by Shelby Bach
Chase turned to me, trying so hard not to comment that he looked like he was in pain.
At the high table, the Director lifted her fork, laden with a dainty bite, and closed her eyes with satisfaction. The witches dug in, spearing the chocolate-mousse-y goop. After that first taste, a lot of compliments passed from witch to witch.
The table just behind us got their plates, and the eighth graders dove in without hesitation. Well, except for Darcy.
“It’s almost too pretty to eat. Where’s my camera?” As soon as she stuck her head under the table to look, her brother darted forward and gobbled up her slice. “Bryan!”
“What?” said the fawn, chocolate stuck to the fur on his nose. “I didn’t get one. And I’m sick of eating grass.”
“Yeah, well, I just hope it doesn’t kill you.” Darcy folded her arms over her chest. “I would hate to spend the whole night at the vet again because some stupid baby deer can’t control his chocolate cravings.”
Then an elf appeared at Lena’s elbow, carrying three plates on each arm.
“Rufus, you are a king among elves,” Chase told him, completely serious.
Rufus grinned crookedly. Lena and I passed plates down the table.
“Didn’t we have spoons?” Henry asked.
When everyone searched the table, peering under plates and around glasses, Chatty started giggling silently once again.
“Chatty,” Chase said, annoyed, “the lemonade thing was funny, I admit. But you don’t mess with dessert. We’re been waiting all night.”
Rolling her eyes, Chatty produced the silverware from under the table. We reached for them.
Rapunzel’s spoon fell through her fingers, like her hand had forgotten how to grip. Then she whispered, in a low, cracked voice, “Don’t let them eat cake.”
But she wasn’t staring at cake. It was the pie on my plate.
“What?” My spoon halted right over the whipped cream.
“Are you crazy? Did you not see me drooling earlier?” Chase caught the spoon Chatty tossed him.
Rapunzel sprang to her feet with a Hansel-worthy bellow: “Don’t let them eat cake!”
Some fifth graders a few tables over laughed, thinking that she was joking, but they didn’t see her face. Horror stretched her eyes so wide you could see whites all around her irises.
“What did I tell you? Crazy,” Chase said, like he knew the scene was going to get ugly very fast.
Everyone had told me, for almost as long as I’d been at EAS, that Rapunzel was insane, but this was the first time I had seen her act like it.
She lurched up onto the table, swung her leg back and kicked—her plate and mine flew off the table. Both slices fell to the lawn, demolished into brown blobs covered in grass clippings.
I slid out of the way, but Chase, Lena, and Henry grabbed their plates before she could kick those too.
All across the courtyard, heads turned toward us and then questioningly up at the high table, trying to see what to do. The Director forked a big bite of pie and shoved it in her mouth with a flourish. Everyone else followed her example.
I couldn’t believe it—they were really going to ignore the warnings of someone who saw the future?
“DON’T LET THEM EAT CAKE!”
“Hansel!” said the Director, smiling in a strained way.
With a long-suffering sigh, Hansel took one last bite of his dessert and rose to his feet. “Come on, Rapunzel. Not now.” When she shied away from him, he lifted her bodily off the table.
“NO! DON’T! DON’T LET THEM!”
Mrs. Taylor’s mouth hung slightly open. You could see fudge on her tongue.
“Born right after the French Revolution,” Henry said conversationally. “Bound to be a little scarred.”
Hansel dragged her across the courtyard. Rapunzel struggled so much that the Shoemaker got up to help.
“Easy now, Rapunzel,” Stu said, gently but firmly, like she was a kid having a tantrum. “We’ll get you to your tower.”
Up at the high table, the Director bent her head toward the unnerved ambassadors from other chapters—probably explaining or apologizing.
“She never changes.” Then Chase raised a forkful to his mouth.
I batted it out of his hand automatically.
Chase scowled. “Not you, too.”
Scowling back, I shoved Lena and Chase’s plates into the grass for good measure.
“She dreamed she saw the Snow Queen in the kitchens!” I went for Chatty’s next, but she was already on her feet. She dashed to Hansel’s table and knocked Ben’s untouched plate to the ground, and his mother’s mostly finished one, and Hansel’s, and Kenneth’s, and Mia’s.
“Was that one mine?” said Mia confused, returning from the bathroom.
“DON’T LET THEM EAT CAKE!” Rapunzel shouted one last time, at the edge of the courtyard, before Hansel slammed an orange-gold door behind them.
Henry still held his plate, but when I reached for it, he pulled it out of my reach. “You can’t deny an old man his pleasures, Rory. Do you know how many times she has seen the Snow Queen here?”
“Last month she said she saw a ‘many-eyed, many-legged monster’ lurking in the training courts. We found a spider. This big.” Chase made a dime-size circle with his hands.
Now that Rapunzel was gone, and the courtyard slowly filled with murmurs, laughter, and the clink of forks on plates, a tiny bit of doubt crept into me. I didn’t know how many times she had seen the Snow Queen. I’d only known Rapunzel for a year, and then only between three and six o’clock on weekdays. Most weeks I didn’t even see her two days in a row.
“She saved our lives so many times,” I said stubbornly. “All she asked us to do is not eat the pie.”
“But it was Fey fudge,” said Lena weakly.
Chatty slipped back into her seat, her shoulders hunched forward, uncertain. She was wondering if we had completely overreacted too.
Then, behind us, Darcy said, “Bryan? Are you okay?”
The fawn’s slender legs trembled, and he sank slowly to the grass. “Just don’t feel so great.”
“It was probably the chocolate. It’s too rich for deer.” Darcy reached into the pocket of her hoodie. “Hang on. I’ll call Mom. We can go to the vet.”
Up at the high table, the Director cleared her throat, loudly and uncomfortably, like something was stuck in it.
Across the courtyard, the witches were all in disarray: one vomiting under the table, Kezelda sticking her fingers down her throat to do the same. The rest were clearing their throats in the same slightly panicked way that the Director was. They couldn’t breathe.
“Treachery,” croaked one.
Kezelda wiped her mouth and stood. “Poison!”
Panic swept across the crowd, Characters wheezing or crying, the two Red Riding Hoods bent double around their stomachs as if something gnawed at them from the inside. Two of the ambassadors fell from their seats, unconscious.
Mrs. Taylor moaned, and Ben rushed around the table. “Mother?” And when she didn’t answer, he turned to me, like I knew what to do. “We need a nurse.”
“Gretel.” I swung out of the bench.
The illusion of Rikard and the Dapplegrim thundering through the trees flickered and faded. Gretel had eaten the pie too.
“We need another, unpoisoned nurse,” I said.
Chase jumped to his feet. “Rapunzel.”
This didn’t feel like good news. If she was still hysterical, I didn’t see how she could help us. But it wasn’t like we had much choice. “Come on, Lena.”
But Lena didn’t move. Her breath rasped out of her mouth, her eyes huge behind her glasses.
“Mistress, describe your symptoms,” Melodie said desperately. “I probably know the antidote. I must make it.”
The fork beside Lena’s hand was smeared with chocolate. She had snuck a taste, and I hadn’t noticed. “Oh, no.”
Lena just pointed at the orange-gold door and shot me a look
that clearly said, Get going.
Chase and I dashed around tables and vaulted over fallen Characters. We burst through the door to the instructors’ quarters. Stu was sitting, slumped, at the base of the stairs.
“I couldn’t go any farther,” he said apologetically.
We sprinted up the steps. Halfway there we reached Hansel. He clung to the rail, trying to drag himself back to Rapunzel’s door, but seeing us, he sank to his knees and raised a key. His voice was weak. “We locked her in. Why couldn’t she just shout poison and be done with it?”
Chase grabbed it, and a few seconds later his feet didn’t even bother touching the steps. He literally flew up the rest of the way, filling the spiral stairway with a gust of wind so strong I almost tumbled backward.
And then, clutching the rail, I had to stop for a second and try not to think about the fact that I’d almost fallen down the stairs.
Above me I heard Chase turn the lock, and the door squeak open. “Rapunzel!”
“Here. Do not shout.”
She was herself again. Relief flooded through me.
“Poisoned!” Chase gasped. “Everyone.”
