by Tad Williams
Applecore scowled. "What does that mean, 'real'? Amn't I real, you? If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you piss me off, will I not kick you up the arse?"
"I'm not trying to offend you, I'm trying to make sense out of this. What exactly does that mean, they want to kill mortals?"
She shrugged, still angry. "Like I said, it's a big political thing. If you want to know more, ask your man Tansy. I'm just the laboring class." "Jesus." He started walking again. The magical forest was beginning to seem even less attractive. "How many of these . . . Chokeweeds are there?"
"Not that many. Maybe a quarter of the Flowers, tops."
"A quarter . . . ? Jesus Christ!" "Would you quit saying that?" Applecore buzzed around his head three times. "It doesn't do me any damage personally, but there's plenty here as don't like it, not to mention that if we meet up with a stranger you'll give yourself away throwin' that name around sure as winter brings frost. Wouldn't go shoutin' 'Mohammed' or 'Buddha,' either, now you come to it."
"What, are you telling me the other fairies wouldn't notice I didn't belong here if I just kept my mouth shut?" "You'd be surprised." She smirked. "There's some stupid fairies, but. Now, far as the Chokeweeds go, you've got to remember there's at least that many Creepers, and they like your sort well enough. The question is how many of the in-betweeners get pulled one way or the other. Don't worry so much, boyo — it's all been going on for a long, long time." She paused, hovering. "Hang on a bit, I hear something strange." She raised her head, tilted it. "Smell something, too . . ."
"What do you think . . ."
"Just stand here and do nothing, will you?"
"But . . ." "By the Trees, I'm ready to start reading Chokeweed pamphlets meself after putting up with you, and I don't even have a vote! Now just shut it and wait for me." And she swung wide around him and then shot off like a bullet, a blur of red dress disappearing among the trees.
Theo sank to the grassy ground, then put his head in his hands to rest his eyes. It was all just bizarre past any grasping. A few hours ago he had been living a normal life in his normal cabin in the mountains of normal northern California. Not a great life, maybe — in fact lately a pretty pathetic-loser sort of life — but one almost completely empty of shambling, corpse-limbed monstrosities and smart-assed fairies.
How did Uncle Eamonn deal with this shit without going crazy? Of course, his great-uncle had gone looking for it. It had been his life's dream. Reminded, he pulled the notebook out of the pocket of the leather jacket, which was tied around his waist. The book had been bumping against his legs so long as he walked that he had actually considered pulling it out and throwing it away, just to keep from going mad — Theo was not a great hiker, he was the first to admit — but it was pretty much his only connection to anything resembling the world he knew.
But I read almost all of it , he thought. I sort of remember some of the families being named after flowers, but why don't I remember anything about this Chokers and Creeps stuff?
He began to leaf through the pages as he waited for Applecore to return, wondering what else he might have missed that could save him from being eaten by big bad wolves or some other godawful thing. It was just so hard to believe that he was actually here — that everything in the book had been true . . .
Applecore buzzed back into view. "Trouble," she said. "We're right at the edge of one of Larkspur's farms. We could go around it, but it'd take us days longer."
"Days longer . . . ?" "To get to Tansy's. Larkspur won't be anywhere near the farmholding — too busy chasin' that corpsey hart — but if one of his factors gets wind of you, his lordship'll come quick enough."
Theo shrugged. "So what are we supposed to do? You can fly, but I sure as hell can't." She stared at him for a moment, perhaps about to say something rude, but instead she brightened and pointed a finger at him. "Disguise, boyo. That's how we'll save your mortal hide."
—————
He waggled his arm. A shower of twigs fell out of the sleeve of his leather jacket. "What am I supposed to be, a scarecrow?" "Quit messing about with the branches — they're supposed to stick out. Same with the leaves in your hair. No, you're not a scarecrow, you're a woodwight. A leshy, some call 'em. Bit big, but if you hunch over . . ."
"You mean I have to walk with this jacket on? I'll get heatstroke." "You'll get worse than that if Larkspur and his mates get hold of you. Put you in the wicker man, roast you like a Hy Breasil potato, they will. Now quit squirming till I put this mud on your face."
