The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (16 page)

The Famisher's clumsy front feet slid from the roof edge. The whole building trembled from the weight of the body falling down the outside wall.

I hugged myself to the nearest branch with all my might, gasping and gulping and still seeing that snaky neck even with my eyes strained wide. My heart beat in my chest like the footfalls of Godzilla,
CRASH, CRASH, CRASH
. I wanted badly to throw up.

Around me the night was silent as if, while I was having my private battle, the rest of the fight had moved somewhere else or ended, leaving me all alone on the roof without Farfarer. If I stayed where I was, I knew I would pass out and probably fall out of the stupid tree-branch ceiling and break my neck. Then it wouldn't make any difference that I had killed a monster instead of letting it kill me.

Slowly, with fumbling, sweaty hands, I worked my way through the branches down to the lowest ones, until I hung feet first, still sickeningly high above the floor. I forced my mind to picture lots of shavings heaped up right under me. I let go.

My butt and lower back hit something springy that bounced me off onto the floor with a thump: one of the piles of woven tabletops stacked around the edges of the hall had broken my fall. I got up, bruised and breathless.

There was a powerful Famisher-stink in here: heavy-duty licorice. What had Kevin been thinking of when he made them smell like that?
Candy,
stupid, I told myself. I giggled weakly and stood for a minute, making myself breathe despite the smell.

Feeling my way over to one of the windows, I looked out cautiously over the moon-washed landscape. My knees were so wobbly I had to hitch my elbows onto the deep sill of the window to stay upright. Nothing moved in my field of vision, though I saw dark lumps lying here and there in the trampled grass.

I was sweating. Without the wind of the elves' laughter, the night was unexpectedly warm. Also, I was terrified. I had just killed one Famisher, only one, and there were hundreds! Maybe thousands! Each one was as horrible as the one I had managed by luck and desperation to destroy. I shook and cried and felt awful. Good thing it was Kevin, not me, who was the Promised Champion.

The least I could do was find the sword again. I took out the rhinestone rose, held it up and whispered, “Come on, shine a little for me, but not too much, all right?”

A bright, thin beam showed me trampled shavings and long dark stains leading in a direction I had turned away from. I didn't see Farfarfer. Maybe it had turned back into a pocketknife now that it had done its work.

The rose light gleamed suddenly off almond-shaped eyes. I froze.

“Rose Traveler, I have what you seek.”

By squinting hard I could vaguely make out someone sitting against the wall. I inched closer, holding the rose pin out in front of me. The little rhinestones seemed to pick up power. By their glow I saw an elf sitting there, one leg twisted under it. The whole left arm was a mangle of cloth, whatever elves have for blood, and torn muscle. Shining dark moisture smeared the wall where the elf had slid down against it.

In my mind I saw again the Famisher plucking up an elf in its jaws. I forced myself to move toward the injured elf.

My foot nudged something in the shavings—a leather bottle about the size and shape of a canteen, like the bottle Kevin had offered me a drink from on our ride to the Brangle. I imagined, at an earlier point of Prince Kavian's adventure, elves giving him one of their canteens as a gesture. Magical beings are always handing the hero special gifts to help him on his way.

When I picked the bottle up, liquid sloshed inside. I saw the elf's eyes glitter at the sound.

“I wanted that,” the elf murmured. “But I had only the strength to retrieve this.” The good hand opened, and in the palm I saw the pocketknife, folded shut.

I said, “I'll give you the bottle for the knife.”

As soon as I said this, a ferocious thirst almost closed up my throat. But the elf smiled, and I knew we had a bargain. I knelt down, keeping an eye on the elf, and pushed the bottle across the floor.

The elf put down the knife, saying softly to me, “Call it. It will come to you.”

I hesitated: a trick? But I remembered the good weight of the sword in my hands and how it had whipped through the air to save my life. It seemed natural to speak to it: “Farfarer, will you come to me?”

The knife was in my hand so quickly I barely had time to open my fingers to catch hold of it. It flared into the weight and size of its sword-form.

