The crew spilled out, gasping at the beauty of the wildflowerfilled valley and the majestic forest spread before them. The forest wasn’t scary or forbidding, like the deep jungle of J16 had been, just very, very beautiful. Enormous—both in width and height—trees reached toward the sky. Moss-covered rocks the size of trucks dotted the landscape. “Total LOTR!” Gabriel said excitedly to Ravi.
“Total!” Ravi agreed.
“LOTR?” Carly asked.
“Lord of the Rings,” Anna replied with an eye roll.
But she totally agreed. She almost expected to see a hobbit walk out of the lush woods. The breeze carried a faint salty smell from an ocean too far away to see. The air smelled woodsy and alive, a smell that was decidedly missing from both the Light Blade and the Cloud Leopard. In fact, unless Chris was making one of his special meals, there were practically no smells on board the spaceships at all. She breathed in deep again, hoping some of it would accompany her back up.
Carly flopped down on the thick, soft grass and stared up at the blue-purple sky. “I wonder if this is what Earth was like, you know, before people. All wild and peaceful.”
“It won’t be peaceful for long,” Piper said, looking up at the sky. “Not when the ogres and dragons come along.”
“Dragons?” Niko said, bending his neck backward to look up. “Did someone say dragons?”
“Relax, dragon boy,” Siena said. “They’re not out yet.”
“Rats,” Niko said.
“I’ll try to take a picture for you,” she offered, patting him on the arm.
“Try to get one face-on,” he said excitedly, “and then a profile, and if you can get an action shot with him, you know, actually setting something on fire, that would be great.”
Siena stared at him. “Sure, I’ll ask the ferocious fire-breathing dragon to pose for me.”
“You’re a pal,” Niko said, grinning.
“All right, guys,” Anna said, checking her MTB. “We’ve got to let them get to it. Those ogres aren’t gonna wake themselves.”
Carly gave everyone hugs, then climbed back into the Cloud Cat with Anna. “I’ll leave the tank in this same spot,” Ravi said, before climbing in himself. There hadn’t been room for the large vehicle with all eight of them in there.
“After testing it out, of course,” Niko added. He turned to go, but Dash reached out for him.
“Thank you again for everything you did to get me here. I feel a hundred times better.”
“No problem,” Niko said. “Thank you for not bursting into flames when I did it.”
Dash raised one eyebrow. “Was that a possibility?”
Niko smiled and shrugged. “Ya never know.” He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
The ground team watched the Cloud Cat take off, and then double-checked the maps Chris had loaded onto their MTBs. “The Horn Tree is the tallest, oldest, most sacred tree of the Elfin Forest,” Siena said, twisting her arm back and forth to get a clearer view of the small screen. “It says we should do our best to reach it without being spotted and only talk to the two guards posted out front. That must be new info from Chris’s update, to help us save time. Supposedly, we should have spotted it easily as we flew in.” She looked up from the readout. “Did anyone think to look before we landed?”
The other three shook their heads, then craned their necks to look up at the forest. “They all look the same height from here,” Gabriel said.
Siena turned to Piper. “Can your chair go up high enough to scope out the area?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “Those trees are really high.”
“Maybe for a regular person,” Gabriel said. “But not for someone who once strapped a gassy robot onto her lap and sailed through outer space.”
Piper grinned. “True. Okay, I’ll give it a try. As long as the trees don’t disrupt the signal between the ground and the chair it should work.”
“Do you want company?” Siena asked. “You know, like we did this morning?”
Piper shook her head. “Thanks, but I can only go a few feet off the ground with more than just me.”
“Be careful,” Dash said. “Come down if it feels too dangerous.”
Piper gave him a salute and zoomed straight up until they lost sight of her among the wide branches and large leaves.
The foliage got thicker as Piper flew higher. She slowed down in order to carefully maneuver through the maze of branches. At one point, she couldn’t see anything but the green leaves all around her. Just when she thought she’d never reach the top, the closely knit branches started to thin and she broke into a clearing between one tree and another enough that she could see blue sky above.
