21

Tom knew. Collins had carefully prepared him to know: he had foretold it, planted the seeds of this final betrayal in his mind. They once were birds, but were tricked by a great wizard, and now they are still trying to sing and still trying to fly. This dazed sparrow scrawling Japanese letters with Mr. Feet's blood on the polished wooden floor was trying to stand and move like a boy so that it could shutter up its mind again and be safe. The sparrow cheeped, and Tom knew that Del was screaming. In horror Tom watched as it fell on its side and fixed him with an eye like a madman's: a panicked black pebble.

The fairy tales had blown into each other and got mixed up, so that the old king had a wolfs head under his crown, and the young prince in love with the maiden fluttered and gasped in a sparrow's body, and Little Red Riding Hood walked forever on knives and sword blades, and the wise magician who enters at the end to set everything right was only a fifteen-year-old boy kneeling on bloodied floorboards and reaching for the transformed body of his closest friend.

'I can't change him back, Rose!' he wailed. The sparrow-heart beat, a thousand times faster than his own, against the tips of his fingers.

'I don't know how to change him back!' He heard his voice as he had when the nails had gone in, sailing up high enough to freeze. The sparrow quivered in his hands. A wing feebly struck his thumb.

'Then you'll have to make Mr. Collins change him back,' Rose said. She stood just inside the door, looking down at Tom with the stunned bird in his wrapped hands. 'Make him do it,' and her voice was fierce.