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With his last scrap of wakefulness, Tom stroked Blunderbuss behind her fuzzy pea-green and tangerine-colored ear. He remembered that yarn. Gwendolyn had used it to make the pom of his polar-bear-and-kangaroo hat. His hat! He rummaged in his satchel, ever so grateful he’d managed to drag it along with them. There it was, bunched up at the bottom. Tom Thorn pulled out the long, wonderfully knit hat and pulled it onto his head. It stretched, thank goodness, big enough to hold a troll’s thick skull. He felt better at once.
“Buss, when you first woke up,” Tom slurred dreamily, “you said a whole lot of silly things. Yes and No and then two Yeses and two Nos and a Maybe. Green. Pineapples. Gin. Who were you talking to?”
Blunderbuss nuzzled up next to her troll. She bit his great, gnarled hand softly and looked up at him with her mismatched button eyes.
“You, dearest darling delirious dimwit,” she growled gently. “When Gwennie first made me you asked me all sorts of things
. I answered as soon as I could, for crying out loud. You were only little. You said: Will you be my best friend? Do you want some of my ham sandwich? Do you miss the Excellent Land of Wom? Are you quite vicious? Will you gobble up Nicholas if he yells at me again? If I sleep with the window open, will you run away in the night? Will you stay with me forever and never leave? What is your favorite color? What is your favorite food? What’s really in your little barrel?”
By the time Blunderbuss finished, Tom Thorn was having his first snore as a troll—a deep, blossoming, bassoon of a snore that, should you listen long enough, would become its own odd melody, a secret song of sleeping each troll makes but never hears.
Toward dawn, the great something that hunted our little band arrived at the edge of the Painted Forest. It stood up on its tiptoes and peered through the branches at the sleeping children and their cold, ashen fire. Even the scrap-yarn wombat had burrowed into the dirt to dream of biting the moon. It had hunted them through the night and felt quite self-satisfied, having been such an excellent and stealthy stalker that the sweet little things just snoozed away like nothing at all was the matter.
Colored lights poured over their faces, dancing, flitting, batting at their cheeks like hot butterflies. Long shadows dropped their black bars onto the forest floor. Rustling sounds filled the air—the great something could not keep quiet forever. Curtains opened in the morning air, coffee trickled into cups, ten thousand fair folk stretched till their shoulders popped delightfully. Newspapers opened, birds peeked out from under gargoyles at the new day, and a river flowed round and round in a circle. Spires of wool and silk and bombazine and corduroy and gingham sparkled in the clean, fresh sun. This huge, happy hunter gurgled along its morning rituals, waiting for Thomas and Tamburlaine and Blunderbuss and Scratch to wake up and notice that they’d been captured by a city.
Pandemonium had come for them.
CHAPTER XI
AN AUDIENCE WITH THE KING
In Which Thomas and Tamburlaine Summon a City, Are Forced to Share Their Breakfast with a Most Unpleasant King, and Learn Some Important Facts About Changelings, Eggs, Monarchies, and the Great Chicago Fire
Tom Thorn counted again.
Tamburlaine, Blunderbuss, Scratch: three. Plus himself made four. Four at most. But through his bleary, thousand-ton sleep—for trolls sleep the sleep of stones, and cannot be roused quickly nor safely without serious technical equipment—he counted four lumpy, blurry, splotchy shapes round the cold fire, which adding himself made five, and that in turn made his head hurt and sleep seem deeply preferable to whatever nonsense that other lumpy splotch turned out to be. Scratch sang out in a jazzy, swinging, somehow worried voice:
Morning bells are ringin’, morning bells are ringin’
Ding, ding, ding-a-ling dong…
Thomas rubbed his heavy fists against his eyes. If he pressed hard enough, perhaps he could punch through his eye sockets and scrub off the back of his brain till it decided to be useful. He felt stiff all over; he could hardly straighten his neck. When he sat up his spine gave several frightful cracks like pebbles rolling down a cobblestone street.
“Careful,” Tam called to him. “You were a rock all night.”
“What?”
“Malachite, I think. You were green. Pretty!” chuckled Blunderbuss. “Is it fun being a troll yet?”
Thomas opened his eyes and took in breakfast, sunshine, and the King of the Fairies all at once. He promptly shut them again.
“Is that a Fairy?” he whispered.
“Yep,” the wombat barked.
“He has a crown on.”
“Yep,” sighed Tamburlaine.
“And he’s eating our food.”
“Strictly speaking,” said the King of the Fairies between mouthfuls, “I’m leasing you this food on a limited, bite-by-bite basis and a generous payment-deferral plan. I’d have thought someone would have told you about Fairy food. You always pay, lad. I’m not running a charity delicatessen.”
Thomas tried again. The Fairy was clearly ancient and venerable. He hunched over a delicate pink-and-yellow teacup with gold plating on the handle and gnawed at a neat, crustless mustard, watercress, and sliced crocodile sandwich. His gray hair was caught up in several wild pigtails around two barnacled goat-horns. He had rheumy eyes and glasses as thick as beer-mug bottoms and three gold hoops in one ear. He wore a thick ermine cloak with fiery pheasant’s feathers on the shoulders and a soft, flowing silver shirt, belted with a string of sapphires, over old, stained, fraying sailcloth trousers. Two iridescent wings jutted out of the back of his cloak, rimmed in gold, glittering as the sunlight made spinning violet prisms inside them. On his head tottered a crown of golden crab’s claws. Each of the claws clutched a blue pearl the size of a walnut. He had the kind of dejected look of those who make a profitable career out of being disappointed in the world. He seemed particularly dissatisfied with the contents of his teacup.
“You lot are in the presence of Charles Crunchcrab the First, King of Fairyland and all her nations. Lucky you. Amn’t I enchanting? Doesn’t my wrinkly left elbow just sparkle with an effervescence of magic?”
“You have mustard on your shoe,” observed Blunderbuss.
