The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (25 page)

“Stop jawing and help me!” hollered Robin Hood as he smacked another albino moose with his paddle.

They scrambled down through the orchids to an icy pool that was quickly becoming moose soup.

“Get the crossbow!” he panted. Tom looked about and saw one laying on the grass. Its arrows stunk of lye, but though his eyes stung, he managed to string it, remembering his Great Battles of Britain and hoping he'd done it right. Tamburlaine and Penny had got hold of several oak branches and were giving the front-most moose a good thrashing.

“In the eye!” urged Robin Hood, and Tom Thorn wrenched the crossbow up toward the frenzied blue eye of the biggest bull. He closed his eyes as he fired—he couldn't help it—and it struck the beast in the forehead. But that appeared to be close enough, as the arrow burst into streamers of wet green light and the moose crumpled to his knees.

The other moose realized their danger and lashed out with their red tails. Wherever the barbs sunk into the water they sizzled, dark red stains spreading through the streams. Tam and Penny and Tom dodged them—Tom felt quite sure they were poison, and one strike would be the last laundry he ever did. He ducked under one brutal, quick tail and rolled through the water, shoving the crossbow up into moose-belly and firing again. He looked over—Tam had somehow gotten on top of one and was beating it about the head frightfully with her branch, nearly crying in fear and confusion. The tail came up to stab her shoulders and he yelped to warn her—but Penny reached up with a knife and cut the tail off at the moose's rump. It shrieked and fell with a tremendous splash, Tam and all. Robin Hood tossed him one of the black paddles; Tom whirled around and caught the last moose square in the skull, knocking it up onto the dry grass. All four of them stood in the moose wreckage, panting and shaking.

And then the moose stood up, one by one, quite calm, and wandered off over the green.

“What was that? What? How was that
laundry
?” Tamburlaine's fingers rattled together like winter branches.

Penny looked at them oddly. “You can't see? Oh … that's…” And she had to sit down, she was laughing so hard. Robin Hood shook his head while she explained. “Well, you wouldn't, would you? We all get a gob of gnome ointment in the eye first thing, but you came round the back way. I bet this all looks like a lovely countryside to you, doesn't it? Pretty enough to pitch a village in? It's just a house. That's the parlor, where we were talking to Tanaquill, her dressing room in the tangerine trees—she's got a bedroom in the white hill up there. It's all just a Fairy's idea of interior decorating. They make us dress like milkmaids and noble thieves so we match the draperies. If you could see clearly, you'd know we're in the laundries now.”

“So that was just a lot of bedsheets and petticoats? That's what you saw? Bedsheets with poison tails?” Tom huffed.

“No, actually, that
was
a lot of white moose with poison tails,” Robin Hood cut in. “That's just what Fairy laundry looks like. It hates us and wants us to suffer. It's not like they wear clothes, really, or sleep in beds that would look like beds to us. Their laundry is … it's their insides, see? Rage, mostly. A little bitterness and gluttony and power-hungry jealousy thrown in with the delicates. They use it hard all week, and on the Sabbats we get it ready to wear again. But anyway, we still see the meadow and the hibiscus and the gully. We just see the washboards, too.”

“Don't people get stuck with those tails?” asked Tamburlaine.

“Sure. I know a girl who lost an arm,” answered the young man. He took off his Robin Hood cap, which even Tom had to admit looked silly. “Sorry, I didn't introduce myself. You sort of lose your manners around here, like old socks.” He held out his hand and smiled a strange, horribly familiar, lopsided smile.

“I'm Thomas Rood,” he said.

 

CHAPTER XVI

T
HE
C
RANBERRY
B
OG

In Which a Troll Meets Himself, a Changeling Hides a Ferret in His Pocket, a Girl Made of Wood Says Quite a Lot Concerning the Emperor of Turkey, and a Fairy Ball Commences in a Cranberry Bog

“
No, you're not,” Tom Thorn insisted.

“I am, though,” replied Thomas Rood.

