Once Upon a Marigold Read Online Free

concoctions had approached the seriously bizarre. (Even Bub and Cate had rejected the rutabaga parfaits.) And he was restless in a way that Ed unhappily suspected was normal for a young person bearing down hard on manhood. Which forced him to think about Christian's nonexistent social life.
    The boy needed some friends besides an old troll and a bunch of animals. Oh, once in a while he had a conversation with Hayes Centaur or Claypool Sasquatch, the gamekeepers, or with a leprechaun or picnicker or elf, or one of Mab's cohorts passing through the forest, but that didn't amount to a hill of figs.
    Ed wondered if it wasn't time to start trying again to find Christian's family. He knew it would be the right thing to do, even though Christian had made it clear he wasn't interested. But more and more he had to wonder if he'd postponed it too long. And if he couldn't locate Chris's family, maybe it was time to think about releasing him to find his own way in the world. Ed had to admit that the very thought of doing that gave him a lacerating pain right in the center of his heart.
    He sighed and considered whether he should add a postscript to his letters. After he got through detailing all of Mab's failings, of course. He could kill one bird with two stones by also asking if the recipient of the letter knew anything about a little boy who had gone missing in the forest about twelve years before. Walter and Carrie, the carrier pigeons Chris had trained to deliver Ed's correspondence more efficiently than passing pilgrims, crusaders, gnomes, and gryphons could, wouldn't be happy about longer letters. But the etiquette book had stressed the importance of doing what you knew was right, even when it was inconvenient—even when you didn't want to do it at all.

    C HRIS'S FAVORITE invention, for quite a while, had been a bigger, better telescope with which he could keep a closer eye on King Swithbert's court across the river.
    He'd watched the four princesses—the beautiful blond triplets and the smaller, darker younger one—grow up. He'd been an unseen guest at the masked balls, and the summer picnics on the terrace, and the triplets' triple wedding. He'd watched old King Swithbert get even older, and Queen Olympia get that cross little line between her eyebrows and that dissatisfied pout to her mouth. And while he watched them, he felt that now-familiar odd stirring, that sensation of something coming—something
bigger,
something
other.
And increasingly, the sense that he no longer fit so well where he was.

    "I THINK I' LL go outside for a while," Christian said one evening, after he'd tidied up the kitchen. "Before the sun sets. I love these long twilights."
    "Okay by me," Ed said, turning to his relentless correspondence. The annual LEFT Conference was coming up soon, and once again he was vigorously trying to drum up support for getting Mab to let go of some of the tooth fairy business. Everybody knew she was past her prime by a good hundred years but still hanging on like grim death to a business she hadn't managed well for as long as anyone could remember. Why, he bet she didn't collect a quarter of the teeth on the first night they were placed under the pillow. Some, he knew, she didn't get to until the third or fourth night. And then she was inconsistent in what she paid for them—sometimes a lot, sometimes a pittance. She said she used the little teeth to make crowns for her fairies, but that was a can of baloney if Ed had ever heard any. What she did was toss them into storerooms, where they gradually lost their pearly luster and crumbled into chalky dust by the bushel. Anybody with an ounce of sense knew that teeth, like people, had to be kept in use to maintain their zip.
    If Ed had his way, he'd build a palace from them. Imagine the radiance of it, all those little burnished white bricks softly glowing. He'd keep his palace polished with toothpaste so it always gleamed, and he'd stud it with the colored