Of Enemies and Endings

by Shelby Bach

  Lena hurried into the prisons, chanting in Fey. When the spell took hold, she ran forward.

  “Thanks, Lena.” The heart wasn’t buzzing gently anymore. It was vibrating hard enough to make my voice shake.

  Behind us came Conner’s voice. “I don’t get it. All she has to do is stab the heart. That would kill the Snow Queen, wouldn’t it? Then this would all be over.”

  That should have occurred to me. It hadn’t. I had been so focused on getting the heart and bringing it to the Snow Queen. I hadn’t considered that there might be another option.

  But stabbing the heart would work. It was pumping magic through her veins instead of blood. Destroying it would end that flow, and considering she was over two hundred years old, magic was the only thing keeping her alive.

  We’d reached the hole in the main corridor. They’d blasted through five feet of solid ice. I wondered what Lena had used on it.

  “Step on the chunks.” Lena pointed out a path up the huge blocks of ice that had fallen out of the wall.

  The others ran down the corridor toward us. “It could all be over,” Conner told his brothers again.

  “What do you think?” I asked Chase before our grade could catch up with us.

  “I think it’s your Tale. It’s your decision.” Chase was saying that a lot tonight. It would only last until he really disagreed with me.

  I stepped onto the first ice block. It melted underfoot, and I almost slipped on my second step.

  Stabbing the heart wasn’t the right way to stop Solange. I glanced back. “I need to bring it to the Snow Queen. That’s what Rapunzel saw in her vision.”

  That didn’t seem to be a good enough reason for Conner. Or Kevin, Paul, Vicky, Tina, and especially not for Daisy. I wondered if I should tell them the heart would probably explode if we put a knife through it. Returning it still wouldn’t be a natural death, but it was as close as we would be able to get under the circumstances. Maybe that would minimize the blast.

  “It wouldn’t end the war,” Chase said, climbing out right behind me. “The Snow Queen would die, sure, but then General Searcaster would lead the army. The invasion would still happen.”

  Something else cracked. Everyone looked up, horrified, but forty feet up, the ceiling was smooth, still frozen.

  “Wall,” Kyle said, pointing to what we had heard. Another huge crack, and the wall began to topple. The others scattered, out of its way.

  Chase took matters into his own hands and decided to get the heart out of the palace before it could destroy anything else. He unfurled his wings, scooped me up, and flew out of the hole. A second later we landed on the snow.

  “You okay?” Chase asked. I nodded, counting the others as they climbed out. All nine of them came out, uninjured.

  Then an enormous shadow fell over us.

  Chase drew his sword. “Giant!”

  atilda threw up her hands. It was very strange to see a four-story-tall woman cowering in front of a kid who had only cleared six feet this summer.

  “Rory!” she said in a tone that clearly meant Help me.

  “Don’t move!” Vicky said, drawing back her bowstring. “Rory already got what she came here for. And if you think that we’ll let you stop her now—”

  “Whoa!” I stepped between them before anyone could do any damage. “Matilda’s on our side! She opened the front door for me.”

  The triplets lowered their spears. They were staring at me again. Well, squinting actually. The heart glowed even brighter outside.

  Chase hadn’t sheathed his sword. “There was an army in there. She might not have thought she was doing you a favor when she opened the door.”

  “She swore a Binding Oath,” I said. “West helped us.”

  Chase eased out of his battle stance. The others followed him.

  The heart had melted another puddle around me, and I sloshed through it, toward a very unnerved-looking Matilda. “Do you think you could give us a ride?”

  They were bound to see us coming. A four-story-tall pregnant giantess was hard to ignore. Add me and Lena on one shoulder, three archers on the other, and our spearmen in her pockets, plus Chase winging his way along beside her, and no one could miss us.

  But the real giveaway was the heart. It wasn’t content with just blazing now that we were getting closer to the Snow Queen. It had decided to put on a show. Yellow light spilled into the air above us, rippling with flame-red streaks. Green ribbons unfurled across the sky.

  The Snow Queen knew by now that I had her heart. She had to.

