Polly Shulman

by The Grimm Legacy (v5)

  “I made a sun,” he said proudly, pointing to a wet circle in the dust.

  “Wow, I can see that,” I said.

  When I turned around again, Grace was gone. I could see Mr. Stone in the distance, growing dimmer.

  Andre picked up the kuduo and I picked up Andre. I put on my backpack and began to walk, choosing the direction at random.

  Chapter 25:

  The Garden of Seasons

  I walked for what seemed like hours. A strength of purpose flooded up through me from my sneakers. Andre fell asleep in my arms, hugging the kuduo. He felt as light as a paper doll. The stars seemed to be falling around us, like glittery specks of dust.

  After a while I found I was walking through trees with dim, bare branches. The air began to take on a tinge of pink, and the specks of dust in the air grew rosy. They rested on my shoulders and Andre’s hair, like flower petals. They were big for dust, soft like petals, and lightly cupped; when I looked closer, I saw they were, in fact, petals.

  The tree branches took on a greenish tinge. Little leaves sprouted. I heard the sound of running water on our left—or was it our right?—and went to meet it. Dragonflies darted. A deer flashed its tail and soared out of sight. Andre woke up and yawned. “Where are we?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think we’re Nowhere anymore, but I don’t know where we are.”

  Ahead of us a fountain tossed water in the air. Leaning against the fountain, looking bored, sat Aaron. Nearby, Jaya was doing a headstand.

  “Elizabeth! There you are!” she shouted, flopping over and sitting up. “What took you so long? We’ve been waiting here forever!”

  Andre scrambled down and ran over to her. “Look, it’s Jaya!” he said.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Where are we? How did you get here?”

  “We used the Golden Key, of course.”

  “On what?”

  “The door. It’s a gate, on this side.”

  “Hello, Elizabeth,” said Aaron. “I was starting to worry you’d never show up. You have petals in your hair.”

  “Where are we? What is Jaya talking about?”

  “We’re in the Garden of Seasons.”

  “This is the Garden of Seasons?”

  He nodded. “The mirror said that’s where we would find you. So we used the Golden Key to open the door—you know, down in the Dungeon, near the elevator. From that side it’s just like all the other doors in the repository, but from this side it looks like an iron gate in a stone wall. How did you get in?” Aaron continued. “You don’t have the key. Is there some other way in?”

  “We didn’t come through any walls or gates; we came straight from Nowhere,” I said. I looked around for a wall, but I didn’t see any. I had a weird sense of familiarity, as if I’d spent hours and hours here, although I knew I’d never set foot in the Garden of Seasons before.

  The fountain filled the air with the scent of water. Water and autumn leaves. Water and autumn leaves and lilies of the valley. And earth. And snow . . . Suddenly I recognized this place: the scenes from the Tiffany windows! I stood up straight and spun around slowly, looking. The frost-rimed rocks to the north, the blossoming trees to the east, the thick, bird-spangled greenwood to the south, the sunset-red forest to the west.

  “You came straight from where?” said Jaya.

  “Nowhere—that’s where we wound up when I ran away from Mr. Stone. The homeless woman who hangs out in the Main Exam Room lives there. Grace.”

  Andre plopped down next to me and started playing with twigs and pebbles, making them walk around and talk to each other. “It’s sparkly in Nowhere,” he said, looking up. “I made a sun.”

  “Where’s Mr. Stone?” asked Jaya. “Is he still chasing you?”

  I shook my head. “I left him in Nowhere. I think he’s stuck there for good.”

  “I made a sun,” insisted Andre.

  “Yes, you did!” I said. “And the stars turned into flowers, and now it’s summer and it’s daytime too. Did you do all that?”

  “Yeah,” said Andre proudly.

  I mussed his hair, which had a few leaves and petals in it. “You’re a pretty powerful young man, then, Andre,” I said. But maybe he was right—maybe he did do all that. I couldn’t say for sure that he hadn’t.

  “So where’s the flower, then?” asked Jaya.

  “What flower?”

  “The one the mirror said would be here when we met you. The one that’s going to disenchant Dr. Rust.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “The mirror said we’d find you here with a flower.”

