Of Witches and Wind (26 page)

“How do you know I couldn't be the warrior?” It ticked me off more when Chase openly snickered. I ignored the little Kenneth-like voice in my head that said I was useless without my sword. “Don't laugh. Which one of us beat the metal dude yesterday?”

Chase rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and who dropped her sword and apologized to the troll for smashing his bridge? You've never killed anyone.”

And I never wanted to. I'd told him so.

“Neither have you—” I started, but Chase looked at me sharply. I broke off and added something else to the list of things Chase had never told me. “Oh.”

“The Fey forge their warriors very young,” Iron Hans said, like he disapproved.

Maybe I didn't want to be the warrior anyway.

“And the third one?” I couldn't bring myself to say the Snow Queen's name.

Iron Hans looked me with his far-off thinking stare. “You are the glue, and the current.”

Great. He had stopped making sense. Definitely like Rapunzel.

He must have guessed that didn't tell me much. “It was Solange who had the conqueror's heart.”

I made a face. That didn't sound like me at all.

“What Tale did Sebastian get?” Chase said. “Tell me it was something with a Dapplegrim.”

Iron Hans frowned. “That is the wrong question.”

“You keep saying that,” Chase said, swinging the hatchet again. “It's annoying. There's no such thing as a stupid question.”

“You'll need to find your own path, Chase,” Iron Hans said. “You cannot wait to be defined by your Tale.”

“Yes, I can.” Chase's face was on the red side, and I couldn't tell if it was because he was mad or because chopping wood was hard work. “I'm going to have the best Tale anyone has ever seen—”

“You should be more truthful.”

And instead of flipping out at Iron Hans, Chase was silent, jaw clenched. I was definitely missing something.

“Tell her,” said Iron Hans. Chase didn't say anything. “Do you still want the reward we discussed?”

Chase sucked in a huge breath. He turned to me. “You know the test for Characters?”

“Where you see something in a magic mirror?” What did this have to do with the Triumvirate?

“I saw the Tree, but being half throws everything off,” Chase explained. “The Fey always see something in a magic mirror. The Director said I might never get a Tale.”

My mouth fell open. I snapped it shut before Chase could comment.

Chase had always bragged about getting a great Tale. But I knew suddenly, from his half-defiant, half-hopeful stare, that he hadn't been trying to convince me and the other seventh graders. He'd been trying to convince himself.

What if he didn't get his Tale? What would stop him from leaving? He could grow up in more places than just Ever After School.

“Of course you'll have a Tale,” I burst out fiercely.

Chase grinned.

“You don't have the luxury of waiting for your Tale, Chase,” Iron Hans said. “You and you alone must determine your role in what will come.” I wondered if he really wanted to sound so freaky, or if you naturally said stuff in a scary way when you lived for a thousand years.

“You don't know that.” Chase's knuckles were white around the hatchet's handle.

But Iron Hans talked like he did know. “I know there may be no glory in it. It should not be glory you seek, no matter what you have been taught.”

Chase gave him a long, hard, withering look, the kind that terrified the fifth and sixth graders, and sometimes the triplets. But
he didn't say anything, which probably meant that he couldn't think of any way to argue.

“You're out of wood. You know where you left it,” said Hans.

Chase burst into the air with a flurry of peachy wings—like he couldn't get away from us fast enough.

“Okay, here's what I don't understand,” I told Iron Hans, mainly to lighten the mood. “How did you manage to get Chase to chop wood? Chase only does chores if a giant threatens to throw him down the beanstalk if he doesn't sweep to her satisfaction.”

“He destroyed my winter's woodpile last night,” Iron Hans said. “I offered him a boon if he would chop up the two trees you smashed to the ground.”

“Chase would do anything for a boon.” I ignored the fact that a thirteen-year-old would need more than a few hours to chop up two whole trees. “But I would have loved to see Chase's face when you told him to split firewood.”

The corners of Iron Hans's mouth quirked up. “His exact words were, ‘Don't you have any armies you need slain? I also kill a mean griffin.' ”

The idea was too strange—it took me a second to recognize that Iron Hans was smiling. He liked Chase, even if he'd spent the last ten minutes chewing him out.

“I learned of Solange's misdeeds after the war, in prison—what she did to Chase's brother and to her own sister, and to so many others,” said Iron Hans. “I will never enter another war. I no longer trust a side enough to kill for it.”

“She had a sister? What did Solange do to her?” Images of torture and beheading flooded my brain.

Chase dropped out of the air, hugging a circular piece of tree trunk, mud splattered over both knees. “Duh. Stuck her in the
tower. The Snow Queen played the witch in Rapunzel's Tale.”

“Rapunzel?” It sank in slowly. “
Our
Rapunzel? She's Solange's sister?”

“Half sister, technically.” Chase buried the hatchet so deep into the wood he had to wiggle it free.

I stopped breathing.

They looked similar. I knew that. I'd noticed it in the beginning, but I'd forgotten. They felt so different, the Snow Queen always cunning, Rapunzel always so sad.

A squirrel—with two metallic stripes of gold down its back—scampered into the clearing and up Iron Hans's leg. I stared at it, uncomprehending, as it chittered away. Apparently, Lena's gumdrop translator didn't cover animal speech.

When I took a deep breath, the air rattled on the way down, and Chase looked so startled I wondered what my face was doing.

