The Kingdom of Kevin Malone

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  But where, which direction? I was ready to run away and try to come back another time with Kevin’s knife. But I didn’t dare leave the shelter of the roof.

  A Famisher came snuffling around close below me. I looked down at it the way you have to look at the worst part of a horror movie even though you know you’re going to hate what you see.

  It had patchy, curly fur all over its humped back, like a buffalo. But the neck was a skinny, bare buzzard-neck. The face, mercifully, I couldn’t see because it had lowered its head to the ground where it was ripping away with satisfied little grunts at something hidden by the shadow of the eaves.

  The only elves I could see were lying very still in the grass or else stirring just a little with movements that might have been nothing but wind tugging at their clothes. There were Famishers, too, about five of them, collapsed on the ground in large dark heaps. One of them kept rolling on its side, trying to get up and letting out a deep, raw squeal each time. Then it would flop back down, lie still a little, and try again.

  Two others had dragged something out through the window and were pulling it between them, each one hanging on with its teeth and snorting aggressively through long, curled slits of nostrils like the f-holes in a violin.

  The worst part was the sight and the sound of that hurt Famisher trying to get up and trying to get up, totally ignored by others of its own kind. What horrible creatures! I couldn’t even think about going down there among them and trying to run away.

  I hugged my branch, leaves tickling my skin. There had to be things I could do to help myself, sensible things, if I could just think of them. But you don’t think much on a battlefield.

  I found myself visualizing my mother longingly, seeing her as she hurried down the hall to my bedroom to wake me up from a bad dream. I thought of my dad, reading to me at bedtime from a fantasy adventure story, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, a book Mom had objected to as too nightmarish. I had loved it.

  But this nightmare was real. For one thing there was the smell, now a mixture of pine scent and something incredibly sharp and disgusting—

  And then the battle quit being a spectator sport.

  A Famisher that had been snuffling around below me lifted its head and looked up at me with huge, shining eyes.

  Thirteen

  Sobragana

  WHERE WAS KEVIN, where was Rachel or Claudia, where was anybody? I was left to face this monster all by myself, without even a stick in my hand—

  Except for the Farsword, of course: mighty Farfarer.

  The Famisher’s eyes, which were big and round and forward-facing like a cat’s, blinked in a slow, sleepy blink that was almost silly looking, like something a cartoon character would do to express being love-smitten. The face rose up, up on the snaky neck, as the creature reared on its hind legs. It was hugely tall. It planted its front feet on the edge of the roof with a rattling thump and looked down at me.

  The face dropped closer, the round mouth curling open, the lips rolling inward and back to expose these incredible teeth in rows, like a shark’s, all around the circular opening and deep inside the cheeks.

  With a velcro rip, which made the Famisher stop and jerk its head back, I dug for the wrapped knife and pulled it out of my jacket pocket. I clamped my legs around a thick branch so I wouldn’t fall and, using both hands, clawed away the cloth wrapping from the knife.

  The Famisher’s breath, a concentration of something like licorice to the millionth power, gusted nauseatingly over me as its face came close again. My ears rang with its squeal of pleasure. A drop of its drool splashed hot on my elbow.

  Oh Mom, oh Shelly, oh Dad—but this was Kevin’s world, Kevin’s terms.

  “Farfarer,” I gasped, “you’re home; be what you truly are!”

  Too late—the cavern of fangs plunged toward me. I threw myself backward, imagining the killing impact of hitting the floor below. But anything was better than that disgusting creature’s maw.

  An underbranch of the roof tree caught me hard behind the knees. There I hung by my legs, head-down in the pitchy dark of Elf Home like a monkey in the jungle on a moonless night. I didn’t drop the knife, though now it felt so heavy that I had to hold it with both hands.

  I felt the close-packed leaves and branches of the roof jam hard against my left side as the Famisher’s huge head punched down through the roof after me. The Famisher’s neck skin, soft as a baby’s, rubbed along the back of my bare hand.

