Storybound (3 page)

Chapter 5

W
hat is
that
supposed to mean?” Una said. She stared hard at Peter. “Why are you talking about writing? I told you I read about you in a book. The same story as this one.” She held up the sheaf of papers she had taken from the pedestal.

“No,” Peter said. “Not the same. That isn’t a book. It’s just an exam. Don’t you see? You’ve been Written In to our world!” He ran his hands through his brown hair. “Professor Perregrin talked about it once in Backstory class. Something about how WIs had a special purpose. The Muses were the only ones who could Write people In. And I know they brought WIs here to help them, but he never said—”

Una seized on his words. “Brought here? Where is here?”

Peter rubbed his forehead. “This is the land of Story. I guess you must be from the land of the Readers. That’s where the old WIs used to come from, I know that for sure. What I can’t remember is what happened to them after the Muses broke their—”

“What do you mean you can’t remember? This is important!”

“It’s not like anyone wants to talk about how the Muses ran Story, Una. And no one’s been Written In since then
.
” He shook his head. “I mean, if someone has been Written In again after all this time . . .” He frowned down at her. “You
are
telling the truth, aren’t you?”

“Why would I lie?” she asked in a quiet voice.

Peter took up his irritating pacing again, this time behind her. “If you’re not lying, then I wonder what’s going on.” Peter was talking very fast now. “
No one
will believe me. I can hardly believe I’m actually talking to a WI. I wonder how—”

“Peter,”
Una interrupted him. She didn’t care what Peter wondered or who would believe him. She gripped the stack of papers tighter. “If you’re right, and I’ve actually been Written In to a book—”

“Exam.”

“Whatever.” Una waved the top page in front of his face. “What I need to know is
who
wrote this?”

“The Talekeepers, and I don’t think . . .” Peter stopped pacing, a look of horror on his face. “Oh no!” He snatched the papers from her hand and nearly dragged her to the door. “I need to go get my grades. They’ll take off if I’m late! Come on!”

Peter wiped his hands on his tunic. The sweat smeared in with the dragon blood and made his palms feel grimy. He had left Una in the Tale station and sprinted over to the review panel. Now he was standing in a large room in front of an imposing table. A Talekeeper and two professors loomed behind it and looked down at him with disapproving faces. And it wasn’t just any Talekeeper, it was Mr. Elton, the Tale Master himself.

“
And
you neglected to slay the smaller dragons and protect the Lady.” Mr. Elton spoke in a grating voice that always seemed too loud. He had combed his stringy gray hair back from a very straight part that ran down the middle of his scalp. Round spectacles perched on his stubby nose, and he seemed to be peering down at everything. Because he was so short this had the odd effect of making him tilt his head back and squint at people. His breath puffed his oversized mustache as he ticked off a list in front of him. “Improper use of genre dialogue. Unheroic attitude toward the Lady. Use of sarcasm. Lateness to review panel. The list goes on and on.”

Peter clenched his jaw. If only he could defend himself properly. The Tale Master’s disapproval surely meant a failing grade.

“And then there’s the matter of the girl,” a professor Peter had only seen once before said. She had the exam spread out in front of her, and her beady eyes looked piercingly at Peter, who shifted from one foot to the other.

“Is she a classmate of yours?” Beady Eyes asked.

Little drops of sweat formed on Peter’s forehead.
Think. You can’t just tell them that Una’s been Written In.
Peter had told Una it hadn’t happened in a long time. He hadn’t told her that back before the Unbinding, all the WIs had been killed when the Muses broke their oaths. Even though Story was safe from the Muses now, Peter knew the Talekeepers wouldn’t welcome a WI after everything that had happened.

Of the three, Elton alone was a Talekeeper. But who was to say the other examiners weren’t his friends? And it wasn’t just the Talekeepers. There had been a near riot after it came out that Professor Perregrin had spent that one class teaching the Perrault students about the old ways of the Muses, and he had been dismissed soon after. If people could get that upset over the mention of the old ways, what would they do if they met a WI? Peter just needed to convince the examiners that there had been some sort of mix-up, and they might leave Una alone. Maybe then he’d be able to find out what was really going on. He swallowed and tried to smile at them, but he had waited too long.

