The Boy Who Lost Fairyland Read Free Page A

it in the high kitchen cabinet he could not reach, behind the baking soda and the belladonna. Pretty soon he’d be big enough. But this! This map had so much ocean! And all the land looked like a great broken puzzle, as though if you squeezed them all together they would fit precisely, shore to shore, and make a picture of something else.
    â€œ Those are the Equator, my dulcet demon. And we can’t get very far without an Equator, so do stop gawping at them.” The Red Wind dismounted with a gallant sweep of her leg and lifted the troll from the Panther of Rough Storms, letting him squish his toes in the blue mud. She looked him over. “Do see to your hair. It’s sticking up dreadfully in front.”
    Hawthorn blushed—trolls blush a very fetching shade of chartreuse—and squashed his forelock down hurriedly with one hand.
    â€œBut that’s not right! Everyone knows the Equator is a great fat serpent who lays around the whole world and bites her own tail and keeps us all safe from marauding meridians,” he spluttered quickly, embarrassed. He did so love to be right. It was his third favorite thing, after fire and his mother.
    â€œDon’t be silly, child. The Equator is a dotted line on a map. It marks the widest part of the earth, midway between the North Pole and the South Pole. Serpents! Why, I’ve never heard such a thing!” But her dark eyes twinkled, and her red mouth quirked as though she was, somewhere deep inside, laughing at him. Perhaps the snake was hiding off further in the Jungle, smirking too, holding her giant breath to keep from being discovered.
    Hawthorn felt quite shy in front of the mossy map. Being a troll, he loved the earth. A troll’s love for the earth is a peculiar thing—it is something like the way you and I love our parents and our dogs and our favorite novels and the stuffed rabbits we have had since we were in our cradles and the very best thing we have ever done with our own two hands, all smashed up together in a rough, enormous ball of feeling the size of a planet. But this wasn’t his earth. He felt as though he were being introduced to the beautiful cousin of his best friend. All his skin flushed and tingled. He felt faint. Perhaps it was only that he hadn’t eaten anything since supper last night and the Jungle was so wickedly hot and wet and close. Being a Changeling was, so far, very tiring work.
    â€œAre they going to come alive?” Hawthorn peered closer at the dark stones. “Or grow legs and dance? Or tell us fell secrets from the deep and loamy vaults of lizard-time?”
    â€œYou’re going to have to start a sort of backward, old-fashioned sort of thinking, I’m afraid.” The Red Wind picked at her sleeve shamefacedly. “Not everything is going to be always alive the way you and I are. Not everything has a dance or a secret or a song locked up inside it. Where you are going, a map is just a map. If it has any magic, it is a simple one: A map shows maybes. Maybe you will climb the Himalayas or sail the Mississippi. Maybe you will see Paris; maybe you will eat wolf stew in Siberia. A map shows the way to everything. No more and no less. But it cannot choose between Annapurna and Missouri. That is your job. If you want the job, that is.”
    The Red Wind turned to him with a very serious expression on her lovely face. She crouched down so that they could look each other in the eye directly, troll to wind. “When you make a choice,” she said, “how do you do it, my stroppy, surly, splendid lamb? Think of all the things you have chosen in your little life, from porridge or parrot pie for breakfast to whether or not to bother with learning to walk. How did you pick the pie and the trip-trapping upon the bridge?”
    Hawthorn shuffled his large, mossy, bare feet on the brilliant blue grass of the blooming map. “Well … you start with fretting,” he said finally.