by Shelby Bach
Then Ben asked how everyone was doing. Kenneth just grimaced.
When I called Lena on the M3, her tears fell on the mirror and blurred her image. She only cried this much when she felt awful, like the time she’d come to EAS with the flu and botched a batch of M3s. I felt about five million times guiltier, wishing that I had realized they would all think we were dead.
“Sorry!” The mirror filled with Lena’s purple sleeve as she wiped it dry. “I mean, I was hoping. Rapunzel kept saying you were alive, but the Director was so sure.”
Chase popped his head over my shoulder, his mouth full of chicken nuggets. “Hey, Lena—I’m still alive too.”
“Hi, Chase,” Lena said with a weak, watery smile.
But Chase had seen the tears. He hastily backed away to the Lunch Box of Plenty. Ben and Kenneth were still pulling handfuls of potato chips from it like it was a regular snack bag.
“Did you see his face?” Lena giggled. She almost sounded like her normal, healthy self, but then she coughed hard—like she’d choked on something.
“Are you okay?” I’d wanted to ask whether or not Rapunzel was really Solange’s sister, but suddenly this seemed like a much more pressing question.
Lena nodded, her hand still over her mouth. She held up a finger and unwrapped a cough drop.
“Well, Companions, we better skedaddle.” Ben stood up, wiping the grease off on his jeans.
“ ‘Skedaddle’? Where do you get these words?” Chase asked.
Mia volunteered to scout ahead, and when Ben asked who wanted to go last and watch our rear, Chatty raised her hand, holding up a whistle—since she couldn’t exactly yell for help.
We marched down a switchback trail that led to the sandy beach. I stared into the mirror, watching Lena’s coughing fit subside, mainly to avoid looking at the drop.
“Your mom called a few times,” Lena said apologetically when she could speak again. Her voice was hoarse. “You have four new voice mails. I’ve been texting her back, pretending to be you, but she’s starting to sound kind of . . . upset.” Lena was being nice. I’m sure Mom had started threatening to show up uninvited on Lena’s doorstep.
“Thanks. Just to warn you, it might get a lot worse,” I said.
Lena sighed. “I should probably let you go. I’m due for another dose of ointment in a minute. Jenny will kill me if I miss it.”
I was officially worried about her. “Lena, we’ll get the Water for you.”
She smiled briefly, but she still looked tired. “I know you will. Bye, Rory.”
I closed the M3 cover and pushed it back in my pack.
Rapunzel was on our side. I was sure. Pretty sure.
But no wonder the Director had been so desperate to stop us. To her it would seem like a fool’s errand: The Snow Queen poisons almost everyone at EAS, so the healthy kids follow her little sister’s orders? Leaving the sick in Rapunzel’s hands, unguarded, so she could finish the job?
But why didn’t anyone suspect the Director?
I glanced around to ask the only person I could think of—Chase. I could hear him whooping down the beach.
He ducked past Kenneth’s outstretched sword and slapped the back of his opponent’s legs with the flat of his blade. Enraged, Kenneth stood-stock still in the middle of the beach until Chatty and I nearly caught up with him. Then he charged Chase with everything he had, his sword raised high. Chase disarmed Kenneth, tripped him, and tapped the back of his skull lightly with the pommel of his sword.
Kenneth glanced ahead. Mia hadn’t turned around once. Then, still stomach-down in the sand, he must have said something amusingly murderous, because Chase and Ben fell over laughing. As Ben helped Kenneth up, Chase scooped the fallen sword out of the sand and passed it back, saying something—probably explaining exactly what Kenneth had done wrong.
Chase liked them. He especially liked the way both eighth graders listened to his every word, even though he was supposed to be younger.
If it hadn’t been for me and Lena, and if it hadn’t been for the Beanstalk Tale and the mysterious destiny I couldn’t shake, he would probably have hung out with these guys.
Stupid of me to worry about Chase leaving EAS. He didn’t have to go anywhere to stop being my friend. It wouldn’t be the first time. Just ask Adelaide.
If we didn’t find the Water of Life, I would lose Lena, too. I could be alone.
