The queen reached down and snatched the loose end of yarn and began to wrap it into a new ball as she followed the string into the woods.
“Ahhh, now I know where we are,” Daphne said. “This is one that Jacob and Wilhelm wrote about. It’s called ‘The Six Swans.’ ”
Sabrina had a vague memory of reading it, or rather, of struggling to stay awake while she read it. Clearly, she had lost the battle.
“That woman is a witch. Her husband is a king and he has seven children with his first wife. The queen wants to do bad things to his kids, so the king hides them in a cabin in the woods. She’s using a ball of magic yarn that will unroll until it takes her to where they are.”
“So the yarn is like a GPS device or something?” Sabrina asked.
A guard shot them an angry look. “Shhhhh!”
“Yes,” Daphne whispered. “In the story I read, it leads her to their cabin.”
The children trudged through the dense woods for the next hour. The men followed the queen obediently as she collected and wrapped her ball of yarn. Finally they came to a cottage built near a bubbling spring. Six smiling boys, the oldest not much older than Sabrina, raced out of the cabin toward the group. Their eyes were bright with joy until they saw the queen. When they turned to flee, the men pounced on them and dragged them to the wicked stepmother. From the folds of her dress she removed six silk shirts, and one by one she pulled them over the heads of the boys. In a flash of light, each boy made what appeared to be a painful, squawking transformation into a white swan. Legs and arms vanished. Lean bodies turned plump and sprouted feathers. Toes were replaced with webbed feet. Once each of the boys had changed, the queen’s men released the swans. The distraught gaggle took to the air and disappeared over the treetops.
“She turned them into birds!” Sabrina said. It hadn’t been long ago that she had been turned into a goose, and sometimes she still felt the instinct to shove her head into the river and feast on tiny fish. “What happens to them next?”
“I don’t remember everything, but I think their sister finds a way to break the spell,” Daphne said. “But to do it she has to keep quiet for six years.”
“What did you say?” the queen asked.
The girls turned to see the queen standing behind them, listening to every word.
“Did you say the king has another child?” she continued.
“Um,” Daphne said.
“I’m not supposed to know that! Now it’s part of the story. I have to go in there and turn her into a swan too. If I don’t, my motivations won’t make any sense, but if I do, how will the boys get rescued?”
“You could pretend you didn’t hear it,” Sabrina suggested.
The queen shook her head. “Guards, these three children have brought the Editor to our story. The revisers will be here at any moment.”
At the word “revisers,” the guards raced into the woods as if running for their lives. The queen followed them, dropping her end of the ball of yarn in her flight.
“We’re sorry!” Daphne shouted to them.
“Messing up these stories is kind of fun,” Puck said. “I hope we run into Ms. Muffet. I’ll give her something to be afraid of . . .”
Sabrina’s gaze fell on the queen’s ball of yarn. She snatched it up and immediately felt the uncomfortable sensation she always experienced when handling magical items. If she held it for too long, she’d be overcome with the urge to use it. So she shoved it into her sister’s hand.
“Wow! The magic in this thing is strong, even more than Dorothy’s slippers. Let’s give it a try,” Daphne said as she held the yarn ball to her mouth. “Take us to Mirror.”
At once, the ball of yarn fell out of the young girl’s hands and rolled into the woods. Sabrina watched it with amazement. “Is it possible? Could it really take us to him and our baby brother?”
Daphne shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
The children chased the rolling ball of yarn through the woods, collecting the loose strand and re-wrapping it as they went. The faster they ran, the faster the yarn seemed to roll, until it zipped down a small embankment to a dry creek bed, where a door materialized. The ball of yarn stopped in front of the door and hopped around as if eager to keep moving.
“So there are doors inside the stories.” Sabrina smiled. “We can stop worrying about going all the way to the end before we find one.”
It seemed as if something was finally going their way. She opened the door and the wind that came out smelled like burning wood and leather. It was oddly familiar. The yarn rolled forward into the void and disappeared. Sabrina took her sister by the hand and snatched Puck by the collar and together they followed the yarn.
The first thing Sabrina heard was a crackling fire and the sound of someone flipping through the dry pages of an old book. When she blinked, she found herself lying on her back in the Editor’s library. Above her, sitting in his leather chair, was the man himself. He looked down and cocked a curious eyebrow.