  “What? Back up. What happened after I left?”

  “The enormous dog flew off somewhere,” said Jaya. “I don’t know where he went. The gigantic bird was in pretty bad shape. Doc was still stuck in the crystal ball, and it made a blinding light whenever we touched it, and that made the bird screech, so I shut my eyes and put the ball in the bottomless box. Then we went back to Aaron’s and asked the Snow White mirror what to do.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It told us to meet you in the Garden of Seasons. It said we needed a flower to break the enchantment. Meet Betty in the magic bower and break the prison with a flower. We figured it meant here.”

  “Betty? My name’s Elizabeth! Someday I’m really going to smash that wretched thing.”

  “Sorry. I’m just telling you what it said.”

  “I wonder what flower it’s talking about. Could it be the one from ‘Jorinda and Joringel,’ in Grimm?” I said.

  “Remind me,” said Aaron.

  “It’s the one where a witch turns Jorinda into a bird, and Joringel finds a magic flower. When he touches Jorinda with it, she turns back into a girl.”

  “That sounds useful,” said Aaron. “Maybe we could use it on Anjali and Marc. Where is it?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “It must be here somewhere,” said Aaron. “The mirror never quite lies. We just have to find it.”

  “What does it look like, then?”

  Aaron shrugged.

  “Is this it?” asked Jaya helpfully. She plucked a dandelion from the lawn.

  “Of course not, that’s a dandelion,” said Aaron.

  “How do you know it’s not a magic dandelion?”

  “What makes you think it would be?”

  “What makes you think it wouldn’t? Anything could be magic here,” she said.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “Test it. Get the globe with Doc in it out of the bottomless box.”

  Jaya opened the box and stuck her arm in up to the shoulder—which looked strange, since the box was only three or four inches tall—and fished around. “Hey, this feels like Anjali.” She hung her from her strings on a bush and tapped her with the dandelion. Nothing happened.

  “Just find Doc,” said Aaron impatiently.

  Jaya went back to fishing in the box. “I’m looking—there’s a ton of stuff in here. Wait, I think this is Merritt . . . No, here he is,” said Jaya. She pulled out the brass figure of Marc beating a gong.

  “It’s my butter!” shouted Andre, dropping his leaves and pebbles. He grabbed the figurine from Jaya and kissed it again and again. “You found him!”

  Jaya went back to fishing around in the box.

  “Please get on with it, Jaya,” said Aaron. “We need Doc.”

  “Calm down! It’s not so easy. There’s a lot of stuff in here and it’s all tangled up,” said Jaya. “Okay, here we go. I think.”

  A blast of white light, like concentrated moonlight, shot upward from the box as she lifted out the globe. Dimly through the light I could see what looked like Doc, still in the globe.

  I heard a screech overhead and something huge came plummeting down from the heavens and fell heavily at our feet.

  Andre ducked behind Jaya. “The birdie that got hurt,” he said, pointing.

  He was right. It was the bird from Mr. Stone’s. Its throat had
stopped bleeding, but blood stained its feathers and its wing still lay at an impossible angle. It shrieked and shrieked.

  “Put down the globe, Jaya! I think that’s what’s making the bird scream,” I said.

  She dropped the globe on the grass and the light went out. The bird stopped shrieking, but it went on making soft growling noises.

  “Do you think touching the globe summons the bird?” Aaron asked.

  “Must be,” I said. “That poor bird looks terrible!”

  The bird was trembling. “The birdie got a big ouchie,” said Andre, still keeping Jaya safely between himself and the bird.

  I dipped my bandana in the fountain and used it to wipe away some of the blood.

  “What are you doing that for? It tried to kill us, remember?” said Aaron.

  “Can’t you see it’s in pain?” I rinsed the bandana and dabbed at the wound in the bird’s neck. It growled, but it didn’t bite me. “Nice birdie. There, there,” I said, washing its wounds.

  “Nice birdie? Way, way, way too nice, Elizabeth,” said Aaron. “Never mind the bird, let’s find that flower and disenchant Doc.”

