Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (24 page)

John wasn’t sure he could even swing his sword at a brownie—they looked too human, despite everything. But he did start hacking at the trunk of the tree, intending to topple the whole business. The brownies gibbered and yelped. The tree quivered. The tree quivered more than it should have, maybe.

The tree, possibly tired of being hacked at and pelted with stones and filled with tiny hairy people, sprang to life. John leaped away, and Finchbriton flew free. The tree snapped a root from the earth like a tentacle and gave John an uppercut that he only partially managed to absorb with the chickadee shield. He landed hard on his back and looked up to see a spindly fist of branches swinging down at him. He rolled and turned, just as he had done on the set of
Galileo’s Revenge
, and carved a few twig-fingers from the fist. Then Finchbriton fluttered in and set the rest ablaze.

The tree pulled back, creaking and groaning, and shook itself like a dog, joggling the some twenty Hairy Men still camped in its branches. Then it plucked one of these Hairy Men free like an apple and chucked it at John.

“WAAAAH!” The brownie whanged off John’s shield and landed in a wad a few feet away, then crawled off. After a moment the tree found another brownie and did it again.

“WAAAAH!”
(whang)

“Stop that!” said John.

“WAAAAAAH!”
(whang)

The tree hadn’t forgotten that the other brownies in the far tree had been pelting it with stones, so it started flinging Hairy Men at them, too. Soon all the brownies were decamping quickly, some of them simply falling straight into the underbrush, and scattering in all directions.

The tree had a few more roots up now and was trying to get ambulatory. Finchbriton set another woody arm alight, which the tree tried to smother in the ferns.

At this John leaped forward and finished the job he’d started—he chopped the trunk from its root system, then went about pruning whatever moved until the tree finally collapsed in the ditch and was still.

John’s arms fell limply to his sides. He was dripping sweat.

“Well,” he breathed as Finchbriton perched close to his ear. “That was just the
worst
.”

Another tree across the gully, seeing what had happened to the first one, uprooted itself and ran off into the bushes.

“Yeh’ve saved us!” said Clara, and she ran to John, still holding the baby. “This is Mab. My worthless husband is Alfie Skinner.”

John pulled his hood back, shook hands with Alfie.

“We were takin’ furs in our donkey cart to Agora,” said Alfie. “They killed our donkey, chased us down here.”

Merle had emerged and stepped over to a brownie that was lying on its back among the ferns. He poked it with his boot.

“Wuuuuuh,” moaned the brownie, and it took a halfhearted swipe at Merle with its hand. “Wuh.”

“Yeh can keep the shield,” said Clara, bouncing the baby, which had now, just
now
, awakened and started to cry. “I know it isn’t much, but it was my da’s. I painted that chickadee on it when I was a girl.”

“Thank you. It’s a good shield.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Merle now as he joined them. “Brownies! They used to be the gentlest of the Fay. Clean-cut, hardworking. They lived in human homes! Did chores for the humans at night when no one was looking.”

Clara pulled baby Mab away from Merle a bit and made a face. “Mister, maybe yeh’re older than yeh look, but my
granddad
told me stories abou’ the Hairy Men.” She spat on the ground. “Only help they offer roun’ the house is givin’ folks fewer mouths to feed.”

Merle raised his hands. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything by it. Things are just … different here than I expected. I’m from very far away.”

Clara squinted. “Mister, there’s no such place.”

John thought it best to interject. “It’s probably unsafe to hang about, isn’t it? Perhaps we can walk together as far as Lough Leane?”

At the sound of his voice Clara beamed again, and John thought he saw Alfie roll his eyes. “We’ll tell everyone what yeh did for us here,” she said. “Oo, an’ I’ll be so proud to tell them yeh’re carryin’ my da’s shield. Folks might even start callin’ yeh the Chickadee!”

“It would be all right if they didn’t call me that.”

CHAPTER 26

Scott and Mick turned to see a dark-skinned, black-haired teen, holding a bow and arrow at the ready. A company of four other beautiful youths were behind him, each with a stylish and richly appointed outfit, each with his own favored weapon. They were the boy band of assassins.

Mick stepped forward. “Well met, young blood. Your reputation precedes you—I believe yeh are Dhanu, most favored changeling of our High Queen—”

“
And charged as captain of her Changeling Guard.
”

    (said Dhanu.)

“
Alas, I asked you two for your own names
,

Sirrah, Sir Runt. I’m freshly vers’d in mine.
”

Mick looked snookered. “Right. Sorry. I go by Mick, an’ … um, I am a full an’ trusty member of the Seelie Court, leprechaun in good standing, Crest of Ór. As such, I request safe conduct for myself an’ my compatriot here, Scott, a changeling from parts distant.”

At this Dhanu took renewed interest in Scott.

“An’ Scott an’ I both crave audience with our High Queen, as is the right of all with Fay blood, at least once in our happy lives. I’ll be obliged, of course, to furnish my True Name whensoever—”

Dhanu, his bow relaxed, raised a hand and stepped uncomfortably close to Scott.

“
You cannot be but human. What fairy

Nursery tended this, such fusty fruit?
”

“Come now,” said Mick, “He—”

“
Speaks, yes? If not to me, how to a queen?
”

“I was born to humans,” said Scott. “I was raised by humans. But my dad and I have fairy blood.”

Dhanu looked Scott up and down at this and curled his lip.

“
You have but drops of fairy blood in you
,

And smell as like the inside of a crow.
”

As insults go, this was so close to accurate that Scott thought it would be petty to tell him it had been a raven.

“I’m … pretty ordinary,” he agreed. He looked at these changelings, carrying themselves with red-carpet grace. He thought he was right in assuming they were all human, but a lifetime of fostering in the fairy court had given them a kind of ageless glamour. Still, they were human, and he was not—not entirely. “You need us in a way, don’t you,” he added, realizing something. “Us ordinary ones. Without us, someone else would have to be ordinary.”

Dhanu glowered at him a moment. Then his eyes changed. They didn’t soften, exactly, but they looked like a pair of eyes Scott might be able to work with. Like he and one of the popular kids had been grouped together on a science fair project and it would all be over soon. Dhanu turned without a word and motioned for Mick and Scott to follow.

“He’s kind of hard to talk to,” whispered Scott.

“Man, it’s this courtly speech,” said Mick. “I don’t think I can pull it off anymore. It’s been too long, an’ I was never very good at it anyway.” He pointed at Scott. “Don’t yeh even try it. Jes’ be polite, an’ don’t put on any airs.”

They walked along the castle wall. Scott liked the Tower of London. This was the castle a child would design: a white stone box, buttoned with arched windows, topped by a toothy parapet, braced at each corner by a tall tower. It lacked only a drawbridge and a moat. They passed an ogre diligently whitewashing one side with brush and bucket.

Then they turned a final corner, and Scott saw where the Fay had concentrated their improvements. The front facade of the Tower was whitewashed like the rest, but the gaps between every stone sprouted mushrooms, wild rose, clover and foxglove and bluebells and ivy. And here and there the fungi and flowers themselves had been trained to form signs and symbols: the now-familiar stars and moons and octagons that Scott could not help but see rendered in marshmallow and floating in milk. Cracks in the masonry had begun to form—nature was having its way. Eventually the elves would tear down their own castle for beauty.

There was still no drawbridge, no moat, but the main castle doors here were twenty feet off the ground. And emblazoned on these doors was another symbol, of two overlapping circles or spheres, split in two by a line.

“I’ve been seeing that a lot lately,” said Scott.

“
It came to fair Titania in dreams
,” answered Dhanu.

Towering giants stood to either side of these doors, stripped tree trunks in the grips of their long bare limbs, their belts hung with the tackle of their villainous, storybook lives—skulls, knives, the spine and rib cage of something or other, a lot of iron horseshoes that had been twisted together on chains. Scott thought the Fay weren’t supposed to like iron; but then he thought it might be like a tongue piercing—something unpleasant the big kids did to show what they were capable of.

He caught his breath. He supposed the only way up to that door was to have one of these bald-headed, snaggletoothed giants lift you up to it, and he suddenly felt a depth of sympathy for Fi that never would have occurred to him otherwise. But instead Dhanu whistled, and stout vines grew down from the castle door, weaving and intertwining so that when they’d reached the ground they’d formed a grand staircase. Roses bloomed as they climbed.

“’S that you, Cuhullin?” Mick asked the giant on the left when they were at the level of his waist. “How’s the wife?”

The giant didn’t answer.

“Ah, sometimes I think the Old Mother should have given giants a set o’ ears on their ankles,” Mick said. “I asked—”

“Not supposed to speak to you, Finchfather,” said Cuhullin.

Mick frowned. “Not supposed to speak on the job, or not supposed to speak to me person’ly?”

Still the giant didn’t answer.

The doors were open. Dhanu said,

“
So now the stage is set, and it is seen

How churl and chaff assay to sway a queen.
”

CHAPTER 27

Near the lake John and Merle parted company with Clara and Alfie and Mab.

“Fare thee well, Chickadee,” said Clara with a girlish smile.

John couldn’t help twitching a little. “We’re definitely calling me that, then?” he asked.

“Chickadee is another name for Titmouse,” said Merle. “We could call you Titmouse.”

“Chickadee’s fine,” said John.

They watched the little family disappear, then proceeded down to the water’s edge. When Merle saw movement, they paused and concealed themselves behind a copse of trees. Finchbriton hopped nervously back and forth on John’s shoulder.

Mermaids.

“Ah,” whispered Merle. “If only I were fifty years younger.”

“Seriously?” murmured John. He squinted to see better, but he didn’t think it helped.

Lough Leane was vast and electric blue, reflecting the dwindling light of the sky above. Down past the rushes the lake met the land, and there were a handful of low, wide stones lapped smooth by water. Lounging on these stones were the mermaids.

John supposed they might be pretty. But like so many things that are meant to be seen in the water, they looked stringy and colorless when out of it. Like seaweed drying on a beach. Their top halves were pasty and bare apart from whatever their lanky hair covered. Their bottom halves looked like low tide. There was a distinct pet-store sort of smell wafting up from the lake.

One thing that really surprised him: nearly all of them were wearing hats. Red silk pointed caps. Those that weren’t had red silk capes. A few had both.