“Hawthorn!” September waved, seeing him at last, marching in from the Great Foulard. “Blunderbuss! Tam! Over here!”
The Changelings rode high atop the scrap-yarn wombat. Blunderbuss wore her full armor, the very armor Tamburlaine had painted for her outside the Redcaps’ cellar. She had once been little and dense and fierce as any wombat—but Hawthorn and Tamburlaine had made her gigantic, stupendous, a first-rate combat wombat. Her armor bristled, all thorny Steppe-grass lashed together like fiery whips, winding round and round her in pumpkin-colored ropes, braided tight. The grasses had thatched up into bright greaves on her legs, a belly-breastplate on the underside of her tummy, a curling orange saddle on her back with long, wheat-sheaf stirrups handing down round her ribs, and a brilliant helmet over her head, with grassy nubs for wombat ears and several splendid spikes. Her fuzzy face was made quite fierce and triceratops-like by all her finery. She tossed her armored head at the sky and hurtled her thrill at the spires of Pandemonium.
“What do you say to all this?” hollered the combat wombat. “Pretty flash for a game of tag!”
Hawthorn and Tamburlaine looked guilty—guilty and beautiful. Hawthorn wore the long-tailed cap Gwendolyn, his human mother, had knitted for him with polar bears and kangaroos on it and his father Nicholas’s old leather jacket with Gwen’s gold jewelry sewn all over it. He would never give those up if he lived to be as old as the alphabet. But underneath it all he wore the outfit he’d found laid out for him in their room when he woke up that morning: a fine troll’s tunic woven out of obsidian and granite and shale (for trolls can weave stone into cloth stronger than marble and softer than a child’s cheek—though it’s very hard work and bruises the weavers all over). On his feet he wore the great and powerful Golden Galoshes, only they really were Golden, and embroidered with very probably some sort of enchantments. His hands were sheathed in the rare and precious Carnivorous Mittens, only they really were tigerskin now instead of scratchy orange and black wool, complete with hard silver claws. And over his tunic, the formidable Houndstooth Suit, which really was made of fierce hounds’ teeth, thatched together like a coat of mail.
Tamburlaine’s walnut-wood skin looked as though it had been polished over and over—she shone like something burned inside her. Her hair was in full bloom, purple and crimson flowers cascading down her back like a highwayman’s cape. She, too, wore what the Briary had given her: a dress of thick canvas, belted with a length of green knives from the knife tree in her own forest. She’d fastened lionbone greaves to her legs and wore bear’s claw rings on her fingers. On her back Tam carried a quiver of paintbrushes, and across her chest two bandoliers of paint-pots.
“Where’s Scratch?” asked Saturday, looking for the gramophone.
Blunderbuss pawed the Plaza stones ruefully. “He’s such a fragile little fellow, don’t you know. He could snap a leg or a handle as easy as flipping his record. We snuck out while he was snoozing away, snoring out torch songs. He’ll be safer in the Briary. The wilds are no place for delicate technology.”
Tamburlaine frowned wretchedly, already missing her friend.
“We’re sorry, September,” Tam began. “It’s only that we’re Changelings. If only Changelings were in charge, nobody else would ever have to get kidnapped just to make the math work out. We think you’d be a lovely Queen, but we can’t trust anyone who hasn’t had to grow up in the human world.”
“I grew up in the human world,” September said crossly.
“It’s not the same.” Hawthorn sighed. “You don’t know what it’s like to always, always feel that you don’t belong, to your family, to your city, or your school, knowing there’s something different about you, something off, that you’re not like the others, that you’re an alien all alone.”
September crossed her arms. “Hawthorn. Everyone feels like that.”
But the troll shook his head. “You were human. You matched. You don’t know what it’s like to be stuck in your own body like a trap.”
Oh, but Hawthorn, my best and dearest boy. Listen to September, who knows a thing or two about living in a strange body. Max could tell you, too, and Thomas Rood and Penny Farthing and even the boy named Humphrey who carved his name in your desk. You could tell him, and so could I. No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings.