Unlucky Charms

  “But then?” said Polly. “And please please please don’t take this the wrong way? But you might have to climb some stairs. Or see what’s on the top of a counter.”

  “Forsooth.”

  “And I’m worried about Harvey, too,” said Polly. “I know he’s invisible mostly, but they probably have some kind of fairy detection system.”

  “Oh, there wath never any chanth I wath going in there,” Harvey answered.

  Polly thought.

  “All right. We’re going for broke,” she decided, not because there wasn’t time to plan but more because she was seven years old and impatient. “Forget sneakiness. They’re gonna take us right inside themselves.”

  And that was how Polly came to walk right past the man at the front desk in the lobby of the U.K. headquarters of Goodco, trying to summon real tears to her eyes. She thought of Grandma Peggy. And when that didn’t work, she remembered the giraffe at the zoo that died because a volunteer accidentally fed it oleander. At this she sniffed and felt her eyes well up. Sorry, Grandma Peggy, she thought.

  The front-desk man got up to follow her, as she expected him to. He bent at the waist and rested his hands on his knees, his face immediately coloring from the effort. “Um, hello? Little girl? I’m sorry, can I help you? Are you looking for someone?” He was an older man, a grandfatherly type, just the sort Polly thought she could handle. He looked like he didn’t get a lot of unaccompanied children through here, which was fine.

  She turned, and the sweet, earnest look on his face was the perfect thing to really get her tears flowing. “It was supposed to be a secret,” she bawled.

  “What was, love?” said the guard, glancing over his shoulder, trying to watch his desk and be a hero at the same time.

  “My dad couldn’t find anyone to babysit me, so my dad’s new girlfriend brought me into work here and said don’t touch anything and don’t go anywhere, but I just wanted to look around and now? I got lost and I can’t find my way back.” She sucked a snotty breath. She hoped nobody was taping this.

  The man relaxed his shoulders and smiled. “That’s fine. Just tell me your … da’s girlfriend’s name, then, and I’ll have her come get you—”

  “NO! No, she said if anyone saw me I couldn’t say who brought me or she’d get in trouble, she works in some secret part.”

  “Well, I think you’d better tell me now—”

  “I won’t. She’ll get mad. Don’t make me.”

  The guard straightened, steadied himself, gathered his features together to regroup.

  “I don’t know the name of her department,” Polly offered, because things weren’t moving along as quickly as she would have liked, “but she says it’s the one ‘with all the bloody pixies.’”

  “Bloody pixies …,” the man repeated foggily. This obviously wasn’t ringing any bells, but at least it suggested a course of action. “You just come back to my desk here, while I call Ms. Aleister. She’ll know where to take you.” He made the call.

  “Ms. Aleister, this is Henry at the front. Yes, ma’am, I do think it’s important. I have a little girl here who came in with one of the employees, and now she’s lost. No ma’am, she won’t say which one. No ma’am, she won’t say which department, but she says it’s the one with the ‘bloody pixies’? Does that mean anything to you?”

  Henry the guard flinched and turned off his earpiece. “She said she’d be right down. So.” He offered Polly a little brown lump of something from a bag. “Would you like one of my candy lozenges? They taste like horehound.”

  CHAPTER 25

  “Wow, look at it,” said John. “Just look at it!”

  “Stop telling me to look at it,” said Merle. He paused to push some nettles away from his face. “I get it. Pretannica is very pretty. I imagine your slight elfishness is making it all extra sparkly for you.”

  “How do you know where we’re going, by the way? Emily said compasses won’t work here, and there aren’t any stars or sun to navigate by.”

  “I’m mostly just heading toward that gap in the trees. Finchbriton, can you fly up high, tell me if there’s a lake in that direction? Lough Leane ought to be near here.”

  “Lough Leane?”

  “Really big lake.”

  Finchbriton scouted up above the trees and returned a minute later, alighting on a low branch before the men. He twittered back his report, and John and Merle stared at him.

  “I’ve just realized I have no idea what that means,” said Merle.

  “Mick always seems to kind of understand him,” said John.

  “Mick has known him for a thousand years.”

  Finchbriton lowed kind of an annoyed whistle and flew to another branch farther along the same path.

