by Shelby Bach
“You’re right, Brie,” said Dad’s image to my right. “Rory didn’t turn out like I hoped. But we can have other kids.”
One sob escaped before I could slap a hand over my mouth, and the noise echoed all around me.
“Was that you?” The idea obviously freaked Chase out more than the skeleton.
“What’s wrong? What did you see?” Lena asked.
“It’s okay.” A hiccup-y sob crept into the middle of the sentence. My eyes were full of tears. I rubbed them away quickly and strode forward, hugging my bloody left hand to my chest so I wouldn’t accidentally break anything else.
I’d suspected that Dad didn’t need me in his life—hadn’t wanted me for a while now.
“Rory, talk to us,” Chase said.
If I couldn’t talk without crying, I wouldn’t talk at all. I had to find the stupid scepter.
Ahead and to the right I spotted the long, elf-size tables, the furnaces full of fire salamanders, the golden harp gleaming on top of Lena’s workstation, and my friend bent over a book.
“Oh, my gumdrops,” Lena breathed.
“Don’t gumdrops now. Do something,” Chase snapped. “I’m in manacles, so it’ll have to be you.”
“Rory, look at us. Take the mirror out of your pocket!”
But her voice blended with the other Lena’s. “I know Rory’s not as smart as me. But sometimes I wish she was just a little quicker. I mean, it just gets so tedious having to explain things all the time. Can’t she do her own research?”
No wonder my dad hadn’t stuck up for me, didn’t want me—I was worse than useless.
I stopped, just for a second. I couldn’t help it.
No. These were just words. Was this really worse than fifty armed trolls? What was the point of crying?
My steps were slow, but at least my legs moved when I told them to.
Walking out of earshot of the Lena-in-the-mirror scene, I pulled the M3 out of my pocket. I licked my lips and tasted tears.
Chase looked horrified. If he’d been on the fence about whether or not he should be my friend, seeing me cry was definitely making the choice easier.
“Lena?” I don’t know what I would have said or asked, but when her image replaced Chase’s, I saw the pillow behind her—recognized the gilded woodwork on the sky blue wall behind her. “Are you in bed?”
“You’re crying,” Lena said, pulling the M3 closer. “You have to tell us what’s wrong.”
“Lena, you’re in the infirmary,” I said.
She couldn’t deny it. Melodie leaned toward the M3, enthusiastically nodding her golden head.
“Yeah,” Lena said with a small cough, clearly not happy about it. “But I’ve got everything I need to help you here. Look.”
She reached toward the M3. Her palms filled the screen for an instant, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. Dark gray lines crept up her hands. The final stages of cockatrice poisoning. Pretty soon she would be as bad off as Rumpelstiltskin.
Lena tilted the M3 toward her table. The golden harp stood above books, dragon scales, various herbs, and the bowl of water that held the scrying spell.
Melodie wrung her hands. “Hi.”
If I stayed here crying, wasting time figuring this out, we would run out of time.
I didn’t care what Lena had said about me. She didn’t deserve to die.
“Lena, I need you to draw a map of the maze and mark the fastest way to the center. Then I need you to leave it flat on top of the mirror.” I knew I’d said the right thing when Melodie smiled.
Lena’s chin jutted out. “But I can—”
“I hear stuff that you guys can’t. I need to plug up my ears.” I drew my sword, sliced my shirt, and ripped off a strip. I cut away two bits for my ears and used the rest of it to bind up my bleeding left hand. “I won’t be able to hear you anymore when you give me directions.”
Her face fell. She reached over to her nightstand for a pen and paper.
I’d hurt her feelings, and a part of me—the part of me furious at her for calling me stupid when I was trying so hard to save her—was kind of glad. I was a terrible person.
Chase came back, scowling. “You won’t be able to hear anything else, either. The troll king could ambush you.”
I couldn’t meet his eyes right then, so I concentrated on tying the bandage one-handed. “This is the only way. You need to sign off too, Chase. If you keep talking, you’ll cut in on Lena’s signal, and I won’t be able to see the map.” And then he could hang out with his new friends as much as he wanted.
