Of Sorcery and Snow (33 page)

“Untethered,” said Hadriane. “So they can start the journey back.”

She didn't need to say we would find our own way home. Since we were heading into the Snow Queen's palace, filled with her minions
and
her allies, we would definitely need to.

It took us only two minutes to pack everything and get out the door, but the fox still managed to finish her breakfast before then. She stared at us impatiently from the cave mouth until we left and climbed up the ridge.

The Snow Queen's palace spread out ahead of us like a crown. A long line snaked out in front of it, flanked by ice griffins and dragons. The fox padded up ahead, leading us down the slope and across the ice.

My heartbeat thudded in my throat.

The giants were easy to recognize—a brown-haired one shivered in a gray coat and red apron, but the green-skinned one next to her didn't seem to mind the cold at all. Matilda and Jimmy Searcaster. We'd stolen Melodie from them during Lena's Tale, so I definitely hoped they wouldn't recognize us.

But Chase had it covered.

When I glanced at the others to see if they'd noticed the Searcasters, all I saw were trolls. Not the kind that wore hockey masks and worked for the Snow Queen, or the huge kind that hid under bridges. These were like the ones I'd fought in the Hidden
Troll Court—short and squat and wearing just one piece of armor.

The one in shin guards looked me up and down and said, with Lena's voice, “Oh, that's
creepy
.”

Up ahead, Forrel's laugh came from the troll in the helmet, and the troll wearing a skirt of chain mail smacked his arm. At least the dwarves were enjoying this.

The scratched-up breastplate in my glamour even had a little blood on the bottom. Gross. “Great detail, Chase,” I said, making a face.

“I know,” said the troll wearing a shoulder guard to my right, but he stumbled over an uneven patch of ice. I wondered how low his magic was running.

“You okay?” I asked him.

“Yeah.” Chase was practically grunting, very troll-like.

Right.
Totally
okay. I could tell by the grumpy sidelong look he was shooting me.

Then I remembered, kicking myself for
not
remembering. Suddenly my heartbeat thudded
everywhere
, booming in my ears so loud I couldn't hear the snow crunching under our feet.

Chase grinned. It weirded me out that I could recognize that expression even when it was hidden under a glamour, complete with troll tusks. “I reserve the right to be cranky. I also have epic plans to sleep for roughly a hundred years after this.”

He didn't actually say anything. I must have imagined it,
I thought, smiling back, but the thumping in my ears didn't calm down. It might have even gotten worse. I felt kind of light-headed.

“Are
you
okay?” Lena-the-troll asked me, way too observant for a moment like this, and I really,
really
wished Chase had given me the glamour with the helmet.

The fox stopped for a second and shot us a look like,
Are you
going to talk the whole way there?
We probably did need to keep our voices down. We were getting close, but we definitely weren't the only ones talking. Hundreds of voices hummed from the line, speaking dozens of languages.

Chase nudged me, looking hard at a spot in the line, right after a bunch of goblins and bulky bridge trolls. A man with a pointy face and a goatee slurped some coffee. A handful of his teeth were gold.

“Ferdinand the Unfaithful,” I whispered. We'd fought him in the giant's desk. “Didn't we see him turn to stone?”

“Well, somebody turned him
back
,” Chase said grimly as we stepped into line.

Now Hadriane turned around, her troll eyebrows raised, demanding quiet.

We shut up. A clan of witches stepped into line behind us. They had green skin, warts on their hands, and giant black hoods over bushy clouds of gray hair. The Wolfsbane clan—I'd kind of stolen their Dapplegrim in Atlantis. Chase's glamour must have been good, because none of them spared us a second glance.

So many people were in line. Ten times as many Characters as we had at EAS, and she probably had more inside.

Wars are about numbers,
Forrel had said.

If that was true, we were screwed.

From here, the palace looked like an arc of skyscrapers. Its ice walls gleamed as brightly as mirrored glass, and its doors—at least five stories tall—were silver, the Snow Queen's black symbol etched over them. When they cracked open, the waiting line grew so quiet that you could hear the hinges groan.

