by James Comins
“Mr. Tibert, I’m glad to meet you. Only don’t call me a wizzle.”
The cat blinked. The fox shrugged apologetically and opened the wrought-iron gate for the cat. Tibert clapped, and the château door opened.
The footman was a black fuzzy thing with a distracting, horripilating pink swarm of wiggling tentacles on its face.
“Low, will you fetch la robe I had thought to give my niece? After, we’ll have tea and madeleines.” The fuzzy creature bowed. As it waddled up the staircase, Renard decided it was a new sort of mota.
They came out to a patio under an awning and sat on metal chairs around a glass table. Terracotta pots held chrysanthemums. The patio was several feet above a rolling lawn. Croquet was set up but not in use.
“We--that is, me and la jeune fille here, are to go a-hunting, as it is said,” said Lenna the Fox.
“What do you hunt?” asked Tibert seriously.
“L’avalanche.”
“Interesting. How will you go about it?” the cat asked.
“Oh, directly. A sword and a crossbow. And,” the fox went on, patting his hip, “I already possess the sword.”
Nearby thumping. Lenna turned.
“Low has brought the gown. Miss Renard, he will show you to a dressing room,” said the cat.
“Yyyyright.” She eyed the wiggly pink star on the footman’s face. “Uh, hello, Mr. Low.” She waved her fingers back and forth a little. He didn’t reply, although he may have sniffed and stuck his nose up higher.
The footman carried a paper box. They went into the house through the sliding glass patio door and up a carpeted flight of stairs. Down a hallway and through a wide white door was a room with a canopy bed and a cream-colored vanity with pastel makeup pats. Before it was a curly metal chair. Low set the paper box on the bed, lifted the cover, unfolded some white tissue paper and withdrew a long, green and blue striped ballroom gown with off-the-shoulder ruffled straps. It looked lovely.
“I shall leave you to it,” said the footman. And he did.
Renard lifted off the squidgy stiff cloth of her teacozy and stood in her slip before the dress. Hm. She snapped her slip strap, glaring at the straplessness of the gown. She took the slip off and dove into the gown, slipping her arms through the floaty sleeves and pulling herself through the tight waist. It was very ladylike, she found, turning around and around in the mirror. Nearby, there were pearls on a hook. She put them on, letting them hang down to her bellybutton. Too long. Off they came, clattering against the vanity mirror. In a fit of inspiration, she put a twist in them and draped the heavy heavy necklace again. Ta-da.
From the big front pocket of the teacozy she took out the foil candy bar wrapper that Sigurd had given her and wondered what to do with it. No pockets in the ballroom gown. The wrapper was very important. She was very certain of this. She wanted to keep it forever. Maybe put it in one of her shoes? They were soggy and floppy. New shoes ...
“Mr. Low? Would you bring me shoes?” she called out the door.
It was very unusual, telling people what to do. Even Binnan Darnan. Asking was better. She decided never to give Binnan Darnan orders any more. It made her feel weird.
The pink-star mota brought in a pair of silvery shoes that were mostly just bands. They looked like the swoopy handle of the fox’s sword.
“Mr. Low? Shoes that go the whole whole way around?” She made a shoe in the air with her hands.
He rummaged in the next-door closet and brought floppy black flats in a little cardboard box. She put the silver wrapper underneath the insole and slipped them on.
Eyeing the pats of makeup, she licked a finger and swiped the red, tapping each cheek. It felt cool and slimish and waxy, two red fingerprints on her face. She rubbed at them with her fists, and they smoothed out to rosy-pink puffs. They sort of lit up her face the way the roses did, and also they sort of weren’t in the right spot. There wasn’t any water to wipe them off. There was a basin of black with a spiky thing. Aitta had some of this stuff in a crystal tube. It made your eyelashes look different. Lifting the glass cover, Renard rubbed the spiky thing and brought it up to her--
Ping, it slipped from her hand and rolled down the new dress. Shocked, she wiped at the prickly tracks. Smudge.
“Mr. Low Mr. Low Mr. Low,” she said through the door, medium-quiet and medium-desperate. The door opened a ways.
“Miss?” said the footman.
“Look.” She pointed to the black tracks down the front of the dress.
“What would you have me do?” asked the star-nosed mole snootily. “What would you have me say?”
“Fix it,” she snapped.
“As Miss wishes. I’ll bring a replacement. Alas, we damage the bright colors with laundry.”
He came back again, and again, and again, bringing things for her to try on, ducking out as she changed, ducking back in when she called for him. He made sniffy comments throughout. By the time she gave up, Renard the Girl had tried on seven dresses. All of them were ugly, and none of them were anywhere close to fitting the way the smudged dress had fit.
“What do I do?” she asked the mota. Paper boxes lay all over the bed.
“Do as you wish. Impertinent and clumsy young madam will have to decide for herself.”
“Hmph.” She looked at the smeared black stain on the beautiful dress that fit. She looked at the ugly dresses that didn’t. She sat on the edge of the bed in a hugely baggy paisley dress that made her skin look blue.
“I’m in a world of magic,” she informed the mota.
“Is this so? As madam says.”
“And none of this happened.”
And it hadn’t. She was sitting in the curly chair in front of the vanity. Low the footman wasn’t there. The light from the tall plaster-framed windows streamed in. Two red smudges bloomed on her cheeks. The dress was fine. Her hands held a black spiky thing, which she carefully set down in its basin.
“Renard.”
“Yeep!” she yeeped.
It was Hodur, reflected in the mirror. Empty shadowed eyes and an orange Robin Hood tunic. She spun, but he wasn’t there in the room behind her, just in the mirror. He was like a ghost or a backward vampire.
“Omigoodness. Hello, Hodur,” she told the blank-eyed face in the mirror.
“Renard. You’ve discovered time magic.”
“It’s Len--”
But it wasn’t. Not anymore.
She pointed to her dress. “Hodur, it was wondrous. It was super. Look, no rolly makeup stain!” She beamed.
“Listen out the window, Renard,” Hodur replied.
She crossed the room to the tall windows. They didn’t open, so she ... oh. Wow. Uh oh.
Dancy dancy dancy la la la la la, the animals and flowers danced and la’d. A blanket of dancing cartoons.
“For you to retreat in time, everything else advances. A month has passed on Earth. Civilization begins to be devoured by trees. There have been no shifts because the Verdance has swallowed up everything. Hurry.” His face faded.
Chapter Twelve
Isengrim
or, I Don’t Want to Go in the Cage
Running running twist push the door running past a snooty mole stairs bambambambam around the corner, no one there, “Lenna! Tibert!” front door,deck,fence,garden,dancing flowers, kicking a fiddling cricket-in-a-top-hat no, stepping on it crunch “Lenna! Tibert!” AAAAGH A WOLF.
“Uh uh uh hello.” She smiled her teeth awkwardly.
A thousand glistering teeth grinned back at her. “Renard, you demon-girl. Arrête! We have you,” the wolf said. He wore a red and yellow puffy-shouldered doublet and a black hexagon hat, like Shakespeare or Christopher Columbus.
“Oboyoboyoboy!” said an evil dancing hedgehog, clapping. “We caught her!”
“Why are you mad at me? I was just trying on dresses.” She pointed to her dress. “See? It fits.”
“The list of your wrongdoings in this nation is without end. To wit.” He put a fist to his mouth an
d cleared his throat dramatically. “Bruin the bear lost a leg in the farmer’s trap at your counsel. Were it not for Lenna’s recommendation, he would have quite lost his life.”
“But I’m Len--” But she wasn’t. She was Renard. That was her name right now.
The wolf leaned in, pursing his lips under a gray tuft of billygoat-beard. “For what personal advancement did you send Bruin to his doom?”
“But I didn’t,” she said. “It was just--”
The animals and their tweetly music leaned in to hear.
“It was the fox!” she said.
“You mean le renard? It seems to me this is your name. Shall I recount supplementary crimes of yours? The murder most volaille of Mrs. Pinte the hen? Does this ring the bell? Or perhaps the imprisonment of Coward the hare?”
“Yeah! Yeah! Coward! What about Coward?” chattered some ducks.
“I’ve been inside trying on dresses.” She grabbed the hem of the dress from her knee and brandished it at the scary wolf. “This is a dress.”
