Of Enemies and Endings

by Shelby Bach

  Goblins. Ranks upon ranks of the creepily skinny creatures marched down the driveway. We had just enough light to spot batlike ears, bald heads, and sneers. At least a hundred and fifty of them.

  Two desires ripped through me: One was to make a break for the Door Trek door that would take us back to EAS, to safety. The other was to sprint toward the goblins, sword raised, to throw myself at their ranks and take down as many as possible. I probably wouldn’t survive, but I might distract the Snow Queen’s forces long enough to let everyone else reach the Door Trek door. I wanted to do both things so badly I couldn’t think of anything else. So I just froze.

  Melodie rubbed Lena’s arm soothingly. “Mistress, what is it? This isn’t like you.”

  It wasn’t like any of us. We didn’t lose our heads in battle. We’d trained for this.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said. “We shouldn’t be this scared.”

  “I’m going to protect my family,” I heard Mr. Zipes yell. And then suddenly he was running down the house steps, toward the goblins.

  “Come back!” Mrs. Zipes rushed down the driveway, intent on stopping her husband.

  It was like they had both become too emotional to think clearly.

  “Mom! Dad!” Conner started after them, and Kyle and Kevin raised their spears, ready to follow.

  “Wait.” Hansel had joined us. He must have been trying to stop Mr. Zipes, because even though our enemies hadn’t reached us yet, he already looked like he’d been in a fight, torn clothes and a swollen lip. “The goblins are using their magic against us.”

  Right. I had dealt with this before. Goblins have a special brand of magic: They can learn your deepest desires and turn those desires against you. They can manipulate you to feel the way they want you to feel—until you make the decision they want you to make.

  That magic must have hit Mr. and Mrs. Zipes first, sending them both sprinting down the driveway, exactly where the goblins wanted them. A swarm broke away from the ranks and dashed forward, in full-on capture mode.

  “Well,” Paul said drily, “they locked onto my desire to not die pretty strongly.”

  “Take a second,” Hansel said. “Calm down. You’re useless if the goblins are controlling you.”

  Lena pulled out her retractable spear and dropped it, sobbing so hard she couldn’t see where it landed. I’m not even sure she noticed her harp yanking on her sleeve.

  “Mistress, these are just foot soldiers,” Melodie said. “They don’t have the control the goblin priestesses have. They’re exaggerating all your desires, not just the one where you want to save yourself.”

  Melodie was right. We could still choose which feeling got amplified.

  “Focus on saving them,” I told Conner, who looked like he might faint. I turned to the rest of the grade. “Focus on helping the triplets and their family.” That was what we all wanted. That was what we’d spent hours waiting to do in the first place.

  Slowly, Lena stood tall. She wiped the tears off her cheeks and opened her retractable staff to its full length. The stepsisters’ eyes cleared. The spearmen fell into line, and the triplets glanced at Hansel for orders.

  “We need one team here, defending the Door Trek door. Our exit is useless if their forces cut us off,” Hansel said. “Another team will go rescue the Zipes before the goblins can get them back to whatever portal they came through. Rory and I will deal with the giants.”

  Giants? As in more than one?

  I whirled around.

  Jimmy’s wife, Matilda, stood in front of the garage. She tugged her chain-mail tunic into place and winced like it pinched her. It probably did. It was made of refrigerator doors and steel cables.

  In her huge hands, she wrung something green-gold and floppy, like a huge glittery handkerchief. Then she thrust it away from her and shouted in Fey, “Give us ice, let it rain, turn slick and white this terrain.”

  I knew a spell when I heard one. The thing in Matilda’s hands disintegrated.

  She’d been carrying a whole dragon skin. I didn’t want to think about how they’d peeled it off a Draconus melodius so that Matilda could use its scales. “How many giant magicians are there?” I asked Lena.

  “Right now?” The wind picked up and ripped Lena’s voice away. She had to shout so I could hear her. “Only one!”

  And she was my opponent. Lucky me. Hopefully, Matilda hadn’t brought any more dragon skins to the battle.

  The temperature plunged, way too cold for the T-shirts and shorts we wore under our armor. The dark sky spat sleet—just a few tiny stings at first, and then sharp rice-size ice pellets assaulted my whole face. I squinted, trying to see.

