Quite Contrary (5 page)

The trees opened up again. This time it wasn’t to create space around a particularly large tree. Instead, the bushes ran out, giving way to brown grass that made a blatant backdrop to a circle of mushrooms. Big, fat mushrooms, but also blackened and sagging.

“Walk around that. It’s a fairy ring. Fairyland is dangerous,” Rat-In-Boots squeaked behind me.

He’d asked for way too much already today. I stomped right up to the ring. I would have stomped through it, but a boy dropped out of the trees in front of me, somehow without breaking his neck.

He looked older than me, but not by much. He was a mess, too. Not much dirt, but his dark hair went everywhere and brown leaves and scraps of fur covered so much of him that I wasn’t sure what was clothing and what was just stuck to him. Still, he smiled gaily and declared, “Welcome, mortal girl! If you will tell me what brings you to the gates of the Fae, I will escort you through our lands with pleasure.”

He was cute. Not that I got drooly and stupid over boys, but his face was pretty without being at all a girl’s, and he had an infectious smile, showing a lot of little white teeth. He took my hand in his as I stepped over the mushroom threshold, and reached out to lay his other hand on my shoulder.

I kicked him in the balls and listened to him wheeze as he fell over in a tight little ball. Rat squeaked with alarm. I kept walking, and the grass rustled as Rat ran up. The weight of him jerked on the back of my skirt as I stormed through the center of the ring and the forest peeled away and became a very different forest.

he mushroom ring was gone. I knew the way into fairyland wouldn’t be the way out. I’m not that ignorant. Fairyland itself was a big step up from Rat-In-Boots’ “the woods.” Scenic trees, springtime green and lots of brilliantly colored flowers, and spaces where the sky showed between the canopy. All of that should have been cloyingly cute, but here they painted a schizophrenic’s arboretum. A few things, like a giant rubber duck, just didn’t fit. Mostly there was no coherent sense of scale. The rubber duck was as big as a hill, a stand of tall grass proved to be teeny tiny pine trees, and crows thronged on the branches of a thistle as tall as a lighthouse. Acorns scattered around the path were merely the size of footballs. I saw trees the right size, grass the right size, and most things matched, but everywhere else I looked something was the wrong size or out of place.

Pretty cool. I kept walking down the nice dirt path, which made a welcome change from the tangled woods. A few more footsteps and the trees and flowers to the right of me lined up at a perfect angle to form a picture of a deformed, leering face.

I liked this place. Finally, a little of the magic I’d supposedly wandered into.

I watched the face slide apart into pieces over the next few steps, proving that it had been nothing but an illusion. A weight tugged at the back of my skirt as Rat-In-Boots started to climb.

“You kicked him!” he squeaked from somewhere behind my hip.

“Don’t you dare give me any trouble about it,” I warned him, my momentarily lighter mood snapping.

But the rat just asked, “How did you know?”

Okay. Maybe, just maybe, I’d gotten that right rat after all. As much as I didn’t want to, I explained myself. “He was being too nice. I didn’t trust him. The first thing he did was put his hands on me. Not only was he up to something, he was ready to use force when I tried to get away. He was so nice and happy to see me that he just had to grab my hand? Yeah, right.”

“The Wolf was anything but nice. You didn’t trust him, either,” Rat probed.

“I don’t trust anybody. Is that what you want to hear?” I barked as my temper snapped. Yes, he respected my judgment, but push, push, push! “Don’t give me the goody two shoes lesson about not everybody being like that. Everybody is like that, and you know it. Everyone is using you for something. You’re using me. Do you think I’m stupid and I wouldn’t notice? You were waiting for me in that horrible hole in the ground I’m sure you don’t hang out in for fun. Now you’re suddenly my best friend and you’ll die for me. Yeah, you mean it, sure, but you get something out of it, right?”

Was he going to argue anyway? It had been a terrible night, and my temper glowed inside me as I waited for him to try.

“Pride,” he answered finally. I stopped feeling so tight. He wasn’t stupid either, and that was a relief. “I get to prove how smart I am, that like Puss-In-Boots before me I’ve figured out how it all works. I was born in a fairy tale, and I’ve learned how stories go. If I make a story go your way, then it’s my story too.”

I answered him with a grunt. If he’d told me it was really all for my own good, I’d have known he was a liar. Instead, he’d admitted the selfish part, and left out the good. He wanted his life to be worth something, so he’d decided to help someone. I didn’t have room to give someone grief who just wanted to be proud of himself.

I wanted to let it drop, and I got my wish. The pretty-faced moron boy dropped out of a tree again in front of me. How did he even—no, fairies, right? He didn’t land nearly as gracefully this time, like maybe he was sore. Heh.

“Now, not so fast, my lady,” he said, holding out his hand to block my path. At least he didn’t try to grab me this time. “You and your talking pet smell of magic. I must tell my Queen what walks in her domain before you may pass in freedom.”

My lips were already parting to tell him about his Queen and his mother, but—RRG. I’d promised the rat. He’d said ‘please.’ He’d better be smart enough to do more than push my buttons.

