by Shelby Bach
When I’d had a question about Unwritten Tales, Rapunzel had sent me straight to Sarah Thumb, who turned out to be the Canon’s expert. I only had to bring up the subject, and then I’d lost almost an hour listening to how many Tales Solange had sparked and how many she’d changed. Most of it was crazy magical theory that went over my head. I’d only copied down one thing she said: If you could see the magic around a person having a Tale—it follows the Characters, clings to them like a giant bubble of pure energy—you would see that it fills an entire room. For an Unwritten Tale, like yours and Solange’s, it fills up the entire courtyard.
“You mean, like a football field?” I’d asked, startled.
“No. Not the way the courtyard used to be,” Sarah Thumb said, her eyes gleaming the way they always did when she talked about magic. “The way it is now. As big as a village.” I must have looked kind of creeped out, because she added, “It won’t stay like this. After your Tale ends, the magic mostly disappears. I mean we think the magic revisits the Tale bearer even after the Unwritten Tale ends. We think—well, I think—that’s how Solange got so powerful. She learned how to control all that magic.”
I didn’t want to control it. I didn’t want to even think about how magic from my Tale was filling up EAS, sparking and changing other people’s Tales. It made me feel like Kelly and Priya’s Tales were my fault.
I abandoned the book and my notes, and turned to “The Tale of Solange de Chateies” and the earliest known version of “The Snow Queen.” Rumpelstiltskin had asked the librarian at the European chapter to make a copy for me—a magical copy, so the illustrations were as crisp and clear as they would have been if they’d sent me the volumes instead.
This version of “The Snow Queen” was a let down. It was almost exactly the same as Hans Christian Andersen’s, which you could check out in the reference room. But the illustrations weren’t. The first Kai, in his portrait, looked almost exactly like Rapunzel: white-blond hair, dark eyes under light eyebrows in a heart-shaped face. But when I asked Rapunzel, she said she and Solange had no known relatives in Scandinavia.
“The Tale of Solange de Chateies” had a lot more to process.
I pulled my notes toward me and stared at the chart I’d written after reading Solange’s Tale.
Solange’s Tale
Mine
Found and destroyed the Seelie scepter before King Navaire could get control of both Fey courts.
Lena’s Tale–Melodie.
Mildred struck with a curse that turns her slowly to glass; Solange and Sebastian go on quest for the antidote and trick a witch into making it for them.
Ben’s Tale–cockatrice poisoning/Lena/Water of Life.
King Navaire starts capturing and killing all Characters questing through Atlantis; Solange decides, on her own, that he must be stopped. Meets Arica. Loses Sebastian.
Miriam’s Tale–kidnapped Portlanders/Hadriane.
The second Triumvirate lost Mildred less than two weeks after losing Sebastian. A witch’s arrow, dipped in a sleeping enchantment, grazed her arm. It was enough to jumpstart her Tale—“Sleeping Beauty.” She wasn’t quite as lost as Sebastian had been, but Solange was still alone.
She went to the Unseelie Court anyway. She glamoured herself as a Fey, and in the seven minutes she had until the illusion wore out, she added cockatrice poison to King Navaire’s dinner. He was dead before he took two bites.
When I first read this, I’d worried just about keeping Chase and Lena safe, but this summer, a new worry had replaced it, one that grew every time I went over these notes.
Years ago, Rapunzel had told me, “She knows the value of heroes, as she was one once.” Solange had saved so many people the day she’d taken down King Navaire.
Everybody agreed that the old Unseelie king had been seriously evil. He’d conquered all of Atlantis with the help of the Pentangle, and he’d started to conquer the other hidden continents. For more than two decades, everyone had been terrified of this guy, and now . . .
Well, now he was mostly known as the guy Solange de Chateies defeated during her Tale. At the time, it had probably seemed impossible that another villain could grow even more evil and famous than King Navaire, but it had happened. And the same could happen with the Snow Queen, too.
I had the potential to become the next villain.