“No,” I whispered, clutching the grip with both hands. “Be small.” At once, it shrank to the cozy dimensions of a pocketknife. The plastic grip felt warm. I tucked the knife away and sealed the pocket flap carefully shut.

“I can't take out the stop,” the elf said, holding up the bottle, “with only one hand.”

I could hear the faint whistling undertone in the elf's shallow breath. I was afraid to go nearer. But we'd been on the same side in this battle. If I had been the one who was wounded, I knew what I would expect from a fellow fighter.

I squatted down beside the wounded elf and worked the stopper out of the bottle. The drink inside smelled of flowers. I closed the elf's slim fingers on the cool, smooth leather.

The elf drank and then inquired politely, “Did you enjoy the battle?”

Too flabbergasted to answer this amazing question, I concentrated on helping to steady the bottle against the perfect Cupid's bow of a mouth for another swallow.

“Why did you only use those string-things against Famishers?” I asked at last. “You people aren't under a vow not to use knives or swords, like Kevin—Kavian—are you?”

The elf swallowed again and panted a little. “We used cords because Famishers can't be killed by any blade until Farfarer sheds the blood of one of their great ones.” An original idea of Kevin's, or something evolved by the Fayre Farre itself? Stupid, anyway.

I was dying of thirst. “What is that stuff ?”

“You can drink,” the elf said. “Our nectars will not harm the Rose Traveler.”

I took a sip. Not the same drink as in Kevin's canteen under the kaley trees, this tasted grassy. I drank some. The elf smiled, making me feel very nervous. Had I just done something fatal?

I stood up. “I have to go,” I said, “and try to find my friends.” I was thinking of Rachel and Claudia, wandering around in this place that now seemed hugely more dangerous and brutal than it had before.

The elf chuckled faintly, and I recognized the tinkly mirth of the crowned one I had thought was female. “They will come to you, in time. And if you linger here—not long, I promise you—you can complete your present errand.”

I didn't have any place to go, actually, not until I knew where Kevin was, or the two girls. And I had no idea where to begin looking for any of them. The drink seemed to have steadied me, making me remember the whole situation, not just my eagerness to get away.

I sat down beside the elf, trying not to groan: I had some new bruises from crashing around at various levels of the Elf Home, and the old sore places from my first ride on a seelim and my roll in the Brangle were still sensitive.

“Complete my errand, how?” I said.

“You brought Farfarer for Kavian Prince,” she said slowly, her eyelids drooping. “He will find you here.”

“Somebody else could find me first,” I said. “Or something.”

“Oh yes,” she said, and her mouth turned up in a cold elvish smile. “That is possible. The brooch you carry signals to Kavian. Farfarer sends its own call. Why do you think the hero-prince has left that weapon in your world so long? The one who carries it here on this side of the gateways draws the angry heart of the Enemy, whose name we do not speak.”

Another common fantasy theme: the one who carries the magic weapon is also magically linked to the bad guy and attracts his attention the way a tall tree attracts lightning.

I must have jumped or made some move toward my pocket because the elf went on, “Be calm, the weapon only draws when it is used.”

I had no intention of using Farfarer again—never had meant to. It had been strictly a matter of survival.

Still, I had a feeling Kevin was not going to be pleased when he showed up: his world, his story, and me flailing around in the middle of it with his magic sword! Maybe this elf would be my witness that I wasn't trying to horn in on Kevin's Promised Champion act or mess things up for him.

An unsettling thought struck me: Wasn't it to get away from the uproar in his own family home that Kevin had made the Fayre Farre in the first place? Yet things were no better here.

I said, “How can Kavian be coming to Elf Home? The Branglemen have got him.”

“Those!” she answered scornfully. “They are animals. They know nothing. Kavian Prince will have escaped them easily. Wait here for him.”

Could this elf be trying to keep me around for some reason of her own? I said, “You're telling me the truth, aren't you? You can't be on Ang—the Enemy's side. You fought the Famishers.”

“Traveler,” the elf said, “we fight Famishers because Famishers kill us when they can, and they do that because it is how they are made. We are made to be pretty and quick and mysterious. Do you know what happens when I die? I have no soul, having been made that way. Death is our ending, or so it is said among my people.”

