The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (22 page)

I was caught between two opposite waves of homesickness as we rode around the pool: for the beauty and grandeur of the Fayre Farre, and for the modest wildness of Central Park. It felt as if my heart was being squeezed in a bone cage.

Our escort began milling around us at the foot of the arch, restless with expectant energy.

Claudia sighed and clambered down off her seelim, giving her mount a regretful pat on its purple shoulder. Rachel and I dismounted too. My blue-green seelim put its head down and rubbed its closed eye on my hip, almost knocking me over. Was this affection, or did it think I was a tree?

Kevin, still mounted, said in a public-address voice, “The princesses want to leave us, friends, through this mystery gate. But do we want them to leave?”

Whoa;
my heart bumped hard.

No one answered Kevin's question. Seelims licked the air with their long black tongues for clues to the cause of the tension.

“Didn't we sing them onto the jeweled thrones from the hoard of Dravud Bloodhand last night?” Kevin went on, with a devilish gleam in his eyes. “Didn't we take them to ourselves with all the joy of our victorious hearts?”

“Kevin,” I said, low and angry, “don't spoil things, okay?”

“Who's spoiling anything?” Kevin said, looking down at me with a smile. “Not me. But I don't think it's very nice of you and your friends, rejecting our hospitality.”

Claudia was already halfway through the archway and there was nothing languid and gliding about her gait, either. She was trotting.

Rachel, right behind her and running backward, waved at me. “Amy, come on! What are you waiting for?”

Before I could make a move, Kevin jumped off his seelim and dashed into the arch ahead of me. He turned and stood there, barring my way.

“Why go anywhere?” he said. “You're a princess here and a brave warrior. The elves make up songs about you.”

I stood there, paralyzed between panic and a sneaky surge of pure delight.

Kevin the Corner Kid, the bane of my childhood, was offering me a high destiny. Heck, Rachel and Claudia could be best friends instead of Rachel and me. My mom and dad would never get to skin me alive for vanishing overnight. And I would never have to look at Uncle Irv and Aunt Jennie and my icky little cousins again, or go live in blonde, skinny Los Angeles.

Two elves sang their strange music, with words I somehow understood: “Stay, lend us your powers. We know who the true Champion is: she who slew Famisher Kram.”

Danu called out good humoredly, “Stay awhile, you can always go home later, Lady.”

Lady? Princess? Slayer of Kram? I had a rich identity here. At home, I was a ninth grader.

“Amy!” Claudia screamed. “He's doing a spell on you, don't you feel it?”

Was he? I stepped forward and felt something like tiny threads breaking all around me in the air.

Kevin said, “What about your Cousin Shelly?”

I was speechless. Somehow, this was the subject I dreaded the most, the subject I had carefully not been thinking about since the battle.

“You meant to remind me,” he said. “Don't pretend you don't want to. I said I'd bring her back if you helped, and I will, as soon as my powers are all gathered back to me. It's already started to happen. Very soon, I'll make you a present of her life as the promised reward to a brave and faithful princess.”

A rush of hope and longing swept through me, and my eyes filled up with tears.

“I will do it,” he said softly. “I will do it for you at moonrise this very night.”

And I knew that he would, and that he could. He had made this whole place, after all.

But Cousin Shelly wasn't part of it. She wasn't a fictional character in Kevin's saga. She had been a real person.

“You never knew her, Kevin,” I began.

“You'll show her to me,” he answered quickly. “She'll be as real as your memories of her, and how much realer can you get?”

I blinked and looked away from him. Scarneck was watching me curiously.

My memories? But look at my memories of Kevin himself. Look how cockeyed and incomplete they had been—still were, even with all the new things I had learned. Other people knew Shelly differently than I did. I'd heard my relatives talking enough to know, if I cared to admit it, that she wasn't only what I recalled. She'd had a life of her own, out of my sight or beyond my notice or understanding. And that life was over.

I stood wavering between dread and yearning. What would Shelly be like in the kingdom of Kevin Malone? Did I want a phantom Shelly living here in the Fayre Farre, a cartoon all sweet and funny, as Kevin's father had been all cruel and hateful?

