With a crash, stone and metal crumbled off the giant’s house to the ground below.
Hydra climbed back into the bowl and put the legs inside, feet end up. She fussed and fiddled, spit and mumbled until the combination of legs and bowl somewhat resembled a whirligig.
Kato scoffed. “There’s no way that thing will fly.”
With a smug and defiant snort, Hydra pulled her scarf off from where she’d tied it around the legs, and the “propeller” began to spin.
“I smell storm comink. Get on or all fall down,” Hydra said as the chicken-copter started to hover.
My stomach was in knots, worrying where Rexi was and if she was okay.
“Dead princess have hard time savink realm from Blanc. So move!”
Kato put his hands on my waist and hoisted me into the getaway vehicle. “Have faith.”
That was asking a lot, considering that, right then, the house groaned and plummeted through the air.
“Rule #79: Never try to take gold from a leprechaun, a dragon, or the demon bankers at Gold Man’s Sacks.”
—Definitive Fairy-Tale Survival Guide, Volume 1
32
Let Go of Me Lucky Charms
The giant’s house broke and fell to the ground. It actually held up better than I had thought it would. Only a few big cracks and… Oh, never mind. The stone walls fell inward, crumbling worse than last year’s solstice fruitcakes.
Someone had managed to flee to the cloud from the house at the last moment, though it wasn’t Rexi or a normal giant either. It bellowed, sounding like a giant, but then, why did he have furry, purple polka dots? I stopped caring because no one else was on the cloud with him.
Crossing my fingers and toes, I prayed Rexi had escaped death at the last possible moment in some odd or unlikely way that no sane person could ever imagine.
The wind shifted slightly, blowing away the rapidly dissipating wisps of cloud. I could hear more thuds as things fell from the sky.
“Must go to rainbow now.” Hydra hooked the goggled spectacles around her ears and blinked. The fractured pieces of glass made her look like a bug with multicolored eyes. She pulled her head off her shoulders and lowered it by scarf this time, rotating it for a three-hundred-sixty-degree view.
She gave her body directions to steer the pestle toward the right spot. “Oy. Right there.”
“The rainbow?” Kato asked.
“Think smaller and more trouble.”
The bowl tilted as I ran to the side and leaned over. Not too far away from the decimated and pointy stick remains of the giant’s home, Rexi ran around like a pokey-haired Chicken Little screaming that the sky was falling. And, well, it was.
The chicken-copter landed right beside her, not nearly as gently as I would have hoped but without breaking any bones.
Excited to see Rexi alive, and pixed she’d disappeared in the first place, I tried to jump out of the bowl without watching my feet. I tripped and ended up flattening her.
“Ugh. Do we really have to do this every day?” She shoved me off her with a grunt. “It wasn’t enough to try and drop a house on me. You had to make sure I busted a rib or two?”
Kato freed himself as well and joined us. “You were already down here? We thought the giant had ground your bones to dust. Did one of the clouds drop and take you down here?”
Rexi got a weird, frozen look on her face. “Yeah, something like that.” Her eyes darted away, a guilty look on her face that made me want to check her pockets.
“See? Vhat I tell you? Like cockroach,” Hydra said as she walked past Rexi.
I waited for the requisite snarky reply, but Rexi was quieter than the Little Mermaid after she’d lost her voice. Maybe it was the shock of nearly having a house fall on her. She was probably silently picturing herself squished, with only her feet sticking out from under the house.
Hydra pulled off the goggles and flung them at me. “Your turn to find rainbow spring.”
I put on the goggles and looked around, but I still had trouble finding the rainbow, and not just because the world through the stained-glass lenses looked like a paint factory had blown up. I stood on my tiptoes, but it was no use.
Just when I was about to pull the goggles back off, hands gripped me from behind and lifted me higher. Kato set me on his shoulder and kept one arm around my lap. The emerald tips of my hair sparked like fireworks. He chuckled, aware of the effect he had on me.
Yeah, it sucks to have hair that emotes along with you.
I got myself back under control and looked again. The extra height improved the view, and just above the Sherwood Forest, something sparkled and moved up. A lot of somethings. It was kind of like looking at a waterfall going in reverse. I took off the spectacles, and the sight disappeared.