  “I think that means we’re doing all right,” said Merle. “Follow the bird.”

  A light rain began to fall. Just as John was about to remark that this seemed unusual, as there were nothing but the thinnest whispers of clouds in the sky, he noticed that it did not appear to be raining at all a hundred feet ahead of them, nor a hundred feet behind.

  “Hard not to take that personally,” he muttered, and pulled his hood up. The trail, if indeed they were even on a trail, dipped into a deeply ferny patch surrounded by young trees. “So … we’re hiking to this big lake … why? I think England is technically in the opposite direction.”

  “I’m hoping for a shortcut,” said Merle, hunching up his shoulders against the rain. “Something the Lady of the Lake told me once, back when we were friendly, or pretending to be friendly. She said, ‘All lakes are one lake in my kingdom.’ She could sink beneath the waves of one lake and break the surface of another, a hundred miles away. In no time at all.”

  John waited politely for Merle to explain why this was relevant, but the old man started whistling, so he found it necessary to reopen the conversation.

  “Okay, what?”

  “We’re gonna try to travel from one lake directly to another, in Avalon,” said Merle. “Use Nimue’s magic against her. Nice, huh?”

  Finchbriton chirped something that sounded ruffled and complicated.

  “I think I agree with that, even if I couldn’t understand the words,” said John. “None of us are spellcasters like Nimue. It can’t be as easy as just dunking your head underwater and saying, ‘Avalon, please,’ like a taxi. Can it?”

  The bird whistled his agreement.

  “Look—I have some small idea of what we might find at Lough Leane,” said Merle. “But if I’m wrong, it’s only a few miles out of our way. A few extra miles never killed anybody.”

  “The miles won’t,” whispered a voice from the underbrush, “but the Hairy Men might, yeh thick idjits! Hide!”

  John ducked slightly to look for the source of this new voice and felt a smooth stone whiz past his ear. It shattered against a nearby boulder and resounded like a firecracker. This was followed by a screech, a monkey-house kind of sound.

  John pulled his backpack up over his head. “Under the boulders! Quickly!”

  He and Merle and Finchbriton dove for cover as the air filled with stones and shrieks, an angry rain, and little hairy men made themselves visible on the high limbs of trees. They were all lean and wild maned, bearded and bigmouthed, maybe eighteen inches tall and wearing only the poor memories of outfits. They chattered to one another in their own language and hurled stone after stone from little leather slings. All around were thuds and cracks.

  John slid under one particular boulder, only to find it occupied.

  “Oi!” said a small (but nonetheless obviously human) man. “Get your own!”

  “Oh, excellent,” said a nearby voice, a woman’s. “They have gotten the Hairy Men to resume slinging their stones. I was just wondering to meself, Have they any more stones? And now, happily, I have my answer.”

  “Merle!” said John. “Finchbriton! You all right?”

  “Not dead,” said Merle from beneath a nearby boulder. Finchbriton whistled.

  ?
??Your mate there’s under a rock,” the small man told John. “Why don’t yeh go share wi’ him?”

  Stones ricocheted off the ground and struck John’s side—not terribly hard, but he expected he’d bruise. “There’s room for us both,” he said, just as the forest grew quiet. “They’ve stopped. Is that good or bad?”

  “Probably just pausin’ to gather more stones,” said the woman. “They can keep this up long as yeh like.”

  “Where are you?” called John.

  “In the shrubbery, under a shield.”

  “You have a shield …,” John said to himself.

  The rain was letting up already, but still it was trickling down into the crevices beneath the boulders where they hid and pooling in uncomfortable places.

  Merle was peering out from his hiding spot. “Are those … maybe this is a stupid question, but are those brownies?”

  “Course they’re brownies! Hairy Men!” said the woman. “What’ve I been sayin’?”

  One of the stone-collecting brownies, on the ground, approached John’s boulder and slung a little spear down off its back. It bared its thick teeth and leaned forward, gave John and his roommate a good look at its fierce face, its flea-peppered mane of yellow dreads.

  “EEEEEEEEEK,” it said. “Wuh-WEEEEEEEEEK!” Then it commenced to trying to poke some part of John that John wasn’t covering with his backpack. Other brownies gathered to watch and holler encouragement.

