Champions of Breakfast

  “Pixie scholars and courtiers filled Denzil Hall and bickered and debated what to do about their waning world, and whether it was really waning at all. Throughout this I stayed at the fringes, frustrated but mum. I realize now that all the court could see that there was something I wasn’t telling, and it riled them. ‘Hasn’t she always been a bit of an insufferable know-it-all?’ they asked one another behind veils of hands. ‘She with her secret magics and private jokes. Always laughing at nothing. Hers is a witch’s laugh, have you noticed?’

  “Before long the pixie kingdom was openly discussing the very real possibility of taking advice from the elves. Surely they knew more about this situation (if indeed it was a situation) than dear Fray?

  “Now I broke my silence.

  “‘The . . . wise and learned court of King Denzil is joking, of course,’ I said.

  “‘Lady Fray should take no offense,’ cooed the arch chamberlain. ‘She has told us herself that her singular knowledge comes from traveling the wider world. The Fay—’

  “I interrupted. ‘The Fay have had nothing to say to the pixies for three hundred years, and likewise. You’ve not seen how they’ve changed. They’ve grown insular and weird. Tangled. They’re bearing some bitter fruit in the court of Titania.’

  “‘Our dear Fray has confused the fairies with a patch of late October blackberries,’ joked the minor domo. It was about as good a joke then as it is now.

  “‘The court of Titania has of late been nothing but civil,’ said the minister of waves. ‘A message of goodwill arrived from Her Majesty on feast day, borne by a most charming white crow. It promises a new age of friendship and sharing.’

  “At this I raised my eyes. ‘Sharing of land?’

  “‘Er . . . ,’ said the minister. ‘Possibly. The message said only ‘knowledge.’

  “I smirked. I was a great one for smirking. ‘I’ll bet it did,’ I said. I’d backed myself against a wall, literally and figuratively. ‘Don’t make this mistake,’ I pleaded. ‘You haven’t seen the fairies. You haven’t seen how they bully the humans. They’ll be bullying us next.’

  “Murmurs rippled through the hall.

  “The king stepped down from his dais. ‘Surely Lady Fray does not draw comparisons between the pixies and the humans.’ It was very italic, the way he said ‘humans.’

  “I breathed, deeply and deliberately, and shared a look with my daughter, who was seated near the dais and surrounded as always by those idiot princes.

  “‘I haven’t been entirely forthcoming,’ I admitted. ‘I have a plan. A plan to save us, and our children, and our grandchildren. I’ve been waiting to see if you all were ready to hear this plan. Maybe that was a mistake. But if the Fay are to be visiting . . . you’ll want a clean house, naturally. Won’t do to have an old black widow like me lurking in the corners, spinning webs. Daughter! Attend!’

  “But Morenwyn wouldn’t come.

  “‘We would prefer the lady Fray and her daughter remain,’ said King Denzil. ‘Guards?’

  “Good pixie men, in arms and armor enchanted by my own magics, advanced like a drumroll.

  “‘Morenwyn!’ I said. ‘Quickly!’

  “‘I’m not coming, Mother,’ Morenwyn said quietly. ‘I’m to be married to one of Titania’s changelings. To unite our peoples. It’s been decided.’

  “She’d said it so quietly that I couldn’t hear her over the clattering press of guards. I’d have to ask about it later. For now there was nothing to do but cross my arms, tighten my tongue, and rattle a ticking string of consonants through my teeth. At this my body closed like an eye and disappeared. And if the spell went right, then the marble floor would have split and sprouted a foul-smelling bush that unfurled and spelled out dirty words with its branches.”

  The spell had gone right. The pixie guards backed away, waving the stench from their noses.

  Queen Rosevear sighed. “Rude.”

  No one in the kingdom could have told you who was the first to refer to Fray as a witch, but the word stuck like it was her True Name, if pixies had such things. And the pixies heard nothing from her as the fairy delegations arrived on their shores, bearing gifts and asking all manner of questions, ‘Where is your sorceress?’ being chiefly among these. But no one knew the answer.

