The Kingdom of Kevin Malone

  Dreading what I would see—not, please not, the skeletal horror that brought me here—I opened my sticky, smarting eyes. I lay in a small bare room with no roof under a starlit sky. A dark flag stirred overhead on a pole, like a huge, sleepy bat stretching and curling up again. That was the source of the flapping noise.

  I wasn’t alone. Someone sat in a corner where two walls met, bent over with his head on his knees.

  “Kevin,” I whispered. He didn’t move. “Kevin, is that you? Where are we?”

  He said drearily, “Sky Castle on the Black Cliffs. It’s supposed to be a fort against evil, but it’s his place now. He’s taken us prisoner, and I have nothing to fight him with.”

  I saw starlight twinkling in at four small windows, one in each wall. Sky Castle? Were we floating in the sky? Though all my stiff muscles protested, I got up and wobbled over to look out of the single little doorway.

  Our cell, if you could call a roofless room that, was perched on a mountaintop. Directly ahead of me I sensed empty space. Far below spread land still hidden in night and edged with distant glints of water. From down there came hints of violent activity—a glimpse of movement by torchlight, faint shouts, and the ring of metal hitting metal.

  My weary body tightened in terror, but my heart jumped with hope.

  “There’s a battle going on down there,” I said. “It’s not over yet, Kevin! Maybe the White One won’t win.”

  “He can’t lose to anyone but Kavian,” Kevin answered dully, “but the Promised Champion without Farfarer is helpless.”

  Did the Branglemen’s prophecy say that? I couldn’t remember a word of it now. “Where’s that . . . that thing gone, anyway? If nobody’s watching us, we can run—”

  Kevin lifted his head. “Run where? It’s brought us to North Peak. There’s all of the North Isle and the Sea of Sandigrim between us and safety, and nothing farther north but wilderness and ocean. We’re prisoners here while the White One’s forces fight off the Armies of the Free. He’ll push them back to Sandigrim shore and wipe them out, while I sit here empty-handed.”

  I dragged into mental focus the park map I’d tried to memorize. The only building in the north end was a tiny blockhouse left over from the American Revolution. The rebel colonists had fortified the cliffs in case the British attacked from the Harlem flats, which lay due north across 110th Street.

  The Blockhouse itself was in a wild and woodsy part of the park that was supposed to be particularly dangerous—a haunt of drug dealers, not dragons. I’d gone there on a field trip with my class.

  Now Kevin and I were in the Blockhouse, in pretty much its actual Central Park form. The thick walls were made of mortared stones the size of grapefruits, and the window frames flared inward to shelter sharpshooters. Inside was nothing but a raised circular pedestal for the central flagpole. From the little doorway where I stood, a narrow flight of concrete steps led down to bare rock below.

  To the north the summit fell away in steep cliffs. Southeast, around the corner from the single doorway, a gentler grade ran down to a patch of woods, crisscrossed with paved pathways linking these heights with the rest of the park.

  I ducked through the doorway and tiptoed down the steps. My reaching foot touched stone without a sound, but horribly familiar pale shapes started up in front of me, gleaming white where their ragged clothes streamed in the wind. Their heavy, burned-bone stench made me dizzy.

  The flying horror had sorted itself back into the forms of many skeleton men. They stood guard, hemming us in. A faint whisper of voices came from them, blurred and fretful, with a clicking, grinding undertone of bone on bone.

  I could see woods beyond them, but no way in the world was I going to try to pass those Bone Men. I scrambled back into the Blockhouse.

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” I said.

  Kevin laughed despairingly. “Dummy. You think magic means you always win?”

  “Of course not, not when other people have magic, too,” I said. “But we’ve got to keep trying. Maybe we have more going for us than you think.”

  “Pah!” Kevin spat. “That’s how much you know about it!”

  “All right,” I said, “I’ve never made a real world. Compared to you I’m an ignorant jerk, Kevin. So enlighten me. Magic means losing, is that what you’re going to tell me out of your infinitely superior wisdom?”

