Sagaria (90 page)

Sir Tombin had told him of how Fariam and Renada, going through the Palace of Shadows, had tried to restore life to as many of the thousands of petrified statues as possible. Webster had been one of a mere handful they’d been able to revive.

Webster took a step toward him. “All I can say is that I’m sorry, Sagandran.” He dropped his gaze, as if speaking to his shoes. “After they’d brought me back to life, Renada and the others put me through a kind of special highlights edition of all the things I’ve done to you, only this time I was experiencing it from your point of view. It wasn’t pretty, what I did. I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to forgive me.”

“I don’t know either,” said Sagandran, his voice tight, “but maybe we can try to make a fresh start.”

“I hope so.”

Webster put out his hand.

After a long hesitation, Sagandran took it.

“And now,” said Sagandran after a moment, putting his arm around Perima’s
shoulders, “we two still have a lot of talking to do.”

Webster grinned. “Talking. Yeah, right. Lucky you,” he added as he turned away.

Sometime in the evening, Sagandran and Grandpa Melwin stood in one of the palace rooms in front of the gleaming surface of the gateway that would take them back to the Earthworld. He and Grandpa had asked to be alone when they left; neither of them could bear the thought of any more farewells. While Sagandran had been recuperating after the companions’ return to Spectram, Queen Mirabella had sent a party of her honor guard to bring the portal to Spectram that had once sent the companions into the Shadow World.

Sagandran shivered, suddenly nervous for some reason. The Earthworld was so far away, and the journey they were about to go on was so very long, yet the Earthworld was just on the other side of that silvery surface, and the journey there was just a few short paces.

“You’d better get used to it,” said Grandpa Melwin. “We’ll be coming back here often enough, you and I. If we don’t, you know, I imagine that girl of yours will discover some way of getting to the Earthworld to fetch you.”

Sagandran smiled. “Yeah. She’d find someone to twist around her little finger, that’s for sure.”

“Talking of fingers, you’ve got it?”

“Sure thing, Grandpa.” Sagandran knew what Melwin was talking about. He spread his left hand, and for the thousandth time this morning admired the gold ring he wore on the finger just next to the middle finger. Set into the golden band was a tiny sliver of gemstone that seemed to contain all the colors of the three worlds. The stone could have been a sliver of the Rainbow Crystal. An engagement ring, although he wouldn’t be able to call it that at home in front of anyone but Grandpa Melwin. Perima had given it to him, saying to him with full Perima-esque intensity as she did so, “Just remember, whenever some ghastly harridan wants to get all smoochy with you, you show her your ring and tell her you’ve already got a girlfriend, right?”

Grandpa Melwin was also bearing something: the sleeping form of Webster, dressed in a remarkably good facsimile of the Earthworld clothing he’d been wearing when he left.

“He’ll wake when he’s back in the Earthworld,” Renada had explained. “He’ll remember nothing of what’s happened here, but I think you’ll find him a changed character.”

“We agreed we’d try to make a fresh start.”

“He’ll remember that he wants to be your friend.”

Now, looking at Webster’s peacefully slumbering face, Sagandran thought,
I’d never have believed that I was going to travel to another world – two other worlds – so I guess the impossible is possible, after all. But what on earth will they all think at school if Webster and I start being buddies?

A door opened, startling both Sagandran and Grandpa. Who would have dared violate the privacy they’d requested?

Queen Mirabella.

She was carrying something heavy in her arms. The leaden crown Arkanamon had fashioned now seemed to shine like silver because of the three crystals mounted on the front of it.

“You forgot this, Sagandran. The three crystals rightly belong with The Boy Whose Time Has Come.”

“But – but what will I do with it?”

“You’ll have it forever with you, which is where it belongs.”

She walked across the little room quickly and, before he could move, pressed the crown to his chest.

“Watch, Sagandran,” she breathed.

He suddenly felt a glow emanating from his breastbone. It seemed to course all through him until his whole body felt warm, from his toes to the top of his head. But it wasn’t just a glow, he realized, it was
life
. He’d become more alive than he’d ever been before. Looking down, he saw the last of the mist that the crown had become seeping into him, leaving only a little dark spot on the front of his T-shirt. Then, as he watched, even that dark spot vanished.

“That’s where crowns should be worn,” said Queen Mirabella. “Not on the head, where all the world is supposed to admire them, but in the heart, where no one can see them save you, but where they have meaning.”

She hugged him briefly, then straightened.

“Now, go, the two of you. Go before I’m tempted to insist that you stay.”

By tacit agreement, Grandpa Melwin went first, walking a little unsteadily under the weight of the sleeping boy. At the very last moment, he turned with a smile for Queen Mirabella, his blue eyes almost matching the gleam from the portal.

Then he was gone.

“I’m glad you didn’t ask us to stay any longer, Mirabella,” blurted Sagandran, “because if you had, I’d be tempted to do so.”

Before he could think any further, he turned on his heel and strode into the glare of blue.

od sat on the porch of his cottage, sucking on his pipe. Around him, Mishmash continued the way it always had and the way it probably always would. The last of the fall flowers spread their soft fragrance all over the village. Children played in the grass and the trees. Somewhere their fathers and mothers were working in the fields, bartering for food, hanging out laundry or doing any of the thousand and one other things the folk of Mishmash did with their lives. But none of them, thought Tod as he furrowed his brow, were working quite as hard as he was.  

He was busily inventing his latest true adventure. Well, he’d done the inventing part already. He knew that he’d been attacked by a savage scorpion three times his size, and that he’d fought it to the death armed only with a pine needle he’d been able to snatch up from the forest floor. He also knew that he’d been halfway home to Mishmash with the scorpion’s head as a trophy when, alas and alack, he had slipped as he walked by the very edge of a ravine and his prize had vanished forever into the turbulent waters below. What he was doing now was polishing and re-polishing his account of all this, so that when he told the tale at the next village feast in two days’ time, it would make Jinnia’s eyes grow bigger and bigger until, at last, she succumbed to the pressure of her maidenly but somewhat slow-witted heart, and agreed to marry Tod. He wondered if he should add in a swarm of vengeful hornets somewhere, just as a clincher.  

Something landed with a crash on the roof of his cottage.  

Tod looked up.  

After a couple more bumps and scrapes on the roof, a broken corkscrew plummeted to the ground almost in front of his nose. As the corkscrew had been made for a human hand, it was almost as big as he was himself. A fearsome weapon! It landed tip down in the middle of his garden, and stood there quivering.

“What in the world?”

“Dreadfully sorry,” cried a vaguely familiar voice far above.

While he’d been composing his epic, the evening seemed to have come with rather more speed than it should have, and now he knew the reason why. Staring at the sky, he could see the underside of an enormous wicker basket blocking the sunlight. It appeared to be suspended from an even bigger balloon, which was made up primarily of patches. The basket lurched and Tod ducked instinctively as a hail of nuts and bolts pattered on the roof and then bounced down in his direction.

Tod did what he always did when things looked dangerous.

He ran as fast as his legs could carry him.

“Probably a good thing he didn’t hang around,” said Flip, digging himself out of the debris of what had once been Tod’s cottage. “Though I’d like to have seen the look on his face.”

“More fool you, dumbskull,” said Willfram with a grin.

The Great Inventor was checking the Even Greater and Doubly Wondrous Ship that Simply
Whooshes
Through the Air for serious breakages. He soon appeared satisfied that any damage was only minor.

“Great piloting, vomithead,” he spat at Willfram.

Willfram was just about to reply in kind when he remembered what Flip had been dunning into both of them since they’d left Spectram. People in Mishmash didn’t talk the way opposomes did. The two were going to have to try really hard to be – what was that word? Ah, yes,
civil
.

“I’ll try a little harder next time,” he said mildly, the strain almost splitting his brain in two.

Flip was hopping from one foot to the other. “Do you think we could just leave everything the way it is for now?” he said agitatedly. “I want to get down to our chieftain’s house as quickly as possible. There was this challenge, you see, and nobody ever thought that I’d be the one to win it – nobody but, perhaps, Old Cobb. Everyone else said that there was no such place as a larger world beyond the mountains, but I’ve been there now and … and I’ve brought back two, um, specimens to prove it.” He smiled sheepishly.

“Specimens, hm?” said Willfram to the Great Inventor.

The Great Inventor sniffed indignantly. “That’s what he said. I heard him myself.”

“Too many more insults like that one,” said Willfram as he put his hand
genially down around Flip’s shoulders, “and we’ll have to declare you an honorary opposome. Now, where does this chieftain of yours live?”

Two hours later, Luti Furfoot rose from the couch upon which he’d been reclining while listening to Flip’s long and intricate account. He and Flip had carried the couch out into the garden so that the opposomes could listen as well. This pair of oddballs Flip had brought to the chieftain’s home with him, introducing them as Willfram and the Great Inventor, were living proof that the Adventurer Extraordinaire had been right, that the world was indeed a far larger place than just Mishmash, nestling within its ring of mountains.

There had been a brief misunderstanding when the two bizarre visitors had arrived, towering over their host, and Flip had been forced to do some very fast talking to smooth things over. Willfram’s grip on Mishmash etiquette had briefly slipped, with unfortunate results.

