by Lari Don
Molly smiled. “Beth will tell you the story later. How’s your throat this morning?”
“Sore, but not as sore as the place in my tummy where the tree used to live.” Rosalind pointed to her chest, to her heart.
“I’m sorry,” said Molly. “But that horrible fire won’t burn any more of your trees.”
Rosalind grinned up at her. “Promise?”
“I promise.”
Molly stepped round the little girl and ran to the kitchen.
Everyone else was already there and no one else was covered in crumbs. Beth asked, “Why did you flush?”
Innes asked, “Twice?”
Molly laughed and flicked crumbs out of her fringe. “Are they all asleep?”
Atacama nodded. “Every single one.”
Beth opened the door. “Ok. Molly and I will cycle through town and meet the two of you at the gorse village, then we can try to persuade the fairy who cursed Innes’s dad to accept a good deed.”
Atacama said, “No, wait, look…”
A larger crow was swooping down through the trees. They all flinched as it shrieked in anger at the sight of the sleeping crows, the same reverberating shriek they’d heard when the crows attacked them at Cut Rigg Farm.
The crow landed and started kicking at the crows on the ground. But it was kicking with black leather boots, not clawed feet. When it landed, it had shifted into the tall man they’d seen talking to Mrs Sharpe.
“Get up, lazy bones,” he shouted. “Get up!”
But the crows didn’t move.
“We have to get out of here now,” whispered Beth, “before Corbie notices us.”
Innes nodded. “Atacama, get to the fairy village by yourself, I’ll bring the girls faster than they can cycle.” As the sphinx slunk off into the woods, Innes stepped outside and shifted into his horse self.
Molly backed off, remembering teeth on her shoulder and tentacles around her waist.
“Come on,” said Beth, climbing onto the white horse.
Corbie was flapping round in the distance, his black coat flicking, yelling at the snoring crows. He was flying up as a crow, then crashing back down as a human.
Molly realised that every time he became a crow, he was slightly bigger, with a wider wingspan.
“Come on, Molly!”
“But kelpies in their horse form are dangerous to people!”
“Not Innes, not today.” Beth held out her hand. “He really believes you can lift his curse, so he needs to keep you alive. You’ll be safer than any human has ever been on a kelpie’s back. Come on!”
Molly reached up and Beth hauled her onto Innes’s back. They rode out of the woods, away from the sleeping crows.
***
Molly balanced nervously on the back of the predatory horse who’d nearly drowned her yesterday. He galloped through fields and along farm tracks around the edge of Craigvenie.
She’d only been on a horse twice before, at friends’ pony-themed birthday parties, when the horses walked slowly in a circle. But she held tight to Innes’s mane and Beth held tight to her waist, so once she got used to the rhythm, she felt quite secure.
Beth shouted, “There are no birds following us. Perhaps Corbie didn’t see us leaving.”
Innes didn’t slow down until he was trotting along a rutted road leading to a field at the base of a low hill. He leapt over the fence into the grassy field.
Beth let go of Molly’s waist. “Jump down!”
Molly slid off, landing on her hands and knees. Beth jumped down beside her.
Innes was standing beside her too. “You’ve not done that before, have you?” He smiled. “I’ve not had a human on my back before either. It’s usually too risky.”
“You’ve not had a human on your back before?” Molly stood up. “So you’ve never actually lured someone onto your back, dragged them into the water and eaten them?”
“Of course not! I’m more of a pizza person, to be honest. And we’re part of the community here, so we don’t eat our neighbours. If I wanted to try a traditional kelpie diet, I’d go somewhere else. Did you really think I made a habit of eating people?”
“When I asked before, you didn’t give me a straight answer.”
“He’s embarrassed,” said Beth. “He thinks he’s denying his kelpie heritage.”
Atacama loped up beside them.
“There you are, slow paws!” said Innes. “I beat you again, even with these two heavy lumps on my back.”
