The Wee Free Men
Page 26

Even in a dream, even at a posh ball, the Nac Mac Feegle knew how to behave. You charged in madly, and you screamed…politely.
“Lovely weather for the time o’ year, is it not, ye wee scunner!”
“Hey, jimmy, ha’ ye no got a pommes frites for an ol’ pal?”
“The band is playin’ divinely, I dinna think!”
“Make my caviar deep fried, wilya?”
There was something wrong with the crowd. No one was panicking or trying to run away, which was certainly the right response to an invasion of Feegles.
Tiffany set off again through the crowd. The masked people at the party paid her no attention either. And that’s because they’re background people, she thought, just like the background trees. She walked along the room to a pair of double doors and pulled them open.
There was nothing but blackness beyond it.
So…the only way out was to find the drome. She hadn’t really expected anything else. It could be anywhere. It could be behind a mask, it could be a table. It could be anything.
Tiffany stared at the crowd. And it was then she saw Roland.
He was sitting at a table by himself. It was spread with food, and he had a spoon in his hand.
She ran over and knocked it onto the floor. “Haven’t you got any sense at all?” she said, pulling him upright. “Do you want to stay here forever?”
And then she felt the movement behind her. Later on, she was sure she hadn’t heard anything. She’d just known. It was a dream, after all.
She glanced around, and there was the drome. It was almost hidden behind a pillar.
Roland just stared at her.
“Are you all right?” said Tiffany desperately, trying to shake him. “Have you eaten anything?”
“Fwa fwa faff,” murmured the boy.
Tiffany turned back to the drome. It was moving toward her, but very slowly, trying to stay in the shadows. It looked like a little snowman made of dirty snow.
The music was getting louder. The candles were getting brighter. Out on the huge dance floor the animal-headed couples whirled faster and faster. And the floor shook. The dream was in trouble.
The Nac Mac Feegles were running to her from every part of the floor, trying to be heard above the din.
The drome was lurching toward her, pudgy white fingers grasping the air.
“First Sight,” breathed Tiffany.
She cut Roland’s head off.
The snow had melted all across the clearing, and the trees looked real and properly treelike.
In front of Tiffany the drome fell backward. She was holding the old frying pan in her hand, but it had cut beautifully. Odd things, dreams.
She turned and faced Roland, who was staring at her with a face so pale, he might as well have been a drome.
“It was frightened,” she said. “It wanted me to attack you instead. It tried to look like you and made you look like a drome. But it didn’t know how to speak. You do.”
“You might have killed me!” he said hoarsely.
“No,” said Tiffany. “I just explained. Please don’t run away. Have you seen a baby boy here?”
Roland’s face wrinkled. “What?” he said.
“The Queen took him,” said Tiffany. “I’m going to fetch him home. I’ll take you too, if you like.”
“You’ll never get away,” whispered Roland.
“I got in, didn’t I?”
“Getting in is easy. No one gets out!”
“I mean to find a way,” said Tiffany, trying to sound a lot more confident than she felt.
“She won’t let you!” Roland started to back away again.
“Please don’t be so…so stupid,” said Tiffany. “I’m going to find the Queen and get my brother back, whatever you say. Understand? I’ve got this far. And I’ve got help, you know.”
“Where?” said Roland.
Tiffany looked around. There was no sign of the Nac Mac Feegle.
“They always turn up,” she said. “Just when I need them.”
It struck her that there was suddenly something very…empty about the forest. It seemed colder, too.
“They’ll be here any minute,” she added, hopefully.
“They got trapped in the dream,” said Roland flatly.
“They can’t have. I killed the drome!”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said the boy. “You don’t know what it’s like here. There’s dreams inside dreams. There’s…other things that live inside dreams, horrible things. You never know if you’ve really woken up. And the Queen controls them all. They’re fairy people, anyway. You can’t trust them. You can’t trust anyone. I don’t trust you. You’re probably just another dream.”
He turned his back and walked away, following the line of hoofprints.
Tiffany hesitated. The only other real person was going away, leaving her here with nothing but the trees and the shadows.
And, of course, anything horrible that was running toward her through them.
“Er…” she said. “Hello? Rob Anybody? William? Daft Wullie?”
There was no reply. There wasn’t even an echo. She was alone, except for her heartbeats.
Well, of course she’d fought things and won, hadn’t she? But the Nac Mac Feegle had been there and, somehow, that’d made it easy. They never gave up, they’d attack absolutely anything, and they didn’t know the meaning of the word fear.
Tiffany, who had read her way through the dictionary, had a Second Thought there. Fear was only one of thousands of words the pictsies probably didn’t know the meaning of. Unfortunately, she did know what it meant. And the taste and feel of fear, too. She felt it now.
