Giant Kidnapping
“Sorry, I’ll do it,” William said, burning up with shame. The giants were kidnapping him so it would be their fault he was out of the dungeon, not his. But he couldn’t let them take the blame for kidnapping a Crown Prince. That would start the war he was trying to prevent. But they were right about needing someone to speak up for them. He was all they had.
Rocks said something that sounded like forget-about-it.
“You’re good guys to do all this for Reggie,” William said. It was easy to misjudge the giants, because they were huge, and kept secrets. “Thanks.”
Traver coughed and said, “So Psyche will do the lock—”
Do the lock? William didn’t want to know.
Psyche zipped back into the dungeon cell.
He tried not to think about his family and the fifteen thousand gold coins. The giants were right. They didn’t have anyone else to speak up for them, except William. He had to do this.
“Once you get into the Fortress, your exit route is clear.” Rocks coughed.
“Clear?” William felt sick, imagining clumps of archers tied up by the hundred. Now that he thought about it, the giants hadn’t been quiet at all. “What happened to all the, uh, Magenta archers?”
Psyche buzzed his ear. “Duh—The archers are at the Mock Battle exercise in the Marigold Kingdom.”
William should have figured that one out sooner. “But they didn’t leave the Magenta Fortress undefended, did they?”
“The guards are still here,” Gneiss said. “But we, uh, put a few boulders in key spots, so they don’t walk down your corridor. It wasn’t hard.” His words had an undercurrent of hurt. “We put them in from the top.”
Oh. William should have realized. He’d been looking at this from the wrong perspective. From the giants’ perspective, the Magenta Fortress was a simple maze. They could see down into it and wait until the corridor was clear, or block it with a rock.
Sparkles poured out of the lock, like a blacksmith’s forge. What was Psyche doing in there?
“Are you okay?” William called softly.
“Shh!” Psyche’s shrill whisper came back. She fumbled around with something on the other side of the door while William sweated.
Sputtering, Psyche flew out of the lock and into William’s cell. She brushed black specks off her wings. “What are you waiting for? Reggies’ grandma is waiting!”
Make that eight giants.
The cell door swung open, but no one was behind it. Psyche flew behind William’s back and something yanked his wrists together.
“Hey! What’s that for?” William twisted around, catching a glimpse of Psyche as she zipped around him with a silky cord in her hands.
“Would you come on?” Psyche flew ahead, yanking his wrists. William stumbled into a trot, just to keep going forwards, and they covered the length of the corridor in no time.
Psyche tied him to the bannister and flew ahead to check the spiral stairs. A touching sign of friendship or humiliating revenge for past insults to fairies? He was still trying to remember if he’d drawn anything insulting in his sketchbook when Psyche came back and yanked him up the stairs. Since she was flying, he had to take the steps three at a time to keep up.
They came out into the light and there, in the middle of the Fortress walls, was the leafy, rectangular pigeon cage made of branches from the Marigold Kingdom’s forest. It was a head shorter than William and slightly wider than it was tall.
“I told the guys to put the leafy branches on top, as camouflage,” Psyche said, a touch of pride in her voice. She unfastened his wrists.
No. He was not going to let the giants put him in there—William dashed down the corridor, and was promptly scooped up by a giant.
“Always wanted to have a pet,” Shale quipped and set William inside the disgusting pigeon cage.
“You have to squash yourself in there.” Shale pushed down on William’s head. “You know, you’ve got really soft hair.”
“Do that again, and I’ll bite your finger,” William threatened, but he sat down and pulled his knees up so the giant could fasten the cage door shut. He couldn’t stretch out full length in any direction and he really didn’t want to touch most of the branches. Pigeons weren’t tidy birds.
“Testy, testy.”
“How am I supposed to stop Queen Ash from a pigeon cage?”
“How were you going to stop her from a dungeon?”
“I had a plan!” William sputtered, thinking of his fairy godparents night-time visit. “There’s going to be peaceful jazz and lots of chapati and, uh, . . . so far, that’s the plan.”
“Needs tweaking,” Shale said, unperturbed. “Here—” He stuffed William’s sketchbook and art supplies into the cage. “Or make a new one. You’re out of the dungeon now. And we’re with you.”
“Where’d you get my sketchbook?” William had left it in the bottom of his cupboard.
“Bea gave it to me,” Shale said, closing the lid of the pigeon cage. Psyche flew up and locked the whole thing shut with her unbreakable fairy filament.
Shale yanked on the lid, which didn’t budge.
“Portable dungeon,” William said, in a grim voice.
“Exactly,” Psyche said, twinkling at him like she’d done him a favor.
Shale’s lightning you-can-do-it smile was the last thing William saw before they were on the move. The other giants nodded and saluted William. They all thought he could do this.
How was he going to save them from themselves? The idea of trying to stop a three-way war between the Seven Kingdoms, the Fairy Kingdom, and Giant Mountains made him feel sick. Food poisoning couldn’t touch it.
The cage rose straight up—leaving his queasy stomach temporarily in the Magenta Fortress—then settled into a sickening, swaying motion that matched the giant’s walk. That’s when Shale’s remark registered.
“Shale,” William called up to the giant who was carrying the cage. “Did you guys capture all those carrier pigeons so you could have a pet?”
Shale started to hum.
“I know you heard me,” William said, but Shale hummed louder. Disgusted, William raised his voice too. “The pigeons aren’t pets. They carry important messages.”
“So do we,” Moth said, patting the pigeon cage, and William gave it up.
But at least he knew why his friends hadn’t heard from him and why he hadn’t heard from them. Because Shale had been keeping royal carrier pigeons as pets. Unbelievable.
Then William got back to “tweaking the plan”. How could he convince everyone that the giants weren’t invading the Seven Kingdoms? That was the first step. Without that, they’d never get Brynhildr to safety or the battlefield cleared, before Queen Ash chopped down the beanstalk and wiped out all of William’s friends. If everyone believed the giants were invaders, Queen Ash could turn the Mock Battle exercise into a real War on Giants.
“Reggie said there were magic beans in his shed. Did he tell you guys who ordered them?” William asked Shale, who started fake coughing and wouldn’t stop. But Moth was right behind Shale.
“Moth!” William shouted. “Why were you guys dropping rocks in the Blackfly Kingdom?”
Moth started coughing too. “Sorry, must have caught something from Shale.” The coughing passed through the line until all seven had it.
“Okay, knock it off,” William said. They weren’t going to tell him. “Don’t wreck your voices.”
The coughing stopped.
“Reggie has to live here, you know,” Rocks said. “He doesn’t need enemies.”
Reggie and the giants needed more friends. But how could William get them?
Pigeons didn’t keep armor in their cages, and millet seed was not a weapon. Paper airplane propaganda, as ridiculous as it sounded, was the only weapon he had. Huge walking billboards would have been nice, but he was lucky he had sketchbook and pencils. The giants’ picket signs could have worked, but they’d been fuel for the chapati griddle.
Ashes were what his mouth tasted like right now. He’d wanted his comic strips to get into the Proclamation so everyone could read them. Even in his wildest dreams, his comics had never been a defense against the Blackfly Queen. Whatever story she was telling the Seven Kingdoms about the giants, William had to set it straight. Forget the Proclamation. These comics were for the giants.