The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (6 page)

I stepped through the thick cold air curtain inside the arch—it made me shut my eyes and shiver—and came out facing not concrete stairs going up to the lake, but a high hillside covered with huge, tumbled slabs of stone, like granite dominoes tossed down from a giant's hand. Had Kevin been crazy enough to put giants in the Fayre Farre?

The slabs lay at angles just off the horizontal, like a flight of steps jolted out of true by an earthquake. Great: giants
and
earthquakes.

It was chilly again, and damp, and no identifiable time of day. I had forgotten my watch.

Now I realized that I hadn't thought about how to find Kevin in his blasted magic land when I got back into it! Suppose he was in the Prison City, or even farther away? Was I crazy, as well as a stupid idiot, to come galumphing back here like this?

“Come on up, I've been waiting for you.” Kevin stood on one of the tilted stairs about twenty yards up the hill. In his dark clothes, he was almost invisible.

I climbed, trying not to rip my jeans. A person in the normal world only has so many changes of clean clothing, let alone so many excuses to give her parents about what has happened to them all.

Kevin looked tired, though his hair gleamed beneath his cap and his black shirt and pants and dark green vest looked fresh and clean. No sweats today. I was glad I had worn a really nice turtleneck, and a clasp to hold my hair back. My hair tends to frizz in damp weather, and the air of the Fayre Farre was damp. If there's anything I hate it's having my hair bunch up like old upholstery stuffing.

“How did you know where to meet me today?” I asked. “You gave me the rose pin.”

He dug out his handkerchief and untied the corner. “The seedstone drew me,” he said. The little crystal in his palm looked like a stone from a jewelry setting.

Quickly I unpinned the rhinestone rose and examined it closely. Sure enough, at the very center of the cluster of petals one tiny metal cup was empty.

“You kept one of the stones from my pin? They're just paste, Kevin, they're not worth anything.”

The red strips glowed brightly in his cheeks, as if somebody had smacked his face twice with a ruler. He said, “They're magic here. This one shines toward the other ones. That way I can tell where I'm likely to run into you. Hey, relax—you'll get it back.”

I held out my hand. He shook his head. “Later.”

“I'll remind you,” I said. “Did that little stone help you get away from the Bone Men at the Dairy?”

“Sshh,” he said, scowling and glancing around. “Come on, this way. Sure, the seedstone helped. Things here always help me, when they're not trying to wipe me out. I'm the protagonist so I'm mostly safe, except for, you know, ordeals and things, until the end. Don't worry, you don't have to hang around that long. How come you picked this arch to come through?”

I shrugged.

“Good thing you didn't use the Gapstow, over by Wollman Rink,” he said cheerfully.

“Why, what's wrong with the Gapstow?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Kevin said, “except with the arches that cross water, you never know. I put a family of trolls under one of them, and they tend to kind of wander from one water bridge to another.”

“Trolls! Kevin, for crying out loud!”

“Water trolls,” he elaborated for my benefit. “All ugly and slimy. Though a troll family looks out for its own, which is more than you can say for some people.”

“Trolls are Norwegian,” I said. “I thought you were Irish.”

“You never heard of the global village?” he said in a superior tone.

“Sure I have,” I shot back. “I read in my spare time, Kevin, instead of mugging people for their pocket money.”

“That was a long time ago,” he said, glaring down from the inch or so he had on me these days. “You're not back on your old street now, telling off a brat from the poor end of the block. The Fayre Farre is
my
place, not yours.”

“I wouldn't talk so tough to someone I was asking for favors,” I said.

“Maybe I won't need any favors,” he said. “I won't know for sure until I've got the prophecy.”

“You still don't have it?” I said. “Kevin, how long have you known about this prophecy, anyway?”

He kicked a pebble off the stair he stood on. “Only a little while. I had to find out there
was
a prophecy, from this dragon I fought. And then Sebbian—” He turned so I couldn't see his face. “We had a singing contest. I won him away from the White One's service, and he went off to get me the prophecy to show his, you know, his loyalty. You're not exactly coming in at the beginning of the story, you know.”

