"Yah!" she cried. "Bigfoot this!"
The next moment Taffy lay rolling on the soft rushes of the floor, clutching her great, big foot in pain.
"Don't you know anything about grammer?" Spider-Rose said, shaking her head. "And a door grammer is just about the strongest, you know. A slab of good heart-oak can hold an awful lot of grammer. A door grammer is proof against any blow, charm, or picklock you care to employ. You can go on and kick it till Ragged Rock if you like. Not as how that's apt to be a very long time. We're all doomed." She sighed, and knelt down on the floor beside the sleeping Cinquefoil. "That's really Cinquefoil, then? Poor little fay. Not bad looking, neither."
"Let me try?" Thor Wignutt said.
Thor had barely moved or said a word in all the time since they were first thrown into this cell. Instead he sat in a corner, with his eyes rolled back in their sockets. From time to time he tapped on his left temple and murmured to himself. When Jennifer T. had gone over to see if he was all right, he had waved her away. Now he approached the oak door of the cell. Gently he stroked it with the fingers of one hand, fluttering them delicately as if they were the most sensitive of instruments.
"Okay, Thor, you're strong and all," Ethan said. "But not stronger than Taffy."
"But, okay, here's the thing. You told me that that werefox guy, Cutbelly, could scamper anywhere, as long there was a way through, a branch or a twig of the Tree. Not just between Worlds, but inside a World. And these twigs and branches are everywhere. I can feel them all over the place." Thor reasoned, slowly, and thoughtfully, but with no trace that Ethan could see of his flat TW03 manner. "I leapt from one world to another, remember? What's to stop me from crossing just one little grammery door?"
And with that, he got right up against the door, until his face, chest, and hips were pressed tightly to it. He closed his eyes and began muttering to himself. The stout door seemed to ripple, for the briefest instant, like a curtain stirred by a breath of wind. Then it fell still, solid and impenetrable as before. But Thor was gone. He had passed right through.
"I knowed there was something haintish about that boy," Spider-Rose said.
"He's a shadowtail," Ethan said, watching to see if Thor was going to reappear. He hoped that his friend wouldn't take it upon himself to set off alone, inside a fairy hill, looking for a piece of wood that might be anywhere. "Cinquefoil said he's the—"
"He's a changeling, is what he is," Taffy said, pulling herself upright and gingerly testing her outraged foot. "Oof. I knew it the first time I laid eyes on him."
"A changeling?" Ethan said. "Do you mean—are you saying—Thor Wignutt is a ferisher?"
"Wow," Jennifer T. said. "That kind of explains a few things."
"But he's so tall," said Ethan, feeling that the explanation begged as many questions as it answered. "And his blood is red, I've seen it."
"No doubt he was fed on human milk," Taffy said. "Nursed by his human mother. If that's the case, then—"
"Then he ain't neither ferisher nor reuben," Spider-Rose said. She had resumed her pacing now. "And that's how come he can walk on through a door all loaded up with grammer. A changeling shadowtail. Huh." She shook her head gloomily. "I predict all kinds of trouble for you with that one."
"With what one?" said Thor. He was standing there, in the cell again, breathing steady and carefully, as if his heart were pounding and he was trying to slow it down.
Everybody stared at him as if he had just returned not from the other side of a door but from the land of the dead itself. Then Ethan looked at Taffy, hoping she would know what to do. The Sasquatch tugged thoughtfully for a moment on her brush of a beard, then went over to Thor and laid one of her big soft paws on his shoulder.
"Can you get me through with you?" she said.
Thor nodded. "Yes, Ms. Sasquatch, I really think I could."
"Then let's go find that stick."
She spun Thor toward the door and stood behind him, ducking her head. Thor reached a hand toward the door.
"No," Ethan said.
Taffy turned back, looking a little startled. There was a strange edge, almost but not quite angry, to Ethan's voice, one that took even him by surprise. He had meant only to say "No."
"It's my stick," he said, feeling a little sheepish. "I shouldn't have let them take it from me. Cinquefoil told me to hold on to it. Besides, Taffy, you're too big and, well, Sasquatchy, to go sneaking around inside a ferisher hill."
"We call it a knoll," Spider-Rose said. "And I wouldn't try it if I were you. They'll catch you for sure."
"You are not a very optimistic person, are you?" Ethan said.
Taffy gave another tug at the luxuriant silvery tuft at her chin, staring coolly at Ethan. Then she nodded.
"All right," she said. "The girl and I will stay here and look after the chief. We can't leave him, and I don't think we should try to move him, either."
"What?" Jennifer T. sprang to her feet. "No way. Eth and Thor and me are a team"
"Three of you are much more likely to attract attention than just a pair," Taffy said. "Be sensible, girl. But listen to this. If this boy and this other boy aren't back in what I consider to be a reasonable period of time for such an enterprise, then we are going after them. I'll kick my way through a wall if I have to."
"Oh, the walls are miles thick," said Spider-Rose, kissing her doll's ragged head. "You'll never get through."
"You can just be quiet," Jennifer T. said. Ethan could tell that she was mad about being left behind. "For some reason," she told Spider-Rose, "you give me a great big pain. Why don't you just go, too, huh? You and your stupid doll. Now's your big chance to escape."
"Oh, sure," Spider-Rose said. "That's just what my mother is looking for me to go and do. As if I'd give her the satisfaction." She stopped her furious pacing and sat down in an angry tangle of tiny legs and arms. "She said I could stay here till Ragged Rock, and that's just what I'm going to do."
Jennifer T. shrugged, and then came over to Ethan.
"Hurry back," she said in a low voice that was not quite as low as it might have been. "Or I can't be responsible for what happens to that fairy."
Spider-Rose stuck out her tongue.
"Okay," Ethan said. He turned and put his hand on Thor's shoulder. It felt appealingly steady and firm.
"All right, shadowtail," he said in a low voice. "Let's find that stick."
The door rippled again, and they passed through it, and were gone.
HOURS PASSED. TAFFY AND JENNIFER T. TOOK TURNS SITTING beside Cinquefoil's pallet, bathing his forehead in cool water from the jar and trying not to think too much about the greenish-black tinge that had begun to spread like spilt ink across the skin of his right hand. Spider-Rose watched them, for a while, and paced for a good while longer. Finally, when Jennifer T. had almost forgotten she was there, she exploded.
"I'm tired of this place! I should have gone with those two little reubens while I had the chance! What was I thinking?"
"It appeared to me as if you were trying to spite your mother," Taffy said reasonably.
"True enough," said Spider-Rose.
"Who is your old mother, anyway?" Jennifer T. said. "Why would she want you to be in here until Ragged Rock?"
"My mother? My mother is Filaree, the Queen of the Dandelion Hill mob!" She stood and drew herself up to her full height of just under the top of Jennifer T.'s kneecap. The little feather in her headband quivered. The headband was worked with a beaded pattern of decidedly spidery-looking rose vines. "Don't you know I'm a princess?"
Taffy and Jennifer T. exchanged looks. Somehow this information did not surprise Jennifer T. particularly. She nodded. Taffy nodded, too.
"So why'd she put you in here?" Jennifer T. said. "Your highness?
"Because she's a leathery old garfish with a heart like the spiky case of a buckeye, that's why!" Spider-Rose declared. "And they're all a bunch of hidebound old farts without an ounce of imagination in them."
"Just what
was it you were asking them to imagine?" Taffy asked.
"Yeah, what did you do?"
"What did I do? What did I do? I gave them an idea, that's what.
A simple, brilliant idea that changed things around here for the better, no doubt about it. Everyone thought so. At least at first. Then I guess everything went wrong."
"An idea about what?" said Jennifer T.
"About baseball, of course."
Spider-Rose stood up, and started pacing again, warming to her subject, waving the little doll around by the tattered rags of its tail. "Actually. Well. The idea wasn't mine. I mean, I embellished it. Improved upon it. But I wasn't the one to come up with it at first."
