Guardian of the Green Hill (10 page)

“I didn't know you were so much fun, Meg,” Finn said after a while.

Meg didn't know she was either.

“We should look for Moll,” she said about an hour later. She'd spent some of the time dozing, some watching clouds, and some trying to watch Finn peripherally without moving her head.

“Mmm-hmm,” Finn said drowsily.

Very rarely, a cloud drifted by, and they talked about what they saw in it. Meg, whose imagination was usually so good, always envisioned sheep. Words grew fewer and farther between, and she said, “I'm only going to close my eyes for a minute.” Not because she was going to sleep, she assured herself, just because the sky was so brilliant.

“Just for a minute,” Finn echoed sleepily, as the wayward sheep clouds without their shepherds roamed free, and the benevolent sun, taking pity on them, sank lower and lower, grew dimmer and cooler, until when at last they opened their eyes again, he was gone entirely.

Meg sat up abruptly, confused. She saw Finn's dim form curled beside her and kicked him gently until he woke up. He rubbed a face that had been rubbed so many times with grubby hands it had turned a muddy brown, and sat up beside her.

“If we were home, we'd get in trouble for staying out after dark. Do you think we will here?”

“How late do you think it is?” she asked. Unlike the ancients, she didn't spend enough time in wild places at night to have any feel for reading time by the moon or the stars. It didn't feel too late … that was the best she could do. “We won't get in trouble, but they'll be awfully worried. Come on, we have to go. I never did look for Moll— Oh! What was that?”

It started as a moan so low it seemed more seismic than sound, like the calls of elephants or whales rumbling through the ground and up through their legs. Then it rose to an almost-human wail before climbing higher, and higher still, to a catamount scream, then an operatic soprano, and finally a keen so high it was sensible only as pain. Meg felt like she had outside Moll's house, swept away by someone else's grief, weak with pity and terror.

“It's Moll!” she said, thoughtlessly grabbing Finn's hand. “She's close. Come on, it sounds like she's right here.”

They barreled down the hill and crashed painfully through the blackberries, tripping and stumbling in the darkness.

“This way!” Meg said, pulling him toward the sound.

“No, this way!” Finn said, pulling her away from it.

The keen rose again, and though it was undoubtedly close, it seemed to come from all directions at once. Still clutching hands, they pulled each other this way and that. Meg wasn't at all sure she wanted to find whoever was making that sound, but it seemed the surest way of making it stop. In the calm between cries, the rest of the forest was silent. No owl or frog dared compete with that outpouring of grief.

They came to a dark, trickling stream, a small spring that flowed through the wood until it met the river Gladys.

“Meg, look,” Finn said, jerking her to an abrupt stop and nearly wrenching her shoulder out of joint. She followed his finger and saw a green-cloaked figure kneeling at the water's edge, leaning out across the flow. Her face was hidden by a deep hood, but long, wild strands of red hair fell forward into the moonlight. It might be Moll. It must be Moll. Who else could it be?

The woman didn't appear to see them, though they stood to her side and slightly behind her only a few yards away. She had something clutched in her hands. She thrust her arms into the stream and churned them among the rocks. She was washing something as she wailed, something white and red. Meg took a tentative step closer. Something about the red was awfully familiar … red by moonlight, thick and dark with a quicksilver sheen and a taste of copper in the air. Blood! She was washing a blood-soaked shirt.

Meg squeezed Finn's hand almost hard enough to pay him back for the wrenched shoulder. She knew that shirt. The fine linen, the silver threads, splashes of other colors that were not bloodred.… It was the shirt Phyllida had given her to paint in. The shirt she had given to Rowan that very afternoon.

“Moll,” Meg began, taking a small step forward.

The washerwoman raised her head with infinite slowness until the hood fell back just far enough to reveal eyes as bright as blood, eyes red from weeping, and redder. There were no other features, no mouth, no nose.… Surely they were just hidden by the hood? But the woman who stared at them, seeing and not seeing, was all eyes. What else did she require when all her life was about weeping?

Meg, wanting desperately to run, took another step toward her, but then she wasn't there.

“Was that her?” Finn asked breathlessly.

“It couldn't be.”

