Of Sorcery and Snow (39 page)

Hands shaking, I reached for his gag—it was gritty; obviously, it had been used before—and I cut it away with the very tip of my sword. His smile softened as the gag fell away, and when his fingers curled around mine, all I wanted to do was throw my arms around him.

“Yes!” growled Searcaster.

But I guess it wasn't time for that yet.

Outside the bars, the wolves had returned, their jaws clamped around Lena's Bats of Destruction, like this was the evil-giant version of fetch.

“Up, bats! Destroy the Characters and the dwarves!” cried the sorceress-giant, and a dozen Bats escaped the wolves' teeth and sailed up toward the balcony. They were
definitely
skinny enough to fit through the bars.

“We can dodge them,” Chase said, “but Rory, you'll need to use your ring to smash them. That's the only way to take them out—”

But when the first bat tried to fly into the comb cage, it burst apart. Fragments of pale wood flew everywhere.

I ducked and felt Chase's arms shield my head. Then another explosion sounded across from us, this one tinkling like someone had thrown a box of tacks against the bars. Then another hit, and another, and another, until they all went off together with the crackling
boom-boom-boom
of a fireworks finale.

Then the room was silent.

Chase looked first. “We're okay,” he said, helping me up.

Not even a splinter had made it inside, but the Bats had done
plenty of damage on the
other
side of the comb cage. Jimmy Searcaster, Ori'an, and Ripper were closest. Jimmy bled from hundreds of wounds, the splinters stuck fast in his skin like a dozen archers had emptied their quivers into his forearms. Ori'an was on his back, orange blood pumping out from a jagged metal shard in his neck. It didn't matter that we couldn't kill him. He wasn't going to be in shape to fight anytime soon. Ripper was howling and pawing at his face. I was pretty sure he had lost an eye. Dozens of his wolves whined at his feet. Another dozen lay still, not even whimpering, probably dead.

They didn't have anything else to send after us.

So Chase decided to gloat. “What did I tell you? We're going to walk out of here, and there's nothing they could do about it. What side are you going to bet on now?”

“Of course. No magic or weapons can pass through these combs. I should have remembered.” At the back of the balcony, the Snow Queen stepped out of the shadows. Even she hadn't escaped the shrapnel. A metal shard, as long and slender as a sword, pierced her chest in exactly the same spot her ice darts had stabbed Hadriane.

Following my gaze, the Snow Queen looked down. Surprise flickered across her face—she hadn't even
noticed
it—and she plucked it out. It was clean. There wasn't even any blood.

She tilted her chin up, not exactly smiling, but I knew how much she appreciated my horror.

The Glass Mountain wasn't the Fey and the Canon's first choice for punishing the Snow Queen. They had
tried
to kill her.
They executed her no less than eighteen times,
Chase had told me once, but nothing had worked.

I was supposed to stop her, and she couldn't be killed.

“There's
nothing
me, Rory, and Lena can't do!” Chase bragged, oblivious.

I should have used a wishing coin to stop him, because as soon as he said it, determination slid into the Snow Queen's glacier-blue eyes.

“Run today, little Rory. Run fast, and run home,” whispered the Snow Queen. “Perhaps it is true—perhaps you can defeat me every time we meet, but know this: I will come for them, and you cannot be everywhere at once. Who will you bid farewell to first? Your friends, who are so helpful? Your parents, who gave you life? Your stepmother's child, who has not yet seen the world?”

Oh no.

It didn't matter whether or not the baby was born yet, or whether or not I was in her life. The Snow Queen could still use her to get to me. Maybe that had been the problem all along. Maybe I just didn't want to love one more person I could lose.

“You won't touch my sister!” I said, slamming against the bars between us. The Snow Queen just
laughed.

“Rory! Most of the kids have gone through!” Lena called to me, our carryalls in her arms. “We're going to need a way down!”

I held up my second-to-last golden coin. “I wish that there was a very safe, very solid staircase leading from the balcony straight into the portal.”

“Perfect! Now hurry up!” Lena said.

Turning my back on the Snow Queen was the hardest thing I'd done all day. Leaving her here alive meant putting everyone I loved in the worst kind of danger, the kind that hangs over you like an axe ready to fall.

So I ran.

When I reached the others, Chase was inspecting the two flights of white steps leading down to the floor, with chest-high banisters of milky ice. “Total waste of a wish. Where's my pack? We could have used my rope . . .”

He drifted off when the dwarves picked up Hadriane's body—Forrel at the princess's head, each twin holding a foot, their faces like stone. They went down first, and Miriam walked beside them, holding Hadriane's wrists in place. Philip followed, carrying the princess's polar bear cloak, all bundled up in his arms.

“We will meet again, Rory,” the Snow Queen said as I stepped down onto the first stair.

I froze so quickly that Lena grabbed my arm, peering into my face worriedly.

“Count on it!” Chase called back. “And you'll be dead!”

When we reached the ground, the kids were gone, all of them, and only the portal was left. It was the first one I'd ever seen that wasn't attached to a doorway, and it was just wide enough to let the dwarves and Miriam pass through together. The sunshine on the EAS side of the portal was already lighting up Forrel's face, and beyond them, I could see the Tree of Hope.

