Giant Fashion
All the way back to the Marigold Kingdom, where the Mock Battle exercise would be held, Psyche and the giants came up with fancy (and useless) details for William’s plan. William didn’t say anything, because he was too busy sketching comics. If he hadn’t been so wedged into the cage, he would have bounced too much to draw.
Every time Shale got excited he swung the pigeon cage higher and higher. It was rough.
William didn’t mind “Stealth Operation CHAPATI” as a top secret name for their plan, but he drew the line at a codename of “Jack”.
“Absolutely not!” William shouted from inside the pigeon cage, but no one paid any attention.
About half-way to the Marigold Kingdom, William shouted up at Shale, “We have to stop. I can’t—”
Shale glanced down and set the pigeon cage down with a thump that shook William’s bones. “Guys! Wait up! Jack has to pee or something.”
“Can we let him out for that?” Rocks asked, coming back to the cage. The other giants all had an opinion. So did Psyche. It was a noisy racket.
William took advantage of being motionless and added more stuff to the messy comics he’d sketched on the way. Drawing was so much quicker when he didn’t get thrown against the cage branches with every giant step. He was so deep into his comics that the sudden peace caught him by surprise. He looked up.
Rocks, Moth, and Bite had crouched down on one side of the cage. Traver, Shale, Gneiss, and Tom peered into the cage from the other side, and Psyche had flown into William’s cage and was perched on his sketchbook. They were watching him draw. Freaky. Making comics that would convince people during a Mock Battle exercise was already too much pressure.
“So what’s the plan?” Moth asked.
“Can we see?” Rocks asked.
“I can’t draw in a moving cage,” William said. “You have to move, Psyche, so I can close my sketchbook.”
She flew out of the cage and he used a stray pigeon feather as a bookmark and passed the sketchbook through a gap in the branches. “I’ve only got five messy sketches,” he said. “But even if I tidy them up, no one will notice five paper airplanes. Psyche might be able to make five hundred, but I don’t know how we’ll get people to look at them. They’d have to zoom around and do tricks.”
“Yeah,” said Psyche. “I can do that. That would be cool.”
Shale laid the sketchbook on top of the cage and opened it, blocking William’s view.
“Always wanted to be a coffee table,” William grumbled. “Better than being a pet, I guess.”
“Quiet, Jack,” Moth said. “We gotta look at your comics. Shale! Your pet needs a snack—”
Shale bounced a cloth lunch satchel next to the bars. “Your mom sent a snack—”
“No way!” William reached through the bars and got a rolled-up chapati out of the satchel. He pulled it carefully inside the cage and took a huge bite.
Honey.
Tears sprang into his eyes. He’d thought he was just hungry, but the taste of home knocked him right into the restaurant kitchen. He closed his eyes to see it better.
The door would be swinging.
An unfinished Re-Forest game with Bea’s forests gone up in smoke.
Whisk sounds on the big metal bowl, because the king was making omelettes.
Flour charred slightly in butter, because the queen was flipping chapati.
This was dangerous thinking. He was melting into a puddle of mush. Stuffing the rest of the honey chapati in his mouth, William tried to pull himself together. The others were still looking at the comics.
First the battlefield, he told himself, then home. Wherever that turned out to be. Hopefully, not the Magenta dungeon.
Taking a few practice breaths first, he asked, in a hoarse voice, “What are you guys doing up there?”
The plan wasn’t ready for the battlefield, but his folded-up leg muscles were killing him and his crooked neck might never be straight enough to keep a crown on his head. But he’d promised to stay in the dungeon, so he didn’t try to get out of the cage.
“This one’s pretty good,” Psyche said. Something whacked the sketchbook. The sun went funny for a second. Sparkly.
“Can you be a little careful with that?”
“Ooooh!” all the giants said together.
William was dying to know what they were looking at. “Glad you found something you like up there, but what are we going to do, guys? I can’t draw five hundred comics. Psyche? Do you hear me? And if you need sparkles to rescue Reggie’s grandma, maybe you should save some?”
Psyche didn’t answer him. But there had to be a limit to her sparkles, right? William didn’t know how the sparkles worked, but she’d used some a few times already—for the cupid comics, the lock in his cell, and just now for whatever she was doing. Fairy magic was never free.
Ignoring him, the giants flipped through his comics.
“Look at that, I’m in this one!” Bite’s voice held pleasure and surprise. He read aloud, “Friends return library books. That’s us!”
The giants loved the library comic as much as he did. William grinned. He couldn’t help it.
“Huh.” Tom’s grunt was approving. “When we die on the battlefield, people will remember us.”
That wiped the grin right off William’s face. The giants were going to be on the front line and they were big targets. “Guys, we’d better get moving—”
“Huh,” Tom grunted again. “Is that right before you got a faceful of—”
“Yeah.” Bite cut him off. “But here I look great.”
