Of Giants and Ice (Ever Afters, The)

by Bach, Shelby

“Not sure. Pretty young in comparison to some of them. The Director is over two hundred years old—come on.” Lena threaded her way through the crowd. “Let’s listen.”

  I could think of a lot of things I would rather do at a Fairie Market, but I didn’t argue. Lena probably needed something to keep her mind off her brother.

  “He picks me up,” Jack said, “this twenty-five-foot monster, and he says, ‘Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.’ I don’t even have my sword out, so I say, ‘You need to get your nose checked. I’m from Idaho.’”

  His audience chuckled like a laugh track on TV sitcoms—automatic and way too enthusiastic for the joke.

  It reminded me of the time right before my parents’ divorce when Mom starred in a really big movie that my dad directed. Every time she came to pick me up from school, my classmates, and their parents, and sometimes our teachers, would crowd around her, laughing at her jokes. That was when Mom had started to send Amy to pick me up.

  “Don’t trust it. Everybody’s looking for their fifteen minutes of fame,” she had told me.

  Apparently, no one had told Jack that. He smiled widely, probably thinking he was actually funny.

  “It didn’t look good,” Jack continued. “I was hanging upside down from a giant’s hand. But we got to talking about Idaho. He had never been there. I told them that everybody raised in Idaho tastes a lot like potatoes.” A lot of people laughed again. “And that we’re really bland unless you cook us right.”

  Chase lurked a few feet behind him. They didn’t really look alike. Jack was much stockier and his hair was too dark, but when they smiled, all their dimples were in the same places.

  This was the widest grin I had ever seen on Chase’s face. Obviously, he enjoyed all the attention his dad was getting. He was also standing exactly like his father—arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the building at exactly the same angle, a hand on his chin.

  “So, I give him this recipe—lots of vegetables, lots of spices,” Jack said, “and while he’s down the street at Jolly Green Giant’s Grocery Store, I work one of his knives out of the cupboard and cut myself free.”

  Suddenly, I thought of something a lot more fun than listening to Chase’s dad brag about himself—payback.

  I crept up behind Chase, and I leaned against a tree too, folding my arms and holding my chin, trying to imitate Jack’s cocky expression. “Aren’t you taking ‘like father, like son’ a little far?” I whispered.

  Chase noticed the way I was standing. He dropped his arms and stood up straight, glaring at me.

  Jack didn’t see or hear any of this, which made him even dumber than his son. “He gets back, carrying in two plastic bags. He doesn’t see me standing just inside the door. So, I stab him first in one ankle and then in the other, and he falls, in slow motion, like a tree, his groceries flying everywhere, horrible packaged goods like dead man’s toes and brain of baby rabbits. And I—”

  “Jack, there you are!” Sarah Thumb and Mr. Swallow landed on a branch above his head. “The Director sent me to get you. The meeting was supposed to start ten minutes ago, and you’re the only one who didn’t show up.”

  For a second, Jack the Giant-Killer got a panicked look in his eyes, exactly like Chase did when the dragon came after us. Then he smiled at his audience. “Looks like we need to take a mandatory intermission here, folks. Duty calls.”

  The little Thumbelina Character rolled her eyes, and Mr. Swallow took off, not bothering to wait. Jack had to run to catch up.

  As soon as his dad was out of sight, Chase shoved me hard in the shoulder. “That wasn’t funny, Rory.”

  I smiled. So far, the score that night was one point to me, and none to Chase. “When you get a little taller, are you going to wear his clothes, too?”

  “You should show him more respect.” His face got red like it does when he’s really mad. “He’s a Jack with two Tales, both Beanstalk and Giant-Killer. That only happens once every three centuries.”

  I shrugged. “I thought he was a little full of himself.”

  “He has a right to be.” Adelaide stepped up behind Chase. The triplets were right behind her. “Since he joined the Canon, he’s killed twenty-five giants.”

  “That’s the most in the history of Jack the Giant-Killers,” Kyle said.

  “Yeah, what do your parents do?” Chase added. “Sit at a desk all day?”

