“What happens when we get to the Wellspring?”

  “The Guardians cannot go the whole way with you. The Garden of the Wellspring is now protected even from us. When the forest sensed that the Wellspring was damaged, it closed its heart to all but the Princesses. Once you enter the heart of the forest, you will need to use your magic to restore the spring.”

  “But I don’t have any magic,” Rachel argued. “None of us do.”

  “You are already using your magic,” he answered. “Have you not noticed?” Rachel felt a rumble of something like laughter from the bear.

  “You mean by talking to you?”

  Fleet nodded. “Do not fret, Princess. When the time comes, the magic you need will come too.”

  “How can we have magic if the magical well thingie is broken?” Rachel insisted.

  Again she felt the rumble of the bear’s laughter. “Your magic is different and cannot be blocked by anyone or anything as long as you use the creative talents inside you. That is why you are Princesses.”

  “That’s another question,” Rachel said. “Exactly why are we the Princesses? We’re just regular girls.”

  Rachel felt a shrug ripple across the bear’s back. “There are many questions I cannot answer. I am only a Guardian.”

  “Swell,” Rachel muttered.

  They made the rest of the trip in silence. Rachel was glad they were able to ride, as nothing proved to be much of an obstacle to the huge bears. They never had to hurry or put forth a lot of effort. It was like riding on big, furry tanks that barreled through thickets as easily as walking down an open path. Finally, the bears stopped.

  “Are we at the Wellspring?” Kaida asked.

  “This is as as close to the Wellspring as the Guardians are allowed,” Fleet said.

  Rachel slid off the bear’s back, landing lightly on her feet. She explained to the others that they would have to go the rest of the way without the bears.

  Kaida frowned. “Which way would that be?”

  Fleet pointed with his broad muzzle. “Through there.”

  Rachel turned to look. Ahead of them was a wall of thick vines, rising high into the trees and offering no entrance whatsoever. A mouse might make it through, but not an 11-year-old girl.

  “Through there?” Rachel asked in disbelief. “We’re supposed to get in through there? Well, that’s the end of this adventure! You need to show us another way in.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The First Spell

  The great golden bear shook his head. “It is the way,” he said firmly. “Do not give up so easily.”

  “What’s he saying?” Marisol asked.

  Rachel pointed. “He said that’s the way to the Wellspring.”

  “There’s no ‘way’ there,” Rissa said, walking over to the thick wall of vines. “It’s a wall.”

  “It is the way,” Fleet insisted.

  Rachel sighed and shrugged. “He says it’s the way.”

  Soon all the girls were standing at the wall of vines, trying to peer through the thick greenery. “I’m pretty little,” Shaylee said, “and I couldn’t get through there. We had better see if there’s a way around this.”

  Fleet turned toward the other bears. “We must go now.”

  “Wait, we need to find another way in!” Rachel shouted at the bears’ retreating backs. “Stop! Um, I command you as Princess!”

  Fleet whirled and bared long sharp teeth, making the girls jump back. “You are Princesses, but you do not command me!”

  “Sorry,” Rachel said meekly, “but there’s just no way we can get through there.”

  “It is the way,” Fleet repeated. He turned away, and the Guardians lumbered toward the tree line. Without another glance at the girls, they disappeared into the woods.

  “Oh, we’re much better off now,” Rissa said. “Too bad none of us thought to bring our magic machete.”

  “I’d rather have an enchanted chainsaw,” Kaida commented as she leaned closer to the vines and began tugging on them. “We’re not getting through here.”

  “Fleet said each of us has some kind of magic to do this,” Rachel said. “We just have to figure out which of us has the right magic for this.”

  “I could try dancing,” Shaylee said. “Rachel said Fleet mentioned dancing.”

  “You could try,” Marisol said. “I’ll dance with you.”

  Shaylee took a few tentative steps that Marisol repeated. Soon, Rachel and Rissa had joined in; but there was no sign of a change in the hedge of vines. “Come and do it with us,” Rachel suggested, calling to the other two.

  Soon the six girls were dancing in unison. They repeated the simple dance over and over until Rachel was sweaty from the exercise and the humid forest air. “It’s not working,” she said.

