The Kingdom of Kevin Malone

  Panting, Kevin answered, “He said, ‘Oh father, do not strike me again, for I fear that I shall die.’ He said it in Gaelic. But I’m not his father. Why did he say that to me?”

  “Not to you,” Claudia said. “To his own father.” She blotted her eyes on her sleeve. “Where do you think he learned to be such a monster?”

  From the battlefield below, voices rang. Famishers and Bone Men don’t sing. We had won.

  Kevin dropped the whip of roses, which had ripped his shirt and raked deep scratches into his arms and hands. His face was streaked with sweat and blood and his dark hair was plastered to his cheeks. He answered bitterly, “Well, he’d better be dead now. Nobody will cry for him, either. Nobody. He should have died a long time ago, before he ever had children of his own.”

  The nearest roses turned and swayed to catch the drops of his blood and his tears on their petals of velvet red.

  Seventeen

  Prince’s Choice

  “LONG LIVE THE PRINCE!” someone shouted. “Hail to our Champion!”

  We rode slowly across the battlefield, trailed by a self-appointed honor guard. My whole body ached from almost being squashed in the bone cage, and Rachel must have felt the same. One of the elves had handed a canteen to Rachel, and whatever was in it—slightly warm and sharp like cranberry juice—had perked us all up. Still, slowly was all we could manage.

  A man Kevin had identified as Sebbian’s brother had met us at the foot of the Secret Stair with some tired and mud-splashed seelims, one of them my blue-green one, which I now rode. From its back I got to wave at an admiring throng who were all waving at me. The Branglemen clicked their throwing clubs together in a rattling racket as we rode by. It was a thrill.

  Our victory was total. The Bone Men on the battlefield had fallen under the rivers of roses that seemed to hunt them out among the fighters. The Famishers had been killed or driven away bleeding and screaming.

  Corpses lay all over the place. That part was not thrilling. War kills. If you want to know more, go look at the photographs Mathew Brady took after the Union and Confederate armies had pounded each other to bits at Gettysburg.

  On the trampled meadows and hummocky hills all dark with blood and veined with roses, they called our names and shouted blessings and thanks. Prince Kavian, they called him, and they called us princesses, which made Rachel toss her hair and say she hadn’t planned on becoming such close family so fast. We did a lot of kidding around. We were silly with relief. It was easy to get high on all the cheering.

  The sun dropped lower. I began to feel nostalgic for my own bedroom. Probably everybody around us was dreaming about home. It made another part of the bond that linked all of us victorious survivors.

  Behind Kevin and me, Scarneck walked between Claudia’s seelim and Rachel’s. Sebbian’s brother, a large man with his left arm in a sling, wearing homemade armor of battered iron, rode beside a gangly kid I didn’t know. Kevin had greeted this boy, Danu, like a long-lost brother. Three slender elves kept up easily on foot. I wondered if there was ever such a thing as a fat elf.

  No one spoke Anglower’s name. I saw no trace of him, only the downspill of roses from the mountaintop.

  “He wasn’t what you expected, was he?” Kevin asked suddenly, as if he’d read my mind. “The White One.”

  “No,” I said. “But he was something, Kevin.”

  “He was,” Kevin said grimly. “The mighty warrior in shining armor with a magic voice. That’s how he always painted himself when he talked about the Old Country. But my mother said Pa was never even in Ireland. He was born here. It was his own father’s stories he was adapting to tell, as if he’d done all those heroic deeds that probably Granda hadn’t done, either. What Pa did, himself, was get drunk and come home and kick his family around when the mood took him, which was often.”

  “That’s terrible, Kevin,” I said.

  “Well, it’s over.” He reined his seelim toward the east. “This way. The elves are making a victory feast tonight.”

  * * *

  We rode east below the highlands surrounding North Peak, and then around a wide, shallow lake with boggy margins that made the seelims honk and pick up their feet high in a disgusted manner. We came out on a grassy plateau facing the bottom of the mountain across a shallow green valley.

  The valley had once been a lake with floating gardens on it, Kevin said, which the original Elf Home on the ridge had overlooked. That was before Anglower had taken over North Isle and driven the elves south.

  A lake—ha, I thought: the Lasker Rink, at the very northeast-most corner of Central Park. And the old Elf Home had stood where the boathouse had once been, the one that Claudia’s book said had burned down.

  Elves had made a new home in the hours since the battle, wedging together the treelike statues of their dead warriors. You could see hands and arms and faces and feet jammed more or less flush to make the walls.

  On the green bank around the hall, men and Branglefolk tended the roasting carcasses of animals and birds. I didn’t look too closely. I’d seen enough dead things for a lifetime.

  Inside, the hall was packed. Elves on the balcony blew curved horns in tremendous fanfares, and the mob of battle-stained fighters roared out our names as we entered.

  There was an earthen dais at the back, and the crowd parted to make a rough pathway to it. One by one we were handed up to sit on enormous chairs so encrusted with gems and gold that they would have been impossible to actually sit in, if not for the heaps of rather moth-eaten and dusty cushions.

  “Where did this stuff come from?” I whispered.

  Claudia tucked her legs under her on the seat—her feet didn’t reach the ground anyway—and said, “Troll treasure, Amy. You wouldn’t believe what we saw on the way here with the sword pieces.”

  “It was all part of Kevin’s epic,” Rachel put in from her own throne. Her face was flushed with excitement and her hair was a mess. She looked great.

  I suddenly felt terrible. My best friend had been off sharing private adventures with Claudia while I was struggling along with old Kevin for company. Maybe I had missed all the best parts. Maybe Rachel really wasn’t my friend anymore.

  Kevin stood up to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. Sore and tired from the fight, he didn’t raise his arms in a victory salute. But he stood straight and held his head up. And you know what? He looked great, too.

  I cheered with everybody else. What else could I do?

  There was food, music, uproar, and more food for what seemed like hours. I ate myself to sleep, right where I was. Since I was a princess, I guess nobody minded.

  Then Kevin was shaking my shoulder to wake me, and the hall was quiet, dim, and stale smelling. For one horrible second I thought I was back at Tavern-on-the-Green, with Elven Sobragana dead and Kram’s huge head seeping blood into the scattered chips on the floor. But Rachel and Claudia stood in front of the throne-mound.

  “Your friends want to leave,” Kevin said. “Are you going with them?”

  I got up carefully. I was stiff and sore all over. Aspirin would have been nice, but I didn’t bother asking. They are not big on analgesics in heroic fantasy; they just push along, bleeding and gritting their teeth.

  “Sure,” I said. “What about you, Kevin?” Funny. I wanted him to come, too, as if he had a home to come to.

  “I’ve used all the gates,” he said. His voice had no expression.

  “Hey,” I said, “you’ve got three princesses here, remember? We can get you through.”

  Rachel said, “I already told him that. He won’t listen.”

  Claudia looked uneasy. “Maybe it’s better if he stays here.”

  Rachel said, “Come on. This isn’t a real place!”

  “It is to me,” Kevin said.

  Outside somebody was singing, flat and hoarsely, and I heard other voices arguing and laughing and somebody hammering metal. It all sounded pretty real to me, too.

  Claudia said, “I’ve gotta g
o, really. Zia Cynzia is going to KILL me as it is.”

  Rachel said, “They’re saddling seelims for us now, Amy. Meet you outside in ten minutes, okay?”

  They left. Kevin and I were alone in the hall.

  “How do we get home from here, anyway?” I asked. The north end of the park didn’t have many arches, according to what I remembered of the map.

  Kevin moodily kicked the base of one of the thrones. “You can go back through the Glen Span, it’s a straight shot west.”

  He was serious about staying, which probably meant I would never see him again. I realized suddenly that I minded. I minded a lot. I think I had some crazy idea of him coming back and living with my family until he could work something else out. Maybe I thought we could make up for the childhood he’d never really had.

  I said, “How do you know you can stay? What if the Fayre Farre spits you out somehow, now that you’ve finished your quest? End of story, poof!”

