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“Then that’s what’s to talk about?” Thomas shrugged. “We’d better get ourselves powdered for the Bog tonight. Our room’s a patch of desert just over that rise. Servants’ quarters. It has a palm tree and a tent and some nice stars over it. Not bad. I’ve slept in worse.”
“What do you mean that’s what’s to talk about?” Tamburlaine said, narrowing her eyes. “There’s rather a lot to talk about.”
“There’s nothing to talk about because you can stop looking.” Thomas Rood was already up and over the edge of the gully, heading for a low, shadowy hill. “Have you ever met a Redcap? You know why they’re called Redcaps in the first place?” Hawthorne scrambled after his other half. Redcaps! That boy had seen Redcaps! And murder
wives too, probably! “They don’t get those hats red with beet juice, they soak them in blood. They eat hearts. Hearts. It’s disgusting.” Rood went on, hardly even out of breath. “A Redcap is a blood tornado with a bonnet on. They tried to eat the Spinster when she started meddling with the Fairies’ business, trying her old curses on them, making all sorts of trouble. Tanaquill told them to have her for a midnight snack, but old Spinny was too quick for them. Redcaps don’t like taking orders anyway. So they’ve got her locked up, guarded with a fearsome, fire-breathing something-or-other and a loyal warrior who never sleeps. Pretty standard situation when you poke at Fairies with all ten fingers. But that was ages ago. Everybody thinks the Spinster can do whatever they can’t do themselves. We’re hungry! Oh, have you heard? The Spinster can spin gold into wheat. We’re sick to death of Fairies? Well, the Spinster can kill ten of them by blinking. Poor old cow. I think she’s just a sad old woman who’d like to see the sky again. But she won’t. Not ever. Fairyland is like that sometimes. It just…doesn’t play nice.”
They climbed up over the ridge. A little round patch of golden-orange desert stretched out below them. A camel with three humps and blue fur munched on the fronds of a small palm tree. A tent of rich tapestries waited for them. Thomas Rood ran down the hill and jumped up to grab coconuts off the palm tree. The camel spat.
“Crack it open on the ground,” he urged them.
Tam smashed hers hard against the rocky desert floor. Out spilled a hunk of moist dark bread, a rind of cheese, a flask of water, and three peppermints. Hawthorn gave his a good whack: a leg of chicken, black grapes, cold cider, and a pot of gravy.
“We’re going to try to get to her anyway,” Tamburlaine said, looking at her meal. How quickly she’d stopped being surprised at strange things like this. “Even if we hadn’t promised, even if we didn’t get a thing out of it, how can anyone let a nice old granny rot away like that? It’s supposed to be good here. Better here. This is supposed to be the place where if a maiden is stuck in a prison, by god, you go and get her out. That’s the whole point of having a Fairyland as far as I’m concerned. Fairyland is the place where nobody is left to their fate. Where you can always be rescued. And rescue someone who needs it. And if it isn’t, I think we ought to make it that way. Tamburlaine—the real Tamburlaine, the one I’m named after—was a great King, you know. Christopher Marlowe wrote a play about him. He kept the Emperor of Turkey in a cage. Well, I turned a bedroom into forest. I bet we can make Fairyland a Fairyland. And no cages for anyone.”
Tam seemed to suddenly realize that she’d said more in a go than she had since they leapt through the wall and clammed up. Thomas Rood stared at her with his big gray eyes. Big gray eyes Hawthorn had had not so long ago.
“You have storybooks in your world,” he said. “Storybooks with stories about us in them. Changelings and things. Right?”
Tamburlaine nodded.
“Is that what Fairyland is like, in those books?”
“Not really,” she admitted. “But sometimes. There’s usually a lot of cutting off toes and dancing to death before everything gets right.”
“There’s four of us, a wombat, and a gramophone. That’s enough for anything, I should think,” Hawthorn said. He put his huge hand on Tamburlaine’s knee. An amethyst glowed in the pad of his thumb. Huh, he thought, hadn’t noticed that. Her knee was warm.
“I’ve stolen some things,” Thomas Rood said slowly. “Nothing as big as a Spinster.”