  “It means you think you’re safe in your very own place,” he said in a grieving tone. “The place you slip off to when the old man staggers in pissed to the eyes and in a hitting mood, see. He can crack your bones, but your heart comes here, where the strength is all in your own arm and the luck of the country favors you because it’s your country. And only you know the way to it: Glen Span, Springbanks, Huddlestone, Winterdale—" He chanted the names of the arches so softly that I could barely hear him through the growing uproar from below and the closer, restless sounds of the watchful Bone Men.

  “Only your own magic twists around and attacks you,” Kevin said savagely. “And things you meant as tests become great monsters. Your soldiers die fighting for you, and your sword gets busted, and you get caught with a fool of a girl, waiting for your enemy to smash you. So in the end he wins.”

  “Kevin, your father’s dead,” I said. “You told me that.”

  Kevin stretched his legs out and began rubbing his right knee, as if massaging stiffness out of some old injury. “Did I? I don’t remember telling you. He got into a barroom fight with too many other guys.”

  A horrible, ear-splitting shriek from the battle below drowned him out. I covered my ears.

  Kevin grinned sourly. “That was a Famisher’s death scream. Now that Farfarer has drunk Famisher blood—thanks to you, not to me—the fighters of the Free Armies can use bladed weapons against them, too. It won’t do them any good, though, not against the White One. Not without me.”

  The sky was turning pearly gray, and I felt the chill in the air that comes before sunrise. Kevin had terrified me all over again with his dreary certainty of disaster.

  “When the sun comes up,” I asked, “will the Bone Men still walk?”

  “Yes,” he said. “In the holdings of the White One they don’t need the cover of dark. They’ll keep us here till he comes and takes the seedstone off me and destroys it like he’s destroyed all the other magic crystals in the Fayre Farre.”

  “For crying out loud, quit whining!” I yelled. “You’re scaring yourself and the whole Fayre Farre to death. If you’d stop moaning and groaning, maybe you could concentrate on getting this place back under control. It’s your world, Kevin!”

  “There’s nothing that’s mine anymore,” he said. “He always takes what he wants, even here in the Fayre Farre. Even here.”

  He hugged his legs and rocked.

  “Okay,” I said furiously. “Leave it to me, then. Let a girl save your neck. You give up. I’ll fight.”

  I ran to one of the windows and yelled out, “Farfarer, come to your master’s hand!”

  “Don’t,” Kevin said.

  “Then you call the sword,” I said.

  He groaned. “God, girls are so stupid!”

  “Listen,” I said, “if the sword comes to the sound of my voice only, it’ll still be my sword, not yours.” Did that make sense? As much as anything in the Fayre Farre did, I guess. “Call the sword with me.”

  “It’s no use.” He got up slowly, like an arthritic old man. “It’s too far. I’m sorry. I wish I’d done all this better.”

  “Sorry!” I squawked, thinking furiously. If Kevin was apologizing, we must really be doomed.

  He turned away and pulled his fist back to punch the wall. I grabbed his arm. He shoved me away.

  “Kevin!” I said, “before you do something incredibly stupid, tell me one thing. What kind of magic works with swords here? What kind of magic do the sword makers use?”

  He stood still, throwing off violence and despair like a radiator throws off heat. “Fire,” he said finally. ??
?Oil, sometimes: the things a blade is forged in.”

  “What else?” I said. “Come on, what else?”

  “Blood,” he said. “What it’s forged for.”

  Blood. Naturally.

  I dug out the rhinestone pin and, without taking time to think about it, jabbed the sharp end into my palm. It hurt. I swore.

  “What are you doing?” Kevin said, grabbing at me.

  I dodged him and ran to the nearest window and slapped my smarting, bloody hand down on the sill. “Farfarer!” I shouted. “Come!”

  Down below, the land gleamed faintly in predawn light: forested hills, distant ruins, ocean beyond. The North Isle, the White One’s country, slowly showed itself.

  At the fourth window, I shouted to the broken sword. Shadowy figures sped up the bare slope of rock toward us. The Bone Men surged together in clattering alarm—too late. Two people darted through a gap in their line and scrambled up the steps into the Blockhouse. Someone flung her arms around my neck—solid, fleshy arms—and squealed in my ear, “God, Amy, are you okay?”

  “Claudia? Where did you come from?”