  “It must be someone else’s magic,” Marisol panted, “and we don’t even know what kind of ‘princesses’ we’re all supposed to be!”

  “But,” Rachel said thoughtfully, “we do know what kind of princess Rissa is supposed to be. It was something about spells, right?”

  All the girls smiled. “Right!”

  “The only problem is that I have no idea how you do a spell,” Rissa said.

  “On television,” Shaylee said, “spells always rhyme, and you write poetry, so maybe you’re supposed to make up a rhyme for this.”

  Rissa shrugged. “I could try.” She scrunched her face in thought for a minute, then said, “We fly up, we slip under, we walk right through—I really don’t care which thing we do.” Rissa paused, thinking. Kaida frowned and made a rolling motion with her hand to get Rissa going again.

  Rissa made a face at her and said. “Magic move us—we need some luck. Get us out of here, ’cause we’re so stuck!” She nodded and grinned at the other girls.

  Rachel turned to look at the thick wall of vines and held her breath. Would Rissa’s spell get them through? Would it do anything at all?

  Suddenly a gust of wind swept down into the small clearing and spun around the girls, kicking up bits of leaves and dirt. It was like being surrounded by a small tornado. “Did I do this?” Rissa shrieked.

  Kaida yelled something back but the howling wind drowned out the sound of her voice. Shaylee shrieked as the spinning wind shrank around the girls and lifted them off the ground. Surprisingly, the wind didn’t spin them, but only lifted them gently and carried them out of the clearing. For a moment, Rachel thought it would drop them safely on the other side of the wall of vines. Instead, they flew through the air, past the forest entirely and far away from the Wellspring.

  Kaida whooped as they rushed through the air, and Rachel saw that even Shaylee was smiling slightly. They were flying! The view of the flashing treetops from the air was thrilling. After a minute or so, the girls could see a river below. Then they noticed that they were losing speed and beginning to swoop down.

  “I can’t swim!” Shaylee yelled.

  Marisol put an arm around the younger girl. “I can! I’ll keep you safe.”

  But the wind carried them just past the edge of the river before dumping them in a swampy clearing. The trees surrounding the clearing were twisted and sickly looking, and the ground was an odd, multicolored, muddy slush.

  “I’m sinking!” Rachel shouted as the mushy ground under her feet gave way.

  “Me too!” Aly yelled. A chorus of cries made it clear that they all were sinking.

  “It’s quicksand!” Rissa exclaimed.

  “I don’t think so,” Marisol said. “It’s more like squishy mud.” She reached out to catch hold of Shaylee’s hand. “Stop fighting it. It’s like swimming. Struggling will make you sink quicker.”

  “Well, like I said when I thought we were about to be dropped in the river, I can’t swim! And this is so gross,” Shaylee whimpered, wiping at a glob of mud on her arm.

  The girls sank until they were nearly waist-deep in the gooey mud, then they stopped. They were stuck fast but not sinking anymore.

  “You just had to put ‘stuck’ in your spell,” Kaida snapped at Rissa.

  “You want me to try again?” Rissa asked.

  “No!” the girls shouted in unison.

  Rachel looked around. Though the trees seemed to lean in toward them slightly, none of the branches were within reach. “How come there’s no useful vine hanging around? There’s always a useful vine in the movies.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s popcorn at the movies too,” Kaida said, “and I’m not seeing any of that either.”

  “Hush!” Aly hissed. “We’re not alone!”

  “What?” Rachel turned toward her sister so sharply that she nearly fell forward into the muck. “What do you mean? ‘We’re not alone’?”

  “I see something moving through the trees,” Aly said, “or the energy from it anyway. I think maybe it’s a person.”

  “Hey, great!” Rissa said. “Help! Help! We’re stuck!”

  A little boy stepped into the clearing. His skin was faintly green, but every bit that the girls could see was striped with mud. He wore a thin leather hat pulled low on his forehead, and he looked to be no more than 6 or 7 years old. “What are you doing in our source?” he demanded.

  Kaida crossed her arms and glared. “We heard mud was a great beauty treatment so we just rushed over.”

  “We’re stuck,” Marisol said, smiling sweetly. “Can you help us?”

  The boy peered closely at them. “You look funny. What are you?”

  “We’re Princesses,” Rissa said. When the boy laughed, she frowned and pointed at Shaylee. “She is the Princess of the Folk!”

  “If you are the Princesses,” the boy said, “why are you here? The Wellspring is not fixed—everyone would know if it was, and this is not the Guarded Forest.”

  Kaida snorted. “Blame the Princess of Spellcraft. She rhymed us into the mud.”

  “Hey,” Rissa retorted. “It was my first spell, OK?”

  “You do not act like Princesses,” the boy said. “You act like my sisters.” His tone of voice made it clear that he wasn’t paying them a compliment.

  “We look a lot more regal when we’re not stuck in the mud,” Rachel assured him. “So would you mind helping us? Please?”

  “I will ask the others,” the boy said. Then he turned and disappeared back into the gloomy trees before they could call to him.

  “Great,” Kaida said. “Well, I know I’m having a good time. Especially now that I can’t feel my feet.” The cold mud was beginning to make all the girls shiver.

  Suddenly Rachel spotted movement in one of the trees close to the edge of the muddy pit. It seemed to be leaning toward Aly. “Look out!” she yelled. “I think that tree’s going to fall!”

  “No,” Aly said. “It’s not.” The tree leaned still closer and one of the branches actually bent down toward Aly’s reaching hands.

  “Are you doing that?” Rachel asked, stunned.

  “Yes,” Aly said as she finally grabbed the branch and wrapped her arms around it. “I guess it’s one of my Princess powers. I can talk to the tree.” She closed her eyes and leaned her face against the rough bark of the tree branch. The tree began slowly standing upright again and the girls could see Aly inching out of the mud.

  She was still about thigh deep in the sticky mud when the girls heard an ominous crack. “The branch is breaking!” Rachel yelled.

  “It’s too hard for the tree to pull me out,” Aly said. “I need to let go! I’m hurting it!” She unwrapped her arms from around the branch, but it curled around her, and the tree kept tugging. “No!” Aly yelled, slapping at the branch. “You have to let go—your branch will break!”

  They heard another loud crack, and the girls could see where the branch was splitting off the tree. But the tree still continued to straighten, pulling steadily against the grip of the mud.

  When Aly was only knee deep in the mud, the branch broke free completely. “Aly!” Rachel yelled, straining against the mire toward her sister. The thick branch brushed her arm as it crashed into the mud. Rachel yelled again. “Aly!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Mud Shapers

  Rachel leaned across the mud and began tugging at the end of the branch, while shouting her sister’s name.

  “I’m OK,” Aly gasped. “Just a little winded. I think I can climb out of the mud using the branch.”

  Rachel felt tears of relief begin to flow when her sister’s mud-streaked face appeared above the branch. Aly slowly crawled up onto the branch and began inching along it toward the edge of the mud pit. Finally, she was able to stand up, albeit shakily. She looked more like a mud pie than a girl—but at least she was standing.

  Just then, a small group of mud-streaked people stepped out of the gloom. “Princess of the Earth,” an older man said formally to Aly as the whole group bowed slightly. “We are the Mud Shapers Folk. We saw the tree heed your magic. We have come to help as well.”

  Using the broken branch as a makeshift bridge, several of the people got close enough to the girls to slip a rope around each of them, placing it under their arms. Using the thick trunk of the tree that had helped Aly, they pulled at the ropes. Even the tree seemed to lean slightly away from the muck, as if doing its part to help pull. One by one, the girls were hauled from the mud’s grip—each one popping free with a wet plop.

  As the muddy girls stood together, the small group bowed again. “We are honored, Princesses.” A thin man with dots of mud speckling his bald head in a leopard-print pattern bowed nearly to the ground. “We apologize for our slowness in rescue—young Stripe did not recognize you. We are far away from the rest of the Folk and news travels slowly.”

  “Th-that’s OK,” Shaylee chattered.

  “Enough with the speeches, Spindlethorne!” An older lady with elaborate swirls of dried mud on each cheek pushed through the crowd and gathered the girls close to her. “Can’t you see the Princesses are frozen through? We can bow and chatter once we get them in dry clothes and filled up with hot soup.”

  Rachel thought that sounded wonderful. The girls gladly let the bossy woman hustle them down a narrow path between the twisted trees. Along the way, they learned that the woman’s name was Hearth. “They sure give people strange names here,” Rachel thought, but her teeth chattered too much for conversation, so she just let the flood of comforting words flow over her. She was glad of the woman’s protective arms because her feet were still numb with cold, and she stumbled over every root in the trail. After Shaylee nearly fell several times, a brawny man simply scooped her up and carried the tiny girl the rest of the way.

  The Folk led the girls into a large mud-brick building. Rachel nearly cried with joy when the warmth of the room enveloped her. Hearth pushed a bowl of hot soup into each girl’s hands, and then called for the Folk men to fill wooden tubs with hot water before shooing them out so the Princesses could bathe.

  Rachel had been to a lot of slumber parties in her 11 years, but this was her first bath party—and the hot water was to die for. Hearth insisted that the girls stay in the tubs until their fingers were as wrinkly as raisins. Then she produced soft, warm dresses and cloaks for each of them.

  “This is lovely,” Marisol said, stroking her velvety bluegreen cloak. “But my mom will kill me if I don’t bring home my regular clothes.”

  Hearth was horrified. “Plain dwellers kill their children?” she gasped.

  “No, that’s just a saying,” Marisol reassured her. “She would yell at me a lot, though, if she saw my clothes so dirty.”

  “Oh, have no concern, Princess,” Hearth said, patting Marisol’s hand. “I will have the clothes cleaned.” She began bustling around, picking up the girls’ muddy things.

  Rachel knew the steamy bath would quickly turn her curly hair into a lion’s mane, so she pulled it back into a ponytail and looked for something to tie around it. Hearth quickly saw her problem and braided Rachel’s hair tightly enough to turn up the corners of her eyes before tying a bit of leather around the bottom.

  During the impromptu hairdressing session, the other girls wandered around the room. The large room had fireplaces at either end. In one, cooking pots were hanging over the fire, but the other was nearly enclosed with bricks. “Is this where you bake bread?” Aly asked.

  “Oh no, Princess,” the older woman said. “That is where we bake the beads.”

  Marisol turned sharply to look toward the enclosed fireplace. “You make beads?” she asked excitedly.

  Hearth smiled. “Would you like to look?”

  The girls gathered around as the older woman took down tray after tray of incredibly beautiful clay beads. In one tray, each bead was a swirl of rainbow colors. In another, the beads were tiny pink roses, positioned with their petals open to show their golden hearts. Another tray held oblong beads so black that they glowed blue in the firelight. “They’re beautiful!” Kaida gasped.

  “That is what we do,” Hearth said softly. “We coax the beauty from the clay and marry it to the magic that each will do.”

  “Who would guess that the gunk all over our clothes could turn into these?” Rissa said.

  “Often what is plainest on the outside hides the greatest treasure,” Hearth said. “I should let the others in now.” She padded over to open the wide wooden doors and soon the room was filled with smiling people—all with different intricate mud patterns painted on their green skin.

  “Ah,” said the balding man, Spindlethorne. “Hearth has shown you our treasure and our duty.”

  “Are these beads really magical?” Rachel asked. “What do they do?”

  The man ran his fingers through the unique beads on one of the trays, his face wistful. “They hold little magic now,” he said. “But these beads are the first gift to every Folk child born.”

  Marisol looked alarmed. “They look like a choking hazard to me.” She had two-year-old twin siblings at home and sometimes launched into mom-like lectures about child safety.

  Spindlethorne smiled warmly at her. “We’ve never had a baby eat one yet.”

  “What do they do with them?” Marisol asked.

  “When a child is born, the parents choose a bead that represents the gifting they see in the child.” He held up several beads. “The rose is for sensitivity to nature. The rainbow is for exuberant joy. The beads are strung on a leather cord and tied to the child’s ankle. It serves as a kind of protection and a reminder of their gifts and abilities.”

 

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