One moment Biscuit and I were walking along the northern path toward Blockville, the morning sun trying its absolute best to push through the gray sky above us. The next moment — whomp — we were inside a cloud that had apparently decided to live on the ground instead of up where clouds belong. I could barely see my own hand in front of my face, which was a problem because my hand was holding a very important map.
“Biscuit,” I said carefully. “The map is wet.”
“The map is dissolving, Ollie.”
“That’s what I said.”
She made the noise she makes when she’s trying very hard not to say something. I’ve heard it a lot since Sproutville.
The fog maze was Wither Wanda’s doing — that much was obvious. It smelled, according to Biscuit’s remarkable nose, like “old socks, sadness, and enchanted gray wool.” The same smell we’d detected back at camp this morning when the sky went flat and colorless. Biscuit said the scent was coming from the north, and she’d been right. She’s almost always right about smells, which is simultaneously her most useful and most alarming quality.
“The hats are definitely in there,” Biscuit said, sniffing the air in three short sharp bursts. “I can smell polka-dot fabric, baker’s flour, and something very official, which is probably the mayor’s hat.” She paused. “Also pickle juice, but I’m not sure that’s relevant.”
“Maybe the mayor likes pickles,” I offered.
“Ollie. Focus.”
Blockville’s Grand Hat Festival was in two days. Two days! The baker who couldn’t bake without her chef’s hat, the mayor who refused to hold meetings hatless, little Pip’s polka-dot party hat — all of them sealed inside Wanda’s enchanted jars somewhere in this fog maze. We had to get them back.
I reached into my tunic pocket and pulled out the Wool of Wonders. It sat in my palm, looking innocent, like it wasn’t responsible for the incident in Rainbow Meadows where I’d become a dirt block during a very tense moment with Baron Blaze. I’d been aiming for hay bale that time. Progress, I reminded myself. Definitely progress.
“I’ll disguise myself as a boulder,” I announced with great confidence. “Wander right past the guards.”
Biscuit opened her mouth.
“I know, I know. I might not get boulder. But I’ve been practicing.”
This was true. On the walk north, I’d spent twenty minutes trying to become specific blocks. I’d managed oak log twice, which felt enormous. Once I’d accidentally become a jack-o’-lantern, which nobody had asked for, but which had made a passing rabbit absolutely lose its mind.
I focused very hard on the idea of a boulder. Gray. Round. Heavy. Definitely not a vegetable.
The Wool of Wonders hummed, tingled, and wrapped around me in a shimmer of light.
I looked down at myself.
I was a pumpkin.
“You’re a pumpkin,” Biscuit said.
“I know I’m a pumpkin.”
“You said boulder.”
“I know what I said.”
She was quiet for exactly two seconds. “Forty percent of the time it works,” she said, which was actually the nicest thing she could have said, and also completely accurate based on our walk north.
The Wither Skeleton guards were enormous, clattering, gloomy-looking things with purple-glowing eyes, standing at the first junction of the maze with their stone swords resting against the foggy walls. They looked extremely bored, which I chose to interpret as an advantage.
I rolled — and I want to be clear that rolling is genuinely difficult when you have legs but the disguise disagrees — slowly along the left wall of the fog corridor. The nearest Wither Skeleton glanced over. I froze. It stared at me with its three glowing purple eyes.
It looked away.
Apparently pumpkins were not suspicious. Excellent. Forty percent was going to be enough today.
Biscuit, meanwhile, had her nose to the air and was moving in careful, deliberate zigzags through the maze, sniffing at every turn. “Left,” she whispered. “Now right. Now — oh, that’s pickle again, ignore that — left again.”
We found Wanda’s jar collection in a wide stone chamber at the very heart of the maze.
There were hundreds of jars. Glass jars on stone shelves, floating jars drifting near the ceiling, tiny jars and enormous jars, all sealed with purple wax and glowing faintly. Inside some of them I could see sunsets swirling in orange and pink, little captured rainbows pressing against the glass, stars going around and around like they desperately wanted to be back in the sky.
And there, on a low shelf near the back, was a row of jars that smelled — according to Biscuit’s immediate and extremely confident sniff — of baker’s flour, official business, polka-dot fabric, and a very specific type of pickle.
The hats.
Biscuit pulled out a jar and held it up. Inside, squashed but perfectly intact, was a tiny tall white baker’s hat, slowly rotating like it was having a lovely nap.
“Right,” she said, and opened her enormous backpack. “I have seven plans for getting these open. Plan One involves the button. I have made seventeen rules about the button, and rule number one is that this is exactly the situation it’s for.”
She clicked Biscuit’s Lucky Button.
The purple wax seals on every hat jar popped off simultaneously with a sound like twelve champagne corks at a birthday party. The hats floated gently up and settled, one by one, back into existence — baker’s hat, mayor’s hat, shiny red helmet, and right at the end, a cheerful polka-dot party hat that spun in a happy little circle before landing in Biscuit’s arms.
From somewhere deeper in the fortress, I heard a furious shriek that sounded a lot like Wither Wanda discovering her jar collection had just partially de-jarred itself.
“Time to go,” I said.
“Absolutely time to go,” Biscuit agreed, already running.
I grabbed the stack of hats, tucked them under my arm, tripped over a completely flat section of stone floor, somehow turned the stumble into a sprint, and followed her back through the maze at top speed — because falling forward, as I’d been learning since Rainbow Meadows, is sometimes exactly the right direction.
Behind us, the fog began to thin, and somewhere very far above, a tiny crack of blue appeared in the gray sky.
Not much. Just enough.