The Unready Queen, стр. 5
“Course he does.” Nudd nodded. “He’ll be spendin’ his first night with the horde this week’s end. Kull is just about sick, he’s so excited for it.”
“Very brave of Annie to relinquish her son for the night.”
“Oh, aye. She’s put the horde on pain of death iffin he comes back in fewer pieces than she lent him.” Nudd chuckled. “Ya know,” he added in the careful tone of one who wishes to appear as though an idea he has been carrying for days has only just occurred to him, “we could take the girl, too.”
The queen raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe yer witchy way just isn’a what the lass needs right now. She’s na what you were, Raina. We goblins may na be fair folk, but we do know our own way around magic. Be right honored ta tutor the future Queen o’ the Deep Dark.”
The queen regarded Nudd for several seconds. “Thank you, Thief King. But I trust that you will understand when I say no child of mine will ever be taken by goblins without bloodshed.”
Nudd’s lips cracked open in a full, broad grin—his jagged teeth parting as he cackled. “Ha! Yer mother would be right proud ta hear ya say it. Sound just like her. You’ve got more’n a little of her in you, too, ya know. I see it most when yer threatenin’ my life. It’s in the eyes, I think. Fine woman, she was. Fine woman. She could cuss like poetry.”
The queen allowed herself a smile.
“Well, the offer stands, iffin ya change yer mind.” Nudd pulled the top hat back down over his floppy ears. “Ya know where ta find me, Raina.”
“Never forget that I do, Thief King.”
Nudd gave the woman a wink and clambered back out over the ruined shrubbery. The queen watched him go before sitting down against a coil of mossy roots. The chief was not wrong. Ever since the night of the Veil Moon—the night Fable had reached inside the gap between realities—the girl’s powers had gotten more unpredictable. She was still the same Fable, for better or worse, but lately the universe had begun responding.
Last week, Fable had slept poorly and had yelled at a chirruping jay in the early hours of the morning. The birdsong had ended abruptly—not because the bird had stopped singing, but because it had stopped being a bird. An exceptionally confused iguana had fallen out of the tree where the jay had been. It had taken the queen all morning to unravel the spell, and the bird that had flown away in the end still looked rather greener than it should have.
More troubling still had been when the queen asked Fable to help pull the withered black brambles from between the Oddmire and the gully. It was a task that should have taken all day, wrenching the dead things from the earth and burning them all in careful piles. By midmorning they were gone. Just gone. The vines had been unmade. Not that the queen had any interest in restoring the wretched plants, but it unnerved her that she could not have done so even if she tried. There was no spell to unravel. They had simply been dismissed from reality, and Fable didn’t seem to realize what she had done.
The queen closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Fable was a good girl. She just had to learn control.
Beneath the queen, the earth trembled.
TWO
“You don’t have to walk us all the way to school,” Tinn said as they made their way down the dusty Endsborough sidewalk.
“We’re thirteen now,” agreed Cole. “Lots of kids our age have jobs already.”
“I’m well aware that you two are thirteen,” Annie answered. “I baked the cake.” She sighed. Already the boys could wear their mother’s work boots when they needed to tromp around the garden, and it would not be very many birthdays before they were taller than she was. They still looked astonishingly similar—aside from Annie, nobody in town could tell the twins apart on sight—but she could not help but notice that they were growing more different every day.
From the very first day she had found them together in their crib, Annie’s boys had been identical to the last freckle. It used to be that if one boy scuffed his chin, the other came back an hour later with a mark to match. That had been the mysterious power of the changeling at work, but Annie had grown accustomed to her boys being mirror images of each other. Lately, though, Cole had taken to wearing his hair pushed back, and had even used his birthday money to try out some of the pomade hair treatment that Mr. Zervos sold in the general store. The fashion made him look older—and rather like his father, though he didn’t know it, which pulled on Annie’s heart. Tinn, on the other hand, kept his hair loose and shaggy, and so low it brushed his eyebrows. It still made him smile when Annie ruffled it. Cole’s shoulders seemed just a little broader than his brother’s, and he stood just a hair taller—but that might have been due to Tinn’s tendency to slouch. Tinn had always been the more timid of the two. Learning the truth—that he was human merely by virtue of magic—had only amplified his anxious nature. They were still her boys, through and through, and neither age nor magic could ever change that.
“We could, you know,” said Cole.
“Hm?” Annie replied. “Could what?”
“Get jobs,” Cole said. “I know you don’t have a lot saved up.”
“You worry about your schooling,” Annie answered. “Let me worry about money.” They walked on a