Of Sorcery and Snow (17 page)

So that sucked. But I can tell you something that sucked
more
: waking up to find the business end of a spear an inch from my face.

The others had woken too. Lena gasped, and Chase cursed.

“You have two choices,” said the small white bear holding the spear. No, it was a bear
skin
, but the scowling face under it didn't look any less scary. “You can fight, and we slay you here for trespassing. Or you can surrender, and we take you to the king for questioning. I prefer the first. That's easier for us.”

e'll surrender!” Miriam called from outside. “We'll go see your king!”

After less than a day in the Arctic Circle, we'd already been captured.

I immediately regretted deciding to let the Tale bearer make the decisions. Then again, I didn't see my sword anywhere. If they'd taken our weapons, then we didn't have much chance of fighting our way out right away.

“Miriam, did you fall
asleep
on guard duty?” said Chase, ticked off.

“Not now!” Lena and I snapped. I was pretty upset too, but we had other stuff to worry about. The not-bear didn't lower the spear a fraction, even when I lifted my hands from under the covers and sat up.

Still, these soldiers were being pretty civil, especially compared to the bad guys who had taken us captive before.

“All our stuff . . . ,” Lena started, pushing her sleeping bag aside.

“We will see to it,” said the not-bear. “Outside now, please.”

Just so everyone knows, it's pretty awkward to lace up your boots when somebody is sticking a spear in your face. But it's twice as awkward to crawl outside with a spear pointed at your
rear and two more spears bristling in the opening ahead.

When I got out, Miriam's wrists were tied together, her face pale. The soldier guarding her was a head shorter than she was and as wide as a hundred-year-old tree. Under his brown beard, his features were blunt and squarish, like a stone sculptor had started to carve his face but had gotten distracted before smoothing out the edges. A dwarf.

The dwarves are not your enemies,
Rapunzel had said.

Well, if that was true, the dwarves didn't seem to know it yet. Neither did the other questers.

Miriam sounded like she was hyperventilating. “I'm so sorry! I'm so so
so
sorry! I really didn't think I could sleep—”

“It's okay,” I said, trying to calm her down. Maybe it
was
okay. Maybe we needed to go with the dwarves. Rapunzel had also said we would have to earn their alliance. I'm sure that included not ticking them off. I raised my voice so Chase could hear me inside. “I think it's better if we cooperate!”

“Clasp your hands in front of you,” said another soldier. He had a beard too, black and braided with red thread, and he barely looked at me as he tied a leather cord around my wrists.

An extremely wide dwarf led a herd of reindeer out from behind a giant ice pile. They snorted and tossed their velvety antlers.

Lena crawled out next. Standing up, she opened her hand and showed me what was in her palm: a small green coin. No, that was her dragon scale. “The heating spell won't last much longer. Should we tell them—”

The bear dwarf emerged from the snow hut and rose smoothly, a whole head taller than the others and the only one so far without a beard. This had to be the one in charge. “I heard, thank you. How much time is left?”

“About forty-five minutes,” Lena said hesitantly.

I wondered how long we had been asleep. I couldn't tell what time it was. The moon was gone and the horizon glowed pale yellow. The icebergs on the water gleamed gold too.

The bear dwarf nodded. “Do not fear. We'll reach safety before then.”

Safety sounded promising. If they really thought we were enemies, they would just leave us out here to freeze.

Chase wasn't very good at cooperating. He emerged with a scowl and took a good look around. “Reindeer? Seriously? You forgot Santa's sleigh.”

Another dwarf slid out after him—probably second in command. He was the only other dwarf who didn't have a beard. “Permission to tie this one up behind Rebdo, captain?”

Chase glanced at me, horrified, but Rebdo just turned out to be the extra-wide dwarf in charge of the reindeer. Extra wide and extra messy. Gravy had dried in his beard, and he had stains all over his fur jacket.

The second-in-command lifted Chase up behind Rebdo as easily as tossing a bundle of laundry in a washing machine.

“It
smells,
” Chase complained, thrashing around. “Geez. Is that the reindeer or you?”

“A bit of both,” said Rebdo, not even a tiny bit embarrassed.

The second-in-command dusted off his hands, a faint smile around his mouth.

I thought the rest of us were in for the same treatment, but nope. The dwarves just lifted us onto the mounts. I barely had a second to get settled in the saddle before the second-in-command swung up in front of me. Then we were trotting across the stark white landscape, not superfast but plenty bumpy.

Lena leaned as far away from the dwarf sharing her saddle as she could, her eyes huge. I didn't blame her. The soldier with red thread in his beard wasn't exactly friendly.

“At least we're still going in the right direction.” I pointed at the Pied Piper's trail under the reindeer's hooves, trying to cheer her up. Maybe the dwarves always arrested trespassers, no matter who they were. Maybe we could talk their king into letting us go.

“Rapunzel could be wrong, Rory,” said Chase, his voice a little muffled.

“Wrong about what?” Miriam said, at the same time Lena asked, “Rapunzel told you something?” But I didn't want to repeat these predictions right in front of the dwarves. I wished I'd taken the time to fill the other questers in the night before.