The rhinestone pin she'd given me, that had saved our lives just yesterday—that had been the real force of Shelly acting in Kevin's world. Her love had been here, her roses still were.

Sadly, I felt my heart open and I let her go.

I could hardly stand to look at poor Kevin. It seemed to me now that the victorious young prince he had made of himself here had only been trying to get
something
good at long last from his horrible father.

Maybe he would have to keep on trying over and over in different ways forever, because beating the White One wasn't really what he'd wanted at all. What he really wanted would never be there in his memory of the man, because it had never been given.

I blinked my eyes to clear them and tried to answer in a neutral tone. “No, Kevin. I'm sure you can do it and I thank you for the offer, but I've thought it over, and I don't want you to bring my cousin Shelly back.”

He seemed to rear up, his eyes gleaming fiercely at me from the gloom of the tunnel. “You don't know what you want! Well, I do. You want to stay here in the Fayre Farre and be a princess and have your cousin alive again. Only you can't accept all that from a kid from the poor end of your old block!”

Then Scarneck stooped and let loose a moorim from—not an ordinary leather bag, but Claudia's PursePet, which was slung from his coppery shoulder. Claudia must have given it to him before she took off through the Glen Span. The moorim darted into the archway and ran up Kevin's clothes without Kevin even noticing. Small red eyes peered at me from Kevin's dark hair.

And whatever Kevin meant to say, what he said to me now was this, and it was the truth: “How do I know I'm real or anything is real without somebody real here with me? I'm afraid. Stay, Amy, help me remember my real life so it doesn't melt away. Help me remember it better. You have to stay.
I'll make you stay
—”

Flushed with fury, he clamped his lips shut and grabbed for the moorim. But the little animal leaped down and scurried back to the Brangleman, who scooped it up from the ground and disappeared into the watching crowd.

Kevin set his feet wide apart. “I don't have to let you go if I don't want to.”

“That's plain treachery, Kevin! Get out of my way.”

“Make me,” he jeered.

God, didn't anything ever really change? It was just like old times: Rotten Kevin standing between me and what I wanted, Kevin who was strong and mean, Kevin the bully, the Corner Kid. I looked anxiously around for help.

“I'm King of the whole Fayre Farre,” Kevin declared, “by right of arms and by force of prophecy, and what I say goes. Everyone will do what I tell them.”

The audience of battered warriors and amused-looking elves watched closely but kept out of it. Who could blame them? They were the ones who were going to have to live with Prince Kavian. Probably most of them thought I ought to stay. Only Scarneck had dared take a risk for me.

And why had he, that dry, skeptical Brangleman, done that?

Because I was worth it. I'd brought the Farsword, killed Kram, helped Kevin defeat his horrible enemy. Things did change. I wasn't Kevin's little victim anymore, a victim he could terrorize and tyrannize over. Those days were over.

Scarcely breathing, I uprooted my feet again and made them march me toward the tunnel.

Kevin didn't budge. But something enormous moved in the shadows inside the Span, close beside him.

“WHAT'S THAT?” I said, stopping dead.

Kevin laughed scornfully. “I'm supposed to turn and look so you can zip by me? You used to run pretty fast, for a girl. Well, no way. I won't fall for—”

A crooked, looming figure, ugly as a gargoyle off a French cathedral, stepped quietly from an opening in the stream-side wall of the arch and picked Kevin up, pinning his arms to his sides and lifting him straight up off the ground.

Kevin said, “Yagghh!” He kicked his feet wildly a yard above the water.

The army behind me gasped and gabbled, but they hung back.

The creature's scaly skin gleamed, and it gave off a dank, fishy smell. Or maybe that was its breath; it had opened its mouth. Kevin's head was going to get bitten off in front of everybody!

From the other end of the arch Claudia called, “Amy, it's all right! It's one of the ones that towed our boat to North Isle for the battle!”

Tenderly, the monster lipped Kevin's hair and then turned its broad face and rubbed its cheek caressingly on the top of Kevin's head.

Kevin kicked harder, shouting, “Smelly, stupid troll, put me down!”

I walked up to the troll, breathing shallow breaths. The creature ignored me completely. I looked up at suspended Kevin. He glared back down at me murderously.

