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He looked doubtfully at her wig, hiding its secret flowers

She waved her hand “I’m not Honest Thomas, we’re only different to look at It’s like how you’re a boy and I’irl, but it doesn’t make any difference We’re both people” Tah she’d just accidentally let a curse word slip A wicked excitement flooded her eyes “Only we’re not I’m not You’re not I’m a…” She trailed off just as he had done, and he realized all at once that she had never told anyone about herself before, either

Be kind, Thomas The first time is always hard

“I’ht switched on in Thomas’s head “At least I think I am I don’t knohat else I could be, really” She picked at her fingernails “My ardener and my father is a librarian That’s nice, don’t you think? Sheand he ic to the two of theic So like ether too much time in the woods Well, they fell in love and my father built a house made of books and roses and radishes in tidy beds beside the Postbox They had a baby girl and when she ca they compromised They named her after a play and a flower—ot very sick, so sick her ears were red and her face was red and her belly was red She burned up with fever and redness, day and night And then one one—and so was their daughter In the crib lay a little poppetlike a barn owl Not all Changelings are ain, a child for a child Some are just dumb dolls meant to scream and turn the teakettle into a rattlesnake and burn the house down, not necessarily in that order, but as quickly as possible”

“Did you burn your house down?”

“No,” said Tamburlaine slowly “But I want to All the tis Nothing feels as good as theEvery day I try like the devil not to wreck anything It’s so hard I got to painting because paint wrecks a white wall, so I like it, but it wrecks it into so about Fetches is we aren’t o off like a little stick of dynamite after a few months and that’s it Do you understand? We’re a kind of joke There plays on here Like a buzzer that zings when the worlds shake hands But hed “If I’ood sense of hus alive but not alive My father was pretty certain he knehat had happened He’s read just everything in the world They hter In the quiet and the dark where they thought I couldn’t hear But Mum kne to take care of a tree and Dad kne to take care of a chapter fro she took me out in the rain until my leaves unfurled and drank up the sky When I tried to eat the woodstove, he gave ht And when I broke…because Fetches always break…she grafted ot well I’ile Like a motorcar that breaks down after ten years, not because it couldn’t be built to go for fifty, but because Mr Ford likes people to buy new cars Planned obsolescence, that’s called, and that’s me I bet your parents don’t even know you’re not their son I think that would be nice Easier To grow up thinking you had the whole world in front of you”

“It’s not,” Thomas said, too loud and too fast “It justwith you and you don’t knohat and they don’t knohat but if you were a better son, a better man, you would be able to fix it It’s funny, you know, they’re always telling me to be a man, take it like a man, act like aroom table, like they know, somehow, that I’m not a h I’ll be tricked into being a man forever” And that was the first time he had let himself say he wasn’t a man, say it, and know that it was true He wasn’t like Tamburlaine, but he wasn’t like his parents, either

“Yes” Tamburlaine nodded “They always say: be a lady, speak like a lady, behave like a little lady, that’s not very ladylike, is it, dear?”

“Well, I won’t be alike one or act like one!” The troll inside hi with anticipation

“Corabbed Inspector Balloon off his desk, opened the cracked red cover to a blank page, and pressed it and his pencil into Thomas’s hands “Don’t let’s be men, or ladies either Don’t let’s act like them or behave like them or speak like them”

“But what else, then? If you’re a Fetch, what am I?”

Tamburlaine shook her head “I don’t know exactly I’m not an encyclopedia Maybe you’re a Fairy Or a Minotaur Or a spriggan or a Glashtyn It’s like a Christht bite We’ll find out together But now, right now, be a Fairy A bad Fairy” Her eyes glittered like rain on new leaves “Write out what you want Like a letter Use your good handwriting—your real handwriting Make it short and really specific—ic sort of squirms into the cracks in what you want and fills them up with trouble”

“No eye of newt or frog’s heart or belladonna?”

“If you’d picked a ladle or a gravy boat or a wooden spoon, maybe You have to use a wand the way it’s supposed to be used Magic has a logic, like algebra Once you get to know it, it’s easy If this, then that You write with a pencil, you don’tsoup with it”

“But I’ve written loads of things and nothing’s ever happened”