“And how long did la robe take to put on?” sneered the wolf.
“A month.” It sounded stupid.
“What absurdity.”
“Absurd! Absurd! Absurd!” said the chipmunks, scampering around on top of each other.
“Hey,” said Renard. “We haven’t talked about you, Mr. Wolf. What’s your name? And why don’t you tell us what mistakes you’ve made?”
The wolf erupted into a buffoonery of laughter. The fieldmice cheeped. The geese honked. The clouds, who had not been paying attention, began to laugh good-naturedly as well.
“You feign not to remember me? After all the affronts, all the insults, all the tricks? You claim not to recognize your greatest ennemi, Isengrim the wolf?” He drew himself up and puffed his chest out, glaring his eyelids open at her.
She nodded, then shook her head.
“You spit on my children, you slap my wife, you defile my larder, and you pretend you know nothing of this?”
“I’m a magician,” shouted Renard the Girl, “and none of that happened.”
Whooosh. The world shrank a foot and a half. No it didn’t. She grew. She hopped a foot in the air as her legs sprung longer. Her fingers were long, too. Her hips were huge. The ballroom gown was tight in weird places.
She was bleeding. In weird, omigod awful awful places.
Aitta had, at one point long ago, told her that she’d someday find out about “woman’s burden.” Aitta had popped a tube with a fluffy thing on a string, and hinted things about it.
All of a sudden, she hated how little Aitta talked. Hated. It wasn’t okay for her to hide so many important secrets. But no one else had even mentioned that such a gross thing could even happen.
“Napkins!” she screamed. “Paper towels! Quickly!” She spotted the star-faced mole on the porch of the house. “Mr. Low, I’m sorry for everything. Please bring me something for--for--”
The mole looked to the wolf, and the wolf nodded and escorted Renard to Tibert’s front door and waited. The mole led her around to a tiled bathroom with gold wallpaper on the ceiling and a huge skylight. He shut the door.
Well, her underwear was ruined. She sat on the toilet, but it wasn’t a toilet. There was the toilet ...
And no toilet paper. Umm.
She very politely asked for fresh underthings. The mole also managed to find some ... pads that stuck to the underpants.
As Renard went back out to the wolf, she hid most of her face behind her hands.
“Now then. You shall have to answer for your crimes, Renard.”
“But I thought--oh. He committed more crimes.” Of course he did. That stupid fox.
“Naturally, we cannot expect you to follow us to King Noble’s courtly encampment for your trial at your own liberté. Bring the cage!”
Two snowy-white Arctic foxes in peasant clothes tugged a bamboo cage forward.
“I don’t want to go in the cage. I’ll walk to the trial, Mr. Isengrim, but please don’t ask me to--”
Isengrim growled very quiet-like. And Renard scrunched herself into the cage, lifting her knees up to her nose and pulling her feet after her into the tiny space. The wolf snapped the door shut behind her.
“On to the king!” he declared.
“To the king!” squirked the evil hedgehog. The Arctic foxes picked up the long bamboo handles and began to march. Hunched over and squashed, Renard found herself bobbing along through the air in the middle of a vicious vicious parade of vindictive dancing and singing animals. And flowers. And clouds. And trees and mushrooms with feet.
“Doo dee dee, we caught the fox. Doot dee dwee dee deeee,” they sang. “Dun dun doo, we caught the fox, dweet dee deet dee deeeee.”
“I’m not the fox,” she said. “Really I’m not.”
But they kept marching and singing “dwee dee deetle doo.”
Isengrim and the hedgehog marched in front, striding like people who had conquered the world. Renard rolled her eyes at them. She hoped the king would see that she wasn’t a foxen. She had cramps in her gut that were not being helped by getting scrunched up in a cage. Nothing she could do, though. Everyone seemed so happy to capture her. They’d been so scared of Renard the Real Fox when he had shown up on the marigold path.