“Well, let's go get the stupid prophecy ourselves, then,” I said. I was not happy to be reminded about poor Sebbian, and it annoyed me to have missed the dragon. “If there's stuff I'm supposed to be able to do around here, I'd like some information about it. I don't know how it is for Prince Kavian in the Fayre Farre, but I've got school next week, and I'm supposed to be moving to California any day now. So where do we start?”

Around us were gray sky, jumbled rocks, the little arch below, and beyond it long meadows down to water and what looked like another castle, far and lone looking. I pointed. “Down there?”

Kevin laughed. “No, not down there. That's the castle of a duke who'd like to nail my head to his gate and send his own son on the quest in my place. So we'll just move along before he finds out I'm hanging around, okay? No, not up the Giants' Stair either. I know the way to where we have to go, don't worry. For starters, we follow the steps across the face of the hill.”

We made our way along, Kevin showing off by walking on the edges of the tip-tilted stones, holding his arms out to keep his balance. The stones led to the edge of where the forest had been sliced through from top to bottom by the Giants' Stair, a name which seemed to answer my previous question about giants.

“What's that?” I whispered, as we stepped off the stones onto leaf-covered ground. “I hear something.” My adrenaline zoomed. I imagined being caught and hustled off to the castle of the ambitious duke.

“Calm down,” Kevin said. “It's just our rides.”

I decided to die rather than ask any more dumb questions. If Kevin was going to be coy about what he wanted from me until we got his darn prophecy, so be it.

I was just glad to be away, moving, doing stuff, in a place where if you died untimely, as they say in Shakespeare, it's not because you are walking down the street and trip on a chunk of uneven paving and break your hip, and then a blood clot gets loose from your shattered bones and stops your heart. It's because you're the minstrel and special friend of a hero-prince, on your way to do him a great and faithful service, but the Bone Men get you first.

 

Five

A Seelim Ride

 

 

 

I
N A LITTLE CLEARING
near the edge of the woods two animals browsed on twig ends. They were big, they were saddled and bridled and shaped something like horses, but they had oval-shaped scales all over, like lizards. One of the animals opened its mouth and a thin forked tongue, black as licorice, flickered out.

I stopped short. “Oh no,” I moaned. “Tell me you're kidding.”

“They're tame and they're strong,” Kevin said, “and we have a ways to go.”

The red one sort of lifted its scales and settled them again with a faint rattle, like a parrot fluffing its feathers. The blue-green one reached forward with a hind foot and delicately scratched itself behind one ear, where its blue crest started. It rolled a flat gold eye at me.

The things were beautiful. They absolutely terrified me. I said, “I am not a rider.”

“They move real smooth,” Kevin said.

The creatures—seelims, Kevin called them—went into a crouch at his command. Handing the sandwiches to Kevin, I boarded the blue-green seelim. When the seelim straightened up, the ground seemed a tree-length away. I grabbed for handholds on the thin leather seat that served as a saddle.

“Where did these things come from?” I asked.

“Sebbian's family,” Kevin said. “He raised them in the forest, in secret. Commoners don't have seelims.”

I heard a bitter edge in his voice. “You didn't mean it to be that way, did you?” I said. “When you started the Fayre Farre? It was meant to be fair as in ‘justice,' not just fair as in ‘pretty.' ”

He shrugged angrily. “Doesn't matter what I meant, does it? It's all changed. Here's your lunch back.”

“Were they all really good friends of yours?” I asked, tying the plastic bag to a leather string attached to the saddle. “Sebbian's family, I mean?”

“I'm not here to have friends,” Kevin said. “They're my people. I'm their prince, their protector.”

I thought I saw a shine of tears in his angry eyes, but of course that was ridiculous. Corner Kids don't cry.

I had worries of my own. I really am no rider. In fact I have actually fallen off a horse. That is, a horse named Daisy, from the one public riding stable in Manhattan, lay down under me one day in the middle of the Central Park bridle path. It was one of the most embarrassing moments I have ever endured.