Then the line moved forward, and cloaked in our troll glamour, we went with them. The fox darted around, trying not to get stepped on, until Lena picked her up.

A Wolfsbane witch gave us a weird look. Apparently trolls didn't keep foxes as pets.

“Pretty,” I grunted, trying to sound like I wanted to fight for it.

Lena caught on. “Mine,” she grunted back, hunching over the fox protectively.

Satisfied, the witch looked away and followed her sisters.

Thanks,
Lena mouthed as we moved inside.

Nothing could have built the Snow Queen's palace except for magic. The building shouldn't have been possible. High ceilings are a challenge when giants are regular guests, but I couldn't even see the top of the receiving room. The space overhead just disappeared into shadow.

It was
way
darker inside. The Wolfsbane witches blinked at each other, rubbing their eyes and scowling.

We had just enough light to see that those lumpy things on the walls weren't icicles. Half were gargoyles, carved to look like ice griffins but with sneering human faces, and the other half were people—real ones, clawing at the ice they'd been frozen inside.

I didn't mind at all when the crowd pushed us away from them, farther into the room.

Lena pointed out an enormous balcony, about three stories from the ground, easily twice as wide as the house Mom was renting. A dozen figures stood up there, but I only recognized the Pied Piper. His red tracksuit definitely stood out. “I think the fox wants us to go that way. Maybe there's a door underneath,” she whispered.

We shuffled forward, trying hard not to touch people since the feel of our hands wouldn't match our glamour. We got a lot of glares, but no one stopped us. Maybe trolls usually tried to get front row seats.

Lena stopped so abruptly that Hadriane crashed into her. A black door was closed in the milky white wall under the balcony, barely visible. I stopped breathing until I realized it couldn't be the door in my dream. It was made out of metal, not old wood.

Then
I noticed what had halted Lena in her tracks—the row of gray wolves guarding it. The leather cuffs with the Snow Queen's symbol hung around their left forelegs.

The fox tried to squirm free. Lena-the-troll held her even tighter.
Now what?
she mouthed.

I looked at Hadriane, but the dwarf princess's head was craned back. Even the troll glamour couldn't hide the horror on her face.

At the balcony's edge was the Snow Queen, smiling at all the guests who had answered her invitation. Freedom agreed with her.

She looked like she had been carved from the freshest, smoothest snow. When she turned her head, her face glittered like snowflakes in the moonlight, and her hair fell around her like smooth spun gold. The white cloak hanging from her shoulders had those funny black specks in it, like you see in portraits of famous kings, and a crown of towering icicles sat on her brow. It was at least a foot high, impossibly heavy-looking for her slender neck, but she wore it like it was as natural a part of her body as her hands.

Lena clutched my arm—she'd never seen the Snow Queen in person before. Even Chase's shoulders had gone rigid, like they do when he's scared.

I think I'd been hoping, just a tiny bit, that the Glass Mountain had messed her up for good—that she would never recover all her magic, so I would have a better shot at stopping her.

But she was really back.

“Welcome to my palace.” Even her voice had changed. It was more musical and more cutting at once, twisting straight into your
brain like a song you hated but got stuck in your head anyway. “I thank you for coming. I know it was a long journey, and I would not invite you here unless I had a matter of import to share with you.”

She gazed out right over our heads.

We were in the Snow Queen's palace. We were literally under her nose, and she had no idea we were here. It was a terrifying thought, but kind of awesome.

It would be way
more
awesome if we got past these wolves without getting captured.

I tapped the dwarves' shoulders and mouthed,
Wait for a diversion.
They nodded.

“A meeting to discuss the state of our world is long overdue,” continued the Snow Queen, “and I fear the fault is mine. I was detained.”

Detained?
That was what she called it? No, she was downplaying it on purpose.

