Of Witches and Wind (30 page)

ran got in touch with your dad. She said we had a family emergency, and we had to send you to L.A. He seemed pretty excited. You have an hour and a half before your flight is supposed to land.” Lena looked much worse than she'd seemed through the M3. Her face was haggard, her eyes half-lidded, the bags under them bigger and more purply than before. I'd been stunned for a few seconds when I first found her, eyes glued to her scrying spell, in the back of the workshop. When she'd hugged me hello, she'd smelled like cough drops. This was usually the moment when she had some brilliant idea, but she looked at Melodie. “Now, we need to get you back to Atlantis in twenty-four hours . . .”

The golden harp said gently, “So we'll need a temporary transport spell to the beach where the questers are.”

“Right,” Lena said, relieved.

She hadn't been able to think of the next step. That was how bad she was feeling.

“Do you have any sand on you? From that beach?” Melodie asked.

I opened both hands. To my surprise, my right palm was covered in a fine layer of it. Lena drew a beaker out of her pocket and scraped a few grains off. Then she shuffled around the workshop,
pulling dried herbs and a jar of powdered dragon scales out of a cupboard. She even walked like she didn't feel well, bent slightly forward like an old woman.

“Can I do that?” I asked.

“No.” If I hadn't been looking at Lena when she said it, then I would have sworn the voice came straight from Jenny. “You need to worry about the scepter and about what you'll tell your dad when you leave to go back to Atlantis. Now shower.”

I didn't even try to argue. I came back when I was clean and L.A.-ready, as close to looking like I'd just climbed off a flight as I could look, but Melodie was the only one in the workshop.

The golden harp lifted both arms toward me. “She's in the ballroom.”

“And she didn't take you with her? Did you guys have a fight?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood. I picked her up and wove my way back through the tables to the door.

“She can't pick me up anymore, Rory.” Melodie's golden chin wobbled. “And don't you dare tell her I told you, but she'll be bedridden soon.”

Bedridden, from a tiny taste of Fey fudge pie.

“How do we make her better?” I stepped into the courtyard. “Besides, you know, the Water of Life.”

“Make her sit still.” Melodie sighed. “But you know how impossible that is.”

Telling Lena not to move was like telling Chase not to eat—it only made them cranky. Besides, I needed Lena's help to save the others. I'd never get to the Hidden Troll Court and back without her help.

I pushed open the door to the ballroom infirmary. It smelled like burned cheese—like the ointment juice. The patients were
all so still. For one horrible second I thought that someone had finished the poisoning job while we were gone, but then I heard people breathing, some more raspily than others.

“Rory, these are the healthiest ones,” Melodie said, much nicer than usual. “The bad cases are farther in.”

One of Hansel's practice dummies, an evil fairy, held out a spoonful of something to a boy, who stiffly slurped it, grimacing with pain. Kyle Zipes. I hadn't recognized him at first—his skin was ashen, his lips almost white.

Melodie tugged on my sleeve and pointed. Ellie. Her lips were white too.

“Lena asked about the Hidden Troll Court and went back to the workshop,” Ellie said before I could ask. Kelly had crawled into the same bed, and Ellie stroked her daughter's hair. Puss-in-Dress sat sphinxlike on top of their pillows.

Beside their bed, reeking, was Rapunzel's flask of giant ointment juice, less than a third full. There wasn't enough of it to fill a milk jug. That couldn't be all we had left. It didn't seem like enough to last through Friday.

The golden harp threw her hands in the air. “This is why it's so much easier when she keeps me in her satchel.” She was trying to lighten the mood too—for Ellie's sake.

Poor Melodie—she'd been here the whole time. She'd watched everyone get sicker and sicker.

“Melodie, these practice dummies follow anyone's orders, right? Even yours?”

“Yes,” Melodie said, clearly not sure where I was going with this.

“You. Come here.” I pointed at a witch practice dummy, friendlier-looking than the others. When it was close, I passed the golden harp over. “Melodie, this dummy will be your legs, and you'll
be Lena's hands. Let her boss you around. Maybe she won't move around as much.”

