We made our way along, Kevin showing off by walking on the edges of the tip-tilted stones, holding his arms out to keep his balance. The stones led to the edge of where the forest had been sliced through from top to bottom by the Giants’ Stair, a name which seemed to answer my previous question about giants.
“What’s that?” I whispered, as we stepped off the stones onto leaf-covered ground. “I hear something.” My adrenaline zoomed. I imagined being caught and hustled off to the castle of the ambitious duke.
“Calm down,” Kevin said. “It’s just our rides.”
I decided to die rather than ask any more dumb questions. If Kevin was going to be coy about what he wanted from me until we got his darn prophecy, so be it.
I was just glad to be away, moving, doing stuff, in a place where if you died untimely, as they say in Shakespeare, it’s not because you are walking down the street and trip on a chunk of uneven paving and break your hip, and then a blood clot gets loose from your shattered bones and stops your heart. It’s because you’re the minstrel and special friend of a hero-prince, on your way to do him a great and faithful service, but the Bone Men get you first.
Five
A Seelim Ride
IN A LITTLE CLEARING near the edge of the woods two animals browsed on twig ends. They were big, they were saddled and bridled and shaped something like horses, but they had oval-shaped scales all over, like lizards. One of the animals opened its mouth and a thin forked tongue, black as licorice, flickered out.
I stopped short. “Oh no,” I moaned. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“They’re tame and they’re strong,” Kevin said, “and we have a ways to go.”
The red one sort of lifted its scales and settled them again with a faint rattle, like a parrot fluffing its feathers. The blue-green one reached forward with a hind foot and delicately scratched itself behind one ear, where its blue crest started. It rolled a flat gold eye at me.
The things were beautiful. They absolutely terrified me. I said, “I am not a rider.”
“They move real smooth,” Kevin said.
The creatures—seelims, Kevin called them—went into a crouch at his command. Handing the sandwiches to Kevin, I boarded the blue-green seelim. When the seelim straightened up, the ground seemed a tree-length away. I grabbed for handholds on the thin leather seat that served as a saddle.
“Where did these things come from?” I asked.
“Sebbian’s family,” Kevin said. “He raised them in the forest, in secret. Commoners don’t have seelims.”
I heard a bitter edge in his voice. “You didn’t mean it to be that way, did you?” I said. “When you started the Fayre Farre? It was meant to be fair as in ‘justice,’ not just fair as in ‘pretty.’ ”
He shrugged angrily. “Doesn’t matter what I meant, does it? It’s all changed. Here’s your lunch back.”
“Were they all really good friends of yours?” I asked, tying the plastic bag to a leather string attached to the saddle. “Sebbian’s family, I mean?”
“I’m not here to have friends,” Kevin said. “They’re my people. I’m their prince, their protector.”
I thought I saw a shine of tears in his angry eyes, but of course that was ridiculous. Corner Kids don’t cry.
I had worries of my own. I really am no rider. In fact I have actually fallen off a horse. That is, a horse named Daisy, from the one public riding stable in Manhattan, lay down under me one day in the middle of the Central Park bridle path. It was one of the most embarrassing moments I have ever endured.
Daisy had stopped walking, thumped down on her knees with a grunt of relief, and slowly collapsed onto her side, where my leg would have been if I hadn’t scrambled off. All this to screams of laughter from Rachel, who rode a lot and really knew how.
I had not gone riding since. I am a city kid. I am not supposed to ride.
But I was riding now. It was surprisingly simple. Our path went straight across open meadows and in among the widely spaced trees of the forest. It actually got to be kind of boring. Kevin was no help. He insisted on telling me the whole history of the Fayre Farre over again.
The “ancient” part was just as dumb the second time as it had been the first: Agro son of Wobbo who slew the Magenacs at the battle of Floppo, that sort of thing. More recently, it went like this: basically, there was this rich kingdom, the Fayre Farre, with a royal family and a Primordial Evil named Anglower who had been caged up by a spell after a huge battle. Generations later, the good wizard Gurd accidentally uncaged Anglower (now called the White Warrior), whose awful minions (the Bone Men) went around taking over everything.