  “Prince Kavian,” Rachel announced, “we have something that belongs to you.”

  Claudia pulled off her doggie purse and upended it. The moorim hung on inside the bag, but a little heap of junk fell out into Claudia’s palm. It took me a minute to recognize the fragments of the pocketknife.

  Kevin groaned. “The Farsword! But look at it!” He said it as if he hardly remembered that he was the one who had smashed it.

  Rachel sank into a crouch in the doorway, looking out. “Whoo!” she said, “that was close! We used the secret stair up the cliff to this place. My little brothers discovered it last year in the real park.”

  Kevin said, “What secret stair? I never put a secret stair here!”

  Rachel grinned. She looked high and fierce, with her blonde hair in a wild and dirty tangle on her shoulders. “Well, somebody did.”

  I glanced at Kevin. “An escape route for the White One? Just in case?”

  “He’d have set Bone Men to guard it,” he said.

  “Maybe he did,” Rachel said, “but they forgot. I bet it’s hard to think of everything when there’s nothing in your skull but some old dirt.”

  “It’s been so exciting,” Claudia gushed. “The moorim led us to the Brangle, and the Branglefolk loaned us a boat that went through this secret water-passage underground.” A tunnel, I thought, another of the park transverses, probably. “Amy, you should have been there. These incredible creatures pulled us right across this ocean, they ran along the bottom and towed us so fast. Then the sword heard you calling—”

  “How did you get the pieces?” I asked, astonished. “We left them scattered all over the place.”

  Rachel said, “The moorims collected all the bits and brought them to the Branglemen. Your friend Scarneck said I was a Princess in gold if ever he saw one, and he handed over the pieces.”

  “Kevin, you hear that?” I asked.

  Claudia corrected me. “We should call him Prince Kavian.” She sounded smitten. Wonderful.

  “But look at it,” Kevin said again. “It’s ruined.”

  Claudia asked timidly, “Isn’t fantasy full of broken blades that get fixed in time for the big fight?”

  I said, “Yes, but ‘broken blade’ means one blade, two pieces, carefully kept together. This is steel spaghetti with plastic sauce.”

  “There’s got to be a way,” Rachel said. “We’ve come this far. It can’t stop here.”

  My hand tingled. I sucked at the scratch in my palm that the rhinestone pin had made.

  “What happened to your hand?” Rachel said, grabbing my fingers. “Jeez, Amy, you’re bleeding—Yuchh, now there’s blood on my sweater!”

  “Blood,” I said. “You said blood, Kevin, oil or blood is magic for a sword in the Fayre Farre.”

  He squinted suspiciously at me in the dim light. “So what if I did?”

  “Blood to make the blade, blood to mend the blade,” I said. “How do we do it?”

  “Ask your girl friends,” he said. “Everybody but me seems to know all the answers.”

  Claudia looked gooily sympathetic, but Rachel rolled her eyes grandly at me, signaling: this guy is a pill. I nodded vigorously, and she hid a laugh.

  The flag went flop, flop, overhead, a little faster in the morning breeze. The sounds of battle below swelled again, nearer—screams and shouts blended into an on-again, off-again roar. Where was Anglower, anyway—down there, fighting? How long did we have until he stormed in here to squash Kevin like a bug, and us with him?

  I said, “Let’s try what boys would do in a secret clubhouse, what comic-book heroes would do.”

  “Oh,” Rachel said. “That’s easy. I’ve read the twins’ comic collection. Give me the pin.” I handed her the rhinestone rose. She stepped up onto the flag pedestal. “Give me your hand, Prince Kavian,” she said grandly.

  Kevin hesitated, then poked his hand out like a dead fish. Rachel grabbed it and jabbed the pin into his palm. He yelled. Still gripping his hand, Rachel gave me back the pin, which I sealed into my jacket pocket again.

  “Now yours,” she said, grabbing my hurt hand, which made me wince.

  “Does this have to be so melodramatic?” I said. I didn’t know what Rachel had in mind, exactly, and I was nervous.

  She said, “If the sword is to go back to the prince, here, we need his blood, too. Your blood to give it up, his blood to take it.”

