Of Giants and Ice (Ever Afters, The) (6 page)

Unfortunately, I didn’t see Lena—or George, or Chase, or Adelaide, or the triplets, or anyone I recognized. Forget finding a familiar face—I would settle for a friendly one.

One girl wearing ripped jeans and heavy eyeliner fed handfuls of grass to a fawn with a spiked collar. When she caught me staring, she glared, and the fawn said with an angry boy’s voice, “What are you looking at?”

Too shocked to even apologize, I hurried through the crowd—so fast that I accidentally bumped into a massive dining room table.

“Whoa,” I said, realizing what was on it.

Pizzas covered the section closest to me—cheese and pepperoni and sausage and mushroom. A little farther down, cakes rose in tiers—five kinds of chocolate, two vanilla, one red velvet, one carrot, and a yellow-white cake that looked like lemon with raspberry jam icing. Beyond that, the other desserts were piled in mounds so big that they reminded me of the dragon’s hoard yesterday: fudgy brownies, snickerdoodles, peanut butter cookies, ice-cream sandwiches studded with chocolate chips. In the middle of the table, there was even a soda fountain—like an
actual
fountain. A stone fairy statue stood on top with cola pouring out of the jug she held on her hip.

I leaned forward to see the snacks at the far end, but someone pushed me back.

“No cutting,” said a scowling high school boy at least two feet taller than I was. I stumbled out of his way as fast as I could.

“Go easy on her. She’s new,” said the girl next to him. She handed me a metal plate. “Here. The line starts over there.” She pointed at least twenty people back.

My face burned as I hurried to the end. I had only been at EAS for three minutes, and I was already making people mad. What a disaster.

I heaped my plate with goldfish crackers and brownies. At the end of the table, I felt like I should have something healthy. So I grabbed a fruit tart, the last one on the platter, covered in strawberries and blackberries. Unfortunately, another hand had reached for it at the same time.

The hand belonged to a teenage girl. For a second, I thought she was the same person I had seen in the mirror yesterday, but this girl’s hair was
actually
silver. It was so long that the end of her heavy braid brushed the ground.

She didn’t speak. She just smiled a little and pointed to the tart in my hand.

“Oh, sorry!” I said. “You can have it.”

When I put it on her plate, she gave me another smile, this one wider, and she pointed to the table.

The round platter was magically full of fruit tarts again.

I turned to thank her, but the girl had disappeared.

Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t know that these plates automatically refilled themselves. One chubby kid had even pulled up a seat by a plate of mini-cupcakes. He ate them one by one until they were all gone and waited until more appeared.

“No more for you, Evan. You’ll eat yourself sick again. The Table of Never Ending Refills wasn’t designed to help you gain thirty more pounds,” said a tall woman with slate-gray hair and a stern expression. She picked up the whole dish of cupcakes and headed off with it.

She walked oddly when she rushed—kind of a shuffle-hop, shuffle-hop. When she kicked up her skirt, you could see her foot
was made out of a weird dark metal. There was no way to know if it was a prosthetic or if she had accidentally dipped it into some enchanted pool.

The boy chased after her. “But it’s my favorite.”

At the end of the table, I worried where I should sit for about a minute before I noticed someone waving—at me, I realized with a relieved grin. It was Lena, sitting at a gilded table next to the Tree of Hope. Beside her sat the youngest person I had seen at EAS so far, a girl with blond curls. She couldn’t be more than seven.

“Welcome back!” Lena said when I reached them. I had forgotten her glasses were so thick, and it took me a second to get used to how big her eyes looked. “This is Kelly,” she added, pointing at the girl.

“Nice to meet you.” Kelly smiled, stroking the white cat in her lap. The feline wore a dress embroidered with purple flowers, but being from a big city, I had seen people dress up their pets before. “Not everyone comes back the second day, you know.”

The table was covered in books. I shoved a stack of them over to make space for my plate and settled into the chair next to Lena. “I can’t imagine why. Where are we going today? Scotland? To battle the Loch Ness monster?”

I meant this as a joke, but Lena said sadly, “No, we don’t get to go on field trips every day. That was a special treat. Besides, I really doubt the Loch Ness monster would make trouble. All the books say it’s gentle.”

