Guardians Chapter Book #5

by William Joyce

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Sadness Into Snow

  AS EVERYTHING HUNG IN the balance, there were only seconds to act.

  Hate and rage move at the speed of light, and before a single second had passed, Pitch had sent forth a searing red wave of fury that engulfed and blinded every creature that stood their ground in Werewolf Valley. The Nightmare Army that levitated around Pitch, bows tensed, now marked their targets.

  By the next tick of the clock their deadly arrows would rain down on the blinded Guardian armies, who could not see the doom that was coming. North, Bunnymund, Sandy, Katherine, and Jack—none of them knew they were each targeted with an arrow aimed at their hearts. In perfect unison every Nightmare Man heard Pitch’s command to let loose their arrows. In the time between the tick and the tock, all of the Guardians would die.

  But . . .

  Jack had already made his move.

  Ombric Shalazar, the greatest wizard the world had ever known, the figure who was now known as Father Time, the man who knew the realm between the tick and tock better than anyone, had seen this moment coming. He could not violate the rule set down by the Man in the Moon himself. He could not go forward in time to help the Guardians or any living soul. The future could not be tampered with or changed.

  But . . .

  The future could be planned for.

  And that is what Ombric and Jack had done. At their last fateful Christmastime meeting, he had told Jack Frost only one thing. He had told Jack to “remember.”

  And Jack had. He had remembered so many things. He had remembered everything. He had remembered sadness and joy and everything in between. He remembered the kiss and the belief it gave him in Katherine. He remembered Pitch’s tears. He remembered that those tears came from love and sorrow. And he remembered Emily Jane’s belief in the goodness of her father. All those remembered things had guided him to this moment.

  So as soon as Jack had sent word to Toothiana, he took the diamond dagger in his good hand. At the exact instant Pitch’s wave of light blinded them, Jack, with a single thrust, speared his own scarred hand completely through, right at the center of the scar. He did it so quickly that he didn’t feel any pain. But Pitch did. In less than a breath he crumpled. As did every soldier in his Nightmare Army. The blinding light of his hate extinguished. The sky shed its reddish hue, and the night returned to normal. But not before the black arrows of the Nightmare soldiers had been released. They streaked toward their targets. There was no time for any Guardian to respond.

  In that blink of time miracles occurred.

  Pitch, writhing in pain, began to fall from the snow-filled sky, and as he did, the arrows turned brittle, then emberlike. Their speed slowed.

  Pitch landed hard on the cobblestone road outside Shadowbent’s castle. His grounding barely made a sound.

  The black arrows, once so deadly, were now so fragile that the falling snowflakes were enough to shatter them. With the glow of the Mythosphere, they dissolved to dust, making a faint chorus of sound, like a million whispered sighs.

  The Nightmare Army still drifted above Werewolf Valley, but they too had become like cinders. The full Moon shined right through them. With a single gentle breeze from Katherine’s Mythosphere, they broke apart, every last one of them, and dwindled till they were less than mist or even smoke. They evaporated in a silence that felt like peace.

  Now they are just a story to be told, thought Katherine. They are a part of the Mythosphere.

  She looked for Jack, but he was gone. She ran to the balcony. A spattering of black blood on the ruins of the stone rail vanished just as she spied it.

  She could sense no feeling of Jack at all. Deeply afraid, she leaned over the balcony, searching for any sign of him.

  She needn’t have feared. He was down below, kneeling over the fallen form of Pitch. Across from him was Emily Jane, also on her knees. She was holding her father’s hand, the one that had always clutched the painted cameo of her. North, Bunnymund, and Sandy had joined her. As had Shadowbent. The Guardian armies began to leave their battle lines, drawn toward the place where Pitch lay. They watched the final moments of the Nightmare King unfold.

  With a sharp pull, Jack took the diamond dagger from his wounded hand. He gently placed that hand on Pitch’s chest, just over his heart. Then he raised the dagger. For a moment it seemed he would stab Pitch, kill him, but he paused. As he held the dagger aloft, it seemed to melt—it was melting!—turning back into tears. Pitch’s tears. They dripped slowly but steadily, landing on Jack’s scarred hand.

  The wound healed. No sign of it could be seen. The dagger dissolved completely. Even the jewels from Nightlight’s uniform became liquid and seeped away.

  Every teardrop that ran from Jack’s hand began to soak into Pitch’s chest. As the last drops vanished, so did Pitch. Or at least what Pitch had become. As the Guardians’ greatest enemy lay in front of them, a great transformation occurred. The twisted grimace and sickly pallor of his face softened and smoothed, and for the first time since the Golden Age, the face of Kozmotis Pitchiner, Lord High General of the Galaxies, Tsar Lunanoff’s first in command, was looked upon by the one person who loved him. Emily Jane leaned close to her father’s face.

  The Lord Pitchiner

  By now Katherine had come down from the castle and stood silently behind Jack. The Guardians together gazed at their fallen foe with a quiet reverence.

  Sandy and Bunnymund were the first to kneel, their heads bowed. They had both known Pitch when he had been Lord Pitchiner.

  Sandy had served under him before the dark days of the Nightmares and had worshipped the once-noble commander. Sandmen cannot cry, but Sandy looked as if he might.

  “From what I know of humans and men,” Bunnymund said solemnly, “he was, before his darkening, a man of greatness.”

  “Brave. Honorable. Selfless,” whispered Emily Jane, blinking back tears.

  “Then he deserves our respect,” said North as he too dropped to one knee. As did the gathered armies; every Yeti, werewolf, fairy, Warrior Egg, squirrel, and bug. They kneeled in tribute to their ancient enemy. He was an enemy no more. Their war had saved him. The Nightmare King was gone. His hate and hurt were gone.

  Jack’s snow was still falling, but not a flake touched Lord Pitchiner.

  “I did my best for him,” Jack said quietly to Emily Jane.

  She gave a slight smile. “You kept your promise.”

  Katherine looked from one to the other, a thought dawning. They are both his children in a way, she realized. Neither would exist without him.

  She looked up at the cloudless sky and the falling snow. This snow, it was Jack’s sorrow. He was mourning his old enemy, and now he wishes him well, she thought. Like everything Jack faces, whether he knows it or not, he changes it. He turns darkness into light, wars into salvation, sadness into snow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Snag, Smush, and Whittle

  TWINER HAD FLOWN TO the Ardelean farm as soon as Jack had given the Tooth Fairy the word to go. He had made himself into a bow and arrow and shot himself there. The bow part of him had grabbed the arrow part, and then the stick-man part of him grabbed the bow, and they morphed into a single well-shot arrow shaft that sped sixty miles with surprising accuracy. He shot himself straight through the keyhole of the Ardelean cabin door, instantly snagging the beanie off the head of Blandim the Worm Boy and destroying his evil unicorn tracings, which the youngest of the three generations of Jacks was unwittingly about to touch.

  Thirty-three one hundredths of a second later Toothiana come crashing through the roof and landed on top of Blandim, successfully smushing him as one would smush a large slug.

  The ensuing splatter was impressive and elicited a delighted “yuuuuck!” from the three Ardelean children. Jack III grinned as well.

  Toothiana easily sidestepped the goo and spun around to face Lampwick Iddock.

  “The flying half-breed makes her entrance,” snorted Iddock in his most
oily tone. “You fluttering harpy, I’ll pluck your—” But before he could finish his insult, she had, with a single sweep of her sword, cut all eight of his legs off at the knees.

  The limbs toppled over like bowling pins.

  “That was rather harsh,” Iddock blurted as he dropped several inches.

  “What exactly are you supposed to be?” asked Toothiana with a hint of repulsion, taking in for the first time Iddock’s evolution from maharaja to Monkey King to . . . what?

  “Whenever I disappoint Pitch, he devolves me into something more embarrassing,” Iddock muttered. “Last time he turned me into a monkey, but he added eight legs as sort of a joke.”

  Toothiana had to think about that one for a moment. Then she laughed. “Oh! Eight legs! A spider monkey!”

  No sooner had she said this than Iddock turned to dust before her eyes, as did his monkey troops. Even the unsightly stain that had been Blandim dried up and disappeared.

  Toothiana and Twiner looked at each other in astonishment. Twiner himself had shifted back to his scarecrow-like self. “I do believe this means Jack succeeded, and the Mythosphere has proved its worth.”

  Toothiana sheathed her swords and scuffed the floor where Iddock had stood.

  “Indeed,” she said absently. “Too bad he won so quickly. I enjoy whittling.”

  “Who was that eight-legged fellow?” asked Jack III.

  “A wicked maharaja, a pathetic man, and a miserable monkey,” she replied frankly.

  “Oh,” said Jack. His grin grew wider still.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Time and Tide

  THE FULL MOON WAS low on the horizon. It would soon set behind the trees that surrounded Werewolf Valley to the west.

  “I would like for you all to see my other family,” Jack told the Guardians. North called for his sleigh. There was just enough room for everyone, even Shadowbent. It was the first time in centuries they had taken a ride together in that most elaborate and wondrous of contraptions.

  Jack sat pensively in front, between North, who piloted his reindeer, and Katherine. It was an effort for her not to glance too often at Jack; she knew it would annoy him. Without intending to, they had both settled into the same age. Jack was the oldest he could ever appear—eighteen—and so was Katherine.

  A light snow still fell. It was Jack’s snow, certainly, but Katherine could feel that it came from a place inside his heart that she had never before known. It was a place of tranquility, perhaps even peace.

  As the sleigh landed outside the Ardelean cabin, Shadowbent looked around appraisingly. “The snow. The cold. This is very like the night I brought you here for the first time,” he said to Jack. And indeed it was.

  Jack thought for a moment. “I went to the house alone,” he said more to himself than to Shadowbent.

  Toothiana and Twiner were standing outside the cabin to meet them. “All is tended to,” Toothiana assured Jack as he leaped from the sleigh. The rest of the Guardians stayed put. This moment seemed to belong to Jack.

  Boisterous sounds from inside the cabin caught their attention. The house was alive with light and warmth, just as it had been all those years ago. Jack’s heart swelled as he walked hesitantly toward the front door. He paused to peek through the window. Once again he could barely see through the frost.

  Then the door swung open, the warm inner glow lit the snowy night.

  A boy stood silhouetted in the doorway. A wild-haired boy. Thin and willowy. Jack could just make out his face. The mischievous grin was there. It was a Jacklovich descendant, all right.

  “You’re him,” said the boy with awe. “The boy they tell us to remember.”

  He grabbed Jack’s hand. The one that had been wounded all those years and wars ago but now was healed, the skin now smoothed of its wounds.

  “And what do they tell you?” asked Jack as the boy began to tug him inside.

  “That your name is Jack Frost.”

  “And?” Jack coaxed.

  “And that you saved our family. And that you’d come back someday.”

  Then his sisters crowded the doorway. One grabbed Twiner, and the other pulled on Jack’s other hand.

  “They told us,” said one sister, “that we should always believe in you.”

  “Even if we never see you,” said the other.

  Now Jack grinned. “And did you?”

  “We believed! We believed! We believed!” the threesome shouted.

  The Guardians, smiling from the shadows, recognized the echo of Ombric’s first lesson in magic—to believe. They watched as Jack was drawn into the cabin, surrounded by children and parents, everyone talking excitedly at once. But Jack stopped just inside the door. Without looking back at the sleigh, he held out his healed hand.

  “Come, Katherine,” he said. “You must see how my story ends.”

  She smiled at her fellow Guardians, hopped from the sleigh, and joined Jack. As she took his hand, it dawned on her: This is the beginning of his story, not the end.

  The snow was still falling, now in huge, feather-size flakes. The tracks of the sleigh and all their footprints would be lost and covered before the Moon set and the sun rose. But they would remember this moment for as long as they had breath. Perhaps longer.

  “I think we’ll know where to find Katherine and Jack when we need them,” North remarked. Bunnymund nodded, as did Sandy, Toothiana, and Shadowbent. For an instant, they felt Ombric’s presence. The great wizard could still work magic like no other.

  With one last look, North called “Away!” to his reindeer. And each of them thought the same thought as they coursed through the sky and watched their mighty friend the Moon finally disappear at the world’s edge.

  No matter what may happen, through time and tide, through thick and thin, children will always believe.

  The End

  Acknowledgments

  Publishing a novel is a long journey and a grand adventure. To me there is a nobility in the process and its traditions. The people who published this book are like a tribe of alchemists.

  I hereby thank, acknowledge, and celebrate:

  Jeannie Ng, eagle-eyed copy editor;

  Lauren Rille, lightning-fast designer extraordinaire;

  Elizabeth Blake-Linn, production manager who gets everything all gorgeously printed with fancy specs;

  Alex Borbolla, who goes over every little detail;

  Anne Zafian, deputy publisher who Makes Stuff Happen;

  Chrissy Noh, marketing visionary and jolly prankster;

  Lauren Hoffman, head of marketing/publicity who has been championing the Guardians books from the get-go;

  Lisa Moraleda, publicist who shouts from the rooftops;

  Michelle Leo, head of library and education, and a saint;

  and the Grand High Poobahs of the House, Justin Chanda —wizard of whiskeys, roof farming, and books— and Jon Anderson, the genial Guardian of the Creative Spirit

  About the Author

  William Joyce has spent most of his life deciphering the long-lost and nearly destroyed records of the beginnings of Santa Claus, Jack Frost, and all the other Guardians of Childhood. From these records he created the Guardians series. He has also written and illustrated many picture books, including the New York Times bestselling The Man in the Moon, The Sandman, Dinosaur Bob, and Santa Calls; won six Emmy Awards; and was the producer of Rise of the Guardians. He won an Academy Award for the animated short film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which was based on the #1 New York Times bestselling picture book of the same name. He lives in Shreveport, Louisiana. Talk to William Joyce and look at upcoming work at @HeyBillJoyce on Twitter and Instagram or at williamjoyce.com.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by William Joyce

  Interior illustrations copyright © 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2018 by William Joyce

  Jacket illustrations copyright © 2011, 2018 by William Joyce

  Portions of the artwork in the book were previously published, in slightly different form, in William Joyce’s E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth’s Core!, The Man in the Moon, and The Sandman and the War of Dreams

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