by Shelby Bach
“It wasn’t that many times,” Adelaide mumbled, which actually did cheer me up a little.
Lena spoke slowly and calmly, like she always does when she doesn’t want me to freak out. “It would be different if you kissed him.” Her voice became tinny. She was reciting something. “ ‘A first kiss has its own magic. It is as powerful a change as the transformation into a sorcerer. Before a first kiss, a relationship was one thing. Afterward, it is irrevocably changed.’ ”
“Don’t you want to kiss him?” Adelaide asked bitterly.
That was a good question. It was easy to want to see my family and friends safely through the summer. It was easy to want to defeat the Snow Queen. It was only a tiny bit harder to want to live long enough to go to high school.
But with Chase . . .
I wanted to rewind our lives to the way things used to be between us, like I had pretended all summer. No, I wanted to rewind to the week between getting back from the Arctic Circle and finding out Adelaide was Chase’s girlfriend. I wanted to go back to the days when just seeing Chase made my stomach explode with happy butterflies and my face break into a goofy smile. If we’d just had a little more time before everything had gotten so complicated . . .
“Rory, you idiot, it has always been you.” Adelaide’s fists balled up. “When we’re together, he’s not even thinking about me. He’s usually watching you on his M3.”
“That’s for those Itari lessons—” I protested.
“That’s the excuse. He’s watching you,” Adelaide said. “He’s been obsessed with you since you showed up in sixth grade.”
Adelaide wouldn’t lie to make me feel better. She wanted to save Chase as much as I did.
I turned to the bed. Sleeping, he looked so defenseless.
I knelt down beside him. I touched his cheek. His skin was chilled, like he’d been sitting in a refrigerator for hours.
This wasn’t how I imagined my first kiss. With all this pressure and the terrible sinking fear that even this might not work.
But if a first kiss could save Chase, I would give it up gladly.
I took a deep breath and pressed my lips against his. They were cold too.
I hated that my mind was racing. I hated that Lena and Adelaide were watching. I hated that his eyes were still closed and his breaths were still even. It hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked, and Chase was waiting for someone else, and he was lost to me.
Then a large hand encircled my wrist. The fingers were still half frozen, but his palm was warm.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve had a nightmare,” said a voice, so weak that I barely recognized it. “They suck. How do humans deal with having them all the time?”
Chase sat up and looked at me drowsily, just like that time he’d overslept and I’d gone to wake him up before his group’s session. He was even grinning.
Buckets of tears poured down my face. “I’m so sorry!”
Chase didn’t draw back on that tiny cot. He didn’t even shoot me a look that said he was too sleepy for this. He just yawned and said, “It’s okay, Rory. I’m fine. I can’t keep my eyes open, but I’m sure that’ll wear off.”
He thought I was apologizing for crying. “No, Chase. I’m sorry for what I said.”
“You didn’t mean it. It was stupid to corner you in front of everybody. Just—” He rubbed his eyes and managed to get both of them open. “Don’t say it ever again, okay?”
He was looking at me like nothing had changed. He had no idea why he’d been asleep or why he’d woken up. If I had my way, I’d never tell him.
“Found them!” Across the room, Lena thrust two spindles into the air high above her head—an adult-size one and a kid-size one. Chase must have pricked himself on the smaller one. Blood had dried on the pointy end. “Okay, we can go home now.”
Chase spotted what was in her hand—he looked from it to the long scratch on his arm and then to me. He started to look slightly green, but I didn’t think nausea was a side effect of a sleeping enchantment.
He knew. He knew I’d kissed him, and the idea made him sick to his stomach.
“Please tell me that I didn’t get my Tale,” he said, strained.
“Okay. You didn’t.” I was too miserable to say anything else.
Chase gave me an exasperated look. Well, at least that much hadn’t changed. “You usually lie better than that, Rory.” He lurched to the window. Adelaide was standing there, staring at the drop like she was thinking about hurling herself out of the tower.
“Move,” Chase said coldly. Hurt flashed across her face.
