Deadly Pink

by Vivian Vande Velde

  With no idea what the king's point was, I touched one of the coins to acknowledge possession of it. “Sure. Why not?” I slid the coin toward him.

  He took the coin and spun the wheel.

  click click click click click

  Then slower.

  click click click

  Then slower.

  click click

  Then one final click.

  The wheel had stopped at 87.

  Well, at least that was different.

  I had no idea what it meant, but it was different.

  “Not a bad score,” King Rasmussem said. “Not as high as us make-believe people. But not bad.”

  “So...?” I asked. His booth consisted of the wheel and the counter to separate us from the wheel. There were no numbers on the counter, so we weren't betting on what would come up, and there were no shelves with prizes—neither exorbitant nor conventional. Had I just won eighty-seven pieces of our gold back? But he hadn't given any coins to the gypsy girl or the pig man when he'd spun for them. “What do I win?”

  The king and the gypsies exchanged a bemused look over that. “You won an eighty-seven,” the king said.

  Before I could say, “Wow! That IS exciting!” I became aware that Emily was standing directly behind me. She had pulled herself up to see what was going on as the wheel spun.

  Now she put her hand over the remaining coin. “Since you took all of mine, I should keep this,” she said. “Spend it on something useful.” Same thought I had had. Which maybe showed that we were more alike than I thought. Or maybe it just showed that this interminable game had made us both cranky.

  In any case, King Rasmussem shrugged.

  Emily lifted her hand off the coin, hesitated a second, then pushed it forward with the heel of her palm. She kept both her hands on the counter—I suspected that was to keep herself steady.

  Once more the king spun the wheel.

  It landed at 22.

  Suddenly, without any idea what was going on, I had a very bad feeling about this.

  “Oooo,” the king said, sounding impressed, but certainly not in a good way. Sounding like when someone says “Oooo, so how long did your parents ground you for?” or “Oooo, that burn looks as though it hurts,” or “Oooo, that girl in the movie should definitely not go to investigate the noise in the basement.”

  “Oooo,” the other two gypsies echoed.

  “That is low,” the king told us. His voice gave away that he was tickled to be the bearer of unfortunate news.

  “Twenty-two what?” I demanded.

  “Twenty-two on the life scale,” King Rasmussem said. He leaned forward and spoke to Emily in a loud whisper. “Better put your life in order, Emily Pizzelli. There isn't time for much else.”

  Chapter 19

  By Royal Decree

  I PURPOSELY AVOIDED looking at Emily's face.

  "See?" I said to King Rasmussem, still expecting—I have no idea why—to find sense in this game. “We need to get out of here. We don't have time to play anymore. Emily is sorry she cheated—tell him you're sorry, Emily.”

  I finally did steal a glance at her, and saw that her face was gray, and she was shaking. I'm guessing the same was probably true for me. She'd spun 22 out of 100. How much time did that translate to?

  Barely above a whisper, Emily agreed, “I am sorry,” as I continued, “We're both sorry. And if you want, we can come back later, or we can promise never to come back—whichever you prefer. Because, really, you have been wronged here, there's no denying that. It's just that now is not a good time. Which your wheel has just verified.” My babbling, and I admit I was babbling, petered out. It wasn't that the king wasn't reacting—he was reacting with boredom.

  Flatly, he said, “Huzzah,” which is Ren-Faire-speak for “Hurray.” As with hurray, how you say it can be a good indication of your sincerity level. I'd guess the king's sincerity hovered somewhere around ... NOT.

  He said, “So you admit your guilt?”

  “Yes,” Emily whispered.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The king gave me a long, level look. “You just denied being a cheater not two minutes ago.”

  “But you explained it to me,” I said, eager to be forgiven. “Now I see that I am guilty. Because I knew she had modified the code so she could have more money and wishes, and yet I accepted money from her. I'm an accomplice after the fact. A guilty cheater accomplice, that's me.”

  The king turned back to Emily. “And you're remorseful over this cheating?”

  “Yes,” Emily said.

  “Definitely remorseful,” I agreed.

  “And you're willing to prove this?”

  Emily and I exchanged a worried look.

  “Prove?” Emily repeated.

  “What do you mean, prove?” I asked. I glanced at gypsy girl and pig man and didn't see anything reassuring in their faces.

  “You will work to accomplish the task I give you, even though I have removed the code you wrote, the code that made things easier?”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Isn't that what you said before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what have you changed now that Emily and I have confessed and apologized?”

  “Nothing.”

  Some negotiation. “So what,” I asked, trying not to let my anger show, “did apologizing accomplish?”

  King Rasmussem considered. “Did it make you feel better?” he suggested.

  I was tempted to say no, but figured that couldn't improve the situation and might conceivably make things worse, because then the king would accuse me of being a guilty cheater liar. Grudgingly, I admitted, “Yes,” and dug my elbow into Emily's side.

  “Yes,” she echoed, playing along.

  “Huzzah,” the king said—also playing along, because we all knew, he didn't believe us for a second.

