The Grimm Legacy (25 page)

A vast bird with a crush-and-tear beak and talons like kitchen knives leapt from the windowsill and flew straight for Andre.

The bird! The bird from Anjali’s window—the bird from the park!

I hugged Andre close, huddling my body around him and waiting for the talons to slice through me. What could I do to save him? What could I do to save myself?

Then I remembered the feather Mr. Mauskopf had given me when I told him about the bird. “When your need is great, give it to the wind,” he had said. I fumbled in my pocket, felt the soft feather, and pulled it out. The wind of the bird’s wings swept it away.

Well, that was useless. I felt the talons grasp my coat.

Then another dark shape loomed in the window and launched itself at the bird, grabbing it by the throat. The new shape wasn’t a bird, but an enormous dog—an enormous dog with wings. I stared at it, recognition dawning. It was Griffin—Mr. Mauskopf’s dog, the Beast, as the librarians all called him. Griffin had wings!

“It’s Griffin,” I yelled. “My teacher’s dog!”

Mr. Stone’s loft was large by New York standards but nowhere near large enough for a fight between a lion-sized winged dog and a condor-sized bird. They smashed through the air, knocking over lamps and toppling statues. Drops of blood spattered the walls. Griffin held on to the bird’s throat while the bird slashed and clawed at whatever it could reach.

The fight didn’t last long. The bird caught the tip of Griffin’s tail in its beak, but Griffin gave a twist and shook it by the throat. It gurgled and stopped struggling. Griffin dropped it and it fell like a baseball mitt and lay flopping on the floor, with blood streaking its neck and one wing lying at an impossible angle.

“Way to go, Griff!” I yelled.

Griffin gave a short, pleased bark. He hooked his tail around something and flung it across the floor toward me.

“The
kuduo
! You found it!” I knelt so Andre could reach it without leaving my arms. “Get that box for me, sweetie?” I said.

He clutched the
kuduo
in his little arms. “Okay, Libbet, I got the box,” he said.

The bird squawked. I looked up. Mr. Stone was standing in the doorway.

“Miss Rew, Miss Rao. I knew you’d be back. But what have you done to my bird? This is really too bad.” He strode over to the bird. It lifted its head and snapped at him. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

He lifted his hand and threw a blast of light at Jaya.

It bounced off, but her outline wavered. “Stop that! I hate that!” she said, shaking herself.

He lifted his hand again.

“Run, Elizabeth! Get the
kuduo
away! I’ll hold him off,” shouted Aaron, picking up a nearby object and throwing it uselessly. He was brave, I thought, but he had terrible aim.

“But I’m only wearing one boot!”

“Just go!”

“My seven leaguers! You took my seven leaguers? You irritating children! Where’s the other one?” said Mr. Stone, looking around. “Oh, there.” He strode to the window.

I ran to stop him, but I must have used the wrong foot, because I found myself hurtling through the air, cold darkness whipping past.

I ran with Andre in my arms.

For a second I was confused; then a rush of exhilaration swept over me. The speed, the air! Was this how Marc felt when he leapt for the ball and spun above the basket?

I landed on my socked foot and glanced around. Tall brick buildings. The Bronx, perhaps? Queens?

Before I could get my bearings, Mr. Stone appeared behind me. He was wearing the other boot. “Stop, Elizabeth, it’s pointless to run,” he said.

Pointless or not, I ran. The air, the speed, the motion—forward! forward!—the world melting to background, ice to my one-footed gliding as I threw myself into the thrill of speed. My mismatched footwear gave me a syncopated rhythm: a step and a leap, a step and a leap. I had no idea where I was going. I followed my feet. At every other step the world reassembled: a town square, a highway, a front yard, a frozen lake, a forest, a parking lot. Mr. Stone was always there, a step behind me.

“You won’t get away,” he called. “I have the other boot.”

I didn’t care. I was in love with motion. The pneum ride had made me sick with its headlong helplessness, but this was different—I was in control.

“Faster, Libbet!” yelled Andre happily, banging on the
kuduo
lid with his fists. A step and a leap. A step and a leap. A mountainside, a snowy beach, a cabin, a frozen stream lit only by the moon.

“Stop!” shouted Mr. Stone. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” I called back, running.

A pale, moonlit wasteland all around us. I paused to catch my breath. Mr. Stone was panting hard, Andre laughing. In the moonlight the ground sparkled like stars or shattered glass. No houses, no trees, no roads—just the glittering ground and the moon.

“Elizabeth,” said a gravelly voice. I spun on my bootless foot, feeling tiny pebbles through my sock, and saw a small woman dressed in layers of cloth. A familiar woman—the one I’d seen dozing in the Main Exam Room, the one I’d given my sneakers to long ago, it seemed, on the day Mr. Mauskopf assigned me the paper on the Brothers Grimm.

