Chapter Thirty-Two My Family Weighs In
Chapter Thirty-Two
My Family Weighs In
When I finished giving an abbreviated account of everything that had happened since my arrival in Tailliz, the others fell silent. Calla absentmindedly stroked the mongoose. The goldfinches, whom she had introduced as Carduelis C. Carduelis and Beaky, blinked drowsily on her head.
We were flying toward the castle. A brief landing had let Gnoflwhogir pull off the seven-league boots and take a more dignified seat—and she’d done me the favor of cutting off most of my hair with her claymore.
Cutting hair with a sword is awkward at best, but the haircut she gave me was still better than the hideous ragged mop the chirurgeon had left me with.
“We should have come sooner,” Jonquil said at length.
“No, we shouldn’t!” Calla scolded her. “We talked about this, remember? Only when she asks from now on.”
“Look, I’m…I’m sorry for yelling at you when I was a lake,” I told them both. “You were right. I was in trouble. Am in trouble.”
Jonquil shook her head. “You had every cause to say what you did.”
“You were just trying to help.”
“I knew how you felt,” Calla said, “but I kept interfering anyway.”
I fumbled for words. “If you hadn’t…I don’t want to be ungrateful—”
“That’s not what I meant!” She looked horrified. “We should trust you to know—”
“Stop it!” Gnoflwhogir shouted. “You three are giving me a headache.”
Into the ensuing quiet, Liam said, “She’s not wrong. Trying to out apologize one another isn’t going to solve anything.”
Calla muttered her embarrassed agreement, and after a moment, Jonquil and I did, too.
Underneath us, the forest of Tailliz was a vast patterned carpet of evergreen needles and white snow, spreading out toward the dim, bluish mountains far to the north.
The gargantuan trees pierced through the canopy like the upthrust spears of a disorganized army, but even they were far below.
The thin, freezing wind of the upper air swept through our clothes, leaving me grateful for the heat of the dragon.
“So, this sorceress,” Jonquil said. “Does she have a weakness?”
“I don’t know.” It wasn’t uncommon for those steeped in magic to have some kind of tragic vulnerability.
If they melted when you threw a glass of water at them, that made for a rather easy fight.
But if you had to find their heart, which was concealed in an egg inside a duck inside a hare in a locked chest buried under an oak tree, then things got rather complicated.
I had never figured out my stepmother’s weakness, if she had one.
“We will stab her, then,” Gnoflwhogir said. “Stabbing is everybody’s weakness.”
“I have a more important question,” Calla broke in. “Tell me about Sam. Is he cute?”
I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice. “Really? That’s your question?”
“Monsters attack you all the time,” Jonquil pointed out, not unreasonably. “Sam is the first person you’ve sounded so much as vaguely interested in since that dreadful prince Mother had to throw into a rosebush.”
“Well, it hardly matters,” I snapped. “I’m engaged to someone else.”
Jonquil and Calla exchanged A Look, which didn’t seem fair, since I was closer in age to either of them than they were to each other, and they therefore had no business whatsoever exchanging Looks that were meaningful to each other but completely unreadable to me.
“He’s not unattractive,” I said. “He has a face. Blue eyes, red hair, freckles.”
“Oh, that’s who was in the dream!” Liam said. I rolled my eyes.
Gnoflwhogir glared at the others, her patience at an end. “All this is irrelevant.”
“Yes!” I was pleased to be moving on at last. “Thank you. Can we—”
She turned the glare on me. “Appearance means nothing. How is he in battle? Is this Sam capable of slaying your foes?”
“He’s—Wait, I told you what he did against the spider wolves and things. Weren’t you listening to my story at all?”
“No,” Gnoflwhogir admitted. “It was very long.”
I tried to take a steadying breath, but the thin air rendered it ineffective. “He’s supernaturally strong. And extremely good at slaying foes. All right?”
“Excellent,” said Gnoflwhogir. “I agree with your sisters. Take him as your mate.”
I buried my face in my hands. Between my fingers, I saw Jonquil and Calla exchanging another Look.