Jennifer T. had a sudden certainty. "Coyote," she said.
"Well, he invented the game, didn't he? Why shouldn't he want to change it? He's called the Changer, after all. And like he said to me, that first day when I met him, out walking in the woods. You could study the question, he said, and think some about it, and research it just a little bit, too. And in the end, if you were going to be honest, you were going to have to admit it to yourself. The game—" Here her brashness seemed to abandon her somewhat, and she stopped pacing, and lowered her voice. "The game was boring."
Jennifer T. scowled. She had known from the first that she didn't like this Spider-Rose. Now she knew why.
"Not overall," Spider-Rose put in hastily, catching the murderous look in Jennifer T.'s eye. "Just here and there. Let's take one example. And this is the example that Coyote made to me. Is there anything duller in all the game of baseball than watching the pitcher hit? Pitcher goes up there, if she even gets the bat off her shoulder it's to give it a few weak waves like she's shooing a little moth away. And then, big surprise, three or four pitches later, she's out. Well, Coyote said, and I couldn't argue with him, why does the pitcher have to hit? That's all. Just a little thought. Let somebody else hit for the pitcher. One of the old-timers, somebody whose legs, maybe they're not what they were. Or one of your born sluggers who can't catch or run or field a position too well, but can knock the hide off a ball with one swing. Somebody who ain't—"
"The designated-hitter rule," Jennifer T. said, shaking her head. She took a rush from the floor, soaked it in a dipper of water from the jar, and then laid it across Cinquefoil's forehead. "You deserve to be in here for that."
Spider-Rose sank to the ground, and laid her little doll in her lap. For a long time she didn't say anything, staring sadly at its blank and wrinkled face.
"For that alone," she said. "But it's so much worse than that."
"What happened?" said Jennifer T., regretting now, a little, her harsh words.
"I wouldn't never have done it," Spider-Rose said. "Even though I seed merit in the idea, I wouldn't never have listened to his talk. Only he offered me something. In return for bringing this idea to the mob. Something I wanted."
"What was that?" Jennifer T. said.
"Her heart's desire," Taffy said.
"That's right," said Spider-Rose. "You don't know—nobody knows—what it's like to be a young ferisher in these worn-down latter days. To be the only baby in the knoll, the only child, the only young person, for hundreds and hundreds of years. Even if you are a princess. Coyote said that he would grant me my dearest wish if I would turn the mob to the new rule, and so I set about persuading them, one by one. Some of them agreed to it right away, and others took years. My mother was the very last to change her mind. But change it she did. And the very next day, she found herself with child. A boy."
"A little brother," said Jennifer T., thinking of Dirk and Darrin and all the times she had made a precisely opposite wish. "You wished for a little brother."
Spider-Rose nodded, unable to speak. Amber tears splashed the ground before her.
"The day he got born was the happiest of my life," she said at last. "But we done saw from the first that there was something…lacking…to him. Something was missing. He didn't never make a sound. Just stared all around him like, eyes big and scared, like everything he saw was more than he cared to contend with."
"And the ball field," Taffy said gently.
"Took us a while to notice," Spider-Rose said. "Somehow the change in the rules unworked the grammers that done kept our grounds green, tamped and raked our infield dirt, fixed and laid our chalk lines, for the tens of thousands of years that we been living in this hill. Which was just what Coyote intended. Later we heard that other mobs all across the Summerlands fell for his idea and went with the new rule, and the same thing happened to them. Of course we gave up the new rule. We went back to the Old Style of play. But it was too late. The field kept fading and withering and dwindling, until one fine morning we came trooping out of the hill and saw that it was as you see it now. Gray and lifeless, a kind of scab on the earth. No amount of grammer and praying could heal. And the very next day when I came into the nursery, I found my brother. What I'd thought of, and loved, as my brother. But it was only another one of the tricks of the trickster."
So saying, she raised the twisted rag to her chest again, and kissed it tenderly on the coarse woolen top of its head. Then she lay back, and rolled over with her face to the wall.