  I was so revolted by the touch of it that I reared up again and broke out, head and shoulders above the roof branches, gasping for breath. There, right next to me, was the Famisher’s crepey, moon-pale neck, straining downward into the hole. Its blobby front hooves were set against the edge of the eaves only a few feet from me.

  In my hands I no longer held a dinky little pocketknife but a sword, its blade’s edge glinting in the moonlight.

  As if in a dream, I hiked my arms back over my head and swung the sword down as hard as I could. The blade seemed to have a strength of its own as it slashed through the air with a rushing sound. At the last second I shut my eyes. A tingling shock shot up my arms. I clenched my teeth to keep from screaming, but screamed anyway.

  So did the Famisher, or anyway it tried to: over a furious thrashing of leaves and branches echoed a horrible, liquid gurgle. The buzzard-neck reared high, headless and spouting like a garden hose.

  Dark, hot blood spattered down. Frantically trying to cover my head I dropped the sword, which fell through the hole in the roof into the hall below. I never heard it land—the shavings would have muffled the sound anyway—but seconds later came the heavy crash of the Famisher’s head hitting the floor, too.

  The Famisher’s clumsy front feet slid from the roof edge. The whole building trembled from the weight of the body falling down the outside wall.

  I hugged myself to the nearest branch with all my might, gasping and gulping and still seeing that snaky neck even with my eyes strained wide. My heart beat in my chest like the footfalls of Godzilla, CRASH, CRASH, CRASH. I wanted badly to throw up.

  Around me the night was silent as if, while I was having my private battle, the rest of the fight had moved somewhere else or ended, leaving me all alone on the roof without Farfarer. If I stayed where I was, I knew I would pass out and probably fall out of the stupid tree-branch ceiling and break my neck. Then it wouldn’t make any difference that I had killed a monster instead of letting it kill me.

  Slowly, with fumbling, sweaty hands, I worked my way through the branches down to the lowest ones, until I hung feet first, still sickeningly high above the floor. I forced my mind to picture lots of shavings heaped up right under me. I let go.

  My butt and lower back hit something springy that bounced me off onto the floor with a thump: one of the piles of woven tabletops stacked around the edges of the hall had broken my fall. I got up, bruised and breathless.

  There was a powerful Famisher-stink in here: heavy-duty licorice. What had Kevin been thinking of when he made them smell like that? Candy, stupid, I told myself. I giggled weakly and stood for a minute, making myself breathe despite the smell.

  Feeling my way over to one of the windows, I looked out cautiously over the moon-washed landscape. My knees were so wobbly I had to hitch my elbows onto the deep sill of the window to stay upright. Nothing moved in my field of vision, though I saw dark lumps lying here and there in the trampled grass.

  I was sweating. Without the wind of the elves’ laughter, the night was unexpectedly warm. Also, I was terrified. I had just killed one Famisher, only one, and there were hundreds! Maybe thousands! Each one was as horrible as the one I had managed by luck and desperation to destroy. I shook and cried and felt awful. Good thing it was Kevin, not me, who was the Promised Champion.

  The least I could do was find the sword again. I took out the rhinestone rose, held it up and whispered, “Come on, shine a little for me, but not too much, all right?”

  A bright, thin beam showed me trampled sh
avings and long dark stains leading in a direction I had turned away from. I didn’t see Farfarfer. Maybe it had turned back into a pocketknife now that it had done its work.

  The rose light gleamed suddenly off almond-shaped eyes. I froze.

  “Rose Traveler, I have what you seek.”

  By squinting hard I could vaguely make out someone sitting against the wall. I inched closer, holding the rose pin out in front of me. The little rhinestones seemed to pick up power. By their glow I saw an elf sitting there, one leg twisted under it. The whole left arm was a mangle of cloth, whatever elves have for blood, and torn muscle. Shining dark moisture smeared the wall where the elf had slid down against it.

  In my mind I saw again the Famisher plucking up an elf in its jaws. I forced myself to move toward the injured elf.