“Then what … who?”

Meg wished she knew more about the fairies. That poor woman must be one—how else could she vanish?—though what her unhappy purpose was Meg couldn't guess.

“Come on, we should go home,” Meg said. “Phyllida will be so worried, and we have to tell her about this. She'll know what it was.”

“I left something at the Green Hill,” Finn said. “We have to go back.”

Meg looked indecisive. This was Finn after all, and for all their sudden burst of camaraderie, she couldn't forget his fundamental nature. To meet him at the Green Hill was one thing, to lead him there quite another.

“It's important. I'll tell you about it on the way back. It's something from the fairies.”

She led him through the darkness back to the hill. It seemed steeper to their tired legs, and they trudged to the summit, grunting and panting like it was any ordinary hill. Finn fumbled through the tall, coarse grasses, on the edge of panic until he found the bag, exactly where he had left it. Meg resisted the urge to ask what was inside and started back down the hill to hurry him along. Then the ground heaved under her, and as she slid to her rump, she had the impression not of an earthquake (which is rare in those parts) but of sitting atop a giant tortoise that had suddenly decided to take a stroll (which is even rarer). Finn staggered on deeply bent sailor legs to collapse beside her as the ground stopped shifting.

“What on earth?” Finn began, but Meg clapped a hand over his mouth and pointed down the hill, even as she pulled him lower behind the veil of Queen Anne's lace.

“What? I don't see anything,” he said indistinctly from behind her fingers, and was piggy-pinched for his troubles.

“Be quiet!” Meg hissed fiercely. “Don't you see them?”

There was a rustle of leaves, a tinkling of silver bells, and the brambles fell aside reverently for a fine dapple-gray horse, which bore the most lovely woman in the world. When Meg had first seen her, she wore a green and silver gown speckled with jewels, but today the Seelie queen had set aside her royal raiments for hunting garb. She wore trousers and a trim green jerkin that might have been leather or might have been leathery leaves. Her hair, that ambiguously pale, shining color that shifted from platinum to gold, hung loose to her waist. A hooded hawk perched on her hand. The bells Meg heard were tied to his jesses.

Even though she knew it was only a glamour—that the Seelie queen could just as easily appear a wizened hag, or a great tusked sow, or a winged fish—Meg was so awed by her beauty that it was a full minute before she even noticed the queen's retinue. There was the prince, her friend of sorts, Gul Ghillie, in his grown-up guise, wearing a green and red doublet and puffed bombasted hose over parti-colored tights, looking rather like a jester or a slim Henry VIII. Behind him rode serried ranks of Seelie nobles, arrayed in fantastic variations of hunting garb through the ages, from foxhunting pinks to leopard pelts, and behind them capered creatures of all shapes, some dressed, some furred, some feathered, some wearing nothing but their own skins. One slate-gray sprite with stubby leathery wings played on a multiple pipe and somehow had breath enough to dance to his own lively tune. A creature that looked like a hedgehog without the spines rolled to and fro beneath prancing feet and stamping hooves. Will-o'-the-wisps hovered at the periphery, assisting the moon to light the panoply.

“What's there? What do you see?” Finn asked as low as he could.

“The court, the queen … Gul Ghillie … all of them. Hush!”

Finn clenched his jaw, mortified, angry at Meg, though it was no fault of hers. Denied again! The fairy court, the queen, within his sight, if only he could see!

They laughed and chatted and sang merry tunes as they rode directly into the hill and disappeared from sight, their voices echoing for a moment before they were absorbed into the ground. The train became intermittent after the great lords and ladies entered, as the lesser fairies, some slowed by their odd forms, followed at their own pace. They were almost gone, all but a small green piglet in a stocking cap and a manikin on a horse. It looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy, dressed beyond its years (though who knew how old a fairy might be) in midnight velvet and masses of ruffles at its wrists and throat. Its golden curls glinted in the glow of the last will-o'-the-wisp, and its face was pale as moonlight.

Why, Meg wondered, did some of the fairies choose to look like men, some like beasts, and some like nothing on this earth? Did they have their favorite forms, like the stubborn Rookery brownie, or did some change all day long? Did they reflect some aspect of their personalities? She would have to ask Phyllida when she began her formal education. That last fairy man, for example, looked remarkably like—

He turned his round little face to the sky, and Meg froze. It couldn't be.

