Guardian of the Green Hill (7 page)

Then he watched.

It took no more than a minute for a bee to appear. Had it already been there, irritated by some inner vexation? Or was it a creation that had not existed before it was brought to life with pencil and paper and skill? In any event, it buzzed angrily and made a beeline for Finn. It circled him tauntingly and then settled at the back of his neck. Gwidion watched, trembling in anticipation, and Rowan, noticing his interest, followed his gaze in time to see his picture come true.

The bee landed, Finn swatted, and the inevitable conclusion was heralded with a howling wail of agony and anguish. (No one but the bee paid any mind to the bee's anguish, for of course a honeybee dies after stinging.)

Finn ran around in circles, screaming, and even Meg, who rushed to him in consternation and figured he must have cut a finger off at least, to judge by the noise, thought he was overdoing it a bit. He grabbed and clawed at the stinger, breaking the poison sac and making the pain much worse as a new surge of toxin made its way into his flesh. Finally Meg calmed him down enough to look at the wound, and she used a flat, dull paint knife to scrape away the remains of the stinger. He rubbed and scratched the wound with one hand and scrubbed at his face with the other.

Everyone but Meg erupted in laughter. Finn, eye bright with wiped-away tears, turned on them with fury.

Gwidion chuckled. “Oh ho, don't take it so hard, little man! What is a tiny prick compared with the tribulations life throws at us? Would your ancestor Llyr make such a bellow, or his father before him, Llewellwn?” Mentioning the names was risky, but there was little chance these children had heard tales of their family's black sheep. He clapped Rowan on the shoulder. “Why, I bet your brother, or cousin, or whatever it is here, wouldn't hardly flinch if a dozen bees stung him. I thought this family was made of sterner stuff.”

Finn found his voice at last. “I'm not a member of this stupid family! Rowan's not related to me. I'd jump off a cliff if he were! I hate all of you!”

Gwidion's face hardened and, quick as a shot, he crossed the distance to Finn and boxed his ears smartly.

“Impudent, lying imp, how dare you try to trick me? Get out! Not part of the family? Why waste my time?”

Meg tried to tell him that Finn had never said he was related to them, that Gwidion had never asked. She was stunned. She'd never seen an adult strike a child before, and though she'd read about children getting spanked or whipped or slapped, it was the stuff of novels, not real life.

Dickie gave a gasp, but Rowan, almost as shocked as Meg, shushed him with a meaningful look. I'll keep your secret, Dickie, the look said. You are more one of us than Finn is. It was one thing for the hated Finn to be struck, quite another for friendly, shy, innocuous little Dickie.

Finn's face was all shades of red—his cheeks flushed with anger and mortification, his eye scarlet with tears, his ears the brightest of all, crimson from the blow. He stood stock-still for a moment, his breath coming in pants. Then his jaw tightened and he looked at Gwidion with a fixed concentration that nearly made the man quail, for it was the same focused look he knew he had when he willed one of his paintings to come true.

“You'll pay for that,” Finn said, evenly and coldly. He looked like he was going to hit Gwidion back. He took a step forward, but as he did so, the great goat who had been kneeling nearby rose. His bleat was like a roar, and he lowered his massive curved horns at Finn.

Finn looked from goat to master and didn't like the odds. “You'll pay,” he whispered again, stern and resolute like a man. Then his strength collapsed and he ran away like a boy. Meg could tell he was crying as he ran.

She wanted to go after Finn. She wanted to run for Phyllida and tell her that they had made a mistake letting this violent man teach them. She wanted to cry herself. Then all at once, her resolution vanished. The children gathered around Gwidion with trusting little faces as his pencil flew. He drew, and the faces became even more trusting.

“What a foolish boy,” Gwidion said condescendingly. “He thinks I hit him—how silly! Don't you agree?”

“Oh yes,” they all said.

“I could never hit anyone, could I?”

“Oh no,” came the chorus.

“Finn is a liar, isn't he?”

That one was easy, even without Gwidion's picture of them all credulously clustered around him.

“Yes, Finn is a liar,” they echoed.