  “Okay, here goes,” said Jaya. She flourished her dandelion like a stage magician’s wand, then tapped the globe with it.

  Nothing happened.

  “I guess it wasn’t a magic dandelion,” said Aaron.

  “You don’t know that,” said Jaya. “Maybe that’s just not what its magic does.”

  “Whatever,” said Aaron. “Let’s go find more flowers.” He walked off around one side of the fountain.

  I filled my water bottle at the fountain and poured some in the bird’s beak. I found an orange left over from lunch in my backpack and put it near the bird’s head. The bird snapped it up in three bites, peel and all, spurting juice on the grass. I shuddered to think what that beak might have done to my hand.

  “Hang in there, I’ll be back soon,” I told it.

  “Bye-bye, birdie,” said Andre, putting Marc down in Anjali’s shadow and taking my hand.

  The fountain spouted in four directions; each spout let out a torrent that turned into a stream. Ducking under the first one before it hit the ground, we went into the woods. It was fall there, like in the western Tiffany window—the perfect, peak-leaf October moment when every maple tree is aflame with orange and red. We found purple asters, and Indian paintbrushes with tall, fuzzy black stems that hurt my hands to break, and a rose. It smelled wonderful, but it didn’t disenchant Doc when we got back to the fountain and tried it. Neither did any of the others.

  The bird had gotten up and was perched on the edge of the fountain, its head tucked under its good wing. It seemed to be sleeping, which I took as a good sign.

  Next we went around behind the fountain, ducking under two torrents this time to the winter side. The stream from the fountain froze into complicated icicles. Shivering, we found witch hazel, winter sweet, and white, waxy bells on an evergreen. None of them disenchanted Doc. The bird didn’t wake up when we hit the crystal ball with a flower and made the ball flash light—it just stirred uneasily on its perch.

  “Any luck?” asked Jaya, coming back from the spring sector with her arms full of daffodils and crocuses, tulips, branches of forsythia, and hot-pink azaleas.

  I shook my head.

  Aaron came back from his search with armloads of summer flowers, which he tossed on the grass beside the globe. He started poking it systematically.

  “Roses don’t work,” I told him helpfully.

  “Oh. You can have this one, then.” He thrust the rose he’d been hitting the crystal ball with under my nose and wiggled it.

  “Stop it! That tickles!” I said, shaking my head to get away.

  He went on wiggling the rose. I grabbed his wrist. He twisted it away from me. “Hold still,” he said, and tucked the rose in my hair.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Will you guys quit it with the mushy stuff and concentrate?” said Jaya.

  “What mushy stuff?”

  “Just test the flowers already.”

  None of them worked.

  “I guess we better go find more,” said Aaron.

  Andre had gone back to playing with the grass near the fountain. “Pretty flower,” he said, waving a minty-looking weed with tiny white blossoms on a tall stalk.

  It wasn’t particularly pretty, in fact. I doubt I would have noticed it myself.

  “What’ve you got there, Andre?” asked Jaya.

  “My turn,” he said. He ran over to the crystal ball and thumped it with the flower upside down in his fist.

  The bird gave a loud squawk. The ball burst open like a popped bubble. Drops flew everywhere and sprayed the grass. Doc sprang upward like a spaghetti pot boiling over, regaining full size so fast that I could barely see it happening.

  “I popped the ball!” said Andre.

  “Well done, young Merritt,” said Doc. “Circaea lutetiana, yes? Enchanter’s nightshade?”

  Andre nodded solemnly.

  “Thank you. I was getting very uncomfortable in there.”

  “Wow! Way to go, Andre!” I exclaimed. “Welcome back, Doc. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I think so, thank you. You’ve brought the kuduo, I see. Good job! Ah, and there are Anjali and Marc. He makes a great-looking mrammuo, doesn’t he?”

  “What’s a mrammuo?” I asked.

  “An Akan brass weight. The Akan people measured their gold by weighing it against mrammuos, brass weights in the shape of men and animals, so naturally one of their princes would take that form. Interesting subject, the gong beater. A symbol of dutiful public service. I wonder if it’s prophetic?”

