Of Giants and Ice (Ever Afters, The) (33 page)

“No, left
arm
.” When I scowled, Chase added, “Unless you want to be completely defenseless if someone injures your right arm.”

“I don’t know. Rory can always resort to the Mighty Snap Kick,” Lena said with a small smile, but I passed the hilt from my right hand to my left with a grimace.

“Wow.” Chase looked pleased with himself. “If I had known that teaching would get you to listen to me, I would’ve tried this much earlier.”

“Well, you’re a better teacher than Hansel,” I said.

“Can you tell Hansel that?” Chase grinned. “Can I
be
there when you tell Hansel that?”

“Story,” I said firmly.

The Snow Queen knew she needed more allies to win the war. She turned to underhanded methods. She handpicked neutral parties and kidnapped family members as collateral. Her prisons must’ve been extensive, because she found thousands of new allies in this way. The tide began to turn. The Director says that for almost three years, the Characters could do little more than hide and defend their loved ones. The Snow Queen was a master at intimidation.

“For instance, look at her symbol again,” Chase said, and Lena didn’t look annoyed at all this time. “A snowflake isn’t very scary, but look closely. See how sharp the points are?”

I squinted at it and realized what he meant. “Is it a throwing star?”

Lena nodded. “She gave them to her personal guards, the ones who kept an eye on her allies.”

She used it as her signature. If you crossed her, she left it with the bodies.

For the first part of the war, the Fey stayed out of it. They didn’t mind their anonymity from the human world. They enjoyed their privacy and their court games. Every once in a while, a fairy would join a side, but it was an individual decision. The King of the Unseelie Court’s favorite daughter, for instance, joined our side—her and her betrothed.

Then, one day, a couple of decades ago, their bodies showed up in her father’s throne room, marked with the Snow Queen’s flakes.

It backfired. The Fey were furious. The Unseelie princess was the heir to the throne and very popular. Fairies joined us en masse. They laid siege to the Snow Queen’s palace. Her army was defeated. She was captured.

“How?” I asked. “Aren’t you skipping over the important bits?” Basically everything that would help me if I ever
did
meet the Snow Queen.

Lena and Chase looked at each other, waiting for the other one to answer. “We don’t know,” Chase admitted.

“It was a Character,” Lena said. “A Destined One. I know that much.”

“We could look it up,” Chase said. “His name is on the Wall of Failed Tales in big, golden letters.”

“But
how
did he Fail?” I still wanted to find out something useful. “The Snow Queen was captured.”

“He died,” Chase said. “That’s pretty much an epic Fail.”

I stopped practicing, feeling exactly like I’d been punched in the stomach—breathless and slightly vomity.

“Chase,” said Lena in a scolding tone.

“What?”

Lena pointed at me.

“Rory,
you’re
not going to die,” Chase said in a slow patient voice, as if it were painfully obvious. “We’re not even sure what the Canon thinks about you. We’ll just keep her from breaking out of prison, and everything will be fine.”

“If she’s still such a threat, why wasn’t she—” I didn’t finish the question, shocked that I could have such a ruthless thought.

“—killed?” Lena said, looking like she knew exactly what I was thinking.

“They
tried
. They executed her no less than eighteen times,” Chase said with a heavy sigh. “Burned her at the stake, stabbed her through the heart, then the usual: firing squad, beheading, lethal injections, and then, uh . . .” He stumbled a little, seeing the queasy looks we were giving him. “A bunch of tortures the Fey cooked up. For revenge.”

“So, she can’t be killed.” My voice rose shrilly. I hated that I was panicking. I hated that Chase and Lena were
watching
me panic. I hated the pity on their faces. “And she can magic bad guys back and forth,” I added, jabbing a finger at the letter.

I was shocked to see someone actually standing over there—a really old man.

“Evildoer!” Lena cried. “Evildoer alert!”

“You don’t need to shout, Lena. I’m right here.” Chase rushed over to intercept him.

The old man ran toward Chase, swinging a black ax. He had a hunchback, a very crooked nose, and warts on his hands.

“This is the most exciting story-time I’ve ever had,” I told Lena. “Two villains in a little over an hour.”

The old man turned to me and smiled. Most of his teeth were black. He took a tie-dyed sack off his shoulder, and when he opened it in front of me, the colors started to spin in a hypnotizing way. Suddenly, I felt dizzy, and even sleepier than I’d been all morning, and for some weird reason, I wanted to jump
in
the sack.

“Rory, don’t look at it!” Lena cried. “It’s enchanted.”

“I noticed,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

Chase crashed into the old man noisily. “Hey, Ugly—you’re fighting
me
.”

I looked back, just in time to see the end of the fight. Chase disarmed the guy neatly, stabbed him through the shoulder, and
then kicked the old man backward. The villain fell through the letter, sack and all, and disappeared.

Looking a lot like his dad, Chase grinned with his arms crossed and one hand on his chin. “We don’t really need to worry unless she sends Bluebeard,” he told us, leaning back toward the wood that divided the cubbyholes, but he misjudged the distance and tumbled into the darkness.

“Smooth, Chase,” I said, half-laughing. “Bluebeard will quake with fear.”

But Chase didn’t come out of the cubbyhole.

“Chase?” I called uncertainly, but no one answered.

“Oh, my gumdrops.” Lena stared at the queen’s letter. “He fell through.”

