Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (8 page)

“I … I don’t know,” said Scott. “This meeting between the fake queen and the fake Reggie Dwight is a really big opportunity, and it’s happening so soon. We can’t miss it. The whole world will listen to us about Goodco if we show them the queen’s just a big puppet.”

Fi was silent. Everyone was, and Scott felt like a jerk. Eventually Polly asked if Fi would like to be picked up.

“You may place me astride your hair tail,” he told her.

“Ponytail.”

“Yes,” said Fi. “That.” He still wouldn’t go in a pocket. Polly lifted Fi atop her head, and he straddled her hair tie like it was a saddle. Scott suspected that he preferred to think of Polly as just a weird horse.

They should get out of the cereal aisle, Scott thought. They should keep moving. But he wanted to tear all these poisonous boxes off the shelves. He wanted to kick them around the store. Emily, he thought, had other ideas. She touched at the corner of one of the Clobbers boxes lightly, like she was worried she’d scare it away.

Intellijuice (or ThinkDrink, or Milk-7) was a chemical additive Goodco had developed after testing it out on Emily for ten years. Actually,
chemical
was a polite way of saying “mostly dragon barf and saltwater,” but it made people smarter. It opened doors in their minds. One day soon Nimue would throw those doors wide and storm into those minds, and a million kids would become her private army of sugar zombies.

Maybe Emily was worrying about this. But Scott thought she looked more hungry than worried.

Erno noticed this, too. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Wait,” said Emily. “Look.”

She’d pulled a box of Clobbers out a bit, and now they could see Scott’s last school picture printed above a recipe for Clobber Bars.

“Oh boy,” said Scott.

Erno pulled other boxes out at random, and they found pictures of Emily, Merle, Polly, Erno, Biggs.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
was printed beneath each, with a phone number and a web address. They were all too stunned for a moment to move. Then Scott quickly straightened the boxes. “Leave the groceries,” he said, and they walked quickly, but not too quickly, out of the store.

John met them out front in a truck with a squarish cab and a boxy cargo area.

“I got us a lorry!” he called from the driver-side window. “Just bought it off the driver around back! Paid way too much.” The sign on the side said it had been carrying Poppadum Crisps in Minted Lamb, Bubble ’n’ Squeak, Baked Bean, and Prawn ’n’ Pickle flavors. The kids reread the sign a few times, but it kept saying that. They piled into the back.

Biggs drove and shared the cab with Erno and Emily. The rest sat around an electric lantern on the cold steel cargo floor, feeling it rattle against their butts as the lorry rumbled toward London. John undid his bandages and scratched his face.

“We could play a car game,” Polly whispered to Fi, in the corner.

“What is a car game?” asked Fi. Polly considered how to answer, but she couldn’t think of any games that didn’t need at least one window to look out of.

The unicat (who’d apparently forgotten what had happened last time) stalked Finchbriton. It crept close, its body low and discreet but its tall tail twitching like it was advertising the Grand Opening of a tire store. Then it crept too close, and Finchbriton whistled a puff of blue fire that lit the tips of its whiskers. They burned down like fuses and ignited a little explosion of activity as the cat leaped up, and back, and ran around and around the truck interior, full tilt and sticking its claws in everyone. Then it went to sleep.

“You could tell me about how you got here,” Polly suggested, kind of softly, kind of not wanting the others to hear her asking. Fi didn’t respond right away, and she was on the verge of repeating herself when finally his voice descended like a deflating balloon.

“The lady Morenwyn had been kidnapped,” he began. “Taken by her witch of a mother, the lady Fray.”

CHAPTER 6

“Why was she a witch?” asked Polly.

“She was a sorceress,” Fi answered. “The only one born in a generation. Pixie magic is rare, but powerful. We aren’t all possessed of little glimmers like the Fay.”

“But why not call her a sorceress or … enchantress or something? Seems like a witch is just a sorceress who doesn’t get asked to parties.”

