"Absolutely not," she said.
"We can explain," Oren said, from under the throne.
"I don't want you to explain. I want you to get out of the snow."
"She lost something," Oren said. "Yesterday. The thing you wouldn't let me hand her over the rope. It fell out of the box during the picture."
Bryn looked at me. I nodded. I must have looked fairly pathetic, because something in her terrifying face shifted.
"What is it?" she asked.
"A chess piece," I said. "A white knight. About this big. I carved it."
"You carved it."
"It took eleven months."
Bryn was quiet for a second. Then she set her energy drink down on the edge of the fake chimney, very carefully, and said, "Did you check the reindeer?"
We had not checked the reindeer. The stuffed reindeer on the chimney turned out to have a sort of hollow in its back where its saddle blanket attached, which was apparently the single most common place in the North Pole Village for things to end up, because, Bryn said, small children are always throwing things at it. She knelt up on the roof of the plywood cottage, which she was clearly not supposed to do, and reached into the reindeer's back and came up with two pacifiers, a Hot Wheels car, a candy cane in its wrapper, and a dollar-store wedding ring, which she looked at and said, "Huh," and put in her tunic pocket.
No knight.
"I'm sorry," Bryn said, and she sounded like she meant it. "There's a lost and found at the security office. I'll call Delbert. If it turns up, they'll have it."