The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (18 page)

Huge hard fingers closed on my arm and jerked me up off the ground.

I was dimly aware of Kevin bellowing somewhere close by. I squinched my eyes shut as tightly as I could: if I saw this thing's face I was going to die right there—or rather I was afraid I wouldn't die, no matter how badly I wanted to.

The next thing I knew, I was flung upward and propelled forward into space, clamped against what felt like iron bars that burned into my side. I was smothered in a rushing current of cold, stinking air so thick and fast-flowing that I could barely breathe.

I couldn't stand it. I opened my eyes.

Below me I saw something like the double wing of an antique airplane. It was made not of wooden struts and canvas but of rags and leather stretched on a frame of bones. All the joints moved, and the whole structure creaked and shuddered as it flapped clumsily along.

Shrieking despite myself, I struggled and squirmed in midair. Somewhere nearby Kevin cried, “Amy, don't! You'll fall!” Through the monster's rib cage I saw him pinned under its other arm.

Between the two of us reared up a towering torso that could have been a dinosaur's, made of a crazy, crooked maze of bones with no relation to a real skeleton. The head—there had to be a head! —was blocked from my sight by the bulge of the shoulder joint, which seemed to be capped with several skulls all jammed together. The two huge wings, rooted in the monster's pelvis where its legs should be, slowly rotated and scooped air below us. Everything creaked and groaned as the wind blew through the open places between the joins, where the bones were lashed together with raggedy twists of sinew.

We were the prisoners of a flying bone dragon as tall as a brownstone, with the wingspan of a 727. Something that had once been a gigantic man—maybe several men buried with their war steeds—had somehow rearranged all its jumbled bones into a winged nightmare, which now carried us away into the darkening sky.

I looked down and saw a massive hand of bone with way too many fingers locked tightly around both my ankles. The monster had tucked me under its arm with my legs doubled up under me so that I could barely move at all.

The battlefield sank away. Elf Home became a toy-sized castle and began a slow, dizzying spin to the right as the monster banked, adjusting its course northward. A wave of sickening dizzyness swallowed me into merciful dark.

 

Fifteen

The Blockhouse

 

 

 

I
WOKE UP LYING ON GRITTY DIRT,
hearing a kind of slow, uneven flapping noise overhead.

Dreading what I would see—
not, please not, the skeletal horror that brought me here
—I opened my sticky, smarting eyes. I lay in a small bare room with no roof under a starlit sky. A dark flag stirred overhead on a pole, like a huge, sleepy bat stretching and curling up again. That was the source of the flapping noise.

I wasn't alone. Someone sat in a corner where two walls met, bent over with his head on his knees.

“Kevin,” I whispered. He didn't move. “Kevin, is that you? Where are we?”

He said drearily, “Sky Castle on the Black Cliffs. It's supposed to be a fort against evil, but it's his place now. He's taken us prisoner, and I have nothing to fight him with.”

I saw starlight twinkling in at four small windows, one in each wall.
Sky Castle?
Were we floating in the sky? Though all my stiff muscles protested, I got up and wobbled over to look out of the single little doorway.

Our cell, if you could call a roofless room that, was perched on a mountaintop. Directly ahead of me I sensed empty space. Far below spread land still hidden in night and edged with distant glints of water. From down there came hints of violent activity—a glimpse of movement by torchlight, faint shouts, and the ring of metal hitting metal.

My weary body tightened in terror, but my heart jumped with hope.

“There's a battle going on down there,” I said. “It's not over yet, Kevin! Maybe the White One won't win.”

“He can't lose to anyone but Kavian,” Kevin answered dully, “but the Promised Champion without Farfarer is helpless.”

Did the Branglemen's prophecy say that? I couldn't remember a word of it now. “Where's that  . . . that thing gone, anyway? If nobody's watching us, we can run—”

Kevin lifted his head. “Run where? It's brought us to North Peak. There's all of the North Isle and the Sea of Sandigrim between us and safety, and nothing farther north but wilderness and ocean. We're prisoners here while the White One's forces fight off the Armies of the Free. He'll push them back to Sandigrim shore and wipe them out, while I sit here empty-handed.”

