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."
The Ice King cleared his throat twice and began.
"'It was night in the Land of Aaa, and it was dark, because of the night. Fionna the human girl and her cat Cake were walking home, when a shadow fell upon them from above. It was a cool shadow.'"
He looked up over the notebook. This was usually where it went wrong. By the second sentence the princesses had found something to look at on the ceiling, and Gunter had once walked out during the title.
His character was still sitting against the bars, looking right at him. 'Still there. Gunter, he's still there.'
"Fionna and Cake. A human girl and her cat." Marshall Lee said it slowly.
"Her magic cat. She stretches."
"Sure she does." Something moved at the corner of the boy's mouth. "Keep going."
The Ice King lost his place, found it with a finger that wasn't quite steady, and kept going.
"'And out of the shadow floated Marshall Lee, the Vampire King! He was a thousand years old and very handsome, and he had a bass guitar that was also an axe, which he had made himself, from an axe.'"
He dropped his voice for the next part and lifted one eyebrow. "'"Hello, ladies," he said coolly, floating. Then he sang a song so good that Fionna forgot what she was doing.'"
Marshall Lee laughed. It came out through his nose first, and it came in the right place, at "from an axe", which was the Ice King's favorite sentence in the whole chapter.
'He gets it. Of course he gets it. I wrote him to get it.' He sat up straighter on the stool.
"Is this the vampire one again?" That was the lumpy one, somewhere behind him.
"He always does the vampire one."
"Quiet in the back! This is between an author and his work."
"What's the song about?" Marshall Lee asked.
"What song?"
"The one he sings. You skipped it."
"Oh. I didn't write the song. Songs are hard." The Ice King waved the page. "It just says it was good."
"Respect."
The Ice King waited for the next part, the one where the listener remembered something he had to do in another kingdom. It didn't come. Marshall Lee had pulled his knees up and rested his arms on them.
"Do you need anything? A snack? I never decided if you eat."
"I'm good."
"He's good." The Ice King passed it on to Gunter and went back to the page. "'"You can't just float into my life, Marshall Lee!" cried Fionna. "Watch me," said Marshall Lee, and he did, a little to the left.'"
"A little to the left?"
"It's a detail. Details make it real."
It was only then that the Ice King noticed the problem, and he held the notebook out and tapped the line with his finger.
"Wait. Why aren't you floating? It says floating right here. It says it twice."
"It's my day off."
"...Vampire kings get days off?"
"You didn't write one in. I took it anyway."
"He's got attitude!" The Ice King told the ceiling. "I did write that! That's in chapter four!"
He read the rest of the chapter. He did all the voices, and the high one for Fionna made his throat hurt. Every page or so he looked up to see who had left. The light in the walls went from yellow to orange, and each time he looked, his character was still there.
He had never gotten to the end of chapter one out loud before.
...
By the last page, Ray's face hurt from holding it still.
He had known who it was before the old man finished the sentence. 'That's her. That's the vampire girl. He turned her into a guy and gave her a pickup line.' The old man sat on his stool, proud of his chapter, sure he'd made the whole thing up on a snowy Tuesday.
'If the kid with the stuffed toy was her...' Ray didn't finish that one. He couldn't prove it, and thinking it made the notebook hard to look at.
"Do the line!" The old man was leaning forward. "'Hello, ladies.' I want to hear it in the real voice."
Ray looked at the bars, and at the seven princesses, and at the glitter on the cover.
"Hello, ladies." He did it low, with the eyebrow.
"Oh my Glob." The cloud fanned herself with a lump.
The old man clapped until his crown slid over one eye. He was still clapping when the far wall of the room cracked from top to bottom.
A yellow fist the size of a car came through it. The rest of Jake followed, in a rain of blue ice, with Finn riding on his head and holding on by the ears. Penguins went in every direction.
Ray had never been so glad to see a twelve-year-old in his life.
"RAY! We got thawed!" Finn jumped down with his sword already out. "The Princess had lamps! Jake's still cold in the middle!"
"My butt's frozen solid, man." Jake shrank as he crossed the room. He stuck one paw into the lock of the cell, and the paw changed shape inside it and turned.
The door swung open, and seven princesses went through it at once.
"See? His royal guard came for him!" The cloud shot past Ray's head. "Foreign princes always have a guard!"
