“What are you doing down here all this time?” quavered a voice. “You’re not Paula!”
It was the old man, and he had his glasses on. He glared at me from the bottom flight of the fire stairs, clutching the rail with his knobby hands.
I jumped up. “Someone I know used to live here. I came to find something for him that he left,” I said. I was still a little high on being able to tell the truth without a moorim chomping on my head. Besides, maybe the old man would understand. Maybe he was psychic or fey or something.
“You’ll find the police, that’s what you’ll find!” he cried shrilly. “I’ve already called them.”
I bolted for the door to the delivery alley. It opened easily when I hit it with my shoulder, but set off a terrific clanging alarm. Over the noise I could hear the old man yelling, “I knew you weren’t Paula, you didn’t fool me!”
I ran up the block, digging the pin out of my pocket again. The little stones glowed when I turned the pin southward on Central Park West. So I trotted downtown along the dark wall edging the park, holding the pin in one hand and clutching the wrapped knife in my pocket with the other.
Nobody bothered me. Maybe nobody saw me at all. Maybe the pin and the knife, between them, protected me from cops, loungers, dealers, muggers, and the regular people strolling on Central Park West on a mild spring night.
Cheery little lights were strung in the trees around the Tavern-on-the-Green just inside the park at Sixty-sixth Street. The restaurant, a pretty brick cottage with tall glass windows bowed out like the panes of a greenhouse, was always packed with people. Inside I saw waiters hovering over tables crowded with diners, the tiny bulbs of the chandeliers gleaming above them all. Outside, the fat white globes of the tall lamps on the terraces shed a cool glow over white cast-iron tables and chairs.
The pull of the pin was now almost physical. It drew me past the restaurant on a looping pathway. I paused to catch my breath and to take a long last look at all those lights.
Then I hurried along the path over the traffic-roaring Sixty-sixth Street transverse. I ran down a steep slope, to an arch that had no name on any map. It was a simple stone bridge carrying a footpath into the park at a place where the park itself lies much lower than street level.
No telling who or what I would find waiting for me on the other side of this arch, I thought. I tucked the rose pin back into my pocket and sealed it in.
Time to go.
But I hesitated, listening to the traffic roar along the park wall and to the silence inside the arch over the coal black bridle path.
Suddenly I was deathly scared, for a city kid’s normal reasons: somebody of my own world—some thief or mugger or unwelcoming street person—might be lurking inside that archway. With the glowing pin tucked away in one pocket and the wrapped “sword” in the other, I felt charged with energy, but something in the real world might keep me from bringing Kevin what I had found.
Well, if I just stood there, something certainly would—my own panic if nothing else! I walked forward with the biggest, most confident stride I could muster, caught my foot on something, and stumbled against the broken drinking fountain by the arch.
I more or less fell through the cold, dividing curtain of air into Kevin’s country.
Twelve
The Rose Traveler
BEHIND ME WATER SPLASHED. Turning, I saw a sparkling fountain shaped like a fish jumping in a stone basin, in place of the drinking fountain.
Here, it was just dusk. On a gentle slope up ahead of me a crowd of people carried flickering lights. Horns hooted mournfully in the background. No doubt about it, I was once again in the Fayre Farre breathing Kevin’s air, feeling the stir of the sunset breezes of his world. My heart thudded.
With quiet movement all around me, I walked forward into a broad meadow.
Up ahead where the moving lights led, a mansion crowned a slight rise in the land. Long flags, streamers really, flew from its towers. It wasn’t hard to recognize the roofline of the Tavern-on-the-Green, but with all its pointed gables multiplied and enlarged.
A figure in a swirly dress brushed by me, stopped, and pointed at me. “The Rose Traveler!” she cried in a sort of trilling whoop. “See, the Rose Traveler!”
I looked down and saw the faint glow of the rhinestones shining right through the fabric of my jacket pocket. I tore the pocket open and put my hand inside to hide the glow with my fingers.
Way too late; strangers closed around me in a dense pattern of moving lights and thin trails of smoke. They were all young looking, slim, and dressed in odd costumes—snug vests over full-sleeved shirts, tight pants and boots or skirts ending in artful tatters—in shades of gold and green. There was a strong piney scent in the air, as if all these people wore tree sap for perfume.
I had a moment of panic as they pressed in around me and more or less carried me with them, singing a song full of slip-sliding harmonies. There was a wild gleaming about them, where the candlelight touched their singing mouths and their flashing, almond-shaped eyes, that made me think of something not human—wonderful androids, maybe, every one of them beautiful, sparkling, and creepily unreal.
I almost longed for the dusty Branglefolk.
And yet I felt a deep, hungry feeling pulling at my heart, drawing me toward this part of the Fayre Farre—the graceful, dusky beauty of it. I was glad to have the solidity of the rose pin in one pocket and the weight of Kevin’s knife in another to hold me down to earth and remind me of what I was doing here.
I turned to the person nearest me and asked casually, “Is Kevin here?”
She shook her head. “Kavian Prince is awaited.”
Oh, boy, I had hit the language thing at last. That made me feel more solidly surrounded by Kevin’s world than anything else.
“I’m also looking for two girls,” I added, “one black-haired and chubby and one with long blonde hair?”
“No one gathers at Elf Home but elvenfolk,” she said, tossing her head with haughty amusement.
Elves! Now I saw the pattern: these almond-eyed folk were Kevin’s elves, the Branglemen were his version of dwarves, and the Famishers were his horrible monsters. Somewhere there were trolls and giants, too, in whatever form his imagination had cast them. I was doing okay tonight, so far: better elves than trolls.
I hoped Rachel and Claudia were doing well, wherever they were. What a shock this place must be to them, coming into it for the first time!
If the moorim had gotten them in. I wished I knew where they were, and whether it was actually going to be Two Musketeers and Another Musketeer and Kevin, or just Kevin and me, period, against the White One.
The mansion had a set of tall wooden doors with twisty, vinelike carvings all over them. The doors swung wide open and everybody, with me in the middle, crowded into a hall with a gallery running all around above it. It was nothing like the real Tavern, which is loaded with stained glass, etched mirrors, and wood paneling. They don’t do Corner Kids there.
Instead of chandeliers of miniature light bulbs, torches burned. Banks of green branches drooped off the wall sconces and the gallery railing, and pine shavings crunched under foot. It was like a room made of forest.
I found that I was squinting, though the torches didn’t seem to be giving off much smoke. The atmosphere was just peculiar, sort of blurry as if with heat-ripples—yet it felt heavy and cold. In the midst of that crowd I was shivering.
Around the edges of the hall I saw tables with circular tops made of woven slats. Some of these tables had been taken apart and the tops stacked by the walls to make space in the middle of the hall where the crowd gathered, as if they had come to dance.
The floor at the back of the hall rose in a sort of mound draped in rugs of live turf, pale green and gold. On top of the mound, on seats cut into live trees growing up into the ceiling, sat two green-skinned people in long robes, with circlets of leaves on their heads like crowns.
The crowd fell back and left me to walk up t
o the dais on my own. I would have paid money for a glimpse of a familiar face just then—Rachel, Kevin, Claudia, even Singer or Scarface—but there were none.
One of the crowned people stood up as I came near. He—I think it was a he, though the form was straight and sexless as a little child’s and the wheat-gold hair hung almost to the waist—lifted his hand in a theatrical gesture that on him looked perfectly natural. The whole feeling was so stagey and pretty—it was like a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream I had seen at the theater in the park last summer.
Only this was not theater. It just had some of the same feel. The current of chilliness in the place made my skin prickle. I couldn’t wait to get rid of the sword, find the girls if they were around, and get us all out of there.
The standing one spoke to me in a sweet voice. “Is it true that you have the crystal rose?”
Rhinestones at home, crystals here.