  I just laughed. Moviemaking was pretty impressive, but I wasn’t going to tell them about it.

  “Rory, you’re as bad as he is,” Lena said in her best children-play-nice voice, as she glanced toward the Ivory Tower to see if the match had started again.

  Maybe it was a little mean of me, but I didn’t care. “I wouldn’t rely on Jack’s fame if I were you,” I told Chase. “Without your dad, you’re just a kid waiting for your Tale to start. Just like the rest of us.”

  Chase opened his mouth to say something else, but nothing came out.

  “Lena!” someone shouted. We all looked.

  Jenny pushed her way through the crowd. Her friends followed her, looking tall and scary and distant—like most eighth graders.

  The sinking feeling came back. Lena’s eyes widened. She obviously hadn’t remembered that both of George’s sisters would be watching the tournament. Then she raised her chin, determined to look cheerful.

  “Did you get the Table yet?” Jenny clearly planned to show it off to her friends. “We thought we’d try it out. Get some snacks to eat during the match.”

  “I got something even better,” Lena said, but she didn’t sound as confident as she had when she told me. She pulled the book out of her backpack and handed it to her sister, who stared at the faded gold cover. “It’s Madame Benne’s spellbook.”

  There was a beat of silence. The other sixth graders glanced first at Lena and then at the grubby old book. I would never admit it out loud, but it did sound pretty unbelievable.

  “You found Madame Benne’s spellbook?” Adelaide obviously didn’t believe a word of it.

  Lena’s gaze slid toward Kyle, and I knew she wished that she were anywhere but in a crowd that included the triplets. “Now we can make as many Tables of Plenty as we want.”

  Unfortunately, Jenny seemed skeptical too. “Did the vendor tell you that this was Madame Benne’s spellbook?”

  Lena shook her head slowly, her eyes large and solemn behind her glasses.

  Jenny leafed through the pages with a frown. “I can’t even read this.”

  Unasked, Chase pointed to the page on the right. “It’s a recipe. ‘Mushroom and Chive Scones,’” he read. He looked my way with a tiny smirk, and I knew he was saying it to get back at me. “It’s just a Fey cookbook,” he told Jenny.

  I could’ve hit him. I almost did just to wipe that smirk off his face, but it wouldn’t help Lena.

  “But it has her symbol in it,” Lena said.

  “Forgers must’ve added that,” Jenny said, exasperated.

  Damage done, Chase smiled at me again and waved good-bye. Adelaide followed him, looking equally smug. The triplets slipped awkwardly into the crowd.

  “All the sources say that she bound her notes in a golden book,” Lena said hesitantly.

  “Don’t you think the forgers know that, too? Lena, how much did you spend on this?”

  Lena looked at her feet and mumbled something. I watched helplessly, insides churning.

  “All of it?” Jenny repeated, horrified.

  I had to do something—at least try to get Lena out of it. “Look, you really shouldn’t listen to everything Chase says. He’s always full of it, and—”

  “Rory,” Jenny said sharply. “Can you give us a minute?” She turned to her friends. “You guys, too. I need to talk to Lena alone.”

  Lena didn’t look at me, twisting the straps of her backpack, probably only a few seconds away from crying. I really didn’t want to leave her, but I didn’t have much choice.

  “I’ll see you later, Lena,” I said
and walked away.

  I felt sick to my stomach and almost as guilty as if it had been my idea to buy the book. After all, Chase had been trying to get back at me when he called it a Fey cookbook and sealed Lena’s fate.

  Chase, I thought again, suddenly so angry that my hands automatically curled into fists. Pulling pranks on me was one thing, but getting Lena in trouble to get to me turned him from a regular bully to a true slimebucket. I was going to tell him so.

  I had to find him first.

  I ran in the direction he’d gone. He wasn’t anywhere in the tournament’s audience, but around the side of the Ivory Tower farthest from the Tree, I glimpsed him running along the wall of a weird building. If I hadn’t been so angry, I might have stopped to stare at it. The circular outer wall was made out of tree trunks, kind of like a log cabin, but the trunks rose vertically from the ground. The bark was still on them.

