Of Witches and Wind (9 page)

An army that was surrounding us.

Mildred Grubb, the Director of EAS, walked out last, her shield engraved with roses. Her long blond hair hung in shining waves
down her back, and her blue dress sparkled with silver embroidery. She spotted us.

“Do I even need to say I told you so?” Chase muttered.

All four marched our way, a scowl on every face. We were definitely in trouble.

ou three don't understand the seriousness of the situation,” said the Director.

Maybe we didn't understand the situation, but we could all tell it was serious. Lena's eyes were huge, her shoulders hunched up around her ears.

“Security sweep, please.” The Director gestured to the other grown-up Characters. Behind her shield she was wearing dainty fingerless lace gloves. Gretel, Hansel, and Stu each disappeared behind a separate door. Dozens of metal dummies split up and clanked after them.

“Um,” I said. “Isn't that overkill? You caught Lena already.”

For some reason the Director whirled around to glare at Lena instead of me. “Did you bind the portal to your essence so that none but you could pass? Use your signature, or your blood, or all ten fingerprints?”

Lena shook her head.

“Did you at least stand here and guard to make sure no one else entered after you?” the Director asked.

Lena glanced at me, stricken. She clearly regretted coming to find us.

“I thought not. Our Door Trek system is spelled to allow
only approved persons through approved gateways at approved times.” The Director obviously liked to have approval over things. “Whether or not you children are aware of the fact, we do this for your safety. We are the second largest chapter of Ever After School in the world, with the highest success rate for completed Tales,” the Director continued. “It stands to reason that we would be targeted by the largest number of villains.”

Lena stared at her feet, her head bent so low that all her braids slung forward, the beads at their ends clacking together. I knew how much she hated being in trouble.

“Anyone could have entered through your portal and wreaked havoc upon the Characters who seek refuge here,” the Director went on. “The Big Bad Wolf, the trolls who cut off Evan Garrison's fingers, General Searcaster—”

“Personally, I don't think General Searcaster could fit,” I said before I could stop myself, and Chase snickered. Lena peeked at me through her hair.

“Aurora,” the Director said in a warning way, but she really couldn't expect Chase and me to stand there and not say anything.

“I'm just saying—she's like four stories tall.” I didn't usually try to push the Director's buttons, but this lecture was going too far.

“And she's not skinny, either.” Half Fey or not, Chase caught on and backed me up. We were still a team.

“Enough!” the Director snapped. “Not another word from you, Aurora. I know you put Lena up to this.”

Put Lena up to what? Inventing? No way. Everybody knew that Lena obsessed over her inventions even more than the rest of us obsessed over our Tales.

Chase and Lena looked just as confused as I was.

“What? It was me and Lena! We worked it out!” Melodie hated
it when other people took credit for her work.

“Got one, Director!” another voice rang out. Stu, the Shoemaker in charge of all the elves in the workshop, emerged from the steel double doors, escorting a girl in a plaid uniform. Mia.

I remembered her head on that table and shivered.

“Found her in the back of the workshop,” Stu told the Director, and Lena glanced up, frowning.

“I'm sorry,” Mia said in her too-soft voice. “I just got lost. I was looking for the room where I could read the Tales. I wanted to prepare myself.”

A pair of heavy wooden doors swung open across the courtyard, and Bryan and Darcy trotted outside, both of them glaring at Hansel, whose double-handed broadsword was sheathed at his back. Their scowls looked surprisingly similar, considering one of their faces was furry and deer-shaped. “What's your problem?” the fawn demanded, as the sword master escorted them across the grass.

“Ellie told me the reference room got some more books on animal enchantments. I was checking to see if they could tell me how to break Bryan's,” said Darcy. “Is that such a crime?”

“I told you,” Hansel said. “It's just EAS protocol—for your own security.”

Gretel stepped through the amethyst door. “All clear.”

One by one, the iron dummies all marched into the courtyard and back toward the training courts. Mia's eyes widened, but I couldn't tell if she was impressed or freaked out.

“So, no bad guy,” Chase said. “That means we're free to go, right?”

“Absolutely not.” The Director narrowed her eyes at me, Chase, and Lena. “I believe we'll break up your little triumvirate for the afternoon.”

Mia's eyebrows lifted. The corners of her mouth went up too. If she thought us getting punished was funny, her getting beheaded seemed slightly less tragic.

“What's a triumvirate?” Chase whispered to me.

Remembering the dream about Mia made me queasy. “Three of something, I think?” I said, distracted.

The Director surveyed us. “Lena, you'll go with Ellie to the workshop and gather all the notes and materials that led up to the invention of the spell. If I hear of you attempting such a portal again, you will appear before the Canon, and we will seriously consider your expulsion. Have I made myself clear?”

Lena stared, wide-eyed, caught between relief and guilt. She had a photographic memory. She didn't need her notes to recreate the spell. The part of Lena that compulsively followed rules wanted to tell the Director this, but she didn't. “Yes, ma'am.”

She was an inventor before she was a Goody Two-shoes.

“And Lena, I want you to know—I nearly decided to break our deal about keeping the dragon. The scales have led you into mischief,” said the Director.

Lena tensed. This would be a much worse punishment.

“But I've decided instead to allow you only enough scales to make carryalls and no more for the next three months. Is that clear?”