“But you know how to get onto the Cellar Steppes.” Penny cracked her own coconut and looked very pleased with herself. “As soon as I saw the Office address I knew Pandemonium was setting a nice fat meal for us. Tanaquill always lets you bring up slow-gin and cornflower champagne for the Bog. I bet she already gave you the key.”
Thomas Rood pulled a sleeping ferret out of his pocket. It curled up contentedly in his palm, snoring lightly, its little pink nose tucked into its white tail.
“But how does that help?” Hawthorn scratched his mossy hair. “Does your pet know where the Redcaps live?”
“Fairy Cellars all know each other socially,” Thomas explained. “There’s not really just the one per house. They’re all connected together like a big old octopus sleeping under all the Fairy mansions. They talk to each other and gossip and trade vintages and pickles and hoard potatoes. When the Fairies have their balls, you have to bring up the gin and the champagne and the jellies and the rum right away because the Cellars run off from the houses and hold their own dances outside the city. Rolling oak barrels and copper pipes back and forth like toes tapping. It’s very odd. So, you know, if you can get into one Cellar, you can get into all of them, except not, because they don’t look like Cellars any more than laundry looks like a moose. They look like a wild Steppe, going on forever and ever. And there’s Scythians on it. And once I saw a manticore. And remember the part about the fire-breathing guardian? If all you needed was a key, the Spinster would be sitting pretty in the Briary by now. Cellars are jealous; they hide all the water and the wine under glamours even we can’t peer through. We’ll die of thirst, or Scythian, or manticore. Or just get set on fire. That’s likely the best we could hope for, being set on fire.”
“Then what’s there to talk about?” grinned Tamburlaine.
“Lots, really,” Thomas Rood sighed. He kicked the golden sand at his feet.
“During the Bog, as soon as we can slip away,” Hawthorn said eagerly.
Penny and Thomas Rood clammed up. They looked pleadingly at each other, and then at the ground, daring the other to speak first. Penny did it, in the end. “Oh…no…no, Hawthorn. We can’t slip away. That’s the whole point. If we slip away, the Bog is over. The Bog is for us.”
Thomas Rood lifted the flap of the tapestry tent. Four suits of clothes lay waiting for them on four bedrolls.
“What’s a wombat?” Thomas Rood asked suddenly.
They presented themselves as ordered at quarter past nine at the Cranberry Bog. A wide, crystal-dark lake flowed over the land, stars spangling in the water like chandeliers. Bright scarlet cranberries floated by the thousands, as lush and vivid as jeweled party balloons. Tiny diamond fish with fluttery veil-fins leapt out of the water and dove back down again at graceful, elegant intervals.
Fairies cavorted everywhere. They splashed in the Bog, their fine gowns and suits splattered with midnight mud. They scooped up cranberries to throw at one another, shrieking laughter, drawing stripes on their faces in the muck, diving into each other’s arms, whirling up to the starry sky and crashing back down in the water all tangled together. The ladies’ hair was nothing but lake-weed and crushed cranberries and that same inky black mud, but they wore it all like Parisian models.
Hawthorn and Tamburlaine wore the clothes that had been laid out in the desert tent for them, just the same as Penny’s and Thomas’s. The clothes were thin paper, barely thicker than newsprint, printed with pleasant farm scenes, as though someone had thought they might as well make an effort. It doesn’t matter what they’re made of, Penny had said darkly. They’re going to rip apart either way. Why waste good wool?
Scratch and Blunderbuss had been allowed to join them—just this first time, Madame Tanaquill had relented. Blunderbuss idly chewed a corner of Hawthorn’s suit. It had a shepherdess on it.
“Never. Again.” Blunderbuss locked eyes with each of them in turn, so she could be sure she was understood. “No stables. No barns or petting zoos or pastures or nothing like that. Not for Scratch, either. We’re not toys.” She spat the last word so bitterly Hawthorn could not help but feel ashamed at all the times he had squashed and folded her in half to make a better pillow. She winked her brass eye at Thomas Rood. “A wombat is me, funny face. Aren’t I grand?”
