“They put us on this path,” the blue-haired fairy said. “They are the only ones who can change their course.”
“But you haven’t even tried to convince them.”
“We can’t just show ourselves and frighten them as we did centuries ago,” he said. “Humans have become too jaded; we can destroy them, but they would never believe it until they were actually dying. If we reveal ourselves, they’ll either try to wipe us out or try to catch us for a zoo or a TV program.”
“Some humans cannot be trusted,” Jazzberry said. “But it never occurred to you to contact the children.”
The dragons in the trees rustled their wings. It sounded like autumn wind blowing through dead leaves.
“Children can still believe without fear or hate,” she said. “And they can identify the adults who can be trusted.”
Fidget jumped out to stand beside Jazzberry. “I have watched the human children for many years,” he said. “Some are cruel, some have been twisted by pain or ignorance or hate. But most are good. When Annie met us, she didn’t try to catch us and put us in a box. She asked us to adopt her.”
The wings rustled again.
“The problem with children,” Jazzberry continued, “is that they are good but powerless. For several weeks, Annie and her friends have been trying to find a way to stop this on their own. But they don’t know enough, they don’t have enough experience, and no adult will take them seriously. So Annie brought her uncle, one of the men who is planning the development, to meet us and decide for himself.”
Uncle Dennis stood up suddenly. “And it worked,” he said. There was a hissing noise coming from the trees, but he ignored it. “Jazzberry was right to do what she did. I had no idea that our plans would harm anyone; I had no idea I was putting you all in danger. I’ll do everything I can to stop the project now, but I don’t have the final say. I can’t dissolve the partnership unilaterally. I’ll have to figure out how to convince my partners to give up the profits they would have earned by building those houses.”
“Not by bringing them to meet us,” the red-haired fairy said.
“No,” Dennis said. “I don’t think that would work. I’m afraid my partners are exactly the kind of people who would try to trap you and put you on TV.”
He sat down. Annie reached over and took his hand. She was so proud of him. She would never have been brave enough to talk back to the fairies.
“Annie,” the red-haired fairy said. “Tell us what you think we should do.”
Jazzberry and Fidget turned to look at her. When she didn’t move, Uncle Dennis nudged her discreetly. Slowly, Annie stood up.
“I...” She looked at the fairies and dragons in the mushroom ring, and up in the trees. All of them were looking at her. Her knees were shaking, and she almost sat down again, but then she heard herself start talking. “I guess I don’t understand why you just can’t move. But Jazzberry says you can’t, so we have to stop them from cutting down the woods somehow. I don’t know how yet, but with Uncle Dennis, and if you do some magic—I mean, if you work with us too, maybe we can win. I’ll do anything to save your home.”
There was a long silence. Annie stumbled back to her seat on the log. The fairies and dragons in the ring talked among themselves for a while, too quietly for Annie to hear them, or even to tell if they were speaking English. It was getting dark now, and harder to see the flying things in the trees. Finally one of the dragons reared up on its hind legs and looked right at her.
“Time to eat,” it said.
* * *
When the mushroom ring melted back into the ground, Jazzberry led Annie and Dennis to a large fire pit. In a moment there was a roaring fire going, though there had been no firewood there beforehand. They sat down on big, flat stones set in a circle all around the fire. A green-scaled dragon came around with a tray of mugs. Annie took one and tasted it: fizzy water, with a hint of something fruity.
“Carnivore or herbivore?” someone asked from behind her.
She turned and saw another dragon, this one with black, glistening scales.
“What?” she said.
“Carnivore or herbivore?”
“What do fairies eat?” Annie said.
The dragon slowly scratched his snout with a claw-tip. “Well, now. A young fairy will eat just about anything. You have to be careful when they’re really young, their teeth are quite sharp and they’re likely to try to take a bite out of a passing pet, or a dragon, for that matter. When they’re mature, though, they give up meat and become herbivores.”
“What about dragons?” Dennis said.
“Ah.” The dragon smiled, showing several rows of needle-sharp teeth. He snapped his jaw closed with an audible clack. “I’m afraid we’re constrained by biology. We can’t digest plants.”
“I’m a vegetarian,” Annie said.
“No, you’re not,” Uncle Dennis said. “We grilled burgers at our house a few weeks ago.”
“Well, I am now.”
“You don’t have to be a vegetarian just because adult fairies are,” Jazzberry said. “I still eat meat sometimes.”
“Herbivore,” she said firmly to the black dragon. He bowed and smiled again.
“Carnivore,” Dennis said just as firmly. The dragon walked away.
Several of the fairies who had stood within the mushroom ring came to sit with them.
“You’ve met Talltree,” Jazzberry said, bowing to the red-haired fairy by flitting into the air and inclining her entire body. Then she turned to the blue-haired one and bowed again. “This is Willowleaf. They’re the Elders.”
“The Elders?” Dennis said. “The oldest?”
“The eldest male and female always have a position on the council,” Talltree said. “Although I also happen to be the council leader.” His sudden laughter was like snowflakes drifting in the sun. “Which simply means I call them to order and must never fall asleep during session.”