“Where am I? Where is this?” I said.

“Nowhere. Nowhere special,” she said. “Have you come for your sneakers?”

Pale white light filled the air, like the moon shining behind a cloud, but there were no clouds. The sky blazed with zillions of stars, more and more dense wherever I looked. I recognized constellations from the freckles on Dr. Rust’s face: a triangle, a cartwheel, a butterfly. They seemed to be spinning slowly—or was I the one spinning? I couldn’t tell.

“Put me down,” said Andre, scrambling out of my arms. He set the
kuduo
on the ground so he could draw pictures in the sparkling dust.

Mr. Stone looked bewildered and rumpled. He lifted his arm and made a gesture as if throwing something at me, but nothing left his hand.

“That won’t work here, Wallace,” said the homeless woman.

“Grace!” said Mr. Stone. He made another threatening-looking gesture.

“Neither will that. Give me the boot.”

“And be stuck here? Not a chance!” Mr. Stone turned and ran, but the boot took him no farther than boots usually do. He tripped and landed in a heap.

“The boot, Wallace,” said Grace, holding out her hand. Slowly, as if against his will, Mr. Stone unlaced the boot and handed it over.

Grace turned to me. She had looked sad and tattered back home, but here she was clearly nobody to pity. She looked strong and calm and powerful. Even her clothes hung straighter.

“Your boot too, Elizabeth,” she said, holding out her hand to me. I pulled off my boot and handed it over. “Thank you. Here.” She held out my old sneakers, with my old tube socks, now clean, tucked neatly under their tongues.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Grace Farr. We’ve met before.”

“Yes, but . . . Where—what is this place?”

“I told you. Nowhere.”

“But how did we get here?”

“Ah, that’s simple enough. You’re missing your sense of direction, aren’t you? Nowhere’s about the only place you
can
go. Or could, without your sneakers. With them, I think you’ll find you have no trouble getting home.”

“Why? Are they magic? Did you enchant them or something?”

Grace smiled. “No. You did, by giving them to me.”

“Libbet?” Andre was pulling at my sleeve. “Libbet!”

“What is it, sweetie?”

“Libbet, I gotta go.”

“We’re going soon—oh! You mean
go.
” I turned to Grace. “Is it okay—?”

“Of course.”

“Go ahead, Andre,” I said, turning my back to give him some privacy.

“And then you’d
both
better go. They need you at the repository.”

“What about Mr. Stone?”

“Oh, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about him again.”

“All right.” I hoped it was safe to believe her. “How do we get home?”

“The same way you got here: just follow your feet. Your sneakers will take you—that’s their magic. Don’t forget your
kuduo.
”

I turned back to Andre. “All done?”

“I made a sun,” he said proudly, pointing to a wet circle in the dust.

“Wow, I can see that,” I said.

When I turned around again, Grace was gone. I could see Mr. Stone in the distance, growing dimmer.

Andre picked up the
kuduo
and I picked up Andre. I put on my backpack and began to walk, choosing the direction at random.

Chapter 25:

The Garden of Seasons

I walked for what seemed like hours. A strength of purpose flooded up through me from my sneakers. Andre fell asleep in my arms, hugging the
kuduo.
He felt as light as a paper doll. The stars seemed to be falling around us, like glittery specks of dust.

After a while I found I was walking through trees with dim, bare branches. The air began to take on a tinge of pink, and the specks of dust in the air grew rosy. They rested on my shoulders and Andre’s hair, like flower petals. They were big for dust, soft like petals, and lightly cupped; when I looked closer, I saw they were, in fact, petals.

The tree branches took on a greenish tinge. Little leaves sprouted. I heard the sound of running water on our left—or was it our right?—and went to meet it. Dragonflies darted. A deer flashed its tail and soared out of sight. Andre woke up and yawned. “Where are we?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think we’re Nowhere anymore, but I don’t know where we are.”

Ahead of us a fountain tossed water in the air. Leaning against the fountain, looking bored, sat Aaron. Nearby, Jaya was doing a headstand.

“Elizabeth! There you are!” she shouted, flopping over and sitting up. “What took you so long? We’ve been waiting here for
ever
!”

Andre scrambled down and ran over to her. “Look, it’s Jaya!” he said.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Where are we? How did you get here?”

“We used the Golden Key, of course.”

“On what?”

“The door. It’s a gate, on this side.”

“Hello, Elizabeth,” said Aaron. “I was starting to worry you’d never show up. You have petals in your hair.”

“Where are we? What is Jaya talking about?”

“We’re in the Garden of Seasons.”

