He took one brief look at the closed compartment across the passage, then slipped into the empty compartment and closed the black curtains.
"Take your time!" Applecore hissed. "Act as if you belong here, ya great eejit."
"Easy for you to say." He reached up, heart thudding, and fumbled down the surprisingly heavy case. "It's hard to imagine anyone in the universe who belongs here less than I do."
"You're a bit of a whiner, Theo, do ya know that?"
"And you're a bit of a… shit." He stared at the suitcase. "It's locked."
"Bugger. Let me have a look." Applecore put her eye against the bag's latch, then turned to Theo. "You wouldn't happen to have a hairpin, would you?"
"You know, I usually carry one…" It was a poor joke, covering rising fear. Any moment now the bag's owner would come back, there would be shouting and conductors called and then he'd be thrown in some weird Brothers-Grimm jail, just like Applecore had said. And then at night, when no one was paying attention… "Jesus. Jesus! Isn't there anything else we can use to open it?"
"I told you before, that name won't do anything but make people itch. Hold on till I think a bit."
Theo stood and stared at the suitcase with nervous intensity. "What else could we use besides a key?"
"Well, I've got a hatpin," said a new voice behind him. Theo jumped and dropped the suitcase onto the floor. It popped open, scattering clothes and small parcels of toiletries all over the compartment. "Oh! I suppose you won't need it now."
It was a girl, standing in the open doorway, dressed all in black with a long coat and close-fitting hat. No, maybe not a girl — how could you tell anything with these folks, anyway, especially age? — but certainly with every appearance of young womanhood. She had a heart-shaped white face and wide, startlingly violet eyes; all he could see of her hair beneath the hat was a tar-black curl on her forehead. "Oh, God," Theo said miserably. "Is this your suitcase?"
She looked at him curiously for a moment, almost startled, then a mischievous smile curled the corner of her mouth. "No. But now I'm rather certain it isn't yours, either. Are you thieves?"
"It's all a mistake," said Applecore decisively. "Just a mistake. Let's put this back and find our own compartment. Sorry if we disturbed you, my lady."
"Oh, a mistake. Well, that's all right, too. It's a long, dull trip." She smiled, showing Theo her small, perfectly white teeth. "If you're bored and want some company, my compartment's just across the corridor."
Applecore, who had flown to Theo's shoulder, gave him a little kick. "Oh!" he said. "That's very kind… my lady. But… but my… associate and I, we… we have a lot of work to discuss."
"Do you want any help picking up those clothes?" She seemed to be enjoying the whole terrifying, embarrassing mess more than she should have.
Good Christ, Theo thought, this is the first time I can ever remember in my whole life wanting a tornado to come down and suck an attractive woman out the window. "No! No, ma'am, we'll be fine. Thank you."
"See you in the dining car, perhaps? Are you going all the way to the City?"
"No." Another kick from Applecore. "I mean, yes! Perhaps we'll see you."
When the girl had slipped back into her own compartment and discreetly drawn her own curtains again, Theo clawed through the clothes, which did at least appear to be a man's (as far as he could tell with his weak knowledge of fairy-fashion). He found a pair of shimmery gray trousers and a white shirt with long, wide sleeves. "Should I look for anything else? Shoes?"
"Don't make it too obvious — besides, you're not trying to look rich, just different than you looked before. You can roll up the arms on the shirt and we'll get back to Third Class. You'll look like a mill worker who had a job review today or something."
Theo stuffed the rest of the clothes back into the suitcase and heaved it onto the rack, then rolled up the purloined shirt and pants and tucked them under his arm. He opened the compartment door and let Applecore check to see if the passage was empty, then followed her out. Except for what might have been a twitch at the drawn curtains of the young woman's compartment, nobody seemed to notice. His pounding heart finally began to slow a little — but not much.
They stopped at the first lavatory once they had reached second class. "Go change," Applecore told him. "Then we'll head on back to one of the compartments where they won't be so likely to notice you weren't there at the beginning of the trip."
"You mean we're not going back to the same seats?"
"And sit down wearing different clothes that just got stolen from first class? It's asking for it, isn't it?"
He stepped out of the restroom a few moments later, as exhausted from all the anxiety as if he had run several miles. The clothes were a decent enough fit, although the pants were a little on the short side. "Good thing I lost weight after my mom died," he said.
"Sorry to hear about your ma, Theo," said Applecore gently. "Now shut it and walk."
Applecore chose a seat on the aisle in a cluster of sleeping house-boggarts — or that was how she described them; to Theo they just looked like more midgets, with bristly beards and bristly eyebrows at least as thick as the beards. The land outside hadn't changed much during their sojourn among the upper classes; the skies were still murky gray above the rain-soaked meadows, so that Theo couldn't even guess what lay beyond the mist that topped the first line of low hills, although he imagined it was more of the same.
"Do you think she's going to tell anyone about us?"
Applecore, who was nodding on his shoulder, gave a sleepy grunt. "That girl? P'raps. Not much we can do about it, 'less you were planning to murder her."
"No! But…" Of course, what else was there for them to do? This might be quaint and picturesque Fairyland, but the train was still moving fast enough to kill anyone who jumped off. "I just… why didn't she get upset? She knew what we were doing."
"She's a Flower — who knows what that lot thinks? Probably thought it was some kind of prank."
Theo sat back and pulled out his great-uncle's book but he couldn't focus on the words. Come on, Vilmos. If you ever needed to study, this is the time. Just because you screwed up college doesn't mean you can't learn something important now… But his brain felt like an animal in a too-small cage. "Where are we?" he asked suddenly.
"Root and Stem! Can't you let a body get some rest? It's bad enough I have to chase around without you murder me sleep, too." She rearranged herself. "We're still in Great Rowan, but we started out close to the border. Be glad — you could be traveling for days, otherwise."
"Which border?"
She groaned again. "And now he's going to make me think." She did so for the space of several heartbeats. "It's two days 'til the moon changes, right? So we'll be crossing into Hazel Wand. That's where Starlightshire will be this time."
"This time?" He had been reading something about this when the padfoot had started making trouble, but it hadn't made any sense. "You mean your towns and cities aren't always in the same place?"
"No, ya thick. The towns are always in the same place, it's the railroad stations that aren't. Well, they're always in the same place on the railroad, I guess, so you're half-right."
"What the hell are you talking about? You're telling me somewhere like that big town we were just in — that it moves? What, just gets up on its legs and walks to somewhere new?"