Once Upon a Quest

  Once Upon A Quest

  Fifteen Adventurous Faerie Tales

  Fiddlehead Press

  Contents

  Once Upon A Quest

  About the Stories

  West of the Moon

  A Bell in the Night

  Mistress Bootsi

  White Rose

  The Goblin and the Treasure

  The Ruins of Oz

  A Touch of Gold

  Magic and Machinery

  Blow Your House Down

  Bane and Balm: A Fae Tale of Eile

  Cat White

  King Arthur and the Chalice of Life

  Fear of Falling

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  The Merrow’s Golden Ring

  Take my Monsters

  Once Upon A Quest anthology published February 2018 by Fiddlehead Press. All stories copyright by the individual authors. Support indie authors: please don’t copy or distribute this title in any form.

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  Cover by Christine Pope

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  Love fairytale retellings? Don’t miss the previous collections - ONCE UPON A CURSE and ONCE UPON A KISS - available at all retailers~

  About the Stories

  ONCE UPON A QUEST

  Fifteen brand new fairytale twists from bestselling and award-winning authors. With inspirations ranging from The Ugly Duckling to Snow White, and everything in between (including trips to Camelot and Oz), these fabulous tales are full of adventure, magic, and a touch of romance.

  WEST OF THE MOON by Annie Bellet

  When her twin brother sacrifices his freedom to save their starving family, Lina embarks on a quest through a magical forest to save him and restore their fortunes.

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  A BELL IN THE NIGHT by Evelyn Snow

  For Stevie Silver, waking the beautiful boy in the glass box is only the beginning, as her mysterious past catches up with her.

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  MISTRESS BOOTSI by Anthea Sharp

  A girl sets out to seek her fortune - and luckily, she has a clever cat for a companion…

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  WHITE ROSE by Phaedra Weldon

  Jack Frost must find his true love and save her from the Snow Queen’s icy shards before he loses her - and his chance at humanity - forever.

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  THE GOBLIN AND THE TREASURE by Alethea Kontis

  Out-of-work soldier Kira Kobold is handpicked by the High Wizard Zelwynn to go on a quest. Her companions? A growly ogress, a surly dwarf, a dimwitted troll, and an overly optimistic goblin. This wasn’t exactly the quest she was looking for…

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  THE RUINS OF OZ by Alexia Purdy

  The Land of Oz was the last place Thea thought she’d find herself after falling through her mother’s enchanted mirror. If the stories she’s been told are real, why is the Emerald City in ruins?

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  A TOUCH OF GOLD by Rachel Morgan

  When Tilly helps two strangers escape from danger, she becomes part of their quest to keep a powerful magical ability out of the wrong hands ...

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  MAGIC AND MACHINERY by Jamie Ferguson

  Maude works with machinery, not magic. Can she find a way to escape the magician’s grasp and free her beloved brother?

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  BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN by Nikki Jefford

  In a brave new world, three wizards journey through wild shifter territories to find somewhere to begin anew.

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  BANE AND BALM by Jenna Elizabeth Johnson

  When the stream providing healing water to Claire’s sick aunt dries up, she must venture into the dreaded Dorcha Forest, where she discovers a stranger willing to risk his freedom in order to help her on her quest.

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  CAT WHITE by Kay McSpadden

  He thought he was following the music, but a white cat led him to realize life held more adventure than he’d guessed.

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  KING ARTHUR AND THE CHALICE OF LIFE by Julia Crane

  Camelot may be at peace, but betrayal and death lurk within the mists surrounding it.

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  FEAR OF FALLING by Shawntelle Madison

  Cast from her griffin’s nest, Ireti is forced into the cruel world of the ground-walkers below. Before she can fly, Ireti must find the strength to walk, and the key to acceptance lies in an undiscovered place—between two worlds.

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  THE MERROW’S GOLDEN RING by Sara C. Roethle

  Ailios was taught to never believe a promise from one of the Faie, but that doesn’t stop her from doing it anyway.

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  TAKE MY MONSTERS by C. Gockel

  In the wilds of the barbarian north, Roman slave Margusa meets a warrior enchanted and enslaved by an Elf Queen. To set him free, Margusa must first confront the monsters within herself...

  West of the Moon

  Annie Bellet

  I finished the final set of reels, my right forearm aching from moving the bow over my violin all evening. The last strains of music died in the low din of Verity’s Beer Hall, almost unnoticed. The double handful of farmers, laborers, and town folk who spent their evening here appreciated my music in the way that I used to appreciate a breeze on a spring day, pleasant but unnecessary. Rolling my sore left shoulder, I looked at the strewn copper bits in the violin case and mentally tallied what they could get me as I went about putting away my instrument.

  Eleven bits tonight. Enough for thread for our mending work and extra to let out the hem of little Callie’s dress so it might see her through the winter. Maybe enough after that for a candle or two, a luxury that would allow my mother and sisters to keep mending the things villagers brought us later, which might bring in more food and more bits. Nobody around here had much, but my family had less than most.

