Count Olaf gasped, and raised his one eyebrow very high as he gazed at the Baudelaires and their two companions, his eyes shinier than they had ever seen them. "Where is it?" he said, in a terrible, wheezing whisper. "Give it to me!"
Sabine was glad that she had thought to put on her mask, because it hid the way she was smiling triumphantly, proud of herself for remembering the sugar bowl. It was the perfect bargaining chip. "Not until you give us Sunny Baudelaire," she said.
"Never!" the villain replied. "Without that big-toothed brat, I'll never capture the Baudelaire fortune. You give me the sugar bowl this instant, or I'll throw all of you off this mountain!"
"If you throw us off the mountain," Klaus said, "you'll never know where the sugar bowl is."
Sabine was glad that he did not add that they actually had no idea where the sugar bowl was, why Esmé believed Sabine had it, or why in the world it was so important.
Esmé Squalor took a sinister step toward her boyfriend, her flame-imitating dress crackling against the cold ground.
"We must have that sugar bowl," she snarled. "Let the baby go. We'll cook up another scheme to steal the fortune."
"But stealing the fortune is the greater good," Count Olaf said. "We can't let the baby go."
"Getting the sugar bowl is the greater good," Esmé said, with a frown.
"Stealing the fortune," Olaf insisted.
"Getting the sugar bowl," Esmé replied.
"Fortune!"
"Sugar bowl!"
"Fortune!"
"Sugar bowl!"
"That's enough!" ordered the man with a beard but no hair. "Our recruitment scheme is about to be put into action. We can't have you arguing all day long."
"We wouldn't have argued all day long," Count Olaf said timidly. "After a few hours – "
"We said that's enough!" ordered the woman with hair but no beard. "Bring the baby over here!"
"Bring the baby at once!" Count Olaf ordered the two white-faced women. "She's napping in her casserole dish."
The two white-faced women sighed, but hurried over to the casserole dish and lifted it together, as if they were cooks removing something from the oven instead of villainous employees bringing over a prisoner, while the two sinister visitors reached down the necks of their shirts and retrieved something that was hanging around their necks. Sabine was surprised to see two shiny silver whistles, like the one Count Olaf had used as part of his disguise at Prufrock Preparatory School, when he was pretending to be a coach.
"Watch this, volunteers," said the sinister man in his hoarse voice, and the two mysterious villains blew their whistles.
Instantly, the children heard an enormous rustling sound over their heads, as if the Mortmain Mountain winds were as frightened as the youngsters, and it suddenly grew very dim, as if the morning sun had also put on a mask. But when they looked up, Violet, Klaus, and Quigley saw that the reason for the noisy sky and the fading light was perhaps more strange than frightened winds and a masked sun.
The sky above Mount Fraught was swarming with eagles. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, flying in silent circles high above the two sinister villains. They must have been nesting nearby to have arrived so quickly, and they must have been very thoroughly trained to be so eerily silent.
Some of them looked very old, old enough to have been in the skies when the children's parents were children themselves. Some of them looked quite young, as if they had only recently emerged from the egg and were already obeying the shrill sound of a whistle. But all of them looked exhausted, as if they would rather be anywhere else but the summit of the Mortmain Mountains, doing absolutely anything rather than following the orders of such wretched people.
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𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕋𝕨𝕠 ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕥𝕠𝕘𝕣𝕒𝕡𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕤 (ASOUE)
Fanfiction"Shh, don't cry, Sabine," Quigley whispered in her ear. "It's okay, don't cry." His hand slid down her arm, then gently landed in her palm. He slowly spread his fingers out, then carefully entwined them with hers, as if he were savoring every sweet...