“
This
is the Garden of Seasons?”

He nodded. “The mirror said that’s where we would find you. So we used the Golden Key to open the door—you know, down in the Dungeon, near the elevator. From that side it’s just like all the other doors in the repository, but from this side it looks like an iron gate in a stone wall. How did
you
get in?” Aaron continued. “You don’t have the key. Is there some other way in?”

“We didn’t come through any walls or gates; we came straight from Nowhere,” I said. I looked around for a wall, but I didn’t see any. I had a weird sense of familiarity, as if I’d spent hours and hours here, although I knew I’d never set foot in the Garden of Seasons before.

The fountain filled the air with the scent of water. Water and autumn leaves. Water and autumn leaves and lilies of the valley. And earth. And snow . . . Suddenly I recognized this place: the scenes from the Tiffany windows! I stood up straight and spun around slowly, looking. The frost-rimed rocks to the north, the blossoming trees to the east, the thick, bird-spangled greenwood to the south, the sunset-red forest to the west.

“You came straight from
where
?” said Jaya.

“Nowhere—that’s where we wound up when I ran away from Mr. Stone. The homeless woman who hangs out in the Main Exam Room lives there. Grace.”

Andre plopped down next to me and started playing with twigs and pebbles, making them walk around and talk to each other. “It’s sparkly in Nowhere,” he said, looking up. “I made a sun.”

“Where’s Mr. Stone?” asked Jaya. “Is he still chasing you?”

I shook my head. “I left him in Nowhere. I think he’s stuck there for good.”

“I made a
sun,
” insisted Andre.

“Yes, you did!” I said. “And the stars turned into flowers, and now it’s summer and it’s daytime too. Did you do all that?”

“Yeah,” said Andre proudly.

I mussed his hair, which had a few leaves and petals in it. “You’re a pretty powerful young man, then, Andre,” I said. But maybe he was right—maybe he did do all that. I couldn’t say for sure that he hadn’t.

“So where’s the flower, then?” asked Jaya.

“What flower?”

“The one the mirror said would be here when we met you. The one that’s going to disenchant Dr. Rust.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“The mirror said we’d find you here with a flower.”

“What? Back up. What happened after I left?”

“The enormous dog flew off somewhere,” said Jaya. “I don’t know where he went. The gigantic bird was in pretty bad shape. Doc was still stuck in the crystal ball, and it made a blinding light whenever we touched it, and that made the bird screech, so I shut my eyes and put the ball in the bottomless box. Then we went back to Aaron’s and asked the Snow White mirror what to do.”

“What did it say?”

“It told us to meet you in the Garden of Seasons. It said we needed a flower to break the enchantment.
Meet Betty in the magic bower and break the prison with a flower.
We figured it meant here.”

“
Betty?
My name’s Elizabeth! Someday I’m really going to smash that wretched thing.”

“Sorry. I’m just telling you what it said.”

“I wonder what flower it’s talking about. Could it be the one from ‘Jorinda and Joringel,’ in Grimm?” I said.

“Remind me,” said Aaron.

“It’s the one where a witch turns Jorinda into a bird, and Joringel finds a magic flower. When he touches Jorinda with it, she turns back into a girl.”

“That sounds useful,” said Aaron. “Maybe we could use it on Anjali and Marc. Where is it?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“It must be here somewhere,” said Aaron. “The mirror never quite lies. We just have to find it.”

“What does it look like, then?”

Aaron shrugged.

“Is this it?” asked Jaya helpfully. She plucked a dandelion from the lawn.

“Of course not, that’s a dandelion,” said Aaron.

“How do you know it’s not a magic dandelion?”

“What makes you think it would be?”

“What makes you think it wouldn’t? Anything could be magic here,” she said.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “Test it. Get the globe with Doc in it out of the bottomless box.”

Jaya opened the box and stuck her arm in up to the shoulder—which looked strange, since the box was only three or four inches tall—and fished around. “Hey, this feels like Anjali.” She hung her from her strings on a bush and tapped her with the dandelion. Nothing happened.

“Just find Doc,” said Aaron impatiently.

Jaya went back to fishing in the box. “I’m looking—there’s a ton of stuff in here. Wait, I think this is Merritt . . . No, here he is,” said Jaya. She pulled out the brass figure of Marc beating a gong.

“It’s my butter!” shouted Andre, dropping his leaves and pebbles. He grabbed the figurine from Jaya and kissed it again and again. “You found him!”

Jaya went back to fishing around in the box.

“Please get on with it, Jaya,” said Aaron. “We need
Doc.
”

“Calm down! It’s not so easy. There’s a lot of stuff in here and it’s all tangled up,” said Jaya. “Okay, here we go. I think.”