  Chase dashed through a small door, cut from a trunk, designed to blend in.

  I rushed in right before the door closed and stomped up the staircase just inside the door. Planning what I was going to say, I dimly noticed that the stairs wound in a very tight circle, the grain’s pattern identical on every step, as if the whole stairway was carved from the same trunk. At the top, branches spread out in every direction, as if the builder had preserved the tree exactly how it grew.

  Chase knelt in the center of the attic, where light shone from below. He hadn’t noticed me yet.

  Seeing him, I darted across the uneven surface and shoved Chase with every ounce of my fury. He caught himself on a couple of nearby branches, narrowly avoiding falling through one of the holes in the floor.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he whispered, staring up at me as if I was the last person he expected to see.

  “What do you think you’re doing? You can bug me as much as you want, but Lena isn’t—”

  “Keep your voice down!” Chase pointed at the hole beside him. “Do you want to get caught?”

  I looked automatically, not through the hole, but at the floor. It had leaves on it—not the silk and plastic kind, but the real kind, the plant kind. The leaves were attached to a branch—no, a whole bunch of branches. The roof above us rustled too, like leaves in a slight breeze.

  I’m not proud of it, but seeing how easily I could fall through, I completely forgot about Lena’s problems.

  Dropping fast, I clung to as many branches as I could get my arms and legs around, my heart hammering. That’s how much I don’t like heights.

  “We’re up a tree.” My voice cracked in the middle. Not just one tree, but it looked like all the trunks that made up the outer wall still had their branches attached. The branches, woven together, made up the floor. There were bigger holes in the middle near me and Chase. I was at least fifty feet from the stairs. The attic started to spin around me.

  “Well, duh,” Chase whispered.

  Only one thought filled my head. “I have to get down.”

  Chase glared at me. “You won’t fall unless I push you. I will if you don’t shut up. I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

  He wasn’t bluffing. I became very still and very quiet.

  Then I heard the voices coming from the first floor, directly underneath us.

  “Then we are unanimous. We won’t tell the young Characters about this particular Tale,” said a familiarly formal voice.

  I looked through the branches to the ground below. Forty or fifty Characters sat in a small auditorium, most of them grownups. They sat in elaborately carved chairs arranged in a circle. If the chairs were a little taller and made out of gold or jewels, they would have looked like thrones.

  “The Canon,” I murmured.

  Chase fiercely motioned for me to be quiet. I bit my tongue.

  “We agree that there is no need to frighten them needlessly,” the Director continued in the same formal tone. She sat in a chair close to the center, carved all over with climbing roses and vines, a lot like the ones in her office.

  “If it is true, if we are reading the beginning of the Tale correctly, we will have plenty of time to prepare,” said Gretel. Her chair and Hansel’s rose up side-by-side, decorated like a gingerbread house. “Four years make a big difference in a child’s development.”

  “And her hands are full enough already,” said Ellie at the other side of the room (her chair looked like a miniature pumpkin carriage, with a seat carved out of it). Several other Characters chuckled grimly, like she had made some sort of a morbid joke.

  I looked at Chase for an explanation, but he only shrugged. He didn’t know either.

  “There are no secrets where children are concerned. Not true ones,” said another quiet voice. It was the girl who had been carving earlier. Dust still covered her clothes. Her chair was a little taller than the others, like a tower, and her silver braid hung over the side.

  “Who’s that?” But I guessed as soon as the question was out of my mouth.

  “Rapunzel,” Chase said.

  “I thought she was a student,” I said.

  “She’s pretty old,” Chase said. “She’s probably the oldest person in that room. Only the Director’s older, but I don’t know if it counts since she was asleep for half of it.”

  “They hear our whispers.” Rapunzel looked up, straight through the hole where Chase and I were watching.

  “She knows we’re here,” I said dryly, waiting to be caught.

  Chase looked worried for a second, but he shook it off. “Doesn’t matter. Everybody knows she has a few screws loose.”

  “Are you always such a jerk?”