  “What is with you guys?” snapped Vicky, shielding her face and sounding a lot more like her usual self. “We get it. She’s the Snow Queen, but I don’t think you like fighting in this stuff any more than we do.”

  “It’s a present,” said Jimmy with a smile. “A gift from Her Majesty to Rory Landon.”

  This was winter. Solange was trying to trigger the first lines of my Tale. My stomach knotted.

  Three goblins had already pinned the triplets’ father. Four more chased Mrs. Zipes.

  “Kyle, Conner, Kevin, Paul, Tina, Lena, and Daisy, you’re the rescue team.” They started running before Hansel finished speaking, so he called after them. “If you can’t fight your way back, hold them off until we get reinforcements! The rest of you, defend the Door Trek door, or the reinforcements can’t reach us.”

  Jimmy had finally caught up. The motion-activated floodlights on the Zipes house burst on and illuminated his green knees. The giant glanced from my group to the kids dashing down the driveway, like he was trying to figure out who to attack first.

  Hansel didn’t give him a chance to decide. He slid his broadsword out of its sheath. The metal shinked as he pulled it free and sleet pinged against the blade. “I’ll handle Jimmy. I want to test out how far we can push the Snow Queen’s protection spell.”

  Jimmy smashed his fist down so hard that the ground shook and Vicky lost her balance. I didn’t see Hansel move out of the way. I only saw the new slice as long as the barn on Jimmy’s arm. The giant stumbled back, cursing.

  I’d heard a rumor once that the Canon had asked Hansel to be their champion before they asked Jack. Now I thought it was probably true.

  Matilda dusted off her hands and put them on her hips. “Well, what are you waiting for, Rachel?”

  I had told Matilda my name was Rachel when I first met her, during Lena’s Tale. She’d known we were Characters, and she still let us inside her house. She’d hidden us in the bread box while her husband and mother-in-law, General Searcaster, ate dinner, and after that, she’d let us go.

  And in exchange, we’d lied to her. We’d broken into her house. We’d stolen from her.

  From Matilda’s perspective, we were the villains, and I didn’t blame her any more than I blamed the Wolfsbane clan.

  The giantess glanced at the Door Trek door behind me. I strongly suspected she had orders to destroy it before more Characters arrived.

  I liked Matilda, but that didn’t mean I was going to let her lay a finger on our way home.

  I yanked all four combs out of my back pocket. I tossed them to Vicky. The comb cage bars rose half a minute later. They met in a peaked roof and sealed together with a clang. Inside, Vicky and Candice notched arrows to their bowstrings, aiming for Matilda’s eyes, the only place where a two-foot-long arrow could do any damage to a four-story-tall giantess.

  I raised my sword and felt its Itari magic flow into me, determined to protect the others.

  “What are you doing, Maddy?” Jimmy said. I remembered how much I hated the way he talked to his wife. “Finish this fast, or there will be more of them.”

  A foot the size of a sailboat swung toward me.

  I was quicker. It was easy to dart to the side, straight to Matilda’s other foot.

  Maybe Chase wasn’t there, but he’d given us his Giant-Slaying 101 semi
nar. You go for the feet. You trip them, wound them, whatever you have to do to get them on the ground, and then . . . well, Matilda wasn’t a pillar. She could be killed.

  I changed my grip and raised my sword like a dagger, preparing to pierce Matilda’s flimsy canvas shoe.

  She noticed. She skipped backward, light on her feet for a giant. I went for her left foot, and she danced past the house. I charged her right Achilles tendon. She slipped out of range again, flattening some shrubs. When I stabbed at her knee, she moved out even further, all the way to the barn. She was drawing me away from all the other fights in the compound. I wondered if she was up to something.

  The answer was definitely.

  She ripped up a cypress tree. Soil showered from the roots onto my head. The tree looked tiny in her hand. But it didn’t feel tiny when Matilda smashed it into me. One branch walloped me in the stomach. A smaller one split my lip open—I was lucky not to lose any teeth. I didn’t realize I’d gone flying until my body crashed into an old storage shed.

  The battle would have been all over for me if the shed’s wood hadn’t been soft and rotting.

  Smart, I thought fuzzily, wiggling my toes to check if any leg bones were broken. She was using a weapon that kept me at a distance—too far away for my sword to reach her. I wondered if she had taken a Character-killing tutorial.

  A shadow flickered above me. Matilda raised her tree again, her mouth grim.

  I dove through the opening. The tree mallet left a car-size crater in the ground.

  Sleet had melted in my hair. A few muddy strands were plastered to my mouth. I shoved them back impatiently. I barely noticed the cold anymore.

  “Her Majesty was right.” Matilda picked a wooden shutter out of her tree-mallet’s branches and flicked it at me. I dodged it easily. “You are hard to kill, like a cockroach.”

  I couldn’t see any trace of the woman who had been so nervous about fixing dinner for her mother-in-law, who had tried so hard to please the cranky, demanding Searcasters. It had been stupid to think about her that way. We were just two warriors meeting on the battlefield, and one of us had more battle experience.

  She couldn’t jump away as easily out here. All these trees would trip her.

  I sprang forward and stabbed down at her left foot. She lifted it out of range hurriedly, her eyes on my sword. She didn’t see me draw my left arm back and slam my fist into her leg.

  The ring of the West Wing could destroy tree trunks and send wolves flying thirty feet back. It could easily break a giant’s ankle.

  Matilda bellowed and toppled. She threw one arm out to break her fall. The other arm curled around her stomach, and then the rest of her hit the ground, crushing a dozen trees and splattering me with mud.

  I sprinted up the length of her body and stopped near her head, beside her exposed neck. A human-size blade can’t behead a giant, but Chase had taught me where the arteries were. I’d only killed wolves before. This blow would flood the ground with red.

  “Please.” Even her whisper was frantic. She couldn’t see me. I was too close, tucked right under her chin, but I’m sure she could feel the prick of my sword.

  I wished I hadn’t seen her arm go instinctively to her middle.

  Brie had fallen just like that a week before Dani was born. We’d been walking home from dinner, and she’d tripped over a crack in the pavement. She’d gotten a huge bruise down the left side of her face, because both arms had wrapped around her belly, protecting my little sister.

  I backed away, careful to keep my weapon poised under her chin. I had to see the giantess’s face. “Matilda, are you pregnant?”

  Her bravery crumpled. Gallon-size tears dribbled from her eyes, and steam rose as they hit the sleet-covered ground.

  “Jimmy doesn’t know,” she whispered.

  No.

  She was lying. She had to be. It had to be a trick.

  But sobs choked the giantess’s throat. I was so close. The sound thundered in my ears. She wasn’t afraid for herself.

  If I still felt bad about the wolves, murdering Matilda would haunt me forever.

  I sighed. At least no one else was around to see me do something so insanely stupid in the middle of a war.

  I stepped back, resting the flat of my blade against my shoulder. “Go home. Take your husband with you. But I will kill you if you hurt any of my friends on your way out.”

  She rolled up onto her hands and knees. Her broken ankle wouldn’t let her stand, so she began to crawl away, snapping up trees and scooping great grooves out of the soil. She hurried, obviously terrified I would change my mind.

  Somewhere to my right, Lena screamed. I had better things to do than bully an injured giantess.

  I sprinted through the woods and up the next rise, following the sounds of the skirmish. Metal clanged on metal. Bowstrings twanged. Goblins bellowed their battle cries, and the triplets hollered right back.

  The other EASers had clustered around another old, ramshackle storage shed. Tina and Daisy stood on both sides of the shed’s open door, their bows aimed at the goblins. Lena had taken up a position right in front of them. Blood oozed from a slice on her shoulder and dripped down her elbow, but besides that, she seemed to have the situation under control. She blocked the serrated sword of the goblin on the left and smashed the butt of her staff into the temple of the one on her right.

  Our spear squadron had taken on the troop of goblins a hundred feet away. In the middle of the skirmish, Mr. and Mrs. Zipes struggled against the goblins holding them, but they couldn’t get free. We were too outnumbered.

  Well, I could help there.

  I swerved around the shed and headed over to back up the spearmen. The goblins must have seen me.