  John anticipated one of the brownie’s lunges and grabbed the spear himself, wrenching it from the hairy little man’s grip. “HA!” he said. Then he spun it around and started poking back.

  “REEEEEEEEEEEEK!” the brownie answered, and retreated to a safe distance with its fellows. Then they started hurling rocks again.

  “Oh!” said the small man. “Ow! Beautiful!” John wriggled between the man and the barrage, tried to block as much of it as he could. Then there was a whistling, and a burst of blue flame surged past them, sending the brownies hooting and scrambling for the trees. Before long the rain of stones began again, but from above.

  “Thank you, Finchbriton!” called John. “You stay under cover, though! I know you’re a small target, but just one hit and you’re done for! Merle! I don’t suppose your wand—”

  “Works on this bunch? Nope, like I said—only humans.”

  “Right. I’m going to try something. Madam? Hello?”

  “Are yeh talking to me?” asked the woman in the bushes.

  “I was,” said John. He paused. “Is there anyone else hiding nearby?”

  “Just me an’ my husband an’ my babby.”

  “Your baby is here? Where is it?”

  “Oh, toddlin’ ’round about someplace SHE’S RIGHT HERE WI’ ME, WHERE DO YEH THINK SHE IS?”

  “All right, all right,” said John. “Um. Well. That makes this next part harder to ask, but … can I borrow your shield?”

  “So it wasn’t so hard when yeh thought yeh were just askin’ for the only means o’ protection from a helpless woman, is that right?”

  “I will get you to shelter with your husband. But I’ll need your shield to fight the Hairy Men.”

  “Let ’im have it,” said the husband. “The Hairy Men won’t be satisfied till they’ve killed a human. Maybe after this one’s dead they’ll bugger off.”

  “That’s some beautiful gratitude, right there,” said Merle from his rock. “If I had a pen I’d write that down.”

  “Finchbriton!” called John. “A little cover?”

  So another plume of especially smoky fire issued forth, and when the brownies paused in their barrage to watch, John ran just behind it and into the bushes. There he found a slight young woman curled up under a battered metal shield painted with a weathered and fading image of a chickadee. She clutched what was perhaps a six-month-old baby to her chest. The baby, apparently used to this sort of thing, was fast asleep. John huddled down beside them both.

  “Hullo,” he said. “I’m John.”

  “Clara Tanner. Oo, yeh’re a nice-lookin’ one.”

  “Soon to be dead, though!” her husband reminded her from his rock. “Terrible shame.”

  “Ready?” asked John, and Clara nodded. “Finchbriton?”

  The finch sent out another screen of fire and smoke. But the brownies, despite their mook behavior and monkey chatter, weren’t entirely stupid. When they saw the flames again, they rained missiles down even harder, and John did his best to protect what the shield could not as he brought mother and baby back underneath the far side of the boulder. They were nearly home when a stone creased his temple.

  “AAH! SSSSS!” he hissed, and pushed all three of them to safety. They curled close in the mud and moss. Clara examined the cut.

  “Oo, it’s a bleeder—head wounds always are—but yeh’ll be all right. Here.” She touched at it tenderly, then removed her scarf and tied it around John’s forehead.

  “Do I look like a pirate?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Enough pillow talk!” said the husband. “Why, I’d almost think yeh’re stallin’! Do yeh want to go die or don’t yeh?”

  “You sure about this?” called Merle.

  “Never ask me if I’m sure about anything! Finchbriton! Want to come along?”

  John launched into the fray, sword drawn, with Finchbriton clinging to his jacket front behind the chickadee shield. Stones clanged noisily off it.

  The brownies were concentrated in two trees—a lean-trunked one rather close to John and a taller, stouter one farther away. He aimed his shield at the far tree and hugged close to the leaner one, even using it for cover and frustrating the Hairy Men up above. With John standing almost directly below them, the tree’s own thick head of branches got in the way of many of their stones, and the brownies in the lowest branches were now in danger from wayward shots flying across the gully.

  There was a lot of angry chatter. A couple brownies threatened to drop down on top of them until Finchbriton sent hot little balloons up at each, and they retreated, singed and barking.

  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!”