"Hey! Hey! That's my audience!" The old man was on his feet with the notebook under one arm and frost running up the other. "And my wives! My potential wives!"
He never got the bolt off. Finn hit him in the stomach with both feet, and the old man went over the stool and landed on his back with Finn on top of him.
"This is for Jake's butt!" Finn pulled his fist back.
"Not the nose! Not the nose!"
Ray got there on legs that still didn't love running. He caught the fist by the wrist.
"Finn. He's done."
"He's the Ice King! He's evil! He steals princesses, it's the only thing he does!"
"I know. Look at him, though."
Finn looked. The old man had both arms wrapped around the notebook and his knees pulled up, and his eyes were squeezed shut. He wasn't making ice, and he wasn't trying to get up.
"...He's not even fighting." Finn's fist came down slowly. He climbed off, frowning at the old man like a math problem.
Ray crouched beside him. He took the egg out of his shirt pocket. The shell had cracked along one side somewhere over the Grasslands, but it had made it.
He put it in the old man's free hand and closed the blue fingers over it.
"It was a good chapter. The axe part killed me."
One eye opened. "This is an egg."
"Yeah. It's all I've got."
"Are you coming back? There's a chapter two. There's eleven chapters!"
Ray stood up.
"Don't kidnap anybody for a while, okay?"
He walked out through the hole in the wall, where Jake was already loading princesses.
...
The wind came in through the hole after they were gone.
The Ice King sat where he had fallen. There was ice all over the floor, the fun tray was upside down, and the cell door hung open with nobody behind it.
"Nobody ever stays for the second act, Gunter."
Gunter was standing on the notebook. The Ice King shooed him off it and checked the pages. The glitter had survived.
The egg was still in his other hand. It was hard-boiled and a little cracked, and it was warm from somebody's pocket. 'Nobody's given me anything since...' The thought went wherever his thoughts went.
He peeled it with his fingernails, which took a while, and ate it in two bites.
"It's good." He swallowed. "Gunter. It's a good egg."
"Wenk."
He sat in the wind and finished chewing. Then he found his pen in his beard, opened the notebook to the end of chapter one, and wrote a new line under the last one.
Marshall Lee takes days off.
...
It was full dark by the time Jake had dropped off the last princess.
He did it on foot, grown to the size of a house, with seven of them lined up on his back and Ray and Finn on his head. One kingdom was made of slime and one of something that glowed, and Ray was too tired to look at either. The cloud went last. She floated off backward, waving.
"Bye, Prince Ray! I'm telling everybody!"
"Please don't."
"She's gonna." Jake turned for the woods.
Finn had been quiet since the ice, and for Finn that was a long time. He sat turned around on Jake's head with his chin on his knees, looking at Ray.
"How come you gave him your egg?"
"He looked hungry."
"But he's the bad guy."
"Yeah."
"You don't give bad guys eggs. You punch them. That's, like, the whole system."
"I was out of punches. All I had was the egg."
"That's not a real answer."
"It's the one I've got, little bro."
Jake laughed under them. Finn didn't. He went on frowning at it, and Ray looked at the trees and let him.
They set him down at the stream, with a promise of breakfast and a message from the Princess that she wasn't finished with him. Finn was asleep before Jake had turned around.
Ray watched the big yellow shape go off through the trees. Then he was alone in the dark with wet sneakers, walking the last stretch to the cabin. He had spent a week jumping at every creak of that roof, and tonight he was too tired to jump at anything.
He stepped over the missing stair out of habit and stopped on the porch.
The door was open.
It hung in on its one dry hinge, and the M on it was turned to the wall. He had pulled that door shut behind him yesterday evening, on his way to a party.
His hand went to his belt. There was nothing on it.
'P.S. That house already has an owner.'
There was a little moonlight inside, the same pale square on the floor. Somebody was lying above his bed. She lay on the air a foot over the blanket with her ankles crossed and one arm behind her head, like the air was a couch. Her hair was black, and so long that the ends of it brushed the floorboards.
A red axe leaned against the wall by the fireplace. It had strings.
She was holding one of the apples from the tree out back. She put her teeth in it, and the red went out of the skin like water out of a sink, until the apple in her hand was as grey as the four in the bowl. She dropped it in with them.
'Oh, shit. That's her.'
She turned her face toward him and smiled, and the moonlight found two sharp teeth.
"Nice place." She looked around the room, then back at him. "Shame it's mine."