Changeling (15 page)

The police-selkie saw me looking at him. “Your friend seems upset,” he said.

“Yeah, well, she doesn't like people sneaking up on her. Neither do I.”

“Well, I don't like strange land folk splashing around the harbor.” A crumb of water-soaked bread drifted down past his nose. “And you've been littering. That's a serious offense, you know.”

“It's just bread,” I said. “Biodegradable and completely edible. I was trying to attract a magic fish, but you're even better. Can you direct me to the Court of the Mermaid Queen?” I remembered my manners. “Please.”

“You want to see the Mermaid Queen?” The selkie laughed. “You have to be out of your mind. The Mermaid Queen eats Land Folk for breakfast. Raw. It would be far kinder to drown you. Unless you can give me a good reason not to.”

“I'm on a quest,” I said proudly.

“A quest, huh?” The police-selkie sounded surprised. “A kid like you? What are you after?”

I didn't think it was a good idea to say anything about the Mirror, so I settled for “I can't tell you,” which was the exact truth. The selkie lifted his upper lip, displaying his long, white, sharp dog-teeth. “I would if I could, believe me,” I said hastily. “The thing is, I can only tell the Mermaid Queen.”

“You're after the Mirror, huh?” the selkie said wisely. “You won't get it, of course, but I understand that you have to try. I'll see if I can set up an audience for you. That fairy changeling, is she your official magic companion?” I nodded. “I've heard that fairy changelings aren't really up to much in the way of magic. You sure you don't want me to let her drown, maybe pick up a better companion along the way?”

This time, I didn't even think about it. “I'm sure,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

“Your call.” The selkie pulled a wand with a circle on top of it out of his belt. “Now, if you'll just swim a little closer to her, we'll be on our way.”

I finned myself up to Changeling. The selkie held the wand to his muzzle and blew a huge bubble around us. Changeling immediately curled up on the bottom of the bubble with her sea-soaked jacket pulled up around her ears. I plastered myself against a transparent side and watched New York Harbor drift slowly by us.

I knew a lot about Fresh Water Folk, but all I'd learned about Sea Folk were their names and descriptions and a couple of stories the moral of which was “Don't go near the water.” But heroes on quests never get drowned.

At first, mostly what I saw was a brownish-yellow murk dotted with a lot of Outside garbage I recognized from the Park: banana peels and paper coffee cups, disintegrating newspapers and plastic bags. Then something large and yellow flashed by the bubble. “Ooh,” I said, and “Wow,” as a school of mermaids in shiny yellow vests swooped and circled around us, scooping up the garbage in their nets. I noticed that their hair was cut short and none of them was wearing pearls. Or singing. So much for Changeling's mermaid lore.

When the mermaids had swirled away from us in a neat, yellow wave, I looked eagerly around for something else—a whale, maybe, or a sea monster. A large, misty shadow below us seemed promising until we got closer and I saw it was a wooden ship, half buried in mud and covered in rust and barnacles. The police-selkie pushed our bubble down inside and wedged us under a piece of deck.

“This here's the brig,” he said. “It's really a brigantine, but the Queen likes her little joke. Don't bounce around too much. These bubbles aren't entirely splinter proof.”

And then he swam away.

CHAPTER 14

 
 
 
It was a long wait. Tucked under the brigantine's deck at the bottom of New York Harbor, I couldn't tell where the sun was. Changeling went to sleep. I didn't. Whenever I tried to think of a plan to get the Magical Magnifying Mirror, I'd get distracted by how cold and wet I was and wonder why I'd ever wanted to go on an adventure in the first place and whether exile Outside would be more or less horrible than being eaten by the Wild Hunt.

When I was very little and wouldn't do what Astris told me, she would threaten to send me Outside if I didn't behave. It worked every time. If the stories are right, Outside is a dangerous place. Ravens don't feed you, animals don't talk, and mortals may hate you if you're wearing the wrong clothes. The worst thing is that there isn't any magic except what you bring with you. I might be ready for an adventure outside Central Park, but I couldn't imagine I'd ever be ready for an adventure Outside.

I missed Astris. I missed the Pooka. I missed Bastet and the Old Market Woman and the Water Rat. I even missed the amorini. And I sure could use a moss woman right about now.

Eventually Changeling woke up, and when she did, she started to whine. She was wet. She was cold. She did not like this place. She wanted to go home.

“Could you just shut up about home?” I said finally. “I want to go home, too, but you don't hear me whining about it.”

“I do not understand,” Changeling said. “Your home is dangerous and frightening. Things chase you. And you live with a rat. Why do you want to go back?”

I wasn't about to discuss Astris and the Pooka with someone who said “rat” in that disgusted tone of voice. “What's so great about your home?” I asked.

“It's comfortable and safe,” she said. “My room is arranged exactly as I like it, and I know where everything is. I have a collection of pressed flowers. I am a huge fan of flowers. They are colorful and symmetrical. I am going to embroider flowers onto all my clothes.”

That sounded like something a supernatural would do, all right. “Did you make your jacket?” I asked.

“No. Mom purchased it at Levi's. But I embroidered it.”

“It's beautiful,” I said honestly.

“Thank you. The flowers are all botanically correct.”

I wasn't really interested in the flowers. “Tell me about your room.”

Her room was robin's-egg blue, with flowered curtains and a desk and a computer and a bookcase and framed botanical sketches on the walls. It was very weird to think that it was my room, too, in a way, or the room I might have had if I hadn't been brought to New York Between.