I caught Chatty staring at them over my shoulder. “Weren’t you supposed to be watching behind us?”
Chatty raised one eyebrow and pointed to herself innocently, as if to say, Who me?
“We’ll switch.” If I had to watch out for attacking trees, fairies, or witches, I might not think quite so much.
• • •
Until nightfall, I was sure that a bad guy would jump out at us from behind every tree, thicket, and boulder. But the scariest thing that hopped out of the forest that afternoon was a beige-and-gray rabbit. Delicate antlers sprouted up between its ears.
I stared at it, wondering if Atlantis animals could do glamour.
At the time, Ben was telling Chase about the storm the night before, how they had found shelter in a seaside cave, how Chatty had stood at the cavern mouth, tossing pebbles into the ocean. “Seriously. She just stood there, skipping stones and getting soaked until the storm stopped. We asked her if it was some magic from her chapter, but she . . .”
Beaming at the attention, Chatty shrugged, all the way up to her ears.
“Right, she did that, and—oh, my God, a jackalope,” Ben said, spotting the creature. Chatty jumped, eyebrows up high, and the movement scared the little guy so much it scampered back into the woods. “Dude, those are real? My grandpa has one of them on his wall.”
“It’s a witch specialty,” said Chase. “They bred them for bridge tolls, like the black cats.”
“Could the witches be tailing us?” It was the first time Mia had spoken since the attack. “The Wolfsbane ones?”
The thought hadn’t occurred to anyone else. Mia was apparently much smarter than she wanted us to think she was.
“Now we need to worry about witches, metal trees, and spying jackalopes?” Kenneth shot a dirty look in my direction. I flushed. “No wonder this Tale needs five Companions.”
“If Darcy were here, I could have sent her to hunt it down,” Ben said thoughtfully. “But we don’t have any long-range fighters left.”
So we moved on. If we were being followed, it wasn’t a great idea to wait for them to catch up.
We walked until the sun set, and then all through dusk. The beach widened, and Mia led us down a path through the middle of the dunes. Each of my sneakers picked up enough sand to fill a playground.
Waves roared. A couple of them soaked my jeans. No one spoke.
The twilight deepened. Ben tripped for the third time, scrambled to his feet, and dusted the sand off his shirt. “I’m good. No worries.”
I called up to the pack leader. “Hey, Mia—we should probably stop. We’re not going to get there any faster if someone sprains an ankle.”
Chatty nodded so vigorously she swayed and stumbled into the dunes. Her wince made me suspect that her feet were covered with blisters.
Ben looked at Chase. “How far are we from the Unseelie Court?”
“About an hour and a half walk down the beach, and then a long climb up a stone stair. Not that far. It could suck in the dark, though,” Chase said, thinking. “Three days, so that’s until noon tomorrow. We might as well make camp for the night.”
I called first watch since I had gotten a ridiculous amount of sleep in Iron Hans’s cave the night before, and Chase volunteered to help. Then he called first dibs on the Lunch Box of Plenty, because he had first watch. Clearly, he’d had an ulterior motive.
I found a boulder to watch from. The sea breeze was even gustier at night, almost chilling, and too loud for us to hear anything but waves and wind. We would have to rely on sight to see bad guys.
“Here.” Chase p
assed me a slice of pizza dripping with pepperoni grease. “Eat it fast, or I will.”
I took a bite. “Why does everyone suspect Rapunzel, but not the Director?”
Chase gave me a weird look, like he couldn’t believe I would still be thinking about this when I had food in my hand. “Binding Oath. The Director swore on her life to do everything in her power to stop Solange.”
“But they were friends.”
“Not anymore. Solange killed the Director’s husband right in front of her. Like seventy years ago,” Chase said. “Revenge is a pretty powerful motivator.”
I made a face. “Do you think we’ll find it? The spring, I mean?”
“Yeah. That’s what we’re here for, right? We’ll find out where it is from the Unseelie, and we’ll be fine.” The duh was implied in Chase’s voice.
