His wicked mother in the meantime was searching the castle high and low, and in a strangely convenient manner forgot to look in the stable until most of the palace had been turned upside down. When she did, it drawing on night time. She flung open the double doors of the stable with a particularly evil gesture, and stood there in the flaming light of the torches and screamed: “Where is the prince!”

Because of palace cutbacks, there was no longer at twenty-four hour stableboy, so all she heard was the echo of her voice and the nervous noises made by the only remaining horse. “Cutbacks,” she muttered.

It was not long before she was riding into the evening toward the sunset, her obsidian-black ball tracing the route that the prince had taken.

* * *

“Are you sure we should be doing this?” asked Mackenzie nervously, glancing over her shoulder. “Won’t your mother get angry?”

“Yes she will,” the prince told her, “but I need that book!”

“What’s so important about a book?” she said. “I always found books a waste of time. So unsensible.”

“That’s exactly what makes them so fun.”

“What’s ‘fun’?”

“Don’t ask any more questions,” Roderick said. “All you need to know is that we are now descending into the bowels of the palace, and of my evil mother’s evil workshop.”

“Quite a sensible choice of words,” Mackenzie commented.

“Thank you,” replied the prince. “Now look around for a book that says ‘Imagination’.”

They searched around for a while before the prince came across a bit of dust seemingly randomly scattered over the table. He recognized the dust, however, and looked closer. “Here!” he said, motioning to Mackenzie. “Look what I found!” She hurried over and squinted at the dust lying on the table.

“It’s tiny little words,” she whispered. “What a silly thing to do?”

“Why are you whispering?” asked the prince. “And what does it say?”

“It says, ‘Imagination wuz here,’ and I’m whispering because it seemed like the right thing to do.”

The prince frowned. “That means she must have the book with her. We need to get it back!”

“Why?” asked Mackenzie, who seemed to be a never-ending fount of questions. “You’ve already got your imagination. What could you possibly do with the book?”

The prince frowned again. “I would spread it around the world,” he replied. He grinned. “Starting with you.”

* * *

The evil queen took the one-way path to Mackenzie’s house, cursing the king the entire time for making one-way paths to distant villiages. What was the point? Did anyone like one-way streets? Were they in style back then or something? (In her further comments on the subject, I will replace any offensive words she may have used with the word “drat” or “dratted” or “dratting”.) And that dratted boy! Always meddling – well, not always, but once was quite enough – in places where he didn’t belong! Just like his dratted father! Drat him! The man created one dratting way streets for crying out dratting loud! To quote Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, “Drat, drat, drat, drat!”

She broke off her thought of the king and his errant son (and groaned at her own pun) to follow the lead of her obsidian-black substance ball. “Where has he gone, all-seeing eye?” she asked, loudly. Which disturbed the sleep (since it was now night) of Mackenzie’s aunt, who hadn’t yet realized that Mackenzie (a sensible girl who could be trusted on her own) hadn’t tucked herself into bed. The aunt looked out the window, seeing what she thought was another loonie wandering around her front yard with an obsidian-black substance ball flaming blue fire, and went back to sleep.

It wasn’t long before the prince’s evil mother had traced all of his steps around the yard (using a method known in some countries as the “funky chicken”), and was galloping off down the one-way path back to her castle.

* * *

At the same time, the prince and Mackenzie had just left the palace, headed, for lack of a better idea, for Mackenzie’s house on the border of the enchanted forest. As they galloped on the prince’s royal steed, his mind flicked back to the race his royal steed had recently lost against his mother’s royal steed. Which he suddenly saw coming toward him in a cloud of dust.

* * *

Her son! There he was, just ten feet away going in the opposite direction! And once again, the queen cursed the dratted one-way street as the prince sped into the distance. As soon as she got to the nearest McDonahue’s rest station, she pulled a quick u-turn in the “emergency vehicles only” u-turn thingy, and began pounding down the path after him.

* * *

“She’s coming up behind us!” shouted Mackenzie, who was terrified of this evil woman on that very fast horse. “She did an illegal u-turn in the ‘emergency vehicles only’ u-turn thingy! She’s a monster!”

The prince nodded, urging his horse on just that little bit faster, the little bit that would be the difference between life and life as a toad.

Reaching the enchanted forest, they dismounted quickly and scurried into its depths. But not before Mackenzie cut a mark in the tree with her Swiss Chard Amy Knife.

“What are you doing?” the prince shouted. “We have to escape!”

“Not without leaving a trail,” said Mackenzie. “Haven’t you ever heard of Hansel and Gretal?”

“No!” the prince, again, shouted. “C’mon, we don’t have time to waste.”

They crashed through the forest, stopping ever so often to cut marks in trees, listening to the sounds of their impending doom coming closer and closer as they did.

Tags: fiction