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Stark frowned, but didn’t say a word. He simply wound up and threw again.
This time he was closer.
On his third try the ball hit the top bottle, and it didn’t even move.
“This is suspicious,” he said, shaking his head.
“I want to try,” Olivia announced.
He gave her a curious look, but didn’t argue.
“Step right up, little lady,” the woman behind thecounter said, her eyes crinkling with a big smile as she laid out three more balls.
“Thank you,” Olivia told her, taking them.
She went back to the line in the snow and then stepped back another foot or so.
“What are you doing?” Stark asked. “You can barely hit them from here.”
“It’ll be easier from a little further back,” Olivia said. “The angle is better.”
The woman behind the counter nodded, her eyes twinkling.
Stark’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t argue. Olivia shook herself and jogged in place for a moment, reminding her body what she was asking it to do. Then she stepped back and pitched the first ball.
It flew out of her hand in a perfect arc, slamming into the center of the pyramid. The bottles shook and clanked, rocking back and forth, and finally coming to a standstill again, exactly as they had been at the start.
“That’s not fair,” Stark said loudly. “She hit it straight on. Why aren’t the bottles falling?”
Warmth blossomed in her chest as she heard him complain on her behalf when he hadn’t said a word when he’d been the one throwing.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll get it by the third one.”
“It’s not right, Olivia,” he said.
“Fairs have different rules,” she told him, trying to hide her smile.
To his credit, he stepped back and kept his mouth shut, though there were still storm clouds in his eyes.
Olivia concentrated and then sent the second ballflying. It smashed into the center of the pyramid again. This time all the bottles swayed and shivered. But they still didn’t fall.
Before they stopped moving she threw the final time, putting everything she had into it. The ball slammed into the stack and the whole thing fell at once, hitting the back of the counter and bouncing, but keeping it’s pyramid shape.
“They were glued together,” Stark murmured. “That has to be against the rules.”
“The rules are different at the fair,” Olivia said, nodding.
“Well, played,” the lady told her respectfully.
A smattering of applause broke out and Olivia looked around to see that half a dozen other staff members had gathered to watch her. At just that moment, the sun sank enough that fairy lights came on all over the village, their soft light reflecting in the snow.
“You’re an athlete,” a Maltaffian man said to her, nodding.
“No,” she laughed. “But I played softball in secondary school.”
“You can choose your prize now,” the lady told her. “Any one you like.”
“Which one do you want?” she asked Stark.
