The Tangle Box by Terry Brooks

“Holiday!” the dragon rasped impatiently.

Lock the Gorse back into the Tangle Box—that was what he should do. Lock it away for good. But how? What magic would it take?

There was no time to wonder about it further, no time to decide what help could be found. The demons had begun to advance, coming across the meadow in a dark mass, slowly, deliberately, inexorably.

“Holiday!” Strabo hissed furiously.

Paladin’s sword and dragon’s fire—would they be enough to save Landover?

Ben Holiday reached for the medallion that would give him his answer.

Horris Kew was practically beside himself with frustration. He stood glumly next to Abernathy at the water’s edge, watching the approach of Questor Thews in the lake skimmer, thinking that his last chance to save himself was about to be taken away.

He had tried to tell Holiday, but Landover’s King did not have time for him. He had tried to tell Abernathy, but the scribe had heard all he wanted to hear. He considered telling Questor Thews when the wizard arrived to convey them back across to the comparative safety of the castle fortress, but he was reasonably certain that he would find no help from that quarter either. No one wanted to listen to Horris and that was the hard truth of the matter. Except that for once Horris had something important to say. He shuffled his size-sixteens, hugged himself like a rag doll and tried to remain calm. But it was hard to stay calm knowing what was going to become of him if the Gorse and the demons prevailed over Holiday. If Holiday won, his circumstances would still be precarious, but acceptable. If Holiday won, he had a reasonable chance of staying alive. But if the Gorse came out of this the victor, Horris Kew was stew meat. It didn’t pay to dwell on exactly what recipe would be used, but the result would be the same. The Gorse had seen him standing with Holiday and the dragon; it had seen him quite plainly. The inference was obvious. Horris had joined the enemy. There could be no forgiveness. No excuses would be allowed. The Gorse would grind him up and spit him out, and that would be that.

Horris recalled how the creature had made him feel when they first started out together in this hateful venture. He remembered the silky, dangerous voice and the lingering smell of death. He could still feel its power threatening to strangle him with invisible fingers. He did not relish experiencing any of it again. The tic was gone from his eye for the first time since he had set the Gorse free. Here was his chance to keep it from coming back.

Thunder rolled out of the west, building on itself where the clouds massed. The heavy bank was spreading rapidly toward the sun, swallowing up its light as it came, turning everything black. Wind whipped across the meadow and over the confronting armies. Horses shied, and armor and weapons clanged. The air began to smell of rain.

Horris had been thinking about the Tangle Box. How had the Gorse been put into it in the first place? Surely the renegade fairy had not gone willingly—no more so than Holiday, the witch, and the dragon. Twice now, Horris had been called upon to speak words of power that released captives of the box.

Could the spell be reversed?

He thought about the way that Holiday and the others had been dispatched. The Gorse had constructed an elaborate net of magic upon the spot to which his three victims had been lured. Then Horris had appeared with the Tangle Box, spoken the words of power, triggered the net, and the trap had been sprung.

Simple enough. It would seem at first glance then that a similar approach would be necessary to snare the Gorse. Except that something was nagging at Horris Kew. Wasn’t the Tangle Box constructed for that particular purpose? If so, then the entrapment of Holiday and the other two was an unnatural use of the box, an aberration of that for which it was intended. Besides, if the Gorse knew this was how the magic worked, how had it allowed itself to be trapped in the first place? And if it didn’t know then, how had it learned since?