Guardian of the Green Hill (28 page)

“I've done all I mean to do. The butter shan't churn itself.” And the brownie disappeared.

With a heavy heart, Finn crept back to Phyllida's room … where he was promptly knocked down by a very groggy and unsteady Bran.

“Whu … oh, it's you. Sorry, boy. Up with you!” He took Finn by the forearm and hauled him up, then sat down heavily himself.

Finn tried his question on Bran. “What do we do?”

“I stay here and guard my daughter,” he said, “and help her mourn my son-in-law.”

“Shouldn't we go after them? Can't we help Meg?”

“I may have the strength to guard a doorway, but I'll be no good running through the woods. Meg's on her own. She's a smart girl, and favored by the fairies. She'll make it to the hill.”

“And then what? She won't be able to stop him just because she's officially Phyllida's heir.”

“Then she'll make her way back here. She knows the woods, she knows the fairies. He doesn't. The fairies are on her side, as much as they're on anyone's side.”

Finn couldn't believe that no one was going to help Meg. Silly was beside herself, crying over Lysander's body more loudly than the strangely calm Phyllida, while the doctor tried ineffectually to revive him. Dickie was no use, of course. Much as he hated to, Finn turned to Rowan.

“What do we do?”

“Well, first we call in the carpenter to check the supports, then the walls must be patched and repapered. And the funeral arrangements. The whole town must be invited, and—”

Finn did what he had always wanted to—he hit Rowan (not too hard) in the jaw. “What's wrong with you? You're acting like some stupid lord when Lysander has been murdered and your own sister is about to be murdered too! You're acting like you're—”

Under a spell. Of course. He pulled the roll of sketches from under his shirt and found the one depicting Rowan. “There. Take that!” he said, and tore it to bits, breaking the spell.

Rowan looked like he was in physical pain. As the shreds of paper floated to the floor, he leaned forward, clutching himself as if he had a bellyache and moaning. He fell to his knees and pounded the floor.

Finn grabbed him by the shoulders. “Snap out of it! We have to help her. What can we do?”

But Rowan didn't know. He was disoriented and thoroughly demoralized, and some small part of him, a part that existed before the spell, perhaps, was still trying to calculate costs and timetables of repairs and funeral arrangements. He shook his head and turned away, back to the pitiful carnage in the room.

Finn paced angrily up and down the hall. He was on his own, and he had no idea what to do. What good am I? he thought. She's out there all alone with a lunatic and a goat after her, and I'm just scratching my head. Except she wasn't alone. The woods were full of fairies, and as Bran said, they had to be on her side. But did they know to help her? Did they know what had happened in the Rookery?

There was one thing he could do, though it nauseated him to even think about it, and he didn't know if it would help. He went to his room and groped under his mattress until he found a small glass jar. He held it tightly in his hand, almost as if he wished it would shatter and be useless. Then he walked to the oval mirror over his dresser and peered at his face. He thought it was a handsome face, even with the eyepatch. The pain of his half blinding was still fresh, and though the injury was mostly healed, his eye, or the place it had been, still ached at times, as if the absent eye were straining to see.

“Good-bye,” he said to his reflection, and went downstairs to the part of the garden nearest the woods.

He took one last look around, at the vibrancy of the sky, bright blue to the east, clouds tinged with rose where the sun settled in the west. The foxgloves depended pinkly from their stalks, petal tongues sticking out at him from gaping petal mouths. He'd never thought much about pink before, dismissing it as a girl's color. Now that he might never see it again, he clutched it to him like a precious thing. Then he looked to the dark woods. Somewhere out there, the girl who had been a friend to him was in terrible danger. With a sigh, he unscrewed the lid and scooped out a dab of the seeing ointment Dickie had made for him when he was illicitly spying on the fairies. He'd stuck it away as a keepsake with no intent to use it—having lost one eye to the fairies' wrath, why would he risk the other? Now he resigned himself to the fact that he would be completely blinded for his crimes. His hand shook, but not enough to keep him from dabbing the ointment in his left eye.

He knew there were fairies everywhere in the region. When he'd used the ointment before, he had only to stroll in the woods to find all sorts of fairies going about their daily business, secure in the knowledge that they were invisible. He had to get their attention, and he could only do that if he could see them.

At first his eye blurred, and for a sickening instant, he was sure the ointment was cursed and he'd lose his sight immediately without even being able to do something for Meg. Then his vision cleared and he saw the world as it always was … except that where there'd been an inconspicuous dun-colored moth, he now saw a diminutive fairy painstakingly gathering buckets of pollen. She had a paintbrush and dabbed some of the flowers with the pollen she'd collected. (And you probably thought bugs took care of pollination.)

“Hey, you!” he said, squatting down to get to her level. She ignored him.

“Hey, I'm talking to you.” He gave her a very gentle jab with his finger, though he miscalculated and sent her tumbling toes over wings into the mulch.

“You can see me?” the tiny fairy squeaked, fluttering herself upright on dusty brown wings.

“Yes … no, don't go!” For the pixie had tried to flit away into the foxgloves. Finn caught her in his cupped hands and felt her batting her wings inside, a ticklish sensation, and then one not so pleasant when she bit him on the palm. “Don't do that. I'm not going to hurt you. I need your help.” He opened his hands a bit for a peek, and she tried to squeeze through. “Can't you change into something a little bigger? I don't want to hurt you.” She wanted to hurt him, though, and bit him again, this time holding on.

“I'm going to let you go, I promise,” he said, wincing and focusing all his concentration on not squishing his hands shut. “Just listen to me first. Meg Morgan, the girl who's going to be the next Guardian, is in danger. There's a man chasing her with a knife, and a goat, and I think they want to kill her. The man wants to be Guardian instead of her. You have to help her.” He considered the wee fairy's size. “Or you have to find someone to help her.” He thought for a moment. That nasty little boy who put his right eye out—Meg had told him Gul Ghillie was really a prince or something. Surely he could help Meg. “You have to find Gul Ghillie, or whatever he calls himself today. Or Fenoderee. Someone who can help Meg. Please.” He opened his cupped hands, and she flitted just out of his reach, thumbed her tiny retroussé nose at him, and fled into the woods.

“Wait, will you do it? Are you gonna find him?” But she was gone, and he had no idea if she would deliver the message. Judging from her tiny fury and the swelling bites on his palm, he didn't think she would.

He crossed into the woods and looked for some other source of help, but the only other unnatural creature he saw was the lumbering Gooseberry Wife heading into the deep forest to spin her cocoon. He hailed her, but she just gnashed her teeth at him and heaved herself onward.

There was a slithering sound like a snake on dry leaves, and Gul Ghillie came into view rolling his hoop with that sharpened hazel stick whose point was the last thing Finn's right eye ever saw.

Finn backed away and held his hands up to his one remaining eye. “Please, I know what you have to do, but don't do it yet. Let me tell you something.”

Gul Ghillie stopped, swinging the hoop hypnotically on his stick. “Well?” he said when Finn was silent.

“It's just … I wouldn't have done it if not for … I didn't mean any harm this time, honestly.”

“Folk who say ‘honestly' are generally being dishonest,” Gul said, and twirled the hoop faster. “Out with it. I haven't got all day. What's important enough to lose your other eye over? Dying for another glimpse of the queen? Got a bet on with your mates?”

“No, nothing like that,” Finn said, peeping out from behind his hands. “It's Meg. She's in trouble.”

Gul cocked his head to the side like an intelligent robin. “Thought you hated all them Morgans. Heard you cursing the lot of 'em a time or two.”

“Not Meg. Not the others either, really, I guess, but Meg … she's okay.”

“‘Okay' won't save yer eye, boy.”

“She's nice. She's nice to me.”

“She's nice to everyone,” Gul said.

What Finn wanted to say, if he looked into the dark chambers of his heart, was that Meg made him a better person. When he was with Meg, he didn't hate the world half so much, didn't think it was against him … and if it was, he knew Meg would stand between him and the world. He wanted to tell Gul that Meg was brave, that he needed her because he wasn't brave, except just a little bit, when she was there. He wanted to tell Gul about Angharad's prophesy, but he didn't dare. He even, had he but known it, wanted to tell Gul how Meg looked in the sweet-pea dress at the festival in the two minutes before it was ruined.

