Ella huffed. “Must you people always be so literal? Never mind. It doesn’t matter who created the problem; we’re going to fix it. Smimf, tell us everything you witnessed in Yondale.”
Smimf recounted every detail of the conversation he’d overheard between Rundark and his generals. When he was done, Ella stood up and rubbed her hands together as the others sat in a small semicircle on snow-dusted logs and listened.
“So Rundark is apparently working with at least one other mystery villain,” Ella said, slipping into her hard-boiled-military-commander voice. “My guess is Deeb Rauber. That cousin of mine has a soft spot for big, showy criminal acts.”
“But Mr. Rundark and the Rauber boy didn’t seem to be on very friendly terms the last time we saw them,” Snow said.
“That was half a year ago,” Ella said. “Villains have been known to team up with people they hate if it will help them achieve their diabolical goals. At least that’s what happens in a lot of the stories I’ve read.”
Somewhere among the trees, a twig snapped. Lila took note of the sound.
“Anyway,” Ella continued, “thanks to Smimf’s intelligence—”
“Thank you, sir,” Smimf said, raising his head proudly.
Ella went on, not bothering to tell him she was referring to a different kind of intelligence. “—our new top priority is clear: We need to stop Rundark before he executes the princes. Which he apparently won’t do until his men have captured the Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters.”
“But that’s us,” said Snow. “We’re ffff!”
“Except Rundark doesn’t know that,” Ella went on. “He thinks we’re dead. This gives us the perfect chance to take him by surprise.”
“Just leave it to me,” Val said, admiring her fist. “Bam! Sock to the jaw.”
“Actually, Val, I don’t think you could get close enough to him for that,” Ella said. “Our big obstacle will be the Djinn Gem. Rundark can use it to turn us against one another. The last time we faced him, he almost made me kill Liam.”
“I still think I could take him,” Val said. “But assuming what you say about this gem is true, what do we do about it?”
“We need to fight fire with fire,” Ella replied.
“The Gem can make fire, too?” Snow asked, worried.
“Just an expression, Snow,” Ella said.
“The Gem can make an expression?” Snow asked. “Does it even have a face?”
“It has lots of faces—it’s a gem!” Lila quipped, snickering.
“People!” Ella snapped. “Fate of the world in the balance here! Pay attention!” Everyone hushed. “To defeat the Gem, we need something just as powerful.”
“A sock to the jaw!” Val said triumphantly.
“No!” Ella howled. She paused for a deep breath. “You know, we work pretty well as the team, but there are times . . .”
“Hey, I got a question,” Val said. “What’s a djinn?”
“A genie,” Lila replied. “A magical being that grants wishes. It was a djinn that made the Gem.”
“So why don’t we just tell this genie to make a weapon for us?” Val said plainly. “One that could beat the Gem.”
“That’s brilliant!” Lila chimed. “If we find the djinn’s bottle, he has to grant us a wish!”
“Whoa,” said Rapunzel. “According to the story, the djinn was somewhere in the middle of the Aridian desert. We can’t possibly hope to find one random bottle among acres and acres of empty sand.”
“But it’s not just a random bottle,” Ella said, with that familiar daredevil gleam in her eyes. “In the story, the bottle was found amid sand-covered ruins—and the thief who stole the Gem wandered back out into the desert and died among those same ruins. And that’s where Liam’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Prince Dorun, found the Gem.”
“And Briar’s book will tell us how to get there!” Lila shouted excitedly.
“I really missed a lot by not being on your last adventure, didn’t I?” Val said.
“Briar Rose had a book called Remembrance of Kings Past,” Lila explained. “A history of the Erinthian royal family. There’s a whole chapter about the Gem, including excerpts from the diary of Prince Dorun, who found the Gem at the ruins ages ago. Hey, Smimf, I hate to ask this, but—”
Smimf put down his sandwich. “Where is it?” he asked with a sigh.
“Top drawer of the vanity table in Briar’s bedroom.”
Smimf vanished in a mini-tornado of snowflakes. Before the last flake settled back to the ground, he reappeared with an ancient, leather-bound book in his hands.
