Free The Fire Chronicle by John Stephens

boy shrugged. “That’s Yarkov. He’s always setting himself on fire.”
    “And I bet those ain’t real dragon eggs,” Beetles said. “You’d probably end up with a chicken or something.”
    Kate was so stunned by their reactions that she involuntarily took a step back and was jostled sharply.
    “Oi! Watch it, you nit!”
    She looked around and saw a stocky, bearded figure whom she immediately recognized as a dwarf. He had a dead goose draped over each shoulder, and the birds’ long necks hung limply down his back. Grumbling about tourists, the dwarf marched away, the goose heads bobbing at his heels.
    Kate managed to say, “That’s a dwarf.”
    “Course it’s a dwarf,” said Beetles, who was now cleaning his teeth with a match. “What else would it be?”
    “But—” Kate stammered. “—But—”
    And then she understood, remembering the day that she and Emma had sat with Abraham beside his fire in the mansion in Cambridge Falls and the old caretaker had told them how the magic world had once been a part of the normal world, but then the magic world had pulled away and hidden itself. According to Abraham, the division had happened on the last day of December in 1899. That meant—
    “It’s all still here,” Kate said. “Magic is still here.”
    “Not here.” Beetles jerked his head in the direction the dwarf had taken. “The magic quarter’s that way.”
    “Show me.”
    A minute later, Kate was standing at the end of a block of tenements. The muddy street was crammed with makeshift stalls, vendors were hawking products, shoppers were bundled up and hurrying against the cold. For being the magic quarter, Kate thought it all looked very normal. Then she noticed that one of the tenements, a reddish building with a wide front stoop, kept switching places with the building to its right, the result being that it was slowly making its way up the street. And she saw that another building shivered each time the wind blew, and that the windows of another—this made Kate very uneasy—kept winking at her.
    And besides the average-looking men and women going about their shopping, Kate saw dwarves moving through the crowd, smoking their long pipes and attracting no notice whatsoever. And there were other creatures, smaller than dwarves and beardless, who wore furry caps and stood arguing in tight groups, poking one another with their tiny fingers. Kate watched them in amazement till a woman passed by carrying a basket and drew her attention. The woman was sweet-faced and grandmotherly, and Kate was about to smile at her when she saw that the woman’s basket was alive and squirming with snakes.
    “Come on,” said Jake and Beetles, and they each took an arm and led her forward.
    The first stall sold wigs of fairy hair in different colors: gold and silver, pure snowy white, a rather arresting pink. The next stall promised to remove curses. The one after that let you buy curses (boils, baldness, pursued by cats …). There were three orfour stalls occupied by fortune-tellers, one of whom was a girl of Kate’s age who watched her closely as she went by. There was a stall that sold toads, tended by a man who looked like a toad himself and called out his wares in a deep, reverberating croak. There was a large tent where four shirtless and sweating dwarves hammered away at anvils with a rhythmic clinking and banging while another dwarf worked the bellows of a fire so hot that Kate actually unbuttoned her jacket. There was a tent devoted to eggs: not just dragon eggs, but also unicorn eggs, griffin eggs, manticore eggs, and eggs of animals that Kate had never heard of. There was a stall whose entrance was covered by a tarp, with a dense green smoke escaping from under the canvas, the tendrils crawling across the slush and cobblestones. Kate followed the boys’ lead and stepped carefully past. Another tent was stocked with thousands of stoppered glass bottles, and the boys informed her that this was where you