my tongue. I was grateful to Jonquil for enchanting the pumpkin, but she had neglected to make it well sprung. It rattled me around like dice in a cup every time a wheel dropped into a rut.
I don’t hate nature. I like the outdoors. Some of it. In limited doses. After journeying east of the sun and west of the moon on my stepmother’s orders, I have seen vistas that defy the imagination with their grandeur. I have stood on a high, windswept cliff top so close to the stars that I could see them performing the joyous pirouettes and cartwheels that make them twinkle. I have descended into a cave so deep I could hear the buried gemstones singing their slow, thrumming songs. I have trudged across cotton-candy clouds to giants’ castles, swum up waterfalls, and trekked over the glaring white plain of trackless ice that stretches across the rooftop of the world.
But however beautiful a place might be, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’d want to spend the night there. I am not good at sleeping in uncomfortable conditions; I toss and turn on anything even slightly hard or lumpy. The plain of ice was miserable. I hardly got any sleep at all, and then as an added, special agony, I woke up every day with my hair frozen to the ground. Nothing says “Good morning!” like a chunk of your hair ripping free from your scalp when you situp.
The trip to Tailliz wasn’t as bad as that. During the day, the pumpkin coach kept the rain off me. My poor driver and guards were soaked whenever there was a downpour, and we got caught in more than one during the monthlong journey. I’m not sure they cared, since they’d been grown out of the teeth Calla’s birds had sown. I doubt anyone who used to live in a mouth is fussy about getting wet.
As usual, my main source of discomfort was the nights. The lands between Skalla and Tailliz were wild and unsettled, as you might have guessed from the state of the roads. We came across exactly two villages along the way. Neither was large enough to have an inn, but both times we were allowed to sleep in a barn provided by a terrified but well-paid farmer. Every other night, I’d either tried to doze off while sitting bolt upright in the too-narrow coach or taken my chances in the wilderness. Needless to say, whenever I decided on camping, it rained. My longing for a good night’s sleep had grown desperate. And the less said about the bathroom arrangements, the better. You’d think that after all the questing, I’d have gotten used to it at some point, but I never did. Even without frozen hair, each new venture into the unknown was a fresh horror of wet clothing, restless nights, and shitting in the great outdoors.
It would have taken scarcely any time to get to Tailliz using the seven-league boots, by the way. But there was only one pair of those in Skalla, which meant the queen reserved them for themost important of endeavors. My marriage, apparently, did not qualify.
So it wasn’t terribly surprising that as we neared the end of our journey, juddering through the mighty forests Liam had described, I was in a thoroughly bad mood.
He’d been right about the trees, though. If anything, he’d failed to capture their magnificence. Over the past week of travel, a scrubby woodland had transformed into a close-packed forest, and then one morning the great trees had begun to appear, their trunks stretching into the distant sky. Far up in their heights, sprays of branches that must have been as broad across as houses dwindled into tiny circles of green against a cloudy gray background. I wondered how much damage they would do if they ever went walking. Even ordinary trees can defeat evil wizards who dare to engage in unsustainable logging practices, and a king in Ecossia famously lost both his throne and his life when the local woods started wandering around.
“Do you think we’ve crossed the border into Tailliz yet?” I shouted out the window at the guard, who had drifted a bit farther from the carriage. Possibly he had done so to get away from my efforts at starting a discussion. A noncommittal grunt answeredme.
“The castle might only be a few hours from here,” I continued. “Or perhaps a day? Not another week, I hope. One more week without a proper bath and they’ll smell me coming when we’re twenty miles off.”
This time I received no reply whatsoever. I shrank back on my hard wooden seat. Perhaps I should have recruited an ogre or a river hag to join my guard. Anyone willing to have a conversation. I wasn’t sure why the teeth found talking such a chore. You’d think that teeth would be more prone to chattering.
But then, what did I know about teeth? Perhaps they disliked dampness as much as I did, and they weren’t feeling talkative because they’d spent the entire journey wet and miserable.Maybe they longed for nothing but dry silence and had hated being teeth in the first place. No one, I imagined, ever asked for their teeth’s opinion on the subject before growing them in their mouths.
I leaned partway out the window to ask if he remembered being a tooth, if he’d been a contented tooth, but before I could, something moving too fast for me to see it ripped my guard off his horse. An instant later, there was a wet crunch.
He hadn’t had time to scream.
The carriage shuddered as something slammed into its side, toppling me back inside before I had a chance to figure out what was going on. My head hit the wall with a crack. I could hear the horses shrieking out in front and the fluttering and cawing of local birds fleeing the area. I had no idea what was happening. Trolls? Robbers?
Unnatural creatures in the woods?
More than ever, I regretted bringing only the teeth along as guards. Teeth are tough, as you probably know if you’ve ever been bitten. But there are tougher creatures in the world. And transfigurations have vulnerabilities. They tend to lapse back into their original forms if they’re damaged enough.
Speaking of which, a misty glow was limning the inside of the carriage. It grew brighter as another slam shook the vehicle. Something wooden snapped and broke. The enchantment wasn’t meant to stand up to this kind of punishment. If I didn’t get out quickly, I’d find myself trapped inside a pumpkin shell—or worse. Transformation spells can go haywire when they break. It could mistakenly try to revert the coach’s contents along with the coach. Myself included. I had no desire to spend the rest of my days as a pumpkin seed.
My surroundings were already beginning to shrink and turn an alarming shade of orange. I pushed at the door handle, which turned slick and pulpy under my hand. Caught halfway between a door and a vegetable, it was too solid to break but toopumpkiny to open. The walls were closing in, threatening to crush and smother me in pumpkin flesh before the spell even had a chance to transmogrify me. The window was too small to squeeze through by then, no bigger than a clenched fist.
My hair had grown to nearly waist length while I hunted for an escape, bursting out from my head and filling the shrinking space with brown curls. I could feel it getting tangled in seeds and stringy fibers. In a panic, I threw my whole body at the door, once and then again. On the third blow, it shattered. I tumbled out onto the ground, landing in an awkward splay on the wet leaves. Behind me, the carriage collapsed into a mangled pile of skin and pulp.
Rain dampened my cloak. A spray of broken teeth fanned out in front of me on the ground. Fragments of molars, bicuspids, and incisors—the remnants of my guards. I hoped they’d been as insensible to pain as the pumpkin-carriage and hadn’t felt a thing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a handful of mice scurrying off into the woods—the horses, too, had returned to their original state.