Chase’s face closed. “Okay. Mirror, mirror, go to sleep, they’ll leave a message after the beep.” His image disappeared.
Lena didn’t look too happy either as she sketched. It took her an excessively long time and I nearly had second thoughts—the maze must have been bigger than I thought. Then she finally finished her drawing and turned it facedown on top of the mirror.
“We’ll be back soon, Lena.” But if she said anything else, I didn’t hear it. I’d already stuffed the torn scraps of shirt in my ears.
Checking the map, I found the next turn and followed it. I wasn’t exactly surprised to see a scene of Lena and Melodie in the ballroom infirmary up on my right, but I definitely didn’t want to hear what Lena had to say about me now. I clapped my hands over my ears, humming as I ran past.
A big improvement.
• • •
Even with Lena’s map, I hit about a thousand dead ends. The mirrors were too confusing. I only saw a few more scenes—one of Chase on a dark beach, and another of my dad at his car, and one of Rapunzel speaking to someone through an M3, but I didn’t stop to torture myself anymore. I didn’t know how long the maze took. The mirror vault messed up my sense of time. It felt like only thirty minutes or so, but by the end of the maze, my feet throbbed. My shoulders ached under the straps of my carryall, and my eyelids scraped over my dry eyes every time I blinked. Hours must have gone by.
Finally the path widened and funneled out to a door made of black marble. Four statues stood guard at the columns—the regular kind, not the enchanted kind. They wore golden outfits somewhere between togas and dinner gowns, their shaved heads held high, their ears and their noses sticking out from their skulls in perfect triangles, their skin dusted with gold. They were at least two feet taller than me.
The goblin priestesses. They had to be. But they just seemed so . . . dignified. Most of the goblins we ran into were a lot seedier. These were a whole different kind of intimidating.
And as glad as I was not to see more mirrors, I still drew my sword. With the night I was having, something worse than this vault might be waiting on the other side.
I opened the door.
The closet space inside was empty except for two things—a pedestal and the two-foot-tall silver birch tree sitting on top, glinting in the moonlight.
I picked it up cautiously, expecting a trap, but the scariest thing that happened was me almost dropping the scepter of the Birch clan on my foot. It was a lot heavier than I had expected.
Well. That part was easy.
Touching it, I’d expected to feel triumphant, or at least relieved. Hollowness gnawed at my insides.
We had the Birch scepter, but that only solved one of our problems. We needed to force Fael to tell us where the spring was. We only had three days left to find the spring—not enough time to just go searching.
I lowered the scepter gently to the floor and sheathed my sword.
I pulled the T-shirt bits out of my ears cautiously, but I didn’t hear anything except how hard I was breathing. I slipped the M3 onto the pedestal. “Lena?”
The map disappeared, and then the M3 showed a picture of Lena—not as she was when I’d seen my best friend last, but healthier, happier. Hello! I’m not here right now, but please leave a message and I’ll get back to you via mini magic mirror as soon as I can. Thanks! Bye!
She was either asleep or I’d hurt her feelings so bad she didn’t want to talk to me un
til I had the Water of Life for her.
Easing my carryall over the scepter, I sighed and tried again. “Chase?”
“Rory? RORY?” His eyes were humongous. Sand stuck to half his face.
“It’s okay,” I said, showing him the silver tree inside my carryall. “I got it.”
“You have to put it in his hands. Fael said—” A gauntlet arm reached for Chase, but he wrestled away from it. “He’s taken us to—”
Two more hands came into the picture—with a piece of silk stretched between them—and gagged Chase.
Another mistake. I’d told Fael I would need to be able to reach Chase at any time, but I hadn’t said Chase had to be able to talk back when I spoke to him. I wondered how long it had taken Fael to figure out that little loophole.
“It doesn’t matter.” I reached into my carryall and felt around all the glass bottles until I found the baby food–size jar. “I’ll take Lena’s temporary transport spell back to the beach, give this dumb scepter to Fael, and everyone will be fine.”