“Do you want to hear this story?”

“Sorry.”

“One by one my brothers quested to rescue Morenwyn, and one by one they disappeared. Only I was left, so I hunted for a sea crow that Fray might once have used as a steed, and when I found such a creature I asked it to take me home to its mistress.”

“You can talk to birds?” asked Polly.

“Forsooth.”

“Can you teach
me
to talk to birds?”

“No,” said Prince Fi. “So: I flew north over the Irish Sea on the chough’s back, shivering from cold, shivering with the thrill that soon I would see my brothers again, and sable-haired Morenwyn. In my reverie I’d scarcely noticed that the bird was plunging down toward something jagged and dark rising out of the ocean, like a colossal bit of backbone. Then I saw this was a castle, larger and stranger than any I’d seen. It was squat and bowlegged, jutting up from a forsaken strip of rock and strutted with buttresses and staircases too monumental for any pixie. Blunt stone towers jutted out at impossible angles like new antlers. A web of windowpanes comprised the whole of one end of the fortress, as delicate as a snowflake but tall as a tree. The chough sailed toward it and might have taken me directly into Fray’s sitting room if I hadn’t the presence to leap off its back and onto the parapet.”

“Parapet?”

“Yes, parapet. The … toothy bits on the tops of castles.”

“Oh, right.”

“How I wished for the ancient times of story and song when the great Spirit had cloven the hours ’tween night and day. I might then have waited for cover of darkness before acting. Instead I steadied myself against the salty wind and vaulted over the parapet. I slid slowly down the sloping castle wall and caught hold of the first window ledge I encountered. And now I pried open the wide windows with my sword and tumbled into the warm scarlet bedchamber of the most alluring pixie woman on a thousand shores.

“Morenwyn leaped to her feet and dropped her sewing. She had been mending some white sail or tent that lay curdled all about on the floor. Now she stood, tall and proud, brandishing her sewing needle. Her hair like a storm cloud, her face as rare as a night sky. The lost stars, remembered in her eyes.”

Here Fi seemed suddenly to compose himself, and shift uncomfortably atop Polly’s ponytail.

“So she was pretty?” asked Polly.

“No, not
pretty
. Not merely
pretty
. She was the dream of the world. She looked down on me, kneeling in the folds of that white tent, or sail, and sighed.

“‘And finally Fi,’ she said. ‘Goody.’

“‘Lady.’ I bowed.

“‘That’s the last of the princes, now. Who’s next after you lot, the dukes? Are the dukes going to rescue me next? Just tell me how long I’ve got before it’s butlers and washerwomen.’

“‘Lady,’ I said. ‘I am here for my brothers, and for you, if you need a champion. Do you need a champion?’

“Morenwyn covered her plum mouth then, with her fingers. ‘You’re asking?’

“‘I am asking if you require rescuing.’

“I didn’t get my answer,” Fi told Polly, “not then. For the window beside me shattered, and the white hand of a giant yanked me out by my cloak. I was whipped through the air, half choking, and understood that Morenwyn was mending neither sail nor tent as a shirtless monster of a man dangled me in front of his thick, bovine face.

“He was on the tallest landing of a staircase outside her bedroom. It sickened me that he’d been watching us there.

“‘Gentle!’ Morenwyn called from the window. ‘Don’t hurt him!’

“‘Won’t.’ The giant grinned. ‘Much.’

“‘I like to think,’ I rasped, ‘that she was talking to me.’ And then I reached as high as I could and drove my sword beneath the giant’s black fingernail.

“He howled and I dropped, holding my shield like a canopy above me to slow my fall. I caught hold of his leg on the way down and slid into the rolled cuff of his pants, where I huddled and waited. It was nauseating, being lurched this way and that as the giant turned about on the slick bricks, searching for me. He peered over the edge of the landing to the rocks below.

“‘Where he go?’ the monster bellowed. ‘You see?’