Piper smiled and pushed her amazing chair to top speed. She brought up her hand to shade her eyes from the glow of the orange suns. She was almost above the trees, where she could get the best view, when—whoosh! Piper’s chair dropped twenty feet, slamming into a mess of branches. It slid, toppling over so that Piper now hung upside down. She could feel herself sliding along a wide branch, lower and lower. The crackling of leaves and wood sounded, and Piper knew she was about to plummet hundreds of feet to the ground. Her fingers grasped at the joystick, desperate to get the motor restarted.
There was a loud snap! and Piper’s chair slid rapidly down the broken branch, flipping right side up again. She finally managed to hit the correct button, and her chair suddenly hummed to life, propelling her straight up toward the blue sky. She slowed and hovered just above a solid-looking set of branches. Her heart pounded as she took a couple of deep breaths.
Down on the ground, Siena, Dash, and Gabriel craned their necks looking for any sign of Piper.
“There she is!” Siena shouted, pointing out a golden speck in the air. “That’s her hair!” A few very tense moments later, they could see the rest of her, carefully floating down through the leaves. Her face was paler than usual when she reached them.
“It was touchy for a few seconds there,” Piper said, peeling off a few stray leaves from her clothes. “The chair must have lost signal strength or something. I was pretty sure I’d be making a new home in the treetops—or falling back down to you, rather than flying!”
She shook out the last of the leaves and said, “So…you know how we’re supposed to walk backward and whistle when we first approach the elves or they might take our being here as a declaration of war? Yeah, well, it might be too late for that.”
“What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.
“A girl in a flying wheelchair is a little hard to miss. If anyone was looking up, they’d have seen me.”
“They’re supposed to be friendly, though, right?” Dash asked.
Siena nodded. “Chris’s records in the library confirmed that. His notes talked a lot about how kind and generous they are with each other. But after the ogres were so awful to them, it makes sense they wouldn’t like outsiders.”
“Did you find the Horn Tree?” Gabriel asked.
Piper nodded. “And from the top I could see the horn itself. It’s inside a room in a sort of tree house about halfway up.”
“How far away is it?” Gabriel asked.
“It’s in the center of the woods, about a mile deep. If you guys run behind me, we can make it in ten minutes.”
“Easy peasy,” Gabriel said, slinging his backpack onto his shoulders.
“Famous last words,” Siena muttered as she dashed into the woods after the others.
The temperature in the forest felt twenty degrees cooler, and the tree cover was so complete that they could only see tiny patches of sky far above. The utter quiet made the crunching of the leaves under their feet sound like thunder. “Can’t you guys run more quietly?” Piper called back to them. No one answered. They were too busy avoiding large roots from the massive trees, the occasional fallen log, and the small creatures that darted back and forth across their path. The animals looked like a cross between a rabbit and a mouse, with twitchy noses and fluffy tails. T
hey’d be cute if they weren’t slowing down their progress.
After about five minutes dodging mabbits (or rouses, Dash couldn’t decide what to call them), Dash still felt great. He could leap over the foot-high roots without stumbling, and kept pace with the others. And then suddenly he couldn’t. If Siena hadn’t pulled him back, he’d have run right into a moss-covered rock the size of a house.
“Hold up,” she called to the others.
Dash leaned against the rock, trying to figure out what had just happened. He wasn’t short of breath. His legs weren’t tired. But his balance was clearly off. He put both hands on the rock to steady himself. “Take deep breaths,” Piper demanded.
“It’s okay,” he said after following her orders. “I feel better.” To test it out, he took his hands off the rock and tried walking a few steps in a straight line. “See?”
“Not bad,” Gabriel said, leaning up against the rock. The thick moss made it feel soft against his back. “But can you do it while rubbing your belly and patting your head?”