"Mddd? Whnnuhhll?" "So you'll look like a little old thing that lives in the woods and hardly ever comes out in the daytime." She buzzed backward a foot or so and hovered, surveying her handiwork. "A few more leaves in your hair would have helped. Ah, well. Keep the collar of that jacket up. Now follow me. No, I told you, walk slow. Like you've got crookedy legs."
"It's hard to remember." "Tell you what, boyo, I'm trying to save your life and you're not helping. Maybe I should take one of these sticks and lodge it up your back passage. That'd make you walk slow enough."
"You know, on a per-inch basis, you may be the most unpleasant person I've ever met." He followed her out through the thinning forest fringe. The mud on his face was itching already, but not half so badly as the twigs and dried leaves in his jacket and trouser legs. Theo did his best to keep up the shambling, arm-swinging walk Applecore had shown him, something like a chimpanzee with a broken neck, but it was hard to feel very confident about imitating something he'd never seen. "Are there a lot of these slushies around here?" He saw flat, green-gold land past the trees now. "The thing I'm supposed to be?"
"Hardly any," she said. "And leshies don't come out of the forest much, anyway. Maybe one day a year."
"What?" He pulled up short, rubbing at his face in irritation. "Then how is this going to fool anyone?" Applecore flew so close to his ear that he winced at the pressure change. "I didn't say it would fool anyone," she hissed. "I said we had to hope it might because, first off, it's the only thing around here big and stupid enough for you to pass yourself off as, and second, on that single day when one of them woodwight fellas does come out of the forest, he walks around honking and whistling and acting mad as an old stick. Don't ask me why because I don't spend much time in the leshy taverns. But when they've got their spring fever on 'em nobody much goes near 'em, so if people think you're one, chances are they'll leave you alone. But just in case anyone does come up looking to pass the time of day, I advise you to start squealing and honking and whatnot, real grumpy-like. Got it? Because I'd say it beats the jabbers out of being roasted like an old spud."
Properly chastened, Theo fell back into his shambling, uncomfortable walk. The great ocean of trees through which they had been traveling had thinned now to a few small copses dotted along the hillside. As they made their way from one cluster of trees to another, Theo saw that they were descending into a disconcertingly wide plain. It was hemmed on either side by rows of green hills, lush as something in the background of a Maxfield Parrish painting, but those were far away — the nearest at least a couple of hours' walk, Theo decided, and probably more. At the base of the hill they were descending the land had been leveled and plowed, the soil dark as ground coffee, but mostly obscured by a sea of waving, shimmering fronds. Here and there figures moved among the stalks, bending and straightening.
"What . . . what is all that?"
"Wheat. Bend over more, you're starting to look human."
He crouched, conscious of a nagging pain starting in his back. "But . . . but it looks like gold. Like real gold!"
"You don't think we make fairy-bread out of the same stuff you mortal fellas grow, do you? Keep walking." Even as they descended the hillside Applecore led him in a wide swing to one side so they could cross the broad field closer to its edge. After a few minutes she lit on his shoulder — "If they see me flying around they'll wonder why a sprite's keeping company with a leshy," she explained — and nestled in among the twigs and leaves, but continued
to issue instructions from her new perch. "Root and Bough, man, can't you remember to gibber a bit? And wave those arms around!"
Theo did not want to die in a wicker man or by any other quaint methods the locals might have devised. He did his best to make appropriate noises and movements. He could see that some of the nearer farmworkers had stopped to watch him over the tops of the rows, but was relieved to see that none of them seemed inclined to do anything but look.
He stumbled along, gratefully aware that the sun was beginning to dip toward the horizon. He had never thought of fairyland as a place where you could get a sunburn, although he supposed the mud and twigs would protect him from that, but it was certainly warm enough to make the leaves down his neck itch like sin and the hot leather jacket feel like a very cruel punishment. There was a tiny bit of solace in the smell of the wheat itself, a rich, heady aroma like freshly unkegged beer, as though there was drunkenness in the grain of Faerie even before any distilling took place.
