The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (19 page)

Claudia asked timidly, “Isn't fantasy full of broken blades that get fixed in time for the big fight?”

I said, “Yes, but ‘broken blade' means one blade, two pieces, carefully kept together. This is steel spaghetti with plastic sauce.”

“There's got to be a way,” Rachel said. “We've come this far. It can't stop here.”

My hand tingled. I sucked at the scratch in my palm that the rhinestone pin had made.

“What happened to your hand?” Rachel said, grabbing my fingers. “Jeez, Amy, you're bleeding—Yuchh, now there's blood on my sweater!”

“Blood,” I said. “You said blood, Kevin, oil or blood is magic for a sword in the Fayre Farre.”

He squinted suspiciously at me in the dim light. “So what if I did?”

“Blood to make the blade, blood to mend the blade,” I said. “How do we do it?”

“Ask your girl friends,” he said. “Everybody but me seems to know all the answers.”

Claudia looked gooily sympathetic, but Rachel rolled her eyes grandly at me, signaling: this guy is a pill. I nodded vigorously, and she hid a laugh.

The flag went
flop, flop,
overhead, a little faster in the morning breeze. The sounds of battle below swelled again, nearer—screams and shouts blended into an on-again, off-again roar. Where was Anglower, anyway—down there, fighting? How long did we have until he stormed in here to squash Kevin like a bug, and us with him?

I said, “Let's try what boys would do in a secret clubhouse, what comic-book heroes would do.”

“Oh,” Rachel said. “That's easy. I've read the twins' comic collection. Give me the pin.” I handed her the rhinestone rose. She stepped up onto the flag pedestal. “Give me your hand, Prince Kavian,” she said grandly.

Kevin hesitated, then poked his hand out like a dead fish. Rachel grabbed it and jabbed the pin into his palm. He yelled. Still gripping his hand, Rachel gave me back the pin, which I sealed into my jacket pocket again.

“Now yours,” she said, grabbing my hurt hand, which made me wince.

“Does this have to be so melodramatic?” I said. I didn't know what Rachel had in mind, exactly, and I was nervous.

She said, “If the sword is to go back to the prince, here, we need his blood, too. Your blood to give it up, his blood to take it.”

Now I caught the drift of what she was thinking, and I jumped back with a gasp. I realized, too late, that I shouldn't even have let her stick Kevin with the pin, which still must have my blood on it.

Kevin chuckled nastily. “What are you worried about, Amy? Look, there's war and pain here but not AIDS, all right? Whatever people do in the real world, here their blood is clean.”

We all must have looked pretty scared and skeptical.

“It's the seedstones,” he said. “They purify. You and I are both carrying them. Our blood's okay.”

“Say that with the moorim on your head,” I said.

He did, and the moorim leaned down and licked the bridge of his nose. Rachel looked at me. I nodded: the moorim's kiss was good enough for me.

At Rachel's nod, Claudia carefully piled the remains of the knife into my sticky palm. Rachel turned Kevin's hand over and squeezed our two hands together on the bits. Claudia began humming a flat, dull tune through her nose, something she'd picked up from the moorim, from the sound of it.

Our hands, joined on the weapon, quickly heated up way past plain old 98.6. Kevin breathed hard and stood leaning back as far as he could get, his lips twisted in a grimace. I gritted my teeth: I could do as well as he did. Our knuckles began to glow. I shut my eyes.

But I couldn't stop feeling the heat intensify and creep up my wrist. I fought down panic and concentrated on the touch of sunlight on my face.

Deep in the furnace that had been my hand and Kevin's hand, something moved.

“Do you give Farfarer to the Prince?” Rachel was yelling in my ear. I hadn't realized, I was groaning so loudly through my clenched teeth. “Amy, do you hear me? Do you give Farfarer—”

“Take it, Kevin, for crying out loud!” I bawled.

Rachel let go, and Kevin and I each staggered backward.

But in his hand he held a gleaming sword, the sharp edge of the dark blade still glowing red with heat.

“Prince Kavian!” I gasped, hugging my own hand to my chest. I didn't dare look down to see if my fingers were crisped. “Farfarer is yours!”

“Farfarer is yours!” Rachel announced, hopping off the pedestal with a triumphant whoop.

Kevin blinked uncertainly at the sword as if he didn't really believe in it. Then he jumped up onto the pedestal and waved Farfarer over his head. The blade caught the rays of the risen sun with a golden flash. He shouted out over the battlefield below, “White One, I'm ready for you! Come fight me for the Fayre Farre!”

“Come to you?” sang a strong, beautiful voice from somewhere close above us. “I am already here.”

We all looked up. Now we could see the design on the sunlit flag: a spiky, armored shape in a horned helmet with crimson pupils gleaming out of black eye slits. The image swelled and shook itself free of the flag, and the White Warrior stepped down inside the stone walls of the Blockhouse with us.

 

Sixteen

The Power of the Rose

 

 

 

H
E SWUNG HIS GAUNTLETS WIDE APART,
spreading space with the backs of his broad, armored hands. Clouds of pulverized mortar puffed up from the Blockhouse walls as they rocked back and began snapping outward in a flurry of angles, duplicating themselves faster than my eyes could follow. New walls grew from the old ones, crashing into place all down the backslope of the cliffs, and a windstorm of displaced air threw me off my feet.

I could feel the ground under me swell and stretch, making room for the walls as they expanded like the interlocking pieces of a gigantic, moving puzzle. In one long roll of tremendous thunder—under the clear sky and pale white sun—a castlelike labyrinth appeared, spreading out and downward from the summit over where the woods had been. Acres of rusty tile roofs on top of ashy gray walls made of boulders the size of Volkswagens blanketed what had become a mile or more of black stone slope.

We were stuck on a sort of wide terrace, the highest point of the whole sprawling structure, overlooking the cliffs—black crags and empty air—and the battle below.

It was sickening, this blotting out of our dinky little Blockhouse on its poky knob of rock by this humongously swollen version of the same basic design—a simple rock-walled room.

The central pedestal was gone. In its place stood a platform of bones, yellow and white and gray. At the center stood this massive chair, made of bones twisted like wickerwork. The armored newcomer settled himself into this throne of decay. Even sitting down, he towered above us.

I hugged the gritty earth. My fear drove every other feeling out of me. There was barely room for one thin breath of air after another.

Lazing there on his sharp-toothed throne, he was a cartoon nightmare turned real: a human-shaped figure big as a bull, covered entirely in scarred white armor that jutted everywhere into jagged points and edges. His helmet crested, between wide-set horns, in a silver plume. His gloves had steel spines set between the knuckles.

“Darth Vader's paler brother,” Rachel whispered to me, with a ghastly, hollow giggle.

Claudia, crouching beside us clutching her doggie purse, whimpered faintly.

Rachel said, “It's dumb, groveling around like this.” She climbed shakily to her feet. I managed to do the same, though I couldn't think why I bothered. We were done for, unless our hero, the famed Promised Champion of the Fayre Farre, came through in the crunch.

He stood a little way from us, sword in hand. His mouth hung open in ridiculous dismay. Kevin Malone, Corner Kid and hero-prince, appeared to be rooted to the ground, a terrified boy with a weapon he was scared to try to use.

“Listen,” Rachel said to the world at large, “it's so quiet. Is the battle over now down there?”

“Go look,” answered the beautiful, ringing voice of the White Warrior. I dared to hope: maybe he was really a good guy under there, Kevin's best buddy pretending to be bad to test him, some wise and handsome god with rewards to hand out when the test was passed. No villain could speak in a voice like that.

He pointed toward the cliff, a sudden movement that rattled the spikes on his gloves and made me flinch. In my mind's eye, I saw him wipe his mask up over his head like a welder's shield and pick his yellow fangs with the needles projecting from his gloves. Now it registered, in a numb sort of way, that many of the skulls and bones that made up his throne were small, delicate shapes—maybe moorim-bones. Maybe the bones of children.

My stomach lurched, and I thought I might have to sit down again.

Rachel, who had wobbled her way over to the edge of the cliff, called me. “Amy, you should come see this.”

The seated monster made no objection. I went, my spine prickling.

Below the cliffs, slanted fields and forests were thick with figures: slender elves, gnarly little Branglefolk, Famishers staring up with their round faces like clusters of ugly flowers, men in dark leathery-looking armor on foot or mounted on seelims. The different groups had moved apart from each other, and seemed to be all waiting for—what?

“Where are the Bone Men?” I said.

“The Bone Men,” replied Anglower in that glorious voice, “those mighty warriors of the bloody past, are wherever I want them to be and whatever I want them to be.”

He reached down and casually plucked a long, yellow bone from the platform under his throne. He flipped it in the air. Soaring, it shook itself out into a gangling human frame which landed bent-kneed, like a ski-jumper. The skeleton straightened and began stalking toward us with long strides. Its feet made dry, scraping noises on the rock.

Rachel and I grabbed each other and huddled together at the cliff's edge. I felt empty space at my back and saw myself flying, falling, gone.

The Bone Man halted. It rocked gratingly on its heel bones and wrapped its long arms around its rib cage. It had no lower jaw, which for some reason struck me as particularly horrible.

The White One laughed, a bright, shocking sound, like ice water poured suddenly into your ears. He turned away from Rachel, Claudia, and me. His business was with Kevin, who still stood gaping like a moron.

Anglower rose from his chair and yanked another bone from the dais: a long, heavy, curved bone with a thick end. He flung it high over our heads, like an ivory lance. In flight, the bone exploded. Fragments rained on the armies below like chalky darts.

Everyone scattered, shouting, screaming. Some fell. Then they drifted together again and stood as before, gazing up toward us.

“No fair, attacking Kevin's men,” Rachel yelled, outraged. Where did she get all this fearless energy? She scared me to death, challenging the monster like this. “You're supposed to fight a duel,
mano a mano!
”

The White One didn't even look at us. The armies below made no sound. They knew that it was all up to the Promised Champion and the White Warrior.

“Shush, Rachel,” I hissed. “There's nothing we can do. It's Kevin's fight, fair or not.”

“So why doesn't he
fight?
” Rachel said in a furious, tearful voice.

Kevin's cheeks flamed as if he'd been slapped. But he didn't raise the sword or say a word.

“If only I had a rock,” Rachel said, staring desperately around, “a chunk of wood, a brick—”

“A weapon,” I said. I thought of Kevin in the laundry room of the D-home, backed against a wall, unarmed except for—my brain seemed to catch fire. “ ‘Using a weapon they already own!'
The rose pin!
”

I jumped up, fumbling in my pocket, yelling about magic crystals—the rhinestones: wouldn't they work against the White One?

I had forgotten the Bone Man.

He tackled me, crashing into my knees with an excruciating impact. Rachel flung herself at him, trying madly to drag away the spindly hand that was knotted into my hair. I heard Claudia shrieking.

With the strength of total panic, I ripped my arm free and clapped the rhinestone pin against the side of the Bone Man's skull.

The whole figure fell apart, leaving me flat on my back in a scatter of bones. But the bones reared up into a new shape faster than my eyes could follow. More bones came clicking and rolling over the rock from the White One's dais and wove themselves together with the speed of snakes striking. They surrounded Rachel and me with a cage of bent and woven bone while Claudia crouched, blubbering, outside.

The triumphant laughter of the White Warrior washed over us. Then, with a clacking sound, the lid banged down. Two of us were penned up in a cage of bones, and the third one was a quaking mound of terror outside of it. I could see that Claudia wasn't going to be any help.

At last Kevin spoke: “Let them go!” he screamed. “You can't touch them, you don't lay your hand on them—not in my country!”

Through our cage of bones we saw him charge, swinging Farfarer two-handed in a sweeping, side-to-side stroke. The White Warrior smashed down at him with the long bone he held. Kevin dodged the blow, but the knuckle-end hit rock and the whole summit shivered. I heard crackings and rumblings deep in the mountain below us.

“He'll smash the place apart!” Rachel cried, for the first time sounding panicky, as if the reality of our situation had just dawned on her. “He'll wreck the whole Fayre Farre!”

The rhinestone rose lay in my palm, its stones crushed and blackened. I scraped it against the bone cage, but it had no effect now. I dropped the ruined brooch into my side pocket again and sealed the flap.

Farfarer made deep, whipping sounds through the air. The White One's bone club slammed the blade aside again and again, until Kevin pulled back, panting. Instead of attacking him, the White One reached down, grabbed up a skull with his free hand and lobbed it out over the battlefield below.