The Unready Queen, стр. 10
“For goodness’ sake, Mr. Burton, sit down,” Mrs. Silva chided. “Your brother does not need your help using the facilities. He’s only in the little boys’ room—he hasn’t fallen out of the world.”
Maybe not this time, Cole thought, but falling out of the world was an unpleasantly real possibility with Tinn.
He had made up his mind to leave anyway the moment Mrs. Silva’s back was turned, but before his chance arrived, the door banged and the whole class craned their necks to see a new girl sauntering in.
“Oh!” Mrs. Silva said. “Hello, young lady.”
“Hi!” said Fable. “Is this school? I’m here to do school.”
Mrs. Silva faltered. “Er. Yes, my dear. This is school. Are you new to Endsborough?”
“Really new.” Fable nodded. “I already found the horse house and the hair house, though. And the pooping house,” she added with a snort.
“Fable?” Cole stood up.
“Cole!” Fable beamed. “You’re doing school, too?”
“Do you know this person, Mr. Burton?” Mrs. Silva said.
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s a—a family friend. She’s just visiting my mom.”
“I see. Will she be staying long?”
“No,” said Cole.
“Yes,” said Fable.
“I see. Well, it’s nice to meet you, Miss—I’m sorry, what was your surname?”
“Oh, I don’t have a sir name,” said Fable. “I’m a girl.”
“Young lady,” Mrs. Silva said. “I’m afraid I don’t have any paperwork for your transfer. I’ll need to make a note to speak to your parents. Tell me, what was your previous institution for learning?”
“What’s a previous instant toot-toot?” said Fable.
“Your education,” Mrs. Silva said, “prior to Endsborough?”
“Oh, I’ve learned lots of stuff. Let’s see, I already know the math and most of the words. What else is there . . . oh—what’s the one about which mushrooms make you get better and which ones make you dead?”
“I mean where were you educated? Your last school?”
“I do not understand the question,” said Fable.
The door banged again and Tinn and Evie stumbled in. “New Fiddleham,” said Tinn, hastily. “She’s our cousin. From New Fiddleham. She’s visiting.”
Mrs. Silva raised an eyebrow. “Your brother just informed us that she was a family friend.”
Tinn glanced at Cole. “Oh. Yeah. She is. She’s a friend.”
“Who is also family,” added Cole. “She’s a friend who is family. A family friend. That’s exactly what I meant.”
Fable grinned broadly at them both. “Aww. You guys.”
Mrs. Silva’s eye twitched in that special way it only seemed to twitch when Tinn and Cole were involved. “Well, I’m sure we can sort it all out at the end of the class. We have had enough disruption for one morning, I think. If you could all find your seats. Fable, is it? Why don’t you sit right there for now, dear. The class was just about to put away their English workbooks and move on to mathematics. Have you any experience with algebra?”
“Not yet, but Annie Burton told me all about them. I’ll probably get to wear one when I’m older.”
Mrs. Silva blinked. Students around her giggled.
“Just . . . try to follow along with the other students,” Mrs. Silva said. “Everyone take out a blank sheet of paper, please. Hana, will you kindly lend Fable a piece of paper?”
Twenty minutes later, Evie had successfully solved for x (which was seven), Cole had accidentally solved for three (which, it turned out, was still three), Tinn had managed to avoid changing colors even a little bit, and Fable had learned how to use a dip pen, gotten ink on both elbows and one eyebrow, and drawn a startlingly accurate cross section of an Amanita mushroom (mycology, incidentally, is the name for knowing which mushrooms make you get better and which ones make you dead, and even her mother would have had to admit that Fable had been a decent study at that).
Mrs. Silva was beginning to hold out a tenuous hope that she just might make it to lunchtime without another catastrophic disruption. She was wrong, of course, but hope is such a precious thing, one cannot really hold it against the woman for clinging to it. In the children’s defense, the thunderous BOOM that shook Endsborough and sent the entire class hurrying to the shuddering windows to watch a cloud of smoke and dust rise over the tops of the buildings was not the slightest bit their fault.
FIVE
“Don’t look at me like that,” the queen said. “If you want the blackberry, you’re going to have to get it yourself.”
The hedgehog made a squeaky, whiffling grunt at her feet.
“I get enough of that tone from my daughter, thank you very much. You have a stomach now. If you don’t want to be hungry, you’d better learn how to fill it.”
Squidge shuffled about on the forest floor before balancing unsteadily on two fluffy hind legs as she tried to pull the elusive fruit a little closer. The vine bobbed, and Squidge rolled over backward in a spiny ball. The queen was uncertain if the creature’s clumsiness was a side effect of having spent the first half of her life as a pinecone or if hedgehogs were just like that.
Raina watched as the scruffy thing righted itself and made another attempt to reach the berry. She tried not to let herself think about how much raw magic it would take to make Squidge. The queen could communicate with a plant. She could even coax a plant to grow in the shape of an animal. But to make a plant into an animal? You could not simply make the world be what you wanted it to be. That was not how the world worked.
Squidge mewled mournfully as she tumbled onto her back for what must have been the dozenth time.
The queen rolled her eyes. “You will need to learn how to be yourself, sooner or later,” she said, and finally bent the branch. Squidge brightened at once and pounced on the berry with glee. “And so will Fable,” the queen sighed.
The sun cut through the canopy and birds sang loudly as the queen paced through the Wild Wood.