“But what if they don’t tell us?” I said. “The southern coast is hundreds of miles long. We’ll run out of time before we find it, or some witches will—”
“Rory, you’re trying to be logical about this. It’s a Tale.” Chase took another bite, and I realized he had three pieces of pizza stacked on top of each other. Gross. “Bad stuff is supposed to happen. Then someone turns a bad thing into a good thing and saves the day. That’s how it works.”
That wasn’t all that comforting. I wanted a solution. I wanted to know everyone would be all right.
He put his pizza stack on his leg, not caring that the grease was seeping into his jeans, and picked up his sword. “Anyway, I still say you’re going to need to kill things eventually, but here’s how you can win a fight without it: You can either bash people with your Left Hook of Destruction”—he tapped the West Wind’s ring—“or the Mighty Snap Kick. Or, because you have this nifty sword, you can use it. Either hit with the hilt or smack ’em with the flat part of the blade. I would try to knock them out or, uh, break their legs”—he shuddered here, probably picturing a femur fracturing, and hurried onward—“to get them out of the fight. Got it?”
“Yeah.” He was so good at this. I wondered if he enjoyed teaching Kenneth and Ben more than teaching me—if he would rather have students who didn’t feel bad about killing trolls, who could become real warriors someday.
“Good. Other people’s lives depend on it. Probably mine. So finish your pizza. We’ll run through some drills. Your sword should adapt to your new fighting style. Just . . .” Chase looked stern, but it was hard to take him seriously—a stringy piece of mozzarella hung from his chin. “Don’t drop your weapon in the middle of a fight again. If nobody is covering you, it could be bye-bye, Rory.”
I shoved the rest of the pizza in my mouth and stood up to practice jabbing, banging, and knocking with my hilt.
I didn’t think I would be able to sleep at all when Kenneth and Chatty relieved us two hours later. I was sore from my shoulders, down to my fingertips.
But the dreams came anyway. Nightmares of Mia’s head on a marble pedestal, her dark hair combed out, white silk spread underneath. A dark door covered in frost, a delicate snowflake with a scrolling S under its handle, and something terrible waiting behind it. My mother telling me I have to call her back, because Kezelda’s familiar—a jackalope named Amy—is worried about me. My father at the LAX airport, demanding to know where I’ve been for three days—not noticing that standing in line at the taxi stand behind him are all green-skinned witches. And then my alarm, on my nightstand at home, ringing shrilly to tell me that it’s time for school, spring break is over, Lena’s dead, it’s all my fault, and I can’t even tell my mother what happened—
When I opened my eyes, the alarm continued across the dark beach—except it wasn’t an alarm. It was Chatty’s whistle. It cut off mid-blast. A Fey in glossy green armor plucked it out of her mouth.
“Turnleaf, did you miss us?” A Fey kid sat on Chase’s chest. Moonlight gleamed on his breastplate, Chase’s bulging eyes, and the dagger he held to my friend’s throat.
swiped at the Fey kid with my left hand. He tumbled into the air like a bug I’d flicked off my arm.
I reached beside me, where I’d left my sword the night before, and my hand closed on only sand. Chase and I both sprang to our feet before the Fey kid could stretch out his wings and right himself.
But another Fey knight had my weapon, and three more had pinned Ben, Chatty, and Mia. Two held Kenneth, who cursed and thrashed. Three more Fey knights were waiting to pounce. The Fey version of a Viking longship had been dragged ashore, its golden sail hanging loose, billowing in the breeze, the sun just peeking over the water behind it. That was how the Fey had reached us, but it didn’t explain why they were here and holding us hostage. They couldn’t wait a couple more hours to see us?
The Fey kid glanced at the others hurriedly, clearly making sure the knights hadn’t noticed I had hit him. “You’re no longer welcome here.”
Chase swept a bow, unexpectedly graceful. He’d probably learned it via the Iron Hemlock method. “Prince Fael. I’ve come on Canon business. We were just on our way to see you.”
The breeze drew sudden goose bumps on my skin.
The Unseelie prince had come in person just to mess with some EASers? I scanned the Fey knights, trying to figure out which one was royal.
