The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (26 page)

“But you know how to get onto the Cellar Steppes.” Penny cracked her own coconut and looked very pleased with herself. “As soon as I saw the Office address I knew Pandemonium was setting a nice fat meal for us. Tanaquill always lets you bring up slow-gin and cornflower champagne for the Bog. I bet she already gave you the key.”

Thomas Rood pulled a sleeping ferret out of his pocket. It curled up contentedly in his palm, snoring lightly, its little pink nose tucked into its white tail.

“But how does that help?” Hawthorn scratched his mossy hair. “Does your pet know where the Redcaps live?”

“Fairy Cellars all know each other socially,” Thomas explained. “There's not really just the one per house. They're all connected together like a big old octopus sleeping under all the Fairy mansions. They talk to each other and gossip and trade vintages and pickles and hoard potatoes. When the Fairies have their balls, you have to bring up the gin and the champagne and the jellies and the rum right away because the Cellars run off from the houses and hold their own dances outside the city. Rolling oak barrels and copper pipes back and forth like toes tapping. It's
very
odd. So, you know, if you can get into one Cellar, you can get into all of them, except not, because they don't look like Cellars any more than laundry looks like a moose. They look like a wild Steppe, going on forever and ever. And there's Scythians on it. And once I saw a manticore. And remember the part about the fire-breathing guardian? If all you needed was a key, the Spinster would be sitting pretty in the Briary by now. Cellars are jealous; they hide all the water and the wine under glamours even we can't peer through. We'll die of thirst, or Scythian, or manticore. Or just get set on fire. That's likely the best we could hope for, being set on fire.”

“Then what's there to talk about?” grinned Tamburlaine.

“Lots, really,” Thomas Rood sighed. He kicked the golden sand at his feet.

“During the Bog, as soon as we can slip away,” Hawthorn said eagerly.

Penny and Thomas Rood clammed up. They looked pleadingly at each other, and then at the ground, daring the other to speak first. Penny did it, in the end. “Oh … no … no, Hawthorn. We can't slip away. That's the whole point. If we slip away, the Bog is over. The Bog is for us.”

Thomas Rood lifted the flap of the tapestry tent. Four suits of clothes lay waiting for them on four bedrolls.

“What's a wombat?” Thomas Rood asked suddenly.

*   *   *

They presented themselves as ordered at quarter past nine at the Cranberry Bog. A wide, crystal-dark lake flowed over the land, stars spangling in the water like chandeliers. Bright scarlet cranberries floated by the thousands, as lush and vivid as jeweled party balloons. Tiny diamond fish with fluttery veil-fins leapt out of the water and dove back down again at graceful, elegant intervals.

Fairies cavorted everywhere. They splashed in the Bog, their fine gowns and suits splattered with midnight mud. They scooped up cranberries to throw at one another, shrieking laughter, drawing stripes on their faces in the muck, diving into each other's arms, whirling up to the starry sky and crashing back down in the water all tangled together. The ladies' hair was nothing but lake-weed and crushed cranberries and that same inky black mud, but they wore it all like Parisian models.

Hawthorn and Tamburlaine wore the clothes that had been laid out in the desert tent for them, just the same as Penny's and Thomas's. The clothes were thin paper, barely thicker than newsprint, printed with pleasant farm scenes, as though someone had thought they might as well make an effort.
It doesn't matter what they're made of,
Penny had said darkly.
They're going to rip apart either way. Why waste good wool?

Scratch and Blunderbuss had been allowed to join them—just this first time, Madame Tanaquill had relented. Blunderbuss idly chewed a corner of Hawthorn's suit. It had a shepherdess on it.

“Never. Again.” Blunderbuss locked eyes with each of them in turn, so she could be sure she was understood. “No stables. No barns or petting zoos or pastures or nothing like that. Not for Scratch, either. We're not
toys
.” She spat the last word so bitterly Hawthorn could not help but feel ashamed at all the times he had squashed and folded her in half to make a better pillow. She winked her brass eye at Thomas Rood. “A wombat is me, funny face. Aren't I grand?”

