Of Giants and Ice (Ever Afters, The)

by Bach, Shelby

  Maybe Matilda was way sneakier than she pretended to be. The thought of Jimmy finding us and swallowing us whole had been bad enough. The idea of Matilda systematically smashing up our bones and kneading us into bread was so horrible that I had to push it out of my head before I panicked, bolted out of there, and got us all caught. “Do you think she’ll ever let us out?” I asked Lena.

  “Yeah. One way or another.” Her voice shook. “All these skeletons are dry, and there are easier ways to get the meat off our bones than letting us rot.”

  The thought brought me an image of Matilda and a deboning knife.

  I gagged again, so hard I tasted bile, and Chase made a strangled sound. Shoving my hand away from his mouth, he stomped to the corner, as far away from the skeletons as he could possibly get, and he sat down with his head between his knees and his sword dangling from his hand.

  Then Lena squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s only an experiment. Only an experiment. Only an experiment.” The mantra must have worked. When she opened her eyes, she had the curious distant gaze of a scientist rather than a freaked-out eleven-year-old.

  “I’m guessing she’s just putting us in here to hide our smell.” Lena shined her flashlight on the rib cage at her feet. There were two spikes on the shoulder blades. “Not all of these are human. I’ve never seen a nonhuman skeleton before.”

  “Your academic interest astounds me,” I said, but watching her act so detached did calm me down a little.

  Chase moaned. “Can we not talk about them, please?”

  “Shh!” Lena and I said together. I glanced outside the bread box. He had spoken way too loud to be safe, and through the crack, I could see Matilda’s husband and mother-in-law enter the room.

  Luckily, they hadn’t heard him.

  “Jimmy! Genevieve!” Matilda raised her arms to hug them. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.”

  The giant looked like his picture: green-skinned with warts on his nose and coarse black hair thinning at the forehead. But when Jimmy smiled, his teeth shone, and I could see how Matilda could like him. “Mother’s train got in early.”

  His mother had the same green skin and even the same warts, but her short hair was gray and stuck up in bristles over her head. When she looked up to glare at Matilda, I saw she wore an eyepatch. “You may call me Mrs. Searcaster.”

  Matilda’s face fell. I felt a little sorry for her.

  “Genevieve Searcaster,” Lena said thoughtfully. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “She was rumored to be the Snow Queen’s general,” said Chase without lifting his head.

  Lena’s eyes bugged out. Hansel had mentioned a giantess named Searcaster, but he had been trying to scare us.

  “No . . . ,” I said slowly, watching Matilda bustle around her mother-in-law, settling her in a seat. It looked so normal, except for the size. Evil generals just didn’t sit around and harass their son’s wives at the dinner table.

  “Sounds like her. Green skin, missing eye, and carries a cane with the cast-iron corpse of a basilisk?” Chase said.

  Genevieve Searcaster leaned her cane against her chair, and I got a good look at it. “There is some sort of snake thing on it.”

  “Let me see,” Lena said. I moved out of the way, and she took my place at the crack. I kept my back to the skeletons. It was easier not to panic if I didn’t have to look at them. “It is her. I thought she was captured and tried for war crimes.”

  “She was,” said Chase. “She got off, because she said that the Snow Queen had her son.”

  I snorted. “Jimmy? Isn’t he a little big for kidnapping?”

  “They did it a lot during the war,” Lena said gently. “The Snow Queen would imprison loved ones of her allies. If they turned, the prisoners would be tortured to death.”

  I gulped, glad that the war was long over. I would probably give in too, if the Snow Queen had Mom, Dad, or Amy. “That’s horrible.”

  “That’s war,” said Chase, like we should expect such horrible things. “Or war with the Snow Queen, at least.”

  Lena didn’t sound so indifferent. “It made it really hard for the Canon to tell afterward who was actually guilty and who wasn’t.”

  “Well, Searcaster’s supposed to be under house arrest until the end of the next millennium,” Chase said. “I don’t know why she’s going on a ski vacation.”

  “I think she’s guilty,” I said.

  “My dad always thought so too,” Chase said, which actually made me feel a little less certain.