“I don’t know rat squat about magic, but apparently I’m Little Red Riding Hood and the vermin hanging from my costume wants to be the next Puss-In-Boots. I’m guessing your magic is the two fairy tales with their fists around our throats,” I answered.

“I was raised by fairies, my lady. Neither you nor your pet are fairies, despite your magic,” he returned, smug. He thought he was being clever.

But not, like, sarcastically clever. I reached down to Rat-In-Boots, and as my hand came near he grabbed the sleeve of my costume and skittered up to hang by my shoulder. “Why doesn’t he know what I’m talking about?” I asked Rat.

“He’s a human stolen as a baby and raised by fairies. He doesn’t know any story but his own,” Rat answered in a hush, “Most people don’t. I learned, because I had to in order to control your story. The life I know isn’t the life he knows, because fairy tales and fairyland aren’t the same.”

Leaf boy’s patience started to crack. “It isn’t polite to talk about someone as if they can’t hear you, my lady.”.

I kicked him in the balls again. It seemed to catch him completely by surprise. My perfect shoes must have hit him like a mallet, because he fell over, half curled but so rigid he couldn’t even yell.

If he had, I wouldn’t have heard it. Fairies were everywhere, laughing as if they’d just seen the funniest thing in their entire lives.

The creepy kid had come out of nowhere. The fairies, it turned out, had been there all along. Crows fell off the giant thistle, spraying feathers and kicking their feet as they were revealed to be hunched little gnomes in bird suits. Acorns bounced with glee, and the top split off one to let a tiny, willowy green girl beat the ground with her fists. Something huge and yet squat lost its balance and fell out of its hiding place behind the rubber duck, hitting the ground with an echoing boom. Someone wire thin and built of bits of straw and twig unfolded out of the tall grass, pointing at the boy I’d just kicked as it made shrill, squeaky giggles.

I’d arrived in freak show central. These things were ugly, and there wasn’t a pretty little blond Tinkerbell to be seen.

Mind you, if there had, I’d have stomped on her.

“What the heck?” I yelled.

“Fairies aren’t like people,” Rat-In-Boots whispered from my shoulder, “Don’t try to predict them. They’re at the same time the smartest and the stupidest people you’ll ever meet. A fairy can whisper words over your cradle that will twist your life around until you give her an orange on your eighteenth birthday, then fall for you giving her a yam.”

“Crazy fairies, right,” I agreed as if I’d known that already. “I meant him.” I gave the boy another kick. Hardly more than a nudge. He was still curled up with his eyes closed, locked in pain. “It’s not that hard for a boy to dodge. He didn’t try!”

“Fairies raised him and taught him to think. Very smart, very dumb. He can’t learn from his mistakes,” Rat-In-Boots said.

I almost felt sorry for the jerk. I’d kicked him hard. Really hard. He croaked as he fought to breathe, and all his friends just laughed at him. If he hadn’t been pulling some scheme to do much worse to me, I really might have felt bad.

“She is marvelous!” yelled a hideous little dwarf with a head bloated like a mushroom cap.

“She is exquisite,” agreed something much prettier, an impossibly skinny dryad stretched out all the way down a tree branch.

“We have to show her to the Queen!” urged a spiny hedgehog man as he jumped up and down excitedly.

Absolute freak show. Even the dryad girl was twice as tall and half as wide as she should have been.

Before I had a chance to tell them how interested I wasn’t in their Queen, Lost Boy found enough voice to whimper, “She isn’t pretty enough to see the Queen.”

Oh, hey, someone was human enough to feel resentment after all! I lifted my foot, then settled for planting my heel against his back and shoving him off the path and into a low ditch. His clenched and shaking arms and legs told me he’d paid enough.

“The Queen is this way?” I asked the assembled fairies, waving my hand down the path.

“Follow the sun, and she will rise before you like spring!” declared a flower that I hadn’t realized was alive.

“Her Majesty is every way, and all roads lead to her,” enthused the hopping hedgehog. Wow, was he ugly. His drippy, pig-snouted face was so ugly it had stopped being cool and gone back to just plain being ugly.

“Widdershins, child. Always move widdershins,” the dryad advised. Apparently, this was also hilarious, although it didn’t get as big a laugh as my kicking the gate dufus.

I took all of these suggestions together, gave them the proper weight they were due, and decided to ignore the carnival rejects and keep walking down the path. The scenery continued to be great. When I passed the out-of-scale trees, I came out in fields where huge stone monoliths had been scattered by a house made out of copper and steam pipes that had fallen upside down in the middle of them. That was one side of the road, and on the other, a jousting tournament featured more twisted little fairies riding domesticated hogs at each other. ‘Domesticated’ might be stretching the point. There was a lot of sliding around and crashing into each other. Dignity did not seem to be a high fairy priority.

It was a good thing I hadn’t said that out loud, or I’d have immediately been forced to eat those words. While I’d been staring at the wallowing pig knights, someone had switched the scenery around me. The path ended at a manicured green lawn, and I stepped into an elaborate royal picnic.

The picnic table was longer than my house, and the cloth heavily embroidered blue and white. Much less ugly fairies crowded the benches. Near the head of the table some looked almost human, with elongated faces and slanted, knowing eyes.