Of Giants and Ice (Ever Afters, The) (36 page)

“Hey, Rory,” Chase said quietly. “Did we really go to the Glass Mountain yesterday? Or was that just a dream, and therefore something we can look forward to in the future?”

I looked at him, mouth twisting in a grimace, not answering. He looked at the ground, fingering his sword hilt with a dark expression. We both didn’t want to think about it.

“Mmm, fresh air,” Chase said with false cheer. “Fresh, non-sulfurous air.”

I smiled, but Lena didn’t even take a moment to appreciate our luck. She ran under the bushes toward where we left the other
packs. Chase and I followed slowly, fighting about normal, non-evil things.

Yawning, I stretched. My arm muscles protested. “I’m so
sore
.”

“Yeah, a wooden desk is no substitute for a good sleeping bag and some petals. My entire side feels bruised.”

“It’s not that. It was training. And now
both
my arms hurt instead of just one.”

“I’m so sorry,” Chase said innocently. “Want me to make your sword heavy again?”

“No.”

“’Cause that kind of sore would blow this kind of sore way out of the water.”

“I said
no
, Chase.”

“Will you two stop bickering for just ONE MINUTE?” Lena shrieked.

Chase and I both froze. I wondered briefly if there was any possible way the Snow Queen could have taken our Lena and left a meaner, angrier one in her place.

She sat in the dirt under the bushes. Our sleeping bags, extra clothes, a first aid kit, the last of our food, and everything else that was supposed to be in our packs were strewn around her.

She clutched the hourglass that Rumpel had given her with shaking hands, and under her glasses, tears glinted on her cheeks.

“Don’t you see what’s happened?” she whispered.

There was no sand left. We had run out of time.

Horror washed over Chase’s face.

“It’s over.” She hugged the hourglass to her chest. “We’ve failed.
I’ve
failed. I’m a Failed Tale.”

I thought of the Wall, of her name carved there in bubble letters, and suddenly I felt like a Failed Companion.

“No,” I said fiercely. After all that we’d been through, I refused to let it end this way. I knelt next to her and tried to work the hourglass out of her arms, worried that she could cut herself if she squeezed harder and broke it. “Lena, it’s not possible.”

“They’ll put my name on the
Wall
.”

“Lena, don’t cry,” Chase said in a small voice. “Crying really freaks me out.”

I sent him a quick glare to let him know how unhelpful he was. I took off Lena’s glasses and started to wipe her face with my sleeve until I realized how much dust and soot was on it. Then I used the closest sleeping bag.

She sniffled and hiccupped, but she stopped crying.

“Lena,” Chase said. His voice was much gentler. “Dealing with the Snow Queen changes everything. No one’s going to blame you, and they definitely won’t put your name on the Wall. I mean, we should get points just for surviving.”

Even though none of us mentioned it, I knew all three of us were thinking of the White Snake Tale. I touched my hand and remembered the fingers Evan had lost.

Lena looked at Chase with red-rimmed eyes, and she hiccupped again.

“Maybe you weren’t
supposed
to get the hen and the harp,” Chase said softly. “Maybe in this version of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ we were just supposed to find out what the Snow Queen was up to. We’ll just go down and tell the Director everything. If my dad’s back, she’ll send him and some others—”

I frowned. The idea of letting the grown-ups handle everything wasn’t very comforting this time, and I couldn’t figure out why.

“Easy for
you
to say,” Lena said savagely. “You don’t have to go back to my grandmother, who’s still mad at me for getting conned
out of a month’s grocery money. You don’t have to tell her you had a fortune of gold coins and then left them in a giant’s desk. You don’t have to explain how you Failed your Tale.”

I looked around. We had only two packs. She had left hers behind—the one with all the food
and
all her new gold coins.

For Lena, coming home to her family without the riches of her happily-ever-after would be so much worse than the usual disgrace. Her Tale had been her chance to make everything right.

“Jenny will tell me how reckless I am,” Lena mumbled, “and it’ll be true.”

“I’m sorry.” Chase looked a little stunned. He was only trying to be nice. “I’m really sorry, Lena.”

Lena covered her face in her hands and didn’t answer. I knew I only had a few seconds before she started sobbing again.

