Of Giants and Ice (Ever Afters, The)

by Bach, Shelby

  It was my cue to pick up right where I left off.

  I wanted to do something. To rip my math notebook to shreds, or to burst into tears, or at least to ask Mom what Dad had said. Anything would be better than being trapped like this. It was like their hidden concern pinned me to my seat, but their fake cheer wouldn’t let me talk about it.

  Unfortunately, I knew from experience that my outbursts could upset Mom for days.

  “It was fine,” I said.

  “Did you take any classes?” Mom asked. “Ms. White said there would be a fencing class! I thought you would like that.”

  Memories of the afternoon came rushing back: the dragon’s yellow eyes, the heat of the flames, and the run up a slippery slope of gold coins. I missed the lair. At least there, I had something to fight. “There were swords.”

  But when I remembered swinging the sword and feeling it hit something, the pressure in my chest drained away.

  At least I had done one thing right.

  That is, if I hadn’t gone crazy and imagined the whole thing.

  “Were the other kids mean to you?”

  Who wants to bet we have a screamer? Chase had said. “Not really.”

  “Did you make any friends?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” Lena had risked coming back to a dragon-infested valley to help me.

  Amy sighed. She always got exasperated when Mom beat around the bush. “But the real question is, do you want to go back there tomorrow?”

  She had no idea it was a life-or-death decision.

  Well, I couldn’t tell them now. That was the quickest way to get Mom to call Dad back and accuse him of upsetting me so much that I started making up crazy stories.

  But should I go back?

  It hadn’t exactly been fun, but for a couple hours, I stopped wondering if I was doing the right thing or worrying about what people thought of Maggie Wright and Eric Landon’s only child. If there was even a chance that I could take a break from being the daughter of my famous parents, nothing could keep me from going back.

  “Absolutely,” I said finally.

  Mom and Amy smiled.

  • • •

  The first weird dream came that night. I mean, I’ve had nightmares before. They usually come after stressful situations or after eating Amy’s spicy enchilada casserole, but this was different. This dream was very clear and very still—as if someone had paused a scene in a movie and placed me inside it.

  I dreamed of a door in a dark corridor. It was made of ancient black wood, old and solid, cracked in the corners and bound with rusting iron bars. The only decoration was by the keyhole. A silver, scrolling S was welded into the iron. From the bottom hung a delicate snowflake so sharply pointed that it looked like it could cut you. In the dream, I knew I had to go through the door, and I was afraid of what was waiting on the other side.

  he next day, after school, the bronze nameplate still read, Ever After School, which I took to be a very good sign for my sanity.

  With a deep breath, I knocked.

  No one answered.

  I knocked again, three smart taps, as loud as I could make them.

  Still no answer.

  I wiped my hands on my jeans nervously. Maybe it was a one-day ticket deal. Maybe dragon-slaying filled the adventure quota for one student, and I wasn’t allowed to come back. Maybe I had hit my head on something and hallucinated the whole thing.

  After one last knock, I turned away from the door and stepped glumly down the short stairway, wondering if maybe they just didn’t like me—if they were too busy to remember that I was coming.

  I stopped. Maybe they were just busy. Ellie couldn’t wait by the door for every student—she probably only did that on your first day.

  When I went back and tried the door, the knob turned easily. I took a deep breath and hoped that I hadn’t made it up, especially since that would make this breaking and entering. Then I stepped inside.

  It was the same hallway, still too dark to see clearly. I ran to the other end with one hand on the wall, feeling ridges and shapes in the stone under my fingers, more excited with every step.

  Outside, I got my first good look around.

  Definitely real.

  The grassy courtyard was even bigger than it had seemed the day before. It was about the size of a football field and lined with dozens of doors surrounding the perimeter—plain doors, carved doors, glass doors, windowed doors, doors with knockers, doors without, a couple metal doors like you see with elevators, and even one that looked like it was made out of marble. EAS’s decorator must have really liked the rainbow theme, because each door was a different color.