  Through the bread box’s thin sides, we could still hear the murmur of the giants’ voices. Genevieve Searcaster’s cut through everyone else’s like the screech of a chainsaw. “When I said I liked white meat, I meant human, not poultry.”

  Apparently, Matilda had just served the main course.

  “I didn’t know we were considered white meat,” Lena whispered dryly, and I smothered a giggle behind my hand, wondering if I was hysterical.

  “I just hope you don’t pass this embarrassing allergy to my grandchildren,” said Searcaster. “I’ve already had to accept that they might not come out a proper green.”

  “What’s going on now?” I asked Lena.

  “Jimmy and Genevieve are sitting at the table, and Matilda is pouring everyone some wine.” Lena bit her lip. “Hopefully, this won’t be a long dinner. We have a lot to do.”

  To reassure her, I told her about the mousehole that Chase found—how it led from the kitchen straight to the backyard. I expected Chase to interrupt me and start bragging at any time, but when I turned back to look, Chase’s head was still between his knees, bent almost to the floor.

  “Chase, what’s your problem?” I said.

  He didn’t answer. He just slid his hands through his hair.

  I moved a little closer, despite myself. It annoyed me to be so concerned about someone I didn’t like. “Hey? Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” he said hoarsely, but he had sweated so much that his curls looked wet. Each breath made his entire chest shudder.

  No matter what Rapunzel had said, being nice to Chase didn’t exactly sound appealing, but if I was honest with myself, only one part of me wanted to hate him forever—the same stubborn side that Mom always said reminded her of my dad. That’s never a compliment.

  I sighed deeply and sat down next to him, moving my sword so it didn’t poke either of us.

  “I’m fine.” Chase lifted his head to glare at me. “I just don’t like skeletons.”

  “Uh-oh. I forgot about that,” Lena said. “He’s afraid of bones.”

  Then Chase scowled at her. “Bones and confined spaces. I got locked in a tomb for three days. You’d be scarred too.”

  “Oh,” I said thoughtfully.

  Rapunzel had known. I’d thought she had been talking just to me when she mentioned fear, but maybe not. Maybe she’d been talking to all of us.

  Lena rubbed her face, murmuring, “Way to go, Lena. All of EAS to choose from, and you pick the sixth graders with phobias.”

  Guilt churned in my stomach. She was right. I should’ve told her to pick a better Companion before we climbed the beanstalk.

  “It hasn’t stopped us, has it? We’ve helped,” Chase said fiercely. “I found an easy entrance, and if it hadn’t been for Rory, we would never have gotten inside.”

  Wide-eyed and stiff, Lena jerked back to the crack as if he’d struck her, and I knew she didn’t mean it the way it sounded. That didn’t stop it from hurting.

  “Is it specific types of bones?” I asked. Chase shot a glare in my direction, but he didn’t say anything. “Like skulls? Or femurs?”

  Chase flinched. He didn’t even like their names.

  It would’ve been so easy to tease him. All I had to do was ask if funnybones counted. But somehow, seeing him struggle like this made me lose my appetite for payback. It reminded me too much of when I got stuck on the beanstalk. No matter what else he’d done before this trip, he hadn’t teased me then.

/>   “Look at it this way,” I told Chase. “The worst that could happen is that they could find us. Then you would get to fight them.”

  Lena stared at me like I’d eaten some enchanted cabbage and grown donkey ears.

  “Right,” Chase said sarcastically. “Then there would be two Jacks on one Tale—a Beanstalk one and a Giant-Killer.”

  “Chase the Giant-Killer.” I tried to smile encouragingly. “Actually, it does have a nice ring to it.”

  Chase eyed me carefully. He couldn’t tell if I was joking or not. “Are you trying to cheer me up?”

  “To distract you,” I replied, a little defensively. “Fair’s fair.”

  He knew what I was talking about. He shrugged. “It’s not my first time up a beanstalk. Whenever my dad would rescue a group of people, somebody would get stuck. I was more patient than my dad when we had to help them down.”

  “I’m glad you were.” It was as close to thanking him as I could make myself go.

  Chase smirked a bit—not meanly, but more like he knew exactly what I was thinking. I grinned back.

