Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (19 page)

“Upon pain of cursing?” said Scott.

“You like that? I thought that was a nice touch. I have him demand they all come upon pain of cursing and promise that God will show by some miracle who should be rightful king of the realm.”

“But …,” said Emily.

“You see the hitch, right?” Merle smiled.

“Arthur
wasn’t
the rightful king of England,” Emily mumbled. “He was the duke’s son.”

“So I knew I couldn’t depend on any miracles, and I had to make my own,” said Merle. “I had a big hunk of marble carved, and an anvil stuck in it, and a deep groove cut in the anvil. Took forever. And I had a sword made by an illiterate swordsmith, with words written in gold that said
WHOSO PULLETH OUT THIS SWORD OF THIS STONE AND ANVIL, IS RIGHTWISE KING BORN OF ALL ENGLAND
. Cost me every penny I had.

“But the genius part,” said Merle, really puffing himself up, “was the magnets made out of fairy gold. I suppose you both know that you can make a magnet with a coil of electric current around a nail or whatever.”

“Yeah, we did that in science class,” said Scott. He felt suddenly weary, wondering if he’d ever get back to doing anything so simple as electrocuting a nail.

“So I managed to scrape together a little bit of fairy gold,” said Merle, “and with that I could make a battery to hide inside the stone and anvil. I had to hide my watch in there too, but then I could use Archie to transmit a signal and turn the battery’s current on and off. Stick the sword in the stone, run the current through the anvil, and suddenly the strongest man in England couldn’t pull it back out. Cut the power, and my tante could do it.”

Emily smiled.

“Maybe you kids know the rest. No one could pull out the sword, so they put together a big jousting tournament so everyone can stick around and keep trying. And Arthur’s foster brother, Kay, forgets his sword back at the inn, so Arthur, being his squire, runs back for it. But the inn is locked, empty, everyone is at the tournament. So Arthur takes the sword out of the stone, easy as anything, and brings it to Kay. ‘How did you come by this?’ everyone wants to know. And he tells them, and they’re all, OMG!”

“Don’t say OMG,” said Scott.

“Hey! I can say slang. I haven’t even been born yet—technically I’m younger than you.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, he tells them and they kneel down to him and he’s crowned King of England. That’s the really short version, anyway.”

Scott huffed. “You could have made
anyone
King of England. You could have made yourself.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like hats.”

Scott looked over to see what Emily thought of all this, only to find she’d fallen asleep. He watched her anxiously, but her breathing was gentle and easy, her face finally untroubled.

Now seemed as good a time as any to ask Merle something that had been bothering him. He felt like everyone had been dancing around it. He leaned close and lowered his voice and said, “Mick told me that the Gloria that separated the worlds … he said it happened right after Arthur and his son battled each other, when they supposedly died. And that’s when you and Arthur traveled to the future, right? So—”

“No.”

“I didn’t even say it yet—”

“You were gonna say that maybe it was us and our time machines that cracked reality in half? Separated the worlds? That maybe I’m responsible?”

Scott squirmed a bit.

“Well, honestly …,” said Merle. “I started wondering about that too, ever since getting mixed up with you bunch. But I’ve checked and rechecked the math. Emily’s checked it, too. There was
nothing in my designs that could have caused this to happen
. I swear. It’s some kind of crazy coincidence. I’m sure we’ll learn the truth soon enough.”

“Yeah. I’m sure we’ll learn the truth soon enough.”

CHAPTER 20

“I think everybody should have a copy of this,” Emily said to all the others, seated on folding chairs in the dank basement. She passed them a stack of pages she’d made up at a local copy shop. They each unrolled their papers to find maps of Great Britain. “They’re maps of Pretannica, courtesy of the Freemen and their big filing cabinet,” Emily added. “Maps with rifts. That circle around the British Isles is the current edge of the universe, according to the Freemen. Everything beyond that doesn’t exist. Those of you going through the rift should try not to get too close to the edge, or it’s my understanding that you’ll stop existing, too.”

“What’s this world map for down here?” asked Scott.

“That shows the locations of stable or semi-stable rifts in our world that Goodco knows about. Notice all the little dots around New Jersey.”

