Of Sorcery and Snow (25 page)

veryone crawled out, but sleepiness had taken its toll. Chase wiped drool from his chin, and before Forrel pulled his hood up, I saw a patch of his dark hair sticking straight out. The dwarf princess glared down the mountain like a scowl could turn back the bad guys and give her more time to sleep. The wolves were still a couple miles away, which gave us a chance to discuss strategy, and as an added bonus, being so high up let us count them—around fifty, plus an extra big one. Ripper.

The dwarves looked to Chase first, who shook his head. “It's no use. They're downwind. They've already smelled us.” So another glamour was out. I guess not even a talented half Fey could keep one up when he was asleep.

“No chance then. Not against so many.” Forrel turned to Hadriane. “Saddle the reindeer. I'll hold them off.”

That sounded like the dumbest idea ever.

Hadriane apparently thought so too. “Please try to limit yourself to
helpful
suggestions.”

Chase zipped up his jacket. “Yeah. Don't forget: You haven't seen me and Rory fight yet. We'll stay in front—take the offensive.”

“Lena, I think you'd better get your spear,” I said, and she nodded, grabbing her carryall to find it.

“I propose that the rest of us defend the reindeer,” said Hadriane.

“If a wolf gets even one of them, we'll need to double up,” said Forrel. “That will slow us down. Increase our chances of getting caught again.”

The dwarf was clearly still on his pessimistic streak, but this time, Hadriane nodded. “We should fight on foot. A reindeer's throat is an easy mark for a wolf. A dwarf with a spear and axe is harder to defeat.”

“Rory,” Chase said sternly. That was his teacher voice—the one that said,
argue with me and I'll make you do a thousand sword raises in practice
. I braced myself. “Today would be a good day to
kill
a few wolves. So we don't have to keep fighting the
same
bad guys.”

So he
had
recognized Mark.

I tried really hard not to lose my temper. He needed to stop nagging me. I never pressured him this much about telling Lena his secret, and definitely not right before a battle. “It doesn't matter if I do. The Snow Queen will just make more. Maybe stronger ones. At least this way, we know what we're dealing with.”

“It's not just that. It slows you down,” Chase said. “You can't afford to waste any time when we're this outnumbered. You would take out more of them if you didn't turn your sword and use your hilt. That's why you lost the duel with Hansel.”

Bringing up the duel was a low blow. “That's not true. I take out just as many as you do. Maybe more.”

“Wanna bet?” Chase said quickly. “If you win, I'll never bug you about this again, but if
I
win, you try my way.”

I had just walked into one of Chase's hands-on lessons, the sneaky kind where he got me to try something I didn't want to do. “And exactly how long have you been
planning
this bet?” I asked suspiciously.

“Since January. How many times do you think we get a five-minute warning before we fight?” Chase replied, not even the slightest bit sorry.

I glanced at the wolf pack. They were so close now that we could see the moonlight gleaming on their teeth. Their breaths rose in steaming clouds.

Well, I
would
really love it if Chase got off my back. “One condition: If you win, I start
training
for your way now, and I try it after the school year ends.”

I stuck out my hand to shake on it, but Chase hesitated.

“Come
on
, Chase. That's, like, eight weeks from now,” I said.

“It's
this
quest I'm worried about.” He shook my hand anyway.

“I don't trust you to count, though.”

“Same here. Mirrors? Magic camcorder mode?”

“Deal.”

“God, Lena, are they always like this?” Miriam asked, as Chase and I clambered out onto the ridge, trying to find a rock with a nice view to set up our M3's on. “How do they get anything done?”

“I'm still trying to figure that out,” Lena admitted, obviously distracted. She had half her body inside her carryall. She hadn't found her spear yet.

Forrel pointed down the slope, right beside the bay. A tennis court-size piece of solid ice still clung to the shore. “We need to get down there.”

“You want to leave this ridge and lose the upper ground?” Chase said disbelievingly. “That's our only advantage!”

“No, it isn't,” said the dwarf with a huge un-Forrel-like grin, and he began to explain his plan.

We waited for the wolves down beside the bay. We waited for so long I began to worry that maybe they had their own strategy meeting. Then Miriam screamed, spooking our mounts, war reindeer or no.

A huge black wolf's head peeked over the ridge. I guess Ripper was disappointed that he didn't get a chance to eat us in Golden Gate Park. He must have figured he'd be the first to take a bite out of us this time.

I suddenly remembered the weapon we'd forgotten.

“Not good,” Chase said, as I swung my pack in front of me and unzipped the pocket. “They were all supposed to go around. We need them to come at us from the water.”

The rest of Ripper's body came into view, his massive legs bent in another crouch. He was preparing to jump, even from a few hundred feet up.

Forrel saw it too. “Get ready to dodge.”

My hand scrambled around even faster.

“That fall will kill him,” said Hadriane.

“Not if you're
the
Big Bad Wolf,” Chase said.

They were both right: Ripper bounded down the slope, three huge leaps that stirred up a cloud of snow and caused half a dozen mini-avalanches. Then he jumped. Miriam screamed again. My fingers closed on Rapunzel's comb, and I threw it, as hard as I could, at the base of the ridge.