At first, that thought had been hard to swallow—that I could ever be as much of a threat as the Snow Queen was. I was just me. But Chase insisted again and again that I was better than I thought I was. This summer, I was finally starting to believe it. All by myself, I’d held off a hundred wolves and ice griffins. I’d wounded one of the pillars. I’d survived jumping off a skyscraper. I’d defeated Istalina, the Wolfsbane clan’s champion, and Torlauth di Morgian, the Snow Queen’s champion.
I’d been at EAS for less than three years. I didn’t want to think about what I could do if I lived in the magical world as long as Solange.
Maybe it was selfish to survive. The Snow Queen scarred us enough. The world couldn’t survive another villain like her.
I pulled out the one page of notes in Lena’s handwriting. She’d tried to hide it from me at the beginning of the summer, but she’d given up when I’d started Livves & Tymes.
Deaths of Sorcerers & Sorceresses
• Death from Natural Causes: their magic drifts back to wherever it came from, plus their spells fade gradually.
• Death from Unnatural Causes (spell/blade): “A rip in the fabric of magic, creating a vacuum where that power should stand in the world.” Magic the sorcerer had within their body explodes. The magic and the sorcerer vanish from the world forever.
Exploding didn’t sound good. The more powerful the sorcerer, the bigger the blast. It tended to kill whoever was nearby.
I’d read about hundreds of slain sorcerers. So far, only four of the people doing the slaying had survived, and it didn’t help me: In 1601, a group of Characters had turned a new sorcerer back into a regular guy by replacing his magic ear with a human one.
Taking out the Snow Queen was pretty much the same as deciding to let her take me out.
The workshop’s steel doors slid open. I whirled around.
“Oh, gumdrops,” Lena said.
“Who?” My hand fell on my sword. I was sure I was about to find out what terrible thing had happened. “Who got attacked?”
“What?” Lena said, bewildered. “No one. At least, not recently. I just forgot the Wolfsbane clan was in the dungeon, that’s all.”
The witches would probably be pretty ticked off to hear that. Lena had put them in prison. “They didn’t attack you, did they?” I asked.
“They can’t,” said Lena. “The dungeon has the same protection on it as your combs. No magic can pass through the bars. Probably a good thing too. They’re all trying to call their wands to them.”
“I didn’t know they could do that.” My research had made me an expert on sorceresses. Witches were still a mystery.
“It won’t work unless someone else opens the cell door for them.” Then she shuffled the dragon scales in her hands like cards and looked at me, biting her lip.
“They told you something,” I said. One of the witches had liked to talk. Her clan mates hadn’t been able to shut her up.
Lena nodded slowly.
The terrible thing didn’t have to be another attack. It could be finding out something the Snow Queen had already done, something she’d kept secret from all of us until now, something a lot worse than the warding hex. “We need to go tell the Director.”
“I don’t think the Director will care. They told me why they needed the Dapplegrim—the one they put on the luggage car in Atlantis.” Lena darted a glance at me and then back to the dragon scales in her hands.
I understood. Lena didn’t think the Director would care, but she thought I definitely would. “Tell me,” I whispered.
“Istalina’s mother was clan leader. She got cursed,” Lena said slowly. “One of thos
e curses that act like slow poison. Fresh Dapplegrim blood was part of the antidote.”
Istalina’s mother must have died. If she’d lived, Lena would have told me, to make me feel better.
I still didn’t regret what I’d done during Ben’s Tale. The witches would have killed that Dapplegrim, who didn’t deserve it, and that Dapplegrim had helped me save Lena.
But no wonder they hated me. What they’d said on the Fey train didn’t feel like an overreaction now. I didn’t just have the potential to be a villain. I’d already become one—at least if you asked the Wolfsbane clan.
“Too bad they couldn’t have come with us. The Water of Life probably would have saved her, too.” I glanced at the door and then away again. If Chase had been here, he would have reminded me how many people we saved with the Water—hundreds of Characters rescued for one witch’s life. I would have reminded him that wasn’t much comfort to Istalina.
Lena guessed why I’d looked toward the door. “I’m sorry that Chase didn’t make it,” she said softly, and I didn’t know if she meant this morning or the fight with the Wolfsbane clan the day before.
