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“Psst,” interrupted a little voice. One of the Changelings that had been playing with green fire outside Bespoke’s shop whispered at them from an alley. She had warm brown eyes and red hair and wore fifty or sixty paisley cravats tied into a long scarf that turned into a dress somewhere along the way.
“I know,” she said. “I know where you can find the Spinster. Give me something nice and I’ll tell you.”
“We don’t have anything,” Tom sighed.
But Scratch leapt forward, eager to please, to fix what he could fix. His crank spun and his sky-blue voice played softly:
Hush little baby, don’t say a word
Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…
“Oh, that is nice!” cried the redheaded girl, clapping her hands. “Come on, then!” She took up Tamburlaine’s wooden hand in hers.
“Where are we going?” said Tam shyly.
“Don’t worry. I’m your friend. You’re one of us.” She glanced down at their shoes. “Sort of, anyway. So I can show you our secrets. I have to, actually. It’d be cruel to let Changelings loose in the city all alone. Like letting puppies play in a fox den. We wouldn’t do that to you. I stayed to collect you once you had your anchors.” The shoes, again. The urchin was wearing rose-colored shoes not so different from theirs, though hers looked painfully tight, as though she’d long ago outgrown them. “Come on! Would it mean anything if I told you where I was taking you? I could say we’re headed to Atlantis by way of Interstate 5 and that’d make as much sense as anything. I’m taking you to friends.” She laughed a little. “You know what a friend is, right?”
“What’s your name?” Tom Thorn asked, determined to get something out of her before they dashed off with another stranger.
“Penny,” she said, and gave them a brilliant, dazzling smile. “Penny Farthing, at your service.”
INTERLUDE
THE GIRL WHO LOST OMAHA
In Which Events Have Consequences
Far away from Pandemonium, a woman is crying. Her name is Susan Jane. It’s a very Grown-Up name, and she’s never liked it very much, but then, Susan Jane is a Grown-Up. I’ve not told you her name before now because most children who are not secretly trolls do not call their parents by their Grown-Up names. But you have met her before.
Susan Jane’s sister and her husband make tea and hold on to her and then swap places. Their eyes are so red, poor dears.
“What’s happened to her? Where can she have gone? It’s been three days—where is my little girl? How can she just disappear like that? Just—gone one morning like the sun erased her?” Susan whispers. Her dog, a small, amiable soul who doesn’t know how to make a single thing better but won’t stop trying, licks her limp hands.
“She’ll come home, darling,” whispers her husband, who is called Owen. “She has to. She’s so clever, you know. She’s all right. Somewhere, she’s all right. I came home, after all, against the odds. Remember?”
Susan Jane reaches out for her sister. Their dark eyes lock, the same eyes. The late afternoon Nebraska sun peeks in to see if it can be of any use.
“Oh, Margaret. Tell me September will find her way back to us. Tell me and I’ll believe it.”
Aunt Margaret drinks her tea. She can’t bring herself to answer.
It’s not always such fun, being a narrator. We must stand by and say nothing so very often, even when we know the very thing that would dry every eye and wake up the house again.
I’ll put a new kettle on for all of us. Hold tight, Susan Jane. Don’t cry, Owen. Hush, now.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CHANGELING ROOM
In Which Tom Thorn Meets a Certain Someone, Finds a Secret Hideout, and Suffers a Calamity of the Foot
Penny Farthing led them through corkscrew streets the color of pumpkins and closes where tassels sprouted up in the dark like mushrooms. They ran past doors boarded up with bolts of sailcloth and windows both broken and whole. No one looked at them as they ran. Everyone seemed to try very hard not to look, in fact. A lady Fairy with long black wings spattered with colors like an opal whipped her head toward them once, and followed them with a hungry glare, but did not come near. They came nearer and nearer to the center of the city. Penny did not falter once, turning this way and that without once stopping to get her bearings. Finally, she brought them up short in a tiny dead-end cotton alley. The service doors of a little hotel would have emptied onto the pillowstones of the street, but they’d been covered over, rather sloppily, with taffeta bricks. A funny brass stump rose up in the middle of the street, a bit like a fire hydrant. It had big satin rope hoops hanging from it and said TIE UP HERE on its brass cap. An old nag horse with white fur and a black mane had been lashed to the hitching post and left blinking sleepily in the sun.
“All trails lead to ice-cold Coca-Cola,” Penny whispered. From within the brass hydrant a voice whispered back:
“Are your whiskers, when you wake, thicker than a two bit-shake? Burma-Shave!”
Penny Farthing grinned again and, still holding on to Tam’s hand, jumped up into the air—and straight into the ear of the old nag. Somehow, when Penny jumped, the ear got ever so much bigger, as big as a door, and before they could wonder at it, they were through, and standing not inside a horse, but in a cozy little room.
