The beard stopped beating. He dropped three feet, caught himself, and hung there with his mouth open. One of the ice bolts slid out of his fingers and broke on the ground.
"...Marshall Lee?!"
Ray looked over his shoulder. There was Jake, and the wall, and nobody else the old man could be talking to.
"Who?"
"Marshall Lee! It's you! It's really you!" The old man landed in front of him on bare blue feet and bent down until his nose, which was as long as a carrot, almost touched Ray's. "The hair! The height! The little bracelets! I forgot I gave you bracelets!"
'Oh, shit. Blue guy, beard, crown. That's the ice one. The one who kidnaps princesses.' Ray leaned back as far as a man with no working legs could lean. "I think you've got the wrong guy, man. I'm Ray."
"He doesn't know his own name. That happens, that happens, you've only just come out." A cold finger poked Ray in the cheek, twice. "You're exactly how I wrote you! Gunter said I'd never finish a character, and look! Finished! Walking around!" He glanced at Ray's legs. "Sitting around."
"Wrote me?"
"Get away from him, Ice King!"
That was Finn, coming across the yard at full speed with the gold sword over his head and Jake stretching out beside him. The old man didn't turn around. He flapped one hand behind him without looking, and something white jumped out of it.
When Ray could see again, there was a block of ice in the yard the size of a refrigerator. Finn was inside it with his mouth open in the middle of a yell, and Jake was wrapped halfway around him with one paw as big as a door. Only their eyes moved. Finn's were furious.
"Finn!" Ray got his elbows under him and started dragging. His legs came along behind him like luggage, and he made it about four feet.
"Ice King." Bubblegum hadn't raised her voice. She stood ten steps off with the tape measure still in her hand. "Put him down."
The old man hadn't picked him up yet. He did it now, as if she had reminded him. He grabbed Ray by the back of the shirt and hauled him up under one arm. He was a lot stronger than he looked, and his robe was as cold as the inside of a freezer.
"Not now, Princess. I'm busy."
Ray saw her face when he said it. Her mouth opened a little and nothing came out. She looked like a woman who had been stood up at her own kidnapping.
"Princess! A little help?"
"Peppermint Butler! Bring the heat lamps!" She was already turning to the block of ice. Then, because she was who she was, she looked back up at Ray and uncapped her pen.
The beard began to beat. The yard dropped away under Ray's sneakers, then the wall, then the roofs of the castle.
"AAAH! Put me down! No, don't! Do not put me down!"
The flight took most of an hour. For the first ten minutes Ray kept his eyes shut. After that he was too cold to stay scared, and he looked.
The Candy Kingdom was a pink dot behind them. Grass went by underneath, and a forest, and a river. The old man talked the whole way, mostly to himself, about how heavy characters turned out to be once they were real and how nobody warned a writer about that.
Then the grass stopped in a straight line, and the ice started.
Ray knew those mountains. On his first evening here he had stood on a hill with blistered heels and asked them why he knew them. The tallest one still had the dent near the top. From this close he could see that the dent was a window, and that the face under it had a door for a mouth.
'Well. Now I know.' The door in the mouth stood open, and they went in.
Inside, it was all blue ice and penguins. They stood around the halls in groups of three and four, like coworkers on a smoke break, and none of them moved out of the way.
"Gunter! Look who came to visit!" The old man held Ray out toward the nearest one.
"Wenk."
"He's thrilled."
The cell was at the back of a big round room. It had bars of ice as thick as Ray's arm, and it was already full.
"Princesses! We have a celebrity! Be nice to him, he's fictional." The old man unlocked the door, set Ray down inside against the wall and locked it again. "That's for your own safety. Characters wander off. I'll go get the good tray!"
He flapped out of the room. Ray sat where he had been put and looked at his cellmates, and seven princesses looked back.
He only knew one of them. She was a purple cloud about the size of a beanbag chair, floating at head height with a gold star stuck to her forehead. She opened her mouth, and she sounded exactly the way he remembered.
"Oh. My. Glob. Who is this?"
"Hi. I'm Ray."
"He's got, like, prince hair." She drifted a full circle around his head. "You guys. He has prince hair."
"He's tall." That came from a green one who seemed to be made of slime. "Princes are tall."
"He's got a ring on a necklace." A very small one, round and red like a berry, pointed at it. "That's a royal thing."
"I'm not a prince. I move boxes."
"That is exactly what a prince in disguise would say." The cloud looked around at the others for support and got it. "Where's your kingdom?"
"I don't have a kingdom. I'm from across the sea."
There was a short silence. Then all of them made the same noise at once.
"A foreign prince!" The cloud flipped over in the air. "Melissa is going to lump herself."
Ray opened his mouth to argue and let it go. 'Sure. Add it to the pile. What's one crown.'