The Fey boy tut-tutted. “You know as well as we do that your Director has only negotiated for three at a time. You have three persons over that allotment.”
The kid was Fael? He didn’t look any older than Kenneth.
“And our quests have run into very bad luck on Atlantis recently.” Chase’s face was blank in the gray light. “The Canon thought it best to send more Companions this time. We planned to arrive this morning at the Unseelie Court for approval of our number as the treaty requires.”
“Your Director negotiated for three sunrises, Turnleaf,” Prince Fael said, not even trying to keep the glee out of his voice. “You’re about two minutes too late.”
No way. Using fancy language against us was so nitpicky.
Chase’s face didn’t change, but his body flinched. So, it was true, and he didn’t know how to get us out of it.
“I would love to kill you for the transgression, but I believe the punishment your Director approved was seven years’ imprisonment,” continued the Unseelie prince.
Seven years? We didn’t even have seven days before the ointment ran out.
We were only a tiny bit behind schedule. If only we hadn’t gotten stuck fighting the witch trees yesterday, or gotten separated crossing the troll’s bridge—
Oh.
It was all my fault. The questers would have reached the court in plenty of time if I hadn’t kept screwing up.
“What’s going on?” Ben asked, and I remembered he didn’t have a gumdrop translator. The other questers didn’t have any idea what Chase and Fael were saying and I didn’t want to be the one who had to break it to them. “Is Chase using his favor to ask where the spring is?”
I shook my head. Never mind getting permission for a six-person quest. Now Chase needed to use that favor just to keep us out of prison.
“I apologize, Prince. I meant to ask—how is His Royal Majesty, your father? I think he would agree that a little extra time isn’t worth seven years of imprisonment.” Chase still sounded polite, so maybe most people would’ve missed it. But I’d heard it long enough to know: Smugness crept into Chase’s voice. “We were always fond of each other. I’m sure that the king and I would have a great deal to catch up on.”
The prince’s face darkened. He obviously didn’t feel like letting Chase blackmail him first thing in the morning. “You presume too much upon us, Turnleaf. You have betrayed your heritage, and now you seek to ingratiate yourself with our king, our loving father. How like you, Turnleaf, to show such spine here, the land where our ancestors’ skeletons are buried, but we have a bone to pick with you.”
“If you’ll just give us—” Chase started, but then he went rigid.
“We know why you have turned your back on us and all that the
Fey have offered you,” spat the prince. He was doing something to Chase to keep him from negotiating anymore. “After all, who would choose to be a substandard Fey when he could pass himself off as an extraordinary human?”
Sweat gathered at Chase’s temples, both fists clenched. I had to do something.
He’ll fall under enchantment, Rapunzel had said. You’ll know when. Skin-to-skin contact is best.
I grabbed Chase’s elbow.
Suddenly, a closet was cast over me like a nightmare, or an ancient memory. The spell had spread to me.
No, not a closet. I recognized that smell—like earth and rot and chalk. I was in a crypt. Shelves rose up all around me, and each one housed a skeleton, the bones of its arms bleached white and crossed over its rib cage.
I couldn’t even feel the sand under my feet. The enchantment was so strong, even spreading secondhand.
Panic thrummed in my chest. I couldn’t stop myself from grabbing the silver grate on the door and rattling it so hard that chalky dust rained down from the shelves all around me.
But the fear felt distant. It came from Chase.
They were fairy bones. I noticed that with the detached part of my brain. You could tell, because they had spokes poking out of their shoulder blades where their wings were supposed to go. Lena had shown me that during her Tale—when we’d gotten stuck in a giant’s bread box, right after Chase had freaked out.
I got locked in a tomb for three days, Chase had said then. You’d be scarred too.
Now Chase couldn’t even talk about bones without shuddering. Fael had caused that—a teenage fairy prince terrorizing a five-year-old.
“Stop it, you petty—” I shouted, but someone shook me before I could finish telling Fael what a bully he was.
Then the vision vanished. I knew that Chase was out of the crypt too, because he was staring at me, his hand on my shoulder.
Great. I’d forgotten Fey Etiquette 101 and almost insulted the Unseelie prince.
