Of Witches and Wind

by Shelby Bach

  Chase caught my elbow. I sat down on something cushy. Someone threw the blanket over me.

  “I’d say I’ll wake you up for your watch, but that won’t happen,” Chase said.

  I wanted to argue, but my mouth wouldn’t move. Then, promising myself that I’d tell Chase off in the morning, I slid into sleep.

  y the time I clawed my way back into waking, the storm was long over. The sun shone into the cave and stretched shadows along the earth floor; the breeze was warm. Morning must have been half over. Something was going thwack-thwack-thwack at the cave mouth in a very annoying way.

  It took me a second to realize it came from Chase and the hatchet in his hand and the log he was splitting into fire-ready pieces.

  “Are you seriously chopping wood?” I asked. The at a time like this? part was implied.

  “Yep. Rory? You’re up, right?” He shielded his face and squinted inside. “I can’t actually see you. It’s too bright out here.”

  “Can you stop? Otherwise, I might have to smack you over the head with that log,” I told him.

  “Go ahead. You’ll put me out of my misery.” He held it out, grinning. I sat up gingerly, but I was barely sore at all. “Feel better?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Where is Iron Hans, anyway? And how long did I sleep?”

  “Fifteen hours,” said a deep voice just outside.

  I jumped out of bed, my hand reaching for my hilt, but someone had taken my weapon away while I slept. My sword leaned against the wall, out of reach. “Geez, way to be creepy and not talk. I thought Chase and I were having a private conversation.”

  Chase hit the log one more time, and it broke apart. “Well, I knew he was there. He’s been making me do chores.”

  Only an ancient metal warrior could make Chase split wood.

  “There’s a third one missing, isn’t there? The one you call Lena?” asked Iron Hans.

  I wished I could’ve seen his face when he said that, but when I walked out, he didn’t look up. On an old stump, he sat still as a pewter statue, the sun glinting off his metallic skin.

  He didn’t feel like an enemy. I had faced enough of them to know—malice kind of radiates off them, so you go, Oh, right—that person wants me dead. Maybe it was the Binding Oath, but Iron Hans only seemed . . . mildly interested. And patient.

  I still didn’t want to talk about Lena in front of him.

  “How about we go find the others now?” I had forgotten all about the bandage on my arm. Easing down to another stump, I unwrapped it slowly. The back of my hand was bruise-free, except for a tiny brown spot between the first two knuckles. “We need to get back to our quest.”

  “Others have found them,” Iron Hans said in a low voice, like squat twisted imps were scurrying around doing his bidding. I tried not to imagine Ben’s face when Iron Hans’s evil minion showed up. “We can only wait.”

  “But how are we going to find them? We can’t afford to just wait around all morning.” We only had a day left before our grace period with the Unseelie Court ended.

  “Rory, we’re good,” Chase said. “Iron Hans sent out an army of squirrels.”

  I paused. “Is that a Fey term Lena’s gumdrop didn’t translate?”

  “No. His Tale was ‘The White Snake.’ He can talk to animals.” Chase stacked the freshly split logs behind him. “According to the squirrels, the questers are following a road just up the ridge. They’ll reach us in an hour. Technically we could meet them halfway, but then we would just have to walk all the way back.”

  So they had solved problems while I slept. That didn’t happen very often. Everything might turn out okay after all.

  I looked Iron Hans over. His light brown eyes looked too human in his very shiny, metal face. I had assumed villains showed up fully formed in our stories. It had never occurred to me that they might have Tales of their own. They might have even been Characters before they were villains.

  “Everybody calls you the Snow Queen’s strongest warrior,” I told him quietly.

  “I was once. I am no longer,” Iron Hans replied, “but when you are as old as I am, your past actions follow you more closely than your shadow.”

  Now he really reminded me of Rapunzel.

  Chase glanced between us. “Rory, he hasn’t been in touch with the Snow Queen since the end of the war. He swore it on his enchantment earlier.”

  That made me slightly less suspicious.

  “This Lena,” Iron Hans pressed, “is she clever? Does she prefer to follow the rules?”