“You’re the best,” Lila said. And Smimf was glad that the cold had already turned his cheeks red, because he could feel himself blushing.
Lila and Ella pored over the book, reading Dorun’s diary entries carefully for clues to his route. Nothing was spelled out as clearly as they had hoped, but there were plenty of directions and landmarks noted: “started out south-southwest from the coconut grove,” “passed a rock formation shaped like a chicken leg,” “turned northward at a giant cactus full of berries,” “went through a red stone arch that looked like a bent stick of cherry licorice” (Dorun was rather obsessed with food).
“So we’re off to the desert,” Lila said.
“Yep,” said Ella. “We just need to stock up on supplies and—”
There was a blast of wind as Smimf suddenly returned with armfuls of water casks and baskets of bread and dried meats. They hadn’t even noticed him leaving.
“Thank you,” Ella said. “And I’ve got one more task for you. It’s a big one.”
“Name it, sir, Your Highness, sir.”
“From what you’ve told us about their conversation, it sounds like Rundark will execute the princes if our attacks on his patrols stop,” Ella said. “Can you pretend to be the Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters while we’re gone? Keep messing with the Darian troops?”
“I can do that, sir,” Smimf said, saluting.
“It could be a while,” Ella said. “We’re going to have to owe you until this is all over.”
“Oh, no charge, sir, Your Highness, sir,” Smimf said. “I’m always happy to help the League of Princes.”
“We’re not the League of Princes,” Snow said. “We’re ffff! And we’re going to save the League of Princes.”
28
AN OUTLAW CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT
“I thought I might like the desert,” said Snow. “But I do not. It’s very . . . beige.”
“You just noticed that now?” Val said, taking a swig from her canteen.
“No, I noticed on the first day, but I didn’t want to be too hasty in my judgment of the place,” Snow replied.
The Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters had been tromping through the searing sand dunes of the Aridian Desert for seven days, and between its blinding light and blaring heat, the sun had become their worst enemy. The women wore damp cloths tied around their woozy heads—except Snow, who wore a floppy, wide-brimmed sunhat, and Rapunzel, whose hair had already grown long enough to fashion into a blond turban.
They had traded their horses for camels—Cammy, Camella, Cameron, Campbell, and Camembert, as Snow named them—at a small merchant’s outpost in the coconut groves of southern Valerium, so their feet, at least, were saved from hardship. Even so, it was grueling travel. In addition to the overwhelming heat, Aridia was also deathly boring. There was less to do here than there was back in their Avondellian jail cells.
With the exception of a few random cacti, the camel merchant was the last living thing they’d seen since entering the desert—though he gave them a vague warning about “things that move beneath the grains.” And every so often, Lila would turn and glance behind the party, as if she were looking for something. But whenever she was asked, her answer was always a mumbled “Nothing.”
Ella carefully matched their route to Dorun’s hints in the book, and thus far they’d hit every one of his noted landmarks—though the distance betw
een landmarks was much farther than expected. The diary entries claimed, for instance, that Dorun’s party traveled from the “jelly bean–shaped oasis” to the “ice cream scoop rocks” in little more than a day, but it took the women three days to cover that distance. When they reached those round, semispherical boulders, they stopped for a break, hopping down from their camels to cool off in the shade provided by the big stones.
“The timing is all off,” Ella groused.
“The book was written hundreds of years ago,” Rapunzel said. “Maybe the landscape has shifted over the ages.”
“Or Dorun was just really bad at telling time,” Lila said.
“Whatever the reason, the situation is . . . not ideal,” Ella said. She was kicking herself mentally, feeling like a fool for relying on the word of a centuries-old prince who might very well have been delusional. “The book made us think the trip would take ten days, but we’re a week in, and we’re not even halfway there.”
“So we’re running a little behind,” Val said casually, shoving a handful of crackers into her mouth and washing it down with another big gulp from her canteen. “Isn’t that what we packed extra food and water for?”