Daisy had stopped walking, thumped down on her knees with a grunt of relief, and slowly collapsed onto her side, where my leg would have been if I hadn't scrambled off. All this to screams of laughter from Rachel, who rode a lot and really knew how.

I had not gone riding since. I am a city kid. I am not supposed to ride.

But I was riding now. It was surprisingly simple. Our path went straight across open meadows and in among the widely spaced trees of the forest. It actually got to be kind of boring. Kevin was no help. He insisted on telling me the whole history of the Fayre Farre over again.

The “ancient” part was just as dumb the second time as it had been the first: Agro son of Wobbo who slew the Magenacs at the battle of Floppo, that sort of thing. More recently, it went like this: basically, there was this rich kingdom, the Fayre Farre, with a royal family and a Primordial Evil named Anglower who had been caged up by a spell after a huge battle. Generations later, the good wizard Gurd accidentally uncaged Anglower (now called the White Warrior), whose awful minions (the Bone Men) went around taking over everything.

Nobody could beat Anglower except the Promised Champion, a newborn prince of the Royal House. Gurd the Good had whisked the baby away to grow up safely on another world. However, Gurd had died before he could explain things, so the boy had grown up ignorant of his true heritage and powers.

Which left him now, well into the story proper, blundering around after a magical weapon he'd finally learned that he needed to defeat Anglower and become King of the Fayre Farre himself.

“What weapon?” I inquired. As a Corner Kid, Kevin had carried an old notch-bladed penknife with which he had threatened, from time to time, to cut off various bits of my childhood self.

“A sword,” he said, “a mighty sword from the Dawn Days. It got lost in a great battle, long before Gurd's time. But the Promised Champion found the sword anyhow, even in the other world, because it was meant for him.”

The Champion being himself, of course. I thought it was modest of Kevin not to pause and point this out. In turn, I refrained from asking whether any battles were ever fought in the Fayre Farre that weren't great. You know, any scruffy, scrappy, messy
little
battles.

“The sword was in a humble guise when he found it,” he went on, “just as he was in humble guise himself. And being just a little kid at the time he didn't know what it was, but he knew it was precious. So he hid it away for safekeeping. But he's here, I mean I'm here. I can't get out into your world anymore. Somebody has to bring the sword to me so I can beat the White One and set things right again in the Fayre Farre.” He fixed me with a significant stare: somebody, maybe me, depending on what the prophecy said.

“Why can't you go get it yourself?”

“The arches won't let me through anymore,” he said impatiently. “I
told
you, I've used them all up. Yesterday you followed me through the Willowdell, the last one that was still open to me. But without the weapon from your world, I'll lose the final duel with the White One for sure.”

I was beginning to wonder if we really needed a prophecy. Kevin seemed to know everything already. Of course for him this was the middle of the story.

“So where's this mighty weapon hidden?” I asked.

“It's someplace in my old building,” he said eagerly. “I hid it there so nobody else could get their hands on it, but I'm not sure where, exactly. It seems like such a long time ago.” He frowned. “I don't recall much from those days now. I only recognized you because the rhinestones in your brooch lit the way to you.”

“Kevin,” I said. “I hate to raise problems, but your building's been renovated.”

“I know,” he said. “I went there twice while I could still get through the arches. By then I couldn't see clearly there anymore. I couldn't find the sword.”

“How can I find it if you couldn't?” I asked.

“Your pin,” he said. “The rhinestones carry Fayre Farre magic now, after so many years here with me. They'll show you the way.”

“Well, I hope they can open locks,” I said. “There must be security up the wazoo in that place now. The whole West Side is like that.”

“You can do it if you try,” he said earnestly.

“Does this sword
look
like a sword?” I asked. “Or is it still ‘in humble guise'?”

Kevin took his feet out of his stirrups and let his legs dangle. “Look, this is the great Farsword of the Fayre Farre that we're talking about. It will reveal itself to you when the time comes, that's all I can tell you. It's years ago that I hid it. The Fayre Farre is real for me now, not your side.”