“You haven’t Failed,” I said softly, and once it was out of my mouth, I believed it.

She made a scoffing sound. “Well, let’s see—no gold, no hen, no—”

“Yeah, right
now
,” I pointed out. “But it’s only been a few days. The original Beanstalk Tales took
forever
. The Jacks used to let
months
go by before visiting the giants again.”

Chase’s eyes gleamed in a hopeful way, but he didn’t say anything.

“But Rumpel said that we only had four days,” she said slowly.

“The other Tales were just guidelines anyway,” I replied. “He said that, too.”

“The chances of survival decrease eighty-seven percent if you deviate from the previous Tale.” Her voice was flat and emotionless, like she had already given up.

“The Tale’s
already
different from the way it should be. You
heard Puss—
all
the Tales are changing. This one deviated before we got here,” I said. “As soon as the Snow Queen wanted the harp, the Tale started to change. There’s a pretty good chance that all the other rules have gone out the window too.”

Lena stared straight ahead, her hands curled in her lap.

“The only way we know we’ll be safe is if we go down the beanstalk right now,” Chase said in a rush. When I glared at him over my shoulder, wondering if he
wanted
the Snow Queen to get the harp, he added hastily, “I’m not saying I
want
to. It would suck to go home empty-handed, but
someone
has to say it. The only safe thing to do is to go home before the giants realize they had more than one visitor. And, Lena, I can guarantee that your family would rather have you alive than all the gold in the world.”

I stared at Chase incredulously, and even Lena giggled in a half-hysterical kind of way. “That sounds ridiculous, coming from you,” she said.

Chase smiled a little, but he didn’t even look embarrassed.

“Okay, so we could pass this off to the grown-ups,” I said. “Nobody would fault us. But do you think that the Snow Queen is going to stop sending villains? If we wait for the Director to send some people, it may be too late.”

I could tell by the look on Chase’s face, and Lena’s, that they hadn’t thought of this.

Lena sighed. “It would help if we knew why she wanted that harp.”

I didn’t answer. I thought of all the Snow Queen’s lists—all the names of people who would join her army if she broke out of prison. She wanted it to free herself, I was almost sure.

Lena looked at her hands and didn’t speak for a minute. She wasn’t in any danger of crying again, but she had a blank deadened
expression that worried me. I held my breath. Chase glanced between us nervously.

“Well, I can’t go down the beanstalk right now,” Lena said. Feeling triumphant, I started to stand, but then Lena added, “I’m too exhausted. I would fall off before we got a third of the way down.”

I realized suddenly what she meant. “You didn’t sleep at all while we were in the desk.” She had been awake the whole time, waiting for us and worrying and then keeping watch after we passed out.

“Right.” Lena looked at the hourglass in my hand. “And so, according to that, I’ve been awake for about two days straight.”

I unrolled the sleeping bags. Lena slid into hers immediately and lay with her back to Chase and me. Then I shuffled around as quietly as I could, gathering everything Lena had thrown around while she hunted for the hourglass. My hand had just closed over the slender vial on a silver chain that Rapunzel had given me when Chase spoke up.

“Hey, Lena?” He sat on his sleeping bag, hugging his knees.

“Yeah?” She didn’t turn around. She obviously resented still being awake.

“I’m sorry.” He sounded miserable. “About the book. I didn’t mean for you to burn it.”

Lena didn’t move. Chase’s gaze slid toward me. I realized my mouth was open and shut it with a snap.

“That’s okay.” Lena sighed. “It was me who got too close to the torch. And me who spent the grocery money.”

They didn’t say anything else. I stuffed Rapunzel’s glass thing in the front pocket of my backpack and finished gathering everything. In a few moments, the only sounds were Lena’s purring snores and the wind whistling through the bush overhead. I lay
down on my sleeping bag with my legs crossed and my hands behind my head. I looked over at Lena, worrying. I tried very hard not to think about the Snow Queen.

It didn’t work. She knew my name. She had
asked
about me.

Apparently, everyone
was
talking about me. The reason why didn’t really matter.

A tiny voice in my head reminded me,
You asked for this. You wanted to do stuff worth talking about. You wanted people to talk about you.

That was true. If I was completely honest, I’d
wanted
the attention.

Well, I got my wish. I was so famous that the Snow Queen had heard of me, the villain who had a habit of kidnapping family members to make sure that she got her way.

Having celebrity parents was a pain sometimes—dealing with reporters who wanted a story and classmates who wanted their fifteen minutes of fame, but this was much much worse. Having a famous daughter could get Mom and Dad captured. Or even killed.

And I hadn’t even told them about any of it. I’d had hundreds of chances to tell them, but I also came up with hundreds of excuses.

I knew now what the real reason was: I didn’t
want
to tell them. I’d wanted to have this new whole world to myself—just for a little while.

They might have had some warning if I had explained things.

I would never forgive myself if anything happened to them.

“Rory?” Chase said softly.

I turned back to him.

“Do you think it’s my fault?”

“No,” I said flatly. “I was there. I noticed the book was on fire before Lena did.”

“I meant about our time running out,” Chase said. “If I hadn’t gotten us trapped in the desk—”

I shook my head. “It was
my
fault, probably.”

“Yours? Why?”

For being so famous that the Snow Queen noticed and made Lena’s Tale harder. For being so scared
. “For taking so long on the beanstalk.”

“What?” Chase turned to me. His voice had a laugh in it. “No, that slowed us down an hour, tops.”

“Oh.” I paused for a second. “If we hadn’t been in the desk, we wouldn’t have found the letter. We wouldn’t have been around to stop Ferdinand and the guy with the sack.”

“Or gone to the Glass Mountain,” Chase said darkly, and I knew he was thinking about his dad.

Why would Chase bring his sword into the lair and not use it?
Jack had told the Snow Queen. I’d forgotten that Chase had brought a weapon to Yellowstone. He had been holding it then—the moment the dragon cornered us. Which meant that
he
had frozen, too scared to think straight.

It didn’t make it okay, but suddenly it was a lot easier to understand why Chase had done his
Rory-in-the-weapons-closet
impression so often.

A couple of days ago, I would have happily pointed this out. I didn’t want to anymore.

“Do you think she was putting some sort of enchantment on Jack?” I asked.

“No. The Glass Mountain limits her magic too much. That was
all
Dad,” Chase said, sounding bitter.

He blinked a lot. I glanced away, recognizing the look on his face. I felt the same way when my parents had announced that
they were getting a divorce and started to explain how holidays were going to work—Christmas with Mom and Spring Break with Dad and a set of clothes in each place, all very brisk and matter-of-fact, like they were planning a trip. That was when I first realized that my parents couldn’t be who I wanted them to be.

I had been so angry at first. “Don’t be too hard on him,” I said.

Chase snorted. “‘He can’t help that he foolishly values all the wrong things.’ Yeah, Rapunzel knew. It would have been easier if she had warned us.”

“You wouldn’t have listened,” I said. He didn’t answer, which meant I was right. “Me neither, actually.”

“Hey, Rory?” Chase looked a little unsure, but he spoke fast. “We could go in right now, just you and me. We could get the gold and the—”

“It’s Lena’s Tale,” I said furiously. Just when I started to think that Chase wasn’t in it for the glory, he suggested taking over everything. “We can’t just steal it from her.”

“I didn’t mean
that
,” Chase said. “But the Snow Queen . . .”

I understood. We didn’t have time to wait for the grown-ups to handle this.

“If Lena decides to go down the beanstalk,” I said firmly, “then I’ll go after it myself. Just the harp.”

“So you’d rather die than let the Snow Queen have the harp?” Chase said incredulously.

I thought of my mother. I imagined what would happen if I never came back from this Tale—how she would have to call my dad and tell him, how they would fight over who was more irresponsible, how Amy would bring Mom a cup of tea and they would cry together.

I thought of the Snow Queen’s slush-colored skin and of her
glacier-pale eyes. I remembered the feeling I had when she looked at me—like she would hunt down everything I loved.

It’s not like I felt any braver, or any stronger, or more capable of stealing a harp from a giant four stories tall than the next Character. If Lena and Chase decided to go home, I was all we had. The one without the photographic memory, the one lacking in sword skills.