“Yes, Val,” Ella said solemnly. “We packed twenty-three days’ worth of supplies, so—”
“So even if it takes us two weeks to get there,” Val began, “we still—”
“We still have to get back,” Ella finished. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d like this to be a two-way trip.”
Val quickly closed the cap on her canteen.
“Maybe we should turn back now,” Rapunzel reluctantly suggested. “At least we know we’d have enough food and water to get back to civilization.”
“But the djinn,” Ella said. “We can’t defeat Rundark without him.”
“I’m not usually a turn-back kind of girl,” Lila said, somewhat apologetically, “but Rapunzel might be right. Maybe we need to go home, restock, and try again.”
Ella sucked on her teeth. There were no good choices here. “We have rations to last us sixteen more days,” she said. “Let’s ride on for another five days. And if we haven’t found the ruins by then, we’ll turn back. At that point, we should still have enough food and water to get the five of us home safely.”
Lila glanced over her shoulder. “What if we have to split the water six ways?”
Everyone looked at her oddly.
“Come out, Deeb,” Lila called.
A messy-haired boy about Lila’s age crawled out from behind a not-too-distant dune and trudged over to them. His eyes were sunken, his lips chapped, and his cheeks sunburned. Grains of sand fell from the shredded rags he wore and dotted the corners of his mouth. The travelers gaped at him in astonishment and confusion.
“You only saw me because I let you see me,” the boy said in a dry, raspy voice.
Lila rolled her eyes. “I’ve been on to you since Sturmhagen,” she said.
“Whatever,” he replied. He held out his empty hands. “C’mon, ladies, make with the snacks. I ran out of food three days ago.”
“Where did you come from?” Ella snapped. “You’ve been following us, Deeb? For what? Some kind of sick revenge?”
“Ha! Think about how many nights you ladies have been camping out in the open,” he said. “Did any of you ever wake up with a mustache painted on your face? That’s right—no. So obviously, I’m not out for revenge. Because that woulda been pretty sweet, and I totally coulda done it.”
“Ooh, now I recognize you!” Snow said, pointing at him and hopping. “You’re that bandit boy!”
“Bandit King,” he said, reeking of bravado. “Deeb Rauber, the Bandit King. Tyrant Ruler of the Sovereign Nation of Rauberia. Scourge of the Universe and Enemy to All That Is Noble and Good. Feared by All and Equaled by None. And did you not hear me say I was starving?”
“Is he serious?” Val asked. “You’re not getting any of our— Hey!”
Rapunzel tossed him a canteen and a biscuit, which he quickly tore into.
“Well, we’re not going to let him die,” she said.
“He’s probably lying!” Ella snapped. “You can’t trust this kid—”
“Watch who you’re calling a kid,” Rauber mumbled with a spray of crumbs.
“You expect us to believe you’re not spying for Rundark?” Ella asked.
“Rundark?” he scoffed. “Oh, jeez. Wow. The sun really has melted your brains. Let me ask you a question: Last time you saw me, what was I doing?”
“Crawling out from behind that dune back there,” Snow said.
“The time before that,” Rauber droned.
“You were kicking Rundark into a moat full of carnivorous eels,” Lila said.
“Ding-ding-ding!” Rauber blared, tapping the tip of his nose. “Yeah, that guy and I are not friends. And when his buddies revived him with a vial of magic tears”—Rapunzel pulled her hair in front of her face—“he declared himself king and tried to have me arrested. But that wasn’t gonna happen. I’m too smart and too fast.”
“Like the tortoise and the hare all rolled into one,” Snow said.
“Darn tootin’,” Rauber said. “So one night I’m in my hideout, plotting my comeback, when suddenly I hear voices from right below my tree house. You know, you ladies don’t talk nearly as quietly as you should when you’re on the run from the law. But when I listened in, I realized we’re all after the same goal—taking down Rundork. So I followed you. And I have to say—your idea to find that genie is pretty good. In fact, it’s exactly what I was gonna do on my own.”
“Pfft! You didn’t know even what the Djinn Gem was when you first saw it,” Lila snarked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Val said bitterly. “The little snot made a big mistake, and now he’s gonna die in the desert.”