That wasn’t fair. She’d been terrified for him too. She slunk back, her arms curled around her middle.
Chase surveyed the icy vines. Some sections were more translucent than the others, a silver-green strip cutting the misty white right down the middle. That must have been where Lena’s axes had chopped a path. The vines had already grown back.
“They enchant you if they draw blood, don’t they?” Chase said in a dead, faraway voice.
“They got Kyle,” Lena said, obviously still a little worried about him. “He turned into—”
“Ice,” Chase finished. I wondered how he knew. “We have to get back to EAS.”
“No argument here,” muttered Adelaide.
The Snow Queen had cast the warding hex on the tower, so we had to get outside for our rings to work. “Lena, do you think your axes could hack through the door?” I asked.
“Axes?” Chase repeated. “You have axes now? Are they Axes of Destruction? Because that just might cheer me up.”
Lena eyed the trapdoor skeptically. “I do. They might be up to breaking us out.”
Something roared far below. Something else shrieked a little closer. Yep, the dragons and ice griffins were awake.
“Looks like we’re going out this way.” Chase hoisted himself up on the windowsill. His wings fluttered into sight, an orange blur above his shoulders. Hovering just outside the tower, he extended a hand toward me. I took it, already dreading the flight. “I can only take one of you at a time. Rory first, obviously, and then—”
His wings blinked out of sight. Chase plummeted. My grip tightened on reflex. His weight nearly tore my arm out of its socket. He banged against the stone below the window, but he didn’t fall.
“Well, that’s never happened before.” Chase looked down. The surprise on his face turned very slowly to alarm. “Is this how people who can’t fly feel all the time? The fear-of-heights thing makes sense now.”
“Can you climb back inside?” I said through gritted teeth. Chase was heavier than I was, and I’d caught him with the hand that didn’t wear the West Wind’s ring.
“Hold on. My wings just let me down. I’m in shock. I’m wondering if I’ll ever fly again.” Chase had clearly woken up enough to be dramatic.
“It’s temporary.” Lena reached out the window and grabbed Chase’s other hand. The strain in my shoulders eased. “It’s just a side effect. The sleeping enchantment put your magic to sleep too, and it’ll cut in and out for a while.”
Together, we pulled him up. He threw a knee over the stone and sat on the windowsill.
“Lena, do you have a spell that can make rope longer or—” I started.
“Hey!” came a faint voice from the ground.
Lena pushed her head around Chase and looked down. “Kyle! Are you okay?”
He was safe. He’d even made it back to the quest. Another knot of tension eased.
Chase seemed worried, but not about Kyle. “What’s happening at EAS?”
We couldn’t really hear Kyle’s response. Apparently, eight stories up was too far away to hold a conversation.
“What was that?” Chase said. To Lena, he added, “Think an M3 would work if we lean out the window like this?”
“Maybe.” She stretched out as far from the tower window as possible. Her M3 flashed in the sun.
They were making me nervous. I grabbed a fistful of both of their T-shirts, ready to pu
ll them back if either of them lost their balance.
From below, a few words drifted up. Either Kyle was shouting at the top of his lungs or he’d cast a voice-amplifying spell. “Rap . . . zel . . . long hair.”
“All that effort for a joke? We don’t have time for that crap,” Chase said, furious. “Kyle, is everything all right at EAS?”
“Wait, what did he say?” Lena asked me.
“If I had to guess,” I said, “ ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair.’ ”
“Oh,” Lena said. “Personally, I would take Rapunzel’s magic carpet over her hair. She saw this, didn’t she? Why couldn’t she have sent it with us?”
“Maybe she needed it,” I said absentmindedly.
I felt the change before I saw it.
The beads on the ends of Lena’s braids brushed my hand. I looked down, and her hair kept growing. It fell past her waist.
“Um . . . ,” I said.
Maybe Lena getting a second Tale should have seemed strange, but it didn’t. Solange had already manipulated the conditions of “Sleeping Beauty.” The magic that swirled around me had clearly decided to strike back with a Tale of its own. Besides, one Rapunzel was already important to me. It made sense that the same Tale would repeat in my best friend.