The sphinx smiled. “So you’ve had plenty of time to come up with a plan, then. What are your tactics?”
Innes frowned and looked round. “Em…”
Beth pointed to the base of the hill. “The fairy village is in that clump of gorse bushes, by the side of that burn. It’s a small settlement, with a couple of dozen fairy families. They need to be close to Craigvenie so they can gather flower seeds and petals from the gardens.”
Innes said, “We need to watch the gorse village, find our fairy target, then work out how to help her with Molly’s egg.”
Beth said, “You won’t be able to go near her as a boy or as a horse. She’d recognise you as a kelpie, and get suspicious.”
“Obviously. I’ll hide in the burn as a pike.”
They agreed to split up round the field and watch different exits from the fairy village. Molly asked, “Who exactly are we looking for?”
“The heather fairy,” said Innes. “She’ll probably be dressed in purple. Let’s watch for an hour, then meet at the furthest corner of the field to discuss what we do next.”
Innes crept over to the burn, Beth sauntered quite openly up to a clump of birch trees and sat with her back to the tallest one, and Atacama climbed up a much bigger tree nearer the fence and lay along a branch like a shadowy leopard.
Molly shifted into a hare and lolloped past the gorse bushes to the moorland slope above, where she lay flat on the ground.
From her low vantage point she could see little round houses, with tiny doors and no windows, hanging from the bottom branches of the gorse bushes. They were woven out of dried grass and rosebay willowherb stems.
Birds cheeped in the trees and the burn shooshed below her. Then the fairy village came to life.
Tiny people stepped or flew out of the houses.
Molly watched, entranced. This week she’d seen a boy turn into a horse, answered a sphinx’s riddles, watched a girl vanish into a tree, and spoken to a legless dragon. But this was the most magical thing yet.
She lay in her hare’s form, staring at the fairies.
They weren’t glittery and they weren’t all young and pretty. There were wrinkly fairies and plump fairies, male fairies and female fairies, and they were wearing sensible clothes made of grass and petals, rather than tight-fitting silk party dresses. But they were definitely fairies. They had wings and they would be small enough to stand on Molly’s human hand. And they were chatting, in quiet high-pitched conversations that a passerby might mistake for birdsong.
Then a fairy dressed in muted purple and green, who was neither young nor old, flew out of the village towards the hillside, with a couple of folded sacks over her shoulder.
Molly lay still as the tiny fairy fluttered past. She saw the fairy land further up the hill and start to fill one sack with faded papery heather blossoms.
The hare watched as the fairy harvested. Nothing else moved except a few insects buzzing about. Molly saw how long it took the fairy to fill the bottom of the sack and realised this would be a slow job. It would be a couple of hours before the fairy even started on the second sack.
Molly wondered if she could offer to speed things up.
She could hold the sack open. She could pick the flowers. But how could she use the stone egg? She wondered if any of the others could see the heather fairy at work, and if they had any bright egg-shaped ideas.
Molly sat up slowly, raising her ears, then her shoulders, trying not to startle the fairy.
The fairy looked up, no
dded at the hare and went back to her harvest.
Molly looked down at the village and the field. She was the only one with a close-up view of the heather fairy and her long task. She’d better go and report back to the others.
Then out of the corner of her wide eye, Molly saw a sudden movement. She crouched down again, quivering with fear.
That wasn’t just a movement. It was a shape, a colour.
A sharp red movement.
There was a fox. On the hillside. Stalking her.
Chapter 27
Molly’s hare heart was racing with fear. This wasn’t a daft dog who would chase her because she was moving and snap at her for fun.
This was a fox. A predator. An animal that lived by killing. A hunter that might have killed hares before.
What should she do? Should she stay still? Maybe it hadn’t seen her, maybe it wasn’t stalking her.
But she couldn’t see it. That sudden flash of red had moved into the blind spot behind her.
