by Bach, Shelby
“Lena?” I whispered.
“Shh. Wait a few minutes,” Lena said.
“Yeah, he might come back for his keys or his teddy bear,” Chase said in a normal tone.
“Shh,” Lena hissed angrily. “You’ve gotten us in enough trouble, thank you.”
Chase made a scoffing noise like he disagreed, but he was silent after that.
We waited. Something rustled in Lena’s direction. A second later, sudden light blazed, and I could see Lena’s flashlight swinging from a cord in her hand. She zipped up her backpack and glared at Chase.
Chase scowled back. “What have I done now?”
“What have you done?” Lena repeated.
“It looked like he made a wooden curtain,” I said helpfully.
“I didn’t make it,” Chase said. “It was already there.”
“It’s the cover. My grandmother has one too,” Lena said. “It locks automatically as soon as you close it.”
Chase gulped. “Locks automatically?”
Lena nodded. “I know, because one time I was playing hide-and-go-seek with Jenny and George. I was the only one who could fit in the desk, but when I pulled the cover down, I locked myself in. No one found me for hours.”
“Maybe this one doesn’t lock.” Chase wedged his fingers under the cover and tried to lift it. It didn’t budge. I went to help, but it was like trying to pick up the side of a house—nothing moved. We just got tired.
Lena crossed her arms over her chest, unsurprised. “Even if it isn’t locked, do you really think the three of us are strong enough to lift it?”
I examined the cover—all forty feet of wood. “There’s enough wood for maybe three trees.”
“Or more,” Lena said shortly. Chase slumped against the cover, defeated. “We’re stuck here until the giants come back.”
“Longer than that,” I said, which got both Chase and Lena’s attention. “Until the giants need something from the desk.”
“Well, we had to hide, didn’t we?” Chase said softly.
“I meant in the papers!” Lena snapped. “Jimmy would’ve never seen us in there.”
Chase didn’t answer. He sank to the floor, his back against the desk, his head bent and both hands in his hair. He looked so much like he had when we were stuck in the bone-filled bread box that I couldn’t get mad at him. Besides, I couldn’t muster the energy.
“At least we don’t have to deal with that guard dog for a little while,” I said.
Lena stared at me. Her nostrils flared so much she kind of reminded me of the dragon.
“We brought the food, right?” I said. “We won’t starve. Worst case scenario, we’ll just hide until Matilda needs to write a letter or something. We could hide over there.” I pointed to a row of dusty binders labeled Fey Tithe—one each for the last sixteen years.
Lena sighed. “They don’t look like they’ve been touched in a while.”
Chase let his hands fall from his head. He looked almost grateful.
I smiled at him, just a little, and hoped it looked sympathetic, not mocking. “While we’re stuck here, why don’t we look for the safe?”
It wasn’t too hard. About five foot square, it was too wide to fit in any of the cubbyholes.
We found it under a stack of mail on the other side of the workspace. When we pushed the bills off, the weight of the envelopes knocked Lena over.
“They certainly didn’t do much to hide it,” I said and helped her up.
Lena dusted herself off. “They were probably busy. Last-minute packing.”
“They did lock it.” Chase examined the grate at the back of the safe. The hen’s white feathers rustled behind the bars, and the harp’s gold strings gleamed.
“So the hen can breathe,” Lena guessed.
“Can you fit your hand through?” I asked.
Chase shook his head. He reached toward one of the holes, but when it got close to the grate, gray lightning crackled across the safe and up Chase’s arm.
Lena and I jumped back, but Chase grinned, looking more like his usual self. “It didn’t hurt.”
“I guess we have to open it the old-fashioned way,” Lena said.
“You know the combination?” I asked.
Lena nodded. “I watched Jimmy last night.”
“You memorized it?” Chase said incredulously. “From a distance of two hundred feet through a crack barely an inch wide while surrounded by bones?” His voice dropped a little on the last word, and it was really hard not to smirk.
“Photographic memory,” Lena reminded him, and she reached for the lock.
