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“Magic mustard, obviously!” King Crunchcrab shouted. “Look, I ought to arrest you two whining little miseries and your sideshow! You’ve traipsed in here, put your feet up, tracked mud and grime and Pan-knows-what all over my nice, neat country without so much as a mind if we leave our great big gauche forest here? A forest I’ll have to look after, by the way! Feed it and walk it and make sure it gets proper schooling and introduce it to society! What will the other enchanted woods say? An upstart thicket with no manners and old Charlie to blame again! And to top it all you’ve dragged my capital city out of bed in the middle of the night and led it on a merry chase to…good gobs of grief, where are we?” The King of the Fairies looked around with a grimace of distaste. “South Avalon, by the looks. Well, at least you have terrible taste in counties. The geographical equivalent of a pub with its windows shot out, ferrets on the card tables, and a lady at the bar insisting that a cup of dirt is whiskey.”
Tom Thorn frowned. His head banged and throbbed, trying to shake loose of his bones. “Your city? Dragged out of…what? What could we possibly have done to a whole city?”
Tamburlaine jerked her wooden head up and back, smiling sheepishly. She looked a little proud, really. He followed her gesture and saw the great polka-dotted, striped, patchworked towers of Pandemonium looming over the wild branches of the Painted Forest, for all the world like a cat waiting to be let in for fish. Pink birds flapped from rooftop to rooftop.
“Pandemonium, may I present my latest irritations? Irritations, Pandemonium.” King Crunchcrab bowed with a roll of his eyes and a clatter of his teacup. “I’m afraid she gets carried away and runs off at the first scent of a likely hooligan. Pandemonium, I hope you’re happy with yourself. Can’t stay put, my old girl. Moves according to the needs of narrative. It’s tremendously annoying. Once she’s got a bit of story up her nose there’s no talking to her. And here we are! Here we find our run-down, secondhand selves, one with the other. You came pole-vaulting into my business, thanks much, so I decided to come out and sit on yours. So, out with it. Who are you, what do you want?” Charlie Crunchcrab’s voice turned delighted and positively joyful. “What kind of vicious, nasty, repulsive little story have you got crawling around in your socks?”
Tom and Tam looked at each other nervously.
“We’re Changelings,” Tam said, and her voice thrilled to say the word aloud, and to a stranger!
“Ugh!” grimaced the King. His wings fluttered in alarm. “Ugh. Disgusting! Watch your language! What a filthy mouth you have!”
“But it’s true,” Tom Thorn protested, stricken. How they had held on to that word, passed it between one another like a warm ember in winter. It was a good word! “We were born here and taken away to live with humans but we’ve come home! We’re home now! It’s all okay, everything that’s ever happened in our lives is okay, because we’re home now. We belong here.”
“You don’t,” scoffed the King. “Changelings don’t come back! It’s absurd! There’s a system, you know—a jolly good one! We fed it all the very best cream and licorice and spreadsheets. You’re meant to stay Over There and grow up to be terrible tricksters! Politicians and actors and bankers and writers and advertising executives! Mythical beasts with horns and cologne! And human children stay here. It’s a fair swap—that’s the whole point. They get something; we get something. I daresay the humans would be at a loss for what to do with themselves if all their politicians were honest gentle-hearts and their actors prudent puritans, if their bankers only traded money that really exists and their writers only wrote about things that could really happen and advertisements only said Ours Is a Very Nice Razor Blade But So Are All the Others! If Changelings start coming back, well, it’s like any sort of rubbish you try to return to the shop. What are we meant to do with you? Put you out with the scraps come Friday?”
“I’m not rubbish!” Tamburlaine gasped, sap-tears filling up her dark eyes.
King Charlie peered at her through his thick glasses. “Nawp, you’re a bit of kindling who thinks she’s too good for the fire. I’ve never seen a Fetch as old as you! Shouldn’t you have blown up and started the Second Great Chicago Fire by now? Now, that was a Fetch. We did up a holiday for her when we heard. Night of the Flaming Cow. You should of seen the little-uns, all lit up with tails on and pots of glue under the tree! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, young lady. We gave you a job to do and you shirked.”
“You should be!” cried Tam. “You are, you’re rubbish, you’re a rubbish King with a rubbish crown and you’re shameful, shameful! I gave you sandwiches and I made you a forest and you shouldn’t talk to me like I’m trash. Like I’m nothing!” He
r voice dropped to a whisper and great golden gobbets of sappy tears splashed onto her knees. “Like I’m still nothing. I hate you. I hate you!”