Gwidion nodded and tucked the pictures into his vest. His controlling spell over the children didn't have to be very powerful. You don't have to get someone to believe something forever—you only have to convince them of it once. After that, however strong the evidence to the contrary, most people will cling to a belief out of sheer stubbornness.

Meg was left with the idea that something unpleasant had happened, but she couldn't quite recall what. They resumed drawing, but the joy of her art lesson was gone. Gwidion was all charm and praise once again, but it was evident he was only interested in the boys' work. Any compliments to her drawing were barbed, and her confidence fell ever lower. When they took a break for lunch, she handed Rowan her smock.

“Here, take this. You're getting charcoal smudges all over your clothes.”

“Don't you need it?” he asked as he slipped the lightweight long-sleeved shirt over his arms.

“No … I don't think I feel like drawing anymore. I'm not very good at it.”

This was Rowan's cue to say she was good and to ask her to stay, but he was too full of Gwidion's praise and thoughts of his own talent to pay her any mind.

*   *   *

Meg finished her treacle tart and headed morosely upstairs to find Phyllida, a little guilty she hadn't gone sooner. When she was halfway up, a large cat scampered down to meet her, coiling its sinuous body around her ankles so she tripped and caught herself on all fours. She sat on the steps and had started to scold the cat when she realized it wasn't one of the Rookery felines. There was Old Tom, the fat kitchen tabby who kept the mice in constant terror, and several dairy cats, but she could tell at a glance this wasn't any of them. For one thing, it had two tails.

For another, it spoke to her.

“I do like a nap,” he said, licking his paw and looking away from her, as cats will when they are really interested in you. “But even I think four centuries is a bit much. Thank you for waking me from my long slumber, pink one.”

He stopped licking his paw just long enough to touch her knee with his nose.

“Who are you?”

He looked at her, surprised. “You did the great magic, did you not? Surely that was all for me, lovely me? I imagine you heard of my great beauty and unsurpassed softness and decided you must stop at nothing to do me this favor. And I, in return, allow you a glimpse of me.”

“I'm ever so sorry, and you are certainly beautiful, but I don't know who you are, and I didn't mean to wake you up.”

The cat squinted his moon eyes at her. “Truly? Then you are indeed a barbarian, as my people have long averred. I am Bake-Neko, and I come from the land where the sun is daily born. Nippon, it is called.”

“Do you mean Japan?”

“Perhaps you call it that, but I do not, or I would have said so.” He looked away again and licked a part of himself that made Meg look away too. His double tails twitched and coiled together like a caduceus. When he had forgiven her, he lifted his front paw and revealed what looked like a dead mouse.

Meg recoiled and said, “Ewwww.”

Bake-Neko took this for a sound of awe and praise, which only goes to show that good things can sometimes come of cultural misunderstandings.

“You won't throw it away, will you? Or bury it?”

“Um, no, of course not,” she said, though she intended to do just that.

“I will tell you something, since you freely confess that you are an ignorant savage. Do not dispose of this mouse. We cats, even demon cats of heavenly beauty such as myself, wrap all our presents in dead rodents. Or dead birds, depending on the season. You cannot get to the present inside unless you let the wrapping rot and decompose. Inside will be a treasure beyond value. If you attempt a dissection, it will vanish, and of course if you throw it on the dustheap, someone else—probably a burying beetle or stray cur—will make off with your gift.”

“I never knew,” Meg said wonderingly, recalling how many dead lizards and mice and pigeons her own cat back in Arcadia had left for her. Had they all contained presents?

“You humans are all ignorant barbarians, methinks,” the two-tailed cat said with a twitch of his whiskers. “I return to my home now. Stick that under your bed, and in a few days, you will have your gift.”

Before she could ask him any more questions, he bounded down two steps and had vanished by the third.

She picked up the dead beastie by its short tail (the Wyrm could have told her it was a Japanese red-backed vole, not a mouse, but as it was dead and only a wrapping anyway, it didn't much matter) and carried it up to her bedroom, where she put it in a shoebox and slid it under her bed before searching for Phyllida.

