Guardian of the Green Hill Page 9

  “Yer precious,” he said, and coughed painfully again. “Nothing can happen to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Green Hill … Lady … Guardian … without you…” He curled into another painful paroxysm of hacking, and Meg called, “Help!” down the hallway. Wooster came running in a stiff and dignified way.

  “Call for the doctor,” Meg ordered. Wooster glanced to Bran for confirmation of his instructions, but Bran had his eyes shut tightly, keeping a firm hold on his agony. “Go! Do it!” She might have been a child, but her voice already had the Guardian’s authority, and Wooster couldn’t deny it. He scurried to the stables and sent a lad.

  “Bran, be still,” Meg told him when he tried again to rise. “You shouldn’t have risked your life to look for me. I can take care of myself, and anyway, forget about that Guardian business. I’ve thought about it, and I won’t do it. As soon as we find James, I’m going home. All of us are going home.”

  “Find James?”

  “Stop trying to talk. Yes, find James. He was replaced by a changeling. Phyllida got the changeling to leave—now we have to get James back. Then I’m through with this place. Now, don’t get upset again,” she added as he struggled against her gentle but firm hands. “It’s not your fault, and I love you very much, all of you, but I can’t bear this anymore. First you, now James, in only a few weeks—who knows what would happen if I decided to stay? I don’t know how Phyllida does it. But she chose to do it. I don’t. I won’t be the next Guardian. It’s too much for me.”

  He gripped her weakly. “Then forget the doctor. You might as well have left me dead on the hill, or under it, or outside on the doorstep till dawn. If you will leave us, all is lost!” He clenched his teeth against the pain and was unconscious by the time Phyllida and the others found them. When Dr. Homunculus pulled up in his little red sports car, Meg slipped away to be alone.

  She considered going to her retreat on the Rookery roof, but the thought of her small self against that vastness of stars overwhelmed her. Again, it was the kitchen, that place for schemes and comfort, that called her.

  In all her years on this earth, Meg had never been so confused. She wanted to stay, and she wanted to flee. She wanted to learn, and (like the Wyrm) she wanted to forget what she had learned. She felt some mysterious pull—whether it was her blood or her curiosity or her budding sense of adventure, she could not say—telling her to stay in England forever and be a part of this strange life with the fairies. And she felt a push nearly as strong sending her toward safety and predictability and, if she was completely honest with herself, dullness.

  And now Bran, she thought miserably. Just when he seemed on the verge of recovery, both physical and psychological, he sounded hopeless again, and it was all her fault. He’d pushed himself to the brink of death once again to search for her while she heedlessly stayed out late. And because she might not (might?) want to become Guardian, he seemed on the verge of despair. Couldn’t she do anything right? She could, maybe, if she knew what right was.

  She looked around for something to eat, but most eatables had been laid waste by the changeling. She tidied up a bit, helpfully putting things where they did not go, so that for weeks to come, Phyllida would search in vain for spatulas and whisks. Meg desperately wanted to do something useful. She could not help Bran; that was the duty of Dr. Homunculus. She could not search for James, for she did not know how. She spied the butter churn in the corner. She shook it and heard a liquid slosh. Someone, Phyllida or a maid, had started churning and had probably been interrupted. She grasped the well-worn dasher handle pressed with indentations from several generations of women’s hands. Hers were a little small, but they found a comfortable place, and she set about churning.

  It was harder than it looked. She had to use not just her arms but her whole upper body. After a few minutes she ached, and the cream was no thicker.

  “I can’t do anything right,” she said in disgust, and thrust the plunger hard into the churn.

  “Twist as ye churn,” came a voice, mournful and low.

  Twist she did as she whirled around and found the Rookery brownie regarding her glumly. And no wonder. She was about to ruin his batch of butter.

  Leathery, callused hands wrapped around her own and guided her in the right kind of agitation to make the better congeal. It was with some alarm she realized she was actually being touched by a fairy. He felt decidedly unhuman, his skin the texture of a bat’s wing, and cold, like James had been, now that she thought of it. He turned her hands around on the plunger as together they raised it up and forced it down until, only a moment later, it began to thicken. And she had been about to give up.