Scratch scrambled between them, pointing his bell angrily at Charlie Crunchcrab. He set down his needle and spun his crank so hard it skipped with fury and the loose, easy voice of the man in the sky-blue suit came hurtling out tight and thin and vicious:
Oh, there’s none so rare as can compare
With Old King Cole and his fiddlers three
“Oh, stop it,” sneered the King. “Can’t shame me, you silly old crapheap contraption.” Scratch recoiled, his brass bell burning with shame. No one had ever called him a harsh name before. Tam always spoke softly to him. Crunchcrab stuck out his tongue like a little child. “I knew King Cole, and you lot aren’t fit to choke on his cigar smoke. Nor me neither, come to it. Now stop your scubbling and explain yourself. You’ve been abroad so perhaps you don’t know what a King is, but in Fairyland you have to do as I say or I’m allowed to thump you, banish you, or turn you into an even-toed ungulate.” He ticked these punishments off on his fingers. “I’m feeling generous today, so I’d let you pick between pig, deer, or pygmy hippopotamus. I could execute you, too, but Pandemonium wouldn’t speak to me for a month. She came all this way, after all. So speak up, you naughty matchstick girl. How did you and your troll fella get here?”
“Stop yelling at her,” Tom snapped. He didn’t mean to snap. He knew, somewhere, dimly, underneath his hunger and the rock-heavy troll sleep still hanging off his mind like a snoring monkey, that he ought not to snap at a King. He’d met a congressman once when his father was given a commendation, which was like a little King as far as he could tell. Nicholas Rood had told him very firmly, so that he could understand it: None of your nonsense, now. Mr. Collins is a political man, and a political man was born sour and spends his whole life pickling. He’d held Tom’s little hand so tight he couldn’t have misbehaved if he wanted to. “We came through her painting. She painted this whole forest on her bedroom wall—and a little bit on my bedroom, too—and taught me magic and we sort of jumped through the painting and came out here.” He didn’t want to say they’d been kidnapped. It would only complicate things. They belonged here. They had a right. And besides, if they’d known where his baseball was going, they’d have run straight into that wall themselves.
Charlie Crunchcrab snatched Tom’s fingers, filthy with dried mud-paint from his night as a rock on the forest floor. The Fairy held them up close to his milky eyes. “It’s on account of the eggs,” nodded the King, as if it were all a bit of nothing.
“Eggs?” Tam squirmed her hands away from him.
“You used eggs to thin your paint and make it all nice and glossy, yes?” Tamburlaine nodded. “Well, good on you, brat-brains! Top of the blighted class! Every country is full of hazardous materials—gunpowder, toadstools, ambition, that sort of thing. But some sorts of things are perfectly polite and sociable Over There, while Back Here they act like hooligans and wreck up the place. Iron’s one. Eggs are another. Oh, you can fry one up in a pan or whip it into a meringue and it’s all well and good—but Fairies know eggs are nothing but trouble. An egg is just packed full of might be—might be a chicken, might be a goose, might be a dodo, might be a Wyvern, might be anything! And so are Changelings. Just crackling with the might be of what they’d have been if they hadn’t got bundled off. Put Changelings and eggs together and you get a wet mess. Once some Cornish mum brewed up a thousand eggs while her Changeling daughter watched, and at the end of it the little wretch jumped right in the pot and the real daughter popped out, boiled pink and giggling. Of course Mummy was pleased. But it was frightful embarrassing for us. That girl didn’t know her place. She didn’t respect the system. She kicked the Unseelie off their thrones with nothing but an albatross, a piece of penny candy, and an old boot. Took centuries to clean up after her.”
“Sounds like my kind of girl,” Blunderbuss piped up. “Systems are for punching and biting and sitting on till they cry double uncle with ice cream on top.”
Charlie Crunchcrab stared at the scrap-yarn wombat as though she’d only just then appeared. He opened his mouth to tell her what he thought of stuffed wombats having the gall to pipe anything at him. Blunderbuss burped scruffily and snatched his sandwich out of his hand, wolfing it down in a single smacking bite.
“Save it, King Snotty the Rude. You can’t shame me, neither. I’ve had knitting needles in places you don’t want to know about. I’d say that Cornish chickie had the right idea. I’m sure we can snuff up an old boot somewhere.”
A thoughtful look crossed the King’s face. Each of his wrinkles seemed to hatch their own individual notions, and argued one with the other. Finally, he scratched his riotous hair and beckoned Tom and Tam to lean in. His voice was suddenly quite different, rough and old and kind.
“I’ve been right rough with you poor pips, ha’nt I? Can’t blame me, I only do’s I’m told. Pandy came running the minute she heard you land, so you hafta be worth a thing or two. And I think I know that thing. I’ll make you a shake-on-it: Help me and I’ll see you’re set up nice. Digs in the city, clothes on your back, a table that’s never empty. Not even a whiff of a thought of going back to middle school in that ugly old world you hopped out of—so clever of you to leg it before you had to get a job! Wanna be a Baron? Easy as squatting. Wanna find your parents in whatever troll-hole they hang a mailbox on? Good lad—I’ve got me a goat who knows every name in Fairyland. When I’m done no one’ll ever guess you spent a silly little summer overseas when you were young. Ain’t good at much, old Chuck, but I’m a good friend.”
Tom and Tam exchanged glances. It was hard enough to say no to Grown-Ups when they weren’t Kings. Scratch hissed a blast of static at the Fairy, whom he had not forgiven.
“What do you want us to help you with?” Tom said, knowing very well that it would be something big, something awful, something too much for him or his wombat or his friend. And he knew he would do it.
“S’easy, kitten. I don’t want to be King anymore, is all.”
CHAPTER XII