Dash proved that yes, he could, although it took more concentration than he’d admit.
“Nice.” Gabriel nodded approvingly.
“Um, Gabriel?” Siena said. “Can you move away from that rock? Like, super fast?”
Gabriel picked up his backpack and walked forward. “Do you want to test my balance too? Because I used to walk to school with a book on my head so—”
“No,” she said, grabbing his arm and yanking him toward her. “It’s because that rock isn’t a rock!”
They all watched with open mouths as the “rock” slowly unfurled two thick arms, lifted a head the size of a car, and stretched its broad moss-covered back—the same back Dash and Gabriel had leaned against! They inched backward as the giant—for clearly that’s what it was—slowly began to stand. It must have been at least sixty feet tall, almost as tall as the tops of the trees.
“Uh, that’s not an ogre, right?” Gabriel asked. “Because I’m pretty sure Chris didn’t say they were a million miles high.”
Siena rolled her eyes. “It can’t be a million miles high. It isn’t even as tall as the trees. And it’s clearly not an ogre. Ogres are much smaller than this.”
“Then what is it?” Gabriel said.
“Guys, whatever it is, I think it’s time to run,” Dash said, backing away already.
Before the giant could turn around and spot them, Piper grabbed the others and motioned for them to start running. They took off around the nearest tree, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the giant as possible.
They passed two more of the mossy rocks as they moved deeper into the forest. “Let’s let sleeping giants sleep,” Gabriel whispered.
No one argued.
A few moments later, they slowed and finally came to a stop to catch their breath. “I think we’re okay,” Dash said, looking behind them. The giant was easy to spot between trees, and he’d only moved a few feet.
“Guess Chris forgot to tell us there were giants here too,” Siena said. Dash, Piper, and Gabriel all shrugged. They were used to Chris leaving out key pieces of information despite his insistence otherwise.
Piper took a minute to get her bearings, then said, “Okay, follow me. We’re not too far now.”
After only a few minutes, Piper stopped short and pointed a few yards ahead. A rock wall at least ten feet high fanned out in both directions. She hadn’t seen that from above. The wall clearly hadn’t been well maintained. In some places, half the large rocks had shifted, leaving gaps big enough to crawl through.
They approached it cautiously, bending to look through the holes. The trees on the other side were even wider than the ones behind them. “Didn’t Chris say the elves live in the trees?” Dash asked. Siena nodded. “They must be hollow inside.” They tried peeking through different gaps, but it was hard to make out any details. Large leaves and thick greenish black moss hung over everything. They couldn’t see any doors or windows or smoke from cooking fires. Nothing to suggest life. But at least they also didn’t see any giants.
Siena backed away. “Maybe the elves are all gone. It’s been a hundred years since Chris was here, right?”
“If that’s true,” Gabriel said. “It would make our job a lot easier.”
“Gabriel Parker!” Piper scolded. “That’s not nice. You’re talking about a whole species.”
Gabriel held up his hand. “Hey, I’m as curious to see an elf as the next guy.”
Piper pursed her lips but didn’t reply.
“The less time we spend wandering through the village—or whatever this is—the better. Let’s wait to climb the wall until we get closer to the Horn Tree.”
They turned east and ran around the periphery of the wall, keeping on the lookout for any movement. After another two minutes, Piper stopped again. “The tree is about a hundred yards past this part of the wall.”
Dash went first, testing out a few different spots until he found one that felt steady enough to climb. Piper floated to the top and kept watch. All the practice on the rock wall in the training room paid off, and everyone easily scaled it. The trees were spaced farther apart than on the other side of the wall, and more of the sky peeked through the branches. A huge slab of rock lay in the middle of a clearing, raised a few inches off the ground by other smaller rocks. When they got closer, they saw that what must have once been a meal covered the surface. Wooden plates held the remains of colorful berries and the bones of some kind of meat. Piper hoped it wasn’t those cute mabbits (they’d agreed that was the better name), but knew it probably was.