  “You guys.” The light from the crack illuminated Lena’s face. She looked frightened, and for a second, I thought maybe Jimmy was heading toward us. “I think we need to listen to this.”

  Genevieve Searcaster’s voice was much louder now, and her words ran together a little. “The Arctic Circle. Pah. In my day, we went skiing in the Himalayas, like normal folk. I still remember racing my older brother down Mount Everest—”

  Her day had to have been a long while back. Two giants skiing on Everest would’ve made headlines even in 1850.

  “Matilda’s been pouring a lot of wine,” Lena whispered. “I think she’s trying to make sure her mother-in-law goes to bed early.”

  “Sorry, Mother. The Himalayas have a lot of humans running around.” Jimmy was even louder than his mom.

  “If you’re seen—” Matilda began.

  “Humans,” Searcaster scoffed. “We never worried about what the humans saw before Her Majesty was imprisoned.”

  Chase stiffened, and Lena sent us a look that clearly said, How the hiccups will we get out of this?

  “The giants have a queen?” I asked hopefully. They shook their heads darkly, and I knew Searcaster meant the Snow Queen. A chill ran down my spine, but I couldn’t understand it—hadn’t the war ended a long, long time ago?

  “There was a woman who understood the dignity of our people,” said the old general. “She knew that the world belonged to us, not the pitiful little humans.” Searcaster’s devotion rang out in every word, and hearing it scared me more than anything. The general would never stop until the Snow Queen was out of prison. “She didn’t expect us to crowd in the forgotten corners of the world. Overpopulation did pose a problem, but there’s an easy solution to that when you’re on the top of the food chain—even if a few of us have allergies.”

  The whole deboning knife scene returned to haunt me, but it was in Searcaster’s hand instead of Matilda’s. I shuddered.

  “No matter. Our day will come again. We won’t have much longer to wait.” Genevieve Searcaster let out a cackle like thunder shattering old windows.

  I didn’t want to know what she meant. I couldn’t imagine a world where green-skinned giants like Searcaster walked city streets and plucked humans out of a house to munch on the same way we ate potato chips. The Canon would never allow it. Searcaster would need an army—

  An army. That last thought grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. “She’s not talking about what I think she’s talking about, is she?”

  Dumbstruck, Lena pressed against the bread box sides like she couldn’t stand without them.

  “Sure it does.” Chase’s eyes were squeezed shut, but when he gulped hard and opened them, he just looked resigned. “It means war.”

  “What do you mean?” Matilda asked. “Has Her Majesty—”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss the details,” Searcaster said, as if her son and daughter-in-law were too stupid to grasp those details. “But the Canon has long ceased their careful watch, and my queen grows restless. Tell me, Jimmy, have you made a decision about what Her Majesty asked?”

  I didn’t like the way she said that—like she already knew she would get her way.

  “Well, Mother, you know what will happen if the Canon finds out I helped her,” Jimmy said uncomfortably. “I mean, it’s bad enough that we’ll be near her old hideout—”

  If Jimmy’s ability to stand up to his mom was all that stood between EAS and war, then we were doomed.

  “Nonsense, son. You have no faith in Her Majesty,” said his mother. “You have no faith in me. Last time, I admit, we underestimated those children of Mildred Grubb’s—”

  How many Characters would we lose in this round? How many of them would I know? My imagination carved not just Lena’s name on the Wall, but George’s name too, and all three triplets’, Gretel’s, and Evan Garrison’s. Goose bumps sprouted on my arms.

  “How do we stop it?” I whispered. “How do we stop the war?”

  Chase and Lena didn’t answer me.

  “That won’t happen a second time,” Searcaster continued. “My queen has a plan for that Ever After School.”

  “They did have some fierce warriors,” Matilda agreed reluctantly.

  Standing at the crack, Lena flinched and took a nervous step back. “Matilda just looked this way.”

  “Do you think she recognizes us?” Chase said in a low voice.

  “Where else would kids on a quest come from?” Lena asked.

  Suddenly, the bread box felt much more like a trap than a hiding place. Where could we run? Where could we hide? If we buried ourselves in skeletons, they could still see us.