  Now I caught the drift of what she was thinking, and I jumped back with a gasp. I realized, too late, that I shouldn’t even have let her stick Kevin with the pin, which still must have my blood on it.

  Kevin chuckled nastily. “What are you worried about, Amy? Look, there’s war and pain here but not AIDS, all right? Whatever people do in the real world, here their blood is clean.”

  We all must have looked pretty scared and skeptical.

  “It’s the seedstones,” he said. “They purify. You and I are both carrying them. Our blood’s okay.”

  “Say that with the moorim on your head,” I said.

  He did, and the moorim leaned down and licked the bridge of his nose. Rachel looked at me. I nodded: the moorim’s kiss was good enough for me.

  At Rachel’s nod, Claudia carefully piled the remains of the knife into my sticky palm. Rachel turned Kevin’s hand over and squeezed our two hands together on the bits. Claudia began humming a flat, dull tune through her nose, something she’d picked up from the moorim, from the sound of it.

  Our hands, joined on the weapon, quickly heated up way past plain old 98.6. Kevin breathed hard and stood leaning back as far as he could get, his lips twisted in a grimace. I gritted my teeth: I could do as well as he did. Our knuckles began to glow. I shut my eyes.

  But I couldn’t stop feeling the heat intensify and creep up my wrist. I fought down panic and concentrated on the touch of sunlight on my face.

  Deep in the furnace that had been my hand and Kevin’s hand, something moved.

  “Do you give Farfarer to the Prince?” Rachel was yelling in my ear. I hadn’t realized, I was groaning so loudly through my clenched teeth. “Amy, do you hear me? Do you give Farfarer—”

  “Take it, Kevin, for crying out loud!” I bawled.

  Rachel let go, and Kevin and I each staggered backward.

  But in his hand he held a gleaming sword, the sharp edge of the dark blade still glowing red with heat.

  “Prince Kavian!” I gasped, hugging my own hand to my chest. I didn’t dare look down to see if my fingers were crisped. “Farfarer is yours!”

  “Farfarer is yours!” Rachel announced, hopping off the pedestal with a triumphant whoop.

  Kevin blinked uncertainly at the sword as if he didn’t really believe in it. Then he jumped up onto the pedestal and waved Farfarer over his head. The blade caught the rays of the risen sun with a golden flash. He shouted out over the battlefield below, “White One, I’m ready for
you! Come fight me for the Fayre Farre!”

  “Come to you?” sang a strong, beautiful voice from somewhere close above us. “I am already here.”

  We all looked up. Now we could see the design on the sunlit flag: a spiky, armored shape in a horned helmet with crimson pupils gleaming out of black eye slits. The image swelled and shook itself free of the flag, and the White Warrior stepped down inside the stone walls of the Blockhouse with us.

  Sixteen

  The Power of the Rose

  HE SWUNG HIS GAUNTLETS WIDE APART, spreading space with the backs of his broad, armored hands. Clouds of pulverized mortar puffed up from the Blockhouse walls as they rocked back and began snapping outward in a flurry of angles, duplicating themselves faster than my eyes could follow. New walls grew from the old ones, crashing into place all down the backslope of the cliffs, and a windstorm of displaced air threw me off my feet.

  I could feel the ground under me swell and stretch, making room for the walls as they expanded like the interlocking pieces of a gigantic, moving puzzle. In one long roll of tremendous thunder—under the clear sky and pale white sun—a castlelike labyrinth appeared, spreading out and downward from the summit over where the woods had been. Acres of rusty tile roofs on top of ashy gray walls made of boulders the size of Volkswagens blanketed what had become a mile or more of black stone slope.

  We were stuck on a sort of wide terrace, the highest point of the whole sprawling structure, overlooking the cliffs—black crags and empty air—and the battle below.

  It was sickening, this blotting out of our dinky little Blockhouse on its poky knob of rock by this humongously swollen version of the same basic design—a simple rock-walled room.

  The central pedestal was gone. In its place stood a platform of bones, yellow and white and gray. At the center stood this massive chair, made of bones twisted like wickerwork. The armored newcomer settled himself into this throne of decay. Even sitting down, he towered above us.

  I hugged the gritty earth. My fear drove every other feeling out of me. There was barely room for one thin breath of air after another.