Kelly nodded. “Mom says all it wants is a little attention. It’s one of Oberon’s pets, and he never goes to play with it.”

“Oh.” I decided not to make jokes until I knew more about this place.

“Guess what?” Lena said excitedly. “I figured out what kind of
dragon George killed yesterday. A
draconus melodius.
The singing serpent.”

“Should I know what that is?” I asked.

Kelly tapped the cover of the book in front of me. A golden dragon breathing flame was embossed on it. In fact, all the books on the table had dragons on the cover or in the title. “She’s been researching since she got here.”

“This one must’ve been a male, because the female’s growl sounds like a harmony,” Lena continued. “That’s how they get their name.”

“She talks a lot when she has a breakthrough,” Kelly whispered to me.

Then Lena hummed a little. The growl of a female
draconus melodius
sounded a lot like the
Jaws
theme with one extra hissing note.

I shivered. “That’s creepy.”

“I second that.” Chase slid into the last empty chair at the table. “Hey, Rory.”

I frowned at him, not sure what he wanted. I mean, he hadn’t exactly been nice the day before.

“
Incredibly
creepy,” Lena said thoughtfully. “That’s why Solange favored them in the war. During a siege, she would station them outside to terrorize her enemies.”

“Gretel says she still has nightmares about the sound,” added Kelly.

I opened my mouth to ask who Solange was and what war they were talking about, but Lena kept talking. “Nowadays, the singing serpents live mostly in Canada, in the tundra plains. This one must’ve been forced south by another bull. It was an adolescent male. It still had its baby teeth.”

“
Those
were its
baby
teeth?” Chase said in disbelief at the same time I said, “The teeth get
bigger
?”

“Show them the picture,” Kelly said to Lena.

Lena dug through her pile until she uncovered a sketchbook. The first drawing showed a dragon just like the one I remembered in tiny, precise pencil strokes—green and gold scales, yellow bulging eyes, and smoke streaming from its nostrils.

She pointed to the mouth with a red colored pencil. “See how the teeth look gray? If these were the adult set, they would look yellow. It’s easier to see in the other sketch.”

She turned the page, where the dragon chased two kids with its mouth open and all the teeth visible. The girl running with a sword wore the same blue shirt I had on yesterday.

Inspecting it, Kelly told Lena, “Looks like you got Chase just right.”

“You drew this? It’s really good,” I told Lena. She smiled and ducked her head, embarrassed.

“I don’t know,” said Chase. “I don’t think I looked that scared.”

George appeared over Lena’s shoulder, glancing at the drawing. “You looked plenty scared. Besides, Lena doesn’t exaggerate. That’s why they call it a photographic memory.”

Chase didn’t seem too thrilled, but Lena smiled gratefully at her brother.

“I’m supposed to give you this, Rory.” George handed over a sheathed sword. I took it by the hilt, and as I lifted it, my shoulder hurt in places that hadn’t felt sore before.

“Is that what you fought the dragon with?” Kelly asked, perking up. Even the cat in her lap stood up to look.

“‘Fight’ is probably the wrong word.” I pulled the sheath off.

Someone had cleaned the sword. It was the first time we had
seen the blade without blood on it. Chase gasped beside me. Interlocking squiggles were etched onto the metal on both sides. They looked like really ornate Celtic knots.

“It’s pretty,” Lena said.

It was beautiful, and it was mine. I couldn’t wait to try it out.

“It’s too big for you,” Chase told me quickly.

“I’ll grow,” I replied, a little more fiercely than I should’ve been on only my second day, and we scowled at each other.

“You would think that dragon-slaying together would make them friends,” Lena commented, and we both scowled at her.

“There you are, Rory!” said another cheerful voice—one of the adults I recognized. Today she wore a red apron, wiping her hands on it as she walked. “I have been looking all over for you.”

“Hi, Ellie,” I said.

“Hi, Mom,” said Kelly, which made me do a double take. You
could
see the resemblance, if you were looking—the same heart-shaped lips and wide-set eyes.

“I heard you did well your first day,” she told me. “Kind of a trial by fire.”

Then she laughed, shaking her head. The kids looked embarrassed. Especially Kelly, who said,
“Mom.”

