Why I Let My Hair Grow Out (20 page)

“In battle? No, I've not yet had the privilege of clashing swords with the warrior queen.” His breath was warm on my neck. “Though that may change before the day is out.”

Warrior-dudes! Fighting and tilling, it was all they ever thought about. “No, Fergus,” I said. “I meant
socially
.”

He shrugged, as if I'd named a weapon he'd never heard of. “No, not that way either.”

“She's awfully pretty,” I said. “Don't you think?”

Fergus laughed. “Morganne, there is no other woman in the world, pretty or otherwise. Only you.”

What a cutie he was. But as entertaining as I found Fergus's devotion, I knew it wasn't under his control, which sort of took the fun out of it. I also knew that if I was lucky, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for who knows how long, I'd be disappearing again, and that was something
I
couldn't control.

During all my months with Raph it was understood—at the time of his choosing, I'd be the one to get dumped. The thought that I could have broken up with
him
was so outside Raph's reality that somehow it never occurred to me either.

With Fergus, I would be the one to leave. We both knew it. I cared about him and I honestly didn't want him to get hurt. But cookies crumble, sometimes. What could I say?

Score points for Raph, I guess. Maybe he'd been trying to be nice, in his own self-involved way.

I watched Queen Maeve sashay into the castle. No matter what happened between us, Fergus would, in time, get over it. Of that I was sure. The evidence was sashaying before my eyes, and it had some serious queenly junk in the trunk.

“That's very sweet, Fergus,” I said gently. “But it's possible that you might feel otherwise, after the full moon comes.”

“It is possible,” he said, holding me closer, “that I might not.”

“‘the war must be won without killing?' that's the most fekked-up thing I've ever heard!” Maeve had demanded mead be served all around, and she and her inner circle of bodyguards were swilling away inside the royal parley chamber. I hoped this didn't count as a feast. If it did, King Conor would be in a mead stupor till morning, and there goes the wedding night. So far he seemed able to resist, though, and Dana was keeping a watchful eye on him.

“There are only two ways to decide a battle,” said Queen Maeve, after releasing a hearty belch. “All-out war or single combat.”

“On this we agree,” said Cúchulainn. “Let's choose our champions and meet on the battlefield. I nominate—me!”

“And I accept your challenge!” hollered Maeve, her spit flying into his face.

“Guys,” I interrupted. “Calm down. Single combat is, like, violent. Someone could get hurt.”

Queen Maeve, Cúchulainn, King Conor, Dana and their respective warrior-dude flunkies all looked at me like,
Duh, isn't that the point?
To think that a society could be this blood-thirsty, and video games had not even been invented yet.

“Now I realize mass slaughter is all in a day's work for you,” I went on, “but we have specific instructions here. No killing.”

“And why? So
your people
will be rid of the terrible enchantments! What's in it for
me
?” Maeve slammed her empty mead cup down on the table and someone promptly refilled it. She narrowed her eyes. “Why should I go along with this ridiculousness?”

“A, nobody gets killed,” I offered. Queen Maeve laughed, and all her warriors laughed along with her in a rather asskissy way, if I may say so.

“B, do
you
want to piss off the Lordly Ones?” I could see I needed to get tough with this crowd, so I copied Maeve's narrow-eyed expression, which was very intimidating and Clint Eastwood-like. “How would you like it if the faery folk decided to pick on
your
neighborhood next?”

Maeve narrowed her eyes even further, into mean-queen slits. “Is that a threat? Is that what
your people
plan?”

“I'm just saying,” I said, bluffing my ass off. “Play ball with me or suffer the consequences.”

Play ball with me.
Is that what I'd just said? My voice started to echo weirdly in my skull. By the time my head cleared I realized King Conor was talking to me. “Tell us, wise Morganne! Among your people, when two tribes are at war, how is the victor decided, unless it be by the death of one or the other?”

“We have many death-free ways to decide things.” Even I could hear how wimpy that sounded, so I started shouting in an attempt to appear more goddess-leader-of-tomorrow-like. “Eeny meeny miney mo, for example!” I yelled. “We flip coins! We make cootie catchers!”

“Cootie catchers!” someone murmured, impressed.

“When my dad needs help deciding something, he calls his lawyer or his accountant,” I bellowed. “When my mom needs help, she asks her therapist!” My listeners were hanging on my every word. “And both of them frequently consult
Consumer Reports
.”

“But who would you yourself consult?” demanded Cúchulainn.

“The wisest ones of all.” I thought of my stacks of college brochures, and my voice grew ominous-sounding. “They are called Guidance Counselors.”

The king looked glum. “Would that we had so many helpful wizards among us! But I fear we are beyond the sage advice of your lawyers and therapists and guidance counselors. The people demand all-out war between two rival kingdoms, and the people's will must be satisfied.”

Rival kingdoms? I thought hard.
Rival kingdoms . . .

East Norwich High School's biggest rival was Old Southport. This had been going on for years. Kids at school whose parents had graduated from East Norwich were still carrying grudges from lost football games of thirty years prior. Parking lot shouting matches between East Norwich dads and Old Southport dads were not unheard of.

Play ball with me.
“When my people want to prevail over our rivals,” I said, my head spinning with the beauty and rightness of what I was about to say, “we play football. That is what we do. And that is what you must do as well.”

“Very well,” the king said. “Teach us how.”

Great. I knew jack shit about football, but then again King Conor and Queen Maeve and all their minions had never heard of the NFL, so who cared? I told them all I could remember, which was basically two teams running back and forth, trying to get a ball through goalposts. There was kicking and running and throwing involved. The more I described, the bigger their eyes grew, and soon they were muttering and pounding the butt ends of their spears on the ground.

“Hurling!” someone cried finally. “She wants the battle decided by a hurling match!”

“Woot! Woot!” Everyone, including Cúchulainn, seemed jazzed by this idea.

“Gross!” I cried. A farting contest was one thing, but hurling? That was beyond frat boy.

“Hurling! Hurling!” The chant went up and the spears pounded, until I thought I might throw up myself.

ninteen

do not get sick, here. as it turns Out, hurling back then is not what hurling is now.

It's an actual sport. There are two teams and a field with goalposts on either end. Each player carries a stick called a hurley, and there's a little ball made of leather that you have to whack through the goalposts.

Fergus and Cúchulainn and Queen Maeve and everyone else in the parley chamber were shouting over each other trying to explain all this to me, when an unexpected visitor appeared in our midst.

When I say appeared, I mean
appeared
, like shifting shadows that suddenly form into a shape you glimpse out of the corner of your eye. A breath later he shimmered fully into being. Fergus and I noticed him first, but that was probably because we'd met him before.

It was the boy, the faery boy we'd seen by the swamp. The one who had taken Erin.

For a moment I was afraid Fergus would throttle him, but before anyone could move the boy smiled and spoke.

“Hello, Morgan. Nice of you to come back.”

Swift as pulling out a plug, the wild sports-bar din in the parley chamber turned to silence.

“Why do you call me Morgan?” I asked cautiously.

“Dumb question!” The boy guffawed. “It's your name, isn't it?”

In another time-space continuum it
was
my name, or would be—but that was too much to try to explain right now, especially since I was the only person in the room who'd ever seen an episode of
Star Trek
. “Yes,” I said. “I suppose it is.”

“Just because
I
am a dreadful speller,
she
thinks she is two different people!” he said, to the open-mouthed crowd. “ 'Tis a silly girl who doesn't know who she is!” The boy laughed. “But you've always been a silly girl.”

“Do we know each other?” I asked. I sensed I was in delicate territory here. “If we do, I'm sorry, I don't remember. Please tell me.”

He made the saddest face, as if he might cry. “I know you don't remember, and it's awful!” he whined. “To not even be remembered by my own sister!”

Everyone gasped. I tried to play it cool. “I don't remember very much about the Land of Faery,” I said gently, the way people talk when they're coaxing suicidal strangers off the edges of bridges. “It's nothing personal. Perhaps I'm under some sort of spell.”

“Or perhaps you just don't love me anymore!” He seemed genuinely upset. “But very well, I will play your forgetting game. When you were a child there were days we danced among the foxgloves and painted the flowers all their bright colors. We climbed the lilies of the valley like ladders and sipped the nectar of hollyhocks until we were giddy with the sweetness.” He bit his lip. “And you don't remember me at all, do you?”

The look on my face must have given me away.

“I'm Finnbar,” he pleaded. “I'm your brother. Remember? We swore it that day on the swings, the ones that squeaked and groaned?”

We had a swing set in the yard when I was little
, I remembered.
At our old house, the one we lived in before Tammy was born, the one that had rooms and doors . . .

All at once he was happy again. “No matter.” He giggled. “Because now we will get to play together. I do love to play at hurleys! Morgan, you will be captain of your team.”

“Unfair!” cried Queen Maeve, turning to King Conor. “You will have
her
—one of the Faery Folk—on your team. She will use her magic to cheat.” She glared at me.

“But I don't—”

“It's an unfair advantage,” Maeve declared.

“But I don't even—”

“True,” mused Finnbar, ignoring my protest. “But never fear, Queen Maeve. I will play on
your
team. That will even things up.”

“But I don't even know how to play hurling,” I cried.

“Don't worry, dear sister. It's very simple,” Finnbar said, with a mischievous smile. “It's a lot like field hockey.”

“So you can throw the ball but not kick it?” the rules of hurling had me totally confused, and I only had an hour to learn them.

“No!” cried Fergus and Cúchulainn simultaneously. “You can catch it but not throw it—”

“You can hit it with the hurley stick—”

“You can carry it on the hurley—”

“You can bounce it on the hurley—”

“You can kick it when it's on the ground, and you can catch it when it's in the air—”

“—but you must
never
pick it up when it's on the ground!”

“That's a foul.”

“Very foul.”

The two of them looked at me as if this were all self-evident. Erin had just finished painting blue war paint on their faces, and now she was doing mine. It tickled and I wanted to rub my nose.

“Hold still, Captain!” she said, brushing a blue curlicue around my eye. “Else how will we tell the teams apart?”

I wiggled my nose to stop the itch but it didn't help. Of all the strange adventures Long-ago had offered me so far, somehow, being plunged into the universal gym-class nightmare was the worst.
It's gym class. You're captain of your team. The game begins, but you can't remember the rules. Everyone is looking at you, waiting for you to do something. . . .

“And what is the point of the game, exactly?”

“It's easy, Morganne! You simply have to get the sliothar through the goal.” Fergus was looking totally buff and
Braveheart
-like, painted and shirtless and holding his hurley stick like Fred Flintstone's club. If I wasn't so freaked out by having to learn this game I would have been very distracted.

“Sorry,” I said, turning my head so Erin could do the other side. “But what's the sliothar again?”

Fergus sighed. “The ball, Morganne. Keep your eye on the sliothar and everything will be all right.”

 
 
cúchulainn, it turned Out, Was a fanatical hurley player.

“Have you never heard that story?” he asked, incredulous. “That's how I got the name Cúchulainn. It was years ago, when I was just a boy—”

“Not now, okay?” We were walking to the field and I was not in a good mood. It would be impossible to play hurling in a long flowy princess dress, but gym suits had yet to be invented, so I was wearing some leather pants of Fergus's that were too big for me, belted around my waist with a rope, and a rough cotton shirt.