  Her voice raspy, Emily asked, “What, exactly, is the task you're setting for us?”

  “Return your ill-gotten gains to the sprites.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Miss Emily set the golden butterflies to come every five minutes rather than once an hour. She set the flowers in the flower-match garden game to grow back as soon as they were cut off rather than the next day. She set the prices of the articles she wanted to buy from the sprites too low, and made the market dwarves accept the ridiculously high prices of the articles she wanted to sell. She set the arcade games to be won too easily, and the prizes to be too grand. She—”

  “Yes, yes,” Emily said. Despite her general fogginess, despite her obvious fear, more than anything she sounded out of patience. “I cheated. I admitted that.”

  “By my calculation, you have accrued 87,853 more gold coins than even the most diligent and attentive player could have. And you”—he turned to me—“owe the sprites 7 coins.”

  Had I missed something?

  “Excuse me?”

  “Seven.” The king spun the wheel and it landed on 7.

  “Huzzah,” the gypsy girl and the pig man said.

  “Yeah, but...” Well, I certainly shouldn't be putting ideas in anybody's head—but how had he calculated seven when I'd taken that chest of jewelry and gems from Emily's pavilion and used that to bargain with the sprites?

  The king gave his zero-degree-Fahrenheit smile. “You're thinking about that money you stole from your sister.”

  Now Emily was looking at me, too. “You did what?”

  “Well...” I said.

  “That wasn't cheating,” the king said. “That was gamesmanship. And the trades you made with the sprites—you were working with the game as your sister had changed it.”

  Well, as long as he was cutting me so much slack ... I asked, “So which seven coins are you counting against me?”

  “The seven you asked for and received right here in front of me. That was knowing receipt of stolen goods.”

  “Okay,” I said. Not that it made any difference. Getting seven coins was accomplishable; ei
ghty-seven-thousand-whatever was not. But it wasn't like I was going to abandon Emily.

  Emily asked, “Where are we going to get eighty-eight thousand coins?”

  “Don't exaggerate,” the king said. “It's 87,853.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Well, let's see. There's always a golden butterfly when you first arrive, and since I just reset the game for the two of you...”

  I snatched at the glittery little thing that I suddenly realized was hovering around my shoulder. Emily, with sluggish reactions, missed the one that alighted on the counter. It rose back up into the air—and the gypsy girl caught it.

  “Hey!” Emily protested.

  “You should have been quicker,” the girl told her.

  “Don't worry,” the king said. “Another pair will come by in fifty-nine and a half minutes.”

  “It'll take years to earn enough money two butterflies at a time,” I said.

  King Rasmussem looked at me as though I had spaghetti coming out my nose. “What are you thinking?” he asked, as though I'd said I wanted to play for years. “Your sister doesn't have years.”

  What I was thinking involved my hands, his throat, and squeezing, but I didn't think this was a good thought to share.

  “Do you have any suggestions?” I asked as pleasantly as I could.

  As though it were a big revelation, he recommended, “Get more coins faster.”

  The pleasantness got even more strained as my favorite mental image grew more vivid. I repeated, “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Well, let's see...” The king paused as though considering. “Who has a lot of gold coins?”

  I assumed it was a rhetorical question, but the gypsy girl said, “The sprites.”

  Pig man, with his newfound ability to speak English, added, “Except they've run out because of”—he nodded toward Emily, as though she and I weren't standing right there watching and listening—“you-know-who.”

  “Hmmm,” the king said, still playing at being the thoughtful helper.

  “Dragons,” Emily blurted out, surprising me because I'd written her off as being no help at all. “Dragons always have gold.”

  “Huzzah,” the gypsies cheered.

  Chapter 20

  Go Back to “Go”

  DRAGONS?” I repeated. “Where are there dragons? Present company excepted, of course, seeing as we've both lost our magical ability...” Using the word lost was a politeness on my part, since I felt stolen away was more strictly accurate.

  The king shrugged expansively.

  “Mountains,” Emily said. She sighed. “Back where we came from. I've seen them swooping over the mountain peaks.”

  “Wonderful,” I muttered. It wasn't that our trip away from the mountains had been useless, since we hadn't had all the information we needed when we'd been back there. But it had taken us all day to get this far—and that had been flying. “Any advice on how to get there?” I asked.

  Again the king shrugged, with a helpless smile. It was as though the English language had suddenly dribbled out of his brain—either that or his IQ had dropped forty points.

  “Anyone?”

  Gypsy girl and pig man followed the king's lead and gave their own shrugs.

  “There's no way,” Emily told me. “It can't be done. I'll help you gather those seven coins you need, and then you can go home.”

  “Not without you,” I told her. I was remembering when I'd been seven years old and I was afraid of some of the older kids at the school bus stop. Dad tried to convince me I could ignore them, and Mom offered to talk to their mothers. Emily had made a game of it. We were superheroes, with powers that changed at our whim. We needed to maintain our secret identities, which those middle schoolers were too dumb to see through. But if we needed to, we could always use our superpowers. Once I was no longer afraid, the middle schoolers lost interest.

