The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (7 page)

My side. Reality, he meant. That thought gave me shivers. What if his fantasy world stopped, for some reason, with me still in it? That is, what if a Bone Man grabbed Kevin and squashed him, bingo, just like that: where would I be then?

This was so upsetting to think about, including the Bone Man that my imagination obligingly served up in full color, that I decided to think about it later, if at all.

“So after I find this indescribable thing the exact whereabouts of which you do not know,” I said, returning to the question at hand, “and that's if this prophecy says I'm the person to do it, then I have to come back here through one of the park arches to deliver this Farsword to you, right? You can't come meet me in Central Park to get it from me?”

“No,” he said. “I told you.”

“What about Anglower?” I asked. “Can he—?”

“Don't say his name,” Kevin hissed. “Call him the White Warrior, or the White One.”

“Kevin,” I insisted, “can he get through the arches?”

“No,” Kevin said forcefully. He glared at the sky. “No, he cannot.” He sounded to me like someone trying to reinforce instructions that he wasn't sure anybody was listening to anymore.

My seelim stumbled and I grabbed leather and did not fall off, thank God. Kevin had the grace to pretend not to notice me lurching around on my saddle like a sack of potatoes.

I said, “You're stuck here with this White One, the Bone Men, and the bad duke of whatnot castle, right? In your own story, that you personally designed. You sure stacked the deck against yourself, Kevin.”

“I am,” he said, “and I did.” He grinned a sparkly kind of grin. He knew he was good-looking. “When you're setting up an adventure for yourself, you kind of overdo the bad guys for the thrill of it, you know? Now I have to stay here and dodge them all until I get my hands on the Farsword.”

Rachel and I had gone through a period of about a year when we had read all the heroic fantasy books we could get our hands on. This was after Mom had read me part of
The Lord of the Rings
out loud while I was recovering from a horrible flu bug. I had finished the trilogy myself and gotten Rachel hooked on it, too. Most other high fantasy was just bad imitation, and we'd soon tired of that. Now I wished I had paid more attention to the generally accepted form of these things.

“How long until you have to get this sword?” I asked.

“Not long,” he said. “There's been omens and things. The big fight is coming soon.” I did not like the way he sounded aggressive and unsure at the same time.

“How does the story of yours end?” Could Kevin have imagined a heroic fantasy with an unhappy ending?

“It ends at the Sky Castle on the Black Cliffs,” he said solemnly. “The Promised Champion gets there somehow, even if he's hurt and starving and his faithful helpers are all dead or captured. He takes the Farsword and fights his way past the Bone Men to the White Warrior, and fights him as well, to the death.”

I decided not to pick up on this business of what happens to the faithful helpers, which probably didn't apply to me anyway. I didn't feel very faithful.

“And he wins, right?” I prompted. “The Champion. Even though he's hurt and starving?”

“That's how I meant it to be,” he said, but he didn't sound very confident.

My seelim burped and flickered its tongue, which made me jerk nervously on the reins.

“Don't pull him like that,” Kevin said irritably. “He's behaving fine.”

“He's a monster out of your imagination, Kevin. He's not behaving at all,” I said, but without much conviction. “Tell me something. Do you have any idea how your fantasy turned real like this?”

He shook his head, avoiding my eyes.

“You must have a theory,” I coaxed.

“Well, maybe because I had no other road to go. I got in trouble in the D-home—”

“D-home?” I said. “As in, Detention Center? Juvenile Hall? Ha. I knew it.”

“Clever you,” Kevin said nastily. “Bet you wouldn't know enough to survive in the lockup yourself. I did it by spending all my time in the library. Somebody had donated a whole shelfful of fantasy novels. Writing stories in my head kept me from going crazy.” He tapped his temple.

“Wow, Kevin,” I said. Pretty lame, but I was busy looking at Kevin in a new light. I had sometimes pictured him in the hands of lots of large cops (wishful thinking). I had never thought of him as the kind of person who would turn to books for help.