Nobody could beat Anglower except the Promised Champion, a newborn prince of the Royal House. Gurd the Good had whisked the baby away to grow up safely on another world. However, Gurd had died before he could explain things, so the boy had grown up ignorant of his true heritage and powers.
Which left him now, well into the story proper, blundering around after a magical weapon he’d finally learned that he needed to defeat Anglower and become King of the Fayre Farre himself.
“What weapon?” I inquired. As a Corner Kid, Kevin had carried an old notch-bladed penknife with which he had threatened, from time to time, to cut off various bits of my childhood self.
“A sword,” he said, “a mighty sword from the Dawn Days. It got lost in a great battle, long before Gurd’s time. But the Promised Champion found the sword anyhow, even in the other world, because it was meant for him.”
The Champion being himself, of course. I thought it was modest of Kevin not to pause and point this out. In turn, I refrained from asking whether any battles were ever fought in the Fayre Farre that weren’t great. You know, any scruffy, scrappy, messy little battles.
“The sword was in a humble guise when he found it,” he went on, “just as he was in humble guise himself. And being just a little kid at the time he didn’t know what it was, but he knew it was precious. So he hid it away for safekeeping. But he’s here, I mean I’m here. I can’t get out into your world anymore. Somebody has to bring the sword to me so I can beat the White One and set things right again in the Fayre Farre.” He fixed me with a significant stare: somebody, maybe me, depending on what the prophecy said.
“Why can’t you go get it yourself?”
“The arches won’t let me through anymore,” he said impatiently. “I told you, I’ve used them all up. Yesterday you followed me through the Willowdell, the last one that was still open to me. But without the weapon from your world, I’ll lose the final duel with the White One for sure.”
I was beginning to wonder if we really needed a prophecy. Kevin seemed to know everything already. Of course for him this was the middle of the story.
“So where’s this mighty weapon hidden?” I asked.
“It’s someplace in my old building,” he said eagerly. “I hid it there so nobody else could get their hands on it, but I’m not sure where, exactly. It seems like such a long time ago.” He frowned. “I don’t recall much from those days now. I only recognized you because the rhinestones in your brooch lit the way to you.”
“Kevin,” I said. “I hate to raise problems, but your building’s been renovated.”
“I know,” he said. “I went there twice while I could still get through the arches. By then I couldn’t see clearly there anymore. I couldn’t find the sword.”
“How can I find it if you couldn’t?” I asked.
“Your pin,” he said. “The rhinestones carry Fayre Farre magic now, after so many years here with me. They’ll show you the way.”
“Well, I hope they can open locks,” I said. “There must be security up the wazoo in that place now. The whole West Side is like that.”
“You can do it if you try,” he said earnestly.
“Does this sword look like a sword?” I asked. “Or is it still ‘in humble guise’?”
Kevin took his feet out of his stirrups and let his legs dangle. “Look, this is the gre
at Farsword of the Fayre Farre that we’re talking about. It will reveal itself to you when the time comes, that’s all I can tell you. It’s years ago that I hid it. The Fayre Farre is real for me now, not your side.”
My side. Reality, he meant. That thought gave me shivers. What if his fantasy world stopped, for some reason, with me still in it? That is, what if a Bone Man grabbed Kevin and squashed him, bingo, just like that: where would I be then?
This was so upsetting to think about, including the Bone Man that my imagination obligingly served up in full color, that I decided to think about it later, if at all.
“So after I find this indescribable thing the exact whereabouts of which you do not know,” I said, returning to the question at hand, “and that’s if this prophecy says I’m the person to do it, then I have to come back here through one of the park arches to deliver this Farsword to you, right? You can’t come meet me in Central Park to get it from me?”
“No,” he said. “I told you.”
“What about Anglower?” I asked. “Can he—?”