The calm, light voice was soothing, though the message was not. I felt tired to death. I leaned my back against the wall beside the elf, who went on, “I live among trees because they hide me and they support me, but outside our forests and meadows there is no life for any of us. When our forests burn, we die in the open sunlight. Because we were made that way.”

She paused, shifting around and breathing in a stressed way that meant, I guess, that there wasn't any comfortable position for her. Her good arm came around my shoulders and drew me against her side.

I pulled away.

“Your warmth will keep me living a little longer,” she sighed, “if you are willing.” Ashamed, I sat still.

“We were made, as everything here was made,” the elf was saying dreamily, her breath stirring my hair, “by Kavian Prince himself, whose world this is. Did you think we did not know this? Elves have secret knowledge, that is one of the things that makes us elves; and what more important secret knowledge is there than this?”

I relaxed, awed by the gift of frank speech from this royal creature. It was as if I had earned a touch of the beauty and enchantment of the Fayre Farre, having just had a good serving of its horrors.

“My blood runs out of me,” the elf's voice sighed distantly, “but not my hatred; that I keep. I hate the rules we live under by command of Kavian Prince. I hate this war made to show himself off, meanwhile ensnaring and destroying us. I hate the shallow world he made for us, and I hate the way it alters at his whim, or against it, but always in relation to him.

“So tell him for me when he comes: Farfarer has been wakened, but not by him, and it has tasted evil blood, but not for him, and it has been elf-given, but not to him. Say that Elven Sobragana said it, who heard the waking and saw the blood spilled and did the giving.”

“I'll tell him,” I said; and as she had stopped speaking, I slept.

 

Fourteen

Farfarer

 

 

 

I
WAS TALKING TO SOMEONE
whose face was unclear, complaining that Kevin had kept secret the magic sword's personal name, “Farfarer.” Names are powerful in magic. Apparently he hadn't completely trusted me. It would also have been nice, I complained, if he had bothered to fill me in about elves. Did they mean what they said? Should I trust
them?

“Do you have a choice?” the person said, and I thought it was Cousin Shelly. But just as I thought this with a little surge of surprise and delight, I was dragged awake by somebody shaking me.

“Get up, Amy, wake up!”

“Talking to Shell,” I mumbled, trying to dive back into my dream, but my eyes opened.

Kevin tugged at my arms, cursing under his breath.

I was freezing, and I couldn't move. Something had me pinned in place, as if I had bent double and wedged myself under a heavy table—like the time when I was real little and I got into the kneehole of Dad's desk and panicked, thinking I couldn't get out because I couldn't straighten up.

With Kevin's help, I squirmed free of what seemed to be a wooden statue of the Elf Queen. It was polished brown and smooth except where the scaly bark draped like cloth. The eyes were open and blank.

It wasn't a statue. It was her.

I began shaking all over. “I was talking with her just last night! She said if I waited, you'd come find me.”

“Then she told the truth, for a wonder,” he said.

I peered around, trying to square what I saw now, in this thin dawn light, with last night's chaos. The hall seethed slowly with pale mist. Everywhere tree branches and vines curled in through the windows and snaked along the walls and floor, as if through an ancient ruin overgrown by jungle. A woody brown vine had even wound itself around one leg of the petrified Elf Queen.

“They go back to the forest when they die,” Kevin said, poking the queen with the toe of his boot. She rocked, her undamaged arm sticking out foolishly over the air where my shoulders had been.

I said, “Don't kick her, Kevin.”

“Squeamish?” he said nastily. “Wait till you get outside and see what's left from the fighting.”

“I saw plenty,” I said. “Last night, if it was last night. How could trees grow this fast?”

“Elves don't breed,” he said. “You know where new elves come from? The forest makes them. So the elves make new forest when they die. It all works out.”

I shivered. I hadn't known Elven Sobragana well, but now I felt sorry for her. While I'd slept she had died, if not truly alone then as good as, and become this wooden statue.