“But,” Kevin went on, “some of the guys thought I had ratted on a friend of theirs. They came after me. They caught me by the back wall of the laundry room.” A shrug. “I didn't have anything on me except that pin of yours, so I pulled it out. You can hurt somebody with almost anything if you're up against it, you know?

“Somehow I stuck myself with the sharp end, and boy, it hurt!” He laughed and shook his head, but his eyes had a far-off, remembering look, and not a lighthearted one. “For a minute I thought I was dying. I thought Bennie or Carlos had knifed me so fast I didn't even notice. I think I passed out. And when I woke up here I was, in the Fayre Farre instead of the D-Home. Not a bad deal, huh?”

“Looks like out of the frying pan into the fire to me,” I said, thinking of the Bone Men. I turned cautiously in my saddle to look behind us, but no scraggly skeletons were in sight.

“You wouldn't say that if it had been you it happened to,” Kevin said, watching me with sly amusement out of the corners of his eyes. He dug his fingers under the shoulder scales of the red seelim and scratched away under there as both animals padded uphill across an open meadow with their odd, springy gait.

A whole lot of weird ideas chased each other through my head: had Kevin really jumped somehow from danger in the D-home to the Fayre Farre, or were we both somehow inside his head while his body was still in terrible trouble back there? In that case, where was
my
body and what was happening to it while I was in the Fayre Farre with him? How long ago had he escaped from the laundry room—and
had
he escaped?

Was I dealing with a ghost here? Was he still actually back there, stuck somehow in a frozen moment of danger? Maybe he was living all of the story he'd made up in just a few seconds in the real world that translated into months, or whatever, in the Fayre Farre, and somehow he'd roped me into living it with him?

I asked, “When you were still able to get through the arches yourself, did you go back to the D-home?”

“Hey, when you get
out
of that place, you don't go back if you can help it,” Kevin said scornfully. “Anyway, that's all a long time ago now. There's no point talking about it.”

I decided not to argue or push for more information. In the first place, it was all so complicated and scary to think about that it made me feel as if my skull would explode. In the second place, I had a feeling that making it into—and back out of—the Fayre Farre was going to take a lot of very close attention to what was going on around me, whether I believed in Kevin's world or not.

We were now climbing pretty high. I saw distant water on both sides of the ridge we rode on and buildings here and there, far away. Some fields had dots in them that might have been cows, or whatever Kevin had invented to take the place of cows.

I said, “I'm surprised you still had this old pin of mine. It's not worth anything. Why'd you keep it?”

There was a little silence. Then Kevin said, “When I took it off you, that was a day my dad came home celebrating a bombing in Belfast. He was a great fan of the Irish Republican Army, did you know that? To hear him tell it, he was a wanted man for all kinds of mighty deeds he'd personally done against the English oppressors in Ireland. Then he kept tabs on things from here.

“That particular night he was so bombed himself by the time he came in the door, he passed out without whipping any of us kids. I kept your pin on me for good luck after that.” He glanced at me sidelong. “Also, I thought those were diamonds in it. I'd never seen a real diamond, how would I know different? Anyhow, I kept it. It was small enough to fasten into my clothes where nobody could find it and take it away from me.”

I didn't know what to say. Kevin's father had beat up on him? You hear about stuff like that in the news, in school even, but you don't expect to know anybody who's lived with it. No wonder he'd made up a fantasy world as a little kid—not for adventure so much as for a refuge.

Kevin pointed. “Hey, great—kaley trees!”

A line of dark trees crowned the low slope ahead of us. They had fat trunks and thick-packed leaves of a dark, glossy green.

“The nuts taste like cashews,” Kevin said enthusiastically. “I tried making them out of chocolate first. I was real little then. It turned out not to be practical.”

“I can imagine,” I said, thinking of melted chocolate running down the branches on hot days.

“How about nuts for lunch?” Kevin said.

“Why not?” I said. “It's been nuts since yesterday.”

The branches grew low enough so we could pick the nuts by reaching up from our saddles. I gave Kevin one of my sandwiches and ate the other myself. Kevin carried water in a sort of fat leather bottle slung from his saddle. He drank some and shared it with me.