  “There,” the brownie said. “Keep at it, and you’ll have butter ere long.” He settled himself on a bench and lit a cheroot.

  Meg churned away, and as the brownie puffed, she told him some of her troubles. He offered no advice about recovering James, and she turned to Phyllida’s desire to train her as her successor.

  “Why can’t Bran take over for Phyllida?” she asked at length. “He’s young, and he knows all there is to know about fairies. He’d do it, and happily, I’d think. Or Rowan. He’d be just as good as me. Hasn’t there ever been a male Guardian?”

  She hadn’t thought the brownie would answer. Taciturn and stubborn, he rarely spoke except about matters that concerned him directly (like his precious butter). So she paid particular attention when he said, “Aye, once. Fer a time.”

  “Then why can’t it happen again? I don’t think I want to be the Guardian.”

  “He were Guardian for ten minutes, no more, and he were druv out o’ the county with a price on his head. No, there canna be a male Guardian. It’s agin’ the laws of nature.” He blew a smoke circle, then a smoke square.

  “But why? That makes no sense.”

  “The blood mun stay wi’ the land. A woman knows if a child is her own, a man, never. The blood mun stay.” He snuffed his cheroot and moved her aside to scoop the clotted butter and press out the buttermilk. She pestered him with questions as he kneaded the butter, rolled it in cold water, and salted it, but he was intent on his work and ignored her. She thought she understood what he meant, but wasn’t quite sure.

  “But what am I supposed to do?” she asked, at her wit’s end, as he spread the butter into molds.

  When he finished, and not before, he cocked his head at her, looking more friendly, more human, than she had ever seen him, despite his rags and square feet. He smiled and took her hand, pressing it against his cold, barrel-shaped chest.

  “What d’ye feel?”

  “I … you? Your skin?” She didn’t know what he was getting at. He put her hand on her own chest.

  “What d’ye feel?”

  “I feel … my heart beating.”

  “How can I tell ye what to do? Ye have what I don’t. That will tell ye.”

  “You mean my heart? Follow my heart?”

  The brownie harrumphed. “Hogswallow! Heart … humph! That’s blood in there, girl child. Ye mun follow your blood. Ye can do no other.” He dropped her hand and vanished, and she was left with six neat slabs of butter and her own heart in her hands.

  The Burden Is Hers, All Hers

  MEG TRIED WITH ALL HER MIGHT to stay home with Phyllida and Lysander as they worked on a way to get James back, but her might was not equal to the task, and she found herself trundled off to the mowing festival along with everyone else.

  “But I have to be here to help you! You need me!”

  “We need no such thing, child. Among Lysander and Bran and me, we’ve got almost three hundred years’ experience with the fairies. You never knew fairies outside of bedtime stories until a few weeks ago.”

  “Even if I can’t really help, how do you expect me to have fun when all the while James is a prisoner?”

  “I don’t expect you to have fun,” Phyllida said. “I expect you to be out of my hair so I can work free from pestering. I expect you to b
e so surrounded by diversion that you might forget your troubles for just the barest instant, smile at a jester, no more. Better that than sulking and moping in your room. And pacing. Yes, I heard you all morning, since four o’clock, stamping with those big feet of yours. Oh, touch a nerve? See how you can forget for just an instant? Well, they are not big feet, but they certainly sound big stomping right above my head when I’m trying to get my beauty sleep.” Actually, Phyllida had been up until nearly three, and the beauty sleep was only a desperate hour or two snatched so she wouldn’t go absolutely insane with sleep deprivation.

  “I won’t forget James,” Meg swore, “not for a single second!”

  Phyllida took Meg’s cool cheeks in her hands. “You will drive yourself mad if you stay here, helpless.” And the rest of us too, she did not add. “You will be weak and fretful and headachy and no use to us at all when we really do need you.”

  “Need me? You’ll need me?”

