Read Quite Contrary for Free Online Page A

urged a spiny hedgehog man as he jumped up and down excitedly.
    Absolute freak show. Even the dryad girl was twice as tall and half as wide as she should have been.
    Before I had a chance to tell them how interested I wasn’t in their Queen, Lost Boy found enough voice to whimper, “She isn’t pretty enough to see the Queen.”
    Oh, hey, someone was human enough to feel resentment after all! I lifted my foot, then settled for planting my heel against his back and shoving him off the path and into a low ditch. His clenched and shaking arms and legs told me he’d paid enough.
    “The Queen is this way?” I asked the assembled fairies, waving my hand down the path.
    “Follow the sun, and she will rise before you like spring!” declared a flower that I hadn’t realized was alive.
    “Her Majesty is every way, and all roads lead to her,” enthused the hopping hedgehog. Wow, was he ugly. His drippy, pig-snouted face was so ugly it had stopped being cool and gone back to just plain being ugly.
    “Widdershins, child. Always move widdershins,” the dryad advised. Apparently, this was also hilarious, although it didn’t get as big a laugh as my kicking the gate dufus.
    I took all of these suggestions together, gave them the proper weight they were due, and decided to ignore the carnival rejects and keep walking down the path. The scenery continued to be great. When I passed the out-of-scale trees, I came out in fields where huge stone monoliths had been scattered by a house made out of copper and steam pipes that had fallen upside down in the middle of them. That was one side of the road, and on the other, a jousting tournament featured more twisted little fairies riding domesticated hogs at each other. ‘Domesticated’ might be stretching the point. There was a lot of sliding around and crashing into each other. Dignity did not seem to be a high fairy priority.
    It was a good thing I hadn’t said that out loud, or I’d have immediately been forced to eat those words. While I’d been staring at the wallowing pig knights, someone had switched the scenery around me. The path ended at a manicured green lawn, and I stepped into an elaborate royal picnic.
    The picnic table was longer than my house, and the cloth heavily embroidered blue and white. Much less ugly fairies crowded the benches. Near the head of the table some looked almost human, with elongated faces and slanted, knowing eyes.
    At the head of the table, in a carved wooden throne, sat the Queen of the Fairies. She might be too tall and slim to be human, but she was still pretty. Really pretty. Blonde and pale. Her eyes glittered with streaks of purple and gold, and she managed to be as thin as teenage girls wish they could be, without being bony at all. She lounged in her throne with the kind of arrogant dignity that Felicia couldn’t have hoped to pull off, fiddling with a little wooden box. As she made bits of it slide out along the sides, I decided it must be a puzzle box. She didn’t seem to be having any luck figuring it out. Any panel she slid out she’d slide back in so she could move a different one seconds later.
    Her sparkly eyes lifted from the box to focus on me, and her echoing voice cut through the babble of a hundred murmuring fairies. “Human children are always welcome in my court, girl in red. If you need proof of how loved your kind are here, look to your hair.”
    “They think red hair means elven blood,” Rat hissed up at me.
    The Queen either didn’t hear him or didn’t care. She talked over him, her voice soft and lazy and friendly, but drowning out all other sounds. Actually, come to think of it, her hair wasn’t just blonde, it was a rich strawberry blonde. “As much as we love you, so few of you come to us unbidden. What brings you to our land cloaked in scarlet and magic and fear?”
    Her crazy talk hadn’t quite gotten on my nerves enough, so I answered honestly, “I’m being chased by the Wolf.”
    “You have earned our