  Something was different about Doc’s face, but I couldn’t figure out what. “How did you get stuck in that bubble?” I asked.

  “Someone trapped me.”

  “But who?”

  “I didn’t see—they came up behind me. One of the librarians, I think. I was in my office.”

  “So Mr. Stone was right! He told us not to trust the librarians. He told us not to trust you,” I said.

  “I bet it’s Ms. Minnian,” said Aaron.

  “Why,” I said, “because she wears her hair in a bun?”

  “Because she never smiles.”

  “I would hate to think it was Lucy—or Martha, or any of them,” said Doc. “But I’m afraid it probably is. I imagine Wallace Stone had some hold over whoever it was.”

  I stared at Doc’s face. Doc’s freckles! That was what was different—they were gone.

  “We’re safe here for the moment,” continued Doc, freckle free. “Let’s deal with Anjali and Marc first.”

  “Let me do it,” said Andre. He ran over to the brass figurine and hit it with the enchanter’s nightshade. Nothing happened.

  “Good try, Andre, but it’s not that kind of spell,” said Doc.

  “Enchanted princes and princesses are a special case.”

  “How do we disenchant them?” I asked.

  “The customary method is the Kiss of True Love.”

  Aaron and I looked at each other. “You better kiss Anjali,” I said.

  “If you kiss Marc.”

  “Elizabeth! Are you in love with Merritt too?” said Jaya.

  “Even though he’s dating my sister?”

  “No!” I said. “Anjali’s my friend, and Marc—well, Marc’s a prince. I would never dream . . .”

  “Go ahead, kiss him,” said Aaron. “You know you love him. All girls do.”

  “You first,” I said.

  “Both at once, when I count to three,” said Jaya. “One, two . . .”

  I lifted Marc, hot with embarrassment. In spite of being a little brass weight, he looked so much like himself that it felt like one of those dreams where you’re doing something you would never do in real life with someone . . . well, one of those dreams.

  “Three!”

  I closed my eyes and kissed. The metal was cold on my lips.

  I opened my eyes. The brass
figurine of Marc hadn’t changed.

  Aaron was holding the puppet Anjali. “Did you kiss her?” I asked him.

  “You weren’t lying. You really don’t . . . ,” he said.

  “Did you kiss Anjali?” I asked again.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Cheater! What are you waiting for?”

  “I was watching you. I wanted to see if—I wanted to know—”

  “Go on, Aaron! Kiss my sister already! I want her back,” said Jaya impatiently. “Even though she’s really annoying and bossy,” she added.

  Aaron shrugged and lifted the puppet to his lips.

  I found I was holding my breath.

  He kissed Anjali.

  Nothing happened. She stayed a puppet.

  I let out my breath slowly. My heart, I discovered, was pounding. Aaron looked at me. I looked away.

  “Not just any kiss will work,” Doc said, “only the Kiss of True Love.”

  “Great,” I said. Despite myself, I felt my heart soar. Aaron didn’t truly love Anjali after all! “The Kiss of True Love—where are we going to find that?”

  “The Marc Merritt fan club?” suggested Aaron.

  “He said the Kiss of True Love, not the Kiss of Puppy Love,” I said.

  “What if Andre kisses Marc?” I asked. “He really does love him.”

  “That won’t work,” said Aaron. “He already did, and it didn’t. We need the Kiss of True Love, not the Kiss of Brotherly Love.”

  “You know who loves Anjali and Merritt? They love each other!” said Jaya. She picked up the two figurines and smushed their faces together. “Mwah, mwah, MWAH!” she shouted.

  “Oh, like that’s going to work,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “No, wait—look!” Aaron grabbed my arm.

  The air around Anjali and Marc grew thicker, like a fog of diamonds. I felt the rose stir in my hair. A smell of roses filled the air, as if all the roses in the Garden of Seasons had hurried over to watch. Colors swirled in the mist. It intensified, slowly, slowly, until I could hardly stand to look, and just as slowly it dispersed.

  There stood Marc and Anjali, full size, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. They looked perfectly human—or, at least, as human as a couple in love can look.