“Why so many around New Jersey?” said Polly.

“So,” said Emily. “A little primer: rifts open up on Earth all the time. Most of them are unstable, only open for a moment, and nothing goes through them, so nobody notices. They’re attracted to magic, so mostly they pop up in places where there’s a little bit of magical buildup, which pretty much means any city where Goodco’s built a factory. Magic is everywhere in Pretannica, so the openings on the Pretannica side are totally random. Point is that at any time a rift could open up in Pretannica so large that you could lead all the armies of the Fay through it at once, but you could never plan your day around it.”

“But some rifts aren’t unstable,” said Merle.

“Right. They stay open for a few weeks, getting bigger, then smaller again around May Day and November Day. Some are even open all the time. Goodco knows about a lot of these, and as you can see on your maps, they’re exactly where you’d expect—Goodborough, Slough, towns where there’s a Goodco cereal factory. Though there’s still a certain amount of randomness. For example, the great big rift in Antarctica that Scott’s mom characterized, or that one in Iran.”

“There’s a rift in … Chad?” said Erno. “Is that a country? I thought it was just the name of that eighth grader with the missing earlobe.”

“Anyway,” said Emily, “all the stable rifts Goodco knows about are really small, too small for even Mick to get through. Or else they’re big but at the bottom of the ocean.”

Fi was looking at his map. “I was sent through a rift and found myself in the Atlantic Ocean, near this rift you’ve marked here. Yet I was near the surface, not at the bottom.”

“Yeah, it must have been a different one. You’ve said this pixie witch of yours had four stable rifts? Nimue would kill for those. She could start the invasion tomorrow. Well. I think John has a report.”

John stood up and Emily sat down. “As you know, after the British Museum incident, I sent out a press release through Archimedes to all the news outlets, explaining our position. Of course most of the chatter on the internet is that I’m, er … crazy.”

“Crazy talented,” said Polly.

“No, just the regular kind. But serious journalists are devoting a lot of time to analyzing that footage from the museum and trying to prove that there weren’t a fire-breathing finch and a tiny man there, and they can’t. So that’s all to the good. And people are asking questions, and Goodco has had to release an official statement, so I’m going to send out another missive and try to keep the ball rolling.”

“Good,” said Emily. “Well—”

“I have something,” said Erno.

Emily’s shoulders fell. “Is this about the thing from the refrigerator? It’s not a clue.”

“It definitely belonged to Mr. Wilson—”

“I’m not saying it didn’t, but he didn’t write it—it’s just some page from an old handbook.”

It was, specifically, a page torn from the 1921 Young Freeman’s Handbook, and it began midsentence.

YOUNG FREEMAN’S HANDBOOK 1921

all know that the Sickle and the Spoon was developed from the vesica piscis, an ancient Christian symbol shown in some medieval traditions to be bisected by the sword Caliburn, or Excalibur.

The enterprising young Freeman can draft his own Sickle and Spoon with everyday objects he’ll find around the home or temple. Dr. Octopodes Bray (K. o. t. R.) has invented an ingenious method that requires no compass but may be accomplished with a straight edge and by tracing the circumference of any cup, plate, or pie tin.

Once the circle has been traced, the first and most important step is to determine its center.

That was all it said. The opposite side was just an etching of Dr. Octopodes Bray, Knight of the Round, probably an otherwise nice man who was born twenty years too early to know how bad he was going to look in a Hitler mustache.

“I know he didn’t write it,” said Erno, “but he must have left it for a reason. We should at least think about it.”

“That can be your job then,” said Emily.

“Fine,” sighed Erno, sitting down.

“Anyone else?”

Scott stood up. “I want to go to Pretannica.”

John turned. “You do? I don’t know how I feel about that—”

“Oh, come on. You can’t really be pulling the fatherly ‘It’s too dangerous’ thing on me at this point, can you?”

“I’ll be happy to have ’im,” said Mick. “He’s good in a scrape. We may need all the help we can get, savin’ the queen.”

“Except I don’t want to go after the queen,” Scott said. “I want to visit the fairies.”