by Shelby Bach
“It’s the ointment of the witch whose power is in her hair, the same one Gretel is using,” I explained to Vicky. (Yes, that was its technical name.) “It’ll heal you fast.”
Vicky surrendered her forearm reluctantly. Rapunzel squeezed out a pea-size drop and dabbed it on the claw mark. The ointment smelled like mint and peppercorn.
Before he followed his students into the training courts, Hansel turned to Rapunzel and said something that lost him all the awesome points he’d won a few minutes before. “Leave the black eye. Rory needs something to help her remember her little stunt.”
EAS has some weird justice.
The stepsisters, the triplets, and Paul quickly skulked away. “Homework,” Tina mouthed apologetically.
“What stunt?” I asked.
“You can’t punish just Rory,” Lena said. “It’s not fair.”
“Not that we’re volunteering,” Chase said. “But come on. The griffins came to us.”
But Hansel ignored them. “How many times have I told you, Rory? You don’t tackle people you’re rescuing—not when you have a weapon in your hand. You sheathe it first.”
I scowled. Sure, Hansel had told me this before, but what were the chances he would have seen me from all the way across that foggy soccer field?
I didn’t look forward to explaining a black eye to my family. I couldn’t tell my mother a damsel-in-distress had accidentally elbowed me in the face when I rescued her. My mom didn’t know much about EAS. Not about chimeras or griffins, or about magic, or that I used my sword for more than just fencing class. She didn’t even know that I got to see Chase and Lena every day. She still thought that they lived in North Carolina. That was where I’d been living when I met them last April.
I knew what would happen if I told my overprotective mother the truth. Mom would either commit me to a kiddie loony bin or never let me out of her sight again.
“Hansel, she was saving lives,” Rapunzel said quietly. “If you punish her for every life she saves, our doom will come faster.”
Rapunzel was a little weird. She was about two hundred years old, and all the time in her tower made her a little . . . off. She also saw the future. It was hard to understand exactly what she was trying to say, but if you did, it just might keep you from meeting a gruesome end.
So I immediately started worrying that lives depended on how I explained my black eye to Mom and her assistant, Amy. No pressure.
Hansel smiled, tight-lipped, like he guessed what thoughts were sending me into a panic, and closed the iron-studded door behind him.
“Is it just me, or does he hate me more than the other seventh graders?” I asked Rapunzel.
“That is the wrong question,” Rapunzel said. “He does not view it as picking on you.”
From her pocket she drew out an ice pack and pressed it against my eye. Apparently, she had known about Hansel’s punishment beforehand too. “I will tell you a secret. We are all a bundle of wishes, but sometimes one desire can drive a person as an engine propels an automobile. You can understand such a person by learning what desire pushes him.”
Lena and Chase exchanged glances. From the bag on Lena’s shoulder Melodie said, “Rory, we’ll meet you in the workshop.”
They usually cleared out when Rapunzel started talking like a fortune cookie.
I was a little bit better at understanding what she meant than the average EASer, but only a little. “Um . . . you want me to ask myself what Hansel wants most in the whole world?”
Rapunzel smiled her tiniest smile, the one she wore when she thought I was funny but didn’t want to hurt my feelings. “To understand him better, yes.”
It was obvious what he wanted—to humiliate me in front of the whole seventh grade. “To make us into awesome warriors he can brag about to other grown-ups.”
“No,” Rapunzel said. “You should ask Gretel. His sister will know.”
I turned around. “Gretel, what does Hansel want most?”
Gretel smeared the last of the ointment over a tiny scratch on Bryan’s furry shoulder, and he trotted off.
“To keep you kids safe. His life mission. He never stops talking about it.” Gretel shot a warning look at Rapunzel.
Rapunzel put the ice pack in my hands. “Your friends are waiting for you.”
I was clearly dismissed. I jogged over to the workshop. Knowing the punishment was for my own good only made it more annoying.
I wasn’t stupid.
I knew Hansel was right. My sword could have caused serious damage in that tumble. I could have gotten myself killed. I could have gotten Mia or Ben killed.
