The Kingdom of Kevin Malone

  “Kevin,” I said, “where are we going?”

  With no warning at all, my seelim squealed and leaped in the air, and I screamed and tumbled off. I landed hard on the back of my shoulders thinking: It’s my fate, it’s just Daisy all over again.

  “Let go of the reins!” Kevin yelled, jumping down before his plunging, squalling seelim could dump him the way mine had dumped me. “Don’t let him drag you!”

  Both seelims sped away, leaving us standing in the middle of nowhere—but not alone.

  About ten feet from us a person stood watching—a scrawny little man shorter than either of us, copper-skinned under a coating of sweat-streaked dust and ash. He wore a loincloth roughly the same color as his skin, a lumpy leather pouch slung from one shoulder, and nothing else.

  “That’s what spooked them,” Kevin said confidently, “and he’s just what we need! I told you everything works for me here.” He drew himself up proudly and began to declaim, “Man of the Brangle—”

  “You are pursued,” the stranger observed softly, pointing past us.

  We were. A shifting, swirling crowd of dust-colored animals boiled out of the ragged forest behind us. They were long-legged and long-necked with big, round faces and a funny way of lifting their heads on their curved necks, like camels, or llamas.

  “What are those?” I said.

  Kevin shouted, “Sanctuary! Sanctuary for Prince Kavian and his lady!”

  The stranger didn’t say a word, he simply turned and ran. Kevin swore and lunged after him, but the little guy just dropped out of sight.

  “Come on, or the Famishers will get you!” Kevin yelled over his shoulder at me. Then he seemed to leap into space and vanish like the coppery man, as if they had both jumped into the Grand Canyon.

  All I could see ahead was dry, bare plain. The oncoming monsters made weird squealing noises behind me—were they laughing? Then two of them out in front opened their mouths and I saw fangs like boars’ tusks.

  I shut my eyes, took a running leap, and tumbled over the edge of a bluff that was invisible until you were right on top of it. Down I slithered in a cloud of dust, into a vast tangle of thorny brush that seemed to stretch on forever.

  Six

  In the Brangle

  THE DRY, SPINY VINES STABBED and tore. I yelled. Kevin dragged me in deeper after him.

  “Hurry,” he panted, “they can’t follow us in here!”

  I lumped along after him as best I could, scared and angry. How typical of him to make our only escape from the baddies (and I didn’t have to look again to know that these Famisher-things were not goodies) through a forest of stickers designed to shred you and your best blue jeans.

  The little stranger was gone. Behind us, the brush seemed to squirm back into a thick, spiky tangle as soon as we had thrashed our way through it. How would we ever get out of there again, even if we could figure out where out was?

  Not that I was in any great hurry to do that just then. I could hear the Famishers padding around and squealing eagerly outside the brush. As Kevin had promised, they weren’t getting in—a definite plus. But if one more thorn raked me across the neck I was going to scream. I hoped the seelims had run far, far away by now. By the look of those teeth, Famishers could eat anything.

  We scrambled into an open space and both collapsed, spitting out dust and twigs. My skin stung all over. For a second I thought I must have gone blind as well: then I realized that the brush grew so tall here that it closed over our heads, drowning us in brown gloom. We were completely enclosed by interlaced branches.

  “I feel like I’ve been through a Cuisinart,” I said.

  “We’re okay,” Kevin said. “Famishers can’t move around in here.”

  “Who can?” I said. “I’m bleeding to death. Where are we, Kevin?”

  “In the Brangle,” he said in a tone of satisfaction, slapping dust off his clothes with both hands and coughing. “Anglower’s creatures have burned up whole forests all over the Fayre Farre. Brangle is all that grows back. The thorns hate him and keep out him and his.”

  “Lucky them,” I growled.

  “You don’t understand.” He had lost his cap and his hair was a dusty tangle, though not as awful as mine. He rubbed at his scratched forehead with his sleeve. “This is where we’ve been heading all morning. See, the Branglemen can talk with the Oldest Ones. They’ll get us the prophecy Sebbian lost, the one we need, if we can find them and get them to cooperate.”