“I heard Morenwyn say, ‘Sorry, Nim, lost track.’

“The monster rushed off and wist not that he had a passenger. He took me to the mouth of a dry sea cave and down beneath that cathedral of rock, to a fire pit where sat four other giants in queer and mismatching dress.

“‘Pixie man!’ my giant, Nim, told them. ‘Help me find!’

“Three of the giants jumped to attention and made ready to follow. A fourth giant, wearing only his undergarment, hesitated. Nim took a serious tone.

“‘You come also, Rudesby. New ones must come when Nim say.’

“When this Rudesby spoke, his language was strange, the accent unfamiliar.

“‘Pleez.’ He seemed to plead. ‘Aye juhst haave too tahlk too thaat tynee wumman. Aye dohnt beelahng heer!’

“Nim grappled with Rudesby and pulled him along by the ear, and that’s when I jumped free of his pant leg, dashed across the sand, and tucked myself into the shadows until they were gone.

“‘Pleez!’ Rudesby struggled as Nim led him aboveground, his voice getting washed out by the sea air. ‘Aye juhst wahna goh
hohwm
!’

“I ventured deeper into the cave, this cave that must form a hollow under Fray’s castle, then scrambled up a set of steep and rough-hewn steps until I noticed another staircase of pixie proportions running parallel to the first. I climbed for an age, toward faint light. Finally I came to find a kind of metal grate, albeit one so large I could just squeeze up through its openings, and found above it the largest room I have ever seen.

“I think you’d call it vast even by human measure. Vast enough to hold hundreds of humans, or even to play a match of that sport of yours, with the basket and the ball?”

“Basketball,” said Polly.

“Yes. Basket and ball. What is the sport called?”

“It’s called basketball. That’s what we call it.”

“Ah, of course. You are the poets of the new world. So: I could see that the castle was immense on my approach to the island, but never could I have guessed that below Morenwyn’s bedchamber it housed little more than one cavernous void, lit on its end by the tall leaded window I’d seen outside. Here was a room like the belly of a whale, with stone ribs buttressing the margins, each curving to the floor and pointing toward a golden monument in the center. The monument was almost ten pixies high, broader than it was wide, taller than it was broad. It was inlaid with silver, symbols, jewels, and it looked like a flaming sword against the ruby sky, framed in that vast and faceted window.

“The air in here was teeming with motes of dust.

“An animal voice screeched in the darkness, high above. I crept around the edge of the chamber. I had no wish to see the golden monument any closer—there was something distinctly Fay about it—and my duty was to my brothers. And to Morenwyn, I thought, if she would have me.

“But then the dust in the air shone like fire, the room lit with ten thousand tiny lights.

“‘Aha,’ said a voice like a growling house cat. ‘Fi, is it? You princes are positively interchangeable.’

“A pixie woman stood far off, on the dais near the base of the monument. I don’t like to say that she looked like her daughter, but of course she did. She resembled her daughter like the charcoal resembles the tree. She was dressed in the rags and ribbons of a hermit.

“‘Well met, Lady Fray,’ I said, and touched at the pommel of my sword. ‘You keep a lovely home. Airy.’

“‘Yes, I do think the airiness is its best feature.’

“‘Anyone else would have cluttered up the place with furniture, things. But you know all a person really needs is one good gold monolith.’

“‘That,’ Fray agreed, ‘and I find nothing really complements a monolith like a stupendously large tapestry.’ Fray gestured to the wall opposite the giant window, and now I saw something that before had been shrouded in darkness: a woven tapestry depicting two overlapping spheres, stabbed through their hearts by some sharp stake, and all the heavens torn asunder by fierce light. And beneath that: a multitude of people great and small, all weeping. ‘I wove it in a day and a night,’ Fray added, though this could only be a lie. ‘I don’t remember a moment of it. But I emerged from my trance with cracked and bleeding hands and looked at what I’d created—a vision of the end of all things.’