  “That’s not much of a risk compared to some of the chances I’ve taken around here. You don’t even know.” His brooding stare told me I didn’t want to, either.

  An idea went off in my head like lightning.

  “Hey,” I said, “listen, I’d like to know. I bet everybody would. If you come home and write it, Kevin, my dad might be able to sell it for you for big bucks in Hollywood, and I mean big.”

  Kevin smiled a down-turned, sardonic smile. “Oh, sure. You think I don’t know the Fayre Farre is a mishmash of stolen ideas?”

  “So what?” I said. “Have you read what’s out there lately? It’s all like that. But your Fayre Farre really lives; it’s a terrific creation.”

  He waved at the empty, littered hall. “The life of it is here, not in my head. I couldn’t put it on paper, I’m no author. But I might be a pretty good prince.”

  “Come on, what do you know about running a world? I mean really running it, as a—a politician, not a hero on a quest.”

  “Oh, right,” he bristled, “what’s the dirty-faced kid from down the block doing wearing a crown?”

  That hurt. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it!”

  “Well, damn it,” he yelled back, “I’m responsible, you understand me?” He began to pace up and down in front of the dais, scowling at the earthen floor. “People fought and died to put me on the throne of the Fayre Farre. I can’t just ride off into the sunset. I have to stick around and make sure things turn out all right.”

  I made myself answer reasonably, like a grown-up. “Things don’t ‘turn out.’ They go on and on and change all along. So you’re talking about being here for good. But this is a dream, Kevin. Real people can’t live in dreams. You’ll go crazy here.”

  Silence. Then he said, “They need somebody in charge, and they’re counting on me to make things hang together now.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s falling apart?”

  “Everything!” He waved his hands in the air, then jammed them into his pockets. “There’s already been a fight between two Branglemen and some elves over something I can’t make out. Danu says the human men want to know if the elves’ hall being rebuilt here means that the elves are staking a claim to the whole North Isle. Now that Elven Sobragana’s gone, there’s some very expansionist factions speaking up among the elves. Old grudges are surfacing all over the place.”

  “What makes you think you can fix that?” I said. “Or that you should? Kevin, let them work things out themselves here.”

  “It’s not that simple,” he insisted, shaking his head. “Old grudges are terrible things. They can keep people at each other’s throats for generations. I can’t let it be like that here. They’ll listen to me. I beat the White Warrior.”

  “Yes, you did.” I shuddered. “But, Kevin, what if he comes back?”

  Kevin’s shoulders hunched involuntarily. “Comes back?”

  “He was beaten before,” I said, “according to all that history you told me. But he came back.”

  “He did,” Kevin said, biting his lip. Then he nodded once, short and sharp. “That’s the clincher. I can’t leave the Fayre Farre unprotected, you see? It has to be as strong as I can make it, in case he does come back.”

  I licked my dry lips and said what had to be said. “But what if it’s you that draws him, Kevin?”

  “All the more reason,” he said harshly. “If I draw him to me, well, best do it here in my country, where I’m a prince and a hero, not in your world where I’m just a tough kid. Well, wouldn’t you do the same, in my place?”

  In a way this was the most flattering thing he could have said to me. It was also the end of the argument, I knew that. So I stepped up close and kissed his cheek quickly before he could pull away. “Good luck, Kevin.”

  I meant it, too. Maybe in his place I wouldn’t have done the same, but so what? The White One was never my father; and the Fayre Farre was not my creation, it was his.

  So I turned and walked out of the hall ready to go home, but without Kevin Malone. The Promised Champion was already home.

  Eighteen

  Troll and Silver

  HALF THE COMBINED FREE ARMIES trailed along southward with us that morning on foot or on seelims, talking and singing like the biggest, most heavily armed picnic you ever saw.

  We reached a wide river, Kevin’s version of a little stream called the Gill in Central Park. Riding west along its course, I heard a distant booming that warned me to expect rip-roaring falls instead of the neat little cascades of the Gill.

