Thinking of her grandnieces, one of whom was going up to Honeysuckle next year, she suddenly felt old. Could it really be three hundred years since she had walked those echoing halls as a student? Sometimes it seemed only a few seasons in the past.
As she put her parcels back in her wheeled basket she could not help noticing that the unpleasant odor around the bench had grown worse. She looked at the sleeping man down at the far end. He was well-dressed, but you never knew what these upper-class folk might get up to, especially the young ones. Out on some kind of sustained rag, no doubt. Still, he didn't smell drunk, he smelled… unclean.
The stranger's head turned toward her and the eyes popped open. Cornelia Yarrow could not suppress a gasp of surprise. There was something wrong with the Flower lord's eyes — they seemed blank and dull, almost blind.
The mouth worked. When he finally spoke, the young noble sounded as if he had never used any language before, let alone the proper diction his social station demanded.
"Where… ?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Where… is… ?" The blank-eyed man shook his head as if the effort to speak was too much, then stood up. A messy something slid off his lap and onto the station's tiled floor with a wet slurp.
That's extremely inconsiderate, Miss Yarrow thought, he's just dropped his lunch on the ground, what kind of manners do they teach these young people today… ? But as she looked at the red, slippery mass of tubing lying beside the bench and the bits that still hung out of the young man's tattered shirt, Cornelia Yarrow came very close to screaming. Instead, she fainted dead away onto the bench.
The irrha, apparently satisfied with Rufinus weft-Daisy's body, which although most decidedly dead was still flexible and not too badly disabled, turned away from the bench and began walking slowly across Penumbra Station, stuffing its dangling innards back into its clothing.
15
THE PLAINS OF GREAT ROWAN
The shape of Faerie itself is even stranger than the nautilus plan of the city I call New Erewhon — for it is no shape at all. To accurately reflect the experience of traveling there, a map of that land would have to revolve like a child's top or go through some other metamorphosis I cannot quite conceive, for Faerie simply will not lie flat and behave itself…
"Reading something?"
Depressed by what was, for Fairyland, a rather brooding landscape smearing past the rainy windows, mostly hilly meadows empty of trees, and by the crush of weird creatures and their strange smells in the third-class compartment, Theo had been trying to reexamine a little of his great-uncle's book. He looked up to see the owner of the voice, something vaguely sheeplike, leaning in from the seat beside him, its belligerent little red eyes squinting beneath knotted gray fleece.
"Uh… yes. I'm reading something."
"Can't read, me. Never learned." It showed long, flat yellow teeth in what might have been a smile, but might just as easily have been a smirk of menace.
"I'm sorry. To hear that."
"Oh, I admire you clever folk who can." It didn't sound very admiring. It leaned a little closer, giving him a whiff of breath like souring milk. "You must think them like me are stupid."
"No, I don't…"
"Just a stupid padfoot, you'll be thinking. And who could blame you? You with your education and advantages and all."
Theo was beginning to wish quite desperately that Applecore would come back from her inspection of the rest of the train. He had hoped that just keeping his mouth shut and avoiding eye contact would keep him out of trouble.
"Hey, yarnback," said a more human-looking fairy, one of the few Theo had seen that actually looked middle-aged. This one was dressed in worn but clean clothing and had a few lines on his face and the closest thing to a tan Theo had yet glimpsed. But he was also wiry and strong, and he was not looking at the padfoot kindly. "Why are you pestering the lad?"
"Is it your affair, old-timer?" the sheeplike thing asked. "Or are you just certain that anyone with manshape is in the right?"
"Manshape's got nothing to do with it," said another creature that certainly did not fall into that category, with an armadillo-like hide and a tiny, plated head that barely poked out of the top of the bony armor. "You're just looking for trouble. Before we even got into Penumbra you were bumping and swearing at some poor boggart because you said he spilled your lunch."
"He did! Clumsy little needlenose knocked over a whole box of hayslaw!"
While the argument continued, Theo slowly sank back into the corner. He lifted his book up to block out these impossible train companions and struggled to focus on his great-uncle's handwriting.
Faerie is divided into regions called "fields," and these regions are not always the same. That is, they remain the same within themselves, but they are not always in the same relationship to each other — at least that is the closest I can come to explaining it, or even grasping it myself. It sometimes seems as though the lands of Faerie are in rings which move, so that one week two lands seem to be beside each other, then the next week it is not so. But it is even more complicated than that, because there are no clear rules to this either in amount of movement or regularity. One day you cannot get to the field of Gateway Oak from Ivy Round or from Great Rowan to Hawthorn Scathe. Then the next day the paths from Oak to Ivy are again clear, but Rowan and Hawthorn may remain divided.
I traveled little outside the City so I did not see many of these effects myself, although I did once, as I will describe. But I often heard it spoken of in precisely the same way that people in my world might talk of the weather without bothering to explain why you should take an umbrella on a rainy day — assuming that any sane adult listener would know. Thus, acquaintances of mine would say, "Alder is far this year, but so beautiful at this season. I think we should gather a traveling party and go — we could be there in a few days." At some other point I might hear that same person say, "I was in Alder Head yesterday evening…"
Something tickled Theo's neck and he stiffened, imagining it was the woolly muzzle of the sheep-man again.
"There's no sign of the hollow-fella," Applecore said into his ear.
Theo tried to keep his voice low. "He's not on the train?" To Theo's immense relief, as the train had pulled out of Penumbra Station they had seen two of the slug-faced hollow-men standing in a crowd on the station, but since one was still unaccounted for, Applecore had been searching the other compartments.
"There's no sign of him, which isn't quite the same thing. The train's pretty full and he could be in the jacks or somethin'. I hope you didn't expect me to force my way into every lavatory on the bleeding train."
"No. So what do we do now?"
"Talk a little quieter, for one thing. I'm standing right next to your jawbone, remember? I can hear you even if you barely whisper, but most other folk can't. What do we do now? Keep on to the City, I guess. I'll get you to these people who want to see you, then I'll head back to my old ones and my brothers and sisters."
"Should you… call someone in your family? Let them know where you are?"
"Nah, I'm a big girl. But that reminds me — we have to tell Tansy what happened."
"How?"
"He gave you that speaking-shell."
"Oh, yeah, we'd call it a phone."
"Whatever. He needs to know. At the very least, the Daisy-clan folk should know that someone's killed one of their family."