Read Online The Kingdom of Kevin Malone by Suzy McKee Charnas - Free Book Online

woke up here I was, in the Fayre Farre instead of the D-Home. Not a bad deal, huh?”
    â€œLooks like out of the frying pan into the fire to me,” I said, thinking of the Bone Men. I turned cautiously in my saddle to look behind us, but no scraggly skeletons were in sight.
    â€œYou wouldn’t say that if it had been you it happened to,” Kevin said, watching me with sly amusement out of the corners of his eyes. He dug his fingers under the shoulder scales of the red seelim and scratched away under there as both animals padded uphill across an open meadow with their odd, springy gait.
    A whole lot of weird ideas chased each other through my head: had Kevin really jumped somehow from danger in the D-home to the Fayre Farre, or were we both somehow inside his head while his body was still in terrible trouble back there? In that case, where was my body and what was happening to it while I was in the Fayre Farre with him? How long ago had he escaped from the laundry room—and had he escaped?
    Was I dealing with a ghost here? Was he still actually back there, stuck somehow in a frozen moment of danger? Maybe he was living all of the story he’d made up in just a few seconds in the real world that translated into months, or whatever, in the Fayre Farre, and somehow he’d roped me into living it with him?
    I asked, “When you were still able to get through the arches yourself, did you go back to the D-home?”
    â€œHey, when you get out of that place, you don’t go back if you can help it,” Kevin said scornfully. “Anyway, that’s all a long time ago now. There’s no point talking about it.”
    I decided not to argue or push for more information. In the first place, it was all so complicated and scary to think about that it made me feel as if my skull would explode. In the second place, I had a feeling that making it into—and back out of—the Fayre Farre was going to take a lot of very close attention to what was going on around me, whether I believed in Kevin’s world or not.
    We were now climbing pretty high. I saw distant water on both sides of the ridge we rode on and buildings here and there, far away. Some fields had dots in them that might have been cows, or whatever Kevin had invented to take the place of cows.
    I said, “I’m surprised you still had this old pin of mine. It’s not worth anything. Why’d you keep it?”
    There was a little silence. Then Kevin said, “When I took it off you, that was a day my dad came home celebrating a bombing in Belfast. He was a great fan of the Irish Republican Army, did you know that? To hear him tell it, he was a wanted man for all kinds of mighty deeds he’d personally done against the English oppressors in Ireland. Then he kept tabs on things from here.
    â€œThat particular night he was so bombed himself by the time he came in the door, he passed out without whipping any of us kids. I kept your pin on me for good luck after that.” He glanced at me sidelong. “Also, I thought those were diamonds in it. I’d never seen a real diamond, how would I know different? Anyhow, I kept it. It was small enough to fasten into my clothes where nobody could find it and take it away from me.”
    I didn’t know what to say. Kevin’s father had beat up on him? You hear about stuff like that in the news, in school even, but you don’t expect to know anybody who’s lived with it. No wonder he’d made up a fantasy world as a little kid—not for adventure so much as for a refuge.
    Kevin pointed. “Hey, great—kaley trees!”
    A line of dark trees crowned the low slope ahead of us. They had fat trunks and thick-packed leaves of a dark, glossy green.
    â€œThe nuts taste like cashews,” Kevin said enthusiastically. “I tried making them out of chocolate first. I was real little then. It turned out not to be practical.”
    â€œI can