Yes, I Will

F
INN RAN SO HE COULDN'T CRY.
Feet pounding first on neatly mowed turf, then on the twisting brambles that love the threshold between sun and shade, then on the thick, damp litter of decomposition in the shadowed forest, he pushed himself farther and faster. How could he sob when he needed his breath for running? That must be sweat that stung his eyes so sharply and coursed down his cheeks, not tears. He ran until his side throbbed with a stabbing pain, until a root reached up to trip him and he sprawled headlong in the dirt. His fingers dug into the soft earth, and he pulled up big handfuls, squeezing with all his strength so he wouldn't cry again.

Again. That was the worst of it. Worse than the friendlessness, worse than being scorned, worse than being struck. He could tell himself that the Morgans and Dickie Rhys were beneath him, not his sort, that he didn't want them for friends. He could tell himself, and almost believe, that their scorn came from jealousy, that they teased and shunned him because they recognized and resented his natural superiority. And as for that so-called artist, Gwidion, well, Finn consoled himself that as soon as he got back, he'd call the constable and have him locked up in a dank dungeon (is there any other kind?) for all eternity. But that they should all have seen him weep like a baby, like a girl, like.… Fresh tears sprung to his eyes, salty with self-pity.

“It's not fair,” he said aloud to the dirt, knowing as he did so that he would never, never say that to any living being. Young as he was, he didn't believe in fair play and knew that the world wasn't a fair place. He justified many of the things he did and said by thinking that the world would do and say those same things to him if he didn't armor himself by striking first.

It wasn't fair that all of those beastly Morgans got to see fairies. He had as much right as any of them. So what if the same blood didn't flow through his veins? He was an American and (though he was also a shameless elitist) firmly believed that birth and blood were not nearly as important as determination and cunning and intelligence and an absolute refusal to stay in the place the fates tried to put you. In this last, he was a great deal like Meg, though she looked at it not so much in terms of her own situation but in circumstances around her.

Why should the stupid Morgans be entitled to something just because they happened to be related to Phyllida? Why should that beastly Rowan see all the fairies he wanted when Finn, finding fairies with his own ingenuity, was half blinded for his troubles? And Silly, the annoying little twit. Meg was okay, though. At least she didn't seem to hate him like the others. And from what he had been able to piece together about that Midsummer War business, she had acted with quite startling bravery. Still, she wasn't any better than he was, and she had both her eyes.

Thinking about his eye made his lip tremble in a new bout of self-pity. However horrible the damage, his tear ducts were still working, and it struck him as the cruelest irony that, though he was half blind and disfigured, that eye could still wound him with its weeping. He rubbed the tears away fiercely, forgetting that he still clutched dirt.

“Oh, great,” he said, and to his surprise found himself laughing. A fine mess I am, he thought. Eyeless, filthy, beaten up … and laughing like a lunatic. He didn't realize that the tired old saying about laughter being the best medicine is true. It won't mend broken bones (or replace an eye poked out with a hazel twig), but when you can laugh, even self-deprecating laughter, you know you're on the road to recovery.

Finn wiped his palms on his jeans and carefully brushed the dirt and grit from under his black silk eyepatch. You could tell he was already feeling better because he was plotting revenge. Laughter is a good tonic; laughter mixed with anger put to constructive use can cure all but the gravest wounds.

When he heard the sound of weeping from the undergrowth nearby, he immediately thought someone was mocking him and jumped up with his dirty fists clenched, ready for battle. But no, the sobbing evidently came from a very little person, and it sounded heartbreakingly sincere.

“Who's there?” Finn asked, mostly gently but with just a little edge, in case it turned out someone was making fun of him after all.

The crying paused, then resumed with fresh passion.

“What's wrong? Can I help?”

“I bro … bro … broke my wagon-hun-hun!” the little voice sobbed and stuttered, and melted away into new paroxysms of suffering.

Finn looked around and saw a child-sized wooden wagon, painted blue with white lettering on the side:
FENODEREE'S MOWING AND CARTING
. The left rear axle was broken.

“Don't cry, kid. I think I can fix that for you.” He turned the wagon on its side and fiddled with the parts. “See, I can use a branch or something, if I can find one the right size.”