  Fortified by this memory, I repeated more forcefully, “I'm not leaving without you.”

  “We'll see,” Emily said.

  She'd given up.

  That We'll see was a delaying trick our mother sometimes used, and that thought brought Mom to mind—Mom waiting at Rasmussem, watching those readouts, growing more anxious by the moment. She'd been like two and a half seconds from a meltdown when we'd been assuring her that both Emily and I could get out of the game any time we wanted to.

  “I have a plan,” I told Emily.

  She didn't look hopeful. She didn't even look particularly interested. But she asked, “What?”

  “I'll tell you as we walk back to your place,” I said, unwilling to talk in front of King Rasmussem.

  Which made little if any sense, considering that the entire game was going on in my head, and he was in there, too.

  But I didn't want to look at his smug face anymore.

  “Come on.” I pulled on Emily's arm, and she shuffled along beside me. Past the boat ride, past the petting zoo, past the spot where I'd tied up the mime. (Either he'd been reset, too, when the king reinstated the original code, or someone had rescued him, because he was gone.) Cirque du Soleil lady was still doing her thing with the scarves. The merry-go-round was playing a jaunty carnival tune and had turned its lights on, because the sun was only a handspan or two above the horizon. At this point, I felt the lights gave the arcade a look that wasn't so much festive as sinister.

  Of course Emily's horses had disappeared just as surely as her gold and her magic had. So that's how we came to be walking through the forest, heading toward her house. Along the way we each captured two more butterflies, which was one of those good news/bad news things: good, because we could use all the gold coins we could get; bad, because that goes to show what incredibly slow progress we were making, with Emily needing to sit down frequently. The sky still had a bit of pink when we got to the first clearing, which was just a clearing: no sign of lute-guy, since he had been conjured up by Emily. By the time we got to the second clearing, night had fallen.

  There was a full moon—according to Emily, there was a full moon every night—and that gave enough light to show that the forest ended at an expanse of lawn. Only a few wildflowers dotted the grass—no garden in this new scaled-down version of the game, so no flower-matching game. No gazebo. The topiary maze was still there, since that's where the sprites' fountain was, but the king had warned us that the sprites wouldn't come back till we went to their homeland with the gold we owed them. Probably all for the best. I don't think I was mentally up to the challenge of dealing with them. And Emily's house? Her fine Victorian mansion had returned to its default setting, no upgrades, just a plain little cobblestone cottage with a thatched roof. We had gone back to basics. It had one door, one window. The flower box beneath the window was empty.

  Inside the cottage, the floor was concrete, like a garage. One big room. The stones the place was constructed with made bare walls, the same inside as out. A toilet and sink were set off in the corner behind a wooden partition. There were two sleeping bags on the floor, one for each of us. To add insult to injury, they were that ugly green of surplus army equipment.

  “See?” Emily said. “I hate entry-level games.”

  Certainly not rich accommodations, but we weren't planning on spending much time here. As I had explained to Emily while we walked, we had to get a dragon to come to us, since there was no way we could reach the mountains where they made their dens, not without magic, not in the time Emily had left.

  “It's not going to work,” Emily had said.

  I had gone to that old family fallback position of “We'll see,” because I didn't want to argue with her. I was getting tired of her being tired, and of me having to be the responsible one. When was it going to be my turn to get to be tired? A cranky little part of my brain kept repeating that we were in this bad situation because of Emily, and it was hard not to let my irritation spill over.

  The last thing I needed was Emily feeling sorry for herself. It infringed on my feeling sorry for myself.

&nb
sp; I opened the food cupboard and saw that the entire stock of edibles consisted of bottled water and cans of Spam. We should have bought some of that fried dough and ice cream at the arcade before our money had been magicked away.

  At least this time I had no trouble finding the mail slot, which was what we had come back for. It was in the wall beneath the window, giving the appearance that any letters we wrote would drop directly into the empty flower box. Hopefully, even in the no-frills version of the game, there was mail pickup. Next to the slot was a little shelf that held several sheets of paper and a quill pen. These were not as fine as the parchment and the ostrich-plume pen from Emily's loll-top desk, but—as with the Spam—were better than nothing.

  There was no place to sit. And there were no lamps. So I needed to work standing at the window, by the moonlight. Thank goodness for that full moon every night. I picked up the pen.

  “Can't we rest just a little?” Emily begged from where she was sitting on one of the sleeping bags.

  Don't whine, I wanted to snap at her. Instead, I told her, “You can rest while I compose the letter.”

  “'kay,” she said. “Grace?”

  “What?”

  Maybe I wasn't doing as great a job hiding my resentment as I thought, because she said, “I'm so sorry I got you into this.”

  “It's okay,” I said, suddenly feeling that it was, in the face of her remorse. What kind of cold and insensitive sister was I? “I'm not leaving you, Emily.”

  “I won't hold you to that.” She closed her eyes, letting her chin drop to her chest, not even taking the time to lie down.

  This had to work.

  I picked up the pen and wrote: