Lazing there on his sharp-toothed throne, he was a cartoon nightmare turned real: a human-shaped figure big as a bull, covered entirely in scarred white armor that jutted everywhere into jagged points and edges. His helmet crested, between wide-set horns, in a silver plume. His gloves had steel spines set between the knuckles.
“Darth Vader’s paler brother,” Rachel whispered to me, with a ghastly, hollow giggle.
Claudia, crouching beside us clutching her doggie purse, whimpered faintly.
Rachel said, “It’s dumb, groveling around like this.” She climbed shakily to her feet. I managed to do the same, though I couldn’t think why I bothered. We were done for, unless our hero, the famed Promised Champion of the Fayre Farre, came through in the crunch.
He stood a little way from us, sword in hand. His mouth hung open in ridiculous dismay. Kevin Malone, Corner Kid and hero-prince, appeared to be rooted to the ground, a terrified boy with a weapon he was scared to try to use.
“Listen,” Rachel said to the world at large, “it’s so quiet. Is the battle over now down there?”
“Go look,” answered the beautiful, ringing voice of the White Warrior. I dared to hope: maybe he was really a good guy under there, Kevin’s best buddy pretending to be bad to test him, some wise and handsome god with rewards to hand out when the test was passed. No villain could speak in a voice like that.
He pointed toward the cliff, a sudden movement that rattled the spikes on his gloves and made me flinch. In my mind’s eye, I saw him wipe his mask up over his head like a welder’s shield and pick his yellow fangs with the needles projecting from his gloves. Now it registered, in a numb sort of way, that many of the skulls and bones that made up his throne were small, delicate shapes—maybe moorim-bones. Maybe the bones of children.
My stomach lurched, and I thought I might have to sit down again.
Rachel, who had wobbled her way over to the edge of the cliff, called me. “Amy, you should come see this.”
The seated monster made no objection. I went, my spine prickling.
Below the cliffs, slanted fields and forests were thick with figures: slender elves, gnarly little Branglefolk, Famishers staring up with their round faces like clusters of ugly flowers, men in dark leathery-looking armor on foot or mounted on seelims. The different groups had moved apart from each other, and seemed to be all waiting for—what?
“Where are the Bone Men?” I said.
“The Bone Men,” replied Anglower in that glorious voice, “those mighty warriors of the bloody past, are wherever I want them to be and whatever I want them to be.”
He reached down and casually plucked a long, yellow bone from the platform under his throne. He flipped it in the air. Soaring, it shook itself out into a gangling human frame which landed bent-kneed, like a ski-jumper. The skeleton straightened and began stalking toward us with long strides. Its feet made dry, scraping noises on the rock.
Rachel and I grabbed each other and huddled together at the cliff’s edge. I felt empty space at my back and saw myself flying, falling, gone.
The Bone Man halted. It rocked gratingly on its heel bones and wrapped its long arms around its rib cage. It had no lower jaw, which for some reason struck me as particularly horrible.
The White One laughed, a bright, shocking sound, like ice water poured suddenly into your ears. He turned away from Rachel, Claudia, and me. His business was with Kevin, who still stood gaping like a moron.
Anglower rose from his chair and yanked another bone from the dais: a long, heavy, curved bone with a thick end. He flung it high over our heads, like an ivory lance. In flight, the bone exploded. Fragments rained on the armies below like chalky darts.
Everyone scattered, shouting, screaming. Some fell. Then they drifted together again and stood as before, gazing up toward us.
“No fair, attacking Kevin’s men,” Rachel yelled, outraged. Where did she get all this fearless energy? She scared me to death, challenging the monster like this. “You’re supposed to fight a duel, mano a mano!”
The White One didn’t even look at us. The armies below made no sound. They knew that it was all up to the Promised Champion and the White Warrior.
“Shush, Rachel,” I hissed. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s Kevin’s fight, fair or not.”
“So why doesn’t he fight?” Rachel said in a furious, tearful voice.
Kevin’s cheeks flamed as if he’d been slapped. But he didn’t raise the sword or say a word.
“If only I had a rock,” Rachel said, staring desperately around, “a chunk of wood, a brick—”
“A weapon,” I said. I thought of Kevin in the laundry room of the D-home, backed against a wall, unarmed except for—my brain seemed to catch fire. “ ‘Using a weapon they already own!’ The rose pin!”
I jumped up, fumbling in my pocket, yelling about magic crystals—the rhinestones: wouldn’t they work against the White One?
I had forgotten the Bone Man.
He tackled me, crashing into my knees with an excruciating impact. Rachel flung herself at him, trying madly to drag away the spindly hand that was knotted into my hair. I heard Claudia shrieking.
With the strength of total panic, I ripped my arm free and clapped the rhinestone pin against the side of the Bone Man’s skull.
The whole figure fell apart, leaving me flat on my back in a scatter of bones. But the bones reared up into a new shape faster than my eyes could follow. More bones came clicking and rolling over the rock from the White One’s dais and wove themselves together with the speed of snakes striking. They surrounded Rachel and me with a cage of bent and woven bone while Claudia crouched, blubbering, outside.
The triumphant laughter of the White Warrior washed over us. Then, with a clacking sound, the lid banged down. Two of us were penned up in a cage of bones, and the third one was a quaking mound of terror outside of it. I could see that Claudia wasn’t going to be any help.
At last Kevin spoke: “Let them go!” he screamed. “You can’t touch them, you don’t lay your hand on them—not in my country!”
Through our cage of bones we saw him charge, swinging Farfarer two-handed in a sweeping, side-to-side stroke. The White Warrior smashed down at him with the long bone he held. Kevin dodged the blow, but the knuckle-end hit rock and the whole summit shivered. I heard crackings and rumblings deep in the mountain below us.
“He’ll smash the place apart!” Rachel cried, for the first time sounding panicky, as if the reality of our situation had just dawned on her. “He’ll wreck the whole Fayre Farre!”
The rhinestone rose lay in my palm, its stones crushed and blackened. I scraped it against the bone cage, but it had no effect now. I dropped the ruined brooch into my side pocket again and sealed the flap.
Farfarer made deep, whipping sounds through the air. The White One’s bone club slammed the blade aside again and again, until Kevin pulled back, panting. Instead of attacking him, the White One reached down, grabbed up a skull with his free hand and lobbed it out over the battlefield below.
Spinning, the skull dropped from view. We heard a distant, thunderous impact and howls of terror.
Kevin cursed wildly and closed in again, sweat flying from his hair. Berserk, I thought. That’s how you fight when you’re berserk; that’s what it means.
Under the cliffs the Free Armies’ soldiers were singing a ragged, rousing tune.
“He’s winning; I think Kevin’s winning,” I chanted under my breath.
Rachel panted, “That won’t help us Amy—this cage is getting smaller!”
I realized with horror that I had been vaguely aware for a couple of minutes of more and more pressure where my skin touched the bonework. I braced my back against Rachel’s and my hands and feet against the dry, rough bones.
“Claudia! Help!” I screamed. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
But Claudia lay scrunched up on the rock, covering her head with her purse.
Anglower hacked at Kevin’s legs with his
club. Kevin parried with a slice that cut the bone club to half its length. Kevin lunged, but the White One dodged, pivoted, and kicked the edge of the bone dais under the throne.
A shower of bones sprayed out over Kevin, who ducked and covered his head. Blood spread from a dozen cuts made by flying fragments right through his clothes. It wasn’t fair!
“I can’t breathe,” Rachel gasped, her spine and shoulders heaving and shoving against mine.
Claustrophobia choked me. My stiffened arms were now slowly but surely buckling at the elbow, and the top of the bone cage was touching my hair.
Backing toward us, Kevin clawed his handkerchief out of his back pocket. He blotted a cut on his forehead with it, then stopped, swore, and bent to tear madly at the corner of the cloth with his teeth: Kevin’s seedstone, the rhinestone from my pin, was in there.
He ran at the White Warrior, who waited for him empty-handed now, flexing the spines on his gauntlets. I imagined Kevin impaled on those spikes, lifted from the ground with the force of the blow.
But Kevin ducked a swing of one armored fist and leaped up against the White One’s massive chest like a basketball player doing a mighty slam-dunk. I saw him slap his hand to one eyehole of the gleaming helmet, and drop the tiny seed-stone inside. Spinning away, he landed in a crouch and flung his arm up over his eyes as a flare of blinding white light blossomed around the White One’s horned head.
When I could see again, I saw a wonder: from the top of the helmet down, the white armor silently peeled away and fell off like sections of shell from a hard-boiled egg.
Inside was a man, just a man: a little taller than Kevin, lankier, a lot older. He wore faded jeans with ironed-in creases, work boots, and a T-shirt under a tan windbreaker. His jaw was blue with whisker-shadow, and deep lines were cut into his cheeks, bracketing his mouth. He stared at Kevin with a puzzled frown.
Oh, I thought, dizzy with relief: it’s just a man. Just a person, somebody we can talk to.
As I thought this, Kevin threw himself into battle again with a terrible, tearful wail. But he fought in slow motion now, sobbing as he moved, grunting with each swing of the sword. The stranger who had been the White One scowled and smacked the blade away each time with his bare hands, retreating unhurriedly toward the castle wall behind him. Incredibly, no blood flew, only tears that Kevin dashed from his own eyes with his free hand.
“We fixed the sword,” I gasped, shoving frantically against the inexorable tightening of the cage walls as they shrank in on us. “Why can’t Kevin touch him?”
Rachel whispered, “Don’t you see? That’s his father.”
I said, “His father’s dead.”
“It’s not his real father,” Rachel said hoarsely. “Worse. A shadow of his father, the Branglemen say. A memory. You can’t hurt a ghost!”
Through the distortion of my tears, I could see the muscles of Kevin’s back and shoulders stand out as he dragged the sword through the air again, like pulling it through deep water. I was so sorry for him. He must have brought a version of the real-world monster, his father, to the Fayre Farre to be the bad guy, the one who loses in the end.
But his father was too strong. Kevin, still only a boy, was no match for him.
Suddenly I felt something small moving on me and I heard an unlikely sound: the sound of velcro tearing. My pocket flap was opened, and delicate paws reached in and drew something out.
“Oh, my God, she’s gone!” Claudia screamed, staring down into her purse. “Oh, my God, Amy, Moorie’s in there with YOU!”
In, but trying to get out again: hard little feet dug for purchase at my hip. I looked down but couldn’t see; my own arm was in the way, and I had nowhere to move it.
Claudia screamed, “She’s coming back out! She’s squeezing through, she’s getting out! Oh, my God,” she keened, “she’s hurt, she got mashed, she’s bleeding!”
I had nothing to spare for the moorim. Before my eyes, the enemy stepped suddenly forward, wrenched the sword out of Kevin’s hands and hurled it aside. It bounced off the edge of the cliff and out into space. Kevin’s father reached out and contemptuously shoved him in the chest. Kevin stumbled backward and fell. He got to one knee and knelt there, exhausted, both hands braced on the rock, like a sprinter with no strength left to race.
Claudia said softly, “Moorie gave me your pin, Amy. Now there’s moorim blood on it.”
Rachel twisted in the cage, grinding my backbone in half. “It’s all we have—even burned out, it’s still the weapon we already own!”
My numb mind wouldn’t work. Staring straight ahead through the tightening bone bars, I saw the ghost-double of Kevin’s father spit on the ground and pull the leather belt he wore out of the belt loops of his clean, pressed blue jeans.
I moaned, “The prophecy lied, then! What good is a beat-up old pin?”
“It’s like something from a grave,” Claudia murmured, somewhere close to my left ear—I couldn’t turn my head to look at her. “It’s all twisted and burned-looking, like something buried in the ground for a thousand years.”
Years—the word bounced around inside my skull. Years. Solve the great riddle of using the years . . . Using a weapon they already own—
Cousin Shelly had given me the rose brooch, a pin in the shape of a climbing rose vine, gift from a person who loved plants and gardens and used them as a kind of antidote to all the horrible stories of ruined families that came at her every day in her work. A symbol of living growth against an avalanche of suffocating misery.
The man lashed his belt down across Kevin’s hunched shoulders with a horrible cracking sound.