I didn’t want to think about Sam, because it made me queasy with anxiety. I had no idea whether he’d recovered from his head injury. Or perished in the siege. “Would you please just tell me how you found me?”
“We used this.” Liam lifted the looking glass. It caught the sun and flashed a painfully bright blaze of reflected light.
“Unhand me, you cretin,” it snarled.
I considered that half an explanation, at best. “That only raises more questions! Where did you get hold of that? And when? And how did you end up saving me in the nick of time?”
“Well,” Calla said, “I first heard you were in trouble when a beaver splashed its way over to me while I was asking some aardvarks to redirect a river. The beaver told me it had heard from a fox who heard from a bear who heard from a swallow who heard from a rat that my sister had been imprisoned in a foul dungeon in the Kingdom of Tailliz.”
“Oh,” I said. “So I did talk to the rat? I wasn’t sure that really happened.”
“Yes, of course you did. I said I’d only come if you wanted me from now on, and I meant it. Anyway, I dropped everything I was doing—”
“Wait, what had you been doing?” I asked. “Why did you need to redirect a river?”
“Because if I gave the river spirit her waterfall back, she’d agree to give me the casket of gold dust I needed to trade the bridge troll for the magic goatskin that a woman made of twigs—”
“I get the idea. Go on.”
“So I went home and told Liam that your intended husband was a horrid villain—”
“He wasn’t!” I interrupted. “Isn’t.”
“Yes, he is,” the mirror said. “Beastly person. He stands in the way of my master’s triumph.”
I frowned at it. “You’re biased.” Vaguely rude images swirled within the depths of the reflection.
“It was a fair assumption at the time,” Liam said. “Anyway, when Calla let me know what was going on, I told her we would need the seven-league boots, so we went and borrowed them from your mother.”
“Stepmother,” I corrected him. “How long did it take you to pry those out of her?”
Calla shrugged. “Not long. I just told her I wanted them, and she handed them over. She didn’t even ask why.”
I opened my mouth, and then I closed it again without speaking. Remember my trip across the plain of ice, where my hair froze to the ground every night? Before I went, I’d spent a full hour begging my stepmother for those boots. She’d said no.
“You planned to use the boots to get to Tailliz?” I asked, rather proud of the fact I’d said it calmly instead of yelling something incoherent and profane.
“No,” Liam said. “Only one of us would have been able to come that way. But I thought we might want to have them on hand if you ever ended up fighting a magic bird in the woods.”
A sliver of sea appeared far ahead of us, a thin line of blue-gray interrupting the endless expanse of green and white. I strained to catch sight of the castle, but I couldn’t make it out yet.
“They came to Gnoflwhogir and me next,” Jonquil said, “and told us you were in trouble, so I offered them a ride to Tailliz on dragonback.”
“And I offered my sword”—Gnoflwhogir drew the weapon in question and waved it threateningly—“so I could stab whoever needed stabbing.”
Jonquil ducked as the tip of the claymore passed uncomfortably close to her head. “We flew to Tailliz as quickly as possible, pausing only for the usual reasons—battles against air pirates, gryphons, that sort of thing. When we arrived at the castle, though, it was under heavy assault.”
“We weren’t sure which side we should be on, at first,” Calla said. “Neither was anyone else. The monsters threw rocks at us, but when we approached the castle, the guards tried to shoot us full of arrows.”
“You did make your approach on a dragon,” I reminded her.
Jonquil sniffed. “That’s no reason to be rude.
I was about to blast everyone with dragon fire, but then a masked fellow in green hopped up onto the ramparts and asked if we were your sisters.
I said yes and demanded you be set free from the dungeon, and he said you weren’t in the dungeon anymore and asked if we could please go find you.
Then he said, ‘Here, use this,’ and he threw the magic mirror at us. Nice throw—a hundred feet at least.”
“It wasn’t nice at all,” said the mirror. “I might have cracked against the stones. I might have fallen into the sea.”
