Of Sorcery and Snow (11 page)

Maybe if I got so freaked out opening a
book
, I had no business going on this quest. Geez.

I flipped to the middle, where someone had slid in a ribbon bookmark. “The Pied Piper” blazed across the top of the page.

“Do you remember orientation?” Miriam said, and I nodded. I'd had mine with her and Philip. “Do you remember what he saw in the mirror?”

The mirror test sometimes gave you a glimpse of your Tale, and Philip had seen a man in red, carrying a wooden flute. He'd seen the Pied Piper.

“Philip knew who had come.” Then, in a hesitant voice, Miriam started to read.

It didn't sound like a flute. More like a cross between a kazoo and a trumpet, and its vibrations made his bones buzz. He'd
been drifting off. It took him by surprise, how quickly he shoved away his covers and swung his legs off the bed.

He was halfway down the stairs before he realized he wasn't in control of his body.

He wasn't afraid yet. This could all be a dream. He'd dreamed this before: stepping off the bottom stair and reaching for the door, unlocking it and walking through, leaving the door open behind him as he strode across the porch and down the front steps.

Philip remembered this part too—passing his sister's car, parked at the very top of the driveway, because she was out of town for a two-day tennis tournament. Like in the dreams, he told his hand to reach for the side mirror, to latch onto it and hold out against the current pulling him into the street. His fingers twitched—

I wish I never had a brother,
his sister had said before she left.
I wish I was still an only child.

That seemed kind of harsh to me, but I wouldn't really know. Philip wasn't
my
brother.

“I didn't
mean
it,” Miriam told me softly, stepping away from the table. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I was talking to my parents. I didn't think he was even listening . . .”

That probably was my cue to take over reading. I leaned toward the page.

—but his hand rose no higher than his waist. He sailed past
his sister's car and his mother's station wagon, down the rest of the driveway and into the street.

Under the tune of the not-flute, other children streamed out of their homes: Jeff, his next-door neighbor, who hadn't been allowed to come over since fifth grade, when he'd convinced Philip to practice golf in the backyard. That red-haired girl who was obsessed with jumping rope. The three younger Brooks boys, who had moved here two months ago from Toronto, and who were trying to win Philip over to street hockey.

Now Philip was afraid.

These kids weren't Characters. They shouldn't have showed up in his dream about his Tale.

Their eyes were open, but their gaze shot straight past Philip, like they were sleepwalking. They wandered down to the end of the street, and around the corner to Hawthorne.

“I can get us to Hawthorne,” Miriam said unexpectedly.

Philip's eyes sought out the familiar places, drinking in the sight of them, worrying he would never see them again: the grocery store his mother shopped at, and the restaurant where they ate brunch on special occasions, like the day he graduated from middle school. The bookstore where he and Miriam had bought their summer reading for as long as he could remember. The bargain movie theater his family had visited every Thursday until Miriam joined the tennis team and had to go to practice instead. The alley with a bright
green door, the one that could take him to EAS.

His eyes were his own, but he could only turn his head an inch.

As his legs marched on, he strained to catch a glimpse of the door, and he noticed someone else straining to look, someone else awake among the herd of sleepwalking children: Evan Garrison, another Character who lived about a quarter mile away.

He wondered how many other Characters had been captured. He wondered when the Canon would send someone to save them.

The Pied Piper turned off the main road, onto a street threaded between a gift shop and a coffee place—

“That describes half the neighborhood!” Miriam said, annoyed.

A staircase led down from street level. A sign with a border hung on the door.

As soon as it opened, the piper's tune leaped forward, and so did Philip's feet. The children sprinted down the steps and streamed across the basement, empty except for one tall hooded figure. Dark wings rose from his back.

“You're late,” the fairy told the Pied Piper. “Take them through quickly, so I can finish my task.”

“A Fey is working with the Snow Queen?” Chase said, clearly ready to wring that particular fairy's neck.

“We'll talk about it
later
, when we have time,” Miriam snapped. “Lena, how's it going over there?”

“I have the one of the Arctic Circle. Still working on the portal one. When I find it,” Lena said, painstakingly returning map after map to the drawer, “you'll be the first to know.”

I started reading again before a fight could break out.

Beyond the fairy, another door had been thrown open. The Pied Piper went through first, leading the children into a cold tunnel. Instantly, Philip's bare feet ached, and it only grew colder as the piper marched them to the cave mouth.

Outside was whiteness in every direction, blank and empty under the night sky except for a strange tower padded with fur, surrounded by a puddle of melted ice. Then the tower bent, and Philip realized it was a giant. She glared at the piper, face twisting under her eye patch. “You're late. I've wasted too much magic keeping the air warm while I waited,” she snarled. “You'll have to make them run.”

And so the children ran. Their breath rose in foggy bursts, but the giant's magic wrapped them in a bubble of warm air. The ice melted to slush under their bare and socked feet. Outside the path of running children, wolves prowled, and if they didn't catch an escapee, the frozen white world around them would.

Philip's fear turned to terror.

I bet those were the same wolves we'd seen in Golden Gate Park.

“Wait, do we know who that giant is?” Miriam said.

Lena nodded. “There's only one sorceress-giant.”

“Genevieve Searcaster,” I said glumly.

The list of villains we would be facing was getting longer and longer. No wonder the Director was worried.

Only once did Philip see a kid break away from the pack—Evan crouched over a hole in the ice, where white fox pups watched the children stampede past, but the sorceress-giant plucked the boy from the ground, carrying him in her fist.

Through the night and the morning, the children ran. They ran until Philip's feet were numb and his breaths ripped through his throat.

When the palace rose out of the bleak landscape, Philip welcomed the sight almost as much as the piper, who had begun to bleed from two fingers, and the giant, whose face had turned gray under her hood. The children were slipping now in the slush. Mary, Evan's sister, would stop and help them up, so Philip started to do the same. His neighbor, the jump-roper, tripped just as they reached the threshold—frozen doors thrown open, tall enough to admit the giant.

Philip had already grabbed his neighbor's hands before he noticed that her eyes had widened. She was awake.

“Philip?” she said. “Where are we?”

They were in an enormous room made of ice—frozen floors, white walls, and a dome ceiling glittering with icicles. It was colder here than it had been during the run, especially with the sweat cooling around his pajama collar.

Around them, other kids were waking. Some screamed. Others cried.

Philip glanced at the villains.

The Pied Piper's tune had stopped. His lips were almost as red as his suit, bruised with the effort of enchanting them for so long.

“I can't control them as well at a run,” the Pied Piper panted.

The giant's face was still ashen, but her voice was steady. “It doesn't matter. Her Majesty has a plan.” Then she lifted her gaze.

Following it, Philip spotted a balcony high above them. He stood, riveted, when a slight figure stepped out upon it—her silver dress edged with lacelike frost, her ivory skin shimmering with ice crystals, her fair hair bound up under a crown.

Her lips—the color of snow mixed with a single drop of blood—curled slowly into a triumphant smile.

My eyes reached the next line before my voice did, and my heart stopped.

“Welcome, children,” said the Snow Queen. “You are mine now.”

And then Philip's terror evaporated. Only despair was left. If this villain had stolen them, there would be no rescue.

The rest of the page was blank. “That's all. That's the last line,” I said.

Now we knew why the Director had cancelled the quest. It didn't seem like such a stupid decision anymore.

Chase stared at me, like he was waiting for me to say,
Late April Fool's.
I clasped my hands behind my back, so that no one could see them shaking. Lena let a map dangle from her fingers, not noticing the crease she was making in the parchment.

“Well . . .” Miriam's voice was rough. She cleared her throat. “At least we know he's still alive.”

I wondered how long she'd been worrying about that.

“Why didn't she
tell
us?” Lena said. “If the Director knew since yesterday, why didn't she announce it?”

“Panic,” Chase said. “It would ruin the ball.”

The Director and her stupid ball. She should have told us. We had a right to know.

I
had a right to know. I was the one who was supposed to stop the Snow Queen, wasn't I?

“Lena, have you found the map of Portland yet?” Miriam asked.

Lena's eyes were huge. “Are we still
going
?”

But we needed to go. The slush the book had described should still be there, frozen over. The tracks would be easy to follow.

I made myself bite my tongue. It
was
Miriam's Tale.

Our Tale bearer just flipped forward in the book, blank page
after blank page. “All this empty space. It means his Tale is still being written. We still have time to rescue him.”

“But from the Snow Queen's palace?” Lena said. “What does she plan to do with her prisoners? Maybe we can rescue Philip after he gets a little farther away from the Snow Queen. . . .”

“You guys are asking all the wrong questions,” Chase said, striding over to the table. “How did she get
out
? And is it really her? That could have been a doll.”

“Like that Mia kid last year?” Miriam said, sounding way less stressed.

That would be nice. At least with a doll, we wouldn't have to worry about the Snow Queen's magical arsenal on top of Genevieve Searcaster's.

Chase took the book from Miriam and turned pages until he found one that wasn't blank. At the very top, it said, “The Snow Queen.” Underneath, an illustration showed the villain exactly how she looked when I last saw her, her skin kind of yellow. She lounged in a throne room hung with white silk. On one side, the drapes had been ripped away to reveal the wall of her prison, the Glass Mountain. Beyond it were the forests of Atlantis.

He began to read.

FIRST STORY, which tells of a Queen and her Prison

The Snow Queen sat in her prison and smiled. True, the children had gotten away. That troublesome Rory Landon had retrieved the Water of Life and rescued the two boys.

Chase looked up. “I resent that. I did a lot in there. It was my idea to—”

“Not now!” I said, and he returned to the book.

Doubtless, they would now be distributing the Water to all those poisoned. Doubtless, they thought that they'd won.

She allowed herself a moment of frustration—yes, wiping out the entire Canon under Mildred's very nose would have been delicious. Killing the Rory girl would have been particularly sweet. But no matter.

Her hard work hadn't been for naught. She had completed her primary objective.

The Snow Queen reached under her throne, and from a spot hidden behind her skirt, she grabbed two bottles, filled to the brim with the Water of Life. The stupid children hadn't realized that she had removed them from the carryall before they had arrived. They hadn't bothered to count the number of bottles.

That was true. Chase and I hadn't checked. We'd been in too much of a hurry. Teams of wolves and trolls had attacked us almost as soon as we'd arrived.

“Wait, what did she want the Water
for
?” Miriam asked.

“‘With this, she could escape,'”
Chase continued.

Black squiggles crowded my vision. I reminded myself to breathe.

Chase's gaze zipped back and forth over the page, reading but not aloud, and I didn't like the way his face was beginning to say,
doom
. Miriam leaned closer and took over.

She would do it now—perhaps this wall was weakened, still recovering from the child's blow. She edged closer to the glass, fighting as it tried to push her back. She unscrewed the cap of the bottle.

She didn't call her attendants to her, in case the attempt failed.

Then she jerked her arm forward. The water flew in an arc over the few feet she couldn't cross and splattered against the glass. For a second, nothing happened—the water only dripped pathetically down the wall, long enough for Solange to swell with rage.

“It didn't work,” I said, but I didn't feel as sure as I sounded. “The spell in the bottles was the same as the spell embedded in the Glass Mountain. If the water didn't explode the bottles, it couldn't explode the wall either. Right?”

Lena shook her head slowly. “I cast the bottle's spell specifically to hold the Water of Life's magic. That's what kept it from exploding. Throwing a bunch of water on the wall would overload the Glass Mountain's enchantment.”