“Is this one just a comic, or do you really want us to wear t-shirts?” Rocks asked, suddenly. “I don’t think that’s safe.”
Oh. They must be looking at the one with the t-shirts.
“We don’t need chain mail,” Rocks said, reversing his opinion. “T-shirts are so dis-armor-ing, get it? Disarming?”
The giants groaned, but William was struck. What if the giants could wear t-shirts like the comic strip?
Best walking billboards ever!
But without a team of embroidery experts, the giants’ shirts wouldn’t be ready for battle. Too bad.
“I don’t know, I might put a bean bucket on my head,” Tom said, to no one in particular. “Not exactly armor, you know . . .”
“Beauty is important,” Rocks deadpanned. “I’ll take a bean bucket too. One with eye holes.”
“People don’t read much on a battlefield,” Bite agreed.
“I still have scars,” Rocks said, gently rubbing his face. “The Seven Kingdoms is arrow-happy.”
“I’m so sorry,” William said, still feeling guilty about the reception the giants had gotten in Cochem and Magenta Kingdoms.
Bite whistled a sharp blast that sounded like a train locomotive. “We don’t have time for all this fooling around. Let William—I mean, ‘Jack’—explain the plan.”
The giants sobered and William felt a stab of pure panic. His ears were ringing, but it didn’t feel like they were going to stop soon, so he just raised his voice.
“We’re trying to convince people that you’re tourists, not soldiers. There’s a rumor that giants are invading the Seven Kingdoms and that I’m leading the invasion. So, you have to look friendly. Everybody smile—” William said.
Obediently, the giants stretched their lips across their gruesome teeth. They looked terrifying.
“Uh, I was wrong about the smiles,” William said. “Cancel the smiles.”
The teeth disappeared.
William racked his brain for a way to make the huge giants look harmless. “How about a royal wave?” Still sitting in the cage, he modeled a very small wave.
The giants leaned over to watch, then copied him. Their hands looked like they were checking the direction of the wind, but this way they wouldn’t accidentally knock a Royal Aeronautical Academy glider out of the air.
“If you had the comics on your t-shirts and could point to them, it would be easier,” William said, regretfully, “but I don’t have a way to get them on your shirts.”
Gneiss held the sketchbook close to his face. “These are pretty tiny t-shirts—”
Psyche buzzed up to Gneiss’s ear and whispered something high-pitched. Gneiss winced, but nodded. “Let’s try it.”
He held the sketchbook in front of his chest.
“A little further away.”
“Like this?”
“Perfect” Psyche zapped the sketchbook with her wand. Sparkles shot out of the end, bounced off the sketchbook and sprayed onto Gneiss’s chest.
William’s mouth dropped open.
On the shirt front, his drawing of a bean was followed by the words “a good friend lately?” But the whole design was bigger than the comic. It was the perfect size for the shirt.
“That’s so cool!” William said, sincerely hoping that ambassadors from the Fairy Kingdom got an unlimited supply of sparkles. “Thank you!” He tried to bow to her, but he was already totally folded.
The cupid did a formal curtsy in the air and patted her Ambassador sash. “You’re welcome,” she trilled.
William couldn’t believe he was going to get his walking billboards after all. His insides felt fizzy. People couldn’t miss giant-sized designs. They might even be able to read them before the archers were in range.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do a test run with the airplanes.”
Inside the pigeon cage, William and Psyche immediately got down to business.
“These are from the cupids.” Psyche poured a pile of cupid-sized paper airplanes into William's cage.
“That’s, uh, excellent.” William was grateful, but the cupid airplanes were miniature. How could they do anything? “I wish I had more than a handful of comic strips to go with them,” he looked at Psyche, hinting. Cupids were fairy children and asking fairies for favors could be hazardous. Could she do more with those sparkles of hers?
But Psyche took out her magic wand and pointed it at William’s comic strips. A stream of silver sparkles shot out of the wand, covered the comic strips, and instead of six comic strips, there were . . . six big stacks next to the pigeon cage.
Wow! That was better than William had hoped. He reached through, took a comic, and folded it into a paper airplane. “Hope they’ll be good fliers.”
“Sparkles are fuel.” Psyche’s wing exaggerated her shrug.
William pulled his arm back to throw it—banging his elbow on the wooden cage. He gritted his teeth and threw it forward—and jammed his fingers on the front bars. Ow!
The paper airplane dropped through the cage bars.
Oh brother!
But the airplane gained elevation and sped up, taking an extra loop around the Marigold castle before diving below the bridge and onto the battlefield. Any normal paper airplane would have nose-dived.
Responding to the giants’ admiring whistles, Psyche bowed in mid-air.
“Psyche—” William called and she whizzed back into the pigeon cage. He lowered his voice and asked, “Can you unlock this, so the giants don’t get in trouble?”
She frowned and her wand came out. “Do you want me to tie you up in here?”
“No, please.” He put up his hands. “I can’t fold airplanes if you do.”