I had managed to collect every last drop from the oak trees at the edge of Rainbow Meadows without tripping once, which was honestly some kind of personal record. I was feeling magnificent about this. I told a nearby rabbit about it, and she seemed impressed, though she may have just been waiting for me to move so she could eat the grass I was standing on.
“Ollie!” Biscuit’s voice came hissing through the tall grass to my left. “Did you get it? All of it? Tell me you got ALL of it!”
“Every drop,” I whispered back, holding up the little clay pot full of golden resin. It smelled faintly of oak bark and something warm, like summer. “How’s the distraction going?”
Biscuit poked her copper bowl-cut head through the grass. Her chunky yellow sweater had a grass stain on the mushroom sleeve, which meant things had been at least slightly chaotic. “Baron Blaze has been telling me his entire life story for the last twelve minutes,” she said. “Did you know he once reorganized all the Nether fortresses by SIZE? He made a CHART. He showed me the chart, Ollie. It was laminated.”
I pressed my lips together so I wouldn’t laugh. “He laminated it?”
“With GOLD trim.” She grabbed my arm. “Come on. He’ll finish the story eventually and then he’ll notice you’re gone and then—”
A sound like a small thunderstorm wearing a very fancy hat rolled across the meadow.
“WHERE,” boomed Baron Blaze, “IS THE SHORT ONE WITH THE RIDICULOUS HAIR?”
I looked at Biscuit. “He means me.”
“He absolutely means you,” she confirmed.
We scrambled out of the grass and into the open festival square, and there was Baron Blaze in all his terrible, magnificent, smoke-trailing glory. His purple cape flapped in the wind. The golden flame patterns caught the afternoon light. The blinking red gem on his enormous hat was blinking VERY FAST, which I was fairly sure meant he was annoyed.
Right behind him, balanced on a flat rock in the center of the square, sat the Flame Tower signal device. I had never seen it up close before. It was about the size of a small fence post, made of blaze rods twisted together, with a spinning redstone dish on top that was throwing little red pulses in every direction. Those pulses were what had scrambled every compass from here all the way back to Sproutville. Those pulses were why every map had gone blank. Those pulses were the whole entire problem, humming away quietly like it wasn’t ruining everyone’s day.
“The resin!” Biscuit whispered urgently. “We have to get it to the decoration frames before he—”
“YOU!” Baron Blaze pointed one glowing orange finger directly at me. “You are the one who keeps nearly stopping my plans! Do you have ANY idea how long it took me to calibrate that signal dish? DO YOU?”
“Probably a while?” I offered.
“FOUR DAYS. I made a schedule. It was also laminated.”
Biscuit made a very small strangled noise.
Baron Blaze swept his cape dramatically and took a long step toward us. “The Wool Festival ends TODAY. My Flame Tower stays RIGHT where it is. And the two of you will—”
What happened next is a little difficult to explain with complete dignity.
I was stepping backward, very reasonably, while Baron Blaze was stepping forward, very dramatically, and somewhere in the middle of all that stepping, my left foot found the only loose cobblestone in the entire square. I have a gift for this. It’s not a gift I asked for, but here we are.
My arms went wide. The clay pot sailed upward in a beautiful golden arc. I had a single, crystalline moment where I thought about how Biscuit always said she had seventeen backup plans, and I wondered if any of them had accounted for this, and then I fell directly, completely, and at impressive speed into Baron Blaze’s Flame Tower signal device.
The spinning redstone dish went sideways with a sound like a very surprised xylophone.
There was a flash of red light.
Then silence.
Then, from somewhere across the meadow — and then from somewhere further away — and then from what sounded like everywhere all at once — came the tiny, unmistakable clicking sound of compasses snapping back to north.
I lay on the ground and stared at the sky for a moment.
“Ollie,” said Biscuit, in a very careful voice. “Every compass in Rainbow Meadows just reset. I can see the needle from here.”
“Mm,” I said.
“The signal’s off. The maps will reload. Everything that’s been scrambled since Sproutville—”
“Mm.”
“You fixed it.”
“I meant to do that,” I said.
Baron Blaze let out a noise like a furnace being turned off mid-roar. He looked at his Flame Tower, now pointing at a very unhelpful angle. He looked at me. He looked at his cape, which had somehow gotten tangled around his left boot during all the excitement. He looked back at me.
“This,” he announced, with enormous wounded dignity, “is NOT OVER.” He grabbed his cape, spun around, tripped slightly over it himself, and then walked very fast in the direction of the horizon, little puffs of smoke trailing behind him like a grumpy parade.
We watched him go.
Then the Wool Festival exploded into color.
Biscuit pressed the sticky resin into the last decoration frames in about four minutes flat, moving so fast her bowl-cut barely bounced. The wool banners snapped tight. The sculptures held. The villagers came pouring into the square with armloads of dyed wool in every color imaginable — sunny yellow, deep ocean blue, pink so bright it was almost loud.
And Snatcher the sheep trotted right into the middle of it all, wearing a tiny yellow party hat that I am nearly certain Biscuit had been keeping in her backpack the whole time.
“Did you plan the hat?” I asked her.
“Plan number eleven,” she said serenely.
The village elder pressed the Rainbow Wool Badge into my hands before the sun went down. It sparkled in six colors at once, which seems like more colors than something that small should be able to manage.
But before she could finish the official speech, one of the younger villagers — a small kid with enormous round glasses — pushed through the crowd holding something flat and square and slightly scorched around the edges. She held it up. It was a trophy, clearly homemade, made from a piece of oak plank with a golden ingot glued to the front. Someone had painted the words on it in bright red dye.
THE GOLDEN STUMBLE AWARD FOR HEROISM NOBODY PLANNED.The whole square cheered.
I looked at it for a long moment. Back in Sproutville, when I’d fallen into the fountain and started this whole mess, I’d thought my clumsiness was just the embarrassing thing that happened before the real hero arrived. But I was starting to think maybe falling forward — really committing to the fall, going all the way — was its own kind of direction. Not elegant. Not planned. But sometimes exactly right.
I held up the trophy. Snatcher headbutted my knee affectionately, which nearly knocked me into the decoration frames, but Biscuit caught my elbow without even looking up from her list.
“Plan eighteen,” she said. “Catch Ollie.”
“Was that always on the list?”
“It’s on every list,” she said.