“Through the desk?”

“Through the
letter
,” Lena said, her voice a couple octaves higher than usual. “Of course the spell would allow for unexpected magics and persons to travel bilaterally. The Snow Queen wanted her villains to transport the harp back to her.”

I had a hard time following Lena when she started talking technical, so I wasn’t sure if I understood her right. “You mean, Chase went to the
Glass Mountain
?”

ena nodded, horrified. “This is bad. She’ll capture him, hold him for ransom, maybe. Oh, maybe it would’ve been better for us to let her have the harp after all.”

Something clenched in my chest when I imagined Chase surrounded by villains, dozens and dozens of them, all staring at him with little smirks, more than he could ever fight by himself.

You’ll have to follow him through the letter,
Rapunzel had said. It
was
spooky how right she was, but I was on the verge of getting used to it.

“I have to go after him,” I said.

“Why?”

“Rapunzel told me to.”

Lena bit her lip, glancing between me and the letter. “Rory, it’s hard for anyone to understand what Rapunzel means. I can’t imagine she would want you to face the Snow Queen directly.”

It was more than just what Rapunzel had said. I didn’t
want
to leave Chase there alone. I didn’t want to sit in the giants’ desk helplessly, wondering if he was okay. I wanted to go after him.

I was
worried
about Chase. And kind of shocked to discover it.

“She said I would have to bring him back.” In front of the letter, I drew my sword slowly and hoped that I hadn’t used all the magic up in one go.

“Rory, please. She’s bound to have allies in there with her, and if she catches you—if you both don’t come back . . .” Lena faltered, wide-eyed.

If
she
were the one who had fallen into the Glass Mountain, I would have already jumped through the letter after her. I wouldn’t have even stopped to explain myself first. I couldn’t stay any longer, even to comfort Lena. “I’ll bring him back, I promise.”

Then I leaped through.

Cold radiated everywhere, starting as an ache in my bones, the same way it does when a winter wind blows through your clothes. Then my limbs stiffened, like a layer of ice covered my entire body. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe.

Just when I started to panic, I tumbled onto a thin blue-and-white rug patterned with snowflakes.

Chase was in the far corner, fighting with a pack of wolves bigger than he was. His sword was already bloody and a lump of gray fur lay motionless, so he had already beaten one of them.

At the other end of the room, the old man with the sack stood between a desk and a rack of spears. His shoulder was still bleeding heavily. He picked up the spear closest to him and began to smile in a way that meant trouble for Chase.

The man threw the spear, and I ran directly into his path. That weird runner’s high returned, and my sword struck the shaft so hard that it fell to the rug with a muffled clatter.

Then the old man with the sack saw me and smiled so widely that I could see the gold caps on his molars.

“Ugh,” I said, before I could stop myself. “As villains go, I think I liked Ferdinand better.”

The old man didn’t appreciate that. With a scowl, he grabbed a second spear from the rack next to him and advanced toward me.

I pushed all thoughts away and lifted my sword. He jabbed so fast the silver point sliced my left sleeve, nearly brushing the skin. He stabbed toward me again, and my sword knocked it out of the way a half instant before the point touched my face.

Then I heard Chase shout and the wolves growling behind me. He needed my help.

Without really paying attention to what I was doing, I grabbed a heavy book off a shelf beside me. When the old man tried to stab me a third time, I deflected the spear with my sword and threw the book like a Frisbee. It thunked him in the head, and the old man collapsed.

I whirled back to Chase, ready to charge the nearest wolf.

“
Genius
—using a book as a weapon,” Chase said, impressed. “We should tell Lena. She always has one handy.” He pulled his sword out of a dead black canine, and three other bodies lay still around him.

“You didn’t need my help,” I said accusingly.

“You came to help me?” Chase grinned. “Rory, I’m touched.”

I rolled my eyes, distracted. Why would Rapunzel send me after him if he didn’t need saving?

“As you can see, all the bad guys have been defeated,” Chase continued. “In
this
room, anyway.”

I glanced around, expecting to find evidence of an evildoer, maybe some torture devices tucked in a corner where normal people put their exercise equipment.

“It’s an office,” I said, surprised. It wasn’t very big, but it seemed like a fairly normal home office besides all the spears, the dead wolves, and the unconscious villain. One wall was covered in maps, one with bookshelves, and another with filing cabinets that looked like they were made out of real silver.

I was distracted for a moment by the picture on the closest bookshelf. In a plain, wooden frame, a grainy black-and-white photograph showed a woman in an eighteenth-century dress. Her dark braid coiled at her feet like a rope. She looked familiar—something about the expression in her dark eyes.

I pointed it out to Chase. “Look.”

“It’s a Rapunzel,” Chase said.

“But doesn’t it look like
our
Rapunzel?” I asked Chase. He looked closer and shrugged. “Is this really the Glass Mountain?”

To answer, Chase pointed at the last wall.

It was made entirely of glass—a thick lumpy sort of glass with ripples in it, like you see in antique windows. Beyond it were great black and green bumps that looked a lot like mountains covered in forests. In the very middle of the glass wall yawned a dark empty doorway.

“Oh, good—I bet that’s the way back.” I took a few steps toward it.

“Just a minute. Now that we’re here, we should look around,” Chase said, sheathing his sword.

That
was why Rapunzel said I would have to bring Chase back. He got distracted when he was by himself.