Geek Fantasy Novel (18 page)

I will not kiss you again for some time,” the Snow Queen said, “for I could kiss you to death.”

Once she had finished kissing him, she grew even more beautiful in his mind. He crept closer and reached his arms around her.

They flew all night, over the lakes and forests, and then over the frozen seas. The storm winds screamed about them; but the whole night there was the great moon, bright and silver, for the boys to look at whenever they got scared. By the time the sun came up, they were asleep at the Snow Queen’s feet.

And somewhere, now far away, was the little girl they’d left behind.

Thank you, Mr. Sumperson, that will be plenty.

When Maarten had begun his booming story, Ralph felt he could listen for hours. But by the time his alter ego was falling asleep in the Snow Queen’s sleigh, Ralph could barely keep his own eyes open.

Much later, Regina opened the door. She was wearing what would have looked like a nun’s habit, had it not been fashioned of stitched paisley patches. While Ralph was dozing, she threw back the gauzy curtains and filled the room with bright and chilly light. Ralph cracked open his eyes to see a smooth blue exterior wall, with the hints of a dense flower garden at its boundary. The sky beyond was an even, brilliant white.

“How long have I been sleeping?” he asked.

Regina looked up sharply, a glare all the more alarming for her generally docile manner. “Don’t worry about how long. Just worry about sleeping enough to get better.”

“I don’t feel any better,” Ralph said. While he had been listening to Daphne’s story, he had pressed his legs to find a fracture. But they weren’t broken or even bruised; they were simply weak. Trying to use them was like trying to make a fist right after waking.

“Oh, you will get better. You simply
must.”
It was the least convincing performance she had yet given.

Regina left Ralph with a tray of scones, each labeled with a little card. The batch encompassed a variety of fantastic flavors: pumpkin curd, sweet rampion, Valhalla rhubarb. They smelled fantastic. But, despite his grumbling belly, despite the scones’ warm and flaky fragrance, he didn’t pick one out. Instead, he lay in his bed and thought.

Perhaps Regina was poisoning him. He could think of no reason for her to do so, but old women in secluded cottages were known to do such things. But if she wanted him dead, she could easily have offed him already. He didn’t seem to be getting any
worse,
at least, and although his legs were as weak as ever, and being awake was enough to put him to sleep, his mind seemed alert.

Why keep him an invalid? If Regina thought he was a warlock, then perhaps she had some wicked use for his sorcery. But surely he’d need to be healthy for that — wouldn’t a bedridden warlock be useless?

He couldn’t resist; they smelled so good. While he finished his last scone (this one the flavor of a pineapple-and-ham pizza) and washed it down with lukewarm tea, he heard another text message come in on his phone. He pulled it out from under his bed.

RALPH. HAVE ACTIVATED BEAR. YRS TRULY MS

After unsuccessfully trying to text back and then hiding his phone away, Ralph decided he didn’t dare fiddle with the bear at the foot of his bed, in case Regina was somehow watching. He had memorized the timing of Regina’s visits (once each for breakfast, lunch, Irish teatime, British teatime, Russian teatime, and supper), and he knew his safest stretch to risk a peek would be after lunch and before Irish tea. For a long time he watched the creature stare back at him with its bead eyes, and wondered what Maarten’s latest text meant.

The bear was one of the jointed variety that parents adore and children find scratchy. Once the safe interval came, Ralph turned him upside, downside, offside, and was about to turn him inside out when he noticed a loose piece of thread on the animal’s lower paw. When he tugged, it unraveled freely. Once the worn velvet pad had fallen away, a mirror was revealed beneath. Or it seemed to be a mirror, only it didn’t show Ralph at all, but rather a girl slogging through snowdrifts. When he tilted it, it showed a different part of the picture, like a spyglass. He squinted closer. The girl was Daphne.

He heard a squeaking sound, and discovered that it originated from the bear’s upper paw. When he held the stuffed animal to his ear he found that he was listening to a perfect reproduction of the sounds of a winterscape — the howling wind, even the ragged sighs Daphne made as she struggled through the snow. And alongside he heard a voice, a young man’s voice, a most ideal and mellifluous voice, describing it all.

And so, by wrapping the bear around his head (like a virtual reality headset as engineered by a nineteenth-century child), he was able to follow Daphne’s story.

Daphne was trudging along a winter trail. She wasn’t sure when or how that started. She wasn’t sure of terribly much, actually. It was like she had always been an olden times little girl, but she had blacked out on the specifics of why.

She spoke to herself (as little girls tend to do when alone in fairy tales — they also tend to weep bitterly, which you’ll notice she will do with regularity). “I miss my young man and my brother so much. And they’re gone forever.”

“No,” said the sunshine. “I do not believe it.”

“We agree! We do not believe it! It can’t be true! It is not so!” cried the winter songbirds, who never knew when to finish making a point.

Daphne wondered what to do next. She remembered having long ago been with her parents, and her brother and sister, and an American boy named Ralph, having some episode in a fairy castle that ended violently, and then suddenly having lived an entirely different life in which she was a Danish girl who lost both her brother, Cecil, and her best friend in the world, a young man named Ralph who made her heart pump a little faster whenever she imagined his face.

She felt peevish, actually. Part of her relished this world of talking sunshine and songbirds, and part of her found it uncomfortably sweet, like eating handfuls of sugar.

Ralph, being so very smart, would understand exactly what was happening, and Cecil was so decisive that he would know precisely what to do about it. And Beatrice would be the compass to make sure everyone came to the right conclusion. But Daphne didn’t have any of them, and didn’t know how to find them, and wept all the more bitterly thinking about it. Her tears fell to the snow’s surface and were lost.

What Ralph had glimpsed of Daphne’s tale so far, though minimal, had been way too cutesy. Ominously cutesy, like happy music in a sci-fi movie. He knew that Daphne was bound eventually to get herself into serious trouble. In order to help her, though, he’d first have to find Cecil (who was bound to be imprisoned nearby) and escape. He found himself unable to determine how to do so while incapacitated and locked in a small room, however. Were he designing this moment in a video game, he would have two options: A small creature would come by to give him a means of rescue (the closest he had come to such a benefactor was the fly, which was unfortunately still quite dead) or he would press some combination of buttons to free himself (as he hadn’t a controller, doing so would be tricky).

Ralph was sure Daphne was about to go through a charming sequence of events that would make for a precious story. But he found it hard to concentrate, knowing he was trapped and going to be “dead in a fortnight” … only he couldn’t remember how long a fortnight was, and he wasn’t able to get a phone call through to his parents, whom he suddenly missed very much.

“I’m sorry,” Ralph called up toward my position in the catwalks, “but do you think you could speed Daphne’s wish along? I don’t have time for ‘cute.’ ”

Absolutely not.

“I’m
dying
here.” Ralph’s voice caught. “Please. I can’t stand this sweet nonsense.”

I’m not taking orders from a character.

“Then I’m not listening to my narrator.”

Fine. Let’s take this narrator out for a spin and see what he can do, then.

The picture in the magic mirror suddenly went dark. Ralph’s heart quaked as Regina opened the door to the cottage and vaulted in, toting Cecil behind her. Death was in her eyes.

Regina shrieked as she slammed through the door, dragging Cecil behind her. Ralph quickly realized that something was off. He was gray-blue, his features lined in purple, hair thick and shiny on his scalp, like Halloween hair. Dead. Unmistakably dead.

“What did you do to him?” Ralph stammered as defiantly as he could. Defiance is a difficult emotion for geeks to pull off. Ralph hiccupped.

Regina advanced on him, and as she left the doorway, he could see that she had a heavy stone cleaver in her fist. He shrank behind the coverlet.

“I’ve got a new bedfellow for you,” Regina hissed.

“Look, Chessie, this has gone far enough. Daphne’s seven; she’s terrified and alone. I know you’re poisoning me, and I know you’ve already
killed
Cecil, and how do you think you’re not going to be arrested?” As he got more agitated, Ralph stood on the bed and clutched the sheet to him.

“Lies,” she said uninterestedly, testing the heft of the cleaver.

“What possible good could killing him do?”

Regina stroked the dull edge of the heavy implement. “Cecil isn’t dead. He’s very ill, though. I don’t have the time to travel between the two of you anymore, so you’ll have to make room for him in your quarters. As far as
your accusation of poisoning, you may feel ill, but that’s only so you stay in one place and don’t go wandering about and ruining everything.”

“You want to keep me here forever?”

“She wished to save you. You’re the object of her quest. So stay put.”

Regina placed Cecil’s body under the covers on the other side of Ralph’s double bed, and wordlessly left the room.

Ralph stared at his new bedmate, to all appearances fully deceased. He reached a hesitant hand and felt Cecil’s neck, and found it slightly warm. Every few seconds, Cecil drew a shallow breath. Whenever he exhaled Ralph could detect the slight aroma of baking soda and dates.

Scones. The boy had been done in by scones.

“Don’t die, Cecil,” Ralph said. “I’m sorry I allowed this all to happen.” He grasped Cecil’s chilled hand.

Ralph’s only other experience with death was in sixth grade, when the school’s whistling janitor, Petey, was discovered laid out flat in a side hallway by a student out on a bathroom pass. The kid had run into the Chorus classroom and summoned the teacher, whom Ralph and the rest of the class followed. What surprised Ralph was that, even after dying, Petey was still the same old janitor; he was still in the same outfit, had the same thick cowlick. He just lost the more subtle Petey qualities. It was the same with Cecil’s corpse — all of his parts were still there, but not the unknowable feelings that connected them.

All Cecil was now, was the hip medieval outfit, the awkward complexion, the arrogant and sensitive set of his features. Ralph stroked his hand and hoped for his mystery to return.

Daphne was resting on an ice ridge that overlooked a snowy prairie. At the far side of that plain rose a tower. The Snow Queen’s palace was savage and unnatural, like the exit wound of a cannon shot off from the center of the Earth.

“Why, it’s hopeless!” Daphne wailed. “I’ll never be able to reach them!”

Rescuing Ralph and Cecil was indeed nearly hopeless, but there was a benefit in that very fact. No one could bestow on Daphne a power greater than that which she already possessed: her very vulnerability. Any kind-hearted soul watching might decide to help her.

Daphne knew she would have to start moving, or risk losing courage, not to mention all feeling in her toes. So she threw herself off the ridge, rocketing through the packed snow, all the way to the bottom of the crest. By the time she slowed to a stop, she was soaked through, her skin red and chapped, and she felt more miserable than she had ever yet felt. And the Snow Queen’s tower was still far off.

There were trees growing beneath the gray sky, she was certain. But all the greenery was blanketed in so much snow that their true forms were long-hidden — they might as well have been old men frozen in mid-step. Daphne
eased between them in the eerie quiet, surrounded by a smooth whiteness broken only by her own footprints.

The swirls of snowflakes began to thicken into shapes that grew more and more pronounced. They did not fall from above, like proper snowflakes, but hurtled along the ground. All the singular loveliness of the flakes grew grotesque; no sooner had Daphne set her eyes on one than another ripped her attention away with fresh shivers of fright. The patterns thickened so transfixingly that a squadron of snowflake soldiers formed before she realized what was happening.

These were the Snow Queen’s guards. Some were little men with spears and crystal bellies that you could peer through to the snowy landscape behind; some were bears with great silver teeth; some were birds with sharp, rhomboid wings. The scariest guards had no shape at all. They were rolling figures of ice that shifted to fit the landscape as they hurtled toward her.

Snow Guards cannot be effectively attacked by any but the most proficient warriors, for how can one kill something animated through magic? Cut off a foot and that foot will still float and advance, slice through a heart and the organ will function as well in two pieces, for snow creatures don’t need anything hot and basic like blood to sustain them. That Daphne stood no chance against these creatures was obvious to any beings who happened to be watching.

And there were some very important beings watching.

Her tale had attracted no small amount of attention, as will the story of anyone who has great odds stacked against her. As I’ve transcribed this quest, pages have been nicked and spread throughout the wish’s realm, and now all the fantastic creatures are clamoring for copies of pages.

Most of them will be of no use in aiding Daphne. But a group of retired golden angels has been following her story. They watched Daphne struggle with this cold legion of magical snowflakes. Though these heroes had once been speedy indeed, they were fat old men now, and it took them some time to fasten their hero costumes. It wasn’t until now that they arrived, the very moment a guard was about to run Daphne through with his ice lance.