“I understand. This process requires another ninety seconds,” said Rapunzel sternly. “I’ve dissolved and diluted it. It will counteract any poison.”
“Oh,” Chase said with relief. “The ointment. The witch hair one.”
She had a plan. That was what happened when you saw a future no one else did. She could react first. Sometimes she just reacted in a way that was hard to understand.
“It cannot heal them completely,” Rapunzel said, like she knew we misunderstood. “It will save them tonight, and for perhaps seven nights to come, but only that. It will buy them time.”
Seven days. EAS could lose almost everyone before I went back to school. And an hour ago, spring break had stretched gloriously ahead—so much time to spend free of homework, class, and Madison.
Still breathless, I leaned against the stairway wall, and a door I hadn’t noticed behind me creaked open. Copper pots gleamed through the gloom. It was the same kitchen we had been cooking in earlier. This doorway must have been Rapunzel’s shortcut.
Chase recovered faster than I did. “It’s better than nothing. Has it been ninety seconds yet? Did I mention the dying people?”
As I stepped inside the kitchen, fear shivered up my spine.
Then I saw them, scattered everywhere—over the countertops and the floor, among all the plates, mixing bowls, and measuring cups. A few hung from the ceiling with metallic twine.
Small, round, glittering snowflakes—silver and sharp. Throwing stars.
“Rapunzel!” I knew without counting that there was one snow-flake for every person in the courtyard. Only one villain left those with the bodies.
A hand dropped on my shoulder. I hadn’t even heard Rapunzel’s feet on the stairs. “I know, Rory. She will laugh when she learns she has ruined Mildred’s big event.”
Chase peeked over her shoulder, and all the blood drained from his face.
The Snow Queen.
She had poisoned everyone.
woke up in the courtyard the next afternoon and pretended for ten wonderful seconds that last night had just been a nightmare.
Maybe I hadn’t really seen hundreds of barbed snowflakes in EAS’s kitchen. Maybe Rapunzel hadn’t really dragged me and Chase back outside and armed us both with flasks of dark brown liquid, ripe with the smell of burned cheese.
But no. The neat lines of the tables were crooked now, after last night’s panic, and Fey fudge pie lay in ruins over white plates. On the beach, past the Tree, the high table’s golden cloth—lopsided now—flapped in the breeze with sharp slaps.
The night before, Rapunzel had jumped on it, her long gray braid swinging. “You are Characters! Show calm! Show courage!”
And amazingly, the crowd listened. Rapunzel ordered everyone poisoned back into their seats and everyone not poisoned to report to her for the ointment liquid, assigning them tables when they came for flasks.
I rushed my flask to Lena first. Melodie’s face fell when she sniffed it, and after I helped Henry take a sip, he asked, “How long do we have?” His voice was croakier than usual.
“Seven days,” I whispered, uncomfortably aware of how Mrs. Taylor’s eyes bulged.
“Don’t worry,” Henry told her, as she drank from the flask. “We’re Characters. The magic here is keeping an eye on us. A Tale will start soon and set this to rights. Half of the kids here were bedridden with the flu epidemic of 1918, but my father’s Tale started and sent him to find a cure from his godfather—a fairy named Death.”
All the grown-up Characters spread stories like that after they’d taken a sip. The Director whispered something about a scarlet-fever outbreak and a quest for a flower that only grew on the cliffs of Avalon. Gretel mentioned a kid in the year above her who searched for a unicorn after a witch clan cursed his whole grade with polio.
The idea spread across the courtyard faster than the ointment liquid: Someone’s Tale was going to save us.
The infirmary was way too small for all the patients, so Rapunzel instructed us to open the ballroom. The sky blue walls, edged with gold, looked way too cheerful for a hospital.
Jenny assigned me, Ben, and Chatty bed duty, which meant that we dragged hundreds of mattresses, saved from “Princess and the Pea” Tales, out of storage.
The patients filed in faster than we could line their beds up. Some poisoned people could walk on their own, but most could only move if they were leaning heavily on someone who hadn’t been poisoned. Rumpelstiltskin had to be carried, and he demanded to go to the library, where he could watch the current volume of ongoing Tales and tell us when the new one started. After helping the Italian delegate into a bed, Chase whispered, kind of out of breath, “You guys got the easy job. These people are heavy.”