Beady Eyes’ expression grew sterner. “Well?” she pressed. “This is not a difficult question. Is she a classmate of yours or not?”

Peter nodded slowly, then shook his head.

Beady Eyes clicked her tongue reprovingly.

Peter knew they could check the school records and see at once that Una didn’t belong. “She’s a friend,” he finally said. “Um . . . visiting. And she wanted to see a . . . I mean my . . . exam.” He was no good at making things up in the moment. Surely they would see through such a flimsy lie. Peter looked appealingly at the stick-thin man with a shock of white hair who was sitting at the other end of the table. Professor Edenberry was his Outdoor Experiential Questing instructor. The corners of Professor Edenberry’s mouth barely turned up. But he didn’t say anything.

Then, Mr. Elton surprised him. He gave Peter a knowing smile. “Ah. Young love,” he said in his loud, unpleasant voice. “Wanted to impress the girl, eh? Wanted to be
her
Hero?” He laughed. “I guess she wasn’t so . . . impressed.” His laugh turned into a guffaw.

Peter glared at Mr. Elton. Like he would sneak a girl in to show off! He began to protest and might even have told them the truth, but the beady-eyed examiner interrupted him.

“Childish pranks,” she said. “In
my
day we didn’t do such things. In
my
day, I wouldn’t have risked my potential career on such a foolish idea. Sneaking someone into an examination indeed!”

Peter balled his hands into fists.
I bet in
your
day you weren’t planning on a glorious career as a practical examiner
.

“You fail this examination.” Mr. Elton sat back and rested his chubby hands on his stomach contentedly. “With no possibility for a retake.”

Peter kept his face neutral. He would not give them the satisfaction of seeing his disappointment. For Una’s sake, he guessed it was a good thing that the examiners hadn’t pressed him further—that they seemed to buy the idea that he
liked
her.
But failing a practical? In Heroics?
He didn’t want to think about what his parents would say. He scowled.

Mr. Elton saw Peter’s expression. “And . . . detention with me, I think. For the rest of the term.” Apparently, things could get worse after all. No doubt Elton would spend the whole detention prattling on about Peter’s family connections like he always did. Just the other day, Elton had caught him in the hall to ask after his parents. Maybe next time Peter could tell Elton how happy his parents were that he’d failed their son. Elton’s face looked as though he expected Peter to thank him for such a delightful present. Peter said nothing.

“My office. Tomorrow morning. Six o’clock sharp.” Elton smiled. “That will be all.”

Una tried to look in every direction at once. Peter had explained that she would have to stay at the Tale station while he went to get the results of his examination and had left her on a bench in the middle of a huge hallway that was lined with doors of all sorts. There were arched doors and studded spiked doors, doors reaching high out of sight and tiny mouseholes. The door she and Peter had exited some time before was made of weathered wood, and, after they had passed through, iron bars had clattered down and locked into the floor.

A constant stream of people passed by her: some entering doors, some exiting, and some waiting outside, calling across the great hallway in loud voices. A woman in a pink ruffled ball gown waved to a sailor. A mummy was asking an old grizzled cowboy for directions. A whole troop of girls in starched blue uniforms giggled as they passed her. Una looked in the opposite direction and saw a small dog barking at a wizard wearing long purple robes with stars all over them.

Peter had made it sound like he was studying to be a character in a book.
Are all of these people characters in stories?
She turned it over in her mind, trying to make it fit. When she read a book, she did sort of see the characters. And when she reached the end of the book, she always felt that their stories must go on. Could it be that whenever she read a book, characters in this world had actually played out the story?

She thought about the papers from the pedestal. Peter had said the examiners would need to review them. Would he bring the packet of papers back? Una wasn’t sure what she would find if she read them. Would there be more about how she had fought the dragons in the cave? Or would reading it somehow take her back to the library? She ran her fingers along the cuff of her sleeve and looked around the wide hall again. Whatever was happening to her now, whatever awaited her in those pages, Una knew she wasn’t ready to go back to her old life.
At least not yet.