Tom Thorn stared at the boy in his absurd green hose and doublet and cap with a long pheasant feather sticking out of it. He could see it, almost. His own face, his human face, as it would have looked if he'd grown up with a smile other than Gwendolyn's to imitate, a glare other than Nicholas's to learn. If he'd hardly ever had a haircut and had worked so hard he had muscles before he had a beard. If he'd spent half his life with his head bent and his jaw clenched. Though, Tom supposed, they'd both done a little of that. He remembered what Sadie had said—a Changeling couldn't get away from stories in Fairyland. They ran straight at you like dogs that missed you while you'd been gone.
Well, I'd better get in on the joke if I'm going to make my way here,
he thought.

“Pleased to meet you,” Tom said, and put on his best grin, trying to make it a grin the other Thomas Rood would recognize. “
I'm
Thomas Rood.”

“No,” the other Thomas said, and to him it was not a joke at all. “
You're
not. You're not!”

Tom Thorn stepped back a little. “No,” he said softly. “No, you're right. I'm not. I'm not. I'm Tom Thorn…” But he stopped. Shook his head. The time for that was done. “No, no, I'm not either. I'm … my name is Hawthorn.” He had never said it out loud, not since he remembered it for the first time in the Painted Forest. “I'm a troll and my name is Hawthorn.” He couldn't help it; he laughed, and felt tears swell up in his eyes. “I'm a troll and my name is Hawthorn,” he shouted. A flock of flamingos startled from a swamp in the distance. Probably they were really a piano, he thought, and giggled again. “I'm sorry, I'm not making sense. It's just that you're me, you see. Or I'm you. We're us! Tom, we're us! Isn't it marvelous to be us?”

“I don't care for Tom,” Thomas Rood said. “Shortening things makes them less interesting.”

Tamburlaine glowed like a polished bannister.

“We're us. We're Changelings, Thomas. But we're each other's Changelings. You got traded for me like a stupid baseball player and you should have grown up in Apartment #7 and gone to Public School 348 and been friends with a boy named Max and written essays for Mr. Wolcott. Our mom should have made a yarn animal for you. Our dad would have … I think Dad would have liked you better. He'd like anyone better, is what I really think. He'd have carried you on his shoulders down on Navy Pier and won you a catcher's mitt at the shooting range. And you'd probably have known what to do with one! And I'd have done … whatever a troll does. And nobody would have had to do rage-laundry with moose. But it didn't go that way. So you're you and I'm me and you've never met the girl with the orchids in the hallway painting or hated the stove that wouldn't light. Do you get it?”

Thomas Rood was crying.

“Yeah,” he choked. “You stole my life.”

“I was terrible at your life, if that helps any.”

Thomas wiped his nose with his Robin Hood hat and tossed it on the ground. He clenched his fists and unclenched them. His face colored darkly and he rushed at Hawthorn with an awful, bloody look on his face—and caught him up in his arms. Thomas Rood hugged Hawthorn so tightly he yelped—not an easy task when one is hugging a troll. Boulders rarely yelp when snuggled.

“It's okay,” Thomas said into Hawthorn's ear. “It's okay. I stole yours, too. Nothing in Fairyland belongs to you unless you steal it. I don't know what a catcher's mitt is, but I bet you don't know how to turn invisible, so probably we're even. No grudges among Changelings, brother.” He pulled away. “You really are my brother in a funny, mixed-up way. Never thought I'd have a brother. Feels weird. Like a new horse. Hullo, Thomas.”

“No, no. You keep it. It wasn't ever mine. I was just … sitting on it,” Hawthorn said. “Keeping it warm.”

Everyone stood affably still, not having the first idea what to say next.

“They're looking for the Spinster,” Penny Farthing said suddenly. “At least, they were when the Office came knocking.”

“She's in the Redcaps' cellar,” Thomas Rood shrugged, as though he were saying nothing more complicated than
It's awfully sunny out today, isn't it?

“Yes, dear, they know that now.”