Twisting her head, she saw the castles on the clouds drifting away from her. She wondered what the King of Birds was like, and whether all the cartoon stupidity had reached it yet. What was life on a cloud like? The bamboo kept banging against her knees. Did you have to be a bird to get to the court of the birds? Could they get some eagles or a pterodactyl or something to carry her up there, so she could see it? Would she fall through the clouds like they were fog, or were clouds sturdier in this world? Who was Noble? If the King of Animals wasn’t a bear, he had to be a reindeer, she decided. Nothing else would be majestic enough.
The sun was whistling tunelessly, and it made her feel even more awful. The whistling was like a scalpel cutting into her brain. “Stop whistling!” she shouted up through the top of the cage.
“Aww, garsh, sorry,” said the orange, round, jolly old Mr. Sun. He stopped whistling.
That was a little better.
A bag was dangling off the bottom of the cage. Food, probably. She dangled a finger down from her hand toward the drawstring, but one of the Arctic foxes, the fatter one, slapped her hand away. Oh well. For a brief moment she couldn’t believe she was actually here, in a cage in a fake magical world this far from reality, with a really tall and goofily-shaped body. Checking discreetly, she found that the pad in her underwear was wet. She hoped the march of dancing things would give her some privacy to change it with one of the spares that Low had given her.
Back on the path, the dark golden and indigo marigolds kept getting brighter until they were shining like cellophane-covered lightbulbs. The world was probably going to be destroyed pretty soon. But ha, there was nothing she could do. She was in a cage and this wasn’t her fault. Maybe she could go back in time again and give herself more time to fix things, if she was a complete squash-for-brains. Time magic was no good. Sigh.
That rotten fox. This was completely his f--
Something caught her eye. On her hand. Her hand was white. She rubbed it. It was flour.
Hm. Wait. She had forgotten something impor--
The rules.
She had forgotten them. Right from the beginning.
Pickles.
“Where are you going to?” she whispered to one of the Arctic foxes.
“To get you out of here,” he said.
“Why?” Her eyes followed the wolf, who marched triumphantly ahead, beside the hedgehog.
“Many reasons, Madame Not-a-weaselle.”
“Lenna!” she hissed.
“Most of them to annoy le loup. Patience is everything.”
“Give me my name back,” she hissed.
“Then it would be I in the cage, no? Patience. Pretend you know nothing of us.”
Oo, that rotten fox
. Oo. The nerve. Once she got her name back, he was in so much trouble. She rubbed the flour off her hand where Tibert had slapped it.
Out the back of the cage she spied a vague white smear. Stomping across it were a line of marching cartoon ostriches in tutus, their eyes closed like upside-down U’s. They wouldn’t notice the flour. But that hedgehog was watching everyone. He’d figure it out pretty soon ...
The Beanstalk went by to one side, green like a chile pepper and as thick as an ancient tree. The parade went right past it. That was “THE MIDDLE,” obviously. From her vantage point a few feet off the ground, Renard could see the technicolor circle of the Verdance all around her. It was still getting brighter, so bright that it hurt. Patience, he said. Yeah, right. She had to pee. And change the pad. And save the world.
“Mr. Isengrim! I have to pee. And ...”
“Non, non, not yet,” hissed Tibert.
Too late. Anyway, she did.
Behind her, the powdered cat tugged the dangling canvas bag open and took out what looked like a rainbow-swirled jawbreaker. As Isengrim kindly brought the parade to a halt, Tibert the fat Arctic fox slipped her the magic pill. He made a *gulp* sound in his throat, and the parade opened a path over to areyoukiddingme a tree. With eyes.
The evil hedgehog tugged open the cage. She tugged her ankle up over the bamboo it was caught around and got out. Her legs felt sleepy and pinggly. The tree politely turned its eyes away, hmphh. She unwrapped one of the spare pads she had tucked into her underwear, folded the old gross gross thing and dropped it. She sheepishly did her business, wiped with a leaf, got her clothes sorted out and ate the pill.
Chapter Thirteen
Renard the Weasel
or, NOW We Will Go Meet No-ble the Reindeer
The tree grew taller. No, she was shrinking. The branches shifted above her as her new tall body slid and twisted. Her clothes got baggy, her big hips shrank, her hands changed, her thumbs hurt, squishing through her hand, then settled and stopped hurting, her ears moved, her shoes slipped off, and a giant eyelash--a bunch of--she was fuzzy.