Chase and I looked at each other as the dial spun and clicked. We were thinking the same thing. One mistake, and we would have to escape the giants’ desk with a life-size Lena statue.
I shrugged. “It’s her Tale.”
“Absolutely.” Then she swung the safe’s door open smugly.
I cheered. Tapping her fingers on the back side of the door, Lena smiled at me over her shoulder.
The leprechaun gold was already gone, and the hen and the harp were still asleep. The bird clucked a little in the middle of each snore. It didn’t make any sense to wake them up before we had a way out.
So we walked to the back of every shelf and cubbyhole, searching for gaps in the wood big enough to crawl out of. Chase took the top levels, and I took the rest. The handle of Lena’s flashlight pulled out to make a lantern that sat up by itself, but the light only reached fifteen feet or so. It was so dark we had to feel across the wooden wall with our fingertips.
“Okay, I’ve got good news and bad news.” Chase wandered out of the last cubbyhole. “The good news: I found a hole.”
“What’s the bad news?” Lena said, without looking up from the papers she was pushing through. Each one was as big as a bedsheet.
“Well, the hole’s only big enough to stick my head through. But more good news: there’s another mousehole behind the desk, so once we get out of here, we’ll have a direct escape route.”
“Maybe we can make it bigger,” I suggested.
“I think I saw a letter opener around here somewhere.” Chase leaped up to a higher shelf. “It would make a good battering ram.”
“What an ingenious way to get hurt. Maybe in a little while.” Lena pulled a notebook from her backpack and began to take notes. “For now, we still need to figure out what the Snow Queen is after.”
“Oh, no,” Chase murmured to me. “She’s gone into geek mode. We’ll never get out now.” I gave him a sharp look, and he added hastily, “I mean that in the nicest, most complimentary way possible.”
“What did you find?” I asked Lena. Over her shoulder, I read, Engorgement Spell.
“The reason Matilda can make her garlic as big as a mixing bowl,” Lena said.
Chase came to look too. “And how is this important to our survival?”
“Rumpel would like to see it,” Lena told him, her chin jutting out stubbornly. “Since we’ll be stuck in here for a while, it doesn’t really matter.”
Chase ducked his head guiltily.
I wandered to another stack of papers. It was too dark to read in the cubbyhole, so I had to drag each piece toward Lena’s lamp one by one. It wasn’t easy.
“Nobody get a paper cut,” Chase said, starting to search too. “You might need stitches.”
The first one I grabbed was a bill for a pair of leather work boots, size 216. The second paper looked like a pretty normal recipe for Lady-fingers until I read: Ingredients: Two sets of noblewoman’s fingers—or any maiden or human female not used to physical labor (*do not use toes as substitute*). There was a scary-looking brown stain in the corner, so I rushed that one back where I found it.
“Hey, the giant’s wife writes poetry,” Chase said. “‘My heart awakens in sight of your green skin, as clean and warty as a toad’s has ever been—’”
“Don’t!” Lena and I shouted at the same time.
“I don’t want to hear any love poems writte
n by a giant,” I said, already a little freaked over Matilda’s gruesome recipes.
“Besides, it’s not very nice,” Lena added. “Those are private.”
Chase tossed the paper aside and reached for another one. “Girls.”
“Oh, my gumdrops,” Lena said.
“What? Did you find it?” I asked.
“No, it’s Jimmy and Matilda’s tithe statement,” Lena said. “They make almost nothing. My gumdrops, it’s practically slave labor.”
“Lena, I say this with respect,” Chase said with a nervous glance in my direction, “but that’s just embarrassing. Come on—say it with me: ‘Oh, my God.’”
“My grandmother’s very strict,” Lena said defensively.
“Then say Crud,” Chase replied. “I’m sure you can say that.”
But Lena shook her head. “She’d make me bite a bar of soap.”
“Seriously?” I said, starting to think that Amy was really easy on me.
“That’s rough.” Chase actually sounded sympathetic. “The Director makes me write when I piss her off, but you win.”
