Biscuit leaned over and whispered, “Do you actually have a plan?”
“About forty percent of one,” I whispered back. She nodded like that was completely acceptable, which honestly made me feel great.
The fog maze was behind us now. We’d found our way out by following the smell Biscuit had been tracking — something she described as “burnt toffee mixed with gray crayon and a very sad Tuesday” — which turned out to be the base of Sky Tower, a tall, crooked structure of dark stone that floated just above the treeline like it had forgotten to come back down. A rickety staircase spiraled up its outside, and at the very top, through the haze, I could just barely see the glow of hundreds of glass jars.
Stolen sunrises. Stolen auroras. All of them trapped up there while the rest of us lived under a flat gray sky that smelled, according to Biscuit, of old socks and sadness.
And somewhere in that tower: the stolen hats.
The plan — the full forty percent of it — came together when I noticed a Wither Skeleton who had wandered away from his post and fallen completely asleep against a mushroom. He was snoring. Actual snoring. Little puffs of dark smoke floated out of his skull with every breath. His helmet sat slightly sideways on his head.
I looked at the helmet. I looked at Biscuit. She looked at the helmet.
“No,” she said.
“Just the helmet,” I said. “I’ll give it back.”
“Ollie, that is a sleeping Wither Skeleton’s helmet.”
“Which is exactly why this is the best time to borrow it!”
I crept over, moving slowly and carefully, which for me meant I only tripped once, and it was a very quiet trip, and I caught myself on a tree before I fell, which I think counts as a personal record. I lifted the helmet off the skeleton’s head with both hands. He snored louder. A puff of smoke hit me directly in the nose.
I did not sneeze. I want that acknowledged. I held it together magnificently.
With the Wool of Wonders wrapped around my shoulders and the Wither Skeleton helmet on my head, I looked — according to Biscuit, who squinted at me for a long time — “like a skeleton who has been in some kind of accident.” Which was close enough to a disguise. I told Biscuit to keep the villagers safely behind the tree line and to use the Lucky Button if anything went wrong. She immediately listed nine reasons she absolutely would not use the Lucky Button, which I took to mean she probably would.
The stairs were windy. Very, very windy. I gripped the railing with both hands and climbed, and every few steps the wind tried to blow me sideways in a way that felt almost personal. Two Wither Skeleton guards near the middle landing looked up as I passed. I gave them what I hoped was a casual, confident skeleton nod.
They nodded back.
I kept climbing.
The jar room was at the top, and it was the most astonishing thing I had ever seen. Shelves and shelves of glowing glass jars covered every wall from floor to ceiling, each one containing something incredible — a sunrise folded up like a tiny orange blanket, an aurora swirling in greens and pinks like it was trying to dance, a meteor shower sparkling silently in a jar the size of my fist. In the corner sat a whole stack of hats. The baker’s tall white chef hat. The mayor’s purple top hat. Pip’s polka-dot party hat. All of them, right there.
I grabbed the hats and stuffed them carefully into my tunic. Then I looked at all those jars.
I had not planned this part. I was operating on the remaining sixty percent that Biscuit hadn’t heard about, which was mostly just hope and instinct.
I opened the first jar.
The sunrise came out like a yawn — slow and warm and golden, stretching across the ceiling and then straight through the tower walls and up into the sky outside. I opened the second jar. An aurora spilled out, green and violet, curling toward the window like it was very relieved. I opened a third, a fourth, a fifth — and then my arms got excited and I opened approximately forty more in about twelve seconds, and all at once the sky outside the tower exploded with color.
That’s when Wanda arrived.
She swept through the door in her swirling black and purple smoke, three purple eyes blazing, Wither Staff raised — and then she stopped. Because the sky behind me through the window was now the most spectacular thing anyone had ever seen. Every stolen sunrise and aurora releasing all at once, layered on top of each other, pinks and golds and greens and blues all tumbling over each other in great waves of color.
And I was so happy about it that I laughed.
Then Biscuit laughed from somewhere below — I could hear her through the floor.
Then the villagers laughed.
Then Pip laughed loudest of all, and Pip had a very, very powerful laugh for someone so small.
Wanda’s purple eyes flickered. Her staff wobbled. She made a sound like a teakettle that had forgotten what it was doing, and then she swept back out through the window in a furious cloud of smoke and disappeared into the distance, shrinking smaller and smaller until she was just a tiny purple dot and then nothing at all.
I stood there holding forty empty jars and a stack of hats.
Then I sneezed.
It was a big sneeze. The kind that arrives without warning and takes everything with it. A shockwave of sneeze-energy blasted outward from me in all directions — and then something extraordinary happened. Instead of blowing the tower apart, the explosion was caught by a small round shield that had been sitting, completely unnoticed, on the shelf directly in front of my face. It absorbed the whole sneeze in one gulp and then, with a happy little pop, released it as a shower of confetti that rained down through the tower windows onto the villagers below.
Biscuit looked up at the confetti, then at me, then at the shield — copper-colored, round, with a little sneeze-swirl pattern etched into the front.
“That,” she said, “smells like popping candy and a very good idea.”
The Grand Hat Festival happened that evening under the most remarkable sky Blockville had ever seen. Every hat was returned to its rightful head. The baker baked seventeen cakes. Pip wore the polka-dot hat and refused to take it off even to eat. And Biscuit made a new list — “Rules About the Sneeze Shield (There Are Fourteen)” — which she presented to me on a very official-looking piece of paper.
At the end of the night, the mayor stood on a box and handed me a rolled-up certificate that was slightly damp from the confetti but still very readable: The Slightly-Damp Certificate of Surprisingly Good Leadership. It had an official seal and everything, though the seal was a little smudged, and I think it might have originally been a stamp of a chicken.
I held it up and grinned my gap-toothed grin.
Back in Sproutville, I’d accidentally built my house upside down. Twice. But tonight I’d climbed a floating tower, borrowed a skeleton’s hat, laughed a villain out of the sky, and sneezed confetti on an entire village.
I was getting better at this.
Mostly.