  Matilda climbed a ridge. She walked quickly, carefully. The way was steep. Melted water made it slick. Her neck glistened with sweat, but then again, so did Lena’s face. I didn’t feel the heart’s heat, but its vibrations definitely got worse. My teeth chattered inside my mouth.

  The giantess paused at the top of the rise. The Snow Queen had chosen to make her stand right next to Ivinhoor’s Bay. The Ever Afters and their allies had arrived. Both armies were spread out across the valley beside the shore. We were still half a mile away, and from this distance they all looked the same, like a rolling sea of people, with a few giants thrown in like boulders sticking out in the water.

  Thousands upon thousands.

  Well, the people brawling far over the bay did kind of stand out. West had found his brothers, and between the three Winds, they’d created a cyclone twisting horizontally over the ocean. I really hoped West didn’t need backup, because I wasn’t sure anyone could help him.

  “How close can you get us?” Chase asked.

  “Where are you trying to go?” Matilda replied.

  The fighting clustered around four or five spots on the ice, a swirl and ebb of bodies, like eddies in the tide.

  Lena pointed one out to me, which seemed to disappear into a small white ridge, scattered with black rock. “That’s where we came out, hours ago. The Portland portal. It was easier this time. The Seelie moved Queen Titania’s pavilion. Miriam and Philip’s grades are defending it.”

  The pillars were just behind the portal. Jimmy Searcaster was stomping on people. Likon was picking fighters up and playing with them. Ripper barked orders to his wolf army. Ori’an flew laps around the sorceress-giant, patrolling against any Fey who might try to get close, and General Searcaster . . .

  She was bent close to the ground, listening to someone.

  “That way,” I said.

  Chase scanned the battlefield, taking in the troops that blanketed the valley. He pointed with his sword. “No. Right there. Between the trolls and the goblins.”

  “How are we supposed to get through?” Daisy asked. “There’s no opening.”

  “We’ll make one.” Chase’s confidence shut everyone up. Hopefully that meant he had a plan.

  Matilda picked her way down the rise and kept walking. Up close, I could see the separate forces—the goblins to the right fighting the Living Stone Dwarves on the left. One skirmish was raging right on the shore. Heads would pop out of the waves, just long enough for a spear or a trident to come sailing out at some really ugly people with wands. More witches, but not from the Wolfsbane clan. Spells couldn’t travel through water. The mermaids were the natural choice to fight them, but I still hoped Chatty was safe, and Ben too. He was probably fighting with her.

  The Snow Queen had to have noticed us by now. But when Matilda stopped a hundred feet from the fighting, she didn’t throw everything she had at us.

  Instead, the goblins turned away from the dwarves. They ran, their spears and swords raised high, out of the way of their pounding legs.

  “Um. What are they doing?” I asked.

  “Deserting, looks like.” Matilda’s voice was smug, like she was pleased that she wasn’t the only one who had turned against Solange. She fished our spearmen out of her pockets and set them down. The triplets staggered, trying to get their bearings. Matilda set Lena and me down next, and then the archers on her other shoulder. “They know you’ve reached the battlefield, so now they t
hink the Snow Queen will lose.”

  That was hard to believe. Nobody else was running.

  The witches continued to sling spells at the merpeople, who ducked under the surface to avoid them and then popped back up to throw more spears. Trolls in hockey masks fought against Characters I’d never seen before. They must have come from EAS’s other chapters. Adelaide had convinced them after all.

  Instead of holding the line with the other Characters, Jack tore through the trolls’ ranks, slashing and stabbing and mowing down his enemies in droves.

  A little further away, some of the Itari fighters had taken on a flock of ice griffins—less than a dozen against hundreds.

  The griffins fell and fell and fell. Bodies lay in a mound in front of George.

  I hadn’t noticed the dwarves coming closer until one of them pulled a helmet off. Forrel leaned on his spear and glanced up at Chase, breathing hard. “Would you like us to pursue the goblins?”

  “No,” Chase said. “Engage the ice griffins. We’ll need to borrow the Itari fighters.”

  Chase was in charge? Since when?

  The dwarf nodded. Then he shoved the helmet back over his sweaty hair and started shouting orders at his men. They formed ranks and attacked the ice griffins’ flank.