  “We just met one,” I said. “And he took off.”

  “He was just a sentry posted at the Brangle’s edge,” Kevin said. “He’s gone for the others, more important ones. I’m their only hope, they all know that. But I’m no good empty-handed; I need the prophecy that will lead us to the sword. They know that, too. If the White One’s minions chase me to the Black Cliffs and I haven’t got the Farsword when I meet him there, everything’s lost.”

  “Maybe your Branglemen don’t care about your sword and your battle,” I said. “I mean, they live in here, right? Then what’s all that to them?”

  Kevin bristled. “Hey, I know what I’m doing, okay?”

  “Well, excuse me,” I said. “I’m just a miserable, expendable flunky without whose help you are probably chopped liver, right?”

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “So how do I get home from here once we’ve got this prophecy?” I said wearily. I felt some sneaking sense of embarrassment, which I didn’t want to let Kevin see. Here I was, a lover of Tolkien, living in a magic world that really worked—and all I could think of was getting myself back out of it again.

  Kevin examined his scratched knuckles. “There’s an arch in here someplace that the Branglemen keep. You’ll use that.”

  My eyes were now used to the dimness. I could see that a lot of tunnel-like openings shadowed the walls around us.

  “Well, let’s look for these Branglemen, then,” I grumbled, getting up. “We can’t just sit here.”

  Something whizzed past my head and stuck into the brush beyond me. Someone said, “Stand still or you’re food for thorns!”

  It was the Brangleman again—or another one, I couldn’t tell. He was still (or also) shorter than I was, but he had lots of authority. In one hand he held two sticks of polished wood the size of a carving knife: throwing clubs, perfectly appropriate to people low in the pecking order in a sword-and-sorcery world (accent for the moment on “sword”).

  Keeping his eyes on us, the Brangleman tucked one club into his waistband, and dipping into his pouch he brought out a small, squirmy creature that he cuddled against his cheek.

  The animal looked at us with little red eyes, its pointy snout twitching. The Brangleman whispered to it, then stooped and let the creature leap from his hand into the brush, giving me a quick view of a body like a very miniature greyhound. There was the faintest rustling sound, and it was gone.

  The Brangleman straightened up. “That way,” he said, pointing with his throwing stick.

  Kevin said, “Man of the Brangle, I am Kavian the Promised—”

  “That way!” The Brangleman bared brownish teeth at us, and he was not smiling.

  I grabbed Kevin’s torn sleeve and steered him “that way,” into a tunnel. We had to walk bent nearly double, the roof of the passage was so low. There hardly seemed to be any air. All around us the brush seethed softly with tiny sounds.

  The Brangleman moved so quietly at our backs that I had to look a couple of times to make sure he was still there. He was, showing his teeth and making threatening movements with the throwing sticks now.

  Once he stopped us with a warning grunt and we stood there while he sniffed at the stuffy air. I did a little sniffing myself: smoke.

  “That way,” said the Brangleman, and off we went again.

  “Hey,” I whispered to Kevin. “There’s a fire burning somewhere in this stuff!”

  “The White One’s men are always trying to burn it off and flush the Branglemen out,” Kevin whispered
back.

  “Oh,” I answered faintly, and let the subject drop. I could not talk about the prospect of being fried alive without freaking completely.

  Our tunnel took a sudden turn to the right, and the ground angled down in front of us like a steep dirt driveway into a cellar. We both stopped dead. As we teetered at the top of the incline, the Brangleman gave us each a shove in the back. We staggered down, clunking into each other and making the exclamations appropriate to the situation. Kevin’s language was even more raw than usual.

  We fell into a shallow underground room hacked into the dirt. A sort of gate made of woven vines—with the thorns still on, of course—slid down behind us. The sharp stakes of the gate’s bottom edge thumped home into deep holes in the floor.

  “Man of the Brangle!” Kevin shouted. “Go tell your chiefs how you have treated the Promised Champion and his companion! They will punish you, this I swear!”