They were all staring at me expectantly. Was I supposed to bow or something? I didn’t think I could do that convincingly, but better not to be too casual, either. These weren’t Shakespeare’s elves or Santa’s elves, they were Kevin’s elves, which meant I’d better watch my step.
“I do carry the rose,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster; it felt important to rise to the level that Kevin’s imagination had set. “I’ve come to deliver something to, er, Prince Kavian. Is he among you?” I could see he wasn’t, but it seemed polite to ask.
If they did know where to find Kevin, they didn’t rush to let me in on the secret. Nobody said a word—no whispers, no elf nudging the elf next to him and asking what did the stranger say, huh, what did she say?
“She traveled also with one of the Oldest,” observed the other crowned person after a while, pointing at my head with a wand of what looked like braided straw. She looked female only because of the redness of her lips.
Oldest? Did she mean the moorim? But it was gone, so how could she tell? Did it leave tracks? I resisted an impulse to reach up and pat my hair. Elves just know stuff, it’s how they are, I told myself.
I brushed my lower left pocket for the reassuring bulk of the knife in there. Could elves lift something from that pocket without the noise of velcro ripping open? Maybe, but the knife was where I’d put it.
I braced my shoulders and went ahead on nerve. It was all I had. “I’d like to make this delivery as soon as I can, being only a visitor here. So if you can tell me where to find Kavian—?”
“He is expected,” the Elf King said, and sat down again. Nobody else moved or spoke. They looked at me. So what was I supposed to do now? I cleared my throat. I was thirsty.
“Could somebody tell me when he’s supposed to arrive?” I asked. “And there are a couple of other visitors around somewhere, friends of mine—”
The second crowned person laughed, a chilly little clinking sound like what happens when you drop a frying pan into the sink on top of a glass that you didn’t notice was in there. “A veritable inrush of outsiders, the omen we have expected. You bring more than the treasure Kavian Prince commissioned you to bring, Rose Traveler.”
What did that mean? Before I could even decide to ask, more horns sounded, this time a sort of bugle-call of high, spiky notes that I didn’t need to have interpreted. It was an alarm.
“Famishers!” I heard distant shouts. “Famishers are coming!”
The soft-breeze sound in the hall suddenly intensified into a gale-like rushing; the elves were laughing. The two crowned ones stood up again. One said, “We will take your burden and complete your errand. Give us Farfarer.”
Farfarer? As I stood there, confused, it came to me like a wave breaking: what is always true about magic swords? They have names. What I had in my velcro-sealed pocket was a Swiss Army knife named Farfarer. Oh, brother.
And these green people wanted it.
There must have been more than a hundred elves in the hall, packed into the strange, wavery air and laughing softly like the wind before a storm. They made no threatening moves but watched me with interest.
“Farfarer is for Kavian only,” I said as firmly as I could.
“We will see that he gets it,” the other crowned person said.
But she wasn’t wearing a moorim, was she?
“Give it to us,” the Elf King said. “Farfarer brings dangers with it that are alien to you. If we relieve you of this burden, many troubles will be diverted from you and your life will be filled with serenity and joy.”
The horn-call warning of the Famishers sounded again, closer. I wavered, twitching and sweating with nerves. Enemies hounded Kevin across his own secret country. The Farsword was his one hope, and I didn’t like the way the lady elf had referred to it as “treasure.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll give it to him myself, thanks.”
Immediately everybody began moving, like a flickering of leaves blown in a wind and just as hard to follow. You could barely tell one of them from another when they stood still, but now it was like the middle of a windstorm under the park trees in autumn.
The candles went out almost all at once. The torches on the walls streamed and smoked and died. I was left standing in shimmering darkness with the sensation of a huge crowd moving very quickly all around me. Inside, the hollow sound of a cold wind rushed around and around us within the walls of Elf Home.
Outside I could hear the horns howling. Behind that came the high, hungry squeals of the Famishers, closing in. Which way to run in the blackness? Where to hide in this whirlpool of elves?
The gallery, I thought. You don’t know what direction to take, so go up.
