"Grateful. Yeah." Theo felt like he was hanging by his fingernails over a bottomless pit of bleakness.
"I didn't mean it to happen," Applecore said a touch defensively. "I told you to stop the coach, didn't I?"
Rufinus practically had his mouth pressed against the opening between window and doorframe where he sucked clean air as though he were trapped in a coal mine filling with deadly gas. "Yes, I suppose you did," he snapped. "But you could have been a bit clearer."
Theo was tired of their bickering and so depressed he felt like he might start screaming. Instead, he asked, "Where are we now?"
They were passing through something that looked almost like a suburban town, although it was a little different from the kind of places where Theo had grown up and spent most of his life. There were no sidewalks, and not only weren't the roads straight, they had clearly been made crooked on purpose, as though right angles brought out the same kind of reaction in the town's designers as too many fermented berries had in Applecore. The houses were small, or seemed to be — most were hidden in copses of leafy trees — but Theo had learned from Tansy's manor that you couldn't trust first impressions. The dwellings he could see were painted a riot of different colors and patterns, and came in a much wider variety of basic forms than Theo was used to — not just boxes, but cylinders, spheres, and more complicated shapes he couldn't define — and even, in the case of one upside-down pyramid balanced on its point, seemed actually to defy gravity.
"This is Penumbra Fields," said Heath. "It sort of grew up around the railway station. Commuter town, I think they call it. Lots of people with a house here work in the City, even though it's a long trip. Only come back on weekends, most of them."
The idea of fairies living in commuter towns didn't sit right, but Theo couldn't think of any specific reason why it shouldn't be so. It was definitely a suburb: they passed a park where a group of fairy children were chasing a small golden object that didn't look like either a ball or an animal, but was inarguably hopping; near them, other kids were flying colorful kites that didn't seem to have strings. He watched a line of smaller kids in many different sizes and shapes, winged and wingless, singing as they were led along the road by a floating, shimmering rainbow bubble the size of a cantaloupe; he guessed they were being escorted to or from school. He wanted very much to hear their song, but before he could figure out how to get his window down the car had passed the small parade.
More confusing was that he could see shiny automobiles in many of the houses' driveways, smaller and less ornate than the car in which he rode, but otherwise not much different: it was obvious that "coaches" weren't just for the rich. In fact, it seemed that the mechanized, early-Victorian nature of fairy civilization his great-uncle had written about as though it were the product of his own fancy, was not only true, that fairy civilization had advanced a great deal since Eamonn Dowd had filled his notebook.
But it's less than thirty years since he wrote that, Theo thought, and they were still deep in the gaslight era then. He stared at a very modern stoplight, similar to what you might find at an Earth intersection except for the colors of the lights, orange and lavender-blue instead of red and green — that and the fact that it hovered in midair, unsupported. Has everything here really changed so fast? Or has the time passed differently from our world? He remembered Tansy's talk of "slippage" and "distortion." What did that mean, exactly?
His thoughts were interrupted as Heath pulled the car through a wide turn, out of the tree-lined back avenue they had been following and into a wider road that dumped them into a busy town square. Theo stared at the row of tall, slender buildings surrounding the square like candles around the rim of a birthday cake. Some of them were over a hundred feet high, weird combinations of heavily decorated, almost Gothic architecture with unusual overall shapes and modern building materials. The large, low building just ahead that he guessed was the railroad station looked a bit like a pointless jumble of spiky objects, but it had a stately dome atop it that wouldn't have looked out of place on a small state capitol, although the hemisphere of this dome seemed more spiderweb than solid thing and was clearly open to the elements.
Must be miserable inside on a day like today, he thought, fighting a surge of homesickness so intense it verged on panic. Just my luck.
What he found most surprising was that they had passed out of a quiet country lane and in only moments were in a busy town center, even if the town itself wasn't very big. It was the first time he'd seen a lot of the so-called "coaches" in one place. Almost all of them were smaller than the town car in which he was riding, and came in a charming array of shapes and hues, from things that looked almost like Volkswagen Beetles to oddly asymmetrical creations whose front end and back end could only be ascertained for certain once Theo could see which way the drivers were facing. People were also traveling on things that looked like bicycles and motorcycles, and children rode on skimming boards and scooters, although calling them by those names substantially broadened the original concept — he saw at least one "scooter" that had weird coppery lizard legs instead of wheels. But if the road that went around the outside of the town square was full of odd conveyances, it was even more full of pedestrians, hundreds and hundreds of them.
"So many people here!" he said out loud.
"Ah, yes." Rufinus chuckled. "It must seem very large and loud to you, I suppose."
Theo scowled. "I didn't mean that. We have cities where I come from that are a thousand times bigger than this. I just… this is the first time I've seen more than a few of you people in one place." Although he had to admit to himself, "people" was another term that didn't quite fit. At a rough estimate, at least half of the folk in the square seemed much smaller than humans, although a few were much, much larger. Besides the knee-high gangs of young brownie toughs, the flocks of even more diminutive winged schoolchildren in uniforms, and the slender, wet, and sad-looking blue women pushing baby carriages or shopping carts, he also saw three or four hulking ogres and at least one weird scarecrow shape nearly ten feet tall that looked a bit like a man on stilts but clearly wasn't.
"Polevik," Applecore explained when she saw him staring at the tall fellow. "They can be shorter if they want to be. Probably got a job washing windows or something."
"Most of the other people in the square seem pretty small — um, no offense," he added quickly. "But a lot smaller than me, anyway. Why's that?"
"Ah, yes," said Rufinus. "I suppose that could be because they do not get the bracing country air we enjoy in the commune."
Applecore rolled her eyes. "Probably it's because lots of the big folks ride in coaches and the rest of us walk or fly, and that's why so many of the folk you see on the street are on the wee side."
"Ah." Rufinus nodded his head sagely. "I suppose you could be right about that, Kettledrum. Heath, be a good fellow and just turn here at the entrance." He scowled. "By the Trees, the holiday traffic is dreadful! I can understand the people needing to travel, but all these others hanging about — why are they not home spending Mabon with their families?"
"Because they can't get home," Applecore said a little sharply. "They can't afford it and their families live too far away."
"Hold on," Theo said to Rufinus. "You said somebody might be looking for us."
"Yes?"
"Well, shouldn't we find somewhere else to get out of a big car… big coach, I mean… like this? I mean, if there's anyone watching the station, wouldn't they be more likely to notice the coach than they would be to notice us by ourselves?"