  My foot nudged something in the shavings—a leather bottle about the size and shape of a canteen, like the bottle Kevin had offered me a drink from on our ride to the Brangle. I imagined, at an earlier point of Prince Kavian’s adventure, elves giving him one of their canteens as a gesture. Magical beings are always handing the hero special gifts to help him on his way.

  When I picked the bottle up, liquid sloshed inside. I saw the elf’s eyes glitter at the sound.

  “I wanted that,” the elf murmured. “But I had only the strength to retrieve this.” The good hand opened, and in the palm I saw the pocketknife, folded shut.

  I said, “I’ll give you the bottle for the knife.”

  As soon as I said this, a ferocious thirst almost closed up my throat. But the elf smiled, and I knew we had a bargain. I knelt down, keeping an eye on the elf, and pushed the bottle across the floor.

  The elf put down the knife, saying softly to me, “Call it. It will come to you.”

  I hesitated: a trick? But I remembered the good weight of the sword in my hands and how it had whipped through the air to save my life. It seemed natural to speak to it: “Farfarer, will you come to me?”

  The knife was in my hand so quickly I barely had time to open my fingers to catch hold of it. It flared into the weight and size of its sword-form.

  “No,” I whispered, clutching the grip with both hands. “Be small.” At once, it shrank to the cozy dimensions of a pocketknife. The plastic grip felt warm. I tucked the knife away and sealed the pocket flap carefully shut.

  “I can’t take out the stop,” the elf said, holding up the bottle, “with only one hand.”

  I could hear the faint whistling undertone in the elf’s shallow breath. I was afraid to go nearer. But we’d been on the same side in this battle. If I had been the one who was wounded, I knew what I would expect from a fellow fighter.

  I squatted down beside the wounded elf and worked the stopper out of the bottle. The drink inside smelled of flowers. I closed the elf’s slim fingers on the cool, smooth leather.

  The elf drank and then inquired politely, “Did you enjoy the battle?”

  Too flabbergasted to answer this amazing question, I concentrated on helping to steady the bottle against the perfect Cupid’s bow of a mouth for another swallow.

  “Why did you only use those string-things against Famishers?” I asked at last. “You people aren’t under a vow not to use knives or swords, like Kevin—Kavian—are you?”

  The elf swallowed again and panted a little. “We used cords because Famishers can’t be killed by any blade until Farfarer sheds the blood of one of their great ones.” An original idea of Kevin’s, or something evolved by the Fayre Farre itself? Stupid, anyway.

  I was dying of thirst. “What is that stuff ?”

  “You can drink,” the elf said. “Our nectars will not harm the Rose Traveler.”

  I took a sip. Not the same drink as in Kevin’s canteen under the kaley trees, this tasted grassy. I drank some. The elf smiled, making me feel very nervous. Had I just done something fatal?

  I stood up. “I have to go,” I said, “and try to find my friends.” I was thinking of Rachel and Claudia, wandering around in this place that now seemed hugely more dangerous and brutal than it had before.

  The elf chuckled faintly, and I recognized the tinkly mirth of the crowned one I had thought was female. “They will come to you, in time. And if you linger here—not long, I promise you—you can complete your present errand.”

  I didn’t have any place to go, actually, not until I knew where Kevin was, or the two girls. And I had no idea where to begin looking for any of them. The drink seemed to have steadied me, making me remember the whole situation, not just my eagerness to get away.

  I sat down beside the elf, trying not to groan: I had some new bruises from crashing around at various levels of the Elf Home, and the old sore places from my first ride on a seelim and my roll in the Brangle were still sensitive.

  “Complete my errand, how?” I said.

  “You brought Farfarer for Kavian Prince,” she said slowly, her eyelids drooping. “He will find you here.”

  “Somebody else could find me first,” I said. “Or something.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, and her mouth turned up in a cold elvish smile. “That is possible. The brooch you carry signals to Kavian. Farfarer sends its own call. Why do you think the hero-prince has left that weapon in your world so long? The one who carries it here on this side of the gateways draws the angry heart of the Enemy, whose name we do not speak.”