The fox – if it was a fox, if it was there – was directly behind her. With a clear line to her spine, her neck and her skull.
Molly shivered. She couldn’t just lie still, feeling so small, so defenceless, so vulnerable. She had to know if there really was a fox.
She moved her head, very slightly, just enough to see behind her.
And there it was.
A fox.
Just metres away.
Molly didn’t see the rust-coloured fur or the wide bushy tail. She only saw the narrow squinting eyes, the naked lips stretched back over vicious yellow teeth.
And she saw the fox dart forward.
So she ran.
The fox ran after her.
Molly had no idea how fast a fox could run, but she hoped it wasn’t as fast as a greyhound.
She dodged about the hillside. She jumped over the fairy and the sacks, the blast of moving air from her speed blowing the loose sack away. She leapt over the heather, twisting and turning around the hillside.
But the fox wasn’t wrong-footed by her changes of direction. This fox knew how to chase a hare. It anticipated her every move. It didn’t have to run as far as her, because it was able to cut the corners of her zigzag escape.
Molly kept running, but she tried to think too. The first thing she thought was that the fairy would need help keeping her sacks on the ground if it got windy, which wasn’t a handy thought right now.
The next thing she thought was that heather was harder to run on than grass, which wasn’t useful either.
Then she thought that what she needed was a boundary, because the fox wanted to eat a hare, not a girl.
She angled down the hillside onto the flatter field, then aimed for the rutted road, hoping that the fields on the other side were owned by a different farmer. Now she had a plan, she ran in a straight line, trusting that her pure speed on grass would beat the fox.
She sprinted towards the fence, using every scrap of power and speed she had, then she laid her ears back and jumped between the middle two strands of wire.
Molly crashed onto the gritty road in her jeans and fleece.
She turned to see a fox snarling at her from the other side of the fence.
“Ha!” she called. “I’m not your lunch today. Go and eat snails…”
The fox ran off, looking glossy and beautiful now that it was a fraction of her size.
Then Molly became aware of a metallic roar.
She looked along the road and saw a red tractor rattling towards her. She shook her head. If she kept using roads as boundaries, she was going to get run over.
She climbed the fence, hoping the farmer hadn’t seen her rolling about, and walked towards their rendezvous point in the far corner of the field. She wasn’t a hare any more, but her heart was still beating far too fast.
Atacama was already there. “I saw the end of that chase,” he said. “I was too far away to help, but you had the speed and the boundary, so I knew you’d be alright. Molly, you have to be more careful about when you use your hare form. I know it’s convenient, but if you’re not in control of changing back it’s too dangerous.”
Molly nodded, still shaking.
Beth and Innes appeared too: Beth calm and smiling, Innes with wet hair and a scowl.
“Those fairies are so irritating,” he said. “All that singing and chattering and washing their petticoats in the burn. I couldn’t see the heather fairy from where I was anyway.”
“I saw her,” said Molly, her voice a bit wobbly. She sat down and Atacama sat beside her, his heavy furry warmth leaning into her, calming her.
She said, more firmly, “I saw the heather fairy, she’s on the other side of the village, gathering heather blossom. And I have an idea about how to help her, because when I was being chased by a fox—”
“A fox!” interrupted Beth. “Are you alright?”
“I’m not being torn apart and eaten, and I didn’t get run over by the tractor I threw myself under, so yes, I’m fine. Anyway, while I was running from the fox, I leapt past the fairy and the gust of air lifted her sack. I wonder if we could offer to weigh her sack down with a stone egg, so it doesn’t get blown away?”
“Blown away by what?” asked Innes. “It’s not windy today. Or are you planning to ask lots of hares to run up and down the hill?”
“It was just an idea!”
“It’s a good idea,” said Beth. “We just need to create some wind.”
“Can you change the weather, Beth?” asked Molly.
Beth shook her head. “We’d need a strong witch for that. But branches move in the wind, so I wonder if I could do it the other way round. Start the branches moving and see if that causes a breeze.”