A willowy woman dressed all in green walked over and sat down uncomfortably close to Una on the bench. The stranger combed her fingers through long narrow braids that fell to her waist. “Have you seen a tree?” she asked Una in a whispery voice. “It’s small, about so high”—she held up an unimaginably long hand with bony fingers—“with twelve branches that have green buds.”

“Um,” Una said, staring at the woman’s fingers.

The woman pulled out a small parcel. “Care for some mulch?” she asked, poking the package toward Una.

Una wrinkled her nose at the earthy smell. “No, thanks.”

The woman began to eat. She looked at Una with gold-speckled green eyes.

“I’m sorry you can’t find your tree.” Una avoided her gaze.

“That’s okay,” the woman whispered. “I was only trying to transplant it. It would do so much better in a moonlight garden, you see.”

“Ah.” Una wished that Peter would return. She watched a soldier in fatigues stop and talk to a vampire.

“I’d only just begun working in a new Tale.” The green woman chewed slowly, and her teeth grated on the grainy dirt. “I had to leave in the first chapter. My tree was dying. And no one would do anything about it. What was I to do, I ask you?”

Una hoped she didn’t expect a response. What if she said the wrong thing? Would the woman know that she didn’t belong here? Instead of answering, she stared hard at the pair of characters in front of her.

“I first went to the canteen, if you can believe it. . . .” The soldier laughed and nudged the vampire with a camouflaged arm. The vampire flashed two very long teeth, and his laugh came out more like a spooky moan.

“And then the Talekeeper fired me, all because I couldn’t find my tree. . . .” The woman was prattling on. Una perked her ears up at that, but she heard nothing more about the Talekeepers. While the woman talked rapturously about her tree, Una glanced behind her at a man clad all in black. He was running hard toward a door with red dragons carved on it. He somersaulted twice, flipped his way to the door, and threw a metal star at the keyhole. The door clicked, and he tumbled through.

That was
so
cool.

The tree woman’s whispery voice kept right on going. “. . . reliable character work, it’s so hard to find these days, especially for a dryad,” she said.

The vampire’s laughter drowned out her words. Una had missed the punch line. She sighed. Peter was taking an awfully long time, and there was so much to see, and it wasn’t like listening to the merits of a lost tree would help her in this new world anyway. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too bad if she wandered around a bit. She stood up. “Er . . . I have to go,” she mumbled to the willowy woman. “I hope you find your tree.”

“That’s very kind of you.” The woman’s eyes welled up with tears.

Una gave her a halfhearted wave. She looked at the doors around her bench, made a mental note of them, and stood, brushing off her silvery cloak. She ducked under a group of fairies who were giggling and calling out riddles to a handsome elf and made her way up to what appeared to be the center of the building. In the middle of a wide-open space, a formidable statue towered over all the characters, who passed by it without a glance. Una counted seven halls, just like the one she had come from, which sprouted off the circular crossroads like spokes on some giant wheel.

She went over and peered at the plaque beneath the statue.
THE TALE MASTER SAVES STORY
, it read. And underneath that:
ARCHIMAGO MORES RETURNS AFTER DEFEATING THE MUSES
.
She looked up at the stone figure. He was dressed for battle, and his mouth was open in a fierce battle cry. With both hands he was driving the point of his sword into a pile of thick books. Una studied it for some time and came to the same conclusion she had at first: Archimago did not look like someone she hoped to meet.

After a while, she walked around the perimeter of the area. Between each of the door-lined hallways was a piece of a painted mural that made up one unified scene. After the third panel she found the title:
The Muses Break Their Oaths
. Each image was more horrific than the last. They showed a great battle, with characters running and screaming in terror. Tall figures that looked like the gods she had once read about in a mythology book towered over the helpless masses. From their hands, shreds of lightning tore down through the dark sky and pierced their victims. One part showed several families hiding in the mountains, and they looked like they must be sick or starving or something. Another had a whole village engulfed in flames. Una felt sick to her stomach by the end.
Why on earth would anyone paint that?