But all he said, sulkily and defiantly, was, “Just help her, would you? Take my eye. I knew what would happen. I just needed you to know that someone's trying to kill Meg so you can save her.”

“And what makes you think we would save her?”

“She's the next Guardian. She's going to devote her life to keeping you safe.”

The air around Gul Ghillie shimmered, and he was no longer a boy but a manticore, a portmanteau beast with the body of a red lion, a scorpion's tail, and the head of a man with a curled Assyrian beard and three rows of teeth. “What makes you think the fairies need a little girl to keep them safe?” he roared, then became Gul Ghillie again.

“Child,” he said, and it galled him, coming from a boy his own age. “Your Meg, if I may call her that, can take care of herself. We knew of her danger. We have known it since Gwidion Thomas first set foot on this isle. We have known it since the first vine sprouted and climbed toward the sun.”

“And you're not going to do anything?”

“What we will do has already been done,” he replied, which made no sense to Finn and dashed the last of his hopes. It had all been in vain, then. He would be blind for the rest of his life, disfigured and alone, and Meg would die at the hands of a madman. There was one small consolation, though, Finn thought grimly: when Gwidion had finished with Meg, he'd return and put Finn out of his misery. That was something.

“Okay, then,” Finn said with false bravado. “Get it over with.”

Gul tossed the hoop high into the air. Finn squeezed his eye tightly shut. He couldn't help it, though he knew it wouldn't do any good.

The terrible piercing pain never came. Just to be sure, he kept his eye closed for about five minutes. That horrid Gul Ghillie was probably just waiting for him to open his eye. This is getting ridiculous, he thought at last, and opened it just a hair, then all the way.

Gul Ghillie was gone, and the sky was brilliant with the full pink of sunset.

Thrice in Three Days

Y
OU WOULD THINK THAT IN ANY RACE
a healthy girl fleeing for her life with a sizeable head start would have no trouble eluding an almost middle-aged gaunt fellow whose only exercise is lifting his brush. But young legs are made for sprints, not marathons, and though Meg was fast enough, she was used to the mad dashes and frequent stops of tag and hide-and-seek and soccer. Then too, she hadn't slept the night before, and though her mind believed she had been under the Green Hill for only an hour or two, her sensible body knew she'd missed a whole night of sleep. Between that and her terror, she was nearly done in. She easily outpaced him at first, but she couldn't shake him. He kept after her with the same tireless, ground-eating half trot wolves use to cover vast miles of tundra.

It wasn't just a matter of beating him to the Green Hill. Now that Meg had a moment to think clearly, she realized that she had to keep Gwidion occupied until dawn. She couldn't lose him—if she did, he might make his way back to the Rookery and harm her family. But she had to stay out of his reach until daybreak. Only when she had officially declared herself the next Guardian would Phyllida truly be safe. Then Meg would be Gwidion's sole target.

It was just nightfall. That meant she had to keep Gwidion in the woods until about five o'clock in the morning. Already she was panting, and a painful stitch throbbed under her right ribs. She risked a glance behind her. He was just within sight. At least his goat wasn't with him. Meg stumbled to a stop for a blessed few seconds' rest against an oak tree.

She began to trot again, then suddenly there wasn't ground beneath her feet, and muddy water was creeping up her nose. Until she actually stepped in it, she'd had no idea that it was a pond. Flat coins of green weed floated at the surface, creating a solid-looking carpet that yielded and sucked her under as soon as her foot hit it. Slimy tendrils wrapped caressingly around her legs, and she sputtered to the surface, snorting out the foul water.

As she kicked toward the far bank, slick fingers grabbed her ankle. She thrashed hard with her other foot and struck something fleshy and yielding. She turned, floating on her back and still kicking, and saw an almost-human face with a toothy mouth a foot across, framed by black algae-filled hair.

Jenny Greenteeth would eat anything that came near her stagnant pool, but her favorite food was flesh of the very young. Even Meg was a bit too old and tough for her gourmet tastes, but good meals were few and far between. She pulled the tempting morsel closer, hand over hand, the girl's panic adding relish to Jenny Greenteeth's hunger. She faced her perpetual dilemma—little bites first, to make them scream, or one devouring coup de grâce to make the waters churn red?