  My grip tightened on the heart nestled in my hands. It trembled so hard that my arm bones rattled.

  When I looked up again, determined to ask Chase what he was up to, he was gone. He’d swooped over the battlefield, found his students, and was talking to them.

  Lena yanked the stack of dragon scales out of the front pocket of her carryall, saying, “Okay, guys. Shields out. I need to recharge them. The mermaids are keeping the witches busy, but when we go in, they might change tactics.”

  I hadn’t even known that the shields could be recharged. I had been so focused on taking the heart to Solange. But this battle was so much bigger than me and her—with all these troops, and all their intricate strategies, and just a tiny chance that I could stop her.

  Chase was back. He landed among the other kids in our grade. “All right. The Itari fighters will go first, cutting a path to the Snow Queen. We’ll do cleanup right behind them, making sure nobody gets to Rory. Got it?”

  “We get it,” said Vicky. “We’ve got bodyguard duty.”

  “We did go over this plan back at EAS, you know,” Kyle said. “In detail.”

  Then I understood. I didn’t need to worry about how we were going to fight through the Snow Queen’s forces. I had the best friends in the history of Characters.

  The magic around me stirred. Orange diffused through the light spilling from the heart.

  I turned to Matilda. “I would stay back. We can’t protect you from the Searcasters. They’ll know you brought us.”

  “I’m not worried. Jimmy and Genevieve will have to fight their way through all of you to reach me.” Matilda’s chin was raised, just like Lena when she was being stubborn. “Besides, I want them to see me. I want them to know what I have done. They always thought I was useless anyway.”

  Wow. Someday I wanted to find out what they’d done to make Matilda want to betray them.

  “Rory!” Chase said.

  I ran over to him. The heart melted the ice ahead of me.

  I stopped right between Chase and Lena. In front of us, the kids in our grade and the Itari fighters pushed forward through the griffins and attacked the next section of the Snow Queen’s army: the dragons.

  Their usual creepy song echoed around us, but most of them only got out two notes, cut down before they got to the long hissing part. The Itari squadron cut through the herd, opening up a path for the rest of us.

  “Do I even want to know what the plan is?” I asked my friends.

  “Nope. You would probably freak.” Chase’s face didn’t have even a hint of a smile, but that might have been because one of the dragons had gotten past the Itari fighters’ line.

  “Or possibly not believe us,” Lena said, sounding like she was pretty close to freaking herself. “I barely do.”

  I trusted them. We’d gotten this far.

  Vicky and Tina blinded the dragon with two well-aimed arrows in its eyes. Conner finished it off with a spear through the heart. The dragon fell. We jogged past it before it combusted, right on the Itari fighters’ heels.

  We’d caught up with the goblins. They’d slain dozens of the singing serpents in the area. No wonder we were making such good time. The goblins were taking out half our enemies for us. “Now what are they doing?” I said.

  “Don’t know,” Chase said, and he clearly didn’t care. “Maybe the Draconus melodious call got creepy even for them.”

  “Or maybe they switched sides!” Lena said excitedly. “Like Matilda!”

  The witches noticed us finally. They raised their wands, and my fellow questers raised their shields. But the witches only managed to squeeze off a couple shots before newcomers swooped in on colorful wings and took on the magic-casters.

  “For Princess Dyani!” cried Himorsal Liior, soaring at the head of a Fey squadron. “For Prince Callion!”

  I expected Chase to react to his brother’s name, but he didn’t. “Finally. Fael was always slow for a Fey.” He led us forward.

  Ripper’s wolf army tried to cut us off. A big Arctic white sprang first, and our Aladdin fell under his paws. The wolf’s jaws closed over Aladdin’s throat, and in the next instant, Keon’s sword beheaded the white-furred wolf. Both deaths were that quick.

  George took the lead in Aladdin’s place. Four small red-brown wolves leapt at him. George spun, his sword flashing gold in the light coming from the heart. The wolves fell.

  Then Lena’s brother looked back at us, his blade wet. “Chase, looks like you’re up.”

  The ice shook underneath us.