Scratch stepped gingerly in the water of the bog, lifting his long legs out of the water distastefully.

“What is it really?” Hawthorn asked softly, his feet already cold and wet in the muck.

“An empty room with an earthen floor and plain wood walls. The moon is coming in through three windows,” Penny Farthing whispered back.

“How awful,” Tamburlaine breathed.

“Not really,” said Thomas. Why would it be awful? “Fairies make everything out of glamour. It's as good as wood and stone and mortar to them. Why force some poor soul to spend a life as a bricklayer when you can make a different universe in your parlor every hour on the hour, anything you can think of, with just a wink and a kiss?”

The Fairies burst into the Bog like a flock of wild parrots. They whirled and danced so thick and fast Hawthorn could not tell if there was a thousand or a million of them. They were a wheel of color and sound, their wings glittering, their feet invisible, their laughter like the bonging of bells where no bells should be. Out of the thick of them, Tanaquill came floating, her black-opal wings flared out wider than the most impossible bird, her face streaked with grime and mud and cranberry guts. Yet on her perfect face it looked like the season's best makeup. Her eyes burned like a wild animal, but when she spoke her voice still hummed and curled round their ears like a happy cat.

“Don't you all look splendid!” she cried. “And your livestock looks very well fed indeed.”

“If you call a bucket of old
scientifick
journals a good feeding, and I don't,” snarled Blunderbuss.

Scratch stayed stonily, stubbornly silent. It was a good weapon when he felt snubbed. His only weapon. He'd had nothing at all, since the stablegirls had not seemed to know, as Tamburlaine did, that a gramophone eats sheet music salad on a vinyl plate, and nothing else will nourish it. Scratch hated the Fairies, all the worse because they insisted on dancing with no music that he could hear, which to him seemed much the same as using the best and most comfortable armchair in the library as an outhouse. He stared out of his bell at the Prime Minister of the Fairies and hoped she'd choke.

“Take your places, darlings!” she trilled. “One to each corner, please, there's a lamb. Chocolates for all afterward, I promise! I've even set aside a bit of slow-gin for those special children who do an extra-good job.” She clapped her hands twice and laughed all the way back into the mad throng.

“What's going to happen?” Tamburlaine trembled.

Thomas Rood squeezed her shoulder. “Nothing, matchstick girl. Nothing's going to happen to you.”

He pulled the sleeping white ferret out of his pocket and tucked it carefully into her hard, wooden palm. “When the music starts, run. Run as fast as you can, over the crags, to the patch of snow with the skating pond in the middle of it. Then wake her up.” He shuffled his feet. “You never know. Maybe the Spinster
can
do anything we need her to.”

“Tanaquill will notice we're gone!”

“Not for awhile. Slow-gin's a bear of a drink. Besides, they don't even really watch anymore. We're like poor fellows playing fiddles in a pub while all the patrons try to ignore the racket.”

“But
you
. What's going to happen to you?” Hawthorn suddenly could not bear the thought that Thomas, the boy who was himself, himself as he should have been if he had not been the boy he was, might be hurt, might go somewhere he could not and suffer there.

Penny smiled. She touched the tip of Hawthorn's nose with her finger.
Magic,
he thought. Just like Gwendolyn. “To us? We'll do what everyone does. We'll do what we are. We're Changelings. We change.”

Penny Farthing and Thomas Rood ran to the near corners of the Bog, dragging their legs through the water and the berries. Hawthorn and Tamburlaine splashed through to the far corners, dodging Fairies, Hawthorn carrying Blunderbuss like a football, Scratch lifting his brass legs delicately as a heron. Wings brushed their faces as they passed; it felt like brushing against fish accidentally when one is swimming in a deep river. They had only just reached the little stone pedestals where they were meant to stand when a broken, disjointed music kicked up. Hawthorn could not see instruments; the song seemed to come out of the cranberries, a song as tart and sour and crimson as they.