My stomach sank all the way down to my toes.
It would have never happened if I’d really been a fighter as experienced as Chase. He would have diverted the chimera, or shoved Mia and Ben out of the way—
“Rory,” Rapunzel called, and I turned back. “If you had not acted when you did, the new Characters would surely have died.” Rapunzel couldn’t read minds. She had told me that more than once, but sometimes it was hard to believe. “Most mistakes can be corrected. Inaction cannot.”
I half smiled. She was obviously trying to make me feel better.
Then she pointed to the workshop. “Extinguish the match in Lena’s hand.”
Uh-oh. Lena had a bad habit of burning stuff accidentally, and some of Rapunzel’s warnings came just in time.
The workshop’s steel doors slid open from the middle like an elevator, and I rushed through. The Shoemaker’s elves were busy covering picnic tables in red and gold paint. The paler elves had veins showing green through their skin, but besides that, they could have been miniature humans in canvas work suits—no wings, no pointed ears. A few of them waved as I passed, but most of them looked stressed. I skirted between them and the tables, saws, chisels, mallets, hammers, sanders, and screwdrivers pushed to the wall.
They were enchanting the Tables of Plenty with the menu for tomorrow’s feast. This was the first one I’d ever been to. All I knew was that a new Red Riding Hood was joining the Canon, the big group of Characters in charge of the rest of us. Everyone at EAS was invited—including some representatives from chapters on other continents.
I spotted Lena in the back, where the Shoemaker had let her set up a permanent station. Fortunately, she wasn’t on fire yet. She was hanging long strips of green paper from an aluminum frame about the size of a garage. When she tacked the fourth wall to the floor with masking tape, it looked like she had created a room within the workshop.
I opened my mouth to ask what was going on, but Melodie pivoted around inside the bag on Lena’s shoulder and pressed a finger to her lips.
Okay, so this was a spell. To a clueless observer like myself, it just looked like Lena was talking to herself in Fey as she threw green-gold glitter on each wall of the paper room.
Sometimes I wished we’d never found Madame Benne’s golden harp.
No, that wasn’t exactly true. I mean, I was definitely glad that we’d kept Melodie from the Snow Queen. Otherwise she would have used the harp to free herself from prison. Just the thought made me shudder.
And I was glad that through Melodie, Lena had access to Madame Benne’s knowledge. It helped Lena invent stuff. If my best friend had a desire that drove all her actions, it was this—becoming the best magical inventor in the last thousand years.
I stepped back, out of the way, past a line of anvils to the furnaces burning in the back wall. Wistfully, I watched Melodie whisper something in Lena’s ear, and Lena repeated it in a loud clear voice. In Fey, of course, so I couldn’t understand.
At times like this, it felt like Lena and Melodie were in a private inventors’ club of two. All the rest of us could do was watch from the sidelines. Even Chase had apparently gotten bored and wandered off.
I could use someone to talk to. I knew what the Snow Queen wanted with Mia.
Despite the heat from the furnaces, goose bumps prickled my arms.
The Snow Queen was targ
eting all the new Characters closest to my age, anyone who might become my friend, and she was sending out her ice griffins and dragons more often than ever. In fact, in the past three months, the only new sixth, seventh, or eighth grader EAS had found in the regular way—by sending a recruiter to schools to perform the mirror test—was Ben.
She wanted to make sure I had as few people on my team as possible.
I didn’t really know why. Last year, when I’d first come to EAS, scarily important people had been interested in me. During the Fairie Market we’d overheard the Canon discussing my arrival. When Jack had visited the Glass Mountain a few days later, the Snow Queen herself had asked him about me.
No one would tell me anything, though. The only hint we had was what we’d overheard Genevieve Searcaster, the Snow Queen’s giant general, telling her son: They haven’t seen anyone like her since Solange’s first arrival. Years before she became the Snow Queen, of course. The arrival of this new Character has forced Her Majesty’s hand. War is returning.