They told him the rest while the feeling came back into his legs. They had been in here for weeks. One of them, who was made of something hard and green, had been scratching the days into the wall, and the scratches went most of the way to the corner.
The old man wanted to marry one of them and hadn't picked. Every day he came and asked about their quirks and their favorite sports. Some days he read to them from a picture book for babies, some days he brought a tray of toys and called it fun, and some days he played the drums.
"Favorite sports? What does he do with that?"
"He writes it down." The slime one shuddered.
"Does everybody around here carry a notepad?" Ray shook his head. "Is he at least good at the drums?"
"No." Six of them said it together. The seventh, who was a hot dog, barked.
"Is that bread?" The small red one was looking at his shirt pocket.
Ray's hand went over the pocket before he could stop it. There were two rolls and an egg in there, and that was all the food he had between here and whenever Jake thawed out. He looked at the seven of them, and at the scratches on the wall.
He tore the rolls into pieces and passed them around. Nobody needed to know about the egg.
"So can you, like, rescue us?" The slime one slid closer, chewing. "Princes do rescues."
"If I had a sword, maybe. It's a whole thing." He had pulled himself up by the bars to try his legs. They held, on pins and needles.
The bars were right there under his hands, though, and in the anime those kids split boulders on the breathing alone.
He took hold of two bars, shut his mouth, and pulled the air down slowly, the way he did on the porch. The heat came into his legs. He pulled with everything he had.
The bars didn't move. His palms had started to stick to them.
"What's he doing?"
"I think he's smelling the door."
"It's probably a prince thing."
'Four afternoons on a porch. Not enough porch.' He peeled his hands off the ice one at a time and sat back down.
He kept them talking after that, mostly so he wouldn't have to look at the bars. He asked the cloud who Melissa was and got twenty minutes on it, and he had a comment for every one of them.
By the time the old man came back, the light in the ice walls had gone from white to yellow, and Ray could feel all ten of his toes.
He had the tray with him. It held a rubber ball, a deck of cards with half the cards missing, and a tiny blue figure of himself in a paper crown. He set it on the floor outside the bars, pulled up a stool and sat down facing Ray, with his back to every princess in the cell.
"Um, hello? Some of us have been here for weeks?"
"Yes, yes, in a minute." He didn't look at her. He was smiling at Ray with his whole face. "I can't get over it. I made you up on a Tuesday, you know. It was snowing. It's always snowing, I live here, but that day it was the good snow."
He scooted the stool closer. "And I thought, you know what this place needs? A cool guy. Somebody who'd come over and sit down and just listen to a person for once. So I gave you the hair, and I gave you the..."
He stopped.
His mouth stayed open. His eyes had been on Ray, and now they were on a spot in the air between them. One blue hand came up slowly and touched the crown. The fingers felt along the gold and rested on one of the red stones, the way a man feels for the glasses he has pushed up on his head.
"What was I..." It was a small voice, with no show in it. "Gunter? What was I doing?"
The penguin at his feet said nothing.
Ray had seen that look before.
It had been on a screen. The same old man stood in somebody's living room with scraps of paper in his hands and that same empty face, and he didn't understand why the girl in front of him was crying. There had been a song. Ray couldn't get the tune. He got the girl's face, and it was the vampire one, the one with the bass.
The rest came up behind it in pieces.
He had been a regular guy once. He'd had glasses and a bow tie and a name, and the name was Simon. He had found the crown and put it on, and it had taken him a little at a time while he watched it happen.
There had been a kid. It was after the bombs, in the wreck of some city. She was small and carried a stuffed toy, and Simon had kept her alive.
Ray tried to see her face and couldn't. Was she the vampire girl? The song had said something about that. He was almost sure it had, and the harder he pulled at it, the less of it he had.
He sat down on the floor of the cell.
The old man was patting the front of his robe now, one pocket and then another, looking for whatever he had lost. He had been alive when that mall still had its lights on. He might be the last person in the world who knew what a food court was for.
Ray didn't say anything. He had been talking since the door locked, and the princesses had gotten used to it.
"Why'd the prince go quiet?" The cloud whispered it loud enough to carry across the room. "He hasn't shut up since he got here."
"Maybe he's still hungry."
The small red one looked at the last piece of roll in her hand. She came over and put it on his knee.
Ray looked at it for a while. He couldn't have told them what was wrong, and he wasn't going to say that name out loud in front of the man it used to belong to.
He ate the piece of bread.
"Right! Where were we?" The old man's hand came out of his robe with a notebook in it, and the rest of him came back all at once, the voice and the eyebrows and the smile. "Story time!"
It was a thick notebook, the kind with a wire spine. The cover was caked with glitter, and a line of penguin footprints crossed it in blue paint.
"You're going to love this. You're in it." He licked his thumb and turned to the first page. "Chapter one."