  By this time it was mid-morning, with the cool light filtering spookily through tall trees onto the leafy forest floor around us. It felt sort of rude to come bustling through there with all the noises that a huge mob of people on the move makes. I wished I could have had time to enjoy it alone and in peace.

  The elves began to sing, high, interweaving sounds that echoed away among the upper branches like the calls of birds with bells in their throats. Walking alongside my seelim, Scarneck translated: it was about how these trees were the ancestors, ancient and patient, of the southern elves, and that these ancestors rejoiced at their descendants’ return.

  “Not true,” Scarneck commented angrily, showing his yellow canines. “All was Brangle here, before the Cold People ever came.”

  “Where did the elves—the Cold People come from?” I said.

  “Over the sea,” he said, jabbing his wooden lance in a vaguely northern direction. “And they should go back there.”

  Kevin was right, there was trouble ahead.

  I watched Kevin riding alongside Danu, who kept talking and laughing, amusing his hero-friend whom he obviously worshiped. At least Kevin had a friend here, a kid his own age. He and Danu could have been brothers, I thought.

  As my seelim picked its way prissily among the trees, a whole new story unrolled in my head: Danu could turn out to be a long-lost sibling, a rival for the crown, and end up joining with the ambitious duke in the south. Maybe here in the Fayre Farre it was the name “Danu,” not “Dan,” that was marked somewhere on the Farsword, maybe—

  Claudia urged her seelim up beside me and put something into my hand. “Singer gave me this to bring to you. He stayed home in the Brangle, but he said to tell you that he won’t forget ‘The Muffin Man.’ ”

  It was a polished silver coin with some kind of flying figure embossed on it—like the horrible bone dragon that had flown Kevin and me over the Sea of Sandigrim to the North Isle. I almost threw the thing away into the forest.

  But the coin was from Singer, a friend. I kept my hand in my pocket, the coin gripped in my fist. Did I want to carry anything home with me from Kevin’s country? Would that somehow give him a hold on me, something to use any time he felt like bringing me here again?

  Or was it something I could use to come here again on my own? I was feeling homesick for this place already. Maybe there’s a forest like Kevin’s forest of North Isle in the dream-world of every city child who ever played in a park.

  The wate
rfall was as wide and furious as expected. We rode through air tingling with spray along a narrow trail inside a steep gorge. Up ahead at the point where the walls of the ravine seemed to meet, I saw something familiar: a tall narrow arch with three high keystones showing boldly against the sky in a fanlike curve. In Central Park terms: the Glen Span.

  Our river disappeared into a small, deep pool at its foot, except for a tidy stream that ran on back inside the tunnel under the Span. Through the arch, facing us, lay Central Park and home—just a blur of sunlit green from here.

  I was caught between two opposite waves of homesickness as we rode around the pool: for the beauty and grandeur of the Fayre Farre, and for the modest wildness of Central Park. It felt as if my heart was being squeezed in a bone cage.

  Our escort began milling around us at the foot of the arch, restless with expectant energy.

  Claudia sighed and clambered down off her seelim, giving her mount a regretful pat on its purple shoulder. Rachel and I dismounted too. My blue-green seelim put its head down and rubbed its closed eye on my hip, almost knocking me over. Was this affection, or did it think I was a tree?

  Kevin, still mounted, said in a public-address voice, “The princesses want to leave us, friends, through this mystery gate. But do we want them to leave?”

  Whoa; my heart bumped hard.

  No one answered Kevin’s question. Seelims licked the air with their long black tongues for clues to the cause of the tension.

  “Didn’t we sing them onto the jeweled thrones from the hoard of Dravud Bloodhand last night?” Kevin went on, with a devilish gleam in his eyes. “Didn’t we take them to ourselves with all the joy of our victorious hearts?”

  “Kevin,” I said, low and angry, “don’t spoil things, okay?”

  “Who’s spoiling anything?” Kevin said, looking down at me with a smile. “Not me. But I don’t think it’s very nice of you and your friends, rejecting our hospitality.”

  Claudia was already halfway through the archway and there was nothing languid and gliding about her gait, either. She was trotting.