“If he’s at a bakery again like yesterday, or at a skating rink like that time we rescued that fifth grader from those wolves in Dallas, or at the Eiffel Tower, like that time Snow White needed backup—” My voice rose higher and higher. I could keep going. I had a whole summer’s worth of stuff Chase had missed.
“If he—” I started again, but this time, my voice cracked.
Lena dropped her dragon scales on her worktable and looked at me. “You know why you’re really angry, don’t you?”
The rant died in my throat.
Yes, I knew.
I remembered Queen Titania’s pavilion. I remembered dancing with Chase—how green his eyes were, how close his face had been to mine, and how he’d talked me through the enchantment without once teasing me for being scared. Sometimes, alone with Chase, that feeling came back—a sort of specialness, like we were the only two people in the room, even when we weren’t, like the air between us was electric and too wide.
Sometimes, around Chase, all I wanted to do was hold my breath and see what happened next. Even with Adelaide around, I felt that, but usually, it was laced with guilt.
I’d even thought Chase had felt it first. Rory, if you’re in trouble, I’ll always come for you, he’d said, and the way he’d said it . . .
But all summer, he hadn’t come. He hadn’t been there when I’d needed him.
My heart turned to a molten lump of rock in my chest, like it always did when I tried to figure out what had gone wrong. No matter how much I wondered, my thoughts always ran along the same lines.
On the day we’d fought off the trolls in my dad’s office, we’d come back to EAS, and Adelaide had been waiting. “What have you been doing with my boyfriend?” she’d asked. I’d laughed, waiting for Chase to deny it. He’d just smiled at her. He hadn’t even looked surprised.
Maybe I’d misread him. Maybe that specialness was all in my head. I couldn’t be sure. We’d never talked about it.
The closest we’d come had been in Arica’s house, right after she glamoured herself to look like me. She had grabbed his hand and gotten kind of lovey-dovey with him, and Chase had looked a little bit happy about it. When I’d brought it up afterward, he’d whirled around, our faces inches apart, and said, I will tell you if you really want to know, but I don’t think you do. I think all you want is to get to the palace, rescue those kids, and deal with everything else afterward.
And I’d frozen. I couldn’t say anything. I’d been an idiot. Maybe, just maybe, that was the moment he’d decided that he might be better off dating Adelaide. At least she could admit that she liked him.
It couldn’t have been easy for Chase on the quest to the Arctic Circle, to like me and then have to deal with my cluelessness and then my hesitation. It must have hurt. It must have made him stop liking me, if he ever had at all.
Maybe I didn’t have anyone to blame but myself. Maybe I’d lost my chance.
“I miss him too,” Lena said softly. “Not the way you do, but I still miss him.”
That was her way of inviting me to talk about it. I couldn’t. If I let it all out into the open, I wasn’t sure I could fake not being mad out there. I wasn’t sure I could stop our grade from tearing into Chase if I admitted out loud how angry I was with him.
We were the Triumvirate. We needed Chase to help defeat the Snow Queen, no matter how flaky he’d gotten.
“Okay,” Lena said decisively, moving to the other side of the table. Old wooden axes were laid out, waiting to be sanded. “I know I’m not him, but I’ll pull a Chase and change the subject.”
That made me laugh, and Lena beamed. She wasn’t used to being the funny one.
“If you’re done with your research, want to help me with these bats?” she asked.
Trying to recruit me for free inventing labor didn’t totally count as changing the subject. “Depends. What are those?” I nodded at a pile of what looked like computer chips.
Lena glanced up. “Oh. Voice recognition software. We’re trying to merge science and spells. Melodie is strongly opposed to the idea, so Kyle and I work on it when she’s not around. Want to see how many we can get through before she gets back?” she asked, smiling.
I was coughing on sawdust by the time I took a break for lunch.
Father-daughter meals had become a tradition. I think it was Brie’s idea. Every Friday, Dad, Dani, and I met up and grabbed something at the Table of Never Ending Instant Refills. Well, Dani slept more than ate, but it was still nice to see her.
