The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  Suddenly, he knew. He bent to snatch up his great-uncle's book. "Come on!" he shouted at the fairy. "Don't be daft — the passage's about to close," she cried, although she had little breath to spare. "Just go! I'll keep it busy!" For a moment she wheeled up above the thing's head, into the full glare of the phantom doorway or whatever it was, and he saw that the fairy magic she was wielding against the undead beast was Theo's own corkscrew, as big in her arms as a painter's ladder. She spun again and dove, jabbing the sharp point at the thing's ruined face. It flinched back, perhaps out of some forgotten reflex — there was not much there worth saving — but did not seem very alarmed.

  Theo's heart felt as though it were about to explode out of the top of his head like a Polaris missile. He leaped toward the glowing seam and scrabbled at the opening with his fingers. It tingled strangely but did not burn. He turned for one last look. A rotting paw just missed grabbing Applecore, but tipped her wing and sent her spinning. She landed on the floor and crouched there for a moment with her head down, clearly stunned. The thing gave a kind of squelchy huff of triumph and staggered toward her. Theo threw himself onto his knees, scooped up the fairy just ahead of the reaching cat jaws, then turned and clambered across the floor toward the door made of light.

  He fell through in a most ungraceful way, into nothingness, into a colorless void that crashed like ocean waves and sparkled like stars.

  Part Two LAST EXIT TO FAIRYLAND

  10 LARKSPUR'S LAND

  He was not simply traveling, he was stretching, somehow — as though a part of him were still rooted deep in the reality he had just left while an increasingly attenuated Theo-ness was being drawn out through thousands of miles of noise and light. All that he was seemed to be getting thinner and more insubstantial, until he felt himself to be a near-infinite, nearinvisible line of consciousness, each mote of thought touching nothing but the single beads of comprehension directly on either side, and all of them pulling farther and farther apart. He was like a rubber band in the hands of God, and God was spreading His mighty arms as wide as they would go . . .

  And then the rubber band snapped.

  ————— When he came back to himself, half his vision was filled with what at first seemed to be a smeary abstract painting of green lines. Grass. He was lying on his side in long grass, and something was moving.

  He regained his focus in time to see Applecore, who was kneeling a few inches from his nose, bend at the waist and decorously throw up. Despite her appearance and proximity, watching didn't trigger his own reflex as it might have with another human being. He sat up.

  That did trigger the reflex. As Theo finished emptying his stomach, spitting over and over into the grass, Applecore took a deep breath and groaned. "Oog. It's worse coming here than going to your side."

  "Glad . . . to hear that." He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. His head was thumping like a timpani solo and he would have sold his soul without hesitation for a bottle of mouthwash. "Because I don't ever want to feel like that again." He raised his head and looked around. "Oh, God." It wasn't so much that anything looked expressly different, or wrong — in fact, it all looked very right in a sort of romantic, pre-Raphaelite kind of way: close-standing trees and shadowy grassy dales, beams of midday sunlight diving straight down through the forest roof like glowing plumb lines, sparked with dust and the bright flicker of flying insects. His nausea had faded, but still the colors around him were almost too strong, the edges too crisp; it made his eyes water to look at anything for more than a few moments. It reminded him of the way a dose of psilocybin made the colors of everyday objects leap out like neon.

  "Where are we?" Applecore bent again and spat an almost invisible streak of light. "Home. Well, home for me. What would you call it? I was never up with all that book-learning shower of shite, and Faerie can't translate what you can't say." She frowned, then brightened. " 'Course. Faerie. That's what it's called."

  "So I was right. No, Uncle Eamonn was right." Theo stretched his legs out in front of him, listened to the almost subliminal fluting of birds. His headache and nausea had all but disappeared. He could almost forget that he had just been through the weirdest and worst half hour of his life. "It's . . . it's beautiful here."

  "That's why they saved this piece," the little fairy told him. "Don't think this is the whole story, boyo." He nodded slowly, although he had no idea what she meant. It was hard to think, almost exhausting: spending time in the midst of such overwhelmingly powerful scenery was hard on mortal senses. So strange, all so strange . . .

  He turned back to Applecore. "What the hell was that . . . thing that came after us?" The unearthly scenery suddenly felt different, even threatening, especially the shadowy depths behind the closest trees. "Will it come here? Is it coming now?"

  "Will it come? Likely." Applecore sniffed. "Now? Couldn't say, but I doubt it'll find you again so fast. Eventually, though. So is it a good idea to laze around in the woods like a fat gobshite? Likely not."

  "What was it?" It took a moment. "Hold on, find me? What do you mean, find me?" "Start walking first." She was up and away, quick as a dragonfly, twenty yards in a couple of seconds, then back just as swiftly to hang in midair before him, a grim little half smile on her face. "Just curious. You standing there with your mouth open — do you have to do that for a bit before your legs start workin'?"

  He shut his jaw and let her lead him through the psychedelic forest.