  I pushed away the bitter thought. My father had ruined us and then left us by his own hand. Resenting a dead man put no bread in our mouths.

  “Lina.”

  I looked up to see Moira Verity making her way toward me through the tables. She was a stout young woman with curly brown hair and a kind word for everyone, even the most belligerent of drunks. I secretly admired her even-headedness though I’d die before admitting as much to my twin, Cortland, who liked to tease me about my own stubborn impulses. Moira was carrying a basket covered in cloth. More mending for my family, I hoped, but it was equally possible the basket wasn’t intended for me at all and that she’d detoured on her way to a patron.

  “I’ll be heading home,” I told her, smiling. “Thanks for letting me play again tonight.”

  “You give me best to your mother and that handsome brother of yours,” she said, a twinkle in her light brown eyes. “This is for your family.”

  I slung my violin case over my back and took the basket she held out. It was heavy and the smell of fresh bread cut through the sawdust and beer of the Hall as I lifted a corner of the cloth.

  “I can’t,” I started to say, my stomach willing my mouth to shut up as I stared at the fresh loaves and length of cured sausage tucked into the basket.

  “Course you can,” Moira said. “You provide a good atmosphere here and it’s the least we can do. Now get home before Moonset, go on.”

  I was too hungry to argue, so I went.

  The night was cold as I made my way up the road out of the village toward the two story manor where my family lived. My mother’s great grandfather had been a Knight, this land his fief, back before my own father had lost all but the small portion of land and the house, which he hadn’t been able to gamble away as they were bequeathed to my mother. No one had lived in the place
in two generations and it had fallen to near ruin. The roof leaked during hard storms, the windows were more boards than lead and glass, and there was only a single working chimney, but it was all my mother, my twin, and my two little sisters had in the world.

  We’d been making do since spring, patching what we could, sleeping in the lower rooms where it was mostly dry, reviving and reclaiming the gardens for what food they could offer. None of us had pulled a weed or brewed a cup of tea in our lives before coming here, but we were all of us proving fast learners, even four year old Callie.

  I had a pocket full of copper bits and a basket of fresh bread and meat tonight, something to bring smiles to my family’s too-thin faces. It was something. A cold wind picked up, carrying on it the smell of frost. Winter was almost here. Everyone in the village said the signs were it would be a long, hard one, the worst anyone had seen in years. I couldn’t deny I feared for us. We had not enough wood stacked by, though Cortland and I went out to the edge of the Tanglewood and brought what deadfall we could home every free day we found. Not enough wood, not enough food. If the village was starving, the little chance we had for bartering mending or music or labor would dry up.

  Cold thoughts for a cold walk. I straightened my shoulders and marched down the lane. We had but to make it through winter. Then Cortland would turn eighteen and could go back to the city and take up an apprenticeship with the Scribes that he’d been promised. They would feed and clothe him, and he would send his small allowance home every holy day.

  Make it through the winter, and there would be money again and one less mouth to feed. I pushed aside my own sadness that my twin brother would leave us, that our dream of attending the University together was gone. Dreams were for full-bellied children. I was no longer a child.

  “I’m home,” I called out as I came in through the kitchen door, setting my basket on the worn oak table. The chimney that worked was in the kitchen, fortunately, the big double-sided hearth serving as both cooking hearth on this side and warming hearth on the other side of the big stone wall that separated kitchen from what had become our family living quarters.

  “Cortland is gone,” Sabitha, my twelve-year old sister, said. Her red-brown braids bounced as she dashed into the kitchen.

  Setting my violin down carefully where it would stay dry but not too close to the hearth, I undid my cloak. “Gone? Where did he go?”

  “Into the Tanglewood,” our mother said. She had Callie on one slender hip, my little sister asleep on her shoulder. Mother’s face looked more drawn and full of sorrow in the shadows through from the firelight. She was a tall, proud woman still, but her hair was now more grey than red, her eyes dull and tired, shoulders bent.

  “Cortland can take care of himself,” I said. I shoved aside the dread as it rose in my belly. My twin was the more impulsive of us, and that was saying a great deal. But he was tall and strong and not stupid.

  Still… there was no good reason in the world to be out in the Tanglewood in daylight much less darkness. We always stayed to the edges of the huge forest. No one dared to hunt or cut wood there, tales of creatures and magic abounding. Herbwives lived within its sheltered branches, women with lore and potions for a price, but we had not had cause in the months we’d been here to seek one out. I hoped Cortland was not hunting for a magic cure for our ills.

  “Eat,” I said. “He’ll return.”

  I waited up for him, sitting on the hearth watching the embers pop and die one by one as the dark of night came and went. My twin finally returned with the creeping silver light of dawn, slipping into the kitchen with the stealth of a thief.

  “Cort, you panicked everyone,” I said, pushing sleep from my eyes. My neck hurt from how I’d fallen asleep against the warm hearthstones and I rubbed it as I stared bleary-eyed up at him.