Lena nodded, biting her lip, and Ellie ushered her out.

Then the Director dismissed Stu and Hansel, then Bryan, Darcy, and Mia. She sent Chase to help the Shoemaker and the elves set up the courtyard for the feast. He went, muttering about how we were getting punished just for being Lena's friends.

She ordered Gretel to take me to the kitchens. When she explained that they were overwhelmed with making Red Riding
Hood's favorite dessert for the feast, Mia actually volunteered to help instead of following Bryan and Darcy to the reference room. The word “suck-up” crossed my mind.

Ugh. She shows up beheaded in my dream, and then she can't even talk without annoying me?
I didn't want to know what that said about me.

“Come on.” Gretel's iron foot gave her a weird limp. She shuffle-hopped away with the same determination and enthusiasm as Amy going to the dentist for a root canal. Mia and I hurried behind her to a plain white door with a big window, all fogged up.

Then Gretel threw the door open. I barely registered the smell of butter and sugar.

So much noise. So many strange witches. They
had
to be witches.

People assumed their ugliness was a stereotype, but Lena had told me once that all witches were cursed with it. Literally, cursed by the Last Mage. Apparently, they were born looking like hags.

Beaky noses, fingernail-size warts, and only three kinds of hair—black and stringy, or gray and strawlike, or bald with spots on their scalps. Several had hunchbacks. One even had green skin.

They stared at us with the same eager hunger a cat gives an unsuspecting goldfish.

Awesome. The Director's villain-rehabilitation program. This would be fun.

Gretel stepped aside, her back hugging the door frame, and waved us in.

One witch in front had a thin-lipped, wide-mouthed smile like a snake. “I still remember how your foot tasted, Gretel dear—faintly of licorice, more of pepper.”

Gretel went rigid. I promptly lost my appetite.

“Kezelda, that's enough.” One slender, straight figure moved in the crowd toward us, her silver braid brushing the floor. Rapunzel.

I'd been at EAS long enough to know that Rapunzel had good days and bad days. On some days, talking to her felt like shaking a Magic 8 Ball, and on others she spoke and acted like any other teacher.

I guessed today belonged in the second category.

“What? Mother gave her another one.” The snake-lipped witch pointed at Gretel, whose skirt flew up several inches, exposing her feet. Gretel's metal foot was much smaller than the other—child-size and bare. No wonder she limped.

I'd never known how she'd gotten it. I kind of wished I still didn't know.

“And we know how Gretel repaid her,” added the witch. We did know. Gretel had shoved the gingerbread witch into her own oven to save Hansel. That was how the Tale normally went.

“Kezelda!” Now that Rapunzel was closer, I could see how stressed she looked. A thousand stray hairs had escaped from her braid, and egg slime streaked the front of her dress. “I assure you that your mother was no fool. She knew the danger of allowing a Hansel and a Gretel into a gingerbread house.”

Oh. I guessed witches could read the Tales too—same as Characters.

To the rest of the onlookers Rapunzel said coldly, “You have work to do, witches.”

The kitchen filled with the sound of chopping knives, metal sifters, and scraping spoons again. Only Kezelda muttered to herself.

“Reinforcements,” Gretel told Rapunzel before making her escape.

Rapunzel looked at me and Mia for a second too long. I expected
some sort of cryptic warning to pop out of her mouth, but all she said was, “Would you mind keeping an eye on Kezelda, right there by the window?”

I sighed. I was stuck making a hundred Fey fudge pies with thirteen angry, “reformed” witches. Spring break was off to a great start.

Kezelda stirred the molten mixture in a sauté pan almost as big as a cauldron. When she wanted us to add more, she just stabbed a crooked finger at one of us—me for another stick of butter, the green-skinned witch for another handful of Fey fudge chunks.

The heat from the ovens was brutal. Sweat glued my collar to my neck. Even worse, the witches chucked food at us if we kept our backs turned for too long. The witch beating a big bowl of eggs nailed me in the elbow once, but otherwise I got a fair amount of dodging practice.

Mia pretended not to notice, like I did around Madison and the KATs. She just bent over the counter and cut up the fudge. Floury bits of dough and butter collected in her long dark hair.

My skin crawled every time I glanced at her.

Nightmares sometimes came true at EAS. I'd started dreaming about falling off a beanstalk the weekend before Lena got her Tale. If someone at EAS had a nightmare about my head on a table, I would definitely want to know. But maybe I was worrying for nothing. You had to dream it three times to be sure it would come true.

“You, girl. I need more butter.” The first words Kezelda spoke to me.

I resentfully unwrapped another stick and dropped it in Kezelda's pan. “My name is Rory.”

“We know who you are,” Kezelda snapped.

I flinched. My mysterious fame struck again. Mia looked up
curiously. The knife in her hand was speckled with chocolate dust.

“We have all heard your name linked with the Snow Queen's,” the witch continued. “Do not give yourself airs, just because—”

With a grunt Kezelda made a weird face like she'd seen something shocking, like a rooster covered in scales rather than feathers. She looked as if she almost swallowed her own tongue. Obviously, she had just remembered that she wasn't supposed to tell me anything.

•  •  •

Kezelda didn't speak to me again.

When a hundred crusts were filled, and all the pies were in the oven, Ellie came to escort the witches to their seats.