Jennifer T. looked at Taffy, who shrugged. Say something, her expression seemed to implore.
"That's, uh, that's pretty harsh," said Jennifer T.
She just didn't want to feel sorry for this betrayer of her people and of the game. But somehow, staring at the tiny, slender back of the young ferisher, she found that she couldn't help herself. She picked up a ragged square of greasy felt that was lying in a corner, carried it over to Spider-Rose, and draped it across the horrible blank face of the shock-haired doll.
CHAPTER 13
The Housebreakers of Dandelion Hill
THE INTERIOR OF A FAIRY KNOLL, as Thor Wignutt explained to Ethan, is invariably laid out on the plan of a spiral. In the case of a great ferisher court such as Caer Sidhe, Lyonesse, or the Fields of Even, there may be several hills, and spirals linked to other spirals linked in turn to more spirals, in a grand and intricate labyrinth of tunnels. But the court of Filaree, Queen of the Dandelion Hill, was just an ordinary sort of ferisher knoll, rustic and plain. It plays no role in any tale or record, aside from this one, and until the appearance there of the traitor princess Spider-Rose, no personage or hero of any particular interest had ever turned up within its confines. Once Ethan and Thor were on the other side of the cell door, therefore, it was immediately apparent that there was only one way to go—up. The cell into which they had been tossed was the lowest room in the hill—the spiral died, so to speak, at its door. Going up it led, in long, gentle but ever-narrowing loops, to the council chamber at the very summit, in the usual and predictable ferisher way. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the whole situation in which they now found themselves, as they set up the curving tunnel in search of Ethan's lost stick, was that Thor Wignutt was explaining the whole thing. He was whispering, so it was harder to tell, but it seemed to Ethan that his friend's voice really had lost, perhaps for good, the slightly irritating flatness it took on when he was being TW03 and explaining about thermal vents, or how you could plot a human being on a sheet of graph paper, if you really wanted to. He was just talking, in that gravelly voice of his. It made Ethan feel oddly sad. It had been annoying, true, to be referred to as "Captain" all the time, and to be kept constantly informed of the coordinates of this, and the ion-emissions of that. But then again there was something kind of nice about the way Thor was always trying so hard to behave like a real human being. That was a lot more than you could expect from some people. The actual significance of what Taffy had told them back in the cell—that Thor was, in fact, not a real human being at all—well, that was just too much for Ethan to think about right now.
As they climbed, they passed dozens and dozens of low ferisher doors, most of them elaborately carved with tangling shapes that might have been vines or flames or the characters that spelled out a grammer. Many of the
doors had been left ajar, even wide open. The rooms inside—kitchens and sculleries, bedchambers and salons, card rooms and galleries, had all been abandoned to the urgency of council. They were lit by rows of tiny windows that let in the afternoon sunshine, though Ethan was sure he had seen no windows on the outside of the knoll.
"Grammery windows," Thor said, passing his hand through a slanting beam of illuminated dust.
"Is that what they're really called, or did you just make that up?'"
Thor considered the question, his big serious head cocked to one side.
"I really don't know," he said.
At first Ethan and Thor crept into the rooms cautiously, looking all around, checking under the doll-sized beds and card tables, peering behind the draperies, touching nothing. But before long the complete desertion of the rooms by the ferisher folk was apparent, and the two boys grew bold. They helped themselves to cheeses, handfuls of pumpkin seeds and wild strawberries, and to the dazzling array of candies that they found piled high in dishes in nearly every room. Ferishers love sweets, and the variety of candies was positively baroque. There were candies like snowflakes, and candies like stars and planets, and candies like the striped domes of Russian churches. The boys stuffed their mouths, and dirtied their faces, and loaded their pockets, too. They opened wardrobes and rifled drawers. They got up on tabletops and peered behind dusty rows of books on the shelves of the moldering library. There was no sign anywhere, though, of Ethan's stick, and meanwhile they climbed ever higher in the knoll, and the circuit of the tunnel narrowed, and now they could hear, faintly, the shouting and blustering of the assembled ferishers, away at the top of the hill.