Melodie nodded, her face brightening slightly. When she ordered the friendly witch dummy back to the workshop, Ellie explained Jenny needed to know that I had commandeered one of their nurses, and pointed me deeper into the infirmary, past the sleeping Director. Her blond hair fanned out perfectly from her pillow, her hands clasped over her stomach.

Only a few beds were occupied in the next section. I stood and stared. I knew the person in the closest bed was Rumpelstiltskin—he was the only Character at EAS as short as a fifth grader and as wide as an adult—but his skin was so blue. His lips were almost black, and it looked like someone had drawn spidery vines across his hands, over his face.

“The final stage of cockatrice poisoning,” Jenny said grimly, appearing beside me. “We have to feed him some of the ointment every fifteen minutes, just to keep him alive.”

It was so much worse than I'd thought.

I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs,
I'll save you!
just to break the silence above all these beds. I'd find that scepter and get it back to Prince Fael.

Someone else screamed first, so loudly that it echoed down the hall. “I won't die here!”

Apparently, this had happened before. Most people just rolled over and pressed their pillows over their ears. Jenny and I hurried down the row of beds.

The witches had an entire room to themselves, ringed off by a curtain and guarded by huge troll dummies. Past the curtain, two evil fairy dummies held the raving witch down, while Rapunzel struggled to tip a potion into her mouth.

The witch shoved the medicine goblet away, and I recognized her: Kezelda.

“What would you do,” she shrieked, trying to twist free of the dummies, “if your mother had been killed by a Gretel, and your grandmother killed by a Gretel, and your great-grandmother, and your great-aunt, and four of your cousins? Wouldn't you want revenge too? Would you be so tempted to kill a Gretel that you would let one into your gingerbread house? Wouldn't you want to change your family's fate?”

It sounded like she was trying to justify the poisoning. But from the look on her face, I would say Kezelda was just as terror-stricken at finding herself near death as everyone else.

“We have to keep them sedated,” Jenny explained to me.

It couldn't have been the witches.

No, I told myself. It couldn't have been
all
the witches. Because if it wasn't the witches, then who could it have been?

Rapunzel tried again to push the medicine past Kezelda's lips. Remembering why I'd come, I told Jenny that I'd assigned a dummy to Melodie.

“Good. Thanks, Rory,” Jenny said.

At my name, Rapunzel looked up, and a little weariness lifted from her face. She handed off the medicine and came to hold both my shoulders, smiling. “I knew you were not dead. I was not sure how you could be saved, but too much of the future I have seen contains you. How did you survive?”

The real answer wasn't something I could say in front of sick Characters. “Um—” I glanced back at the door, hoping she would take the hint.

“Yes, I could use some fresh air,” Rapunzel said smoothly, leading me back outside. I waved to Jenny and trotted after her.

The bed-bound patients watched us leave, staring so hard that I felt my face burn. I wondered if they suspected Rapunzel like Lena did.

“Did Chase use his wings?” Rapunzel asked when the door closed behind us. We were alone in the courtyard. I nodded, trying to figure out a graceful way to bring up what I really wanted to talk about. Rapunzel smiled wider, a laughlike catch in her voice. “Interesting. That child is extraordinary. His Fey gifts are weak by fairy standards, but he uses them so masterfully—”

“Are you really the Snow Queen's sister?” As soon as it burst out of me, I wished I could take it back.

The shock on her face faded, and then she reminded me of Chase on the beach, negotiating with Fael when Ori'an was about to kill me. No, she looked exactly like the Snow Queen—Solange's carefully composed, chilly expression. “Yes.”

I had expected her to say no, it was just a rumor, the Director had misunderstood. But now a new feeling crept in—the same guarded watchfulness I felt when Madison and the KATs walked into homeroom.

Rapunzel was the grown-up I trusted most at EAS. What could I do without her?