  There was no answer. The Brangleman had gone. “Where did you learn to talk like that?” I said.

  He peered out through the thorn gate. “I bet I’ve read more books than you. I know how nobles talk.”

  I moved cautiously around our prison. Floor, walls, and ceiling were made of packed, polished earth as hard as stone. Little sharp edges stuck out all over where roots and rootlets had been clipped off. They bit into me when I sat down and leaned back. There was a dusty smell that made me think of live burials.

  “Maybe we can dig our way out,” I said, running my hands over the wall beside the thorn gate.

  “With what?” Kevin said. “They cut these rooms and tunnels in the clay, stuff the spaces with brush, and set it afire. The walls bake into brick. You can’t dig through it with your fingernails.”

  I said, “So are you just going to sit here?”

  He took off his dirty green vest, folded it, and stuck it between his back and the wall. “I am,” he said. “And you might do the same. One thing I’ve learned this side of the arches: when you get a chance to rest, take it.”

  “Will that Brangle-guy come back?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m the Promised Champion, the hero of the story. They need me.”

  “Seems to me you need them, for the prophecy,” I said. “Not to mention helping get us out of here.”

  He chewed his lip. “It works both ways.”

  So they couldn’t just drop him down a hole and forget about him. But where did it say anything in Kevin’s world about what they could or could not do with me? I’d have bet that no instructions existed on that point.

  Smoke wafted in. I coughed.

  Kevin said hoarsely, “The air’s better down lower.”

  I crouched down. The ground felt warm. “What if the fire—” My jaw locked with terror.

  Kevin shook his head. “He wouldn’t leave us in the path of the fire,” he said, sounding so sure that I was certain he was just as petrified as I was. “The Branglemen know fire, and the green and the dry parts of the Brangle—where it won’t burn and where it will—and they know how the air currents move in here.”

  “And they don’t eat roast Champion,” I said.

  “Don’t be a smart-mouth,” he warned. I could see his eyes gleam angrily. “I may be just a street kid to you, but I am someone in the Fayre Farre.”

  “Which is nothing but a figment of your imagination, Kevin,” I snapped back. I was not in a friendly mood.

  “It’s my country,” he said. “And it’s real; real enough to stick you with its thorns.”

  “You too,” I said. “You’re stuck here in more ways than one.”

  “Ha ha,” he said. “Same old Amy, too smart for her own good. Are you in college yet?”

  Well, I was annoyed and silly enough to answer, maybe because of the fight I’d had with Dad about that very subject that morning—was it only a few hours ago? Kevin and I were down there a long time, and after a while I knew pretty much what I had at the beginning.

  What Kevin knew was lots more: that my mom was running a design studio for a big textile company now instead of free-lancing, and that my dad was writing for Hollywood, and all about Cousin Shelly.

  Dad’s new career really got Kevin interested. He asked a ton of questions about screenplays—how long did it take Dad to write one, did he have an agent, how did a script get produced, a whole lot of stuff I mostly didn’t know the answers to.

  Feeling cornered and ignorant about matters that I was sensitive about to begin with, I finally went on the attack. “What happened after you left home? I know you got into trouble.”

  “Some,” he said cautiously.

  “Enough?” I asked. That sounded a lot more sarcastic than I’d meant it to sound. “I mean, enough so you can do what you’ve signed up for in the Fayre Farre? From what I’ve seen, they play rough here, Kevin. They kill each other. Can you do that if you have to? Have you ever killed anybody yourself? For real, I mean, in the real world.”

  Silence.

  “Come on, tell me.”

  “You don’t want to know that,” he said gruffly. “People getting killed, real trouble—what could that have to do with you anyhow, with your big apartment and your rich pals?”

  I stared at him. “Kevin, I didn’t pick where I lived.”

  “Well, neither did I,” he said. He had detached a huge thorn from his sleeve and began cleaning his fingernails with it. “But I lived there anyways, didn’t I? Long as I could stand it, I did. And I bet I stood it a lot longer than you or any of those jerks in your building would have. Bunch of wimps.”