  Every once in a while, a door would open, and a kid or two would come out. Most of them made straight for the middle of the courtyard, where everyone was gathering.

  The Tree of Hope looked exactly the same. Its low branches were covered with bookbags, jackets, and raincoats.

  Under the Tree, someone had set up furniture. Not plastic patio chairs, but real furniture. Coffee tables carved with jousting scenes sat in the grass. Girls a few grades older than me had collapsed together on an overstuffed leather couch, giggling loudly.

  As a practiced new kid, I knew that first-day awkward is nothing compared to second-day awkward. On the first day, you don’t know anyone, and no one knows you. It’s a clean slate all around.

  The second day is different. You’re expected to remember people’s names. You want to find the quasi-friends you met the day before, but you have no way of knowing if they’ll be as friendly on Day Two. You’re expected to know the routine and follow it. It was twice as important to do that at EAS. I could only imagine the epic screw-ups that could happen at a magic after school program.

  Lena could probably point me in the right direction if I found her.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t see Lena—or George, or Chase, or Adelaide, or the triplets, or anyone I recognized. Forget finding a familiar face—I would settle for a friendly one.

  One girl wearing ripped jeans and heavy eyeliner fed handfuls of grass to a fawn with a spiked collar. When she caught me staring, she glared, and the fawn said with an angry boy’s voice, “What are you looking at?”

  Too shocked to even apologize, I hurried through the crowd—so fast that I accidentally bumped into a massive dining room table.

  “Whoa,” I said, realizing what was on it.

  Pizzas covered the section closest to me—cheese and pepperoni and sausage and mushroom. A little farther down, cakes rose in tiers—five kinds of chocolate, two vanilla, one red velvet, one carrot, and a yellow-white cake that looked like lemon with raspberry jam icing. Beyond that, the other desserts were piled in mounds so big that they reminded me of the dragon’s hoard yesterday: fudgy brownies, snickerdoodles, peanut butter cookies, ice-cream sandwiches studded with chocolate chips. In the middle of the table, there was even a soda fountain—like an actual fountain. A stone fairy statue stood on top with cola pouring out of the jug she held on her hip.

  I leaned forward to see the snacks at the far end, but someone pushed me back.

  “No cutting,” said a scowling high school boy at least two feet taller than I was. I stumbled out of his way as fast as I could.

  “Go easy on her. She’s new,” said the girl next to him. She handed me a metal plate. “Here. The line starts over there.” She pointed at least twenty people back.

  My face burned as I hurried to the end. I had only been at EAS for three minutes, and I was already making people mad. What a disaster.

  I heaped my plate with goldfish crackers and brownies. At the end of the table, I felt like I should have something healthy. So I grabbed a fruit tart, the last one on the platter, covered in strawberries and blackberries. Unfortunately, another hand had reached for it at the same time.

  The hand belonged to a teenage girl. For a second, I thought she was the same person I had seen in the mirror yesterday, but this girl’s hair was actually silver. It was so long that the end of
her heavy braid brushed the ground.

  She didn’t speak. She just smiled a little and pointed to the tart in my hand.

  “Oh, sorry!” I said. “You can have it.”

  When I put it on her plate, she gave me another smile, this one wider, and she pointed to the table.

  The round platter was magically full of fruit tarts again.

  I turned to thank her, but the girl had disappeared.

  Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t know that these plates automatically refilled themselves. One chubby kid had even pulled up a seat by a plate of mini-cupcakes. He ate them one by one until they were all gone and waited until more appeared.

  “No more for you, Evan. You’ll eat yourself sick again. The Table of Never Ending Refills wasn’t designed to help you gain thirty more pounds,” said a tall woman with slate-gray hair and a stern expression. She picked up the whole dish of cupcakes and headed off with it.

  She walked oddly when she rushed—kind of a shuffle-hop, shuffle-hop. When she kicked up her skirt, you could see her foot was made out of a weird dark metal. There was no way to know if it was a prosthetic or if she had accidentally dipped it into some enchanted pool.

  The boy chased after her. “But it’s my favorite.”

  At the end of the table, I worried where I should sit for about a minute before I noticed someone waving—at me, I realized with a relieved grin. It was Lena, sitting at a gilded table next to the Tree of Hope. Beside her sat the youngest person I had seen at EAS so far, a girl with blond curls. She couldn’t be more than seven.

  “Welcome back!” Lena said when I reached them. I had forgotten her glasses were so thick, and it took me a second to get used to how big her eyes looked. “This is Kelly,” she added, pointing at the girl.

  “Nice to meet you.” Kelly smiled, stroking the white cat in her lap. The feline wore a dress embroidered with purple flowers, but being from a big city, I had seen people dress up their pets before. “Not everyone comes back the second day, you know.”

  The table was covered in books. I shoved a stack of them over to make space for my plate and settled into the chair next to Lena. “I can’t imagine why. Where are we going today? Scotland? To battle the Loch Ness monster?”

  I meant this as a joke, but Lena said sadly, “No, we don’t get to go on field trips every day. That was a special treat. Besides, I really doubt the Loch Ness monster would make trouble. All the books say it’s gentle.”

  Kelly nodded. “Mom says all it wants is a little attention. It’s one of Oberon’s pets, and he never goes to play with it.”

  “Oh.” I decided not to make jokes until I knew more about this place.

  “Guess what?” Lena said excitedly. “I figured out what kind of dragon George killed yesterday. A draconus melodius. The singing serpent.”

  “Should I know what that is?” I asked.

  Kelly tapped the cover of the book in front of me. A golden dragon breathing flame was embossed on it. In fact, all the books on the table had dragons on the cover or in the title. “She’s been researching since she got here.”

  “This one must’ve been a male, because the female’s growl sounds like a harmony,” Lena continued. “That’s how they get their name.”

  “She talks a lot when she has a breakthrough,” Kelly whispered to me.

  Then Lena hummed a little. The growl of a female draconus melodius sounded a lot like the Jaws theme with one extra hissing note.

  I shivered. “That’s creepy.”

  “I second that.” Chase slid into the last empty chair at the table. “Hey, Rory.”

  I frowned at him, not sure what he wanted. I mean, he hadn’t exactly been nice the day before.

  “Incredibly creepy,” Lena said thoughtfully. “That’s why Solange favored them in the war. During a siege, she would station them outside to terrorize her enemies.”

  “Gretel says she still has nightmares about the sound,” added Kelly.

  I opened my mouth to ask who Solange was and what war they were talking about, but Lena kept talking. “Nowadays, the singing serpents live mostly in Canada, in the tundra plains. This one must’ve been forced south by another bull. It was an adolescent male. It still had its baby teeth.”

  “Those were its baby teeth?” Chase said in disbelief at the same time I said, “The teeth get bigger?”

  “Show them the picture,” Kelly said to Lena.

  Lena dug through her pile until she uncovered a sketchbook. The first drawing showed a dragon just like the one I remembered in tiny, precise pencil strokes—green and gold scales, yellow bulging eyes, and smoke streaming from its nostrils.

  She pointed to the mouth with a red colored pencil. “See how the teeth look gray? If these were the adult set, they would look yellow. It’s easier to see in the other sketch.”

  She turned the page, where the dragon chased two kids with its mouth open and all the teeth visible. The girl running with a sword wore the same blue shirt I had on yesterday.

  Inspecting it, Kelly told Lena, “Looks like you got Chase just right.”

  “You drew this? It’s really good,” I told Lena. She smiled and ducked her head, embarrassed.

  “I don’t know,” said Chase. “I don’t think I looked that scared.”

  George appeared over Lena’s shoulder, glancing at the drawing. “You looked plenty scared. Besides, Lena doesn’t exaggerate. That’s why they call it a photographic memory.”

  Chase didn’t seem too thrilled, but Lena smiled gratefully at her brother.

  “I’m supposed to give you this, Rory.” George handed over a sheathed sword. I took it by the hilt, and as I lifted it, my shoulder hurt in places that hadn’t felt sore before.