She gripped the pan. It didn’t seem quite such a good weapon anymore.
The cold blue shadows between the trees seemed to be spreading out. They were darkest ahead of her, where the hoofprints led. Strangely enough, the wood behind her seemed almost light and inviting.
Someone doesn’t want me to go on, she thought. That was…quite encouraging. But the twilight was misty and shimmered unpleasantly. Anything could be waiting.
She was waiting, too. She realized that she was waiting for the Nac Mac Feegle, hoping against hope that she’d hear a sudden cry, even of “Crivens!” (She was sure it was a swearword.)
She pulled out the toad, which lay snoring on the palm of her hand, and gave it a prod.
“Whp?” it croaked.
“I’m stuck in a wood of evil dreams and I’m all alone and I think it’s getting darker,” said Tiffany. “What should I do?”
The toad opened one bleary eye and said: “Leave.”
“That is not a lot of help!”
“Best advice there is,” said the toad. “Now put me back—the cold makes me lethargic.”
Reluctantly, Tiffany put the creature back in her apron pocket, and her hand touched Diseases of the Sheep.
She pulled it out and opened it at random. There was a cure for the Steams, but it had been crossed out in pencil. Written in the margin, in Granny Aching’s big, round, careful handwriting was:
This dunt work. One desert spoonfull of terpentine do.
Tiffany closed the book with care and put it back gently so as not to disturb the sleeping toad. Then, gripping the pan’s handle tightly, she stepped into the long blue shadows.
How do you get shadows when there’s no sun in the sky? she thought, because it was better to think about things like this than all the other, much worse things that were on her mind.
But these shadows didn’t need light to create them. They crawled around on the snow of their own accord, and backed away when she walked toward them. That, at least, was a relief.
They piled up behind her. They were following her. She turned and stamped her foot a few times, and they scurried off behind the trees, but she knew they were flowing back when she wasn’t looking.
She saw a drome in the distance ahead of her, standing half hidden behind a tree. She screamed at it and waved the pan threateningly, and it lumbered off quickly.
When she looked around, she saw two more behind her, a long way back.
The track led uphill a little, into what looked like a much thicker mist. It glowed faintly. She headed for it. There was no other way to go.
When she reached the top of the rise, she looked down into a shallow valley.
There were four dromes in it—big ones, bigger than any she’d seen so far. They were sitting down in a square, their dumpy legs stretched out in front of them. Each one had a gold collar around its neck, attached to a chain.
“Tame ones?” Tiffany wondered, aloud. “But—”
Who could put a collar around the neck of a drome? Only someone who could dream as well as they could.
We tamed the sheepdogs to help us herd sheep, she thought. The Queen uses dromes to herd dreams.
In the center of the square formed by the dromes the air was full of mist. The hoof tracks, and the tracks of Roland, led down past the tame dromes and into the cloud.
Tiffany spun around. The shadows darted back.
There was nothing else nearby. No birds sang, nothing moved in the woods. But she could make out three more dromes now, their big round soggy faces peering at her around tree trunks.
She was being herded.
At a time like this it would be nice to have someone around to say something like “No! It’s too dangerous! Don’t do it!”
Unfortunately, there wasn’t. She was going to commit an act of extreme bravery and no one would know if it all went wrong. That was frightening, but also…annoying. That was it—annoying. This place annoyed her. It was all stupid and strange.
It was the same feeling she’d had when Jenny had leaped out of the river. Out of her river. And the Queen had taken her brother. Maybe it was selfish to think like that, but anger was better than fear. Fear was a damp cold mess, but anger had an edge. She could use it.
They were herding her! Like a—a sheep!
Well, an angry sheep could send a vicious dog away, whimpering.
So…
Four big dromes, sitting in a square.
It was going to be a big dream.
Raising the pan to shoulder height, to swipe at anything that came near, and suppressing a dreadful urge to go to the toilet, Tiffany walked slowly down the slope, across the snow, through the mist…
…and into summer.
CHAPTER 10
Master Stroke
The heat struck like a blowtorch, so sharp and sudden that she gasped.
She’d had sunstroke once, up on the downs, when she’d gone without a bonnet. And this was like that; the world around here was in worrying shades of dull green, yellow, and purple, without shadows. The air was so full of heat that she felt she could squeeze smoke out of it.
She was in…reeds, they looked like, much taller than her…
…with sunflowers growing in them, except…
…the sunflowers were white…
…because they weren’t, in fact, sunflowers at all.
They were daisies. She knew it. She’d stared at them dozens of times, in that strange picture in the Faerie Tales. They were daisies, and these weren’t giant reeds around her, they were blades of grass and she was very, very small.