  “You have heard what they’ve been saying, haven’t you?” Searcaster said slowly. “About the new Character everyone can’t stop talking about?”

  I wasn’t EAS’s only new Character, but somehow, as Jimmy and Matilda murmured that yes, they had heard, I knew that they were talking about me. My face even flushed hotly, like it knew I was the center of attention.

  This was it. I knew it. This was when I would finally find out why everyone kept talking about—

  “They haven’t seen anyone like her since Solange’s first arrival,” continued the general. “Years before she became the Snow Queen, of course.”

  No, it couldn’t be me.

  I’d been wrong. I wasn’t special, not at all.

  “The arrival of this new Character has forced Her Majesty’s hand,” said Searcaster. “War is returning, Jimmy. You must decide what side you will fight for.”

  I certainly wasn’t this special—not special enough to make anyone start a war. I couldn’t be.

  The room was silent for a long moment. Standing at the crack, Lena began to tremble, and I wondered what she saw. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chase put his hand on his sword.

  Matilda laughed. It was high-pitched and obviously fake, but some of the tension in the room disappeared. Lena’s trembling stopped, and I could breathe again.

  “Of course we know what side we’ll be on,” Matilda said. “It’s just that Jimmy has gotten a little attached to it.”

  “Is that true?” the old general asked. Jimmy didn’t reply, and it seemed like answer enough for his mother. “When I gave you the object before my trial, it was only for safekeeping. I’m sure that she will compensate you handsomely. I don’t care about any of the others, but you must return that—”

  “Oh, I know what we can do!” cried Matilda. “We can get out that old harp. Its music always cheers us up. You are supposed to be on vacation, Mrs. Searcaster.”

  “Ugh.” Lena wrinkled her nose like she smelled something a lot more foul than bone dust. “Matilda just looked this way again. She’s definitely on to us. She interrupted her mother-in-law so that we wouldn’t find out what the Snow Queen was after.”

  Privately, I thought this was a good sign. Matilda wouldn’t have risked interrupt
ing someone as scary as General Searcaster if she just planned on killing us afterward.

  “Watch her. See where they keep the harp,” Chase told Lena.

  “Get all three of them out of the desk, Matilda,” Jimmy said. “I want to show Mother.”

  “Second door on the right,” Lena said. “She’s coming back.”

  “Here we are!” Matilda cried. Something rattled the table as she set it down.

  “That’s a nice safe,” said Searcaster. It was impossible to tell if she was being sarcastic or not.

  “Elf-made,” Jimmy said proudly.

  “Turns you to stone if you don’t get the combination right,” added Matilda.

  I gulped, imagining Lena-, Chase-, and me-shaped statues, but Lena just watched the giants through the crack calmly.

  “I bet she said that for our benefit,” said Chase. “She might be lying.”

  Lena shook her head. “It’s true. Jimmy is being really careful.”

  The safe’s door squeaked open, and the next thing we heard was a chicken clucking.

  “The hen that lays golden eggs?” said Searcaster. “I had no idea it was still alive.”

  “Isn’t it immortal?” said Matilda, surprised.

  “It’s getting on in years. Only lays an egg every other day now,” said Jimmy with real regret.

  “It might be depressed,” Matilda pointed out. “It might lay more if we let it run around a little.”

  “We can’t let it out!” said Jimmy. “It’s too valuable. There are thieves everywhere!”

  Like us, I thought, feeling slightly guilty.

  “Matilda just looked this way again,” Lena said.

  “Never mind the hen. Let me see that harp,” said the old general greedily.

  When he took it out, both of the giantesses gasped in surprised delight.

  Matilda sniffed, like she was tearing up. “She gets more beautiful every time I look at her.”

  “Oh, crackers,” Lena said, irritated. “Matilda just moved and blocked my view. I can’t see it.”

  “Sing, my lovely,” Jimmy cooed.

  Music came. It was the kind of song you feel in your chest. In the notes, I heard harps and flutes, and the kind of high clear singing they use for angels’ voices in Christmas movies. I felt my nose prickle, right under the bridge, and blinked rapidly before Chase could notice.