In a clipped accent, the white cat explained, “Ellie is quite fond of her puns.”

It would’ve surprised me much more if the fawn hadn’t yelled at me earlier.

•  •  •

Ellie showed me through the amethyst door for orientation, waving good-bye cheerfully as I entered the building. The Director’s office was covered in white marble, with roses inlaid in the walls over a pattern of thorny vines. Silver fountains ran in the corners,
and the sound of trickling water bounced off the walls.

Two kids sat in puffy floral armchairs, next to a humongous marble-top desk carved all over with roses. One kid was Miriam, and next to her a boy about my age slumped in his seat. He had the same dark, glossy hair she did.

“When do I get a wand?” the boy asked.

“You don’t. You have the wrong idea about magic. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” The voice belonged to a woman, who sounded
a lot
like Amy, but I couldn’t see where it came from.

“You don’t
control
magic,” said the voice. “We can’t. Magic is a wild thing, a force of nature, like the wind, or the weather, ever shifting, ever changing. We might be able to observe its patterns and predict its path, but it is— Oh, you must be Rory! Welcome!”

“Rory!” Miriam jumped up and gave me a hug. “This is my little brother, Philip. Philip, Rory was one of the kids who saved my life.”

I half-laughed. “Not really. Chase and I would’ve been dead meat if George hadn’t shown up.”

“How is that any different?” Miriam dropped back into her seat. “My life passed before my eyes right before you got there.”

I started to shrug, and then I realized: She was right. I had kind of saved her life. How had I not noticed?

Oh, right. Worrying about my sanity had kept me occupied.

Philip waved a little without meeting my eyes. He seemed kind of uncomfortable.

Then something on the desk moved. It was a very tiny woman, waving to get my attention. She wasn’t any bigger than my hand. After the talking fawn and cat, meeting her shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

“Oh, oops,” she said. “Not on the list, but introductions, of course. I’m—”

“You’re Thumbelina!” the boy burst out.

“Thumbelina is my
Tale
, not my
name
.” I was close enough now to see the irritated look on the woman’s face, the tuft of auburn hair on her head, and the nylon jeans she wore—like something she had stolen from Barbie and altered to fit. She also wore a large needle on her belt, like it was a sword. “Honestly. Don’t you think my parents had more imagination than that? If I were called Thumbelina, do you think I would have ever taken my husband’s name? Tom and Thumbelina Thumb? How ridiculous. My name is Sarah, Sarah Thumb.”

For such a little person, Sarah Thumb had a powerful voice when she was upset. Philip shrank back into his chair, obviously wishing he hadn’t said anything.

This was why I tried to keep my mouth shut as much as possible, especially during the first couple days.

“Better apologize,” Miriam whispered.

“Sorry,” said Philip quickly.

“Yes, well, me too.” Sarah Thumb sounded sheepish. “I get a little carried away sometimes.”

She held out her hand and shook each of our index fingers briskly. Then she started leafing through pieces of paper on the desk. They were so big that she could’ve used them as picnic blankets. “The Director normally handles these orientations. She’s gone out to meet with the MerKing, but she wrote down a list of things we should talk about. Here we go.”

She wrestled a pink memo free and stood on top of it. The elegant cursive was as tall as her hand was long. “Fairy Tales do not equal make-believe,” Sarah Thumb read aloud. “Well, duh. If you still think that magic isn’t real after a dragon almost eats you, you have serious problems.”

“
I
didn’t see any dragons. And everybody at home says
she’s
crazy.” Philip jerked a thumb toward his sister. “It was even on the news.”

“Really?” Suddenly, I was even
more
glad that I hadn’t mentioned dragons to anyone the night before.

“Yep. They even called it something when they interviewed her about the dragon and the kids who killed it. What was it again?” he asked his sister.

Miriam glared daggers at him. “Shut up.”

A grin stretched across my face and wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard I tried. I covered my mouth so that Miriam wouldn’t think I was laughing at
her
.

“Oh, yeah.” Philip folded his arms smugly. “Post-Traumatic Stress. I shouldn’t believe anything she says.”

Sarah Thumb put a hand on her hip. “Yeah? So, it’s pretty normal for you to meet women only four inches tall?”

Philip didn’t reply, and it got harder not to giggle.