  “At least none of us grew up to think we were princes and princesses,” I said. Not nice, but he’d started it.

  He snorted. “No point in it, for you. You were already the royalty of the street, weren’t you? Whining brats with your pockets full of money—”

  “Until you came along and stole it,” I retorted. “Don’t feel so sorry for yourself. You don’t know anything about any of us. Remember Sylvia Sorensen from the sixth floor? Well, her mother killed herself, did you know that? Sleeping pills. And that scrawny boy with the lisp, what was his name—”

  “Tony,” he said. “Him and his baseball card collection. He was ready to sell his blood to get it back. I couldn’t give those cards away, they were so beat up. They weren’t worth a thing.”

  “Tony had such bad allergies he had to go to a special camp every summer.”

  “Oh boy, poor guy,” Kevin sneered. “Camp! Poor deprived little creep. He stabbed me in the hand with a pencil. I still have the scar!”

  “Then you must have scared him into it.” I remembered Tony as a timid boy.

  “It didn’t take much to scare you brats from up the block,” Kevin said. “Crybabies. You had everything, the whole bunch of you. We didn’t have nothing.”

  “Didn’t have anything,” I corrected. “If you’re going to call yourself a hero, you should learn to talk like one.”

  “Ha, that’s how much you know,” he crowed. “You know why the real Spanish, from Spain, speak Spanish with a lisp? Because they had a king who lisped, that’s why. He was the king, so everybody had to talk like him. Once I’ve beaten the White One and taken my kingdom back, everybody in the Fayre Farre will have to talk my way or have their heads whacked off. How about that?”

  “How about that?” I said. “It stinks. They’re better off with old Glopgoner in charge instead of you. Who needs a hero with a chip on his shoulder?”

  “When you need a hero,” he retorted, “you don’t stop to pick and choose. You take what you get.”

  “And the people around here are going to get you?” I laughed. “I’d be doing them a favor if I made sure you never find this stupid sword.”

  Kevin lunged forward and shoved his face in mine. “It’s not stupid!” he shouted. “It’s the only chance any of us have got!” He leaned back again, glaring at me. He was fast and strong as a snake, and he had scared me, pouncing like that.

  “I didn’t ask to be dragged into this, Kevin
,” I said, my heart still pounding in alarm. “Why should I help you anyway?”

  He made an exasperated sound. “You’re part of the story. The rhinestone rose sought you out. Look, the Promised Champion was raised in a foreign place but there’s people he knows there. Like this girl he grew up with.”

  Scandalized, I burst out, “You used to take my money! You call that growing up together?”

  “Well, we knew each other, didn’t we?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t say so,” I said. “I sure never knew Prince Kavian, the hero of the Fayre Farre. Some hero.”

  “Hey, didn’t you hear me? Watch it,” he snarled. “Without me you’d be a dead duck in the Fayre Farre, even if I wasn’t a prince.”

  “Well, I’m just a tourist,” I said, “and where I come from, it’s called America and even important people are just citizens, like the rest of us. So if you want me to bow and grovel and talk highfalutin’ baloney to you, Prince Kavian, you can just forget it.”

  We sat and glared at each other through the murk. This was not an improvement on conversation, no matter how irritating. For one thing, I noticed how thirsty I was. But I was through complaining. I was not going to play comic sidekick to Kevin’s valiant prince.

  Suddenly Kevin whispered silkily, “You’ll do it, Amy.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Whatever the prophecy says. Because there’s something I can do for you.”

  “Such as?” I said.

  “Once I’m in charge around here,” he said, “once I’ve overthrown the White One and taken back my kingdom, all the magic he’s stolen comes back to me. It has to. I’ll be able to do whatever I want here, like in the old days when I first made the place.”

  I did not like the sound of this at all. The boastful, vengeful tone, which seemed to promise a lot of unpleasant reprisals against anyone who had sided with the White One for whatever reason, was only part of it. There was something else, something personal and particularly aimed at me.

  “What are you talking about, Kevin?” I asked.