Of Giants and Ice (Ever Afters, The) (20 page)

“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 glass 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.

I was so grateful to be back on solid ground that I felt a little light-headed. “Oh, you’re the Frog Prince.”

He snorted. He also had hair in his nose. “These old bones don’t feel princely anymore. The name’s Henry. And who might you be?”

“Rory. I’m new.”

You know when all of a sudden, a whole room gets quiet, and everyone’s trying not to look at you in a weird way, and you realize that people have just been talking about you?

That happened.

It’s a lot more disturbing when it happens with a bunch of important grown-ups.

My face grew hot, like always, but I found myself wondering why they would talk about a random sixth-grade Character. And why Chase was staring at me like that, eyes narrowed, arms crossed, looking kind of jealous.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t think it had anything to do with my parents.

“Exactly how long have you two been up there?” the Director asked, and I knew we were in trouble.

“Chase came in right about the time we were voting on whether to tell them,” said Henry, “and Rory came in when you said the vote was unanimous.”

“If you knew they were up there,” the Director said, exasperated, “why didn’t you tell us?”

“I
did
tell you,” Rapunzel said, equally exasperated. “I said, ‘They hear our whispers.’ Is that unclear?”

Several members of the Canon groaned. I couldn’t keep myself from giggling. It looked like understanding what Rapunzel said was a common problem.

“They didn’t hear much,” Henry told the Director, patting my shoulder.

“We heard enough,” Chase said. “What’s the Tale that you don’t want to tell us?”

“Shut up. Let him get us
out
of trouble,” I whispered, and the Frog Prince chuckled.

The Director stared at us for a long moment until we both started to squirm uncomfortably under her gaze. Even Chase had the sense to look like he felt guilty. Visions of punishments danced in my head.

“You can’t blame the children for trying to find out what concerns them as much as us,” said the Frog Prince.

The Director sighed. “I suppose so. It is up to their parents to find fitting punishments.”

I grinned and then tried to hide it. That didn’t seem likely. There was no way I would tell my mom, and Jack gave Chase a thumbs-up. Chase grinned like he had won some sort of prize.

“I trust that you won’t want to leave the same way you came in,” the Director said. “The door is there.”

She pointed. Chase and I ran that way before she could change her mind. The Canon began whispering before we had even left the room.

Outside, the Ivory Tower was gone, and so was the crowd. The tournament was over. I wondered who had won, and where Lena was, and what Jenny might have said to her.

The doors closed behind us with an audible click, like we were being locked out, and Chase scowled at me. “Now look what you’ve done. Do you have any idea how long it took me to find a good place to eavesdrop?”