Chase and Lena thought this meant I had a Great Destiny—that some prophecy foretold me taking down the Snow Queen. When I’d asked Rapunzel about it, she’d said something like Keep your fear, and you will do what must be done. I was pretty sure that was her way of saying, Stay alert, but don’t worry about it too much now.
So I didn’t think about it very often.
It felt the same as thinking about graduating from high school. It was big and vague and scary and far away, and I couldn’t really do anything to get ready for it. But some days I wondered if I should be doing something, something better than accidentally stabbing the kids I was trying to rescue.
I took a deep breath to steady myself, and then I wondered where that burning smell was coming from—
Alarmed, I spun around.
The paper room was on fire, flames eating the long strips from the ground up. Lena watched, a little to the side, arms crossed, a match still alight in her fingers. The flame was dangerously close to her sleeve.
I rushed over, plucked it from her hand, and blew it out.
“Oh, hi!” Lena grinned, like I’d just shown up. She noticed the match smoking in my hand. “Thanks for that. I’m making a carryall. See?” She waved at the flaming paper room. She always talked this fast when she got excited. “Remember my deal with the Director? She lets me keep a dragon in the menagerie and gives me all the scales; I make her fifty new carryalls.”
I nodded. She had told me about it at least a hundred times before we captured the dragon and dragged it down to the dungeon.
“Well, the Director told me that if I don’t hurry up and produce a few carryalls by the end of next week, then the deal’s off.” Lena sighed. “She said something like, ‘recreating the carryall spell should take priority over your own inventions.’ ”
“So, why are you burning the paper?” I asked quickly when she paused for breath.
“Oh, I need the essence of the space. This is how big it’ll be on the inside. It’s easiest to get an essence of something by burning a small piece of it, like fingernails or spit or leaves, but with space it’s tricky because you need the whole space. Madame Benne’s original recipe for a carryall tells you to burn down a whole hut, but Gran brought out the fire extinguisher when I tried to do that in our backyard. I think I can get away with just this.” She pointed at the aluminum frame. The last of the paper waved from the top bar, like a banner edged with orange flame.
Now we could see clear to Lena’s worktable, strewn with her notes. Behind the table a huge vial rose from floor to ceiling, the glass several feet thick and embedded with black iron bits shaped like strange symbols and letters.
“But the scales are turning out to be a problem,” Lena said. “Madame Benne preferred to work in phoenix feathers, but the elves needed all the spare ones. Unfortunately, it’s harder to burn scales, so we’re trying powdered scales instead—”
I nodded seriously, pretending I followed all that.
The last of the paper burned up.
“Mistress!” Melodie pointed to the floor. The ashes glowed slightly green.
And then the inventors’ club was back in session.
“Yay!” Lena knelt on the floor next to the pile of ashes. “What’s the next step?”
“We need to bind the ashes to the inside of the backpack—” Melodie began.
I could only stand so much of this. Before they got too carried away, I interrupted, “Where’s Chase?”
“Um . . .” Lena glanced around the room, puzzled. The ashes had turned her brown hands gray and glowing. “He was just here a second ago. . . .”
Metal clinked against glass, and we both turned toward the vial. A pewter hand gripped the cylinder, and a metallic face peeked out from behind it, light reflecting dully from his hooked nose, his wide full mouth. His eyes were in shadow, the metal skin covered in reddish brown hair.
Iron Hans. The Snow Queen’s most deadly warrior.
My heart lurched with panic, but I forced myself to stay where I was. I even folded my arms over my chest.
This Iron Hans was too short to be a full-grown villain. In fact he was exactly Chase’s height, and he held his huge ax—the double-headed blade as big as a steering wheel—the same way Chase held his sword.
He took a step toward us, and I grabbed him, feeling a boy’s T-shirt rather than the hairy old dude’s shoulder it looked like I held.
“Not funny, Chase.” I shoved hard.
Chase went sprawling and dropped the illusion, laughing.