  “I’m not trying to be mean,” Chase snapped back. “It was her Tale that did it. She was left alone in her tower too long. She’s supposed to have the gift of prophecy, but mostly she just freaks people out.”

  A lot of the Characters sitting below did seem uncomfortable, shifting in their wooden chairs, but the Director said, “Thank you, Rapunzel. We’ll keep that in mind. We should all take care not to speak of it outside these walls.”

  Chase gave me a look that proudly said I told you so.

  I pointed right below us. An old man sat in his chair, looking straight at me and Chase, his enormous gray eyebrows raised very high. Then he winked slowly and turned back to the meeting.

  I enjoyed watching Chase gulp. “Looks like he isn’t going to do anything though.”

  “On to other business.” The Director looked over a sheet of paper. I was beginning to think that she was the type of person who had a list for everything. “Rumpelstiltskin, you had something to report?”

  “We must do something about Solange,” said Rumpel. “She’s already started to move.”

  Several people below gasped at the name. Apparently, the younger Characters weren’t the only ones who freaked out over the Snow Queen.

  “Has she escaped?” asked someone I hadn’t met. She wore an old-fashioned red hat (it was pretty easy to guess which Tale was hers).

  “Not yet,” the Director said and motioned to Rumpel to continue.

  He flipped through the enormous book to a different page and read, “‘The queen grew restless in her glass prison. She had waited patiently for many years, and she grew tired of pretending that she was not dangerous. She sent one of her dragons to a park much favored by the human world and waited to hear of the havoc it wreaked.’”

  A sigh of relief escaped from half the audience.

  From a chair carved with huge leaves and giant faces, Jack said, “If all she has done in twenty-some years of imprisonment is let loose one dragon, then we should count ourselves lucky.”

  Most people laughed, but not the Director, or Rumpel, or Rapunzel—or even Chase.

  “The point is that Solange shouldn’t be able to do anything at all.” The Director sounded so stern that all the Characters in the room became quiet again. I wondered what happened to the Snow Queen being like Napoleon—all defanged and everything. “Someone needs to go out there and make certain that her g
lass prison is secure.”

  A glass prison didn’t sound very secure to me, but several members of the Canon grumbled that this was unnecessary.

  The Director shook her head. “If it were anyone else, I would agree, but Solange is too dangerous.”

  That sneaky, self-important grown-up—she had lied to me. She’d hid the truth like I was a little kid that needed protecting. I hated it when grown-ups did that.

  “Now, who will go?” asked the Director. “Jack?”

  Jack shifted in his seat uncomfortably as everyone turned to look at him. I liked him even less. “Don’t you have any more giants that need slaying?”

  “You are the Canon’s champion,” the Director said firmly. “It is your duty.”

  Jack glanced around at all the faces watching him. “Fine, but not until after the weekend. I need to spend some time with my son.”

  “Your son!” said Sarah Thumb, outraged, and her husband tried to hush her. “You only remember you’re a father when it’s convenient for you.”

  I felt Chase move before I saw it. I reached forward to stop him, to keep him from giving us away, but he was already halfway through the branches before I grabbed him. His weight dragged me down with him, and I hung there in the middle of the meeting, an attic branch in one hand and Chase dangling from the other.

  “Chase!” said Jack, surprised.

  His weight wasn’t helping me keep my grip. My heart thumped hard, and I knew I really would fall. “I’m slipping!”

  “Nobody can talk about my dad like that,” Chase said.

  “She’s, like, four inches tall, you idiot,” I snapped, but I shouldn’t have looked at him. The drop made me feel sick. “What are you going to do?”

  “Let him go, girl,” said the old man who had been sitting below us. “He’s close enough to jump.”

  I dropped Chase. He landed lightly on both feet, glaring at everyone around him. The old man reached up and plucked me from the branch too. He was really bald. The only hair on his head grew on his ears. He had a wide mouth, thin lips, and eyes that bugged out a little. But he seemed friendly.

  The old man set me on the floor and picked up his walking stick, which had a warty animal carved on top.