Hawthorn began to run. Tam was running beside him, she was—he didn't look, he just chose to believe he wasn't leaving her behind. Thomas said run; he ran. Scratch loped beside him, shuddering in the face of the wild, uncouth music. The wet grassland squelched under his feet. The stars overhead bored into his skull and the jewelry on his coat jingled in terrible time to the Fairy waltz.

It was Blunderbuss who looked back. Once she did it, they all had to. They had to see. The wombat stretched her woolen neck round and Hawthorn followed her gaze, trying to run and watch at the same time. Tam was there, just behind him, and she looked, too, though she thought perhaps she didn't really want to.

Penny Farthing and Thomas Rood were gone. In their places crouched two snarling Panthers, green eyes glowing in the dark. Then the Panthers vanished and they wriggled into two tall, graceful giraffes—then they began to change too fast to stay together. Thomas flashed into a wild horse, Penny a basilisk, then a minotaur, then a boar with bloody tusks. Thomas shrunk down into a beetle, then swelled into a buffalo, a hydra, a griffin, a black donkey. For a moment they were both Wyverns. Then reindeer, then elephants, then two blue lions roaring up at the night.

*   *   *

They could still hear the music as they skittered onto the snow and ice of the pond. What was it really? A party? A secret bookcase? Tamburlaine held the little white ferret out in her hand.

“Hey,” she whispered at it. She tugged a bit at its tail. “Upsie-daisie?”

The ferret's eyes blinked sleepily open. She yawned. She slithered off Tam's hand and hopped down onto the ice. She sniffed at it—and then with a ferocious appetite she chewed into the ice, sending up shavings like woodchips from an ax. Around and around she gnawed until there was a hole big enough for a body in the pond. The ferret looked at the hole expectantly.

“Nothing for it,” Hawthorn said. Lights had appeared over the snowy ridge behind them. Voices. The stink of crushed cranberries.

The troll held his enormous nose, jumped into the slushy water—and came out in sunlight as hot as a slap.

 

CHAPTER XVII

J
UMPING
B
EAN
L
IFE
BY
W
OMBAT
AND
M
ATCHSTICK

In Which Hawthorn Writes a Letter, Tamburlaine Paints a Redcap, Blunderbuss Grows Up, and an Old Friend Pops in, Very Slightly Late

The Cellar Steppes stretched out under an infinite sky. Hot orange grasses as tall as Tam's waist moved in great oceanic waves around bald spots of cracked cobalt earth yawning wide. The sky blazed deep, bright red, the bloodiest sunset a sailor ever shuddered to see. There were no trees and only a few stones, buttes towering up in spindly blue rock columns like forks stuck in a roast. The wind smelled like good, wholesome potatoes put away against hunger.

“How do we know where Tanaquill's Cellar ends and another begins? Or where to find the Redcaps' Rum Cellar? It just goes on and on forever!” Tam scratched the back of her neck in the heat.

Hawthorn looked round. The Steppes lay empty and quiet. He saw nothing but sweet orange grass. But Thomas Rood had said everything Cellar-like would be well hidden. It wouldn't be anything so obvious as the blue buttes knobbling up toward the cloudless sky, or the cloudless ceiling, if only he could see it right, see it for what it was, and not just the Fairy wallpaper. It just looked so big. It went on forever. And trolls are not quick creatures.

Blunderbuss was looking up at him. She was grinning and waggling her rump, her scrap-yarn mouth a little ragged with running, stray bits of worsted popping free of her lips and catching on her cloak-clasp teeth.

“Go on,” she rumbled. “You've still got your pencil, dimwit. And I'm bored with being little. Why are you still living like a seventh-grader who's late for class? The likes of us don't walk to school, we
ride
.”

Hawthorn scrambled his pencil and notebook out of his satchel. He hadn't thought, he just hadn't thought. When you spend your whole life as a monkey who uses his hands to do things, it's a hard job to stop thinking you're that same clever monkey and switch over to being mostly mountain. He spread out the last page of Inspector Balloon's paper on the cracked cobalt dirt and wrote in his very best penmanship: