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But whether she was Maleficent’s daughter or not, she had failed.
She was returning home empty-handed.
Boy, did she not want to be around when her mother found out.
This wasn’t the victory lap Mal had imagined when she’d first set off in search of the Forbidden Fortress.
Defeated, the unlikely gang of four began to retrace their steps, just looking for the way out. They had lost everything, as usual. By any reasonable standard—or by her mother’s infinitely less reasonable standards, Mal thought—they were utter and complete failures, every last one.
Especially her.
The moment they retreated from the throne room, though, Mal couldn’t help but feel a shiver of relief at also leaving its darkness behind.
Although, oddly enough, the fortress had a different feel now, like it was dead. Mal couldn’t feel the same energy it had before.
“Do you think the hole in the dome’s plugged up again?” she asked Carlos. “It feels different in here.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe the magic it sparked is spent, now.”
Mal looked up at the sky. She had a feeling there wouldn’t be any more magic on the island.
Nobody said a word as they found their way back to the hall where the Magic Mirror was now just an ordinary surface—especially not Evie, who avoided so much as a glance at it.
Nobody said a word, either, as they hurried once again over the crumbling marble floor, this time avoiding both the scampering rats and the fluttering bats—going nowhere near any goblin passages or suffocating mazes or dusty tapestry rooms or portrait halls—until they reached the vast, empty cave that had so briefly become the sand-filled Cave of Wonders.
Especially not Jay, who only quickened the pace of his own echoing footsteps until he once again found the rotting wooden door that had brought them there the first time.
And Carlos seemed in a particular hurry to get through twisting passages that led to the black marble–floored, dark-fogged halls of the main fortress. As he pushed his way out the front doors, the gargoyle bridge once again faced them.
Faced him.
When the others caught up to Carlos, they stopped and stared over the precipice where he stood. The dizzying depths of the ravine below were, well, dizzying. But he didn’t seem in any hurry to step back up to the bridge this time.
“It’s fine,” Evie said, encouragingly. “We’ll just do what we did before.”
“Sure. We cross one stupid bridge.” Jay nodded. “Not very far at all.”
That was true. On the other side of the bridge, they could just make out the winding path leading its way down through the thorn forest, from the direction they’d originally come.
“We’re practically home free,” Mal agreed, looking sideways at Carlos, who sighed.
“I don’t know. Do you think it looks a little more, you know, crumbly? After all those tidal earthquakes we were feeling back there? It doesn’t seem like the safest plan.” He looked at Mal.
Nobody could disagree.
The problem was still the bridge. It was all in one piece this time, with no missing sections—but they all knew better than to trust anything in the fortress.
And not one of them dared set foot on it, after last time. Not after the riddles. Though they’d made it over easily enough the first time, once they’d answered the riddles, they hadn’t thought about having to go out the way they’d come.
“I don’t know if I can do it again,” Carlos said, taking in the faces of the once again stone gargoyles. He winced at the thought of their coming to life again.
In Mal’s own mind, she hadn’t gotten much past imagining the scene where she reclaimed her mother’s missing scepter and came home a hero. She had been a little foggy on the actual details beyond that, she supposed; and now that the whole redemption thing was off the table, she really didn’t have a backup plan.
But as she looked at Carlos, who stood there shivering, she suspected, at the memory of collapsing bridges and fur coats and a mother’s true love that wasn’t her son, Mal figured out a way across.
Mal stepped in front of him. “You don’t have to do it again.” She took another step, and then another. “I mean, you don’t get to hog all the cool bridge action,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “Now it’s my turn.”
“What?” Carlos looked confused.
