The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (10 page)

“Sing them another song!” he hissed. “Make them give you the
real
prophecy!”

He gave me a shake that almost caused whiplash.

I reacted automatically: I yanked one arm free and I punched him in the chest, rocking him a little and nearly breaking my hand. But he let go of me.

“Leave me alone, Kevin!” I yelled, moving back fast. “I'm not a little girl now, that you can shove around and terrorize the way you used to!”

Looking murderous, Kevin Malone took a quick step toward me.

The Branglefolk watched, commenting quietly among themselves. I heard someone laugh softly.
Ho ho,
just an afternoon's entertainment. What could I expect from people with ears they could cock like a dog's?

I made myself stand up straight, I made myself plant my feet firmly, and I raised my voice into a sort of sensible, public mode.

“Like it or not, Kevin, it sounds to me as if you certainly do need me and at least one friend of mine, probably two, to make things work out right here. And if you want
anybody's
help, you'd better start practicing some self-control.”

Scarneck must have agreed, because he stepped between us. The sharpened end of his lance touched Kevin's chest. Kevin glared like a movie villain. It would have been funny, if—well, if it had been funny.

“You Giants can settle your arguments another time,” Scarneck said. “Now fire is coming, and we must run away.” He turned toward me. “The princess in mourning will use the archway. Kavian Giant stays with us until you bring the weapon.”

A little jab of panic shot through me. “What if I can't find it?” I said. “What if I don't come back?”

Singer laughed lightly. His yellow eyes did not look amused. “Then we will trade this hero to the fire makers for some peace, if they will take him.”

I looked at Kevin, at a loss for parting words. His life was in my hands, and we both knew it. Two Branglemen took hold of his arms and began tying him up with leather cords.

My heart beating fast, I walked away behind Scarneck, who padded ahead of me so quickly that I almost lost him. He was just a shadow flickering in shadowy space. What chance did Kevin have to give these people the slip here in their own maze? Not much.

Too bad. I didn't feel much like coming back to save his bacon. Kevin Malone wasn't just a tough little kid anymore. He was a selfish, bad-tempered, probably dangerous boy. I had my sore hand to remind me.

Meanwhile, here I was running after a furry little guy with pointy ears through a whispering, crackling tangle of dwarf thorn trees with a rat on my head.

I passed a patch of green on my right, then another: a whole string of gardens had been chopped into the Brangle, like a necklace of emeralds on an invisible string. A Branglewoman looked up from digging with the pointy end of a wooden lance. She whistled and called out something. Scarneck called back and kept going.

I saw water ahead: a wide green lake half choked with tall reeds. There was a curved footbridge over a narrow neck of water, with an ornamental cast-iron rail. Scarneck stopped short in front of me, pointed at the bridge, and disappeared back into the Brangle.

I was left alone—except for the moorim—to stare out at the placid green shore opposite with its fringe of reeds. I could cross over, but I would be just as lost on that side as I was on this. My way out was not over the bridge but under it, from one side of its walkway to the other, and so, with luck, out of the Fayre Farre.

Not pausing to see if anything was lurking—I needed momentum to get me out of the cover of the Brangle, not lots of terrified thoughts—I dashed down the bank and into the water, sliding on the slippery bottom-mud as I turned sharply to cross beneath the shadowy underside of the bridge.

Cold water slapped my jeans around my legs and weighted my sodden shoes. The width of the bridge's walkway from rail to rail was only a few yards, but the water seemed to drag me back. The dank shade under the bridge coated my skin with ice.

I threw myself full-length over the last few feet of distance, and came splashing out into late afternoon sunshine, drenched with the brown water of the Central Park rowboat lake.

That's when I remembered Kevin's trolls. Now I knew one bridge they were
not
living under. Or else they were not at home today.

And what day was it, anyway?—how long had I been gone? A man on a nearby park bench was folding up the newspaper he had been reading. By the size of the paper—as thick as a small blanket folded square—it had to be the
New York Times
Sunday edition.

Overnight in the Fayre Farre had been just an afternoon in the real world. Thank goodness: otherwise I'd have some really mammoth lies to tell my parents, and as a consequence would probably die of moorim-bites.

Shivering, I slipped and stumbled up the bank of the lake beside the stone foot of the bridge. Instead of impenetrable thorn scrub, ahead of me rose the woodsy slope of the wild little section of the park called the Ramble.

Ramble—Brangle. Kevin wasn't going to win any prizes for originality.

 

Eight

A Very Clean Moorim

 

 

 

S
O I ENDED UP WALKING HOME
in squishy shoes that Sunday afternoon, with the moorim, also wet, clinging to my head. I was starving and freezing, too, since a brisk spring breeze was blowing right through my wet clothes.

I walked into the apartment. People were yelling, which was not a usual thing in my house. Mom and Dad were in their bedroom, discussing really loudly Aunt Jennie's comments to one of the cousins, of course, not Mom or Dad directly, on the shiva, which she had said we weren't doing right.

As quietly as I could, I got a package of sliced meat, a rye roll, and a jar of pickles from the fridge, and tried to sneak past the open bedroom door.

“Amy Sachs, where have you been?” Mom, rushing at me, stopped short in the doorway and stared. “And why are you
wet?
Where do you keep disappearing to, anyway, and at a time like this? Are you part of this family or aren't you?”

Peering at me over Mom's shoulder, Dad looked frazzled too. I tilted my head back in a way that I hoped would hide the moorim from them both without actually dumping it off backward onto the floor and spoke up as cheerfully as I could.

“I told you this morning, Dad,” I said. “I went to the museum with a girl from my class for a report we're doing together next week.”

No moorim-nibbles on my scalp, what was going on up there?

“Nathan?” Mom said to Dad in a dangerous tone, keeping her eyes on me.

Dad frowned. “I don't remember anything about the museum,” he said.

“You were on the phone at the time,” I said.

This was almost true. He had just started that phone conversation as I'd left, which was why, I guessed, the moorim was letting me get away with this part of my completely untrue excuse.

Mom's mouth turned down. “That I can believe: talking with those crap-artists in Los Angeles.”

Dad chose not to be deflected from the topic under discussion.

“So where
have
you been?” he asked.

“I told you, I went to the museum with my friend Joyce,” I improvised. “And after, we were playing around the fountains out in front and the wind blew the water all over the place and got us wet. Anyway, it was more fun than sitting shiva.”

The looks on their faces told me to correct that last part
fast.
“I mean, I needed a break, you know? What's the big deal, anyway? It was schoolwork.”

“Joyce?” Mom said. “I don't remember meeting a girl named Joyce.”

Dad said, “You don't look as if you've been at a museum. You look as if you've been running relay races in a barbed-wire factory.”

“Underwater,” Mom added.

I was fed up. “Well, I'm glad everybody's so happy to see me,” I said. “I wouldn't have come home at all if I'd known I was in for a police interrogation.”

Okay, I was being pretty uncool here, but I was really distracted, wondering when the darn moorim was going to chomp down on me for the lies I was telling. Maybe only lies told to actual Branglemen counted?

Mom pointed. “Amy, go get cleaned up. I don't want you sitting down to dinner looking like some—some street waif!”

She went back into the bedroom with Dad, starting some comment about what a pain in the neck Aunt Jennie was. Their door closed. I breathed in deeply—the moorim seemed to sigh a tiny warm sigh into my hair, too—and I bolted for my own room.

At last.

While I ate what I'd grabbed from the kitchen, sitting on my bed, I hurriedly made notes on what I could remember of the prophecy. I didn't like the sound of it one bit. Aside from the junk about princesses, there was that line about being “imprisoned.” And what weapon did we already have? It made no sense. Prophecies are supposed to be sort of obscure, but this one seemed like pure, frustrating gobbledygook.

In the shower I thought things over.

What was important was that I was home now, out of the Fayre Farre, with a souvenir to remind me that it had not been just a dream. The moorim, nattering frantically to itself in a high, breathy voice, had one foot braced on my left ear and was trying to winch its way back up to the top of my skull via my wet, slippery hair, hanks of which were clutched painfully in its other three feet. I finally gave the creature a boost with my hand for fear of being plucked bald by its desperate mountaineering.

But, moorim or no moorim, I didn't absolutely have to go
back
, did I? The prophecy was only a prophecy, not a history of something that had already happened. Even the moorim couldn't
make
me return. Probably.

So what did I want to do about Kevin and his Fayre Farre? What
should
I do? Anything?

I mean, a magic sword, for Pete's sake, and Kevin the Promised Champion! Should he be in charge of a whole world? What kind of supreme ruler would he be to Scarneck and Singer, and Sebbian's poor bereaved family, and all the giants and trolls he'd stocked the place with?

Could I even be sure that Kevin really was the hero of the story? For all I knew, Anglower was a freedom fighter leading an uprising against a rotten royal family of which Prince Kavian was the current and terrible heir apparent.

God, it was so
complicated.
And it was so real.

It now seemed obvious to me that if the Branglemen decided to chop Kevin's head off because I didn't play my part in the epic of the Fayre Farre, well, Kevin's head would be off. Really. In his world
and
mine. My smarting knuckles and millions of scratches told me that, not to mention the moorim's warm little weight on my skull.

Speaking of which: I turned the shower on harder and hotter, to see what would happen. But the moorim hung on tightly, making pathetic muffled moans into my scalp. Since I didn't really want to drown it, I let up on the water. The moorim shifted its sopping little weight higher onto the top of my head and lay there gasping faintly.

I needed someone wise and understanding to consult with, but talking to Cousin Shell was not an option.

I couldn't dry my hair because the moorim kept skipping around up there and kind of grabbing my fingers when I got too close. It had sharp little claws, and small rivulets of water seeped off it into my hair and down my skin.

Pulling on my bathrobe, I flopped down on my bed with Claudia's park book. The moorim sat on my head and fidgeted. Maybe it was grooming itself, combing its fur with its tiny clawed fingers. I didn't let myself think about what it might be looking for.

 

* * *

 

Hours later I heard my mother's quick footsteps heading my way. The moorim dove for cover, deeper into the back of my hair, which had dried into a Brangle-like mass without the smoothing effects of my hair dryer, brush, or comb.

“Amy?” Mom said, sticking her head in my bedroom doorway. She looked composed but red-eyed. I braced myself for the worst.

“Have you been sitting in here alone thinking about Shelly?” she said, taking the park book out of my hands and looking at it. “No, I guess not. Well, come on—it's dinnertime.”

“I'm really not hungry,” I said, trying to look meek and contrite.

She sat on the end of my bed and looked at me. “I don't understand you. I thought you were close to Shelly, but you're acting so selfish and unpredictable—running off yesterday with Rachel, and today with some kid I've never even heard of, and coming back here looking like a drowned rat!”

“I told you what happened,” I mumbled.

“You're not dressed,” she said. “Are you sick? Did you catch cold, getting wet like that?”

“I'm fine,” I said.

“This girl—Joyce—what's her last name? I'm going to call up her mother.” Her eyes narrowed. “What's that on your head?”

“It's a hamster,” I said.

She stared incredulously. “A
hamster?
”

The moorim lay very still. Was it sick? In shock over the humongous lies I was telling? Maybe I had burned out its judgmental system by overloading it.

“It's a toy, actually,” I gabbled brightly. “Somebody was handing them out in school last week, a kid in the Modern Issues elective who's doing a paper on deviant experience.”

“Deviant experience?” my mom said. “Wearing animals on your head? That's a bit much even for the Cornford School. Teaching kids about deviance isn't on the curriculum that I remember, and frankly I'm not sure it's what your father and I meant your tuition money to pay for.”

As she spoke, I was thinking: tomorrow was a school day. If I wanted a chance to tell Rachel about the prophecy without the whole world poking their nose into our business, I was going to have to do it now, tonight. If I could just get away from my mom. . . . I got up and began digging clean clothes out of my closet.