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Of Giants and Ice (Ever Afters, The)

Page 21

by Bach, Shelby


  “I thought humans couldn’t do magic,” I said suspiciously.

  Chase just started up after Lena. “The ropes are enchanted to do that. A built-in spell. Like your sword.”

  It was a mistake to remind me about my sword. It made my mood about a million times worse. “That doesn’t explain why you knew how to make it heavy.”

  I put my hands on the nearest rung of the rope ladder. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t nearly as high as the beanstalk before I could make myself move.

  The rope ladder swung a little bit, especially every time I stepped up a rung. The nausea came back, but not dizziness. Definitely easier than the beanstalk.

  “I told you I’m special.” Chase looked over his shoulder to smile at me in a way I didn’t like. “Just like you, apparently—if no one’s seen anything like you since Solange first showed up.”

  I scowled. I did not appreciate him bringing that back up when I was twenty feet off the ground. “I’m not anything like the Snow Queen.”

  “Can you two not bicker?” Lena said. “There are giants sleeping down the hall.”

  “He just called me evil.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Reaching the tabletop, Chase pulled himself over the edge with his elbows.

  “It can’t be me.” I rolled onto the table and stood up, brushing off my jeans. “What could I have possibly done like the Snow Queen? Freeze when I’m scared? Suck royally in Hansel’s class? Throw rocks at her dragon?” A soft clattering noise came from the floor below, and I stepped away from the table’s edge nervously. “Did you hear that?”

  Chase grinned. “Are you trying to change the subject?”

  “No. I really heard something. Clicking against the floor.” I glanced over the edge, but there wasn’t much point in looking without Lena’s flashlight. “I bet there’s something down there. Maybe the mice.”

  “Right.” Chase rolled his eyes. “Or the giant’s guard dog.”

  “It’s okay, Rory. We don’t have to worry about any prophecies now.” Lena shined the flashlight across the table. “It’s not like we don’t have enough to do— Oh, look! They left the safe unlocked.”

  Neither of them believed me. I tried not to get annoyed. After all, I had wanted to change the subject.

  Lena headed toward the safe, but Chase paused, scowling. “Why are you fighting this so much? Having a Destiny means you’ll go down in history. You’re not excited at all.”

  I wasn’t.

  I felt about the same as I had on my first day in Mrs. Coleman’s class. There was a math test before lunch, and Mrs. Coleman made me take it even though I hadn’t even been there for the lesson, much less studied. Panic was the best word. I didn’t want to mess up before I even got a chance to start.

  “I think I’m still trying to get used to the fact that giants are at the top of the food chain,” I said softly, walking beside him. “Having them talk about me is way too much to handle.”

  “Yeah, but since when is it a bad thing to find out you’re special?” Chase said, and I knew we both wished that he were the one with the Destiny, not me.

  The safe was a little smaller than my bedroom closet and made of a hard gray stone like granite, even the door. The combination lock looked like silver, and the dial was tarnished. On the top shelf, the hen slept, its head under its wing. I don’t have a lot of experience with chickens, but it looked pretty normal to me. The harp stood on the other side, head bent, her golden hair hanging down. It covered her face and waved a little while she snored harmoniously.

  “The safe must keep them asleep,” Lena said quietly. “It’s pretty simple magic.”

  “She made a lot of noise for something so little,” I whispered. The harp was only about a foot tall, a lot smaller than I thought.

  Chase whistled very softly and pointed to the bottom shelf. It was covered in coins, several inches deep. “That’s a lot of gold.”

  Lena knelt and pulled a sack out of her backpack. She loaded the coins inside slowly, careful to make sure none of them clinked.

  I knelt beside Lena to help. The coins were heavier than they looked. “I know I’m new to this,” I said slowly, “but wouldn’t it be more efficient to take all three at once? I mean, they’re all here.”

  Chase’s eyebrows disappeared under his bangs, and he looked at Lena eagerly. Maybe we could go home early. Then we could clear up the whole Snow Queen misunderstanding so much faster.

  Lena glanced up at the sleeping hen and harp, clearly tempted. Then she sighed. “We can’t.”

