Of Enemies and Endings (11 page)

“It reveals this door's true nature: it is a one-key safe.” Rapunzel sounded almost smug. “My sister taught me the spell. It requires much planning. For this one to be ready in time, I had to start years ago, before you arrived at Ever After School.”

I looked at her. She'd said this wasn't a lesson in how to defeat the Snow Queen, but I didn't believe her anymore. Rapunzel never mentioned her sister casually.

“To finish the casting, I had to steal some Water of Life. I know where Mildred hides it,” she said, which meant the one-key safe was powerful
and
complicated. “The spell is sound. Look.” She reached for the doorknob but, an inch from the metal, her hand stopped midair, straining against an invisible barrier. “This door can only be opened by one person, and this fact cannot be changed after the spell is cast. I have linked this one to a certain quality of yours.”

“Which one?” I said, wondering if it was normal to feel a little apprehensive when a seer gave you a birthday present.

Rapunzel smiled, in a sly way that clearly said,
I'm not telling
. “Not your status as a bearer of an Unwritten Tale. If I had specified that, Solange would be able to enter. Your present is safe inside.” She stepped out of my way.

My hand closed over the doorknob. It turned easily.

The room beyond was closet-size and empty except for two objects: one was a statue of a soldier in an old-fashioned uniform with a yellowing tag tied around his wrist. I knew what it said. I'd read it the first time I'd seen this guy:
Wolfgang Sebastian Bruhm, 1788–1804
. The third member of the previous Triumvirate.

This time, I knew what had turned him to stone. Arica the sorceress had cast a spell on him. He'd been protecting the same object he was stored with—a battered, metal saltshaker, sitting in dented glory on top of a pedestal. The Pounce Pot. The last I heard, the Director had used it to make sure that Chase, Lena, and I didn't find out that my Tale had begun.

It was so powerful it could make a person swallow their tongue if they tried to share the secret. I'd seen that happen. It wasn't pretty.

I took a deep breath. I focused on not puking.

Rapunzel leaned against the wall beside the door frame. With all that triumph in her face, she looked almost exactly like Solange. “Someday soon, you might need to hide a secret.”

The second I stepped out into the courtyard, Lena, the triplets, the stepsisters, and Paul Stockton immediately started singing, “Happy birthday to you.” That wouldn't have been so bad, except the courtyard was crowded with people eating breakfast. Half of them turned to look. Some of them
joined in
.

I flushed, but some of the tension in my stomach eased. “Payback will come.”

“Our birthdays are
months
away,” Lena said happily. Balanced over her hands was a tray of cupcakes. She must have gotten it from the Table of Never Ending Instant Refills. I wondered how she convinced it to take requests. At this time of day, all it wanted to produce were muffins, pancakes, and cereal. “Chocolate for breakfast.”

I scanned their smiling faces again. I didn't even realize who I was looking for until Tina said, very gently, “We invited Chase.”

“No show,” Vicky said, less gently.

It was worse than Mom barely talking to me this morning. Birthdays were important to Chase. He wouldn't miss mine unless . . . well, unless our friendship had fallen
really
low on his list of priorities. “Maybe he's still on the mission at that farm in Idaho.”

“Overnight?” Kevin scoffed, but worse than that was the silence from the others. Their pitying looks.

“Ben's back,” Kyle said reluctantly. “He said he's glad Chase is busy and lessons are cancelled for the day. He was going back to sleep.”

Chase's group wasn't like Hansel's classes. They didn't meet every other day besides Saturdays on a strict gingerbread jack–enforced schedule. They just met whenever Chase was free.

If he wasn't celebrating with us and he wasn't on a mission, then he must be on another date with Adelaide.

I
was
that low on his list of priorities.

I should have defended him again. I should have made a joke about how we would have all slept in like Ben and Chase were doing if we'd been up past midnight hunting dragons and helping Marty Mason move.

But I couldn't make myself. I was too hurt.

Because the problem had never been him and Adelaide disappearing so often. It was that this summer felt like our final days, and both of them were choosing to spend those days away from us.

I tried to ignore the cold thread of fury worming through my veins and focus on the friends who were here. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it. I picked up a promising-looking cupcake—chocolate with smooth chocolate frosting and cookie crumbles on top. “Please tell me you don't expect me to eat all of these by myself,” I added.

“Definitely not.” Paul reached for a cupcake.

Tina grabbed one next. “It's a shame we can't
really
celebrate. We're all too busy, but maybe afterward.”

“The war will have to end soon, right?” said Vicky. “I mean, it
is
your birthday, and July's almost over.”

The triplets goggled at the stepsisters, and Lena actually glared, like bringing up the beginning of my Tale should be off limits. I'd told the rest of our grade about it just once, the day after Daisy's home had been attacked. I thought it was only fair for them to know why the Snow Queen always tried to take out Characters close to me. After that, we never mentioned my Tale, definitely not in public. They knew I didn't want to discuss it.

But bringing it up now made the dread back off a little.

She had given us all an
after
.

I smiled. “That would be really nice.”

After the cupcakes were gone, we split up. The stepsisters went to archery class. The triplets and Paul went with them, hoping to beg a target off of Hansel for their own practice. Lena ran to the dungeons to collect more scales from the dragon we kept down there for an ever-refreshing supply.

I didn't have class. I wished I did. I needed a bigger distraction than cupcakes.