We could have been on a picnic. But I was not cheerful. The empty landscape got on my nerves. My legs ached from yesterday's skating and now, in different places, from riding a seelim.

After eating we followed the road over rolling land through scattered stands of trees. Where was everybody? I was afraid to ask. We left the woodsy hills behind and started across a wide, dry plain. A hot breeze toasted my throat. I tried scratching my seelim the way Kevin had scratched his. It groaned, with pleasure I hoped. Under the scales its skin was soft and cool.

“Kevin,” I said, “where are we going?”

With no warning at all, my seelim squealed and leaped in the air, and I screamed and tumbled off. I landed hard on the back of my shoulders thinking:
It's my fate, it's just Daisy all over again.

“Let go of the reins!” Kevin yelled, jumping down before his plunging, squalling seelim could dump him the way mine had dumped me. “Don't let him drag you!”

Both seelims sped away, leaving us standing in the middle of nowhere—but not alone.

About ten feet from us a person stood watching—a scrawny little man shorter than either of us, copper-skinned under a coating of sweat-streaked dust and ash. He wore a loincloth roughly the same color as his skin, a lumpy leather pouch slung from one shoulder, and nothing else.

“That's what spooked them,” Kevin said confidently, “and he's just what we need! I told you everything works for me here.” He drew himself up proudly and began to declaim, “Man of the Brangle—”

“You are pursued,” the stranger observed softly, pointing past us.

We were. A shifting, swirling crowd of dust-colored animals boiled out of the ragged forest behind us. They were long-legged and long-necked with big, round faces and a funny way of lifting their heads on their curved necks, like camels, or llamas.

“What are
those?
” I said.

Kevin shouted, “Sanctuary! Sanctuary for Prince Kavian and his lady!”

The stranger didn't say a word, he simply turned and ran. Kevin swore and lunged after him, but the little guy just dropped out of sight.

“Come on, or the Famishers will get you!” Kevin yelled over his shoulder at me. Then he seemed to leap into space and vanish like the coppery man, as if they had both jumped into the Grand Canyon.

All I could see ahead was dry, bare plain. The oncoming monsters made weird squealing noises behind me—were they
laughing?
Then two of them out in front opened their mouths and I saw fangs like boars' tusks.

I shut my eyes, took a running leap, and tumbled over the edge of a bluff that was invisible until you were right on top of it. Down I slithered in a cloud of dust, into a vast tangle of thorny brush that seemed to stretch on forever.

 

Six

In the Brangle

 

 

 

T
HE DRY, SPINY VINES STABBED
and tore. I yelled. Kevin dragged me in deeper after him.

“Hurry,” he panted, “they can't follow us in here!”

I lumped along after him as best I could, scared and angry. How typical of him to make our only escape from the baddies (and I didn't have to look again to know that these Famisher-things were not goodies) through a forest of stickers designed to shred you and your best blue jeans.

The little stranger was gone. Behind us, the brush seemed to squirm back into a thick, spiky tangle as soon as we had thrashed our way through it. How would we ever get out of there again, even if we could figure out where out was?

Not that I was in any great hurry to do that just then. I could hear the Famishers padding around and squealing eagerly outside the brush. As Kevin had promised, they weren't getting in—a definite plus. But if one more thorn raked me across the neck I was going to scream. I hoped the seelims had run far, far away by now. By the look of those teeth, Famishers could eat anything.

We scrambled into an open space and both collapsed, spitting out dust and twigs. My skin stung all over. For a second I thought I must have gone blind as well: then I realized that the brush grew so tall here that it closed over our heads, drowning us in brown gloom. We were completely enclosed by interlaced branches.

“I feel like I've been through a Cuisinart,” I said.

“We're okay,” Kevin said. “Famishers can't move around in here.”

“Who can?” I said. “I'm bleeding to death. Where are we, Kevin?”

“In the Brangle,” he said in a tone of satisfaction, slapping dust off his clothes with both hands and coughing. “Anglower's creatures have burned up whole forests all over the Fayre Farre. Brangle is all that grows back. The thorns hate him and keep out him and his.”