“He threw it?” I asked. “You’re sure? It wasn’t, say, blown on a sudden wind or fired out of a bow somehow?”
“Definitely a throw,” Calla replied. “Overhand, like a spear toss. Why?”
My breath caught, and something in my chest clenched tight. Sam. Sam was awake. Sam was alive. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want Calla and Jonquil to trade their Look a third time.
“We dodged and weaved our way out of the battlefield,” Calla continued when I stayed silent, “and landed in the woods. We decided we should give the mirror to Liam because he’s the cleverest. But although he asked question after question, using every rhyme he could think of, it refused to show us anything. ”
“Mirror, mirror on my knee,” Liam murmured. “Mirror, mirror by my boot. Mirror, mirror in the mud.”
“My humiliation,” the mirror said, “knows no bounds.”
“I was in an invisible room,” I told them. “I don’t think it was able to see me until I got out.”
Calla nodded, startling awake the goldfinches. “That makes sense. From our end, it looked like you weren’t anywhere in existence, and then suddenly you popped into being and were attacked by a bird. Liam figured out exactly where you were—”
“Mirror, mirror with an attitude,” he said, “pinpoint longitude and latitude.”
“—and Gnoflwhogir grabbed the boots.”
“So I could get there and start the stabbing,” Gnoflwhogir explained, somewhat unnecessarily.
The castle appeared at last, a blunt thumb of stone poking up out of the gray sea. Jonquil peered at it, adjusting the dragon’s heading, then glanced back over her shoulder. “The rest of us followed along after, and everything else you already know. Normal family rescue operation.”
“Well, thank you for coming. And also for helping out now, even though they shot arrows at you.”
“Of course. Something needs to be done about that sorceress.” Calla shuddered, holding Lord Thrombwobbley close.
The mongoose wriggled in her too-tight grip.
“Those monsters she’s been making…I tried to talk to some of them, when we were in the woods.
There’s nothing there. They’re not real anymore.
Like walking corpses. Puppets stitched together with resentment and animated by magic.
All the forest animals are terrified it will happen to them. It’s horrible.”
As the castle loomed larger, I saw that the gate to the courtyard had been shattered by boulders, and the walls were breached in several places, talus slopes of rubble tumbling into the sea out of holes that looked like vast bite marks.
The remains of the ice prison littered the shore, thousands and thousands of glittering white chunks bobbing in the surf. The monsters had broken free.
And they had launched a new plan to reach the half-destroyed bridge.
Stone giants were getting on their hands and knees in the shallow water of the bay, lumbering into place one after another, their backs forming a broad causeway the other creatures could use to stride, leap, or squirm their way across.
There were more of the stone giants now, a few dozen at least. No doubt every rock formation in the surrounding area had been recruited to Angelique’s cause.
I recognized one with a sapling growing out of its elbow. Plunging them into a lake had never been more than a temporary solution. They were hardly going to drown.
Archers stood on what was left of the battlements, the distance making them tiny as finger puppets.
They fired arrows too small for us to see at the cloud of gnat-like flying creatures surrounding them.
An armed host had assembled at the ruined remains of the gate.
Perhaps a hundred tin soldiers on toy horses, preparing to face the coming onslaught.
A miniature lion paced impatiently to and fro.
At the very front, spread out across the ranks, were a dozen figures clad in green, one of them mounted and the rest on foot.
“Can this dragon go any faster?” I pleaded.
“Hold on.” Jonquil whispered something to the dragon, and it angled downward, its wings flexing as it slanted into a long dive. “So. We’re up against slashing claws, poisonous bites, stabby birds, invulnerable rocks, and what looks like an enormous hamster. Anything else?”
“I’m not sure.” I scanned the forested ground racing past, looking for any holes that might house an antlionlion.
I didn’t see any, but something about the woods didn’t look quite right.
For a moment, I tried to convince myself the movement might be caused by the wind.
But it didn’t take me long to abandon that idea as wishful thinking.
“Are those trees,” I asked, “walking onto the beach?”