The extra weight must have hurt. Lena touched her head and grimaced. Then the braids rippled past her fingers. She definitely noticed that. “Oh, my gumdrops.”
Chase glanced at her, clearly wondering what her problem was. Then he did a double take. “Geez, Lena—just because I got my Tale doesn’t mean you needed another one. It’s not a competition.”
Lena didn’t think that was funny. She grabbed one of the strands and squinted at it, trying to see. “Rory—I can’t tell—is it growing in braided?”
It was growing too fast for me to tell—a new foot every second. Dark loops curled on the floor, dotted with bright blue beads. “I think so.”
“That’s a first,” Lena said slowly. I guess it was hard to think straight with new hair pouring out of your scalp. “Helpful, though.”
“I’d say.” Chase grabbed a handful of braids from the tower floor, but I tugged him back before he could jump.
“You’ll yank the hair out of her head,” I said. “Let it finish growing first.”
“We’re a little short on time,” Chase told me, irritated.
“Why?” I said. I mean, we weren’t stuck anymore. Lena’s new braids were going to get us out. He could wait for the five minutes it took for her hair to grow.
“This is a trap,” Chase said. “Every other time she laid a trap, she also sent someone to attack us. Where are her fighters?”
I had a sudden vision of General Searcaster arriving in Avalon, ripping off the roof of our tower, and plucking us out.
Lena’s mouth trembled, so I knew she was thinking roughly the same thing. Another ten feet of braids coiled around our feet. Adelaide scooted away from the strands, trying not to look at any of us.
Then Lena’s chin lifted. “This one’s my Tale. So it’s my decision.” She reached into her carryall and pulled out the small knife she used to chop spell ingredients. “Start at the other end. If you braid the braids, it’ll be closer to real rope. I’ll cut it when we have enough to reach the ground. No one goes out that window until then, you hear? We need everyone in fighting shape in case any giants show up.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I grabbed a handful of hair and tried to follow it to the end.
Chase watched me. “How do you braid again?”
“Um. Three strands.” I found the ends and divided them. It had been a long time since I tried to do anyone else’s hair. I wished Miriam, EAS’s new expert on dwarvish braids, had come.
Adelaide rolled her eyes. “The mighty Triumvirate, defeated by hair. Get out of my way, and keep the ends from tangling.”
I stepped back.
Chase edged away from her the second she grabbed Lena’s hair. That had to kill her a little, but she didn’t complain. She didn’t even comment. A thick, tight, even, ropelike braid formed under Adelaide’s quick fingers.
Finally, Lena sheared off her hair, close to her scalp. It kept growing for another minute, long enough for her to panic. But the braids just reached her calves and stopped. She handed me some string from her carryall and ordered me to wrap up her hair. “It doesn’t have to be pretty,” she told me. “I just don’t want to step on it.”
Chase finished separating the strands, and a few minutes later, Adelaide completed the rope.
Still no sign of our enemies, but nobody had told Chase that. He searched the room and hauled his carryall out from under the bed. He grabbed something inside and tossed it to me. I caught it—a jar filled with green-gold paint, labeled 2—WEAPONS CLOSET.
A temporary-transport spell. It wouldn’t break through the warding hex. Besides, we had a way out. “Why—”
“Just hold on to it,” he said. “And hope we don’t need it.”
Chase tied the end of the rope around the only thing nailed down in the room—an iron torch bracket attached to the stone wall about a foot above my head. He double-checked that his sword and sheath were secure. Then he scooped up an armful of rope and dumped it out the window. He jumped a second before Lena protested, “Wait! Let me check the knot!”
The rope went taut.
The knot held. Lena peeked outside again. “Okay, he’s already three-quarters of the way—No, he’s at the base. He’s talking to Kyle. Your turn, Rory.”
“We all know it’ll take you the longest to get down,” Adelaide said.