It had been a few months since he’d tried this last. The first time he’d done it, right after my first sword lesson, he’d been friends with Adelaide, and they’d scared a squeak out of me with this same trick. I’d gotten better at not flipping out, but I didn’t understand why he kept trying it.
“I couldn’t resist,” Chase said, grinning.
Maybe he was still upset that I’d killed the chimera instead of him. He always needed to be the best—that was the desire that drove him. It was pretty annoying, actually.
“Wow.” Lena appeared beside us. “That was a glamour, wasn’t it?”
Chase picked himself up off the floor. “Nah, just an illusion.”
“But when Gretel does an illusion spell, you can see it coming out of her,” Lena said. “How did you hide it so well?”
“Secrets of the trade.” But for once, Chase sounded a lot more uncomfortable than smug.
“Can you teach me?” Lena asked, grinding up some more dragon scales.
Chase was an expert at changing the subject. He tapped the vial. “What is this thing, anyway?”
“It was once the East Wind’s prison,” Melodie said.
All of Lena’s excitement rushed back. “It contained his essence, the same way the Glass Mountain contains the Snow Queen’s essence. We’re going to recreate that after we sort out the—are you okay?” she asked me anxiously.
When she’d mentioned the Snow Queen, something had twisted in my stomach. The freak out must’ve blazed across my face.
I shook it off. I was being stupid, worrying like this. There wasn’t exactly an instruction manual to tell seventh graders how to defeat the worst villain the world had ever seen.
All I could do was train even harder to improve my griffin-slaying skills.
Outside the workshop a bell clanged—first of the evening. That meant it was six p.m. where my mom was—time for everyone in Eastern Standard Time to go home.
Lena, who lived in Milwaukee, an hour behind New York, and Chase, who lived there at EAS, didn’t need to go anywhere yet.
I hopped off the stool. “Chase, swear you’ll give me a lesson tomorrow.”
“You think we’ll have time before the feast?” He clearly disagreed.
“I’m coming early, remember? Half day at school,” I said happily, weaving back through the elves’ Tables of Plenty. Tomorrow was also the first day of spring break. Chase, Lena, and I were going to hang out at EAS all week—plenty
of time for training. “Mom’s going to drop me off at the airport, and Ellie is going to set up a Door Trek gateway there.” Mom and Amy thought that I would be flying down to North Carolina to visit Lena. I chose not to think about that.
“What time are you coming again?” Chase asked.
“Around one.” I wondered why Lena looked so distracted. It was impossible to tell what invention was on her mind.
“Rory, did you think of an excuse for your black eye yet?” she asked.
I had completely forgotten. I couldn’t even remember where I’d left Rapunzel’s ice pack. Dread curled up in my stomach. “Help me think of something!”
• • •
Unfortunately, Mom was in the front hallway closet when I returned to the house we were renting. I couldn’t warn her before she saw me.
“Rory, what happened?” She threw her coat over the stair rail and rushed toward me.
“Some kid threw a ball at her.” Amy only sounded that disapproving when she was worried about me.
Ever since I’d gone up the beanstalk, Amy had been suspicious of EAS. Mom would’ve been too, but Gretel had enchanted her to think that I had taken a five-day-long field trip to Raleigh. Unfortunately, Amy had noticed I didn’t remember taking any of the pictures saved in my camera.
Amy knew something about EAS didn’t add up, which made my life slightly more difficult. When Mom had first realized that she would be stuck promoting one of her films during my spring break, she’d given me a choice—visit Lena or visit my dad. It was an easy decision—spend a week hanging out with my friends, or spend a week trailing after my famous director father, stuck in boring meetings. I’d picked Lena. But Amy had spent the rest of the day asking, “Are you sure?” She’d obviously hoped I would change my mind, which—considering that she wasn’t my dad’s biggest fan—was really saying something.
“No, they didn’t throw it at me.” It took all my willpower not to wince when Mom tilted my chin and examined my eye. “Some eighth graders were playing catch, and I walked right into the baseball.” This lie came compliments of Lena. I held my breath to see if it would take.