But Chase still struggled—while I carefully painted the frame attached to the marble door, when I set the bottle and brush down carefully on the floor stripe, and even while I read the spell from the paper Lena had written out for me.
I didn’t realize what he was so upset about until I stepped through the doorway and onto Atlantis sand. The sky was charcoal, and greenish-gray waves lapped the abandoned beach.
Prince Fael had taken the questers somewhere else.
And by the looks of things, I had less than an hour to find them before the sun rose.
couldn’t believe this night wasn’t over already.
I sighed and rubbed my face, trying to think where they’d go, worrying about how much time I had.
“Prince Fael took them back to the Unseelie Court.”
Hearing the voice, I almost tripped and fell face-first in the sand.
On top of the closest boulder sat a small, hunched old woman, her nut-brown face lined with a thousand wrinkles—the mother of the four winds. Either she was following us around or she felt a little bad for having enchanted me without my permission. In the gloom, I couldn’t quite see her expression. “The Turnleaf told the other Ever Afters that you had made it inside the Hidden Troll Court. The Fey overheard. The Unseelie prince was so looking forward to killing someone that he relocated to his throne room, where you could never reach him before time ran out.”
So Chase’s bragging had given us away. Big surprise there.
“How long before daybreak?” I asked.
“Little more than a half hour,” she replied.
Chase had said we would walk for a while, and then climb some steps, but I was pretty sure he’d said it would take longer than thirty minutes. “And how long does it take to get to the Unseelie Court from here?”
“It depends on how you plan to travel.” That was a hint if I’d ever heard one.
The West Wind was out. He’d said he would need four days to recover from that glass vial.
I only had one other boon left. I stepped onto a flatter bit of sand, trying not to think about what would happen if this didn’t work. I stamped my left foot three times and whispered, “Dapplegrim.”
The beach was still.
I missed Chase, master of the brilliant backup plan.
“Give him a moment,” the mother of the four winds said. “Five minutes is usually standard. You Ever Afters grow more and more impatient with every generation.”
“Sorry.” I rubbed my face again. All the adrenaline from the Hidden Troll Court had worn off long ago, and my thoughts were processing much more slowly than normal. “This isn’t an insult or anything, but why are you here?”
“I owed Rapunzel a boon,” she said.
“She asked you to meet me?” That didn’t make any sense. If Rapunzel knew that Prince Fael would move the questers, she could have told me herself back at EAS. Or through the M3.
“Given a choice,” the winds’ mother said, “I would have repressed the vault’s magic to spare you the blood, tears, and broken glass. The goblin priestesses and their magic are bound to me. What they see, I see.”
My face burned. She must have watched the whole thing. “What stopped you exactly? You thought my day needed to suck a little more?”
“Rapunzel believed you would benefit from the mirror vault,” she replied.
Ugh. Rapunzel was Solange’s sister through and through.
“What did you learn when you faced such doubts, child?” said the mother of the four winds.
I hoped she didn’t expect me to thank her for reducing me to a sobbing bloody mess on the maze floor. “Walking and crying at the same time can end in broken glass.”
The winds’ mother narrowed her eyes in a way that clearly said, I don’t have to help you if you’re going to be a sarcastic little snot. I sighed. “You still need to conquer the Unseelie prince,” she said. “Ask me the question Rapunzel gave you.”
“Um . . .” Despite everything, I thought back. I didn’t want Rapunzel as my enemy. I still wanted to believe she was helping me, but setting me in that maze . . . “She said to ask you what really happened the night Iron Hans escaped.”
“The priestesses’ magic reveals the fears and desires of anyone who passes in front of their mirrors, and the Unseelie prince entered the Unseelie vault the night Iron Hans escaped. We learned three secrets.” The winds’ mother grinned. You could see goblin in her smile.
“Prince Fael stole his father’s key to accomplish a childish prank. He locked a half-Fey child in the tombs of their ancestors,” she continued. She obviously meant Chase. “To taunt the Fey child, the Unseelie prince threw the key away from him, over the wall to the beach below. But the king’s key can open any lock in his court. It must not be misplaced. It must not be missed. When Prince Fael summoned the key back to his side, as only Unseelie royal can do, the key did not come. A chipmunk had found the key, picked it up, and carried it between his teeth down to his master in the dungeon. That is the first secret: Fael gave Iron Hans the key that opens all Unseelie locks, the one that set Iron Hans free.”
