Of Giants and Ice (Ever Afters, The) (30 page)

When Chase was halfway up, I forced myself to approach to the desk and reached tentatively for a wooden leaf. Lena screamed. I don’t know if it would’ve freaked me out more or less if I had more sleep, but I jumped away from the desk, with my hand on my sword.

Chase landed lightly next to me and scowled up at Lena. “What?”

“You scared the hiccups out of me,” Lena said. “You were almost there—over thirty feet up. I thought you
fell
.”

“I’m fine. You won’t have to carry an injured Companion down the beanstalk.” He herded me toward the desk with a shooing motion. “Go on. I’ll catch you if you slip.”

It felt like he was babysitting me. Sighing, I reminded myself again that it wasn’t nearly as bad as the beanstalk, and I began to climb. I was only a little bit nauseous.

Chase scaled the desk just a couple feet below me, saying, “Petal, leaf, vine, petal, petal—”

Annoyed, I almost looked down to glare at him, but I thought better of it. “I don’t
need
you to tell me where to put my hands and feet.”

“How was I supposed to know? You did yesterday.”

“Can you two
not
bicker while we’re in enemy territory?” Lena said.

“
You
just screamed a little while ago,” Chase pointed out. “That was a lot louder than me and Rory.”

“No bickering,” Lena said firmly, sounding like Jenny. “I don’t want to keep telling you.”

Then Chase grumbled about the burden of overcautious Characters and how the giants were on vacation and how this was turning out to be the easiest Tale he’d ever been on. But he grumbled quietly.

It
was
much easier than the beanstalk. It was even easier than Chase’s rope ladder the night before, which swung a little with everyone’s movement. Maybe I was getting better with the heights thing. It only took me a couple minutes to reach the flat workspace
where Lena was standing. She held a hand out anxiously, ready to help me.

I slowly eased my foot off the carving and toward Lena. Then came a sound none of us were expecting.

I froze, but so did Chase and Lena.

“Was that . . . ?” Lena said.

“A door slamming?” I finished, horrified.

Footsteps thudded down the hall—heavy ones that rattled the pictures on the walls and the paper on the desk shelves. They could only belong to a giant.

Chase leaped up to the workspace and grabbed my arm in the same motion, dragging me with him. We ran over the top of the desk with Lena, back toward the shelves, where enormous loose papers and checkbooks and folders spilled out of every cubbyhole.

“Feed them? Did I remember to feed them?” It was Jimmy, muttering angrily to himself. “Of course not, woman. If
you
remembered, why didn’t you tell me before we left?”

“The door’s open,” I whispered, trying not to panic. “He’ll see us when he walks by.”

“Hide.” Lena looked around frantically. “We need somewhere to hide.”

“Here.” Chase pointed out a rope hanging from the wood above us. To Matilda, it was probably a thread. It was attached to a handle at the top of the desk.

Chase launched himself at the rope, grabbing it as high up as he could reach.

“Don’t!” Lena cried.

But it was too late. Chase had already tugged it with all his body weight.

With a faint rumbling, slat after slat slid down, curving over
the workspace we stood on. The cover stopped at the edge of the desk, closing us in. Then it was completely dark, except for a small sliver to the far left, where the wood above didn’t quite meet the wood below.

Of course Chase
would
pick the most dramatic way to hide us all.

“What?” he said. You could hear the grin in his voice.

“No more talking,” Lena whispered fiercely. “Not until the giant leaves.”

Jimmy’s footsteps thudded closer. “But
no
, she reminds me hours later, so I have to waste good gold on using the hotel’s Door Trek system. Come on, then.” At first, I thought Jimmy was still muttering to himself, but then I heard some light tapping, like the sound a dog’s claws make against a hard floor.

“A guard dog?” Lena said as quietly as she could.

“I
knew
I heard something last night,” I whispered back smugly.

Something hit the floor in the room across the hall with loud wet slaps. “Steaks,” said Chase. “Sounds like.”

None of us mentioned how big a giant’s dog would be. We would be lucky if it only had one head.

Meat ripped across the hall with disgusting squelching sounds. “There’s plenty of food here for a couple days,” Jimmy said. “Don’t eat it all at once or you’ll go hungry tomorrow.”

We heard him stomp out of the room and slam the door. “I wouldn’t even bother if they belonged to me, but no . . . Mother says, ‘You must care for what is entrusted to you.’”

He did such an awesome impression of Genevieve Searcaster’s rasping accent that Chase and I snickered. Lena hushed us. We heard him curse his luck, his wife, and his mother all the way down the hall, and he was still grumbling when he slammed the front door. Then the lock slid into place with an audible click.

“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 written 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.