“Don’t say his name,” Kevin hissed. “Call him the White Warrior, or the White One.”
“Kevin,” I insisted, “can he get through the arches?”
“No,” Kevin said forcefully. He glared at the sky. “No, he cannot.” He sounded to me like someone trying to reinforce instructions that he wasn’t sure anybody was listening to anymore.
My seelim stumbled and I grabbed leather and did not fall off, thank God. Kevin had the grace to pretend not to notice me lurching around on my saddle like a sack of potatoes.
I said, “You’re stuck here with this White One, the Bone Men, and the bad duke of whatnot castle, right? In your own story, that you personally designed. You sure stacked the deck against yourself, Kevin.”
“I am,” he said, “and I did.” He grinned a sparkly kind of grin. He knew he was good-looking. “When you’re setting up an adventure for yourself, you kind of overdo the bad guys for the thrill of it, you know? Now I have to stay here and dodge them all until I get my hands on the Farsword.”
Rachel and I had gone through a period of about a year when we had read all the heroic fantasy books we could get our hands on. This was after Mom had read me part of The Lord of the Rings out loud while I was recovering from a horrible flu bug. I had finished the trilogy myself and gotten Rachel hooked on it, too. Most other high fantasy was just bad imitation, and we’d soon tired of that. Now I wished I had paid more attention to the generally accepted form of these things.
“How long until you have to get this sword?” I asked.
“Not long,” he said. “There’s been omens and things. The big fight is coming soon.” I did not like the way he sounded aggressive and unsure at the same time.
“How does the story of yours end?” Could Kevin have imagined a heroic fantasy with an unhappy ending?
“It ends at the Sky Castle on the Black Cliffs,” he said solemnly. “The Promised Champion gets there somehow, even if he’s hurt and starving and his faithful helpers are all dead or captured. He takes the Farsword and fights his way past the Bone Men to the White Warrior, and fights him as well, to the death.”
I decided not to pick up on this business of what happens to the faithful helpers, which probably didn’t apply to me anyway. I didn’t feel very faithful.
“And he wins, right?” I prompted. “The Champion. Even though he’s hurt and starving?”
“That’s how I meant it to be,” he said, but he didn’t sound very confident.
My seelim burped and flickered its tongue, which made me jerk nervously on the reins.
“Don’t pull him like that,” Kevin said irritably. “He’s behaving fine.”
“He’s a monster out of your imagination, Kevin. He’s not behaving at all,” I said, but without much conviction. “Tell me something. Do you have any idea how your fantasy turned real like this?”
He shook his head, avoiding my eyes.
“You must have a theory,” I coaxed.
“Well, maybe because I had no other road to go. I got in trouble in the D-home—”
“D-home?” I said. “As in, Detention Center? Juvenile Hall? Ha. I knew it.”
“Clever you,” Kevin said nastily. “Bet you wouldn’t know enough to survive in the lockup yourself. I did it by spending all my time in the library. Somebody had donated a whole shelfful of fantasy novels. Writing stories in my head kept me from going crazy.” He tapped his temple.
“Wow, Kevin,” I said. Pretty lame, but I was busy looking at Kevin in a new light. I had sometimes pictured him in the hands of lots of large cops (wishful thinking). I had never thought of him as the kind of person who would turn to books for help.
“But,” Kevin went on, “some of the guys thought I had ratted on a friend of theirs. They came after me. They caught me by the back wall of the laundry room.” A shrug. “I didn’t have anything on me except that pin of yours, so I pulled it out. You can hurt somebody with almost anything if you’re up against it, you know?
“Somehow I stuck myself with the sharp end, and boy, it hurt!” He laughed and shook his head, but his eyes had a far-off, remembering look, and not a lighthearted one. “For a minute I thought I was dying. I thought Bennie or Carlos had knifed me so fast I didn’t even notice. I think I passed out. And when I woke up here I was, in the Fayre Farre instead of the D-Home. Not a bad deal, huh?”
“Looks like out of the frying pan into the fire to me,” I said, thinking of the Bone Men. I turned cautiously in my saddle to look behind us, but no scraggly skeletons were in sight.
“You wouldn’t say that if it had been you it happened to,” Kevin said, watching me with sly amusement out of the corners of his eyes. He dug his fingers under the shoulder scales of the red seelim and scratched away under there as both animals padded uphill across an open meadow with their odd, springy gait.
A whole lot of weird ideas chased each other through my head: had Kevin really jumped somehow from danger in the D-home to the Fayre Farre, or were we both somehow inside his head while his body was still in terrible trouble back there? In that case, where was my body and what was happening to it while I was in the Fayre Farre with him? How long ago had he escaped from the laundry room—and had he escaped?
Was I dealing with a ghost here? Was he still actually back there, stuck somehow in a frozen moment of danger? Maybe he was living all of the story he’d made up in just a few seconds in the real world that translated into months, or whatever, in the Fayre Farre, and somehow he’d roped me into living it with him?
I asked, “When you were still able to get through the arches yourself, did you go back to the D-home?”
“Hey, when you get out of that place, you don’t go back if you can help it,” Kevin said scornfully. “Anyway, that’s all a long time ago now. There’s no point talking about it.”
I decided not to argue or push for more information. In the first place, it was all so complicated and scary to think about that it made me feel as if my skull would explode. In the second place, I had a feeling that making it into—and back out of—the Fayre Farre was going to take a lot of very close attention to what was going on around me, whether I believed in Kevin’s world or not.
We were now climbing pretty high. I saw distant water on both sides of the ridge we rode on and buildings here and there, far away. Some fields had dots in them that might have been cows, or whatever Kevin had invented to take the place of cows.
I said, “I’m surprised you still had this old pin of mine. It’s not worth anything. Why’d you keep it?”
There was a little silence. Then Kevin said, “When I took it off you, that was a day my dad came home celebrating a bombing in Belfast. He was a great fan of the Irish Republican Army, did you know that? To hear him tell it, he was a wanted man for all kinds of mighty deeds he’d personally done against the English oppressors in Ireland. Then he kept tabs on things from here.
“That particular night he was so bombed hi
mself by the time he came in the door, he passed out without whipping any of us kids. I kept your pin on me for good luck after that.” He glanced at me sidelong. “Also, I thought those were diamonds in it. I’d never seen a real diamond, how would I know different? Anyhow, I kept it. It was small enough to fasten into my clothes where nobody could find it and take it away from me.”
I didn’t know what to say. Kevin’s father had beat up on him? You hear about stuff like that in the news, in school even, but you don’t expect to know anybody who’s lived with it. No wonder he’d made up a fantasy world as a little kid—not for adventure so much as for a refuge.
Kevin pointed. “Hey, great—kaley trees!”
A line of dark trees crowned the low slope ahead of us. They had fat trunks and thick-packed leaves of a dark, glossy green.
“The nuts taste like cashews,” Kevin said enthusiastically. “I tried making them out of chocolate first. I was real little then. It turned out not to be practical.”
“I can imagine,” I said, thinking of melted chocolate running down the branches on hot days.
“How about nuts for lunch?” Kevin said.
“Why not?” I said. “It’s been nuts since yesterday.”
The branches grew low enough so we could pick the nuts by reaching up from our saddles. I gave Kevin one of my sandwiches and ate the other myself. Kevin carried water in a sort of fat leather bottle slung from his saddle. He drank some and shared it with me.
We could have been on a picnic. But I was not cheerful. The empty landscape got on my nerves. My legs ached from yesterday’s skating and now, in different places, from riding a seelim.
After eating we followed the road over rolling land through scattered stands of trees. Where was everybody? I was afraid to ask. We left the woodsy hills behind and started across a wide, dry plain. A hot breeze toasted my throat. I tried scratching my seelim the way Kevin had scratched his. It groaned, with pleasure I hoped. Under the scales its skin was soft and cool.