Oh. Nice. But I didn’t know what to do with that secret—besides maybe tell Chase.
“Iron Hans went walking—in the small hours before dawn, when fairy revelers are in bed. He searched for his ax. He kept to the shadows. He discovered the Unseelie prince lying asleep and covered Fael’s mouth with his iron hand. ‘Return my ax to me,’ Iron Hans told the sleep-muddled prince, ‘or I will kill you.’ That is the second secret: Prince Fael was the only Fey who saw the prisoner before Iron Hans left the court that night, and Prince Fael raised no alarm.”
I didn’t have time for long-winded stories. The gloom had lightened to gray, a few shades darker than Rapunzel’s hair. The sun was coming up. I glanced past the winds’ mother, searching for a giant horse thundering across the beach. Maybe I should try stamping my foot again.
“The Unseelie prince did not want to die, but he could not give Iron Hans his ax. The war trophy had changed hands many times since Iron Hans had been defeated. The Hidden Court trolls now kept it in their Hall of Fallen Warriors,” continued the winds’ mother. That must have been the name of the room of pretty spears, and bows, and swords. I was still waiting for a point to this story. “Prince Fael pleaded for his life. He would give Iron Hans anything except the ax. He would give him something the Hidden Court trolls might trade for. He would give Iron Hans the scepter of the Birch Clan.”
I snapped to attention. “Wait, Prince Fael gave the scepter to Iron Hans?”
The winds’ mother nodded deeply. “That is the final secret. That night, the Unseelie prince entered the mirror vault just before dawn. Because he is of royal blood, the goblin priestesses could not invoke their magic to stop him, but they could read his fears. The first two secrets, if revealed, might strip the prince of his rank, but to freely give away the scepter of the Birch clan, the symbol of his family’s power . . . Fael would be banished fro
m the Unseelie Court. He would be deemed a Turnleaf, shunned by all Fey.”
This was the blackmail we needed. We could make Fael tell us where we could find the Water of Life. We could make him take us there.
If I could just reach the Unseelie Court before the sun rose, everything might be okay. Everyone might live.
I sneezed unexpectedly, and with a leap of joy I whirled. “Dapplegrim.”
The horse thundered down the beach, flames flickering at the end of his mane. He trotted to a stop directly in front of me, even more massive than I remembered. I sneezed again.
“You know, I find it insulting that you have this response every time we meet,” said the Dapplegrim.
My eyes itched like crazy. “I’ll be out of your hair forever if you drop me off in front of the Unseelie prince before the sun comes up. Can you?”
“Simple,” said the Dapplegrim, with a trace of scorn.
No wonder Atlantis was so dangerous. Everybody who lived here was so touchy.
I turned to the mother of the four winds. “Mind if I borrow your boulder?”
She just smiled. I scrambled up behind her, and the Dapplegrim sidled closer so I could clamber up his back.
“Remember, Rory,” said the mother of the four winds, while I looked for a bit of mane I could hold without crispifying my hand. “Doubts can conquer a person more quickly than an army. If you know yours, you can conquer them instead.”
I couldn’t think as far ahead as conquering. I just wanted to get them out of my brain. I slid a leg over the Dapplegrim’s back. “Was it real?”
“Of course it was real,” said the mother of the four winds. “Check the wound on your hand if you believe you made it all up.”
“No, I mean what everybody said; did they actually—” But I couldn’t finish the question. As soon as my behind settled on the Dapplegrim’s back, he sprang forward.
I decided that I would rather get singed than fall off. I clutched two fistfuls of mane and squeezed my eyes shut against the fiery horsehair flapping in my face. The Dapplegrim galloped so fast that the world slid by in gray. Sea spray filled my mouth as the Dapplegrim splashed through wave after wave. My clothes were soaked in minutes.