One last thought occurred to me. “The combs.”

Chase took my very last wishing coin. “I wish to tweak the enchantment over these four combs, to add a condition that they'll return to their owner when she says,
‘We're leaving this land, come to my hand.'”

The giant bars around us didn't change, but the gold drained away from the coin.

Then we stepped toward the portal. Lena and Chase stood at the edge with me as I turned back and shouted the new retrieval spell. The four combs clinked into my palm. With the bars gone,
I could see the huge doors at the end of the entrance hall, taller even than the Searcasters. Half the audience had marched through them, out into the white landscape. The Snow Queen's allies were abandoning her.

Then Chase and Lena dragged me through, and the portal collapsed.

tumbling, I crashed into a very solid chest covered in golden chain mail.

“Easy.” Hansel dropped hands on my shoulders and steadied me. “You're safe now.”

We were, but my family wasn't. Mom and Dad and Brie and the baby and Amy—they were all in danger. That wouldn't change until I stopped the Snow Queen for good.

I needed to go home.

“Miss us?” Chase wiped the orange troll blood off his blade and onto the grass. Lena just looked wrung out, head bent over the carryalls.

Line after line of metal dummies stood at attention behind Hansel. We must have set off EAS's intruder alert. I waited for the yelling to start, like it did
last
time we dropped an unapproved portal in the courtyard.

“Are you hurt at all?” he asked us.

I shook my head. I was pretty sure I should thank the sword instructor. Without him, I would never have known how to beat Torlauth. I probably wouldn't have remembered the other weapons in my pockets either. But I was too freaked out by the way he wasn't telling us off.

“Um. Did you guys see a thousand and one kids come through here?” Lena said.

“There.” Hansel nodded across the courtyard. The kids had formed a line in front of the door to Portland. In the daylight, their pajamas and sleeping sweats looked dirty and rumpled, but every face gleamed with impatience. “We're trying to send them all home before the Characters got here. They'll start arriving any minute.”

Gretel and Ellie stood to the right of the Portland door, holding a mirror shard in their hands and making each kid look at it before they passed through. The Mirror Test. Unicorn Nightgown must have seen something in it, because Gretel pulled the girl aside and put her in line with a couple other kids.

Hansel stepped out of the way, letting us pass. “The Director will want to talk to you before long, but go and say your good-byes.”

The dwarves waited on the grass. Miriam and Philip were with them, and the three of us headed over too.

The elves from the Shoemaker's workshop arrived with a stretcher, the kind they use to carry wounded Characters to the infirmary. The dwarves lowered Hadriane onto it and took the handles. Miriam and Philip spread the polar bear cloak over her, covering her face.

Something hard lodged itself in my throat, and I swallowed and swallowed around it, trying not to feel so awful. With her head raised and her eyes clear, Ima looked so much like a princess that I knew her big sister would be proud, but I remembered her crying back at the balcony.

“We cannot stay,” Prince Iggy told Gretel. “We will visit briefly with Queen Titania at her pavilion and tell her of what transpired this afternoon. She may not yet know that the Snow Queen has
kidnapped her son. Then we will return home. We have been too long from our city, and I know my father will be anxious. But we thank the Characters of Ever After School.” He turned to me, Lena, and Chase, and he bowed, as low as he could with the stretcher in his hands. “We will be indebted to you forever.”

Thank you, thank you,
Ima had said, and suddenly I knew why it bothered me.

Hadriane was gone. She wouldn't show up enchanted, like Miriam; a swallow of the Water wouldn't heal her, like Lena. She wasn't coming back, and these kids would miss her every day of their lives, like Chase missed Cal.

And I'd convinced her to come with us.

I didn't deserve to be thanked.

“Our father will know what the Snow Queen did to our sister,” Ima added fiercely. “The Dwarves of the Living Stone will never ally with that sorceress again.”

“I'm so sorry about Hadriane.” My voice wobbled all over the place, and my nose prickled like it does right before I cried.

Forrel must have guessed what I was thinking, because he said, “Listen, and listen well, Rory Landon. Haddy has had
one
dream, and one dream only since she was born, and that was of facing the Snow Queen's allies and speaking the truth. Do you understand?”

I nodded, blinking hard. She had told me about it, that night we shared a watch.

But Miriam said, “You mean like the
Character
dreams, right? The ones that show the future?”

Forrel nodded. “Why do you think I fought so hard against her coming? She never expected to return home.”

I should have noticed.

“And for that, Forrel, you have earned your beard,” said Iggy. “Whether it will be under my rule, or my father's.”

Forrel's tiny smile reappeared. “Prince, it's not a beard that I want.”

Then my heart fractured a little more.

“We know,” Ima said gently. At least Forrel had the twins to look out for him. “Now, let us return home. Before nightfall, I want to convince our father that we should
move
.”

The kids from Portland moved aside to let the dwarves through first. Maybe they didn't understand everything that had gone down in the Arctic Circle, but they definitely knew that Hadriane had died for them. The twins didn't look back, but Forrel nodded a good-bye to us as he stepped out of sight.

“Should we be worried about three dwarves carrying a stretcher covered in a polar bear skin down the middle of Hawthorne?” Philip said.