I dashed straight ahead into the darkness. With gusty laughter, forms that I sensed rather than felt seemed to snatch themselves out of the air in front of me just in time to avoid collisions. I almost lost my balance, flinching and swerving, in fear of being hit in passing or being rushed for the Farsword.
In six good strides I felt the rise of the dais under my feet, and then I barked my shin on the edge of one of the twisted-tree thrones. Grabbing the trunk of the thing and bracing the soles of my running shoes on the seat, I did my best to swarm up into the branches.
I thought the tree would take me onto the balcony. Instead I found myself climbing into what felt like long, dry, grassy leaves packed close in layers spreading out from the trunk. Then I was outside on a cold night with a huge moon blazing in the blackness overhead.
My arm muscles burned with the strain of the climb, and my shin ached where I’d hit it on the seat edge. From my perch in the wide, flat spread of branches that roofed the hall, I looked down on the massacre outside the walls.
The moonlight was so bright that the racing figures below cast shadows on the pale grass. What looked like a hundred Famishers galloped around with their tusks flashing and their snaky necks weaving as they snatched at the elves running among them. Over everything blew the chilly breeze of the elves’ laughter.
I swear they were laughing even as the round, fanged mouths of the Famishers chomped them like celery. The elves ran like little kids, on their toes. One dodged a Famisher and then somehow, quick as light, swung up on its shaggy back and hung on. I saw a flicker of motion as the elf slung a thin rope across in front of the monster’s throat, catching the free end in the other hand and giving a hard twist. The Famisher fell, turning its head back on its snaky neck so its round, toothy mouth could gnash at the elf.
A skirted elf rode a Famisher right below me, and I saw her arms flex hard. Black blood sprayed out from the front of the Famisher’s neck where the cord bit, and down the creature went in a tangle of knobby legs. But another running Famisher veered alongside and plucked the elf off with a crunching sound. I covered my ears with my hands.
The elf’s face was turned toward me, clear in the moonlight—beautiful, open, looking up at me without expression. The arm the elf could use twisted to stab stiff fingers at the Famisher’s eye—
My stomach heaved.
The Famisher squealed and sh
ook its head hard, and the elf dropped to the ground, a limp clutter of crooked limbs. The Famisher began running in circles. It could only see out of one eye now.
From every side came ugly noises—thudding steps, sharp cries, gurgling squeals. I kept seeing things I didn’t want to see.
A line of thirty or so Famishers came thundering toward the wall below me, chasing a dozen elves before them. The slower elves were grabbed, hiked in the air, and thrown away or gulped down the Famishers’ huge, round maws. But suddenly all the elves spun around and dashed back among the monsters. They dodged the snaking Famisher heads and jumped onto the beasts’ shoulders, trying to use their deadly cords.
They crashed against the wall below me in a churning mob, Famishers letting out these piercing screams that could have expressed either pain or triumph. I saw two elves actually running over them from one back to another, like dancers. Famishers thrashed against the walls, falling or trying to scrape the deadly riders off their backs. Right below me, Famishers tossed away mangled elves, or shook them off their huge shoulders, or were themselves choked down, lying where they fell.
Bugle-calls rang out way off to one side. Trampling and squealing, the remaining Famishers all lurched off in that direction.
The wind softened. The elves weren’t laughing now.
Nothing moved on my side of the building anymore except two Famishers that came rooting around under the windows below me with their big round faces, like monster sunflowers. I thought of them getting inside and searching upward with those horrible heads in the dark, and maybe sniffing me out or spotting my feet or the scuffs I had left on the tree. Who knew what they could see or smell, even in the pitch dark inside Elf Home?
As quietly as I could, I edged farther out in the tree ceiling until I was in the eaves, where the edge of the roof hung over the walls. From there I could jump down and try to get away, provided I didn’t break a leg when I landed. According to my memory of the map in Claudia’s book, the Dalehead Arch (the closest unused one to the Tavern-on-the-Green) must be around here somewhere.