A dark vision pulls John into its midst before he can resist.

He’s drowning in the belly of a dragon, floundering in yellow bile, black bile, dark, thick blood. He claws with his hands, trying to grab something, anything, to help him keep his head above the spewing mess. He clutches at his throat, finds the ribbon around his neck and follows it down to the pouch Ma gave him. In the second before his body is forever sucked into the swirling mess, he clasps the pouch in his fist.

He is out of the beast. His body is normal - or the same as it has ever been which, he knows, is very far from normal. He is not drowning; he is not dying. He is standing on an ordinary street. London!

But this is not the London he’s dreamt of for so long.

There are too many people. Every single person in the whole world has to be gathered here. He turns his head in every direction. All these humans, but no faerie. No Faerie Queene. Not even a sign of his little hobgoblin.

His knuckles, gripping Ma’s pouch, are bony white, so he tucks it back under his clothes, brushing the other two pouches as he does so. Touching the old leather one, Da’s one, sends a chill through his body that scratches into the marrow of his bones. Surely it should be impossible to feel cold in this enormous city, with the heat of so many bodies around him. Trying to rub the heat back into his body, his fingers pause on his legs, on the rough fabric of his stockings.

During the journey, he’d been fortune-blessed to find a discarded bundle of clothes with no sign of an owner. For a long while, he’d hesitated reasoning they must be cursed for no one he knew would ever leave valuable garments in a ditch. Yet no one came to collect them, and if they’d been plagued surely, they would’ve been burnt or buried? The hobgoblin had shown no aversion to them. So, John took them for his own. They were not the best fit and he had no needle and thread to adjust them, but they were his. For the first time in his life he experienced something that normal boys half his age knew, he wore breeches. Da had always forbidden it, when Ma risked pleading for him, Da shouted that ‘whatever the thing you birth’d is, it doesn’t need the waste of new clothes, it can do well enough in Jetta’s cast offs.’

It was a source of pain to both of them that his twin sister, Jetta, grew much bigger much faster than him. John could wear her old dresses for countless seasons whereas her clothes were always needing working on to make them last through the month.

That is all the past. What is the point of running away, if he still thinks about it? He sucks his lips into his mouth. It might take longer than he hoped to find peace. Especially as London is not what he expected. Will the people here be the same as the ones from the village? Just more of them.

He gazes down at his body. The material separating his bare skin from the world seems so much thinner than when he’d been alone in the country. Any stranger who glances at him will see the exact shape of his legs. He tries and fails to shake away the traitorous wish that he is still wearing a skirt. He adjusts his grip on the bundle he’s carrying, his former clothes, no, he should think of them as Jetta’s clothes now, and with a grunt, pushes on.