  The elves assured the pixies that the world was as whole as ever. The changeling prince Dhanu himself claimed to have recently visited the frost giants of the Americas, though he was reluctant to discuss any details of his time there. He courted lovely Morenwyn, and the two seemed to hit it off despite the height and age difference. The sons of Denzil privately lamented the loss of Morenwyn to an outsider, but they kept silent for the good of the kingdom.

  So when Morenwyn disappeared in the night, none doubted that the witch Fray must have come and kidnapped her. They didn’t know that Morenwyn had compared the changeling Dhanu to Prince Fi once too often, or that the couple had begun to quarrel, or that Dhanu, in a pique, had told her, “You can stay in this world and die with your Prince Fi then, for all that I care!”

  So Morenwyn had crept from the castle, and found a seagull to fly her, and used her own feeble blood magics to find her mother.

  “What was your plan?” asked Rudesby. “What didn’t you tell your people?”

  “That I had found an island—this island. That there were giants living on it, some of whom had come here from a distant place. That this island had invisible doors that might take us to a safer world. But I hadn’t yet studied the doors, and I wasn’t certain what we’d find on the other side. I thought it best to hold my tongue about them until I was certain, because I knew the Fay wanted such doors for wicked reasons.

  “And then, one night while studying the doors, I fell into a trance. I had a vision of two worlds, split in twain by a stake or spear or sword. And a tear in the sky and a great void consuming all that is.”

  “That’s the tapestry.”

  “Yes, that’s the tapestry. I’m convinced now that the same instability that created the doors will one day tear the universe apart. But I don’t know why. You can be a help to me, Rudesby, while I figure it out. Would you like to help me, Rudesby? Would you like to help save the universe?”

  You could see the reflex answer, the first impression on his lips. “I wanna go home” is what he nearly said. But every boy, when he’s young, secretly believes that someone will ask him to save the universe sooner or later. Rudesby was a man now, so for a moment he’d forgotten. He’d forgotten that when a princess or an old wizard or a race of friendly aliens or a pixie asks you if you’ll help save the universe, the correct answer is yes.

  Rudesby nodded his head.

  “Good. Then I have a job for you. I had another vision a few nights ago, you see. I foresaw a familiar group of pixies, with two humans and a leprechaun. And they were determined to find their way back to our island. The boat I sent them should just be arriving. Be a dear and capture them?”

  CHAPTER 14

  “So that’s it, huh?” Scott said as the boat neared Fray’s island. “Her castle’s bigger than I expected.”

  “I told you it was large,” said Fi.

  “Yesterday you called a walnut large.”

  “It was a large walnut.”

  “The dark castle loomed . . . ,” Mick began tentatively. “The . . . great black castle loomed like a . . . a . . .”

  Everyone held their breath politely, but Mick had stalled. He rapped his forehead with his knuckles.

  “Juices aren’t flowin’ this mornin,’” he muttered. “It’s all these pixies! My mind ain’t in full flower. No offense, lads.”

  “The black castle loomed like a . . . big black tent,” Polly offered. “Is that good?”

  “The castle loomed like a giant building in the distance!” Fo announced.

  “The trouble is that nothin’ looms as hard as a castle,” said Mick.

  “The castle loomed like another, different castle,” said Polly.

  “The castl
e loomed in that fashion common to castles the world over,” Denzil said with a flourish.

  “Forget I brought it up.”

  “The castle loomed like a storm cloud,” said Haskoll, “dark and heavy with portent.”

  “The castle loomed like a storm cloud,” said Scott, “dark and heavy with portent.”

  “Hey.”

  Mick raised his head and smiled at Scott. “Well now, that’s not half bad. How’d yeh think o’ that?”

  “It just came to me.”

  “Hey!”

  “Brothers,” said Fee. “Do my eyes play tricks, or is there a giant on the island’s shore, awaiting our arrival?”

  They all fell silent and looked. It wasn’t a giant, of course—it was just a man, though Scott didn’t feel like having that argument. A man in dingy underwear the color of a greasy napkin.

  “They call him Rudesby,” said Prince Fi, “and the last time I was here I gave him fair reason to have a grudge against me.”

  They couldn’t have turned the boat around if they’d wanted to—a combination of tide and magic sent them hurtling toward Rudesby, grinding up the beach until they came to a stop by his feet.

  “’Lo,” said Rudesby. “I’m here t’ capture you. It would mean a lot to me if you didn’t make a big fuss about it.”

  Fee ran up the starboard edge of the boat to its prow. “You expect a prince of the kingdom of the pixies to come without a fight?”

  Rudesby cringed. His whole body cringed. “Aw, man, I don’t know . . . yes? Please?”

  Up to this point, even Scott had been clenching his fists, ready for a scrap. But everyone kind of lost steam. Haskoll had disappeared again.

  “I just . . . ,” Rudesby whined. “It would be great if you guys would all be cool and just come along quietly, and then maybe Nim won’t pull my ears and tell the others to call me Rudesby anymore.”

  “That’s not your name?” asked Polly.

  “My name’s Chaz. Ha! Man, it feels good to say that. My name is Chaz.”

  Mick, who had been in a twelve-step program in the eighties, said, “Hi, Chaz” reflexively.

  “My name is Chaz, and my life’s been a big turd since Vegas, but if you let me tie up the kid and the leprechaun and stick the rest of you in this little cage here, maybe everything’ll turn around for old Chaz.”

  The pixies huffed and grumbled about this, but Scott changed the subject.

  “Vegas?” he said. “I thought you sounded American. You’re from Las Vegas?”

  “I’m from San Francisco,” said Rudesby. “Me and my wife were on our honeymoon in Vegas, and after that we were gonna drive down and see the Grand Canyon. But I lost all our money at the tables and Lacey threw her wedding band at me and ran off with a magician.”

  For half a minute the only noise was of the dark waves lapping at the rocks and the thunk of the boat, rising and falling.

  “Had just enough gas to drive down to the Grand Canyon by myself. Drove straight through the night. When I got there I went right for this thing called the Skywalk. It’s awesome. It’s this huge glass horseshoe that goes right out over the rim of the canyon. You can walk out and look straight down. It was Lacey that read up on it, Lacey that wanted to go see it, so . . . I guess maybe I thought she’d be there waiting for me. It was stupid.”

  Rudesby sat down on the rocks.

  “So I didn’t know I was gonna do it, but suddenly I’m jumping off the Skywalk, right? And I guess I go through some magic portal like in a movie, and I get caught in a net with all these eagles in this weird castle here. And it’s just like in a movie, except in movies the main character doesn’t get stripped down to his underwear and treated like a jerk, does he?”

  “It’s because you’re not the main character,” Polly told him. “I am.”

  “Oh. Hey. I thought all pixies were black.”

  “I’m not a pixie, I’m just magic.”

  “Look,” said Scott. “We’re not gonna let you tie us up or stick us in cages, but we’ll come quietly with you if you take us to see Fray.”

  Fee and Fo raised their voices in protest.

  “What?” said Scott. “We want to get inside and see Fray anyway, don’t we?”

  “Lad has a point,” said Mick.

  “We’ll even walk . . . I don’t know, single file or something. And you can bark orders at us.”

  Rudesby nodded his head—slowly at first, but with a rising vigor like he might just start shaking hands and passing out cigars, he’d never heard an idea so good.

  “I think I’d really like that,” he said.

  “Okay then!” said Scott. “Um . . . everyone line up?”

  “In what order, do you suppose?” said Denzil. “Oldest first?”

  “How about biggest to smallest,” Fee grumbled. “Everyone fall in behind Scott.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Emily was in a dog carrier. The unicat was with her. Erno was in another carrier that she could not see somewhere behind her. They had called to each other, talked for a bit, made and unmade foolish plans. But in time it came clear that there was nothing to say, and now Emily was pretty sure Erno was asleep.

  She didn’t know where Biggs was. He hadn’t returned any of their calls.

