lady,” he said, holding out his hand to block my path. At least he didn’t try to grab me this time. “You and your talking pet smell of magic. I must tell my Queen what walks in her domain before you may pass in freedom.”
My lips were already parting to tell him about his Queen and his mother, but—RRG. I’d promised the rat. He’d said ‘please.’ He’d better be smart enough to do more than push my buttons.
“I don’t know rat squat about magic, but apparently I’m Little Red Riding Hood and the vermin hanging from my costume wants to be the next Puss-In-Boots. I’m guessing your magic is the two fairy tales with their fists around our throats,” I answered.
“I was raised by fairies, my lady. Neither you nor your pet are fairies, despite your magic,” he returned, smug. He thought he was being clever.
But not, like, sarcastically clever. I reached down to Rat-In-Boots, and as my hand came near he grabbed the sleeve of my costume and skittered up to hang by my shoulder. “Why doesn’t he know what I’m talking about?” I asked Rat.
“He’s a human stolen as a baby and raised by fairies. He doesn’t know any story but his own,” Rat answered in a hush, “Most people don’t. I learned, because I had to in order to control your story. The life I know isn’t the life he knows, because fairy tales and fairyland aren’t the same.”
Leaf boy’s patience started to crack. “It isn’t polite to talk about someone as if they can’t hear you, my lady.”.
I kicked him in the balls again. It seemed to catch him completely by surprise. My perfect shoes must have hit him like a mallet, because he fell over, half curled but so rigid he couldn’t even yell.
If he had, I wouldn’t have heard it. Fairies were everywhere, laughing as if they’d just seen the funniest thing in their entire lives.
The creepy kid had come out of nowhere. The fairies, it turned out, had been there all along. Crows fell off the giant thistle, spraying feathers and kicking their feet as they were revealed to be hunched little gnomes in bird suits. Acorns bounced with glee, and the top split off one to let a tiny, willowy green girl beat the ground with her fists. Something huge and yet squat lost its balance and fell out of its hiding place behind the rubber duck, hitting the ground with an echoing boom. Someone wire thin and built of bits of straw and twig unfolded out of the tall grass, pointing at the boy I’d just kicked as it made shrill, squeaky giggles.
I’d arrived in freak show central. These things were ugly, and there wasn’t a pretty little blond Tinkerbell to be seen.
Mind you, if there had, I’d have stomped on her.
“What the heck?” I yelled.
“Fairies aren’t like people,” Rat-In-Boots whispered from my shoulder, “Don’t try to predict them. They’re at the same time the smartest and the stupidest people you’ll ever meet. A fairy can whisper words over your cradle that will twist your life around until you give her an orange on your eighteenth birthday, then fall for you giving her a yam.”
“Crazy fairies, right,” I agreed as if I’d known that already. “I meant him.” I gave the boy another kick. Hardly more than a nudge. He was still curled up with his eyes closed, locked in pain. “It’s not that hard for a boy to dodge. He didn’t try!”
“Fairies raised him and taught him to think. Very smart, very dumb. He can’t learn from his mistakes,” Rat-In-Boots said.
I almost felt sorry for the jerk. I’d kicked him hard. Really hard. He croaked as he fought to breathe, and all his friends just laughed at him. If he hadn’t been pulling some scheme to do much worse to me, I really might have felt bad.
“She is marvelous!” yelled a hideous little dwarf with a head bloated like a mushroom cap.
“She is exquisite,” agreed something much prettier, an impossibly skinny dryad stretched out all the way down a tree branch.
“We have to show her to the Queen!”