We even had a usual table, tucked up close to the Tree of Hope’s trunk. Low branches draped their leaves over half the surface and two of the chairs, hiding it from most of the courtyard.
Dad was already there, his sandwich and Dani’s fancy white baby carrier thing on the table, holding our spot. He grinned when he spotted me heading over from the workshop. “How’s the birthday girl?” he asked, pulling me into a hug as soon as I was close enough.
His hair was going in a hundred different directions again. Usually, this was a sign that he’d been working on his screenplay all morning.
“Fine.” I definitely felt better than I had earlier. It had helped, having something to do with my hands. I almost thought I’d been overreacting to my birthday. The Snow Queen might not do anything. Considering what had happened back in San Francisco, she might have planned her big evil surprises for the day before my birthday.
“Fourteen! I can remember when you were as small as Dani,” Dad said. “Actually, it doesn’t seem that long ago.”
I couldn’t think of a response. The month before, I’d let it slip at home that every time I saw Dad, he had the baby strapped to him. Mom actually laughed, a bitter-sounding laugh that made my skin crawl. “I don’t believe it. Rory, when you were little, I don’t think he ever changed a diaper,” she’d said.
She’d apologized for it afterward. She’d said she was exaggerating, but I knew it was kind of true.
I picked a chair next to my sister and sat down with my pizza. Danica was wearing the red-and-white-striped baby suit I’d given Brie at the baby shower a few months ago. She was still too young to roll over all the way, but her eyes swiveled all around until she found me. I smiled and stuck a finger under her hand. “Hello, Dani.” My sister squeezed hello back.
I wasn’t jealous, exactly. I wouldn’t let myself be like Solange. When she’d found out her father had started a new family, Solange had decided to steal her little sister and groom her to be the next Rapunzel.
But I did feel like Dad’s least favorite daughter.
Sure, Dad and I had spent a lot of time together recently, but Brie had arranged all of it. I was pretty sure that he didn’t think about me when I wasn’t around—except maybe to remember he wouldn’t have moved to EAS if it hadn’t been for my Tale.
A long, flat box sat next to her fancy baby carrier. It wa
s about the same size as the gift box you usually get in clothing stores and wrapped with black paper printed with hot pink bubble letters that said HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY BDAY over and over again. “Is that for me?”
“Yes,” Dad said slowly. I didn’t know why he suddenly looked nervous. I mean, I could already tell he hadn’t picked it out.
Only Brie would use that paper, and only Brie would tie a pink bow that big. She’d probably chosen the gift inside, too. She had non-embarrassing taste, but considering it might be the last birthday I ever had, I would have liked it if Dad had put in a little effort.
Then again, Dani was still so small. Both of them had their hands full. It was nice of them to take the time to give me a present at all.
“You might like it,” Dad said. “You really might . . . not.”
“Okay . . .” Maybe it wasn’t another shirt.
“In fact, it may be more a present to me than a present to you.” Dad was babbling slightly. If he hadn’t seemed so antsy, I might have gotten slightly upset that Dad was giving himself a present on my maybe-last birthday ever. “Actually, we got you something else. Something bigger. We ordered it online, but the post guy couldn’t deliver it to the address the Director gave us, so—”
Whoa. Seriously babbling. “Dad, what is it?” I asked, staring at the box with alarm. Not trapped-on-a-rooftop-with-monsters-trying-to-kill-me alarmed, but you know, concerned.
“It’s—” Dad’s face darkened. “That kid’s not coming, is he? I don’t want him to interrupt us.”
I wished I hadn’t known exactly who Dad was taking about. “That kid’s name is Chase, and he’s one of my best friends.” It was annoying to have to defend him when all I really wanted to do was yell at him a little.
“I don’t like him,” Dad said.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, but only barely. “I know. And trust me, he knows too.” Last time Chase had crashed father-daughter lunch, Dad had glared at him the whole time, determined not to like my friend. It was almost as disturbing as seeing how polite and friendly Chase could be when he was trying to win Dad over.