I dragged into mental focus the park map I'd tried to memorize. The only building in the north end was a tiny blockhouse left over from the American Revolution. The rebel colonists had fortified the cliffs in case the British attacked from the Harlem flats, which lay due north across 110th Street.

The Blockhouse itself was in a wild and woodsy part of the park that was supposed to be particularly dangerous—a haunt of drug dealers, not dragons. I'd gone there on a field trip with my class.

Now Kevin and I were in the Blockhouse, in pretty much its actual Central Park form. The thick walls were made of mortared stones the size of grapefruits, and the window frames flared inward to shelter sharpshooters. Inside was nothing but a raised circular pedestal for the central flagpole. From the little doorway where I stood, a narrow flight of concrete steps led down to bare rock below.

To the north the summit fell away in steep cliffs. Southeast, around the corner from the single doorway, a gentler grade ran down to a patch of woods, crisscrossed with paved pathways linking these heights with the rest of the park.

I ducked through the doorway and tiptoed down the steps. My reaching foot touched stone without a sound, but horribly familiar pale shapes started up in front of me, gleaming white where their ragged clothes streamed in the wind. Their heavy, burned-bone stench made me dizzy.

The flying horror had sorted itself back into the forms of many skeleton men. They stood guard, hemming us in. A faint whisper of voices came from them, blurred and fretful, with a clicking, grinding undertone of bone on bone.

I could see woods beyond them, but no way in the world was I going to try to pass those Bone Men. I scrambled back into the Blockhouse.

“There's got to be something we can do,” I said.

Kevin laughed despairingly. “Dummy. You think magic means you always win?”

“Of course not, not when other people have magic, too,” I said. “But we've got to keep trying. Maybe we have more going for us than you think.”

“Pah!” Kevin spat. “That's how much you know about it!”

“All right,” I said, “I've never made a real world. Compared to you I'm an ignorant jerk, Kevin. So enlighten me. Magic means losing, is that what you're going to tell me out of your infinitely superior wisdom?”

“It means you think you're safe in your very own place,” he said in a grieving tone. “The place you slip off to when the old man staggers in pissed to the eyes and in a hitting mood, see. He can crack your bones, but your heart comes here, where the strength is all in your own arm and the luck of the country favors you because it's your country. And only you know the way to it: Glen Span, Springbanks, Huddlestone, Winterdale—" He chanted the names of the arches so softly that I could barely hear him through the growing uproar from below and the closer, restless sounds of the watchful Bone Men.

“Only your own magic twists around and attacks you,” Kevin said savagely. “And things you meant as tests become great monsters. Your soldiers die fighting for you, and your sword gets busted, and you get caught with a fool of a girl, waiting for your enemy to smash you. So in the end he wins.”

“Kevin, your father's dead,” I said. “You told me that.”

Kevin stretched his legs out and began rubbing his right knee, as if massaging stiffness out of some old injury. “Did I? I don't remember telling you. He got into a barroom fight with too many other guys.”

A horrible, ear-splitting shriek from the battle below drowned him out. I covered my ears.

Kevin grinned sourly. “That was a Famisher's death scream. Now that Farfarer has drunk Famisher blood—thanks to you, not to me—the fighters of the Free Armies can use bladed weapons against them, too. It won't do them any good, though, not against the White One. Not without me.”

The sky was turning pearly gray, and I felt the chill in the air that comes before sunrise. Kevin had terrified me all over again with his dreary certainty of disaster.

“When the sun comes up,” I asked, “will the Bone Men still walk?”

“Yes,” he said. “In the holdings of the White One they don't need the cover of dark. They'll keep us here till he comes and takes the seedstone off me and destroys it like he's destroyed all the other magic crystals in the Fayre Farre.”

“For crying out loud, quit whining!” I yelled. “You're scaring yourself and the whole Fayre Farre to death. If you'd stop moaning and groaning, maybe you could concentrate on getting this place back under control. It's your world, Kevin!”

“There's nothing that's mine anymore,” he said. “He always takes what he wants, even here in the Fayre Farre.
Even here
.”

He hugged his legs and rocked.

“Okay,” I said furiously. “Leave it to me, then. Let a girl save your neck. You give up. I'll fight.”

I ran to one of the windows and yelled out, “Farfarer, come to your master's hand!”

“Don't,” Kevin said.

“Then you call the sword,” I said.

He groaned. “God, girls are so stupid!”

“Listen,” I said, “if the sword comes to the sound of my voice only, it'll still be my sword, not yours.” Did that make sense? As much as anything in the Fayre Farre did, I guess. “Call the sword
with
me.”

“It's no use.” He got up slowly, like an arthritic old man. “It's too far. I'm sorry. I wish I'd done all this better.”

“
Sorry!”
I squawked, thinking furiously. If Kevin was apologizing, we must really be doomed.

He turned away and pulled his fist back to punch the wall. I grabbed his arm. He shoved me away.

“Kevin!” I said, “before you do something incredibly stupid, tell me one thing. What kind of magic works with swords here? What kind of magic do the sword makers use?”

He stood still, throwing off violence and despair like a radiator throws off heat. “Fire,” he said finally. “Oil, sometimes: the things a blade is forged in.”

“What else?” I said. “Come on, what else?”

“Blood,” he said. “What it's forged for.”

Blood. Naturally.

I dug out the rhinestone pin and, without taking time to think about it, jabbed the sharp end into my palm. It hurt. I swore.

“What are you doing?” Kevin said, grabbing at me.

I dodged him and ran to the nearest window and slapped my smarting, bloody hand down on the sill. “Farfarer!” I shouted. “Come!”

Down below, the land gleamed faintly in predawn light: forested hills, distant ruins, ocean beyond. The North Isle, the White One's country, slowly showed itself.

At the fourth window, I shouted to the broken sword. Shadowy figures sped up the bare slope of rock toward us. The Bone Men surged together in clattering alarm—too late. Two people darted through a gap in their line and scrambled up the steps into the Blockhouse. Someone flung her arms around my neck—solid, fleshy arms—and squealed in my ear, “God, Amy, are you okay?”

“
Claudia
? Where did you come from?”

“Prince Kavian,” Rachel announced, “we have something that belongs to you.”

Claudia pulled off her doggie purse and upended it. The moorim hung on inside the bag, but a little heap of junk fell out into Claudia's palm. It took me a minute to recognize the fragments of the pocketknife.

Kevin groaned. “The Farsword! But
look
at it!” He said it as if he hardly remembered that he was the one who had smashed it.

Rachel sank into a crouch in the doorway, looking out. “Whoo!” she said, “that was close! We used the secret stair up the cliff to this place. My little brothers discovered it last year in the real park.”

Kevin said, “What secret stair? I never put a secret stair here!”

Rachel grinned. She looked high and fierce, with her blonde hair in a wild and dirty tangle on her shoulders. “Well, somebody did.”

I glanced at Kevin. “An escape route for the White One? Just in case?”

“He'd have set Bone Men to guard it,” he said.

“Maybe he did,” Rachel said, “but they forgot. I bet it's hard to think of everything when there's nothing in your skull but some old dirt.”

“It's been so exciting,” Claudia gushed. “The moorim led us to the Brangle, and the Branglefolk loaned us a boat that went through this secret water-passage underground.”
A tunnel,
I thought,
another of the park transverses, probably.
“Amy, you should have been there. These incredible creatures pulled us right across this ocean, they ran along the bottom and towed us so fast. Then the sword heard you calling—”

“How did you get the pieces?” I asked, astonished. “We left them scattered all over the place.”

Rachel said, “The moorims collected all the bits and brought them to the Branglemen. Your friend Scarneck said I was a Princess in gold if ever he saw one, and he handed over the pieces.”

“Kevin, you hear that?” I asked.

Claudia corrected me. “We should call him Prince Kavian.” She sounded smitten. Wonderful.

“But look at it,” Kevin said again. “It's ruined.”