“What the devilisthat?” I ask.
“Jealousy,” Orville says, gesturing at the contents of the cauldron. “Nasty, foul stuff.” He wipes his hands on his apron, leaving behind two glowing palm prints. “Now, Prince Oliver, what’s your fancy?” He grins, gesturing to the floor-to-ceiling shelves full of glass canisters, all labeled carefully in Orville’s spidery writing:STRENGTH. PATIENCE. BEAUTY. GIGGLES.
I rub the back of my head, making my hair stand on end. “I blacked out a little while ago. Frump thought maybe you’d have something that could make me… I don’t know… a little more focused.”
“Ah, certainly,” Orville says. He starts moving jars, handing me a container of serpent’s teeth and another of dragon claws as he rummages. “I know it’s around here somewhere,” he mutters, and he climbs adodgy ladder to the top shelf, knocking down a long, gauzy spool of memory and a cobalt blue shaker full of fairy dust, which overturns in a fit of glitter and sends us both into paroxysms of uncontrollable sneezing.
“If you can’t find it,” I yell out, “I’m happy to make do with a couple of leeches….”
“Aha!” Orville cries. He clatters down the ladder, holding a muslin sack. He unties the drawstring and shakes a handful of iridescent clamshells into his palm. Choosing one, he pries it open with a knife to reveal a pair of perfect white pearls inside. “Take two of these and call me in the morning,” he says cheerfully.
I put the pearls into my pocket just as there is a fiery explosion across the room. The heat blasts me flat onto my back on the floor and sends Orville flying. He ends up tangled in the wrought-iron candelabrum that hangs from the ceiling. “Excellent! It’s ready!” Orville says.
“What’s ready?” I ask, sitting up.
“Just a little something-something I’m trying out.” Orville walks toward a black pedestal that looks a bit like a birdbath but is filled with purple, hazy smoke. He rubs his hands together with glee, then extracts a chicken egg from his apron pocket. “Cross your fingers,” he says to me as I come to stand beside him.
He drops the egg into the purple smoke, but I never hear it hit bottom. Instead, the smoke rises into a tallcolumn and forms a lavender screen. After a moment, a chicken materializes upon the smoky display.
“I… I don’t get it,” I say.
“What you’re looking at,” Orville explains, “is the future.”
Or the past, I think. After all, what came first—the chicken or the egg—
Orville interrupts my thoughts. “Pretty ingenious, don’t you think?”
“But that… you can’t…”
“Let’s try something else.” The wizard glances around the shack and then plucks a caterpillar off the lopsided window frame. He drops it into the mist, and a moment later, a butterfly made of violet smoke rises in a spiral from the pit of the pedestal.
“Orville!” I cry. “That’s incredible!”
“Not bad for an old guy, huh?” He elbows me, then reaches up to pluck a hair from his head. “Here goes nothing….”
He drops his own hair into the mist, and a moment later, there he is, clear as can be—if a little more wizened and lined in the face. This future Orville is bent over a cauldron that suddenly explodes in a purple blast.
“Yessir,” Orville says. “Looks entirely accurate.”
“I want to try. I want to seemyfuture.”
The wizard frowns. “But why, Oliver? Youalready know what happens to you. You live happily ever—”
“Yeah, yeah, right. But still. You never know. I mean, will I live in the kingdom or move away? Have kids? Start a war? I just want some details….”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea….”
Before Orville can stop me, I yank a hair out of my head and toss it onto the pedestal.
For a long moment, there is nothing but a swirling lavender whirlpool. Then a geyser of mist sprays toward the ceiling, raining down in a dome. Inside this snow globe made of smoke, I can see myself.
The first thing I notice is that I’m not wearing a tunic.
I’m not carrying a sword or a dagger.
And I’m not standing in a scene from this fairy tale.
Instead, I am dressed just like the people in the photographs I’ve seen in Delilah’s house. I’m sitting in a room that reminds me of Delilah’s bedroom… except different. There is a fireplace, for example, that Delilah’s room doesn’t have. And there’s a bookcase behind me, with every shelf filled. I can’t understand some of the writing on the volumes; it is in tongues I do not recognize.