Iron bars as thick as tree trunks shot up beside the slope, and they clanged when Ripper's body struck them. The giant wolf whimpered a tiny bit as he slid down the new fence, stunned, and I let out the breath I'd been holding.

“I'm sure that's
not
how it looked when it blocked our path from the library,” Lena said wonderingly. “What craftsmanship.”

“You can examine it
late
r, Lena,” I said.

Ripper was beginning to stir and
growl
. He wore a cuff made from white leather around his left leg, and above his paw dangled a silver charm, an
S
with a snowflake hanging in the bottom curve, its spikes as sharp as a throwing star.

It was the Snow Queen's symbol.

“Awesome. Toss us the other two,” Chase said. When I did, he caught one and dropped the comb. Another wall sprang up fifteen feet opposite the first. Lena caught the third. She threw it behind us, and bars sprouted up, linking the two sides and climbing up until they wove together into a roof.

Ripper laughed. “You've just made the cage you'll die in,” he said, in such a creepy growl that I wished we had an archer who could nail him in the eye. Then he howled so loud the bars hummed.

Now the wolves
had
to attack us from the water. A dozen of them streamed down the ridge, right between the M3's Chase and I had set up. Mark stopped to sniff at one, but when his pack mate nipped at his white paws, he turned away. A larger group rounded the ridge and followed the water's edge to join their leader.

If the reindeer didn't like Miriam screaming, the wolves
really
freaked them out. One yanked its lead rope loose and tried to make a break for it. Hadriane caught it almost instantly, but I was glad we had the comb cage to keep them corralled.

“Ranks!” barked Ripper. The wolves formed lines on the ice hugging the shore: a row of big white wolves and a row of nimble grays and blacks, and another row with white wolves.

Around every left leg was a white cuff with that snowflake charm. They didn't just look like a pack. They looked like an
army
.

Wars are about numbers,
Forrel had said.

Then creepy to end all creepies, they all barked back, “Yes, sir!” And they grinned, tongues hanging from every pair of jaws, as if they
knew
how much hearing them talk made me shudder.

I'd been an idiot to leave Mom and Amy guarded by just the tile servants. If the Snow Queen really decided to go after them, the dirtballs wouldn't stand a chance, and neither would my family.

“You're going to die,” called a wolf in the back, and his pack mates howled in triumph.

But we had them
right
where we wanted them.

“Now!” Forrel called.

I darted forward and smashed my left fist into the ice. The ground beneath the wolf pack shattered, and the pieces shot apart. Some chunks were big enough so that the wolves could keep their footing, but half the pack slid into the water.

Ignoring their yelps and whines, I leaped back onto the solid rock shore.

Chase jogged out to me. “None of those count, Rory. You didn't use your sword at all.”

“You can't just make up rules,” I said, shaking out my stinging hand. “That's not fair.”

“Not fair? Who's the one of us with a magic ring
and
a magic sword?” Chase replied, and I rolled my eyes. He'd known about them before we made the bet. “Ripper counts for five.”

Not a good idea. Bet or no, Chase had
no
business fighting Ripper. The giant wolf couldn't be killed except by Likon and Ori'an. Besides, the Big Bad Wolf was safely out of the way. Ripper leaped from ice chunk to ice chunk, trying to make his way back to land, but he was having trouble finding ones big enough to float under his weight. He kept sinking up to his huge furry ankles.

“Will you two give it a rest?” Miriam said, still in the cage thirty feet behind us. “They're regrouping!”

“We can see that, Miriam!” Chase stared down a trio of white wolves who had managed to stay afloat on a nice-size raft of ice.

Either the Snow Queen had turned these guys so long ago that they'd forgotten how to speak, or they were just stupider than the others. They didn't talk at all. They didn't even show any strategy. They just waited to float closer to shore and growled, watching Chase.

But Forrel threw his spear and nabbed the one on the right. It splashed into the water.

“What will we get if we dwarves kill more wolves than you and Rory put together?” asked Forrel.

“Nothing!” Chase said, annoyed. “Stop killing my targets.”

He took a running start and leaped on to the white wolves' ice raft. Forget my sword and ring. He'd just used his invisible wings. He beheaded one wolf and stabbed the other, and then he jumped to the next big chunk of ice to deal with the black wolves stranded on it.

I waited for the wolves to come to me.

Some grays managed to make it to shore. They ran up along the ridge, intent on revenge and—you guessed it—growling. These wolves were big on growling.

Behind them, the littlest gray hadn't been so lucky. He doggie-paddled over to the nearest chunk, so soaked that his fur lay flat on his skin, making him look more like a seal than a wolf. His white paws scrabbled against the ice, trying to get a grip so he could pull himself up. “I
hate
you EASers! Why do I always end up
swimming
?”

“We'll get her for you, Mark!” yelped the gray who ran in front.

I took a deep breath, concentrating on protecting the fighters holding the line at the comb cage behind me. My sword's magic flowed into me, and when the first gray wolf leaped, it jolted my body into action.

I ducked and struck up with my left fist, smashing the wolf's ribs. It crashed into the rocks beside us, whimpering. But not knocked out—out of the corner of my eye, I could see it trying to get up.