The black dragon came back, handing Dennis and Fidget what looked like giant turkey legs. He gave Annie a warm bundle wrapped in some kind of thick, tough paper. She opened it and found a delicious-smelling stir-fry, which she immediately started eating with her fingers. They had spent the whole day in the woods and she’d missed lunch.
“Which of you is female?” Dennis said.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Willowleaf said.
Annie stopped eating long enough to look closely. It was hard to tell because of their loose robes, but Talltree and Willowleaf seemed to have exactly the same body shape and neither had facial hair. The only real difference was the color of their hair.
“Females are born with violet hair that ages to blue,” Willowleaf said. “Males are born with yellow hair that ages to red.”
“It’s a lot harder to tell with dragons,” Fidget said around a mouthful of turkey. “We don’t change color and there are three sexes.”
“Three sexes?” Annie said. “What are you talking about? Aren’t you a boy?”
“He’s one kind of boy,” Jazzberry said. “Dragons have two different ways of being male.”
“There’s no species like that on Earth,” Dennis said.
“There is now,” Talltree said. “And there has been for a while. Let me tell you a story.”
* * *
Long ago, so long ago that no one can quite remember when it happened, two groups of explorers met while they were both investigating a strange star. Neither group had ever before encountered another race capable of traveling through space, and they were ecstatic to finally meet some neighbors, even though it took some time to learn to talk together.
When they did, though, it was hard to get them to shut up. They had so much to say, and so much to hear, and they liked each other so much that they swapped half of their crews. Each ship went back to its home world carrying guests from the other ship.
The two peoples became close friends, and they never traveled alone again. Each of them had strengths the other lacked, each of them had way
s of seeing the universe that the other had never thought of. Together they were smarter and stronger than they could ever have been apart. So they embarked on new adventures, always together, and this went on for half a galactic day.
(“That’s over a hundred million years!” Dennis said.
“Shh,” Annie hissed.)
One of the survey ships working in an outer arm of the galaxy came upon a sun whose third planet had something they’d never seen before: a race of intelligent beings that, except for their large size and the lack of wings, looked exactly like one of the explorer races. They had observed other intelligences before, but this was the first time they had seen anything that looked familiar.
(“What did the other aliens look like?” Annie said.
“Shh,” Dennis said.)
They stayed long after they had finished cataloguing the planets of this star, because they were curious about the flightless giants. They wanted to know everything about them.
But then came disaster. During routine maintenance on their ship, something went wrong and they lost the ability to leave the system. As time went by, the ship deteriorated more and more, until finally they realized that very soon they wouldn’t be able to move the ship at all.
So they flew their ship one last time to a sparsely inhabited place that could support them. They landed the ship and buried it under a huge mound of dirt, leaving only a hidden cave as the means to get in and out. The ship shut down, except for producing the rare nutrients that the explorers couldn’t get from native food. They sent a message to their friends at home, but it would be a long, long time before help could come.
While they were waiting, the explorers continued to observe the giants, and over time the natives built a civilization, and grew in numbers, until the remote spot they’d chosen to hide the ship was right on the edge of a major city. And then some of the natives decided to strip the ship-hill of trees and build houses on top. But in the process, of course, they would discover what lay beneath the hill, and now disaster loomed again.
Because the ship is guarded by terrible warriors, who are not completely under the control of the other explorers. If the ship is disturbed, they will emerge from their long slumber, and their only goal in life is to protect the ship at all costs. No one knows what they might do if they perceive the flightless giants to be a threat.
This is why we have to stop your partners.
* * *
Annie had finished eating and she was getting sleepy. She was having trouble following the conversation after Talltree finished his story.
Was it true? Were the fairies and dragons not really magic, but just aliens? She thought aliens would be nasty, mean, and ugly, and try to eat people. But adult fairies didn’t even eat meat at all. Was there really a spaceship in the hill under the Haunted Woods? She’d like to see a spaceship...
“Lie down here,” Jazzberry said, tugging at Annie’s arm. She slid off the log and lay down in the soft leaves beside it. Fidget brought a blanket from somewhere and covered her up.
“I have some questions,” Annie mumbled.
“Later,” Jazzberry said. She flew down and kissed Annie’s cheek.
Annie woke several times during the night. She heard Uncle Dennis’s voice, but now the deeper voices of dragons were weaving in among the tinkling sounds of the fairies. She only caught snatches of what they were saying before she dropped back off to sleep.
“One guardian is always awake,” a dragon said. “Admales grow to a huge size if they’re fed the right nutrients during a critical point in their growth.”
“I don’t understand the purpose of three sexes,” Dennis said.
“What’s the purpose of life itself?” the dragon responded. “That’s the way sexual reproduction evolved on our planet.”
Later, she thought she heard Jazzberry say, “She’s flunking her classes in school because of us.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Willowleaf said. “Shall I give her everything?”
“No, that would make her stand out. Adult knowledge would be a handicap to a human child.”
“I’ve spent a lifetime studying them, but sometimes I don’t understand them at all.”
“Yes, mama. No, don’t do it now, she’s awake. Wait until she falls asleep again.”