I found another recipe (this time for biscuits); a butcher’s bill for three whales, four condors, and twelve heifers; and a letter from Matilda’s mother telling her not to give up, that every giants’ marriage has giant-size problems. I found some regular-size lettering and was incredibly relieved until I realized that it was the fine print for a Bank-Friendly Giant credit card.
Chase found some love letters from Jimmy and Matilda’s courtship, wrapped in yards of faded red ribbon. He read one in Lena’s light and started gagging loudly.
“Don’t want to know,” Lena told him firmly.
“Can’t repeat.” Chase pretended to gasp for air. “Too vile.”
Then I found another letter, the envelope strangely cool to the touch. I manhandled it into the light. It was addressed to Jimmy in old-fashioned handwriting, the kind that I hadn’t seen since studying the Declaration of Independence in fifth grade. I froze when I saw the symbol in the corner—something I had seen only a couple times before, in dreams.
“What’s this symbol stand for?” I asked. “An S with a snowflake in the bottom curve.”
Chase dropped the receipt he was reading. “That’s the Snow Queen’s seal.”
It couldn’t be.
“You found it!” Lena grabbed her flashlight lantern and ran toward me.
It didn’t connect right away. For the first time, I was glad to be so sleep-deprived. Part of me felt like I was dreaming again. I looked closer at the snowflake, hoping that I had made a mistake, that it wasn’t the same symbol. But it looked exactly like the one that had been in my dream, just clearer. Each point was long, as if wickedly sharp, with barbs on the end.
If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have had a meltdown right there. But a detached part of me pointed out that we would have plenty of time to analyze dreams after we weren’t locked in a giant desk anymore.
“I was starting to think that we’d never find it,” Chase said, helping Lena wrestle the letter free from the envelope. They propped the paper up so that we could all read at the same time. It was studded with the same wicked-looking snowflakes and covered with the same old-fashioned handwriting as the envelope.
Lena raised the flashlight-lantern.
Jimmy Searcaster,
I wanted to write you personally to tell you how much the harp would comfort me in my imprisonment. Your mother tells me that she has already applied to you on my behalf, and still, you hesitate. This glass prison won’t hold me forever, and I have always known where to find my friends—and my enemies.
P.S. Do take care of my darlings. They will take care of you.
“Oh, my gumdrops,” Lena breathed.
“The harp?” I wondered if my sleepy eyes had misread. “She wants the harp?”
“Matilda was brilliant,” Lena said. “Last night, General Searcaster was just about to demand to see it. The Snow Queen probably gave her orders to make sure it was intact. But Matilda interrupted and brought the harp up first—to throw us off the scent. She knew we’d think she was just changing the subject.”
“Well, it worked,” I muttered. The harp was the last thing I expected her to want. A giant, glass-mountain-shattering hammer, maybe. A Glacier Amulet, yeah. But a musical instrument?
“I don’t believe for a second that she just wants to hear pretty music,” Chase said. “So this can’t be any old harp. There’s bound to be something special about it.”
“Maybe it doubles as a key,” Lena said. “I’ve read that some of the new elf-made locks use music instead of number or symbol combinations.”
“Well, look at it this way. Now we don’t need to waste time searching for a fourth item. We can hit two birds with one stone,” I said.
“But we were going to let the Canon handle it,” Lena said, hesitantly. “I hope it won’t interfere with the Tale too much.”
“It shouldn’t,” Chase said, “but it might be why this particular Tale came up at this particular time. Magic is weird like that.”
Lena smiled slightly. “You’ve been listening to Sarah Thumb.”
“‘My darlings,’” I read, pointing at the postscript. “Do you think that she sent the guard dogs?”
“‘Take care of you,’” Chase said. “A very polite way of saying ‘eat you’?”
“Jimmy did say that they didn’t belong to him,” I said.
“But the Snow Queen isn’t known for using dogs,” Lena said.
“She uses wolves,” Chase said. “She used to break whole wards out of prison and enchant convicts the way fairies used to enchant princes—turning them into animals.”
“I thought that was a rumor,” Lena said, looking horrified.
Chase shook his head. “They’re true. My dad still has the teeth marks to prove it.”
“What’s the big deal about the Snow Queen anyway?” I didn’t want to be bothered, but if this Destiny thing turned out to be true, I should probably find out more about her. “The way I remember it, all she did was take some kid back to her castle, and he wanted to go. Personally, the Big Bad Wolf scared me more.”
Chase and Lena exchanged a look. “She’s not a problem because she kidnaps boys,” Chase said. “That was just how she got started.”
“I guess you haven’t been around long enough to know much about the war,” Lena said. “None of the other sixth graders learned anything. The triplets don’t know much, and Adelaide doesn’t care. I only found out because I read a lot.”
It was clearly going to be a long story, so I sat down on a pink eraser, my back to the letter. I didn’t want to look at it any more than I had to.
“She’s a problem because she can get the villains to work together,” Chase explained. “Doing pretty much exactly what she wants.”
“Before Solange showed up, villains weren’t too bad,” Lena said. “I mean, they were evil, of course. Wanting to eat people and everything, but they weren’t much of a threat. They never teamed up.”
“They knew better than to trust each other,” Chase added. “The witch from Hansel and Gretel allied herself with some giants once, but they ended up eating her house. And her, actually.”
“Characters only had to deal with them one at a time, which was manageable.” Lena’s voice started to sound distant and tinny, like she was reading aloud from a page in her photographic memory. “Then, by the end of World War II, the Snow Queen became more prominent. She attempted to rally others for decades, but on March fourteenth, Nineteen forty-five, she developed a new tactic.”
“Nineteen forty-five!” I scowled, remembering the Director’s Napoleon comment. She’d wanted me to believe that the Snow Queen hadn’t caused any trouble in hundreds of years, but why? If Solange was so bad, what was the point in pretending she wasn’t?
“Lena, no offense, but you’re starting to sound like the History Channel,” Chase complained.
I raised my eyebrows, but since it was true, I cou
ldn’t say anything.
Lena did look offended. “Well, you tell her, if you can do better.”
“Look—can we just eat first?” Chase said, and I grinned. We were never going to miss a meal with Chase around. “Please? I haven’t been this hungry since the Table of Never Ending Refills broke, and we had to eat Rumpy’s cooking for a week.”
Lena shrugged and slung her backpack off her shoulders. She handed a wrapped parcel to me, but when she tried to pass one to Chase, he took a step back.
“No, thanks,” he said. “Those sandwiches suck.”
“We would offer you some trail mix, but you ate most of it.” Lena unwrapped her sandwich so roughly she ripped the paper.
“I left some chocolate,” Chase said defensively.
Lena tugged the bag of trail mix from her pack and showed it to me. It was a third the size it had been when I had last seen it.
“Two M&M’s!” I shouted, staring at the bag in Lena’s hand. “That doesn’t count as not eating them all!”
Chase disappeared into one of the cubbyholes and called back to us, “I thought I saw Matilda’s secret stash in here earlier. If you’re nice, I’ll share.”
I snorted. “If the table at EAS was broken, why wouldn’t he just bring snacks from home?” I said, lowering my voice so he wouldn’t hear.
“Chase lives at EAS,” Lena whispered back, obviously still not happy with him. “He didn’t have that option.”
I wondered if EAS had a boarding school I didn’t know about—bunk beds with blankets covered in silver beads like the sleeping bags. But no, Jack was the Canon’s champion. His whole family probably lived in an apartment near the instructors’ quarters. “Is Chase’s mom a terrible cook too?”
Lena shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think she lives with them.”
I unwrapped my sandwich slowly, quiet for a moment. From what Chase had said, it sounded like Jack was always on a mission. Mom traveled for work too, but at least she took me with her. If his mom wasn’t around, that meant most of the time Chase was by himself.
“But,” I asked slowly, “wouldn’t it be lonely?”
Lena didn’t answer. She took one look behind me and screamed.