“The walls are blue?” I asked suddenly. “What happened to the fairy-tale mural?”

“That is a very odd question,” Changeling said. “There used to be a mural on my wall when I was very small. I did not like it. The fairies were not accurately drawn.”

I knew that. The mural fairies had been pink and cute and fluffy—not like real fairies at all. But I'd loved them anyway. “Are there stars on the ceiling?” I asked.

“We moved from that apartment when I was six, and I think most of the stars had fallen off by then.” A thoughtful pause. “How do you know about the stars and the mural?”

The truth was, I didn't know. My questions had just kind of flown out of my mouth. “Magic,” I said shortly. “Tell me about Michiko.”

“Michiko is our au pair. That means she looks after me in return for a place to live while she pursues her studies at New York University. She is a big fan of anime. Anime is—”

I interrupted before she got started on another speech. “I'd rather hear about your, um, mom. What does she look like?”

“She is of medium height and rather small-boned. Her eyes are hazel and her hair is dark brown and very curly, just like mine. She says we should be grateful—women pay good money to get their hair to look like ours. However, I think it is not very reasonable to want tight curls. They are hard to comb.”

“You can say that again.”

She began obediently, “I think it is not very—”

“Reasonable to want tight curls. Got it.” I was feeling weirder and weirder. “What about your father?”

“Dad is getting bald,” she said. “But he is very distinguished-looking nonetheless. He is also extremely intelligent. Mom says he can make a computer roll over and purr, but I think she must be teasing. If a computer rolls over, it breaks. Dad would never do that.”

She went on for a while about Mom and Dad and Michiko and someone called Strumble, who, I gathered, was a (non-talking) dog. “I miss them,” she said at last. “I am worried that they must be anxious about me.”

I moved restlessly, making our bubble bounce. “We have to finish the quest first. Maybe we'd better make a plan.”

A long silence followed while I pulled myself together and tried to remember my questing lessons. Quests, I recalled, are traditionally achieved by force, by magic, or by trickery. I wasn't a fighter and I didn't have any magic, which left me with—“the Riddle Game!” I exclaimed.

“I do not understand.”

I couldn't believe my ears. “Are you dumb or something? The Riddle Game is the oldest game there is. If I ask the Mermaid Queen a riddle she can't answer, she has to give me a boon. The catch is, after playing it for so long, the Folk know the answers to every riddle there is. Which means I'll have to make up a new one. Unless you've got a better idea?”

“I am not dumb,” Changeling said stonily. “A riddle is a question whose answer derives from a pun or a metaphor. I think riddles are dumb.”

“Then it's a good thing I'm the one who's making one up,” I said. “Now shut up and let me think.”

I pulled a springy curl into my mouth and sucked. Astris hated when I sucked my hair, and I hadn't done it in a long time. But it helped me think and Astris wasn't there. The curl tasted salty.

“Questions,” I muttered. “Puns and metaphors. Come on, Neef. How hard can it be to make up a riddle?”

The answer to that, after I'd chewed through about half an inch of hair, was really, really, really hard. It took me a while just to work out that you had to think of an answer before you could figure out the clue. And then you had to turn it into a poem, if possible.

The best riddles have one-word answers. For obvious reasons, I kept thinking of things like “dark” and “mud” and “boat” and “fish,” which the Mermaid Queen would have to be a total lamebrain not to guess. What I needed was something totally land-based.

In the end, the riddle came to me in a flash: question, answer, and all. I mulled it over for a while, changed it around so it would sound poetic, and then I said, “I got the riddle, Changeling. You want to hear it?”

“Riddles are dumb,” Changeling said. “Besides, someone is coming.”

“How do you know?”

“The water sounds different.”

I strained my ears until they ached, but all I heard was a slow, regular swishing and some deep-voiced throbs that I thought had been there all along. A faint light began to filter through the rotting deck like daylight through leaves, heralding a school of tiny, glowing fish. They were followed by six mermaids who were even tougher looking than the Harbor garbage collectors. Their hair was short and stiff and prickly like spiny coral, and their fins were pierced and threaded with shiny brown tape. They wore tight black vests held together with big silver pins, and tridents tattooed on their right arms.

Without a word, they fitted a net around our bubble and maneuvered us out of the wreck like a chunk of extra-large garbage. Then they towed us across the Harbor with the light-fish swimming ahead of us to show the way. I bounced from side to side trying to see everything at once, while Changeling sat rigidly with her legs crossed and her eyes closed, Folkishly determined to see nothing at all.

Like Central Park, New York Harbor was much busier at night. Mermen with green skin and spiny heads flirted with our merguards, who ignored them. Ugly, knobby, magical fish darted up and gaped at us, then peeled off on their own business. I saw a troop of police-selkies skimming along the silty bottom and waved at them in case one of them was our friend. None of them waved back.

After a while, I saw something huge drifting ahead. At first I thought it might be another wreck, but as we got closer, the shape got clearer. I made out a long bag and a cluster of tentacles that seemed to beckon us forward. We headed straight for it, and soon I was looking straight into the kraken's cold blue eye. Its wicked curved beak opened a little, almost as if it was laughing at me, then it bunched its huge tentacles and shot away in a cloud of black ink.

The bubble bounced and spun, tossing Changeling and me around like pebbles in a bowl. Gradually, the water cleared.

We were heading straight toward a high wall. It was all rocky and gooey and stuck with rusty iron bars and garbage—not at all the kind of place I'd expect a powerful Genius to live.