NINE

Torsten did not know he was an ax man. As a young boy, he’d thought he was more of a sword man. He pictured himself wielding something with a long slim blade, like a rapier. That night, in front of the house with two halves, he changed his mind. A rapier wasn’t wide enough to deflect throwing stars or arrows. He was an ax man.

The moon overhead shone like a clean plate that approved of naughty cutlery being put in its place. The trees swayed in the wind like forgotten forks that had been left in a pie on the windowsill to cool for far too long.

The crack and splitting sounds of half the house coming down did not wake a soul. The birds slept and the crickets chirped, but no one noticed the sound of a house toppling to the anger of one overly energetic prince.

In the morning, there wasn’t a roof on Torsten’s side of the house with two halves. He had only been demolishing a house, but he had been shot at by more arrows than an archer who had survived a siege for six months. He had had more knives thrown at him than if he had dedicated his life to becoming a ninja. And his brothers, who thought they had survived rigorous martial training, had fewer cuts and bruises from years of training than what Torsten received in that one night.

The three walls of the house lay in broken pieces in the grass, their studs had been ripped apart and between all of them, hundreds of loose steel blades had been set free. Once the walls were detached, the knives were confused. The spell that animated them was damaged though not completely broken. Their shiny edges slipped through the grass like fish on the shore—confused and out of their element

The ax between Torsten’s hands had tried to spare him blisters, but it could not in the relentless destruction and Torsten finally had the palms and fingers of a fighting man.

When Fayette came around the corner, she dropped the basket of muffins she was carrying. She hurried across the grass, though she paused over and over again, seeing the steel blades protruding from the harmless blades of grass.

“What happened?” she called to Torsten, lifting her skirt and watching where she was going.

“Well, the walls of my side of the house were trying to draw my blood, but they intended to take a little too much. Was this your doing, Princess?” The way he said ‘Princess’ was laced with accusations, but he was far too tired after his hard night to get more mouthy. His throat was dry and he needed a drink more than he needed to tell her off.

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“I don’t know what you’re saying,” the elfin princess said crossly. When she reached him, she put up her hands and began casting a healing spell on him that began with the two cuts on his cheek and spread out over his entire body. “We weren’t trying to draw blood from you.”

“Then what do you call all this?” he said, holding his head from a headache that boomed in his skull from having spent the whole night awake. He pointed to the hundreds of blades, perhaps thousands, that had fallen from inside the house walls. Other parts were acidic and melting wood and plaster.

She looked at them in confused silence. “As you said, something was wrong with your side of the house, but you didn’t say anything that led me to believe that you wouldn’t be safe on your side. I even brought you breakfast since your kitchen didn’t seem to be working.”

“I would love breakfast,” he breathed as he used all his strength to stay still while the blue and yellow light of her spell worked its magic.

Her healing spell finished, but it did not remove the blood stains from his clothes or ease the fatigue in his shoulders. It also did not entirely erase the two cuts on the side of his cheek.

Fayette took him by the hand and led him back to the place where she had left her basket of muffins.

They saw that she really should not have left the basket unattended on the ground because pins and needles had crawled into the basket and wormed their way into the muffins. They could see their protruding heads.

“We can’t eat them now,” Fayette lamented as she pulled him onward.

“Where are you taking me?” Torsten wondered, though her soft touch was so welcome to his rough one that he went along with her when he did not receive an answer.

She pulled him past her side of the house, down the lane, and all the way to the archway they had entered by. In a sudden act of determination, she pulled him through the archway and into the forest they had traveled through the first morning.

Fayette found the sign she had checked when they first arrived. She pushed at the bushes and branches covering the words. Torsten wasn’t positive, but he thought that more characters were visible.

She let go of the branches and declared, “We’re at the wrong house.”

The Extra Tail in the Fairy Tale

“We’re at the wrong house.”

That was what the elven princess said, but it was the perfect time for a yellow goat, who had learned to climb trees, to sample the blond hair of the prince.

He was right there.

Chomp!

“Hey!” Torsten shouted before he punched the goat between the eyes and broke three fingers on the goat’s skull.

The goat wasn’t hurt, but at least he lost his footing and fell from the tree.