Guardians Chapter Book #5

by William Joyce

  When I still did not offer up a name, Jacklovich said, “He’s so frozen, he doesn’t remember his name.”

  He was right in one regard: My mind was frozen. So much had happened. So much had led me to this place and these people. Wars had been fought and won. Moons had been nearly destroyed. The Golden Age had died, and yet I now sat in a simple wooden cabin with this kind and generous family who only wanted me to be warm and fed and to know my name. And I could not think of what I should be called.

  I remembered that North had once said to Bunnymund, “My long-eared friend, you think too much. Difficult answers require a great deal of thought or none at all.”

  And so I spoke.

  “My name is Jack . . . Jack Frost.”

  I said it without thought. It just spilled out. But I realize, now, that it made perfect sense.

  “Jack,” said the boy, delighted. “Like Jacklovich. Like me!”

  In short order I was given an old nightshirt that had belonged to Victor, and the family began the ritual of going to bed.

  No questions were asked as to where I’d come from or how long I’d been wandering. Perhaps they assumed I was just a bad-luck boy who’d lost his family. In the general excitement of being their guest it was decided I would sleep on a cot in the children’s room, which pleased me very much. As I settled into the cot and under the heavy blankets that the mother had brought, Jacklovich never stopped talking.

  “We will have so much fun. You will stay with us and be my best friend and we will have great adventures and—”

  His parents came in.

  “Hush, Jacklovich,” said his father. “Our guest is tired and so are you.” He must have been right, because the boy said nothing more. Then both parents hugged him and kissed him, and made sure his covers were up under his chin.

  The scene stirred the most precious of my Nightlight memories. The hug and the kiss good night was exactly how the mother and father Lunanoff had said good night to the baby Man in the Moon so long ago.

  Then, incredibly, they came to me! First the father hugged and kissed me on the forehead, then the mother did the same.

  “We hope you stay for a long time,” said the mother, then they both left.

  In all my centuries of life, in all those times I had seen the hug and the kiss good night, I had only watched. No mother or father had ever done those things to me. I knew their power; I knew that this ritual was a great protector of children during their journey through the night. But I had never once experienced it myself.

  And this night I had.

  The mother and father had taken me into their home, and by this simple act, they had made me feel something I had always longed to feel. I was not a protector or a warrior or a Guardian.

  For the first time, I was cared for, not by friends or colleagues or wizards or kings or ancient stars above. I was cared for by beings more powerful, in their way, than all those others. I was cared for, cared for, by a mother and a father.

  There is no care stronger in all the universe.

  As I fell asleep, my mind had only one thought: I am Jack Frost and I belong.

  I needed no dreams that night. Mine had come true.

  The days that followed were a happy regimen of chores, play, eating, stories, and sleeping. Each of these activities was bound by two constants: friendship and imagination. From the very first morning onward, Jacklovich, Ana, and I were inseparable. We approached every activity as an adventure to be amplified by our collective imaginations. Milking a cow in a freezing barn was made memorable by becoming an improvised epic in which the barn was a castle, the cow a magic beast, and the milk a life-saving elixir. Going from the barn to the house would become a journey in which we were hazarded by an ever-changing series of monsters, villains, armies, and enemies. Sometimes we would be wounded, sometimes we would be captured, sometimes one or all of us needed rescuing or saving or being miraculously brought back from the edge of death. Sometimes one of us would die and the other two would mourn with great conviction. Sometimes our grief was so unendurable that we would all drop dead in the snow until we got bored, and then, by some quirk of our own narrative logic, we would spring back to life and begin an entirely new drama with different terrors and triumphs.

  For centuries I’d lived a life of relentless adventure and I’d dreamed of quiet and normalcy. Now I had the quietest, most normal life imaginable, and I spent my every waking moment inventing danger and adventure—it was glorious.

  Jacklovich, Ana, and I lived our lives in our daydreams. A unique type of bond forms among people whose exploits, hazards, and escapades are all pretend. We did not know what we would do in real danger, but oh my, how brave and selfless and grand we were as our pretend selves!

  I remembered something that Ombric often said: “To understand pretending is to conquer all barriers of time and space.” And now I understood what that really meant. We would be friends forever—Jacklovich, Ana, and I had sworn it, out on an ice-covered lake on the far edge of the farm. It was the scariest place we knew of, so we went there often. No grown-up could hear us from the center of the lake. And the ice was thinnest there. We would peer through the milky frozen water into the shadowy murk of the lake below and imagine all of our favorite horrors. For Jacklovich, it was ghosts and skeletons and vampires. For Ana, it was a sea serpent. And for myself? I would never—could never—tell my friends the truth of what I feared most. So I would always pause and make them wait until they couldn’t stand my silence any longer and I would scream in mock terror, “A toy teddy bear!” or “Seven smiling kittens!” and they would fall down with laughter.

  But one day we stood there, and Jacklovich, for no other reason than it seemed absolutely the thing to do, said with great seriousness, “We must swear by the thing that scares us most that we will be best friends forever and ever.”

  “I swear,” said Ana and I.

  “And I swear,” said Jacklovich.

  “And if we ever break the promise?” asked Ana.

  “Then the thing that scares us most will come and get us,” said Jacklovich. “But that will never happen,” he added.

  Such a wonderful perfection were we in our pretending.

  We had no idea that we were being listened to by forces dark, ruthless, and unsympathetic.

  That night as we were tucked into bed by Mr. and Mrs. Ardelean, I felt as happy as I ever had. Father Ardelean pulled back the rough cloth curtains of the room’s only window.

  “It is a full moon tonight,” he told us. “It shall be your nightlight this eve.”

  Mother Ardelean said her good-night poem for us. She recited this poem most every night. Her lilting voice made everything she said seem strong and truthful.

  “As the wide world sleeps

  keep these little ones safe.

  Keep their fears far away

  and their dreams bright till day

  so no hurt or harm or sorrow

  may ever come their way.”

  Jacklovich and Ana always said the words along with their mother, and that night I did as well.

  “That’s the first time Jack said the night words with us,” Ana remarked sleepily.

  “I know,” said Mother as she kissed Jacklovich and then Ana.

  “He is part of the family now,” said Father, then Mother leaned down and kissed me, too.

  I closed my eyes. My old friend the Moon was my nightlight now. And I was Jack Frost of the family Ardelean.

  Winter had been long, but the constant snow had been our ally. We had built a sort of snow castle out on the lake, complete with walls and even a tower. New snow added to the height and mass of our fortress, and the wind had sculpted it into fantastic curves and points. I wondered if Emily Jane had not lent a hand with the wind. Still, the fort reminded me of North’s city and my Guardian friends.

  I missed you all, but I knew that my life, my childhood life, was where I was meant to be.

  Jack paused his story and looked at Katherine through the
tangle of his bangs.

  Katherine could tell that it was important to Jack that she understand this. She nodded reassuringly, and Jack looked relieved, then continued his tale.

  Sometimes a week would go by before I had the chance to speak to Twiner, though he was always with me. On these rare times when I was alone, we spoke only briefly.

  “Twiner, you still alive?”

  “Of course,” he would say.

  “Just checking,” I’d say.

  “Are you still alive, Jack?”

  “Of course.”

  “Just checking,” he’d mutter.

  We never slipped in front of the others. I had not revealed any of my old powers, and Twiner, true to his word, had stayed silent. So as far as my family knew, I was just a regular boy.

  But the days had started growing longer and the snow fell less frequently. The ice would start melting. We knew that spring was coming and that our days at the fort would soon end. So we spent as much time there as we could.

  Our last day seemed so ordinary. Which should have been a clue.

  Farm chores are light in winter and we finished early, so we were able to trek to the fort after lunchtime. The weather had darkened, and the hope that we might have more snow cheered us. Perhaps the fort might last longer than we thought.

  As we arrived, the wind began to pick up. Ana ran ahead. She always liked to raise our flag. There was a rickety tree limb that served as our pole, with my old blue shirt hanging from it.

  I had come to love that flag. It was ragged and crude, but we had put our hearts into it, stitching patterns of white thread around its sleeves and neck. We’d intended the patterns to look like snowflakes but we weren’t very good at needlepoint, so it looked, well, not like snow. But it didn’t matter. It was our flag, and we knew what it was supposed to be like.

  Jacklovich and I were still twenty or so yards away from the castle as Ana raised the flag. It flapped in the now-steady breeze. The fort looked its best, all white and smooth. Ana waved to us.

  “Hurry!” she shouted. “It’s time to set sail!”

  Ahh. Today the fort was to be a ship. I wondered where our minds would bring us today.

  That was the last happy thought I would have for a long time.

  As I raised my arm to wave back, I felt the unmistakable pain in my left hand. No! No! Not here! But there was no denying it—the pain was so sudden and sharp, it brought me to my knees.

  “Are you all right?” asked Jacklovich, running toward me.

  There wasn’t time to answer. The wind had become a gale. I understood immediately that Emily Jane was trying to warn me. Then we heard the howling of wolves. Jacklovich looked around in alarm.

  “They’re coming to help us,” I told him as he reached down to help me up.

  “Help us? Why?”

  The wind blew loose snow from the lake ice. Then the ice around us began to creak and groan. Thin, hair-width cracks appeared, making strange twanging sounds, as if a mile-long harp string had snapped.

  “Run,” I cried. “To Ana!”

  The blowing snow added a peculiar haze to the terror that began to unfold. The ice gave a great groan and suddenly began to splinter and shatter in a path heading directly toward us. But I knew that this force was coming only for me.

  “Get to the fort, now!” I yelled to Jacklovich.

  He ran toward the fort, gripping and pulling me with him. I tried to break free—to keep him safe, I had to get away from him, but the thing under the ice was coming too fast.

  “Twiner, get us out of here,” I whispered urgently. The staff immediately responded. As the ice underneath us crumbled away, Twiner lengthened into a pole and vaulted us to safety inside the snow fort.

  But not before we caught a glimpse of a hideous creature that breached the ice. Long, foul looking, it was a nightmare incarnate.

  “The Lermontoff Serpent,” I said aloud.

  “I should have known it was amphibious,” remarked Twiner.

  Jacklovich and Ana were gaping at me, speechless, clutching each other.

  “There’s a lot to explain but no time to do so,” I told them, trying to keep my voice steady, trying not to frighten them even more than they already were. “Do as I say, and we might have a chance.”

  They nodded, but the situation was complicating more quickly than I could fathom. A gust of wind whirled the coating of snow from the ice, and we could see through it easily now. What we saw was dire. Hundreds of man-size shadows darted menacingly underneath the ice, surrounding not only the fort, but any path to solid ground. Meanwhile, the serpent had circled around and was swimming toward us once more.

  “Are these the things you most fear, Jack?” asked Ana carefully.

  “Yes, Ana,” I admitted.

  But I realized I had never feared what these creatures might do to Jacklovich and Ana.

  Then Ana cried, “Look over there!” From the forested edge of the lake, werewolves were racing toward us across the ice, howling wildly.

  “They are friends. I promise,” I assured them. “You must go with them. Both of you.”

  “But what about you?” Jacklovich asked, his voice quavering.

  The shadowy figures were circling in a frenzy under the ice at our feet. They made a horrible scraping sound—they were tearing away at the ice! They would break it apart within seconds. I had to lead the coming battle away from the fort if I wanted to save Jacklovich and Ana.

  I pushed my friends up our small snow tower and waved at the werewolf leading the pack. It was Shadowbent, of that I was certain. I waved again, then pointed to my adopted brother and sister. I knew he understood.

  There wasn’t time to even hug them farewell. With Twiner in hand, I leaped from the tower and toward the path of the serpent. For these past months I’d not tested my old powers. I had buried them in the furthest reaches of my mind, in a place past memory, so I had no idea at this point how much they’d dimmed, how much they were intact. But now they flooded back. And with a fury.

  I slammed the tip of Twiner upon the ice to announce my return, to let my enemies know their day would not go easy. The ice around me pulverized into a million arrowlike shards that made a target of the serpent.

  The creature breached the ice, then dove deep to where my arrows had no chance to do any harm. But it gave me the opportunity to have Twiner aimed and ready. To my shock, however, the serpent did not come at me again. It swerved away and instead sped toward the snow fort. Then I realized with growing dread that the Nightmare Men had not followed me either, but were now breaking through the ice around and underneath the fort. In a blaze of speed Shadowbent and his werewolves galloped up to form a thick circle around Jacklovich and Ana, but they would be no match against the speeding serpent, which could sink the fort entirely.

  I focused all my power to direct Emily Jane’s winds; I had to get to them NOW. She did not fail me.

  “Why does it attack the children and not me?” I asked Twiner as we flew above the lake, fast as light.

  “What I think,” said Twiner as he morphed into a long harpoon, “is too dark to say.”

  As we landed on the snow fort tower, I turned to Jacklovich and Ana, who looked so very scared. There were only seconds to spare.

  “I am your brother and your friend. Always.” I hugged them quickly.

  Then I nodded to Shadowbent. He scooped the children up onto his back, then the whole pack of werewolves sprang from the fort and ran for the lake’s edge just as one corner of the fort fell through the broken ice. The Nightmare Men’s eyes glowed red with fury. One screeched, “Pitch will let you live, but he will kill all those for whom you care!”

  My blood went cold. This was the truth Twiner could not say. Now that I was linked to Pitch, he would know, feel, be able to track down anyone with whom I formed a lasting bond, and send his Nightmare Men to kill them.

  As the Nightmares moved to chase down Shadowbent and the children, the serpent crashed through the splintered ice be
neath the fort and soared over me. Its jaws were opened wide and bore down on me. One quick glance assured me that the werewolves and the children had safely reached the lake’s edge and were disappearing into the forest. So again I smashed Twiner down upon the ice, this time with a force that shattered everything that was frozen. The ice arrows were tenfold more than were needed to decimate every Nightmare Man and the serpent, but for me, they were not enough. I wanted Pitch to feel this loss. I willed the arrows to slice his men to ribbons, I covered every inch of his serpent with wounds deep enough to hurt but not kill. As the creature sank into the cold waters where my snow fort caved, I let myself be clamped in its jaws. Then I took the diamond dagger hidden in my coat and ended the serpent. I let myself sink with it to the dark, lonely bottom of the lake.

  Because I knew what must be done.

  There I would stay. Away from everything and everyone.

  Pitch must believe I was dead so he could harm no one I loved.

  I had to feel nothing. Be nothing.

  I would become invisible.

  Vanished. Gone.

  I had taken one thing from the fort as it sank. My blue shirt, our flag. I held it tight in my hand.

  For a hundred years I stayed there. For nearly all that time I thought no thought, I forced myself to never remember a moment or feel a single emotion. I would leave not a crumb for Pitch to follow. I could sense your sorrow, Katherine, at my being gone, but I could not let it into my heart. For Pitch would know and come for you. And in time I erased my memory. I forgot my whole life. I didn’t remember Pitch. I was a book of empty pages. That’s when I came back into the world. I knew I was different. I knew I had powers. Twiner kept my past a secret but stitched on the blue shirt were three names: JACKLOVICH, ANA, and JACK FROST.

  I took the name that seemed right and began my new journey. It was years before I remembered any of you. That occurred on that last night in London, with a different snow fight, when the Nightmare Men tracked me down. Then I remembered everything. I knew someday I would need to use the diamond dagger to face Pitch.