“Aren't you going to say anything?” I snapped, frustrated. Rapunzel
always
said something. Sometimes it didn't make any sense, but it still helped.

“I don't know what else there is to say,” Rapunzel said, not looking at me. “She is my sister. We share a father. Her mother was a French noblewoman killed in the Revolution. Mine was a peasant Character with mermaid ancestry.”

“What was she like?” But that wasn't what I really wanted to know. “How do you feel about her?”

“I love my sister,” Rapunzel said, and I couldn't believe she used the present tense. “She was the witch in my Tale. She was my whole world for my first fifteen years. But my sister is gone—the Snow Queen is heartless. I love a ghost.”

I couldn't stand listening to her talk about Solange like she was a good person. The Snow Queen had deceived Iron Hans. She had killed Chase's big brother. “You aren't telling me anything useful.”

“You sound like Mildred, Rory,” Rapunzel said wearily. I recoiled. That was definitely an insult. “My life was not designed to provide information to you, or the Director, or the Canon. The beginning of my life was manipulated toward one end only: an immortality I never wished for. Solange sliced my neck when she cut my braid away. She left me, bleeding, in the path of the Rapunzel before me. The previous Rapunzel gave me her apple and brought me into the Canon. Else she would have watched me bleed to death.”

“But you didn't have to take it,” I reminded her.

“I was pregnant. My twins,” Rapunzel said shortly, almost impatiently. “Is this what you wanted? Does this tell you a thing you didn't know about my sister?”

She had never mentioned kids before. She looked about sixteen, so it never crossed my mind. “Why—why would she do that?”

Rapunzel sighed, and her temper gusted out too. “Solange believed she was giving me a gift. She believed I would thank her and stay beside her forever. When I did neither, she punished me.”

“What happened to your, um, twins?” I asked, worried that they were part of the Snow Queen's punishment.

Rapunzel shrugged, fresh pain in her face. “They were born. They grew up. They lived their lives, had their own children, and they died. Centuries ago now.”

Chase might have told me I was being gullible again, but Rapunzel's grief felt real. “You truly did not know? All this time?” she asked.

I shook my head.

We were quiet for a moment.

“I can say nothing to make you trust me.” Rapunzel spread both hands palms up between us. “That decision must come from you. Regardless, you must arrive in Los Angeles in ten minutes. But I would ask the mother of the four winds what happened the night Iron Hans escaped from the Unseelie Court.”

“Oh,” I said, a little stunned by how quickly we had moved from tragic backstory to this-is-what-you-need-to-know-to-survive-the-next-few-days mode. “Okay.”

Then Rapunzel disappeared back into the ballroom infirmary. She didn't say anything else. She didn't even wish me luck.

Across the Courtyard, the workshop door creaked open, and Lena spotted me. “Rory! Where the hiccups have you been? We only have nine minutes left, and it'll take me four to explain how to do this spell.”

I didn't want to go. I didn't even want to cross the courtyard. I wanted to go find a quiet corner and try to process at least one thing that had happened that morning before I had to go face my dad. Everything was happening too fast.

But I jogged over and picked up my luggage, hoping that my dad would be too busy to notice that it didn't have any airline tags attached to it.

“Another new carryall.” Lena pushed a neon-green backpack to me as soon as I was close. I tried not to notice how she was leaning heavily on the courtyard wall, too weak to stand up straight. “Put your sword in here, so nobody asks questions about it. A new
magic mirror and your cell phone are already inside. Your battery died, by the way. The transport kit is in here too. And some water bottles. They're magic. They'll contain the water of life's essence. Now pay attention,” said Lena, still in Jenny mode, as I unbuckled my swordbelt, “because you're going to need to do this for yourself after you find the scepter in the Hidden Troll Court.” She showed me what looked like a baby food jar of greenish-gold paint. “First you need to find a doorway. It can be to a closet, anything, it doesn't matter, but isolated is probably better. Then you need to paint this solution on the frame, including the floor.”