Then there were strange dreams. She was flying over the whole world, just as she’d done with Jazzberry and Fidget to Egypt, but much faster and everything glowed with impossible detail. She could see from one edge of the Earth to another, but if she focused she could watch a woman walking her dog in Budapest or a man reading a newspaper in a park in Lima while his son played on the swings. She hadn’t even known that she knew the names of those places.
She woke again.
“I don’t understand,” Dennis said. “How can you be so intelligent with such a small brain?”
A fairy said, “How can your species have such a large brain and be so stupid?”
A dragon laughed. “Do you suppose there’s only one way to organize a mind? You haven’t even figured out how your own brains work. Some parrots speak and think better than some humans, and they have small heads.”
Again she awoke, and no one was speaking. The fire crackled cheerfully. Its light shone on the canopy of trees above. She could see a few stars winking through the branches, and she recognized half a dozen of them: Vega, Deneb, Altair. When had she learned the names of the stars?
When morning came, Annie sat up and stretched. She looked around. Uncle Dennis was sleeping close to the fire pit, where the fire had finally gone out. She turned her head and came face to face with Fidget, who was sitting on top of the log, grinning and rubbing the top of his head with the tip of his tail.
“Sleep well?” he said.
“Uh huh. Um... I need to go...”
“This way,” he said. She followed him to a secluded place well away from where she’d slept. He vanished while she peed. She found her own way back.
Fidget handed her another package wrapped in rough paper. It was a completely different kind of food from last night, rice mixed with fruits, sweet and very tasty. Annie ate it with her fingers, since she’d been offered no fork.
Uncle Dennis woke up as she was finishing.
“What’s the time?” he said, and stared at his watch. “Oh, my god, they’ll think we’ve been kidnapped. Annie, we have to go.”
He jumped up, but stopped as if he’d thought of something.
“What?” Annie said.
“I have about a thousand more questions to ask them.”
“Later,” Jazzberry said, flying slowly toward them. Fidget was back on the log. None of the others were visible. “We’ll lead you home.”
They followed Jazzberry and Fidget back to the council clearing and then into the trees. It took a long time to reach the places that Annie was familiar with. She hadn’t realized that the Haunted Woods was this large. But then she visualized it from the air and saw that the hill was really quite big, covering more than a hundred acres. Like Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, she thought.
“Good luck in school on Monday,” Jazzberry said when they parted, and she and Fidget laughed as they flew away. What was so funny?
There was no police car at her house, but Uncle Dennis had to explain three times that he and Annie had been hiking in the woods, got lost after dark, and decided it was safer to sleep under beds of leaves than to stumble around in the night.
“But what were you doing up there all day?” her mother said. She was still crying.
“Studying the wildlife,” Dennis said. “It’s really a remarkable place, you know. There are deer up there, and lots of butterflies, and birds of all kinds.”
“Too bad you’re going to mow it all down,” her father said.
“Well... I might have to rethink that,” Dennis said. Her father jerked in surprise. “Hey, I’ve got to go. I’m so sorry this happened, Ray, Laura, I didn’t mean to alarm you.” He leaned over to say goodbye to Annie. “I’ll never be
able to thank you enough for this,” he whispered, and kissed her on the cheek.
“You’d better take a shower,” her mother said when Dennis was gone. “I’ll get breakfast started.”
Annie had to improvise all through her breakfast of banana pancakes, making up stories of how they’d spent their day, how they got lost just before dusk, and couldn’t find their way back to the trails she knew. Her father suggested that maybe she shouldn’t go up there any more. Annie managed not to panic, and replied that now that she knew the woods better than ever, it was safer than it had been before, and he dropped the idea.
On the bus to school the next day, Annie sat next to June and whispered that they needed to go up to the Haunted Woods that afternoon, she had a story to tell her.
“What about?” June whispered back.
“It’s too complicated,” Annie said. “I want to tell you there.” June looked unhappy about that, but she dropped the subject.
Mrs. Longsnout surprised them with a pop geography quiz that afternoon. Annie groaned to herself—another wonderful day ruined by the horror of geography. But to her surprise she not only knew every answer, it was easy. She finished the test in just a few minutes and looked up to see that everyone else was struggling and squirming in their seats.
Mrs. Longsnout looked back at her with wide eyes.
Chapter 8: Know-It-All
“I don’t want you going back up into those woods,” Annie’s mother had said that morning.
“But Mom!”
“I mean it, Annie. You spend too much time up there. It’s too far away from home, and it’s a wilderness. There could be bears or coyotes up there.”
“I don’t think there’s been a bear around here for a hundred years,” her father said around a mouthful of toast.
“Raymond, please.”
“You’re right, I forgot about the zoo. Annie, don’t go up into the woods. One of the zoo’s lions or tigers might have escaped, too.”
“You don’t think it’s dangerous?” her mother asked her father.
“Laura, she and Dennis spent an entire night up there, all alone, without any equipment, and they’re fine.”
“You can jaywalk twenty times without a scratch before a bus flattens you.”
“What are you saying? There are rogue buses up in the woods, too?”