“No, he’s not,” Rapunzel insisted. “At least not while we have food and water to share. I won’t let it happen.”
“I’m with Rapunzel,” Lila said. She cast a scornful glance at Rauber. “Make no mistake, I hate this kid. But look at him—he won’t last another day on his own.”
“Hey, I hate you, too,” Rauber said cheerfully. “All of you. I’m not gonna pretend I don’t. Especially you, Little Miss Erinthia—I owe you for tossing me down the Snake Hole. And Ella, cuz, our hatred for each other goes way back to childhood.”
“You’re still a child,” Ella said flatly.
“My point is that one doesn’t rise to the rank of Evil Genius without realizing that sometimes compromise is necessary,” Rauber said. “You may not love your choice of partners, but you need to get the job done. So you hold your nose and work with them anyway. And I mean that literally, because have you ladies smelled yourselves lately? Phew!”
“I don’t know,” Ella said, eyeing her young cousin sternly. “You’ve caused a lot of grief in twelve short years. And not just for us. A big part of me feels like you deserve to rot in the wastes of Aridia. But . . . well, we’ve got two definite votes for helping Deeb out. And one pretty firmly against. Snow, where do you stand?”
“Over here, by this rock,” Snow answered.
“No, I mean—” Ella stopped in midsentence when she saw Deeb dart to the nearest camel, snatch a supply pack from its back, and dash over a nearby dune.
“That little brat!” Val howled and started after him.
“Wait,” Lila said, grabbing Val by the arm to stop her. “Maybe we should just let him go. He’s not going to last long out there anyway.”
“That was the pack with the book in it,” Ella said in horror.
“Crud,” said Lila. “Let’s get him!”
“Stay here,” Ella said to Snow and Rapunzel as she, Lila, and Val took off after the fleeing Bandit King.
“At least he won’t be hard to follow,” Val said, pointing to the long line of footprints that ran across the sand before them. The women ran, tracing the trail up and over a series of tall, windswept sand hills. As they rounded the crest of their sixth dune, the
y were knocked onto their backsides by Rauber bursting up the other side of the hill, running in the opposite direction. All four rolled to the bottom, where Val grabbed Deeb’s ankle before he could flee again.
“Not so fast,” she said with a grin. “If you think you’re—”
“You can hold me here and lecture me if you’d like,” Rauber said. “But I’m guessing you’d rather run away from that.” He pointed back up to the top of the dune. An enormous armor-plated insect scrabbled over the edge on long, hairy, segmented legs and clicked its jagged jaws at them. The thing looked like a cross between a rhino, a tarantula, and an angry fork.
“That’s a brain-melter beetle!” Lila shouted as she struggled to run in the loose, deep sand. “Don’t let it near your head!”
“I wouldn’t really let it near any part of you,” Rauber added.
Val let go of him and drew her sword to face the giant bug. But she wasn’t expecting the creature to leap from the top of the dune and land right on top of her.
“No!” Ella cried. She attacked the beast with her sword, but the blade simply clanged against the monster’s armored shells. It turned and flicked Ella aside with one of its spear-like legs.
Fig. 22
BRAIN-MELTER beetle
While its attention was on Ella, Lila tried to drag Val out from under it, but to no avail. Suddenly, the beetle spun its grotesque head back to Lila. Its jaws snapped open, just inches from her face, a long strand of yellow saliva dangling from its mouth. Lila barely had time to be horrified before she heard a sizzle and noticed a stream of smoke rising from the monster’s right eye. The beetle hissed, jumped off of Val, and quickly burrowed into the sand, fleeing.
Deeb Rauber stood one dune over, holding a magnifying glass high over his head. He slid down to join the women. “See, I can be useful,” he said.
“How did you know to do that?” Ella asked.
“Well, first of all, I’m awesome,” he said, puffing out his scrawny chest. “Secondly, frying bugs with a magnifying glass is practically a second career for me.”
While he was busy preening, Ella yanked the pack away from him. “I’ll take this, thank you,” she said. “And you can come with us. But I will ration out your food. And you will only take what I give you.”