At least one person in the audience refused to swallow that. “You were defeated, Your Majesty.” The people near the speaker shrank away until he was standing by himself—an old goblin, with his arms crossed and a circlet of rusted metal above his batlike ears. “Forgive me for being so blunt, my queen. I mean no disrespect, but these years without you have been long.”

The wolves guarding the underside of the balcony didn't like that. They growled.

Solange spread her hands with a wistful
what can an evil queen do?
kind of smile. “I admit, my imprisonment was a great setback, but defeated? I don't believe so. Can a mere jail cell—even one as mighty as the Glass Mountain—smother a true and just cause such as ours? The years in prison stoked a fire within me, a fire to see our cause realized. For too long, our peoples have been squeezed into the forgotten corners of the world, squeezing out our might,
our dignity, our very lifeblood. We have subsisted on the land left over from the humans, and that is no way to live.”

The goblins around the one with the rusty circlet stood taller. She was winning them over.

“If we band together once again, we can end our exile,” the Snow Queen said. “Together, we will make those who have stolen our homes tremble at our strength, and together, we will destroy them. We will take back the lands that the humans stole from us, and we can live as we were
meant
to live—as the proud masters of this earth.”

The wolves guarding the balcony howled, and near the walls, some trolls in hockey masks beat their spears against their shields. But what really freaked me out was how much of the audience joined in.

Conviction is a kind of weapon,
Hadriane had said. These people thought they were fighting for their very existence.

And worst of all, after meeting the Dwarves of Living Stone, I didn't really blame them.

“Forgive me again, my queen, for expressing such doubts,” said the rusty-circlet goblin, “but I have grown old listening to your speeches. I do not want to spend the rest of my life making war if we won't live to see the results. Today I see an army still scattered—there, I see Ripper. . . .” My head whipped around to the back corner he pointed at, where the teeth of a huge furry shape gleamed in the shadows. “But one of your pillars is lost to us forever. And where are Likon and Ori'an? Where is General Searcaster? Where are the witches, who were your earliest supporters?”

With outraged howls, the wolves abandoned their posts and bounded into the audience.

“Stop!” the Snow Queen cried, and the pack halted in a tight
circle around the rusty-circlet goblin. His face shone with sweat. “Wolves, your loyalty is commendable, but King Licivvil is not to be harmed. As I expressed on the invitation, this is a free forum, a chance to discuss our future openly and honestly.”

Of course, the Snow Queen didn't call the wolves back, either. She just let them bare their fangs in a circle around the goblin.

Good. That left the door unguarded. All we needed was a diversion, and we could sneak over to it.

“I did not sit idly in my prison,” admitted the Snow Queen. “My plans have already been set into motion. The Pied Piper's work last week is only one part. Searcaster and my other pillars have undertaken a task vital to our cause, but I have received word of their success—they will return momentarily. As for the witches, I confess I do not know.” Here, her smile glimmered again, soothing and inviting at once. “However, a few of them are in the audience. Perhaps they can speak for themselves.”

“I will speak for the witches.” That cold angry voice sounded familiar, but I didn't recognize it until the crowd cleared around the new speaker.

Kezelda, the gingerbread witch. She pointed a crooked finger at the Snow Queen. “You poisoned me and twelve of my sisters when you poisoned Mildred Grubb's Ever After School, and you framed us to take the blame. You left us to die. I have brought proof.”

She thrust something silver and square in the air: one of Lena's M3's. Then an illusion unfolded above her: the Snow Queen, as she looked in the Glass Mountain, with strawlike hair and slush-colored skin, saying,
“Rapunzel is the only suspect. Well, besides the witches, and all the witches are disposable.”

Chase grinned.
He
was the one who recorded that, back when Solange had us trapped in the Glass Mountain. We had no idea that
the Director had shared it with the witches. I elbowed him—all the other trolls in the audience just looked confused.

Triumphant, Kezelda slapped the M3 shut, and the recording of the Snow Queen disappeared. “Since we witches are so disposable, I'm sure you can fight without us.” Then she turned and strode toward the open doors and the glittering landscape beyond them.