Ice Country(57)

“Everyone, this is Wes, my brother. Wes, meet the people of fire country, the ones you tracked to the palace.”

“Hi people of fire country,” Wes says.

“Hi, Wes,” Buff says.

“Hey, Buff.”

“How’d you get caught, Icer, brother of bad-plan-maker?” Feve says without a smile.

I stare at the ground, feeling fire-country-hot all of a sudden.

“It was my own stupidity,” Wes says. “This isn’t Dazz’s fault.”

I look up. “It’s all my fault,” I say, not letting my older brother take my blame away. None of us would be here if not for me.

Wes continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “No one really paid me any attention, letting me move about the palace pretty much as I chose, so long as I was there to prepare the meals on schedule. I got too confident, started sneaking places I shouldn’t have. Most doors were open or unlocked, and I investigated them all, but they were all just rooms for normal palace activities, like dining or meeting or preparing. Nothing unusual. This was all on the first day, mind you.

“Today I got bolder, seeking out the darkest and the least-traveled places in the palace. After the lunch preparations and cleanup were over, I found a staircase that seemed to lead to nowhere. It spiraled round and round and up and up and into one of the towers, only at the top there was no way in. Just a stone wall and pair of gleaming brass mountain lion heads, mounted on the wall, mouths open in a perpetual growl.”

“Sounds like a dead end,” Circ says from down the row.

“That’s what I thought, but when I went to inspect the lions, there were faint cracks running from above and below them, like someone had torn away the rocks at one time, and then put them back together piece by piece, so perfectly you could barely tell they’d been pulled away.

“So I pushed on the lions, hard, with all my might, and guess what? They pressed into the wall.”

“Into the wall, Icer?” Feve says.

“Yah. Right in, like there was nothing behind them. But that’s not the strangest thing. As soon as the brass lions disappeared, there was the sound of chains pulling, clinking through a pulley. The door started to rise.”

“Holy blaze!” Skye says. “A secret room.”

“More than that,” Wes says, jamming his eyes shut as if they’re stinging. When they flash open, there’s hurt in them. “A prison,” he says. “A child prison. Past the door were little bodies, brown-skinned and every one of them shrinking back from me as if I might hit them, or do worse. I just stood there for a minute, shell-shocked, searching the faces, wishing beyond wishes that she’d be there. Jolie, that is. Do they know about Jolie?”

I nod, my eyes never leaving Wes’s face, urging him silently to continue, to tell me the part where he finds Jolie, where he tries to escape with her, where he gets caught and they take her away again. The part where at least she’s still alive.

“She wasn’t there,” he says, and my heart sinks into my empty stomach, beating dully, thumping a hole in my gut.

“Maybe you just didn’t see her?” Buff says.

“Maybe,” he says. “Before I could go in, really look at them all, someone grabbed me from behind, threw a bag over my head, and dragged me down here.”

His words are still hitting my ears, but I’m not really hearing them, because I’m back at how he didn’t see Jolie, how she wasn’t there, how for all we know she’s been planted in the ground somewhere, having outgrown her usefulness to the king.

“Any of them children you saw older?” Skye asks, and I want to bang my head against the wall for not thinking to ask it myself. She probably thinks I’m all selfishness and no caring. Always focused on my own problems and no one else’s. She’s lost a sister, too. We’ve got that in common, which is what I gotta get through my freeze-brained head.

Wes shakes his head. “They all looked to be seven, eight years old. Nine at the most. No older than that. Why?”

Skye just slaps a fist in her palm, so I tell him what Skye and Siena told me about their sister.

“This whole thing is icin’ sick,” Wes says when I finish.

“We’re knocked,” Siena says. “There ain’t no way out now. Not unless the sun goddess decides to shine down on us.”

I grab the bars, slump against them. The sheet of gray clouds covering ice country will prevent the sun goddess or any other goddess from seeing any of what’s happening here.

No one says anything after that.





~~~





I don’t even bother with the gruel. It’s tasteless and unsatisfying anyway. My stomach rumbles, but I ignore it. The others eat theirs and keep up a healthy chatter, all about how else they can escape, whether there’s any other way now that our inside man’s a little too far on the inside.