  “Aye, we may well. Who knows what it will take to free your brother? If I can make use of you, then I surely will, and you must be in a fit state for it. Which you will not be if you mope in your room all day. Now, for the last time, for your brother’s sake, get out of this house!”

  Meg couldn’t fight anymore. Finn could have, and if he really wanted to get his way, he would never stop arguing, would lie and sneak to achieve his ends and, truth be told, was not above a bawling, screaming, fist-pounding tantrum. But Meg wasn’t like that, and what’s more, she still believed that grown-ups were usually right, or in any case, couldn’t be fought.

  So Silly and Dickie (with the invisible Wyrm around his shoulder) and Finn (complaining of the heat and sun and dust all the while) and a very reluctant Meg set out on foot for the hayfields on the outskirts of Gladysmere. Rowan stayed behind for his art lesson and said he would join them afterward. Apparently Phyllida didn’t see any danger of Rowan getting in her way.

  Meg went, but she went defiantly, first speed-walking in a huff, then dragging her feet so much that, if she was careful, she might never get there at all. Look at them, she thought as she watched Silly skipping ahead of her, stirring up dust on the roadway. She doesn’t care, not one bit. Nothing really bothers her. She doesn’t think what poor James might be going through, how scared he must be in that dark place without us. She thinks that everything will be all right, always. It’s no different from a book for her—the world might be dull in the beginning, full of adventure in the middle, but the ending will always be happy for the main characters, and in her mind she and our family are undoubtedly the main characters. Silly might actually be worried if Dickie were in trouble, but James, to her, must be immune. That’s what Meg thought about her sister, anyway.

  Meg read her sister correctly in one respect—Silly never doubted for a minute that James would be recovered unharmed. What Meg didn’t realize was that Silly was scheming to get him back herself.

  “Dickie,” she said, skipping in place so he had a chance to catch up, “I need your help.”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “I’m going to get James back.”

  “You are?”

  “Yup. Wanna help?”

  “Sure. Let me get Meg, and we can—”

  “No! I don’t want her to know.”

  “How come?” He didn’t like keeping secrets from Meg and was pretty sure Meg wouldn’t like it either.

  “Well … I don’t know if it will work, for one, and I don’t want her to get all upset. And then…”

  Dickie waited.

  “Oh, don’t look at me like that!” Silly said, though Dickie didn’t know he had been looking any particular way. It only goes to show what a guilty conscience will make a person see. “The thing I’m planning to do, I don’t think she’ll think it’s nice.” She pronounced nice with sneering disgust, as you might say mice if you found them using your pantry for an outhouse.

  “Then maybe we shouldn’t do it.”

  “What are you, a goody-goody?” He was, and he knew it. “Don’t you want to get James back? Well, then, I have a perfectly good idea, and it will work, and just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean I’m going to let James stay with the fairies. He’s probably having a blast, and I wish I was there, but that’s not the point. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “So? What are you going to do?”

  “We,” she said with emphasis, for if she went down, he was going with her, “are going to kidnap a fairy.”

  “Hisss-sss-sss,” a sibilant voice said, and the Wyrm dimly materialized.

  “Oh, that thing always gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Silly said. “No offense, but you do tend to appear. Wait, were you laughing at me?” She stopped squarely in the road with her fists on her hips, ready for battle. No one better laugh at Silly unless she told a joke, and then they better laugh but good.

  “Kidnap a fairy?” the Wyrm said. “How, pray, do you propose to do that?”

  “I don’t know!” Silly said defiantly. She’d had visions of simply grabbing one of the smaller ones around the throat, stuffing it in a backpack, and arranging an exchange. Now that the Wyrm mentioned it, though, it might be just a little bit harder than that.

  “That’s why I have you,” she said to Dickie. “You know all there is to know about fairies.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said.

  “Nor would I,” the Wyrm added loftily.

  “But you know a lot. You’re always reading about them in the Rookery library. You were able to help Meg when she had to get to the Midsummer War. You must know some way of capturing a fairy.”

  “Well…”

  “And your Wyrm can help us.”