Something terrible
was
going to happen, and Chase wouldn't be around for it.
Again.

I did what I usually did on mornings when the staff class didn't meet, everyone else was busy, and no one needed saving. I slipped inside the workshop and went over my research.

The workshop was empty—the shoemaker and the elves were manning the phones and M3's in a room closer to the Director's office. But Lena's section was abandoned too, with dragon scales and baseball bats scattered all across the worktable. Melodie, Lena's golden harp and assistant inventor, must have gone out for extra ingredients as well.

I walked over to a shelf Lena had cleared for me back in April. A stack of dusty, leatherbound volumes waited there, most of the lettering rubbed off their spines. I'd read one more than the others:
The Livves & Tymes of Sorcerers & Sorceresses
. I had it out on semipermanent loan from the reference room, because when Rapunzel had seen me with it, she'd said, “In my tower, my sister had a book of that title. She read it to me as bedtime stories, but usually not the endings. Too gruesome.”

I pulled out the papers underneath it. My notes covered the first dozen pages—I wrote down anything I could find out about the Snow Queen's immortality or her sorcery or her Tale. I flipped to the last page and quickly scribbled down the answer to the
Why snow?
question Rapunzel had told me yesterday. Not that I thought I would forget.

Rapunzel had answered my questions all summer, like what body part Solange had lost during her Tale to make her a sorceress the first time (two toes to frostbite—she was eleven) and how powerful that made her (not very—she could cover a room with frost or hold a glamour for seven minutes) and why the European chapter of EAS had kicked her out (they found out she had kidnapped and enchanted a boy named Kai; she gave back the golden apple and didn't age a bit).

When I'd had a question about Unwritten Tales, Rapunzel had sent me straight to Sarah Thumb, who turned out to be the Canon's expert. I only had to bring up the subject, and then I'd lost almost an hour listening to how many Tales Solange had sparked and how many she'd changed. Most of it was crazy magical theory that went over my head. I'd only copied down one thing she said:
If you could see the magic around a person having a Tale—it follows the Characters, clings to them like a giant bubble of pure energy—you would see that it fills an entire room. For an Unwritten Tale, like yours and Solange's, it fills up the entire courtyard.

“You mean, like a football field?” I'd asked, startled.

“No. Not the way the courtyard used to be,” Sarah Thumb said, her eyes gleaming the way they always did when she talked about magic. “The way it is now. As big as a village.” I must have looked kind of creeped out, because she added, “It won't stay like this. After your Tale ends, the magic mostly disappears. I mean we think the magic revisits the Tale bearer even after the Unwritten Tale ends. We think—well,
I
think—that's how Solange got so powerful. She learned how to control all that magic.”

I didn't want to control it. I didn't want to even think about how magic from my Tale was filling up EAS, sparking and changing other people's Tales. It made me feel like Kelly and Priya's Tales were my fault.

I abandoned the book and my notes, and turned to “The Tale of Solange de Chateies” and the earliest known version of “The Snow Queen.” Rumpelstiltskin had asked the librarian at the European chapter to make a copy for me—a magical copy, so the illustrations were as crisp and clear as they would have been if they'd sent me the volumes instead.

This version of “The Snow Queen” was a let down. It was almost exactly the same as Hans Christian Andersen's, which you could check out in the reference room. But the illustrations weren't. The first Kai, in his portrait, looked almost exactly like Rapunzel: white-blond hair, dark eyes under light eyebrows in a heart-shaped face. But when I asked Rapunzel, she said she and Solange had no known relatives in Scandinavia.

“The Tale of Solange de Chateies” had a lot more to process.

I pulled my notes toward me and stared at the chart I'd written after reading Solange's Tale.

The second Triumvirate lost Mildred less than two weeks after losing Sebastian. A witch's arrow, dipped in a sleeping enchantment, grazed her arm. It was enough to jumpstart her Tale—“Sleeping Beauty.” She wasn't quite as lost as Sebastian had been, but Solange was still alone.

She went to the Unseelie Court anyway. She glamoured herself as a Fey, and in the seven minutes she had until the illusion wore out, she added cockatrice poison to King Navaire's dinner. He was dead before he took two bites.

When I first read this, I'd worried just about keeping Chase and Lena safe, but this summer, a new worry had replaced it, one that grew every time I went over these notes.

Years ago, Rapunzel had told me, “She knows the value of heroes, as she was one once.” Solange had saved so many people the day she'd taken down King Navaire.

Everybody agreed that the old Unseelie king had been seriously evil. He'd conquered all of Atlantis with the help of the Pentangle, and he'd started to conquer the other hidden continents. For more than two decades, everyone had been terrified of this guy, and now . . .

Well, now he was mostly known as the guy Solange de Chateies defeated during her Tale. At the time, it had probably seemed impossible that another villain could grow even more evil and famous than King Navaire, but it had happened. And the same could happen with the Snow Queen, too.

I had the potential to become the next villain.

At first, that thought had been hard to swallow—that I could
ever
be as much of a threat as the Snow Queen was. I was just me. But Chase insisted again and again that I was better than I thought I was. This summer, I was finally starting to believe it. All by myself, I'd held off a hundred wolves and ice griffins. I'd wounded one of the pillars. I'd survived jumping off a skyscraper. I'd defeated Istalina, the Wolfsbane clan's champion, and Torlauth di Morgian, the Snow Queen's champion.