  Another common fantasy theme: the one who carries the magic weapon is also magically linked to the bad guy and attracts his attention the way a tall tree attracts lightning.

  I must have jumped or made some move toward my pocket because the elf went on, “Be calm, the weapon only draws when it is used.”

  I had no intention of using Farfarer again—never had meant to. It had been strictly a matter of survival.

  Still, I had a feeling Kevin was not going to be pleased when he showed up: his world, his story, and me flailing around in the middle of it with his magic sword! Maybe this elf would be my witness that I wasn’t trying to horn in on Kevin’s Promised Champion act or mess things up for him.

  An unsettling thought struck me: Wasn’t it to get away from the uproar in his own family home that Kevin had made the Fayre Farre in the first place? Yet things were no better here.

  I said, “How can Kavian be coming to Elf Home? The Branglemen have got him.”

  “Those!” she answered scornfully. “They are animals. They know nothing. Kavian Prince will have escaped them easily. Wait here for him.”

  Could this elf be trying to keep me around for some reason of her own? I said, “You’re telling me the truth, aren’t you? You can’t be on Ang—the Enemy’s side. You fought the Famishers.”

  “Traveler,” the elf said, “we fight Famishers because Famishers kill us when they can, and they do that because it is how they are made. We are made to be pretty and quick and mysterious. Do you know what happens when I die? I have no soul, having been made that way. Death is our ending, or so it is said among my people.”

  The calm, light voice was soothing, though the message was not. I felt tired to death. I leaned my back against the wall beside the elf, who went on, “I live among trees because they hide me and they support me, but outside our forests and meadows there is no life for any of us. When our forests burn, we die in the open sunlight. Because we were made that way.”

  She paused, shifting around and breathing in a stressed way that meant, I guess, that there wasn’t any comfortable position for her. Her good arm came around my shoulders and drew me against her side.

  I pulled away.

  “Your warmth will keep me living a little longer,” she sighed, “if you are willing.” Ashamed, I sat still.

  “We were made, as everything here was made,” the elf was saying dreamily, her breath stirring my hair, “by Kavian Prince himself, whose world this is. Did you think we did not know this? Elves have secret knowledge, that is one of the things that makes us elves; and what more important secret knowledge is there than this?”

 
; I relaxed, awed by the gift of frank speech from this royal creature. It was as if I had earned a touch of the beauty and enchantment of the Fayre Farre, having just had a good serving of its horrors.

  “My blood runs out of me,” the elf’s voice sighed distantly, “but not my hatred; that I keep. I hate the rules we live under by command of Kavian Prince. I hate this war made to show himself off, meanwhile ensnaring and destroying us. I hate the shallow world he made for us, and I hate the way it alters at his whim, or against it, but always in relation to him.

  “So tell him for me when he comes: Farfarer has been wakened, but not by him, and it has tasted evil blood, but not for him, and it has been elf-given, but not to him. Say that Elven Sobragana said it, who heard the waking and saw the blood spilled and did the giving.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said; and as she had stopped speaking, I slept.

  Fourteen

  Farfarer

  I WAS TALKING TO SOMEONE whose face was unclear, complaining that Kevin had kept secret the magic sword’s personal name, “Farfarer.” Names are powerful in magic. Apparently he hadn’t completely trusted me. It would also have been nice, I complained, if he had bothered to fill me in about elves. Did they mean what they said? Should I trust them?

  “Do you have a choice?” the person said, and I thought it was Cousin Shelly. But just as I thought this with a little surge of surprise and delight, I was dragged awake by somebody shaking me.

  “Get up, Amy, wake up!”

  “Talking to Shell,” I mumbled, trying to dive back into my dream, but my eyes opened.

  Kevin tugged at my arms, cursing under his breath.

  I was freezing, and I couldn’t move. Something had me pinned in place, as if I had bent double and wedged myself under a heavy table—like the time when I was real little and I got into the kneehole of Dad’s desk and panicked, thinking I couldn’t get out because I couldn’t straighten up.