“Not now though,” said Atacama, tipping his head as if he was listening. “The laundresses and harvesters are heading back to the fairy village. When they return to work after lunch, Beth can build a breeze and Molly can offer the fairy help.”
Molly could hear faint noises from the bushes: birdsong conversations and tiny bursts of laughter from groups of fairies on their way home. Then she noticed Atacama was silently moving his lips again.
“Are you trying to write your riddle?”
The sphinx nodded.
“Can we help?” offered Innes.
“No. You can’t help without the answer, and I can’t tell anyone the answer, because if I did, no door I guard would ever be secure.”
Molly said, “I’ll be back to a non-magical life in the city soon, Atacama, so you can tell me your answer.”
Beth said, “You can tell all of us. I’ll promise never to tell anyone else the answer, if that would help.”
Atacama smiled. “If you all made that promise, I could trust the whole team with the answer.”
So they all promised never to tell anyone else the answer to Atacama’s riddle, then the sphinx whispered, “The answer is… a clock.”
Innes said, “What about: My face shows the time, but no emotions.”
“Too simple,” said Atacama. “I don’t want anyone unworthy to get past me. Using the word ‘time’ is too obvious.”
“We could use ‘face’, but not ‘time’,” suggested Molly. “What about: You can say what you like to my face, but I won’t show any emotion.”
“That’s good,” said Beth. “And clocks have hands, so what about: Talk to the hand.”
Atacama snorted. “I can’t use naff out-of-date slang in an elegant riddle.”
“The hands work though,” said Innes. “What about: I move my hands all day, but I never make anything.”
“But a clock does make something,” Molly pointed out. “It makes a noise. Tick tock tick tock.”
Innes nodded. “Alright, try this: I move my hands all day, but I never wave with them or pick my nose with them or…”
Beth said suddenly, “Tock! Talk! That could be a pun. Riddles have puns, don’t they?”
Atacama nodded.
Beth grinned. “So: I tock all day, but I never tel
l you anything.”
“But clocks tell the time!” said Innes. “And anyway, ‘tock’ and ‘talk’ are spelt differently.”
“Yes, but sphinxes speak their riddles,” said Beth. “They don’t write them—”
“Shhh!” said Atacama. “Wait! I almost have it.” The sphinx lay down and put his paws over his face.
After a few silent minutes, he sat up and said solemnly:
I tock all day, but I never say hello;
I move my hands all day, but I never wave goodbye;
You can say what you like to me,
but my face will never show any emotion.
What am I?
“Wow,” said Beth. “Well done, Atacama!”
“We all wrote it,” said Atacama, “as a team, working to lift all our curses.”
Molly nodded. “But is your curse really lifted, I wonder?”
“I don’t know.” Atacama had a wide smile on his long face. “But I have a riddle and I have an answer, so I can go home and tell my family I’m a real sphinx again.”
“Now it’s just you and me, hare-girl,” said Innes. “We’re the only ones still cursed. And we can lift both curses by helping one fairy…”
So Beth walked over to the birch trees and chatted to them about breezes. Atacama and Innes found hiding places with a view of the hillside. And Molly took the stone egg out of her pocket and waited.
She could hear the faint noises from the village change from chattering to clattering. Were they finishing lunch? Then three fairies fluttered out towards the water. She looked up the hill and saw Atacama nod to her. That meant the heather fairy was returning to her harvest.
Molly glanced over at the trees and saw branches moving back and forth, more like oars pushing through water than branches blown by the wind. But they must have affected the surrounding air, because Beth’s purple hair was whipping around her face.
Then Molly felt her own hair ruffled by a breeze. It was time to head for the hillside.
She didn’t want to surprise or scare the fairy, so she walked slowly towards the clump of heather the fairy had been harvesting earlier and said gently, “Hello. I saw you working and I felt the wind getting up, so I wondered if I could help you?”