  Emily had yet to hear about Scott’s adventures in Pretannica—about the Tower of London that was enchanted to vanish with Queen Titania and all her retinue; about the huge ravens who felt its pull, compelled by the same spell to find it wherever it appeared. But she would have felt a kinship with those ravens now as she shivered in the cargo hold of a passenger jet winging its way over the Atlantic. She felt certain they were over the Atlantic, because she began to feel a tug now—the pull, growing ever stronger, of home.

  She couldn’t say just how she felt it, or why, but Goodborough, New Jersey, was reeling her in with outstretched arms, a voice neither motherly nor in the strictest sense even human whispering, “Welcome back. We knew you’d be back. We kept your room just how you like it.”

  She surprised herself by getting a little sleep, too, the unicat curled up in the crook of her arm. She awoke when the plane touched down and went through the complicated business of remembering where she was. For a moment she even thought it might be that OTHER cage she’d been locked in, ha ha, life’s funny, isn’t it.

  Soon a man came to take her cage off the aircraft, and she pleaded with him just as she had pleaded with the man who’d loaded her on board in London.

  “PLEASE HELP ME! Please please please, I’m not a dog, I’m a kid! Please don’t let her take me!”

  “All right, calm down, calm down in there,” the man told her as he wheeled her down a ramp. “Your owner’s gonna get you real soon and it’ll all be over.”

  Emily exhaled and hugged herself. The unicat licked her fingers.

  Home was so close, now. She’d be in the Philadelphia airport, of course. Goodborough was across the Delaware River, just ten miles away.

  She was taken to baggage claim, maybe the same baggage claim where she and the others had narrowly evaded capture by Nimue and her Freemen just a few scant weeks ago. She was wheeled up to a group of bags and saw, for a moment, Erno, through the door of his cage. Harvey was sitting on top of it—had he been on the flight too? He must have been. He must have been in the cargo hold, listening to the terrible things Erno and Emily said about him. Soon Emily’s carrier was turned and parked neatly beside Erno’s, so that she could see only slivers of him through the slots in the plastic.

  “You okay?” Erno asked her.

  She made a noise like a laugh. But not exactly like a laugh. She knew that her laughter had always sounded a little strange—to herself and to others—like it wasn’t her first language.

  “Am I okay? Even if I were still the smartest girl in the world I wouldn’t know how to answer that question,” she told him.

  A teenage girl was crouching in front of their carriers and cooing at them.

  “Who’s a good dog?” she asked them.
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  “I’d treat that as a rhetorical quethtion,” said Harvey.

  “Neither of us is talking to you,” said Erno.

  “Aw, you’re a yappy little fella, aren’t you?” the girl asked Erno. This gave Emily an idea.

  “Bark,” she said.

  “Bark bark,” she said a second later.

  “Hello, sweetie,” the girl said. “Am I not paying enough attention to you?”

  “Bark bark bark.”

  The girl looked at her strangely.

  “Bark bark bark bark,” said Emily.

  “What are you doing?” asked Harvey.

  “Hey, Mom!” the girl called toward the baggage carousel. “I think this dog is counting.”

  “Bark bark bark bark bark.”

  A couple other people had noticed this too, and now they crowded near the cages.

  “Bark bark bark bark bark bark,” said Emily.

  “That’s . . . amazing,” said a man.

  “Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark.”

  “STOP THAT!” said someone new, a man some distance away. “STOP THAT . . . THAT BARKING!”

  The girl really stared inside the cage now, stared like she was trying to spot the differences between two pictures, which in a sense she was.

  “There’s a cat in there too,” she said. “Why didn’t I see that before? There’s a cat in there with the dog. That . . . is a dog, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it’s a dog,” said a man who was breathing as if he’d run some distance to get there. “It’s my cat and dog. Please step aside.”

  “Sorry.”

  Emily pushed her face up against the door. This new man looked perfectly ordinary, but he wore a pink tie, so she assumed he was a Freeman.

  Erno began barking “Jingle Bells.”

  “Stop that! Stop it!” shouted the man.

  “That dog is barking ‘Jingle Bells,’” said someone nearby.

  “What kept you?” Harvey asked the Freeman.