After much vigorous shaking, the little girl was on her feet and the sisters followed their uncle into the fort. It was a flurry of activity. Everyone was rushing about with buckets of water, doing their best to put out the raging fire that was turning the camp’s garden into ash.
“The saboteur has struck again,” Uncle Jake said.
“Fudge,” Daphne complained. “This guy is starting to get on my nerves.”
“He freed the chickens in the henhouse, too, but that’s not what we should be concerned about. Look!”
Uncle Jake pointed to the ground. There she saw the broken pieces of hundreds of arrows. Sabrina knew at once these belonged to the Merry Men. They had been working on them for days and were to play a major part in the next day’s attacks.
“Did you see anything?” Sabrina asked her uncle. She knew he had spent another night next to Briar’s grave.
He shook his head. “I must have dozed off. The fire was raging when I woke up. Whoever is doing this has gotten away with it three times. It’s time to put the Grimm detective skills to work.”
Daphne clapped her hands. “Yay!”
“I’ll search the garden,” Uncle Jake said. “Daphne, you take the henhouse, and Sabrina, you search the armory. If you find any clues, whistle.”
The trio separated. Sabrina rushed to the armory and found the large metal lock on the door intact. How could the saboteur get the arrows out of the armory without opening the door? Perhaps he had a key. She thought about who had keys: Charming, Seven, Robin Hood, Ms. White, and maybe a few others. None of them struck her as someone who would betray the camp. Charming hadn’t always been trustworthy, but this was his camp. He was too proud of himself to sabotage it.
She circled the building to look for another way in and found a window on the far side that was slightly open. This must have been how the villain had gotten inside and removed the arrows. She was just tall enough to pull herself onto the window’s ledge and force the window open. She clambered into the dark, dry room. Inside she smelled welded metal. There wasn’t much light and the moon, hidden behind clouds, was not helping. She wondered if she should climb out and get a match, but decided against it when she got a strong whiff of gunpowder. The last thing she wanted to do was blow herself sky-high—it would be hard to solve a mystery on the moon. Since she couldn’t see, the whole investigation seemed pointless, so she decided to climb out. The sun would be up soon and so she would have to wait.
As she made her way back to the windowsill, she stepped on something that rolled. She lost her footing and tumbled onto her backside. She quietly cursed the pain as she searched in the dark for what had caused her accident. Her fingers touched something small and sleek that felt like wood. She shoved it into her pocket. Whatever it was, it might make someone else fall.
She got back to her feet, crawled out the window, and rushed to find her sister and uncle. Both had returned to where she had left them, and they had been equally unsuccessful.
“I couldn’t see a thing in the chicken house,” Daphne said.
“I had the same problem,” Sabrina said.
“There was nothing in the garden,” Uncle Jake said. “I’ll have to wait until they put the fire out to search the rest of it.”
“Well, that was a bust,” Daphne said.
“You want to come in to the hall and sleep with the rest of us?” Sabrina asked, seeing the dark rings around her uncle’s eyes.
“Yeah, you’re going to get the flu sleeping out here,” Daphne scolded.
Uncle Jake shook his head. “No, I need to be near her.”
He turned and walked back to Briar’s grave.
It was morning faster than she expected. Henry and Daphne went to work training as many soldiers as they could in the use of the new weapons, but it did little to raise the army’s morale. Also discouraging was the cold rain and fog that had drifted into camp. It was a miserable day and it reflected in the faces of the already reluctant army.
As they marched through the gates to fight their next battle, Sabrina wondered if she would see any of them alive again. The first battle had been disastrous and, according to some, an ambush. Now as they went off to battle again, the lingering feelings of humiliation, fright, and exhaustion weighed on their shoulders more than their heavy packs of supplies. Uncle Jake was the only one among them that looked prepared and focused.
Aside from a handful of elderly guards deemed too feeble to fight and a small group of Everafter children, which included Red and Pinocchio, the Grimms were left alone in the camp. Everyone did what they could to occupy themselves until the soldiers returned.
Granny spent most of the day studying a three-dimensional map of the town that Mr. Seven had constructed. She fretted over Charming’s plan and studied all possibilities. When she had a strategic idea or a good route for a retreat, she told one of the Everafter birds that had stayed behind and it flew off to deliver her message to the troops.