  “How did you know that?” I glanced accusingly at Chase. He was too busy chopping wood to notice, or at least he pretended to be.

  “You are not the only three to change the course of Character history,” Iron Hans said. “There is a precedent.”

  “We haven’t done anything,” I said, but goose bumps popped up over my arms.

  Chase grinned, perfectly delighted. “This is when you tell us why everyone talks about Rory, right?”

  Iron Hans’s eyebrows—a slightly blacker metal than the rest of his skin—rose. “You do not know already? Rory—”

  Then he stopped, and it looked like he had swallowed his tongue. He looked just like Kezelda had when she had started to tell me something—only way less ticked off.

  “Well?” Chase said, putting down the hatchet. “I order you to tell us!”

  “Chase, he doesn’t have to do what you say,” I reminded him. “Besides, I don’t think he can help it.”

  Iron Hans met my eyes, nodded once. Obviously, he hadn’t gotten control of his tongue back yet.

  “Are you cursed?” Chase said, interested. “You lose your voice every time you say Rory’s name or something?”

  “That’s the dumbest-sounding curse I ever heard,” I said.

  “No, it’s not. It stopped him from telling us whatever he was going to tell us.”

  “Is there an object located at your chapter?” The second Iron Hans had his voice back, he used it to interrupt the bickering. Lena would have done that too. “A silver cylinder, closed on the bottom, the top riddled with holes?”

  “No,” Chase said.

  “Wait, you mean the magic saltshaker?” I said.

  Chase stared. “How do you know about it and I don’t? I live there.”

  “I saw it the day of the feast, right before I found out you—right before I met your mom,” I said, kicking myself when Chase’s face fell. “It’s on a pedestal in a room full of enchanted statues. It was next to a statue in old-fashioned clothes, and his name was Husky, or Wolf, or—”

  “Wolfgang Sebastian Bruhm?” asked Iron Hans.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said.

  “Wolfgang?” Chase repeated. “Did his parents hate him?”

  “He was called Sebastian,” replied Iron Hans, and the look on Chase’s face clearly said, That middle name isn’t any better.

  I waited for Iron Hans to tell me how he knew the name, but he just stared out at the landscape, face smooth. I was pretty sure that was his thoughtful expression.

  “Soooo . . . ,” Chase said, impatient. “The magic saltshaker?”

  “It’s a Pounce Pot,” Iron Hans said. I did not snicker, mainly out of shock that the words “pounce” and “pot” went in a sentence together. “Centuries ago, to help ink dry, you would sprinkle powder over the wet vellum. This one keeps secrets. It is enormously powerful.”

  “With a name like ‘Pounce Pot’?” Chase thought Iron Hans was pulling a fast one.

  “You write the secret, and the name of the person or persons from which the secret should be kept,” Iron Hans said, “and over it you sprinkle ground unicorn horn from the Pounce Pot. It can keep one secret from one person their entire life. If someone tells, or tries, their tongue will rebel, as mine did now. If the secret is written, the person will lose interest, or perhaps the ability to read. Its adaptability is its power.”

  “What if we made Rory go hide over there?” Chase said sarcastically. “Could you tell me,
then?”

  “Mildred must have added your name as well, and Lena’s, knowing that you are close to Rory,” said Iron Hans. “The Pounce Pot can keep secrets from more than one person.”

  Chase turned to me, mouthed “pounce pot,” and shook his head darkly.

  “But for less time,” added Iron Hans. “Not their whole lives.”

  That was only slightly comforting.

  “How do you know if the Director used this thing or not? She might not even know it exists,” Chase pointed out.

  “Mildred knows about it. She went on a quest for it with Solange and Sebastian,” Iron Hans said. “I helped them.”

  Yeah, I’d felt less bowled over when a dragon knocked me down last February.

  “You’re making that up. No way the Director went on a quest. That would be too far from her hairbrush.” Then Chase went still—like he had just processed the second name.

  I only knew one Solange. “The Director and the Snow Queen knew each other?”

  “Solange and Mildred were the closest of friends,” Iron Hans said. “When they were girls, Mildred read everything. She memorized rules and recited them. Only Solange could convince her to break them.”