“My,” Willfram had said, bowing to the chieftain beneath him, “but you’ve got a face exactly like my rear end.”

“It’s a compliment!” Flip had shrilled, jamming his shoulder against the door so that Luti couldn’t slam it. “Er, I mean …”

Well, that little misunderstanding was behind them now.

It would be a long, long time before Luti Furfoot could absorb the full implications of what he’d been told, but that was all right. Doubtless Flip would be called upon to retell it at each and every village gathering until the day he died, so Luti would have plenty of chances to hear it again.

In the meantime, he had a formal duty to perform.

“I hereby declare,” he said to his audience of four (Dodgem having slipped into the garden to join them when he’d heard that his best pal was back in town), “that the challenge laid down between Flip and Tod has been settled in the favour of the former. I shall declare this again publicly in two evenings’ time at our celebration of the new moon, so that all of Mishmash shall know the truth.” He paused. All of Mishmash didn’t seem like so very much any more. “Shall know the truth,” he repeated. “I have no doubt that by that time, young Tod, wherever he might have gotten to, will have recovered from whatever indisposition it might be that ails him, and will gladly and gallantly admit his defeat.”

There was the sound of someone behind him choking on an indigestible mouthful of incredulity.

Luti turned.

It appeared that he’d been orating to an audience of five, not four.

“Jinnia!” he cried as she emerged from where she’d been standing in the cottage doorway.

“Father,” she acknowledged. Her face as she looked at Flip was radiant.

Luti Furfoot cleared his throat. “As I remember the terms of the challenge,” he said, “I promised that, if you survived your expedition, and if you proved your case, I would—look, Flip, pay attention, won’t you?”

“I’m listening,” said Flip dreamily.

“Where was I? Yes, I said I’d give you anything that’s in my power to give you – within reason, of course.” The chieftain laughed nervously.

“Yes,” responded Flip, affecting interest in what his chieftain was saying. He was drowning in Jinnia’s eyes, and enjoying every minute of it.

“I can give you grand estates, perhaps a whole farm of your own. Or perhaps you’d like half of all the nuts I’ve stored up for the winter. Or …”

Luti Furfoot’s voice trailed off. He had a pretty good idea what he was going to hear next. The only surprise was that it was his daughter who said it, not Flip.

“What you can give Flip, Daddy,” she said sweetly, “is your approval and blessing of our marriage at the Festival of the Full Moon.”

Now that Luti thought about it, there had always been something about that Tod fellow he hadn’t quite liked. Hard to put a finger on exactly what it was, but …

“I could think of nothing that would delight me more, my dear,” he said, his voice beginning to bubble with excitement.

Flip felt a paw resting on his shoulder. It was Old Cobb.

“I knew you could do it, Flip,” the oldster said smugly. “I also knew that there was a land behind the mountains,” he whispered.

“You did?” said Flip in surprise. “But why didn’t you say anything?”

“I knew it because I can communicate with birds, which you, ahem, probably discovered when that hawk snatched you up.”

Flip remembered the incident only too vividly. “I thought my last moment had come.”

Old Cobb chuckled. “I suppose you did, but you have to admit that it was a splendid start for your adventures.”

“It was
extraordinaire
,” Flip said and smiled. “But no more hawks in the future, okay?”

“I promise,” said the oldster. “You have not only helped to save the whole world, which will be too much for our people to understand, but things will also be different around here from now on. We are now part of the world and not
the
world. I congratulate you, young Flip.” Old Cobb gave Flip a great bear hug. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I will commemorate your homecoming with a pint or so of apple cider and then start planning a great celebration in your honor with Luti.”

With a final pat on Flip’s shoulder, the oldster walked toward his cottage, his strides remarkably springy. He even made a little hop now and then.

Flip smiled.
Thank you Old Cobb. Thank you for believing in me.

As evening fell (the real evening, not just the shadow cast by the Even Greater and Doubly Wondrous Ship that Simply
Whooshes
Through the Air), two young people sat in the garden of Flip’s cottage. The bright moon of Sagaria smiled benignly down on them.

“Tell me your story all over again,” said Jinnia, leaning her head against Flip’s shoulder. “I want to hear just one more time how you stole the key from that wicked, nasty, horrid worg.”

“What,
again
?” said Flip. He’d told her the whole tale three times already since they’d left her father’s house.

“Yes, again,” she said smugly. “I like to hear about my husband-to-be’s cleverness and courage.” She clasped her forepaws together. “You’re not just my husband-to-be, Flip, you know? You’re my hero too. I think you’re so very, very brave.”