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A bright, piercing bell chimed and a deep, pleasant voice announced: “Now serving number thirty-four.” Overhead, a throng of glowworms rearranged themselves to display a glittering numeral 34 in the air.
A long counter perched at the head of a vast ballroom full of customers, velvet ropes and brass bannisters, buskers playing harps and hurdy-gurdies, stamp sellers in colorful waistcoats calling out their wares like fresh fruit: Vintage Mallows, ten for a Kiss! Commemorative World’s Foul Airmails, no two alike! Black-Mail stamps straight from Fairyland-Below, Still Ripe! A bright blue-and-yellow theatre mask grinned down from the polished teak of the service counter. A long, slow ticker of numbers peeled out of its mouth like the bow-tied tail of a balloon. A little gnome with spiky hair hopped up and ripped one off, grimacing at what must assuredly be a number quite estranged from thirty-four before taking her place in the queue.
“Shall I fetch us a number?” said Hawthorn shyly.
“Certainly not,” replied the Red Wind. “Rules are for those who can’t think of a better way. Imagine! A Changeling waiting in line!”
The Red Wind shuffled in the pockets of her wild ruby gown and came up with a magician’s fan of tickets, each with a merry little number written upon it.
“Let’s see…12? 21? 122? 697? No, no, I know I’ve something in the forties here.”
“Miss Wind,” Hawthorn said as she shuffled through the underside of her breastplate and boots searching for more tickets, “I want to ask you a question, and I want you to answer me seriously and not call me any baby names or make fun of me.”
“Hmm? Oh, of course, my…Hawthorn. And you can call me Red. Formalities irritate the skin and cause nearsightedness, you know.”
“Why did you take me out of Skaldtown? Do you take very many children? Are they all trolls? What is a Changeling?”
Hawthorn was quite certain the Panther of Rough Storms laughed at him.
“That’s rather more than one question. Therefore I think it’s only fair I give you rather more than one set of answers.” She cleared her throat dramatically. “One: Skaldtown is a frightfully dull place with nothing at all to do on a Wednesday night. Two: Goodness, I couldn’t possibly remember. Winds have the beastliest jet lag, you simply can’t imagine. Three: See above. Four: A Changeling is a little bomb dropped by Fairyland upon the human world for fun and profit.”
Up ahead, the glowworms called number thirty-eight, and a throng of young ladies in short black capes bustled forward, smoothing their hair so as to impress the mail.
“I said no making fun,” said Hawthorn.
“One: I was bored. Two: I have been known to spirit a child or two away, I shan’t lie. It is in my nature to Swoop In and Make a Mess of the Garden. Three: Trolls make excellent Changelings as they weigh quite a lot and enjoy violence. Four: A Changeling is the sort of child who climbs out of his crib at night just because he sees something shiny that he wants. If you were not already a Changeling, you would have told me politely that you like bridges and porridge and your father’s snoring and to please be on my way.”
They took their place in line. Everyone towered above Hawthorn—but do not worry, little love! When you are a grown troll no one will tower over so much as your left elbow.
“You said I was sweet and pliable! Was that why you chose me?”
“One: There is a department in the human world entirely devoted to receiving young boys and girls of Fairy extraction so that their supply of a certain kind of tale will never run dry, even when modernity comes and no one can remember what a spindle is. Two: See above. Three: Trolls, being mostly dirt and stone and moss with a bit of blood mixed in, are prime candidates. It’s like sending a piece of Fairyland itself on vacation. It’s much harder to talk a Wyvern into flying about on a Panther. After all, they have their own wings, and besides, they don’t fit very well into a Changeling suit. Might as well try to cram a forest fire into a handbag.” The Red Wind crouched down and touched Hawthorn’s face ever so gently. Her eyes grew large and soft. Tickets fell out of her coat onto the floor all round her. “Four: The mass of Fairyland must remain constant. A Changeling is a deal struck with the second law of thermodynamics. Spit on the palm and shake.”
Hawthorn curled his fists. He tried very hard not to cry.
“Red! Stop it! I just want to know—”
“One! Because you were born in—”
“What’s going to happen to me,” finished Hawthorn, halfway between a whisper and a squeak. “In stories, when someone appears in a cloud of red veils and asks the son of two magicians to go away on an adventure, it’s because he’s the best man for the job, because he’s secretly a prince or has a birthmark in the shape of a train engine, and can invent unsolvable riddles and call the lava from the deeps and defeat the Unicorn Queen of the Electric Mountain, but I don’t think they have any of those things in this human world you keep talking about. I don’t even know that I’m as sweet as all that, if sweet is what you need to survive there. I’m not mean or anything; I know about runes and shapeshifting and I can fix the chimney by talking to it in a winsome way when Mother is busy with her leprechauns, but what I mean to say is: Maybe I won’t make a good Changeling. Maybe you don’t want to tell me what one is because it’s something awful, and anyway I only weigh half a ton, but my father says I’ll grow.”
The Panther turned his heavy jet-black head and looked at Hawthorn with large, solemn, yellow eyes.
“A Changeling,” he growled, “is a Fairy child brought across the border and exchanged for a human child so quickly and secretly that no one knows it’s happened at all. Like sweeping away a tablecloth and leaving all the glasses standing. You go there, the human comes here, and between the both of you the world has such a lot of fun it nearly passes out.”
?
??But what am I meant to do?”
The Panther wrinkled his muzzle. “You don’t have to tell a Changeling to do anything. They do it the way the sun does daytime.”
“Here we are!” the Red Wind crowed. “Yes! Forty-six! We oughtn’t make it too obvious, you know. The best cheat is the one that looks like fair play.”
And in hardly a moment, the glowworms scattered into tiny fireworks and settled back down into a broad, proud number 46.
“NEXT!” boomed a deep, severe voice, which echoed all over the post office. That great bellow blew them straight back into the folk who had silently joined the line behind them. The party in front of them, all severe cheekbones and graceful deer-legs, protested as the Red Wind, along with her cat and her troll, sailed past them toward that tall counter half buried in flurries of paper and clanking machinery.
At the top of the towering teak desk, more like a judge’s bench than a shop counter, loomed an enormous and terrifying creature. It took all of Hawthorn’s strength not to hide behind the Red Wind’s skirts. The thing had one head, and that was well enough, and two arms and two legs, which is a more or less average number in Hawthorn’s experience. But such a plain face! Such a tiny mouth! And no wings or antlers or bits of jewel peeking through the skin. No mad, curving nose, just a snub, button affair stuck onto the middle of the creature’s face. It was a lady-creature. She had long brown hair tied up in a braid around her head, anyway. And spots of rouge on her cheeks. Her hands looked scrubbed and clean, but the troll would eat his own heart if they had ever held a wand or a sword or even a crystal ball. Such things leave marks. Hawthorn himself already had a splendid callus between his thumb and his first finger where his wand (a bone rattle with red ribbon and a silver bell in) had begun already to settle snugly into place.