  Jimmy Searcaster was coming, and Likon stalked up along the ridge to make sure he didn’t step on any of his own allies. Ori’an had dropped the Fey he’d been pounding into the ice and taken flight. Ripper bounded over the ranks of his wolves.

  All four pillars, closing in.

  Chase watched them. “Yep, that’s my cue.”

  Fear sliced through me. Chase couldn’t fight the pillars, especially not all four of them at once. They couldn’t be killed except by another pillar, and none of them were going to desert the Snow Queen.

  “No,” I said. “It’s my Tale, and I say no.”

  “You’re overruled,” Chase said. “We shifted from quest mode to battle mode about a half hour ago. Besides, what was it Rapunzel said? ‘United in purpose even when their paths diverged’?”

  I opened my mouth, ticked that he would throw that back in my face, but Lena said, quickly and sternly, “No bickering right now. Save it for after.”

  “We’re not bickering.” We were saying good-bye.

  “Rory, you’re not going to die,” Chase said, “and I’m going to live to be an old man and die in my sleep.”

  Ripper howled, only about a hundred feet away. He would reach us first.

  “You can’t know that,” I said. Sounding confident wouldn’t help, not with this. I knew him too well. I knew how often it covered up what he really thought.

  “I do.” Then Chase’s hand cupped my face. I thought for sure that he was going to kiss me again, but he just tilted my head so he could speak into my ear. “Do you remember my dream? About my birthday party?”

  “Of course. Grandpa Chase.” He might live, then. His dreams about the Snow Queen had turned out to be true.

  “There’s the cake with all the candles, and all these people. And then . . .” He paused, like he always did when he was thinking about chickening out. “You make a really beautiful old lady.”

  My own heart gave a great, walloping thump. I didn’t expect to feel hope. Gold and scarlet ribbons pierced through the light pouring out of my hands.

  Chase stepped back. His gaze was steady. “Gotta go. Lena will get you the rest of the way.”

  He leapt up. His vivid orang
e wings spread out, so bright under the heart’s blaze that he looked like he was trailing fire. Seeing a warrior coming for him, Ripper stopped in his tracks. His jaw split in a wolfish grin.

  “Wait!” Lena told the others. “Let Chase draw them off first.”

  Chase swooped down at the Big Bad Wolf. Panic replaced my hope.

  Ripper’s jaw snapped hard. I heard the teeth even from twenty-five feet away, but Chase was a good flier. He dipped lower, missing the fangs by a few inches, and delivered a long slash along Ripper’s underside, slitting him from throat to tail.

  I knew from experience that a wound like that wouldn’t kill a pillar, no matter how much blood he lost, but it would definitely hurt. It would make even the Big Bad Wolf sloppy.

  Ripper whirled around, spraying blood, but he didn’t seem to notice. He pounded after Chase, who was soaring straight for Likon, the second-closest pillar.

  “Okay. They’re far enough away.” Lena stepped behind me, planted her hands on my shoulders, and guided me forward. “Come on, Rory.”

  I went, but still I didn’t take my eyes off Chase.

  He’d drawn even with Likon, but Ripper had caught up to him as well. Two at once.

  Then Chase doubled back, so swiftly he was just an orange streak across the sky. He dove at Ripper’s face again. The wolf stood his ground, expecting another feint, but this time, Chase landed a slice across Ripper’s good eye.

  A howl of pain split the air around us. Chase had blinded the Big Bad Wolf.

  He flew over to Ripper again, so close that the rusty black fur rippled. Then he pricked the wolf’s ear.

  Ripper pounced on the spot where Chase had been last, claws and teeth tearing with everything he had. He couldn’t see Chase fly away. He couldn’t see Likon coming to help him. The Big Bad Wolf landed on the blue giant’s throat, killing him as swiftly as the white wolf had killed our Aladdin.

  This was why Chase had taught himself Itari. He’d been planning to take out the pillars himself.

  Likon didn’t get up. Ripper didn’t even stop to sniff his comrade and see what he’d done. Chase jabbed Ripper’s flank, and the wolf tore after him without realizing that Chase was leading him straight to the next closest giant, Jimmy Searcaster.