  “Well, the safe is open,” I pointed out. “And we—”

  “No, we can’t deviate from the other Beanstalk Tales,” Lena said fiercely. “If we do, it’ll decrease our chances of survival by eighty-seven percent.”

  Disappointed, I dropped two more handfuls of coins into her backpack and reached for the last of it, stuck far into the corner.

  “Besides, I really don’t want to take any chances with Genevieve Searcaster here,” Lena said. “I’m pretty sure we’ll wake the hen and the harp if we grab them. They might raise the alarm.”

  “Good call,” Chase said. When Lena finished zipping up her backpack, he slung it over his shoulder. I looked at him suspiciously. He wasn’t usually so helpful. “They’re leaving on vacation tomorrow, so getting the other two should be easy. Shall we?” He gestured to his rope ladder.

  “One second.” Lena pulled another bag out of her pack and dumped it out, scattering gold coins across the bottom shelf, almost covering it.

  “Is that what you picked from the storeroom?” I asked.

  “Leprechaun’s gold,” said Chase with approval.

  “The giants shouldn’t notice anything’s missing until after they get back.” Lena dusted off her hands and smiled, proud of herself.

  On the climb down, I got stuck just once for about a second, but I got myself going again before Lena reached me. A big improvement, if I do say so myself.

  As soon as we were hidden under the fridge, Chase started humming the same lullaby that the harp had sung earlier, but it wasn’t until we emerged in the cold night air that we realized Chase was eating.

  “Lena told you not to touch the trail mix.” I tried to snatch it back.

  “What?” Chase just raised the bag above his head. He was way too tall for me to reach it. “I’m hungry.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t carry Lena’s backpack just to be nice.”

  “Lena’s not complaining.” Chase looked over my shoulder.

  Lena didn’t even look at him, but she stumbled over one of the twigs I had pulled out of the campsite earlier. “I don’t like it, but I need to save my energy for more important things. Like finding my sleeping bag.” She yawned hugely.

  I glared at Chase. He looked slightly ashamed, but he still stuck his hand into the trail mix bag. “How ’bout we make a deal? You let me snack, and I’ll take the first watch.”

  “Fine. With the caffeine in all that chocolate, I bet you’re the only one who can stay awake.” Lena fell heavily to the ground between the other two backpacks. “Which one has the sleeping bags?”

  “Don’t eat all the M&M’s,” I told Chase fiercely and went to help Lena.

  Digging through the packs, I found what Rapunzel had stuffed in my bag—a glass vial on a silver chain. It was the same light she’d used while she was carving the night of the Fairie Market.

  The young will lie in the dark, she had said.

  Well, of course we would. It was time to sleep. Did she think we needed a night-light?

  I shoved it in the front pocket and searched deeper in the backpack.

  The sleeping bags were midnight blue with silver beads stitched on them. If you squinted, they looked a little like puddles reflecting the night sky, which was probably supposed to be some sort of camouflage. Lena was asleep even before I finished rolling out the other two. I could hear her soft purring snores.

  I wriggled into my own sleeping bag. I expected to feel every bum
p and groove on the hard ground beneath me, but it was as soft and yielding as my mattress at home. Either Ellie had given us magic sleeping bags, or the petals helped a lot.

  I glanced at Chase. Since when is it a bad thing to find out you’re special? he’d said.

  Chase dropped M&M’s into his mouth one by one. “Go to sleep. I’m waking you up for the next watch, Destined One or not.”

  I gave him one last dirty look and then closed my eyes.

  It took me a while to fall asleep. It wasn’t just the Great Destiny.

  It was knowing that people were talking about me. I had dealt with my celebrity parents all my life. I had even hated it sometimes, but if I was really honest with myself, hadn’t I wanted to be famous too—not as my parents’ daughter, but just as Rory? Hadn’t I wanted to do the kind of great things that people talked about?

  But it’s one thing to be famous for something you’ve already done rather than something you’re supposed to accomplish someday.

  I didn’t want to be the one destined to destroy an amulet or whatever, only to let it accidentally slip through my fingers at the last moment.