  An old one stepped up front. I recognized him and his rusty circlet from the Snow Queen’s palace. He was King Licivvil. He pulled a dagger from his waist and placed it right over Mrs. Zipes’s heart. She went still. We all went still, but it wasn’t just the threat that stopped me in my tracks. It was the calm deliberate way he did it, and the confident patient way he spoke. For a second, it was so quiet that the only sound was the shouts and thumps of Jimmy and Hansel’s battle drifting through the trees. Then the goblin king said, “You’re going to let us pass.”

  “After you let them go. According to my mirror, this is your portal home,” said Lena. So that was why she and the archers were guarding the shed. She must have used the M3’s scrying function. “I’ll destroy it if you hurt her. You’ll be stuck here when our reinforcements arrive.”

  King Licivvil actually smirked. “This isn’t one of your temporary-transport spells. It’s much harder to destroy a portal. You’ll have to bring down the whole building to break the magic. All I need is one stab.” He twirled the blade.

  “You sure about that?” Lena said. “Up, ax! Chop!”

  Something flew out of her carryall and smashed against the doorway behind the archers. The shabby building couldn’t take it. The whole structure shuddered. Dust shivered from the beams.

  “What is that?” asked the goblin king.

  It was a new invention, an ax, flashing in the sun and chopping away at the old boards. Chunks of wood rained down, and all the goblins started shouting at once, mostly at their king, like he should do something.

  Lena stepped closer to Tina and whispered something. Tina nodded.

  King Licivvil raised the dagger and stepped away from Mr. Zipes. “All right, all right.”

  Right then, emotion rose in a wave, and those same two desires tore my concentration apart: I could run back to safety at EAS; it would be so easy, if I didn’t have to worry about anything but myself. Or I could turn myself over to King Licivvil in exchange for Mr. and Mrs. Zipes. I could let him have the glory of taking me to the Snow Queen. At least then it would all be over.

  I shouldn’t have thought that last part. I hadn’t realized that I wanted it all to end so badly, not until my stomach lurched with excitement. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to
ride out the goblin magic.

  I heard the arrow thwack before I saw it sticking out of King Licivvil’s neck. He fell backward. Spears flew from the triplets and Paul Stockton, pinning the goblins who held Mr. Zipes. Tina loosed an arrow. It hit the goblin restraining Mrs. Zipes in the heart.

  Totally disorganized without their leader, the rest of the goblins retreated, leaving us. I stared shakily at the blood staining the sleet. The Searcasters’ blood was green, and trolls’ blood was orange. I hadn’t expected goblin blood to be the exact same shade as a human’s.

  I hadn’t expected the others not to need me.

  Mrs. Zipes scrambled toward her husband and kissed him, which made the triplets groan. Daisy was congratulating Tina on her shot, and Lena was calling her axes off.

  My friends were acting like we’d already won, and I still couldn’t catch my breath. Something terrible would happen. Terrible things always happened.

  I wondered what Matilda was doing. I wondered why the crashing sounds from Hansel and Jimmy’s fight had stopped. I sprinted back to the main house. “We need to get to the Door Trek door!”

  Then I came out of the trees and saw them.

  The two giants stood between the house and the barn. Jimmy had thrust a hand high in the air. Matilda balanced on one foot, trying to reach the white cuff on her husband’s wrist. The snowflake charm dangling from it was as big as a shield.

  Our reinforcements had crowded around them. The comb cage had been taken down, and two hundred high-school fighters lined up in front of the portal. Their ranks bristled with raised swords, spears, and bows, but they didn’t attack.

  A second later, I spotted the reason.

  Our sword master was in Jimmy’s other fist. Blood poured from a cut over his eye, down his cheek and off his jaw, and he squirmed in the giant’s grip, trying to fight fingers longer than he was tall.

  “Hansel!” I charged at the giants, furious at our fighters for not helping him. He didn’t even have his broadsword.

  Hansel looked straight at me. He threw a hand up, telling me to stop.

  So he had a plan. Maybe he had a knife in his boot. Maybe he wanted to use it to prick Jimmy and get him to loosen his grip. Maybe he thought it was too embarrassing to let his students rescue him, especially when so many of us were here.