“Not heavier than mattresses,” I hissed back.
“A mattress doesn’t yell at you if you drop it,” Chase pointed out darkly.
Then, when the last bed was filled, I slipped out to the Tree of Hope before Jenny could give me anything else to do, and I fell asleep, leaning against the trunk.
Of course, I hadn’t meant to sleep for so long. I stood up, rubbing a crick in my neck. I didn’t want to find out quite yet if I’d get in trouble for napping. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and called Mom. It rang three times, and then voice mail clicked on.
Mom’s recorded voice wasn’t as comforting as I’d hoped it would be.
So she wouldn’t worry, I left a message. Something about how I might not be able to call that evening, because Jenny was having a party and counting on me to help. It was almost true. Except Jenny would be bossing me around the sickroom instead of her house.
The plain pine door to Ellie’s storerooms creaked open.
I froze, sure that Jenny was coming to tell me off, or Chase to complain about all the chores that Jenny had made him do while I was sleeping, or Rapunzel to tell me more bad news. But it was just Chatty.
She waved at me, the trash bag in her hand billowing. She stopped and stared at the table so long that I got up to see what it was.
A seagull lay on its back between two glasses, its brown feathers perfect and still, its delicate clawed feet sticking straight up in the air. A dead robin lay a little farther down, and on the next table lay a tiny sparrow.
“What killed them?” I whispered.
Stony-faced, Chatty pointed at an abandoned plate. The fudge on top was riddled with small, cone-shaped holes—like someone had poked it with a pencil. Or maybe a beak.
The Snow Queen had done this, too.
Chatty pushed the trash bag toward me, and while I held it open, she gathered up the ends of the tablecloth. Glass shattered and silverware clinked as she dumped the whole bundle inside the bag.
The Snow Queen was still in her prison. She couldn’t have come in person.
The witches. Solange must have sent one of them with th
e poison. The kitchen had been so crowded. They could have easily slipped it into the crust, or the eggs, or the chocolate. The food fight had been a great decoy.
Up the beanstalk last year, General Searcaster had said, “My queen has a plan for that Ever After School.”
This had to be it. I had probably been there when they slipped the poison in. I’d probably been worrying about a stupid dream.
Chatty dumped a fourth tablecloth bundle into my trash bag. Then she waved a hand in my face until I looked at her. She half smiled, her eyes shining with sympathy, and I knew exactly what she was telling me: It’ll be okay, Rory.
But what if this was how I was supposed to stop the Snow Queen? What if my destiny had been to spot the poison? What if I’d failed already?
Across the courtyard, Lena rushed out from the workshop’s double steel doors. “Rory! There you are!” She didn’t look like someone who’d been near death the night before.
I frowned. “Aren’t you supposed to stay still? Rapunzel said the poison would spread faster if you moved around a lot.”
“Yeah, but I just had the teensiest, tiniest bite. Seriously. Like this big.” Lena pinched her finger and thumb together so close they nearly touched. In the bag at her hip, Melodie clutched a neon-green backpack and glanced up anxiously at her mistress. The harp was being a lot quieter than normal. “That’s barely enough to kill me.”
I wished she wouldn’t joke. She hadn’t heard herself. The breath rattling out of her throat hadn’t even sounded human.
“Rumpel just transferred to the infirmary, and I overheard what he told Rapunzel. The new Tale started—a quest. We have maybe four minutes before everybody comes out here, but I want you to have these.” Lena took the neon-green backpack from Melodie and held it out. “First, a brand-new carryall. And this.” From her pocket she pulled out what looked like a silvery gumdrop. It was uncomfortably sticky when she stuck it in my hand.
I wrinkled my nose. “Please don’t tell me that I have to eat it.”
“Of course not. You put it in your ear, like headphones. It’s a translator. The other chapters use them—all of them besides us and Australia. None of the other continents share a common language,” she explained. “You know, like in Asia it’s Thai and Mandarin and Japanese and so on. I improved this one. I added Fey, and Goblin, and most of Elvish and Dwarvish, and some Troll—although I didn’t get any Ogre.”