“Then that's what's to talk about?” Thomas shrugged. “We'd better get ourselves powdered for the Bog tonight. Our room's a patch of desert just over that rise. Servants' quarters. It has a palm tree and a tent and some nice stars over it. Not bad. I've slept in worse.”

“What do you mean that's what's to talk about?” Tamburlaine said, narrowing her eyes. “There's rather a lot to talk about.”

“There's nothing to talk about because you can stop looking.” Thomas Rood was already up and over the edge of the gully, heading for a low, shadowy hill. “Have you ever met a Redcap? You know why they're called Redcaps in the first place?” Hawthorne scrambled after his other half. Redcaps! That boy had seen Redcaps! And murderwives too, probably! “They don't get those hats red with beet juice, they soak them in blood. They eat hearts.
Hearts
. It's disgusting.” Rood went on, hardly even out of breath. “A Redcap is a blood tornado with a bonnet on. They tried to eat the Spinster when she started meddling with the Fairies' business, trying her old curses on them, making all sorts of trouble. Tanaquill told them to have her for a midnight snack, but old Spinny was too quick for them. Redcaps don't like taking orders anyway. So they've got her locked up, guarded with a fearsome, fire-breathing something-or-other and a loyal warrior who never sleeps. Pretty standard situation when you poke at Fairies with all ten fingers. But that was ages ago. Everybody thinks the Spinster can do whatever they can't do themselves. We're hungry! Oh, have you heard? The Spinster can spin gold into wheat. We're sick to death of Fairies? Well, the Spinster can kill ten of them by blinking. Poor old cow. I think she's just a sad old woman who'd like to see the sky again. But she won't. Not ever. Fairyland is like that sometimes. It just … doesn't play nice.”

They climbed up over the ridge. A little round patch of golden-orange desert stretched out below them. A camel with three humps and blue fur munched on the fronds of a small palm tree. A tent of rich tapestries waited for them. Thomas Rood ran down the hill and jumped up to grab coconuts off the palm tree. The camel spat.

“Crack it open on the ground,” he urged them.

Tam smashed hers hard against the rocky desert floor. Out spilled a hunk of moist dark bread, a rind of cheese, a flask of water, and three peppermints. Hawthorn gave his a good whack: a leg of chicken, black grapes, cold cider, and a pot of gravy.

“We're going to try to get to her anyway,” Tamburlaine said, looking at her meal. How quickly she'd stopped being surprised at strange things like this. “Even if we hadn't promised, even if we didn't get a thing out of it, how can anyone let a nice old granny rot away like that? It's supposed to be good here. Better here. This is supposed to be the place where if a maiden is stuck in a prison, by god, you go and get her out. That's the whole point of having a Fairyland as far as I'm concerned. Fairyland is the place where nobody is left to their fate. Where you can always be rescued. And rescue someone who needs it. And if it isn't, I think we ought to make it that way. Tamburlaine—the real Tamburlaine, the one I'm named after—was a great King, you know. Christopher Marlowe wrote a play about him. He kept the Emperor of Turkey in a cage. Well, I turned a bedroom into forest. I bet we can make Fairyland a Fairyland. And no cages for anyone.”

Tam seemed to suddenly realize that she'd said more in a go than she had since they leapt through the wall and clammed up. Thomas Rood stared at her with his big gray eyes. Big gray eyes Hawthorn had had not so long ago.

“You have storybooks in your world,” he said. “Storybooks with stories about us in them. Changelings and things. Right?”

Tamburlaine nodded.

“Is that what Fairyland is like, in those books?”

“Not really,” she admitted. “But sometimes. There's usually a lot of cutting off toes and dancing to death before everything gets right.”

“There's four of us, a wombat, and a gramophone. That's enough for anything, I should think,” Hawthorn said. He put his huge hand on Tamburlaine's knee. An amethyst glowed in the pad of his thumb.
Huh,
he thought,
hadn't noticed that.
Her knee was warm.

“I've stolen some things,” Thomas Rood said slowly. “Nothing as big as a Spinster.”