"Cool. Thanks."
"Enjoy your visit."
He hadn't sensed her arriving, if that was what she'd done, but he did sense her going. It was an odd departure, something barely perceived, like a light going out in a building he'd been watching while thinking of something else.
It's all magic, he thought. This whole world works on magic. And I don't understand any of it. Man, I'm in trouble here.
Even with the directions, he had to retrace his steps three times before he found the kitchen, because he did not at first realize that turn right at the end of the corridor, then turn right again immediately meant just that. After he had gone up and down the close-ended corridor several times looking for a place to make the second right when there clearly was no such place, he tried to be a bit more literal. He went back to the ornamental tree, then walked to the end of the hall again. As soon as he had made the right turn into the corridor he immediately turned right once more, bracing against the smack in the nose he expected when he hit the wall. But suddenly there was no wall there.
The kitchen was a high room of pale stone and dark floor tiles, huge and warm, agleam with hanging brass pots and pans. At the far end a small bristly figure on a stool was leaning over a huge shiny stovetop, alternating between shouting up into the rafters and doing something that looked like conducting opera. Nearer stood a long refectory table. There were only a few people sitting at it, less than a dozen, but it looked like a lot more because two of them were ogres.
"Hoy! Pinkie!" shouted Dolly. Her voice made the crockery vibrate in the hutches.
"There goes the neighborhood," rumbled Teddybear.
As Theo stood warily in the doorway the ogres' companions turned and examined him with interest. They were the size of small children, round-faced and more or less human, dressed in matching gray uniforms that gave the scene the air of break time at some Munchkinland fast food restaurant. The little people had long, curling eyebrows and the males — Theo thought he was on fairly solid ground here — sported wide, fluffy beards.
"Can… can I come in?" he asked.
"Course you can," said Dolly cheerfully. "We were just telling the others about you."
"You were." Teddybear belched, a drawn-out noise like a garbage truck hefting a Dumpster. "I was eatin'."
"The lights went out." It was strange to be relieved to see anything as ugly as the ogre siblings. "Or did that happen only where I was?"
"Happens all the time these days," said Teddybear. "Power plant workers having a little holiday or something. Somebody needs to grind a few of those lazy bastards into jelly."
"You hungry?" Dolly asked Theo.
"Not for jelly," he said. "Not now."
"Come join us." She gestured for him to sit next to her and pulled a basket full of bread closer to the edge of the table. She elbowed her brother to move over, leaving a tiny sliver of bench between the massive gray bodies. The little people watched avidly as Theo wiggled into the space.
It's like taking my bike in between two semis, he thought. If either one of 'em twitches, I'll be nothing but a smear. He settled in gingerly. "Yeah, actually I am sort of hungry."
"Are you allowed to eat?" the ogress asked as the little people whispered among themselves.
"Allowed?"
"Isn't there something about mortals eating our food and then their heads blow up or something?"
"What?"
Teddybear shook his head. "Gah, Doll, you talk a load of old fewmets sometimes. Their heads don't blow up — that's silly. They turn purple all over and die. And it's not just from eating — it happens even if they just put some stone in their mouth or even just jump over some branches. Mortals can die from doing just about anything here."
Theo, who had been reaching for a piece of bread, pulled back his hand. "What are you talking about? Is this a joke?"
One of the little people on the far side of the table stood up on the bench so his head was on the same level as Theo's. "They're giving you a bad time, Stepstool." He sounded like he'd just won the helium-breathing finals. "Mortals don't die from eating our food, they just can't go back to Mortalia again."
"Mortalia?" one of the others asked.
"Where mortals come from," the first little man explained smugly.
"What the hell does a brownie know?" demanded Teddybear. He sounded angry, but considering that he could have stuffed half a dozen of the little people into his mouth at one time, they didn't seem very alarmed. "You're all idiots. Our mum told us the story. All about this mortal boy named Percy Faun, and how he covered himself with grease so he could slip through the door to here from… from the mortal place. He ate some pommy granite and died."
"Mortals don't eat rocks, sodskull." Dolly rolled her eyes. "Do they, Pinkie? You don't eat rocks, do you?"
Theo's hands were now in his lap. Despite the cramping of his empty stomach, he didn't want to touch anything that might be food. His head blowing up might be a fitting end to a very difficult day, but although he doubted that would really happen, he didn't feel like taking any chances — especially with the possibility of not being able to go home. "No," he said. "No, we don't eat rocks."
"All right, it wasn't granite then," said Teddybear. "Miss Clever. But it was something like that. He ate it, then he tried to go home but he fell over some sticks and died."
"You said they turned purple," Dolly pointed out. "Mortals, I mean."
"Fell over some sticks, turned purple, then died."
Theo could only sit and listen to his stomach rumble while they argued over the top of him. The brownies seemed to think it was all very funny.
13
A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER
"Of course you can bloody well eat," Applecore informed him as she led him down the hall from the kitchen toward Tansy's lab. "What else are you going to do, ya thick, live on air?"
"But… but the ogres said…"
"Ogres!" She buzzed across the antechamber so briskly he almost had to run to keep up. "There's a reason Tansy didn't send one of them after you, you know. Even Dolly, and she's a bleedin' genius by ogre standards, couldn't find her arse with both hands and a treasure map. And our Teddy can't count to eleven without unbuttoning his trousers." She gave him a tiny shove toward the door into the lab. Inside his host stood waiting, arms crossed on his chest. "He hasn't eaten anything since he's been here, sir," Applecore announced, "because the ogres have been giving him some old shite about how it will keep him from getting home again."
"What?" Tansy appeared startled, as if he had been miles away. "Oh, he hasn't eaten?" He spoke to the air. "Fetch in some food for Master Vilmos."
"Certainly, Count Tansy," said the sweetly reasonable hob-voice.
"I'm very sorry," Tansy told Theo. "When you first arrived, I was quite… absorbed. I should have asked you if you had eaten. Terrible way to treat a guest. My apologies."
Theo could not help staring. A few hours earlier the fairy had looked at him like he was a bug. Now he was treating him like a real guest. What the hell was that about? "I… I just…" It took a moment to shake off his surprise. "Dolly and her brother, they told me that if I eat here, I can't go back. It's some old story, apparently."
Tansy nodded. "It's just that, I'm afraid — an old story. I have no doubt it has some basis in truth, mind you. I would guess that in the old days, when there was little to inhibit travel between your lands and ours, it was easier for a mortal to dally here and forget to cross back, so that by the time he returned the slippage would have meant a terrible dislocation on his return."