As he reached the edge of the field and stepped between two rows of golden stalks, a trio of heads popped up only a couple of rows away. Theo let out a gasp of surprise and stopped. As astonishingly small as she was, Applecore still looked quite human, and the fairy-gentry he had seen earlier could also have passed for human at a distance, but the three faces staring at him were not so easy to mistake. All three had huge eyes, faces as wrinkled as a thousand-year-old mummy, and instead of noses just two round nostrils opening straight into their faces.
Something sharp jabbed his earlobe. "Make some noise, you eejit," Applecore whispered. Theo began to wave his arms and moan. The strange faces regarded him expressionlessly for a moment. He lunged into the wheat as though heading toward them and they vanished down behind the row.
"What the hell were those?" he asked when he could hear them rattling away in the other direction.
"Dobbies," said Applecore. "Not too bright, those lads. But they'll not come back." "Ugly." Theo shivered. Applecore laughed sharply. "Ah, if you find those a bit homely, I'd hate to be in your shoes when you meet a killmoulis or one of them fachan. Or old Peg Powler herself!"
"Don't want to meet any of them," Theo said wearily. "Want to go home."
Applecore frowned. "Yes. Well."
————— It was a long trip across Lord Larkspur's wheatfields, but although they saw many other creatures tending the crops, brownies and hodkins and hogboons and other domestic fairies who, according to Applecore, did most of the rural manual labor, most of them seemed quite willing to keep their distance from Theo the Woodwight. The sun continued to sink lower until it seemed to be sitting atop the hilly meadows to the west. Once, when Theo looked back, he could see the forest stretching behind them all the way back to a line of distant mountains whose peaks were as faint as wind-tattered clouds in the southern distance.
"The forest . . ." he said. "It's huge!" "The Silverwood? One of the biggest," Applecore said, "Inside the borders of Faerie, only True Arden and Old Brocéliande are bigger, or that's what they taught me."
"And it all belongs to this Larkspur guy?" "No, no, he's not that important. Delphinion, the bit his family owns, only runs into one edge of the forest — just happened to be the place we ended up. It mostly belongs to the Six Families, like everything bloody else." She pondered for a moment, then darted ahead and out of sight. Theo slogged on. He could see the end of the wheatfield, now. It was very close.
Applecore was back within a minute. "We're in luck," she said. "The border is near — just the other side of the river, only a couple of hops. And there's a bit of woodland there, too, so we won't have to worry so much about being seen."
"Does that mean I can pull these damn leaves out of my hair?" He sighed. "Border with what, exactly?"
"With the Sun's Gaze Commune — the Daisy House lands, where Tansy lives. As for those leaves, just wait until we're across the river, boyo."
"Commune . . . ?"
"They're big on old-fashioned names for things, the Daisy clan. You really don't want to be wasting time discussing this now, do you?" Theo staggered out of the last of the wheat like an exhausted distance runner breaking the tape, only to find that Applecore's idea of "a couple of hops" seemed to be derived from some kind of mutant-kangaroo scale. The river was wide and active, dark water and sparkling foam intermingled like some kind of living crystal, but it wasn't very near at all, not the way he felt. He groaned and sank down onto the grass at the edge of the field. "I'm not going to make it." He lowered his head, felt sweat and dirt and scratchy leaves on the back of his neck. "I'm dying of thirst, too."
"The river, Theo." She said it almost kindly.
As he got up and began to limp down the long hillside, he realized it was the first time she'd used his name. He was only a hundred yards or so from the water, could feel the spray in his mouth and breathe the ozone tingle into his lungs, when Applecore, hovering beside his ear, said something he didn't want to hear.
"Oh, shite, we're in trouble now," was the way she put it.
"What?" "Don't turn around! Riders on the far side of the field, back where we started. Some of Larkspur's march wardens, most likely. They look like they're talking to someone up there."
"Probably those Dob-thingies," Theo said miserably. "I never trusted the no-nose bastards."
"Just hurry. They're a long way away, and they don't look like . . . Whoops."