“Oh! Do you see?”

But Finn could see nothing except the dark forest.

Her hand tightened on his again. “Finn, is it … is it?”

The fairy boy on the pony looked exactly like her own brother James.

He rode into the arch of the Green Hill, and the earth trembled, settled, and was still. The Green Hill had closed its earthen gates upon its treasures.

As Meg had learned once before, no amount of ranting and raving and pounding on the grass can induce the Green Hill to open against its will. The last retreat of the fairies hunkered and held its peace against Meg's commands and Finn's few baffled kicks against the turf. When Meg had expended enough of her energy to be rational again, Finn asked her what she had seen.

“James. Or … I thought it was James. It
looked
like James.” She used to live in a world where, if something looked like a thing, it
was
that thing. Not so anymore.

“Tell me exactly what you saw,” Finn said, and she did, even concealing her annoyance when he made her linger over her description of the queen, down to the moment she saw James's dear little face.

“But you can't know if it was him, can you? I don't know much about fairies”—though after weeks of quizzing Dickie on his research, Finn knew more than he thought—“but it might just be a fairy pretending to be James, right? I mean, if they knew you were watching, they might take his form just to mess with you, make you think they had stolen him. Isn't that something they'd do?”

She had to admit it was.

“That's it! I've had enough!” she yelled, not at Finn but at the Green Hill. “I won't do it! You all are crazy—you fairies, and Phyllida, and Bran, and everyone in this village. You are horrible, mean, cruel.… Why doesn't everyone move away from here and fence it off with barbwire and post guards?” She collapsed into tears. “You made me kill Bran. You took James, or even if you didn't, it's just as bad to make me think so. I won't be Guardian! I won't! Phyllida can find someone else … or no one else! I don't care. I'm writing home tomorrow. I want to go home! I want to see my mom and dad! I hate this place!” And to Finn's dismay, she fell on his shoulder, heaving and sobbing in a wet, sticky mess.

“Uh, there, there?”
There, there?
He cursed himself. What on earth did “there, there” mean? Where, where? What good was that supposed to do Meg?

“Come on, let's go home. Phyllida can sort this out.” He pushed her gently away, and as soon as the warmth of her cheek was off his shoulder, he almost wished it were back. As repulsive and confusing as it was in one way, it was also kind of nice. It made him feel important, older, different from how he usually was.

Who knows what Phyllida thought when they appeared at the door, so long after dark, coming from the woods, Meg distraught and tear-stained, Finn with obvious signs of having been struck about the head.

“Where's James?” Meg demanded before Phyllida could put any of her hypotheses into words.

“Upstairs in bed, I imagine. Meg, where were you? We were so worried.”

Phyllida found herself talking to Meg's rapidly retreating back as the girl dashed up the stairs. Meg scoured the bedrooms and found no sign of James.

“Where is he?” she asked, almost hysterical.

“I don't know, dear. Tell me, one of you, what this is all about? What has James to do with it?”

Finn had to be spokesman. “We were at the Green Hill,” he began.

“Meg took you to the Green Hill?” Lysander asked.

“No, I found it. We were looking for Moll.” He almost told them about the weeping woman, but first things first. “Then we went back to the hill, and Meg saw the fairies, and she said she saw James with them. He went under the Green Hill, and we couldn't get in.”

“Is this true?” Phyllida asked Meg as she ran by.

“Yes, yes, yes!” she said exasperatedly, making dashing forays into rooms in search of James and then coming back to the group.

Rowan, Silly, and Dickie were drifting downstairs, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, asking what all the hubbub was about.

“James is missing,” Meg said. “Have you seen him? Who saw him last?”

“Oh, don't worry, he's in the kitchen,” Silly said. “I heard him go down about an hour ago, and I went down too for another piece of apple tart. You missed a good dinner, Meg. Where were you?” But Meg was already sprinting to the kitchen, with Phyllida, Lysander, and Finn following close behind her, the others coming up behind on sleep-heavy legs.