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Scratch stepped gingerly in the water of the bog, lifting his long legs out of the water distastefully.
“What is it really?” Hawthorn asked softly, his feet already cold and wet in the muck.
“An empty room with an earthen floor and plain wood walls. The moon is coming in through three windows,” Penny Farthing whispered back.
“How awful,” Tamburlaine breathed.
“Not really,” said Thomas. Why would it be awful? “Fairies make everything out of glamour. It’s as good as wood and stone and mortar to them. Why force some poor soul to spend a life as a bricklayer when you can make a different universe in your parlor every hour on the hour, anything you can think of, with just a wink and a kiss?”
The Fairies burst into the Bog like a flock of wild parrots. They whirled and danced so thick and fast Hawthorn could not tell if there was a thousand or a million of them. They were a wheel of color and sound, their wings glittering, their feet invisible, their laughter like the bonging of bells where no bells should be. Out of the thick of them, Tanaquill came floating, her black-opal wings flared out wider than the most impossible bird, her face streaked with grime and mud and cranberry guts. Yet on her perfect face it looked like the season’s best makeup. Her eyes burned like a wild animal, but when she spoke her voice still hummed and curled round their ears like a happy cat.
“Don’t you all look splendid!” she cried. “And your livestock looks very well fed indeed.”
“If you call a bucket of old scientifick journals a good feeding, and I don’t,” snarled Blunderbuss.
Scratch stayed stonily, stubbornly silent. It was a good weapon when he felt snubbed. His only weapon. He’d had nothing at all, since the stablegirls had not seemed to know, as Tamburlaine did, that a gramophone eats sheet music salad on a vinyl plate, and nothing else will nourish it. Scratch hated the Fairies, all th
e worse because they insisted on dancing with no music that he could hear, which to him seemed much the same as using the best and most comfortable armchair in the library as an outhouse. He stared out of his bell at the Prime Minister of the Fairies and hoped she’d choke.
“Take your places, darlings!” she trilled. “One to each corner, please, there’s a lamb. Chocolates for all afterward, I promise! I’ve even set aside a bit of slow-gin for those special children who do an extra-good job.” She clapped her hands twice and laughed all the way back into the mad throng.
“What’s going to happen?” Tamburlaine trembled.
Thomas Rood squeezed her shoulder. “Nothing, matchstick girl. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
He pulled the sleeping white ferret out of his pocket and tucked it carefully into her hard, wooden palm. “When the music starts, run. Run as fast as you can, over the crags, to the patch of snow with the skating pond in the middle of it. Then wake her up.” He shuffled his feet. “You never know. Maybe the Spinster can do anything we need her to.”
“Tanaquill will notice we’re gone!”
“Not for awhile. Slow-gin’s a bear of a drink. Besides, they don’t even really watch anymore. We’re like poor fellows playing fiddles in a pub while all the patrons try to ignore the racket.”
“But you. What’s going to happen to you?” Hawthorn suddenly could not bear the thought that Thomas, the boy who was himself, himself as he should have been if he had not been the boy he was, might be hurt, might go somewhere he could not and suffer there.
Penny smiled. She touched the tip of Hawthorn’s nose with her finger. Magic, he thought. Just like Gwendolyn. “To us? We’ll do what everyone does. We’ll do what we are. We’re Changelings. We change.”
Penny Farthing and Thomas Rood ran to the near corners of the Bog, dragging their legs through the water and the berries. Hawthorn and Tamburlaine splashed through to the far corners, dodging Fairies, Hawthorn carrying Blunderbuss like a football, Scratch lifting his brass legs delicately as a heron. Wings brushed their faces as they passed; it felt like brushing against fish accidentally when one is swimming in a deep river. They had only just reached the little stone pedestals where they were meant to stand when a broken, disjointed music kicked up. Hawthorn could not see instruments; the song seemed to come out of the cranberries, a song as tart and sour and crimson as they.
Hawthorn began to run. Tam was running beside him, she was—he didn’t look, he just chose to believe he wasn’t leaving her behind. Thomas said run; he ran. Scratch loped beside him, shuddering in the face of the wild, uncouth music. The wet grassland squelched under his feet. The stars overhead bored into his skull and the jewelry on his coat jingled in terrible time to the Fairy waltz.
It was Blunderbuss who looked back. Once she did it, they all had to. They had to see. The wombat stretched her woolen neck round and Hawthorn followed her gaze, trying to run and watch at the same time. Tam was there, just behind him, and she looked, too, though she thought perhaps she didn’t really want to.
Penny Farthing and Thomas Rood were gone. In their places crouched two snarling Panthers, green eyes glowing in the dark. Then the Panthers vanished and they wriggled into two tall, graceful giraffes—then they began to change too fast to stay together. Thomas flashed into a wild horse, Penny a basilisk, then a minotaur, then a boar with bloody tusks. Thomas shrunk down into a beetle, then swelled into a buffalo, a hydra, a griffin, a black donkey. For a moment they were both Wyverns. Then reindeer, then elephants, then two blue lions roaring up at the night.
They could still hear the music as they skittered onto the snow and ice of the pond. What was it really? A party? A secret bookcase? Tamburlaine held the little white ferret out in her hand.
“Hey,” she whispered at it. She tugged a bit at its tail. “Upsie-daisie?”
The ferret’s eyes blinked sleepily open. She yawned. She slithered off Tam’s hand and hopped down onto the ice. She sniffed at it—and then with a ferocious appetite she chewed into the ice, sending up shavings like woodchips from an ax. Around and around she gnawed until there was a hole big enough for a body in the pond. The ferret looked at the hole expectantly.
“Nothing for it,” Hawthorn said. Lights had appeared over the snowy ridge behind them. Voices. The stink of crushed cranberries.
The troll held his enormous nose, jumped into the slushy water—and came out in sunlight as hot as a slap.
CHAPTER XVII
JUMPING BEAN LIFE BY WOMBAT AND MATCHSTICK
In Which Hawthorn Writes a Letter, Tamburlaine Paints a Redcap, Blunderbuss Grows Up, and an Old Friend Pops in, Very Slightly Late
