Page 50 of The Neverfear

Anya grabbed at her head, stunned, as her hair cascaded down her shoulders, down her back, down her knees to the ground: it began to pool in yellow piles at her feet.

‘How do I make it stop!’

‘Spit out the apple!’

She spat. ‘By the Immortal!’ She looked at the great piles of hair on the grass. ‘A Rapunzel tree. I won’t be able to run with it like this.’ She drew a rapier and sliced the hair off to ankle-length.

Christopher looked up at the sloping garden. ‘We need to work faster. Come on.’ He picked an apple at random and bit into it – and then he screamed as the apple in his hand caught fire. The piece in his mouth erupted in flames. He spat it out, the roof of his mouth instantly blistering.

Anya stared wildly around her. ‘That’s a feu tree! My father told me about them – quick, there’ll be a balm tree nearby! Like nettles and dock leaves.’ She ran to the neighbouring tree. ‘Here,’ she said, taking a bite from the apple and handing the chunk to him. ‘Ugh, it’s like wax. Rub it on your burn! Quick, before it gets worse.’

Christopher rubbed the wax on his burnt hand, his scorched tongue and mouth. The pain lessened, though it did not vanish.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Keep going.’

One turned into a rock when Ratwin bit it. ‘Ah, scobberlotchers! I chippeds a tooths.’ Another turned into a rat, which scrabbled in Christopher’s hands; one became dirt in Anya’s mouth. Jacques was stretching out his tiny neck towards another, when Anya called: ‘Jacques! Stop!’

The Garden Is A Trap

Christopher could hear in Anya’s voice that something was urgently wrong, but Jacques hadn’t listened. He was about to bite.

‘Dragon! Halt!’ She spoke like the princess she had once been, and the dragon responded like a soldier, snapping to attention.

‘It’s poisoned!’ she said.

Jacques dropped the apple and launched himself into the air, coming to rest on Christopher’s shoulder. ‘How do you know?’

‘It’s a trap,’ said Anya. ‘This whole garden: it’s a trap.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The ones at the beginning – they’re just to lure you in. The snake is only part of the guard on the trees. It’s the apples themselves! Some of them are deadly. I recognise that one. It’s an arsenapple.’

‘What’s that?’ said Christopher.

‘You’ve heard of Snow White? That was the apple she bit into. If she’d swallowed even a shred of it she’d have died.’

Christopher stared around him. ‘So what now? There’re still hundreds left! How can we know which ones are deadly?’

‘If my father was here, he’d know! Even the snake knows! But I don’t!’ She put her head in her hands, her fingers tugging at her mass of hair, her face screwed tight. Then, very slowly: ‘Christopher?’

He recognised the look on her face. He had seen it before. ‘You’ve got a plan?’

‘Yes. But you won’t like it.’

‘Why?’

‘We’re going to have to free the snake.’

Ratwin stared at her. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is nots a things I am comfortables-delighteds by.’

But Anya was starting to glow. ‘Listen! We untie it, and then we run for our lives – yes, or fly, Jacques – in four separate directions across the orchard. The snake can’t go after all of us. And its job is to protect the golden apples. So – I think it has no choice but to go to the tree, and protect it by staying close.’

‘And we’ll know which one it is!’ said Christopher. ‘But what happens when it’s at the tree? Because what we’ve got then is a venomous man-eating snake that we’ve really, really annoyed.’

‘Yes,’ said Ratwin. ‘Sureslies, we’ll thens be devoured.’

‘Not,’ said Anya, ‘if we offer it something else. The Bestiary says it longs for the apples but it’s not allowed to pick the fruit itself. So this is what we do.’ They leaned together as she spoke.