" 'Whoops?' What the hell does that mean?"
"It means they're riding across the field. Don't look back! But see if you can sort of hurry your bony arse toward that river, will you?" Theo did not waste breath on more talking. He sped to a stumbling lope. Although he had abandoned any pretense at leshy-hood, preferring to concentrate on running rather than gibbering and throwing his arms around, he was pretty sure his fatigue and uncomfortable costume kept him from looking entirely human: a few of the leafy branches that had started under his collar had worked their way down past the small of his back until they threatened to become the stick-up-the-arse Applecore had mentioned earlier.
The sun had dipped behind the low western hills, and although it brought a measure of blessed coolness to the air, it also made Theo think about what it would be like to be chased through unfamiliar lands in the dark. He galloped awkwardly down to the edge of the river and stood there, staring at the current. He almost thought he could see faces in the eddying water, shapes like fingers in the froth.
"I'm . . . I'm not that good . . . a swimmer," he panted.
"Any nymphs owe you favors?" Applecore didn't seem to be joking.
"What's a nymph?" She scowled. "I think you'd better just jump and swim hard and hope for the best. Because in about the time it's going to take me to explain, those horseback fellows are going to be here."
Theo turned to see half a dozen tall, mounted figures riding through the wheatfield, trampling the stalks as they came — not at full gallop, but not going slowly, either. "Oh, shit," he said, and jumped into the river.
It was stunningly wet — like ordinary water that had undergone some kind of molecular shift: in the moment of submersion he could almost feel it trying to force its way in through his pores like an invading force. He came up thrashing and spluttering, an electrical thrill of cold running along his spine and squeezing his skull. Trying to paddle, he dug at the water with tingling, clumsy hands, and for a moment he actually made some forward progress, but the current seemed to reach up and grab him, a cold fist that squeezed him hard and then turned him over and over like a toy; within heartbeats he had lost any sense of up or down. He tried to call out to Applecore, but there was only the ravishing chill and a view of sun and sky like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope — in fact, the coin of bright air rotating above him was getting smaller very rapidly indeed.
He was sinking, his last breath burning in his lungs. Just as the blackness began to extinguish his thoughts, he thought he saw pale shapes floating toward him through the swirling, muddied waters. They surrounded him, their fac
es green as pale jade, hard and unsympathetic as masks. Their staring eyes were like bottomless holes, like abandoned wells forgotten in a field, but it didn't matter because he was sinking, sinking, drowning, dying. . . .
11 A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCING SHED
Because she was by birth a loireag — a type of water fairy — Mary Mosspink had a patience with humidity that other, dryer folk did not possess. Even so, the hot damp evening depressed her, and she could sense that the mood of The Forcing Shed's patrons was not a good one. In fact, several decades' experience as an alewife told her it was the sort of night when it would be a good idea to prepare for trouble. She was already regretting that she hadn't found a replacement for Shortspan the half-troll, her other bartender and unofficial bouncer, who had called in sick.
The clientele was no different than usual, a few serious drinkers who always stopped in on their way home (but never actually seemed to go home), some Twilight District office workers who really would go home after a drink or two — the Eastwater-Merrowtown train station was just across the street — and a table full of young Flower bloods on the first stop of what looked like a long night's revel. These last were loud and a bit rude, but they'd already been in almost an hour and hadn't caused any serious trouble. In fact, nothing looked much different from normal, but Mary still couldn't shake the feeling of unease.
Thus, when she left old Juniper in charge for a moment and went back into the tavern office to get change for a gold Oonagh out of the safe, she took a package out as well. She unwrapped the Cuckoo automatic briefly to make sure there was a bronze-jacketed iron egg in the chamber, but also to check that the safety was on, then folded the cloth around it again and slipped it into the pocket of her capacious smock. When she had given the waiting customer his change and released the old greencoat back to the kitchen, she slid the gun into the shelf underneath the register, far enough back that Juniper or someone else wouldn't come upon it by accident. Just as she withdrew her hand, the front door opened with a bang that made her jump and set her small wings flexing.