  “Is that what you fought the dragon with?” Kelly asked, perking up. Even the cat in her lap stood up to look.

  “‘Fight’ is probably the wrong word.” I pulled the sheath off.

  Someone had cleaned the sword. It was the first time we had seen the blade without blood on it. Chase gasped beside me. Interlocking squiggles were etched onto the metal on both sides. They looked like really ornate Celtic knots.

  “It’s pretty,” Lena said.

  It was beautiful, and it was mine. I couldn’t wait to try it out.

  “It’s too big for you,” Chase told me quickly.

  “I’ll grow,” I replied, a little more fiercely than I should’ve been on only my second day, and we scowled at each other.

  “You would think that dragon-slaying together would make them friends,” Lena commented, and we both scowled at her.

  “There you are, Rory!” said another cheerful voice—one of the adults I recognized. Today she wore a red apron, wiping her hands on it as she walked. “I have been looking all over for you.”

  “Hi, Ellie,” I said.

  “Hi, Mom,” said Kelly, which made me do a double take. You could see the resemblance, if you were looking—the same heart-shaped lips and wide-set eyes.

  “I heard you did well your first day,” she told me. “Kind of a trial by fire.”

  Then she laughed, shaking her head. The kids looked embarrassed. Especially Kelly, who said, “Mom.”

  In a clipped accent, the white cat explained, “Ellie is quite fond of her puns.”

  It would’ve surprised me much more if the fawn hadn’t yelled at me earlier.

  • • •

  Ellie showed me through the amethyst door for orientation, waving good-bye cheerfully as I entered the building. The Director’s office was covered in white marble, with roses inlaid in the walls over a pattern of thorny vines. Silver fountains ran in the corners, and the sound of trickling water bounced off the walls.

  Two kids sat in puffy floral armchairs, next to a humongous marble-top desk carved all over with roses. One kid was Miriam, and next to her a boy about my age slumped in his seat. He had the same dark, glossy hair she did.

  “When do I get a wand?” the boy asked.

  “You don’t. You have the wrong
idea about magic. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” The voice belonged to a woman, who sounded a lot like Amy, but I couldn’t see where it came from.

  “You don’t control magic,” said the voice. “We can’t. Magic is a wild thing, a force of nature, like the wind, or the weather, ever shifting, ever changing. We might be able to observe its patterns and predict its path, but it is— Oh, you must be Rory! Welcome!”

  “Rory!” Miriam jumped up and gave me a hug. “This is my little brother, Philip. Philip, Rory was one of the kids who saved my life.”

  I half-laughed. “Not really. Chase and I would’ve been dead meat if George hadn’t shown up.”

  “How is that any different?” Miriam dropped back into her seat. “My life passed before my eyes right before you got there.”

  I started to shrug, and then I realized: She was right. I had kind of saved her life. How had I not noticed?

  Oh, right. Worrying about my sanity had kept me occupied.

  Philip waved a little without meeting my eyes. He seemed kind of uncomfortable.

  Then something on the desk moved. It was a very tiny woman, waving to get my attention. She wasn’t any bigger than my hand. After the talking fawn and cat, meeting her shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

  “Oh, oops,” she said. “Not on the list, but introductions, of course. I’m—”

  “You’re Thumbelina!” the boy burst out.

  “Thumbelina is my Tale, not my name.” I was close enough now to see the irritated look on the woman’s face, the tuft of auburn hair on her head, and the nylon jeans she wore—like something she had stolen from Barbie and altered to fit. She also wore a large needle on her belt, like it was a sword. “Honestly. Don’t you think my parents had more imagination than that? If I were called Thumbelina, do you think I would have ever taken my husband’s name? Tom and Thumbelina Thumb? How ridiculous. My name is Sarah, Sarah Thumb.”

  For such a little person, Sarah Thumb had a powerful voice when she was upset. Philip shrank back into his chair, obviously wishing he hadn’t said anything.

  This was why I tried to keep my mouth shut as much as possible, especially during the first couple days.