  If EAS was looking for a traitor, wouldn’t they suspect the villain’s best friend? No wonder the Director was so eager to accuse Rapunzel. The best defense was a good offense, right?

  I had serious doubts that the Director was actually behind it, but even poisoned and confined to her sick bed she would try to preserve her reputation. I couldn’t wait to point this out to Lena.

  “They called them the Triumvirate,” said Iron Hans.

  Chase’s gaze met mine, and I knew he remembered what the Director had called us, too. This was why the Director thought I had convinced Lena to make the portal in EAS’s courtyard. More evidence to tell Lena. Solange had probably convinced young, pre–Sleeping Beauty Mildred to do bad stuff—maybe even evil deeds, considering who Solange grew up to be.

  “It was more common,” Iron Hans said, “when lifetimes were shorter: The ties you made at eleven could forge the course of your life.”

  Was he talking about Solange and Mildred and the other guy? Or did he mean me, Chase, and Lena now?

  “That’s right, Rory. You’re stuck with us.” But Chase didn’t look at me as he brought the ax crashing down on the log.

  “Wow. That sucks. How will I ever manage?” I said, adding extra sarcasm, and Chase grinned back.

  Part of me wanted to stop talking about this, like I usually did when we were talking about my Great Destiny or whatever it was. But a practical part—a curious part—knew I might never get this opportunity again: someone outside the Canon, someone who knew and wanted to tell me.

  “What quest?” I wondered if villains had a Canon too—and a school, and a book like Rumpelstiltskin’s.

  “They defeated the Pentangle,” said Iron Hans.

  “The same Pentangle that King Navaire founded?” And when Iron Hans nodded, Chase actually looked a little pale.

  Lena would have just recited off every fact she remembered about the Pentangle as soon as it came up. I missed not having to ask. “Uh . . . who?”

  “He was the longest-running king the Unseelie Court ever had. Fey, obviously—and a tyrant. You couldn’t sneeze in Atlantis without his approval. But that wasn’t enough for him,” Chase said. “He recruited four of his most powerful contemporaries—a goblin priestess, the last mage ever, a gnome seer, and the matriarch of a witch clan. With them he conquered almost all of the hidden continents. He was preparing to conquer the human lands too, before some Characters stopped him.”

  Suddenly, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining some winged, crowned figure sitting in the Oval Office, telling the U.S. president what humans were and weren’t allowed to do—the same way Madison told the KATs.

  “The gnome seer was why they needed the Pounce Pot,” Iron Hans said. “Solange knew they would never be able to reach Navaire if he realized his enemies were coming.”

  Oh. The Director hadn’t started out evil and then switched sides. The Snow Queen had started out good. Solange had once been a regular Character, back when she was my age. Overwhelmed by her destiny, just like me.

  My heart contracted in my chest, like it wanted to shrivel up and hide rather than listen to any more of this.

  “Are you sure we’re talking about the same Mildred?” Chase said. “Taking down evil Fey kings is something she’d mention.”

  “You cannot speak of the Triumvirate without mentioning Solange, and no one discusses that part of Solange’s past,” said Iron Hans, “but when she joined the Canon in the nineteenth century, she was widely heralded as a hero.”

  The Snow Queen was even part of the Canon. My heart shrank a little more.

  I didn’t want to know Solange had been a good guy once. I hated hearing that even more than I hated hearing I was just like her.

  “So,” said Chase, “you’re saying that me, Rory, and Lena are supposed to defeat the Snow Queen and her minions the same way the Triumvirate defeated the Pentangle?”

  Iron Hans was silent.

  “You—” Chase started angrily.

  “No, that’s what he can’t tell us,” I said quickly, before Chase started shouting.

  Iron Hans nodded. “Part of it.”

  “So now that Rory’s here, you’re all set to dump your old mistress and help us?” Chase said, clearly skeptical again.

  Iron Hans’s eyes suddenly turned as hard as the rest of him. “Solange was not my mistress. She was my friend.”

  Chase snorted. “You and the Director have great taste in friends.”

  But when Iron Hans had gotten out of his Fey prison, he hadn’t gone to join the Snow Queen. He hadn’t even spoken to her. He’d come out here to the woods. All he wanted was to be left alone. That was the only thing he had added to the Binding Oath—that Chase and I tell no one where he was.

  Iron Hans sighed, like he didn’t want to fight about it. “No one’s story is ever the complete one. Soon after I helped them gain the Pounce Pot, Mildred’s Tale began, and she slept for a hundred years.”

  Chase took another swing at the log with an extra loud thwack. “Tell me about the dude. He was the best fighter, right?”

  Wow. Chase was being so subtle. I had no idea which one he wanted to be.

  “Sebastian was the grandson of a Potsdam Giant. So he had a warrior’s training,” said Iron Hans.

  Chase beamed. “Well, that definitely doesn’t describe Rory, so it’s got to be me—”

  “How do you know I couldn’t be the warrior?” It ticked me off more when Chase openly snickered. I ignored the little Kenneth-like voice in my head that said I was useless without my sword. “Don’t laugh. Which one of us beat the metal dude yesterday?”

  Chase rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and who dropped her sword and apologized to the troll for smashing his bridge? You’ve never killed anyone.”

  And I never wanted to. I’d told him so.

  “Neither have you—” I started, but Chase looked at me sharply. I broke off and added something else to the list of things Chase had never told me. “Oh.”

  “The Fey forge their warriors very young,” Iron Hans said, like he disapproved.

  Maybe I didn’t want to be the warrior anyway.

  “And the third one?” I couldn’t bring myself to say the Snow Queen’s name.

  Iron Hans looked me with his far-off thinking stare. “You are the glue, and the current.”

  Great. He had stopped making sense. Definitely like Rapunzel.

  He must have guessed that didn’t tell me much. “It was Solange who had the conqueror’s heart.”

  I made a face. That didn’t sound like me at all.

  “What Tale did Sebastian get?” Chase said. “Tell me it was something with a Dapplegrim.”

  Iron Hans frowned. “That is the wrong question.”

  “You keep saying that,” Chase said, swinging the hatchet again. �
�It’s annoying. There’s no such thing as a stupid question.”

  “You’ll need to find your own path, Chase,” Iron Hans said. “You cannot wait to be defined by your Tale.”

  “Yes, I can.” Chase’s face was on the red side, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he was mad or because chopping wood was hard work. “I’m going to have the best Tale anyone has ever seen—”

  “You should be more truthful.”

  And instead of flipping out at Iron Hans, Chase was silent, jaw clenched. I was definitely missing something.

  “Tell her,” said Iron Hans. Chase didn’t say anything. “Do you still want the reward we discussed?”

  Chase sucked in a huge breath. He turned to me. “You know the test for Characters?”

  “Where you see something in a magic mirror?” What did this have to do with the Triumvirate?

  “I saw the Tree, but being half throws everything off,” Chase explained. “The Fey always see something in a magic mirror. The Director said I might never get a Tale.”

  My mouth fell open. I snapped it shut before Chase could comment.

  Chase had always bragged about getting a great Tale. But I knew suddenly, from his half-defiant, half-hopeful stare, that he hadn’t been trying to convince me and the other seventh graders. He’d been trying to convince himself.

  What if he didn’t get his Tale? What would stop him from leaving? He could grow up in more places than just Ever After School.

  “Of course you’ll have a Tale,” I burst out fiercely.

  Chase grinned.

  “You don’t have the luxury of waiting for your Tale, Chase,” Iron Hans said. “You and you alone must determine your role in what will come.” I wondered if he really wanted to sound so freaky, or if you naturally said stuff in a scary way when you lived for a thousand years.

  “You don’t know that.” Chase’s knuckles were white around the hatchet’s handle.

  But Iron Hans talked like he did know. “I know there may be no glory in it. It should not be glory you seek, no matter what you have been taught.”

  Chase gave him a long, hard, withering look, the kind that terrified the fifth and sixth graders, and sometimes the triplets. But he didn’t say anything, which probably meant that he couldn’t think of any way to argue.