  “I beg your pardon!” the Wyrm hissed, furiously flapping the stubby wings behind his neck. “I am no one’s Wyrm but my own, and how dare you imply…”

  Silly, accustomed to offending people and not at all ashamed, said an automatic and insincere “sorry” and went on. “Between the three of us, we should be able to catch one, right?”

  The Wyrm said, “I’m afraid—”

  “Ohhh,” Silly said in apparent sympathy. “If you’re afraid, that’s another story. I thought you just weren’t as smart as you always say you are.” She averted her eyes and waited for this two-fanged attack to strike home. You’d think a Wyrm so old he had learned everything there is to know and started to forget it again would be immune to such facile tricks of psychology. But perhaps among his forgotten lore were the special tactics of determined nine-year-old girls. Good thing he fell for it, or Silly would have had to whip out her heavy artillery, the dare and the double dare.

  The Wyrm’s shining scales stood on end, and he spat in rapid-fire patter, “Ground ivy, milkweed fluff, daisy chains, pig’s bladder! So there!”

  Dickie and Silly looked at him in confused amazement. The Wyrm, having proved himself, settled back down around Dickie’s neck and preened his scales with his nose.

  “Um, what was all that?” Dickie asked.

  The Wyrm blinked (for unlike snakes, he had eyelids), sighed, and said, “I was under the impression you wanted to know how to capture a fairy. You can tie him up in ground ivy or a daisy chain, you can blow a cloud of milkweed seeds at him to immobilize him, or you can stuff him in a pig’s bladder, and he can’t escape. Why I have to prove my vast knowledge to a couple of chits like you is beyond me, but you weary me to no end, and I am going to sleep.” With that he closed his eyes and fell into a deep and utterly fictitious slumber.

  “Well,” said Silly, looking sidelong at Dickie and just managing to suppress her giggles, “that certainly helps. So, Dickie, are you in?”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said.

  * * *

  To keep up appearances, they opened their easels on the croquet lawn, but not a smear of charcoal nor a daub of paint violated the pristine whiteness of the paper.

  “Where is she?” Gwidion whispered. “You have to bring me to her, without her knowing.”

  “I can’t
find her,” Rowan said. “You’re going to get it for me, aren’t you? All for me? You’re going to help me?” He rubbed his hands together like a fly.

  “If you help me. That was the bargain. Help me complete my portrait of Phyllida Ash, and she will leave everything she possesses to whomever I say.”

  “I looked all over, and I can’t find her. The fairies took my little brother, you know.”

  “That is none of my concern, nor should it be any of yours. When the Green Hill has a new master, you can order the fairies to return your brother.”

  “I don’t think it works like that.”

  “Just find her,” Gwidion said, clenching his teeth in exasperation. Children were easy to manipulate, but they were so dense at times it was hardly worth it.

  Rowan went back into the Rookery and began a systematic search. It wasn’t nearly as fun as hide-and-seek, and after poking his head into the first few dozen rooms he began to feel lonely. The house was so huge it was daunting. Who would want to live in a mansion? But to own a mansion! That was another thing entirely. His true nature warred with the acquisitiveness laid on him by Gwidion’s spell. Every silver wall sconce with stalactites of old wax-drippings, every suit of armor dented from a bout that happened centuries ago, every peeling bit of wallpaper in forgotten guest rooms called out to him like a siren, I am yours, take me! Even as he got sick to death of the endless rooms, he wanted to own them all. How lucky that Gwidion had happened to knock at their door. Otherwise he never would have known his true ambition.

  He was lingering in a sort of study, looking lovingly at a vase covered in improbable dragons and ghastly peonies, a vase he would never in a million years choose or suffer to stay unbroken in any home of his but which now, for some reason, joined the ranks of things that he must own, when he heard voices from the next room. He put an ear to the wall. The voices were still too muffled to tell what they were saying, though he was pretty sure he heard Phyllida. The sound seemed to be coming from around his feet, and after a little searching, he found a mousehole in the baseboards, the same mousehole, in fact, that had once held his life-egg. It communicated directly with the adjoining room. He lay down on his belly, and sure enough, the voices came through clearly. It was Phyllida and Lysander.