  “I’m sorry, Lina,” he said and I knew from the tone in his voice that he’d done something terrible, for twins are closer kin than brother and sister alone, at least in my own small experience. I always knew when he lied, or he was in pain, and he knew the same about me.

  “What have you done?” I whispered as I stood.

  He shook his head and put a blue velvet purse on the table by way of answer. When I stared at him, making no move to touch it, Cortland emptied the purse. Silver coins spilled out, bouncing across the scarred oak. I caught one as it threatened to roll off and turned it over in my fingers.

  At first the coin looked plain silver, no markings, but even as I watched it changed to a proper silvain of the Kingdom; sheaf of wheat on one side and the King’s own image imprinted on the other. I dropped it quickly.

  “Magic?” I asked, keeping my voice pitched low so as not to wake the others in the next room. “What have you done?” I repeated. No one came back from the Tanglewood with a bag of magic silver who hadn’t paid some terrible price.

  Cortland sighed and sank down onto the rough-hewn bench. Whatever he might have said next was cut short by our mother entering the kitchen.

  She took one look at us, then at the table with its pile of silver, and turned toward the banked fire. “This requires tea,” she said.

  Sabitha and Callie slept on in the other room as I cut two slices off one of the loaves Moira had given me and mother made tea. Then we all sat, Cortland stuffing bread into his mouth, me fidgeting with my tea cup, and waited for the story.

  “I finished helping Jalin with her cows early, so I thought I would go get more wood,” Cortland said after he had finished chewing the last bite of bread. “I went deeper into the wood than we had before and I came upon an oak tree so large ten men couldn’t link hands around it. In the oak was a door and it stood open.”

  “And you didn’t run away as fast as your feet could carry you?” I said, glaring at him. Doors in trees lead to nowhere good, not if stories were to be believed.

  “I’m no idiot,” Cortland said, glaring back at me.

  “Let him finish,” Mother said.

  “I backed away from the door, though I had arms full of wood, and I backed right into a giant white bear. He threw me to the ground and roared that he would kill me for the offense.” Cortland shuddered and I could see the lingering terror in his eyes, so I withheld my questions about a talking bear.

  “I begged for my life, I’m not ashamed to admit,” he continued. “And as his paw came down, claws like scythes, I cried out that my family needed me. He held the blow. I guess no one had ever given that excuse before.” Cortland ran a damp hand through his mess of red curls. “I told him everything,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “After, he told me he was the Bear King, and that if I agreed to come to him and be his scribe, he would reward me in such a way my family would never want again.”

  “And you agreed?” I said, half question, half scornful statement. I tried not to think what I would have done in his place, but a traitorous voice inside told me I might have done no different at all.

  “I agreed,” Cortland said, his voice stronger now as he looked me in the eye. “He had another bear bring this purse. Every morning with the sunrise it will fill with one hundred pieces of silver. No one will starve, mama, no one. You can fix the roof, have a real garden. Lina can go to university next year.”

  Our mother was silent, her eyes bright with unshed tears, as she stared at the pile of silver. She reached out her hands and clasped Cortland’s. I wondered when my twin’s hands had grown so broad, when they had gotten bigger than our mother’s. I looked down at my own hands, my long fingers as tanned as my brother’s, my palms narrower but no less calloused now.

  “The Bear King will treat you well?” Mother asked.

  I wanted to scream. She was going to let him go. I felt a madness rising within me, as though the whole world were tilted and I was the only one standing upright.

  “I believe he will. I’ll be scribing, just as I would if I went to the city.”

  I did not hear what else might have been said for my feet carried me away from the table, out the ki
tchen door, and across the frost-locked garden. I did not stop until I reached the crumbling wall that marked our western boundary. There, I collapsed against the cold stones and sobbed.

  “I was always going to go away,” my brother’s soft words reached me before his arms did. He pulled me into a hug and I had not the strength or will to stop it.

  “But in the city we could visit you or you could come home sometimes,” I said. “Will this Bear King let you visit?”

  “He lives west of the moon and east of the sun, and I do not know if the door in the tree opens often or I think we would have heard more tales of such in the village,” Cortland said.

  “In the stories, no one ever returns from the lands of magic.”

  “I know. But do I wait and watch you all starve because I wanted to be free? Look at Mother, Lina. How will she survive a long winter? She gives what little she has to Callie already.”

  I turned my face away from him, hating the truth in his words. I, too, had feared that a hard winter would kill at least one of us. We had lost so much already.

  “I must return at dusk,” Cortland said. “Please don’t make me spend my last day here without you.”

  I swallowed my sorrow and let him lead me back to the house. We decided, mama, Cortland, and I, that we would tell the village that Cortland had gone to apprentice early. We would ration the silver, as tempting as it was to spend as much as we could, keeping to the reasonable amount that might be a generous apprenticeship fee. Cortland wanted Callie and Sabitha to believe this also, for we could not trust them to keep the secret.