The captain just frowned at us. I thought maybe he didn't like his prisoners talking so much, but he said, “Rory Landon, Chase Turnleaf, and Lena LaMarelle.”

We were the Triumvirate. We had a reputation, because the last Triumvirate, which had existed centuries ago, had included the Snow Queen, the Director, and this guy named Sebastian. The Triumvirate before
them
had founded the Canon. I hadn't expected word to spread all the way up here.

“Wait, you know about them?” Miriam asked. At least that bit of news hadn't reached the eleventh-grade rumor mill yet.

“Her Majesty sent out a report,” said the soldier riding with Lena.

I swallowed. Only the Snow Queen's allies called her “Her Majesty.”

My dream came back to me with the force of a door slamming—Chase and Lena captured, Torlauth looming, Solange smiling.

It still might not come true, but if the dwarves delivered us to the Snow Queen's dungeons, it was very
likely
.

I didn't want Chase to be right. Rapunzel would never send us into danger on purpose, but maybe she didn't know these dwarves had allied with the Snow Queen. Maybe we
should
try to escape.

“You must be the Tale bearer, then,” the captain told Miriam.

“Miriam Chen-Moore.” She totally ignored my
shut up, shut up, shut up
glare. “And my Tale is ‘The Snow Queen.' She and the stupid Pied Piper stole my brother, and if you think you can stop me from getting him back—”

She was gearing up for a TMI rant, but Lena interrupted. “Aren't we getting kind of close to that water?”

Dead ahead, the shoreline curved sharply out into the bay, where a massive iceberg floated. The dark water around it would probably kill us if we went for a swim, heating spell or no, but the mounts didn't stop.

When the bear dwarf's reindeer picked up speed, the others did too. They ran straight for the water, like they didn't notice the solid ice under their hooves was about to run out.

Toppling off a galloping reindeer didn't seem like a great improvement over my morning, but it was better than plunging in and freezing to death. I shifted to the edge of the saddle and hoped the others would follow my example. But before I could jump, the second-in-command reached back and clamped a hand around my tied wrists.

He turned over his shoulder, shouting so I could hear him over the wind. “Wait! Our captain knows what she is doing!”

“Whoa! The captain is—” I was going to say,
a girl,
but luckily, the second-in-command interrupted me.

“I wouldn't call her Princess Hadriane! She hates that when she's on duty!”

We'd been captured by the dwarf
princess
? Seriously?

When I squinted at her, I noticed the chestnut braid whipping around above her polar bear cloak. It looked wider than a human braid was, and a golden chain had been woven through it.

Her reindeer reached the edge—and kept going. A tiny ridge appeared under us, connecting the shore to the iceberg. I could see the city on it now, ringed with a wall of ice. Homes were carved into the hillside, like frozen boxes stacked on top of each other. From this far away, the ladders running up the slopes looked like stitches holding the houses together.

Princess Hadriane reined in her mount, and we trotted toward the city's wall, slowing so we could catch our breath.

“A cloaking illusion!” Lena said when she could talk again. “Like the one that hides Atlantis.”

“Did we know this was here?” I asked Lena, a.k.a. the quester in charge of the map.

She knew exactly what I was thinking. “No, it wasn't on there.”

“What are those?” Miriam asked, staring at the city gates. They looked like two huge icicles with giant brown carvings of dwarves frozen inside them.

“The Living Stone,” the second-in-command replied. That sounded supercreepy, but maybe I'd just seen too many enchantments that turned people into statues. “You call it ‘petrified wood.' We brought it from our homeland.”

“Wait, you mean the Petrified Forest National Park? In Arizona?” said Miriam, as the gates opened ahead of us. The reindeer walked in. The wall was at least thirty feet high and too slippery to climb.

“We don't know what the humans call it,” spat the dwarf riding with Lena. I was beginning to think of him as Cranky Beard. “We call it ‘homeland,' which was lost to us when the Europeans
invaded. First they stole the Living Stone from our cities, but they only passed through. Then they stole our land, and we were the ones who needed to pass on.”

We could probably count Cranky Beard out as a possible ally.

The reindeer carried us down an avenue in the shopping district, with bricks of ice laid in the snow like cobblestones. The buildings on each side were made out of huge slabs that looked like they'd been harvested from a glacier. Cloth had been frozen in some of them to make certain sections less transparent. I craned my neck around the second-in-command so I could peek in the windows: a dress displayed on a snowman mannequin; frozen vegetables piled up in baskets; fine leather gloves and metal gauntlets stuck on upside-down icicles.

The only thing missing were the customers and the shopkeepers. None of the stores were open. On one of the doors, someone had written a message in dots and lines. The gumdrop in my ear managed to translate it:
CLOSED FOR THE TOURNAMENT
.

You will need to win,
Rapunzel said.

Win another tournament? I hadn't had much luck at the EAS one, and I'd
trained
for it.

“It's warmer in here,” Lena said uncertainly. “Right? I'm not imagining it?”

“An enchantment, under the dome that veils us,” said the second-in-command. “It keeps the cold from stealing heat from the warm, and the warm from melting the frozen.”

“A cloaking spell
and
an advanced stasis spell?” Lena said. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I recognized that excitement—she was a second away from asking if she could meet their magicians and do a little research.