Just to spite her, I grabbed the rope, twirled a bit of it around my leg, anchored it with my other foot, and hopped out the window without even glancing down first. The hair rope felt weird—springy and too thin to bear my weight. I hoped the magic from our Tales was helping it hold together.
I closed my eyes and loosened my grip.
The rope ran out over my leg less than a minute later, way less time than I expected. There wasn’t enough. I knew it. I should have checked. I—
Hands grasped my waist, steadying me.
“I get it. Your eyes are closed,” Kyle said from a few feet away. “I thought you took that pretty fast, for you.”
Kyle was manning three axes. He looked like he usually did when he offered to test Lena’s inventions—amazed, nervous, and ready for anything.
He wasn’t the one who caught me.
Holding my waist, Chase scowled up at the hair rope. His wings flickered in and out behind him, buzzing with agitation whenever his magic kicked in. It was the best thing I’d seen all day. All his Chaseness had come back.
“You can let go now, Rory,” he said.
This was totally what I imagined would happen after my first kiss. “Right.” I dropped the last few inches.
The second my feet thumped onto the grass, Chase grabbed the rope and held it steady for the next person. At the top of the tower, heart-stoppingly small, Adelaide was lowering herself out the window.
“Lena, don’t wait for her!” Chase called, even though he knew perfectly well that she couldn’t hear him up there.
Well, I didn’t see any giants. The Snow Queen hadn’t sent her forces. Yet.
That made the vines the scariest thing around, but Kyle had them under control. One of the icy tendrils sneaked into the clearing directly beside the tower. He pointed at it, and the ax on the right sailed forward and hacked it back.
I tugged my ring out of my pocket, ready to go. “Kyle, was everything okay at EAS?”
Kyle nodded slowly. “Rapunzel was there. She told me to say the long hair thing. I didn’t think it would actually work, but she wanted me to promise. She’d just saved my life. It didn’t seem polite to say no.”
So, Rapunzel had known the Tale was coming, and she hadn’t warned me or Lena. She hadn’t even hinted. That wasn’t like her.
Adelaide landed and backed away from Chase and the rope, without saying anything, without even look
ing at us. She took something out of her pocket. It flashed blue in the sun. Her ring of return.
“Don’t even think about it, Adelaide,” Chase said, and not in a very nice way. “We go back together.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, wincing, but she curled her fingers around the ring and waited.
Chase wasn’t telling us something. He was too freaked out. “Why?” I said.
He didn’t answer right away.
Lena had made it halfway, but she was having trouble sliding down. The wind kept whipping the hair on her head around the rope. She stopped at least five times to unwrap one from the other. Chase’s wings buzzed again, in and out. If she fell, he was ready to leap up as far as his malfunctioning magic would let him and catch her.
“Chase?” I said.
“Get your sword out,” he said, without taking his eyes off Lena. “When we go back, we need to be armed.”
That was it. He thought the Snow Queen had sent her fighters to EAS, the stronghold Solange had never even been able to find. His Tale was making him paranoid. “But, Chase,” I said gently, “how would she get in? EAS is so well-protected.”
“That is exactly what the Fey thought about their courts,” Chase reminded me.
Anxiety churned my insides. That couldn’t be true. We left EAS for the dangerous missions and quests, and when we got back, we were safe. That was how it worked.
Rapunzel would have told us if an attack was coming. I was almost sure.
“Okay.” I drew my sword and dug my ring out of my pocket. Adelaide notched an arrow on her bowstring. Kyle called all but one ax back into the sack. Then he grabbed it in one hand and held his spear in the other.
“Any day now, Lena,” Chase called.
This time, she was definitely close enough to hear him. “It’s harder for me than it was for you guys! I don’t think that this is how Rapunzels normally leave their tower.” She’d gotten stuck again, just eight feet above us. “Forget it. I’ll jump the rest of the way. See you at EAS.”
Lena’s ring flashed blue. Then she disappeared.
“She used hers,” I said, Master of the Obvious.
“Crap.” Chase unsheathed his sword. “NOW!”