A blast of white light, like concentrated moonlight, shot upward from the box as she lifted out the globe. Dimly through the light I could see what looked like Doc, still in the globe.

I heard a screech overhead and something huge came plummeting down from the heavens and fell heavily at our feet.

Andre ducked behind Jaya. “The birdie that got hurt,” he said, pointing.

He was right. It was the bird from Mr. Stone’s. Its throat had stopped bleeding, but blood stained its feathers and its wing still lay at an impossible angle. It shrieked and shrieked.

“Put down the globe, Jaya! I think that’s what’s making the bird scream,” I said.

She dropped the globe on the grass and the light went out. The bird stopped shrieking, but it went on making soft growling noises.

“Do you think touching the globe summons the bird?” Aaron asked.

“Must be,” I said. “That poor bird looks terrible!”

The bird was trembling. “The birdie got a big ouchie,” said Andre, still keeping Jaya safely between himself and the bird.

I dipped my bandana in the fountain and used it to wipe away some of the blood.

“What are you doing that for? It tried to kill us, remember?” said Aaron.

“Can’t you see it’s in pain?” I rinsed the bandana and dabbed at the wound in the bird’s neck. It growled, but it didn’t bite me. “Nice birdie. There, there,” I said, washing its wounds.

“Nice birdie? Way, way,
way
too nice, Elizabeth,” said Aaron. “Never mind the bird, let’s find that flower and disenchant Doc.”

“Okay, here goes,” said Jaya. She flourished her dandelion like a stage magician’s wand, then tapped the globe with it.

Nothing happened.

“I guess it wasn’t a magic dandelion,” said Aaron.

“You don’t know that,” said Jaya. “Maybe that’s just not what its magic does.”

“Whatever,” said Aaron. “Let’s go find more flowers.” He walked off around one side of the fountain.

I filled my water bottle at the fountain and poured some in the bird’s beak. I found an orange left over from lunch in my backpack and put it near the bird’s head. The bird snapped it up in three bites, peel and all, spurting juice on the grass. I shuddered to think what that beak might have done to my hand.

“Hang in there, I’ll be back soon,” I told it.

“Bye-bye, birdie,” said Andre, putting Marc down in Anjali’s shadow and taking my hand.

The fountain spouted in four directions; each spout let out a torrent that turned into a stream. Ducking under the first one before it hit the ground, we went into the woods. It was fall there, like in the western Tiffany window—the perfect, peak-leaf October moment when every maple tree is aflame with orange and red. We found purple asters, and Indian paintbrushes with tall, fuzzy black stems that hurt my hands to break, and a rose. It smelled wonderful, but it didn’t disenchant Doc when we got back to the fountain and tried it. Neither did any of the others.

The bird had gotten up and was perched on the edge of the fountain, its head tucked under its good wing. It seemed to be sleeping, which I took as a good sign.

Next we went around behind the fountain, ducking under two torrents this time to the winter side. The stream from the fountain froze into complicated icicles. Shivering, we found witch hazel, winter sweet, and white, waxy bells on an evergreen. None of them disenchanted Doc. The bird didn’t wake up when we hit the crystal ball with a flower and made the ball flash light—it just stirred uneasily on its perch.

“Any luck?” asked Jaya, coming back from the spring sector with her arms full of daffodils and crocuses, tulips, branches of forsythia, and hot-pink azaleas.

I shook my head.

Aaron came back from his search with armloads of summer flowers, which he tossed on the grass beside the globe. He started poking it systematically.

“Roses don’t work,” I told him helpfully.

“Oh. You can have this one, then.” He thrust the rose he’d been hitting the crystal ball with under my nose and wiggled it.

“Stop it! That tickles!” I said, shaking my head to get away.

He went on wiggling the rose. I grabbed his wrist. He twisted it away from me. “Hold still,” he said, and tucked the rose in my hair.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Will you guys quit it with the mushy stuff and concentrate?” said Jaya.

“What mushy stuff?”

“Just test the flowers already.”

None of them worked.

“I guess we better go find more,” said Aaron.

Andre had gone back to playing with the grass near the fountain. “Pretty flower,” he said, waving a minty-looking weed with tiny white blossoms on a tall stalk.

It wasn’t particularly pretty, in fact. I doubt I would have noticed it myself.

“What’ve you got there, Andre?” asked Jaya.

“My turn,” he said. He ran over to the crystal ball and thumped it with the flower upside down in his fist.

The bird gave a loud squawk. The ball burst open like a popped bubble. Drops flew everywhere and sprayed the grass. Doc sprang upward like a spaghetti pot boiling over, regaining full size so fast that I could barely see it happening.

“I popped the ball!” said Andre.