I didn’t know the answer to the riddle, but I knew what to do.
“Claudia,” I said. “Plant the rose pin. There are cracks in this rock. Stick Shelly’s pin down one of them, quick!”
I couldn’t see her, the way my head and shoulders were jammed tight in the bone cage, but I heard her crying. “Moorie got squeezed to death by the bones. She’s dead, poor little thing. We hardly even got to know each other.”
“The pin,” I said choking. “Plant it or the moorim died for nothing, and we’ll all die, too.”
In front of me, Kevin moved slowly backward on all fours. The man followed, snapping the belt between his fists. He looked like murder, a million times scarier than that puffed-up cartoon, the White One. I hated him with a scalding hate, for Kevin and for all of us.
“There,” Claudia said softly, moving back into my field of vision and brushing her palms together.
Instantly the earth bucked and the bone cage flew apart with a tearing shriek, spilling Rachel and me out like Monopoly dice shot from a box. Something erupting from the rock under us had exploded our prison. A giant? Who cared? All I wanted was to get real air into my lungs, and to straighten my aching arms and legs.
The whole peak seemed to be shivering and crumbling with the some tremendous uprush from below. Maybe the North Isle was volcanic? Were we about to be spewed out over the Fayre Farre in a shower of molten lava?
My teeth chattered madly and my skin was iced in sweat: panic mode in the old body. I hugged the shaking ground.
Kevin’s father stood brace-legged on the shivering cliff. Kevin, crouching at the edge, rocked not only with the movement of the mountain but with the effort to get enough momentum of his own to stand upright. His shirt was torn, a red stripe was burned across one shoulder, and tears slicked his cheeks. I could see his lips and throat spasming with sobs, and I knew he would throw himself off the cliff rather than take that strap across his back again.
With a crackling hiss like millions of small, wet explosions at once, whatever had demolished the bone cage whipped up and caught the man’s ankle, yanking him off balance. Something flung itself up his thin body, a swarm of snakes—no—a net of stems and branches, growing at fantastic speed and putting out leaves, flowers.
A humongous plant squirmed and sprouted out of the split stone peak, unfurling a staggering mass of thorny stems, lea
ves, and blossoms. Roses as big as babies’ heads burst wildly into bloom higher than I could have reached.
In seconds Kevin’s father was overwhelmed and pulled down in a bank of climbing roses, his shape lost in the quivering, vinelike stems. The blur of growth spread like spilled paint over the remains of the dais and the throne and poured out over the edge of the cliff in a green cascade starred with flowers.
The ground stilled, the thunder died away. We kids were left on a mountaintop covered—except for a few bare ridges of stone—with roses.
Claudia grabbed my arm. “Look—Kevin’s gone crazy!”
Kevin was dancing at the cliff’s edge, kicking his legs up into the air and shouting breathless shouts of victory. Cautiously, we made our way to him, walking—limping—on the rocky ridge paths.
“He’s caught!” Kevin yelled. His eyes glittered wildly. “He can’t do anything!”
The phantom of Kevin’s father lay tangled in roses just at the head of the great fall of them over the lip of the cliff. Flowers opened all around him as we watched. He strained to free his hands, blinking up at us with bloodshot, angry eyes.
“Kevin, get me out of this,” he said in a reedy voice, tearing one hand free and raising it to shield his eyes from the sunlight. “What are you waiting for? Do as I say. I am not too drunk to thrash you, boy.”
Instead of answering, Kevin stooped and tore rose vines up with both hands. With all his strength he lashed them down on his trapped enemy, as if flailing a whip, a cat of twenty thorny tails.
The man covered his eyes with his arm, crying out in a language I didn’t know. Sobbing, Kevin hauled the vines back with bleeding fingers to strike again.
The man groaned and rolled over, burrowing down into the bed of blooms and thorns. His free hand clawed into the tangle of rich growth alongside him, and as he turned, he lifted it and dragged it over his head and body like a blanket. The bank of roses rolled him under, covering him deep and hiding him from the sun and from our stupefied eyes.
“What did he say?” Rachel whispered. “I couldn’t understand him.”