I said, “Kevin, listen. I did my stuff here; I did what you asked me to. I don't want rewards, I want to go home. And I'm going.”

He quit struggling and concentrated on swearing furiously at me. I could just make out a ragged-edged cave in the side wall where several smaller trolls clustered, peeking out with glowing eyes.

When Kevin paused for breath I said, “I'm going, and I want a decent goodbye.”

“Go ahead, then!” he yelled, raising hollow echoes in the archway. “Run home like a baby, I don't care!”

“You think that's good enough?” I asked. I believe I actually stamped my foot. “I don't. That sounds to me like Anglower's nasty, spiteful son, not like a Promised Champion, a hero of battle, a ruling Prince of the Fayre Farre!”

Silence. I folded my arms, which were covered with goose bumps. I sneezed. It was cold, damp, and odorous in there with Kevin and his troll, and I couldn't wait to get done with all of it. But I waited.

Kevin growled, “All right. Thanks for your help, and good luck to you.” Then he added craftily, “But you have to pay for your passage. It's customary to give these bridge trolls something—or else they take an arm, or a leg. Mine, this time. On your account.”

I didn't believe he was in any danger from the adoring troll that held him, but how could I know for certain? And I did have money, coin of the realm. Singer's silver gift burned cold in my hand.

Kevin must have read something in my eyes.

“Amy, don't go,” he said. He relaxed against the troll's warty shoulder. “Look how ugly she is.” His voice was rough with wry affection. “I made her that way. However they are, I made them all. I can't walk out on them. You can—but you don't have to. You could stay. You could see what wonderful things I'll do here to make up for all this pain and trouble.”

“You'll do great,” I said, hoping with all my heart that it was true. “I don't have to see it to know it, Kevin.”

I pitched the coin into the water right under Kevin's feet. The troll, her gaze caught by the bright movement, forgot she was holding him and let go. He landed with a squawk on all fours, in water up to his forearms, as I sprinted past him.

That's how I remember the Promised Champion most clearly: picking himself up with water streaming from his sleeves, his expression unreadable in the dimness under the arch. The troll was hunkered down beside him paddling around in the water, looking for the shiny thing that had fallen there.

I jogged on to the west end of the Glen Span, where Rachel and Claudia waited in the sunlight of an April day in New York City.

 

* * *

 

Never again, I told my parents: it was all done and would never happen again. Rachel and Claudia and I had wandered around the city together overnight by way of helping me say goodbye to my Manhattan childhood. That was the story we told. My parents believed it. And, in a way, it was true.

Mom put me in charge of all of Shelly's plants, which is supposed to be a chore but I like it. Taped to one of the pots I found a postcard somebody sent Shelly of a cactus, one of those round ones covered with fine hair like a moorim's fur, in the Huntington Gardens. Mom says that's a world-famous botanical garden that Shelly always wanted to visit. It's in Los Angeles, and Shelly never got there. But I will.

I'd say I got off lightly. Claudia was instantly grounded for life, more or less. She acts as if nothing happened, which I guess is one way to handle it. Mostly she is into some heavy studying in science. She says she's thinking seriously of trying to get into veterinary school.

She brought something home with her, something from the Fayre Farre: a rose she picked on the mountaintop. It's in a jelly jar of water on her windowsill, as fresh as that day she picked it, which strikes me as creepy.

“Maybe she should have left it,” I told Rachel.

We were lying on my bed reading a copy of
ArtScene,
a weekly paper that Dad had brought back from Los Angeles. Rachel's parents had docked her entire allowance. She can't go shopping, so she's been spending more time at my house. She has also taken up karate. Of all the people to go in for martial arts! She says she loves it.

She tapped her pen against her teeth and kept skimming the personals. Rachel loves to read the personals, any personals. “Claudia says not to worry about it,” she said. “The rose isn't really a flower, it's like, a symbol. Don't you get it? The roses were time. Solving ‘the riddle of using the years' meant figuring out that your brooch was the key to the roses, and the roses were stored-up years. They smothered Anglower in all the time it would have taken for real roses to grow and cover that whole mountain right down to the plains. Time was the only cure for all the bad memories of his miserable father that Kevin carried around. Maybe Claudia needs time like that, too. So she took the flower.”