“Okay,” Dash said, “I guess the elves are still alive, which is good. But does anyone else think it’s creepy that no one’s here?”
They all nodded.
“Anyone know what they’re supposed to look like?” Dash asked. “Chris didn’t describe them.”
“None of Chris’s records in the library had pictures,” Siena said.
“Maybe they’re all around us, but invisible!” Gabriel suggested. “Or maybe, like in LOTR, they’re totally beautiful and perfect, and looking at them will make you fall instantly in love.”
“Not sure that’s what happens in the books,” Piper pointed out, but Gabriel was on a roll. “Or maybe they’re green with pointy ears!” he continued. “And only three inches tall, which explains why this table is so low to the ground!” He fell to his knees and began sifting through the grass, pretending to look for them.
Siena and Piper giggled.
“Let’s assume none of those are the right answers,” Dash said, trying not to smile. “We’ll just have to keep our eyes open for any movement.”
“What if no one’s at the tree when we get there?” Siena asked.
“We’re about to find out,” Piper said, pointing to a nearby tree that was so tall, no one could see the top of it. They couldn’t see any guards either. They spread out to search the immediate area.
The Horn Tree was so wide that it took a few minutes before they circled it and met back up again. Except for the mabbits, nothing moved in the woods at all.
“Wherever they are,” Piper said, “they must not care about guarding the horn anymore. After all this time, they’ve probably gotten so used to not being attacked by the ogres that they don’t see the point of posting guards.”
“Or maybe they don’t even remember what the horn does,” Siena suggested. “Or even that it’s there at all.”
“Pretty sure they remember,” Gabriel said. In his search for a doorway into the tree, he had pushed aside some of the huge leaves and exposed a large part of the tree trunk. Rather than the gray bark that they could see peeking out from the other trees, this portion of the tree was white and smooth. Drawings covered most of the space. The image in the center—the one surrounded by yellow and pink flowers—was everyone’s favorite alien.
“That guy sure gets around,” Gabriel said with an approving whistle. “They even captured his bubbly personality.” Gabrie
l stepped next to the drawing, imitating Chris’s expression, which was really just showing no emotion at all.
Piper and Siena rolled their eyes. Dash stepped closer to inspect the rest of the drawings. The whole scene clearly depicted the story of Chris making the horn and using it to put the ogres to sleep. The ogres were nasty-looking creatures with beady black eyes, long hooked noses, and arms that hung longer than they should. Nowhere in the pictures did they see anything that resembled elves, though.
“Okay,” Dash said, “so the elves know the story. Then where are they?”
“That depends,” an unfamiliar female voice rang out from behind them, “on who’s asking and what they want.”
The ground team would have turned around faster had there not been the sharp ends of spears jabbing not so gently into their shoulders. Dash cleared his throat and held up his hands. “We come in peace,” he said, cringing at how lame that sounded. “We’re friends of Chris.” He motioned with his head at the picture on the tree. “You know, that guy.” The point of the spear pressed a little more harshly into his back when his head moved, so he froze again.
“You have interrupted Feast Day,” a deeper voice accused. “You have trespassed on our village while we bathed in the sea in celebration of a hundred years of peace. And now you stand before our most sacred tree and mock us? Explain yourselves!”
“Please,” Piper asked in her sweetest voice. “We really are friendly and mean no harm. Can we please turn around and talk?”
After a long moment of silence, the male voice answered. “Power down your weapon first.”
“Um, what weapon?” Piper asked, holding out her empty hands.
“The one you sit upon.”
“Oh, this,” Piper said, still keeping her voice light. “It’s not a weapon. I use it to get around. My legs don’t work.”
The voices conferred with each other in a language the kids couldn’t understand. Finally, the spears pulled back. The four of them turned around slowly, rubbing their necks where the points had dug in. Gabriel gasped. “OMG, I was right!”