  I was still just me.

  It might not be enough, I realized, drifting off, as Chase started to sing that lullaby again.

  • • •

  I dreamed of the beanstalk. This time, Chase was there, climbing down right beside me. The top of his T-shirt was red with blood, and he moved clumsily. He fumbled, and I reached a hand up anxiously, ready to catch him.

  When we fell, he started to scream.

  It didn’t surprise me to have Chase there. It shocked me that I was more worried about him than about the fall.

  Way too concerned, actually. Someone shook me awake about a hundred feet above the ground, and I opened my eyes to see Chase scowling at me, his hand on my shoulder, which didn’t help me figure out what was dream and what wasn’t. “You okay?” I asked him sleepily and squinted at his shirt in the dark, looking for signs of blood.

  “Yeah.” Chase gave me a weird look (one that I completely deserved, for once). “You need to wake up, though. It’s your turn to keep watch.”

  “Oh.” I sat up and blinked hard, trying to force myself awake. As Chase crawled into his sleeping bag, still giving me funny looks, I ignored him. I stared out at the Searcasters’ pool and wondered what could happen in the next few days that would make me worry about Chase Turnleaf.

  s Chase had put it over breakfast, “Even giants aren’t stupid enough to leave an open safe on their kitchen table when they go on vacation.” So, that morning, we went looking for the desk.

  We found it easily. After coming through the mousehole under the fridge, we scurried down the hallway and slipped past the second doorway on the right. Chase used Jack Attack to turn on the lights. The desk looked antique, but fairly normal—wooden with flowering vines carved up the side.

  I hadn’t woken Lena for her turn to keep watch. I’d wanted to give her an extra hour of sleep. She needed the rest. As her Companion, it was the least I could do.

  It was also a mistake. By the time we found it, exhaustion made everything a little fuzzy.

  So I just stood there staring at the desk while Lena and Chase talked about it. It was as big as my school.

  “It’s a roll-top. My grandmother has one like it,” Lena said. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “I told you,” Chase said, irritated. “The giants left hours ago. I watched them leave myself. They took a magic carpet the size of this room. Matilda worried that the wind would mess up her hair, and her mother-in-law told her to be quiet or she would accidentally knock her off the carpet somewhere over Canada.”

  Lena glared at him. “I believe they’re gone. I’m just not sure we should be doing this now. All the Tales say that retrieval of the items occurs in the evening. Late afternoon at the earliest.”

  “You’re going to waste a perfect opportunity just because it’s still morning?” Chase said.

  “It does seem way too convenient.” Being that tired made me even crankier than usual. “I thought that Tales were supposed to be harder than this.”

  “And you’re complaining because it’s too easy?” Chase rolled his eyes. “Look, in my family, we don’t question getting lucky. We just work fast.” He started climbing up the carving on the side of the desk. “If anybody else wants to get it over with, this is the best way up—petal, leaf, vine, petal, petal, leaf, and so on.” He grabbed a new handhold with every word, demonstrating.

  “I do want to get this over with,” Lena said, more to herself than me. She grabbed a handhold and pulled herself up a few feet. She didn’t climb as fast as Chase, but she was more careful, testing out each carving before she trusted her weight on it. Her carryall backpack swung across her shoulders, throwing her a little off balance. She had insisted on bringing it with us. She said it was so we could have the food nearby at all times, but I was pretty sure that the real reason had more to do with her gold coins. She wanted to make sure nothing happened to her new treasure, not when it was her ticket to making up for the Fey cookbook incident.

  When Chase was halfway up, I forced myself to approach to the desk and reached tentatively for a wooden leaf. Lena screamed. I don’t know if it would’ve freaked me out more or less if I had more sleep, but I jumped away from the desk, with my hand on my sword.

  Chase landed lightly next to me and scowled up at Lena. “What?”

  “You scared the hiccups out of me,” Lena said. “You were almost there—over thirty feet up. I thought you fell.”

  “I’m fine. You won’t have to carry an injured Companion down the beanstalk.” He herded me toward the desk with a shooing motion. “Go on. I’ll catch you if you slip.”

  It felt like he was babysitting me. Sighing, I reminded myself again that it wasn’t nearly as bad as the beanstalk, and I began to climb. I was only a little bit nauseous.

  Chase scaled the desk just a couple feet below me, saying, “Petal, leaf, vine, petal, petal—”

  Annoyed, I almost looked down to glare at him, but I thought better of it. “I don’t need you to tell me where to put my hands and feet.”

  “How was I supposed to know? You did yesterday.”

  “Can you two not bicker while we’re in enemy territory?” Lena said.

  “You just screamed a little while ago,” Chase pointed out. “That was a lot louder than me and Rory.”

  “No bickering,” Lena said firmly, sounding like Jenny. “I don’t want to keep telling you.”

  Then Chase grumbled about the burden of overcautious Characters and how the giants were on vacation and how this was turning out to be the easiest Tale he’d ever been on. But he grumbled quietly.

  It was much easier than the beanstalk. It was even easier than Chase’s rope ladder the night before, which swung a little with everyone’s movement. Maybe I was getting better with the heights thing. It only took me a couple minutes to reach the flat workspace where Lena was standing. She held a hand out anxiously, ready to help me.

  I slowly eased my foot off the carving and toward Lena. Then came a sound none of us were expecting.

  I froze, but so did Chase and Lena.

  “Was that . . . ?” Lena said.

  “A door slamming?” I finished, horrified.

  Footsteps thudded down the hall—heavy ones that rattled the pictures on the walls and the paper on the desk shelves. They could only belong to a giant.

  Chase leaped up to the workspace and grabbed my arm in the same motion, dragging me with him. We ran over the top of the desk with Lena, back toward the shelves, where enormous loose papers and checkbooks and folders spilled out of every cubbyhole.

  “Feed them? Did I remember to feed them?” It was Jimmy, muttering angrily to himself. “Of course not, woman. If you remembered, why didn’t you tell me before we left?”

  “The door’s open,” I whispered, trying not to panic. “He’ll see us when he walks by.”

  “Hide.” Lena look
ed around frantically. “We need somewhere to hide.”

  “Here.” Chase pointed out a rope hanging from the wood above us. To Matilda, it was probably a thread. It was attached to a handle at the top of the desk.

  Chase launched himself at the rope, grabbing it as high up as he could reach.

  “Don’t!” Lena cried.

  But it was too late. Chase had already tugged it with all his body weight.

  With a faint rumbling, slat after slat slid down, curving over the workspace we stood on. The cover stopped at the edge of the desk, closing us in. Then it was completely dark, except for a small sliver to the far left, where the wood above didn’t quite meet the wood below.

  Of course Chase would pick the most dramatic way to hide us all.

  “What?” he said. You could hear the grin in his voice.

  “No more talking,” Lena whispered fiercely. “Not until the giant leaves.”

  Jimmy’s footsteps thudded closer. “But no, she reminds me hours later, so I have to waste good gold on using the hotel’s Door Trek system. Come on, then.” At first, I thought Jimmy was still muttering to himself, but then I heard some light tapping, like the sound a dog’s claws make against a hard floor.

  “A guard dog?” Lena said as quietly as she could.

  “I knew I heard something last night,” I whispered back smugly.

  Something hit the floor in the room across the hall with loud wet slaps. “Steaks,” said Chase. “Sounds like.”

  None of us mentioned how big a giant’s dog would be. We would be lucky if it only had one head.

  Meat ripped across the hall with disgusting squelching sounds. “There’s plenty of food here for a couple days,” Jimmy said. “Don’t eat it all at once or you’ll go hungry tomorrow.”

  We heard him stomp out of the room and slam the door. “I wouldn’t even bother if they belonged to me, but no . . . Mother says, ‘You must care for what is entrusted to you.’”

  He did such an awesome impression of Genevieve Searcaster’s rasping accent that Chase and I snickered. Lena hushed us. We heard him curse his luck, his wife, and his mother all the way down the hall, and he was still grumbling when he slammed the front door. Then the lock slid into place with an audible click.

 

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