He stepped closer, hatchet in hand. “Rory, you really didn't know? You didn't even suspect?”

I shook my head, too shocked to trust my voice. I
should
have suspected.

Iron Hans looked up from the squirrel. “I am sorry to rush you, but the human questers are a quarter mile north of us. They tried to outrun their enemies, but they have been attacked. They are fighting for their lives.” His warm brown eyes met mine, mournfully. “They are losing.”

e didn't have time for a proper good-bye. Or for any of my questions, and definitely not time for answers. I yanked the smelly bandage off my ribs and strapped on my sword belt. “Bye, Iron Hans. Thanks for all your help.”

Chase buckled on his own sword. “Rory, he had to help us, remember? We made him take an oath.”

“Then maybe we should apologize, too,” I said.

“Go.” Iron Hans pointed toward a ridge lined with firs. “There. That is where you must run.”

Of course it was uphill. I took off at a sprint. At least we weren't carrying our packs.

“See ya, Iron Hans!” I heard Chase call, right behind me. I was panting within ten seconds, but Chase said, “Are we going to tell people about metal man?”

“Is this a good time to talk about it?” I asked, annoyed at how out of breath he wasn't. “Our friends are in trouble. Besides, the Binding Oath won't let us.”

“The oath only keeps us from telling people where he is, not that we met him,” Chase said. “Anyway, I don't know if you noticed, but our friends are almost
always
in trouble. As soon as we handle the fight, they'll ask us where we've been all night.”

I was so sick of keeping secrets. Keeping track of what I could talk about was exhausting.

“If the Canon finds out, they'll send my dad to track him down,” Chase said. “Dad will have to kill him. Iron Hans is that dangerous.”

That would probably end worse for Jack than for Iron Hans, but I couldn't tell Chase so.

“It would be a shame for him to die just because we found him. And he likes you, Rory—he told me you have to be as tough as dragon scales to fight with your ribs that bruised.”

We ran up the ridge, along a narrow path probably made by deer or goats or the Atlantis equivalent. My foot found a loose rock, and when I stumbled, Chase caught my elbow and hauled me up. Wings fluttered, but I didn't see them.

“Fine,” I said. Iron Hans had been really nice for a famous villain. “But we're telling Lena.”

Chase grimaced. “You want to tell the biggest Goody Two-shoes in the whole seventh grade? Iron Hans is doomed.”

Sounds drifted through the trees: metal clanging on metal, and a human girl's scream.

I pushed myself faster. “Lena needs to know what he said about the Triumvirate, and she'll want to know where we heard it.”

Chase was quiet, except for a rasping
shink
as he drew his sword. “Let me do the talking when they ask. You're not very good at lying.”

We reached the top of the ridge just about the same time my thighs started burning so much I thought they would combust. I spotted the EASers first—three figures defending someone on the ground. Crooked metal limbs dove down at the questers, red leaves flapping.

Trees,
I thought, watching their gnarled black roots creep along the ground like inchworms, dragging their trunks along lurch by lurch.
Trying to kill us.

Another witch forest, and this one was moving.

“My arrows are useless!” Her face sweaty with pain, Darcy sat behind the others. It seemed like a stupid thing to do—until I saw that her leg was bent in a nauseating way. She couldn't get up, not with a broken leg.

An iron branch shot forward. Someone—Chatty?—swung a spear like a baseball bat, so hard that the tree swayed and almost fell.

“Geez. It
is
always the quiet ones,” said Chase.

Another figure drew closer to Darcy's tree—Ben. Darcy was the best fighter among them, but arrows couldn't hurt metal trees. They were in serious trouble. The sword's magic tugged me across the ridge at an even faster sprint than before.

“Did you guys miss us? I get the feeling that you did.” Then Chase leaped onto the nearest witch tree and stood where the trunk split into branches.

Ben straightened a little. “Chase?”

“At your service,” Chase said. “When did Chatty get here?”

“Yesterday. Lena walked us through how to send Rory's ring of return back without her. She cried a lot, mind you, but Chatty still showed up. Kenneth is still healing, but she's supposed to come and replace—” Ben started. “Look out!”

Another witch tree—this one with a giant slash on its trunk—plunged three branches toward Chase, but he jumped out of the way. The crooked limbs of both witch trees tangled together, so tightly that the metal squeaked.

“See?” Chase said. “More mobility, but absolutely no brain. Not so scary.”

It took me slightly longer to catch up, but I was there in time to see a squat witch tree take a twiggy stab at Ben. My sword parried, and the deflected blow shot straight into the forest floor and stuck.

“Rory?” asked Ben.

I waved over my shoulder, too breathless to answer.

“Watch out!” Ben said, as the scarred tree whipped a limb at Mia's head. Mia was busy with a witch tree with a silvery-looking trunk, blocking branches right and left. She was pretty efficient for someone who hadn't even attended one of Hansel's training classes yet.

I stepped forward, ready to protect her, and the runner's high disappeared.

I didn't think anyone else noticed—there wasn't time. I just snap-kicked the limb from the scarred tree away, one twig an inch from Mia's hand.

When the squat witch tree swung a branch at Ben's head, my sword's magic flared again, and I shoved Ben six inches down. The branch sailed harmlessly over his hair, the momentum of the swing spinning the tree all the way around.