  ————— "I'm not being difficult," she said as they came out of a stand of trees and into an open dell. "I just don't know much. I'm a messenger, me — strictly hired help. All I can tell you is that just like Tansy sent me after you, someone else must have sent that falling-apart thing. Doesn't take much in the brains department to figure that out. You said you've never seen anyone like me before, not in real life. Ever seen anything like that?"

  "God, no!"

  "There you are, then. It came from one of the in-between places, must have. If I could find you, then it could too." He shook his head. He was tired of the adventure already. He wanted to lie down and sleep, but instead all he did was put one foot in front of the other, following this irritating little flying woman, on and on through what had changed from a magical landscape into a fatiguing nightmare, as though he were being forced to do a survival trek through a Disney film. The sheer visual intensity of the forest, the glittering motes of dust, the bumblebees bright as spun coins, the snaking, tangled roots and colorful toadstools in all their profusion, even the vivid green of the grass, was hallucinatory, and it was getting to be like an acid trip that wouldn't end. It made his head ache. "But why me? I'm nobody! I'm . . . boring!" "Am I arguing? Just save some of the questions for the old fella — he'll probably be able to tell you a good whack more than I can."

  "Tell me about him. You said his name was . . . Tansy?" "Count Tansy, yes. One of the Daisy clan, but a good bit less stupid than most of your landowning shower." She pursed her mouth in distaste. "Still, I don't owe him nothing and I wouldn't have done this for him if he weren't paying me, even if he did say it was important."

  Theo shook his head again. "Me? You're talking about me again. Important."

  "Important to someone, yeah, or they wouldn't have sent ol' Bag-of-Bones to suck your brains out through your nostrils, would they?"

  "Speaking of sending, why did this Tansy send you? Why didn't he come himself?"

  "He's used his exemption already, I guess."

  "He's used . . . what?" She stopped, hovering, and held a finger to her lips. At first he thought she just wanted him to stop asking so many questions, but then he realized she was listening to something. His skin suddenly seemed to fit poorly, his heart to grow a little too big and violent for his chest.

  "Is it . . . that thing?" he whispered. She shook her head, but did not seem very happy. He did his best to stay still so she could hear whatever it was she was straining her tiny ears after.

  "Follow me," she whispered at last. "Quick b
ut as quiet as you can. That means pick up those great clumping feet!" She zigzagged away toward the edge of the clearing and he half-ran, half-pranced on tiptoe after her through the wildflower-sprinkled grass. "Down here." She pointed to a gully shielded by undergrowth. Theo scrambled down into it, pressed himself into a mat of fallen leaves that glimmered silver and gold and smelled like something that came in expensive bags from a posh gardening store, then cautiously raised his head to look back at the clearing. It was empty. "Didn't expect I'd have to spend my last charm so soon," Applecore muttered.

  "What . . . ?" Theo began, but Applecore flew up beside him and gave him a surprisingly solid kick on the jaw.

  "Shut it!" she hissed. Long seconds crept by, then what looked like a horizontal flash of sunlight burst from the trees and streaked halfway across the clearing in a heartbeat, then stopped, changing from blur to solid shape so abruptly that he almost gasped in surprise.

  It was a deer, a huge white buck, with a spreading rack of antlers like two leafless trees carved out of ivory. It stared at the spot where Theo was hidden. The dark liquidity of its gaze seemed to mark him easily despite his held breath and tight-clenched muscles.

  Beautiful, beautiful . . . was all he could think as it stood frozen in an angled stab of sun like a statue made of burning phosphor. It blinked, then leaped away into the trees on the far side of the clearing, a movement so swift and effortless that Theo could not at first entirely understand what had happened.

  His mouth worked as he tried to express even a halting appreciation for the vision he had just been given, but Applecore's wings were buzzing beside his ear. She prodded him with her foot, more gently this time.

  "Ssshhhh." Her whisper was so close he thought he could even feel the tiny puff of her breath inside his ear. To his surprise, she began to sing. Her voice was scratchy but tuneful. He could not make out the words, but the repetitive melody was oddly compelling, so much so that he did not at first notice that another noise was growing all around him, a sound that even at its loudest never became more than a flutter like rain on hardpacked earth.

  The riders stormed into the clearing. Again, he found himself dumbstruck, but it was a less simple awe than that which had pierced him at the sight of the stag. There were close to two dozen of the newcomers, male and female, dressed in costumes that seemed to come from completely random times and places, both modern and ancient; even the colors of the cloth were elusively inconstant, changing like mother-of-pearl, like sunlight on the water of a moving stream. The riders' faces were fine and proud and strangely ageless — every one of the hunting party could have been twenty or forty in human age, or neither. He found it was as hard to look at them as it had been to look at the land around him when he had first come through. His brain searched desperately for measurements, categories, ways to make these creatures into mere humans, but could not find the mechanism: they confused his familiar ways of judging people just as surely as the stag had turned him into mud and stone by the mere fact of its lightning-swift loveliness.

  Even their horses were strange, although he could not say what was different about them — they had four legs, manes, eyes, flashing teeth. But that did not make them horses, at least not the sort of horses he knew, any more than elaborately curled and arranged hair, jewelry, and quiet conversations made people out of these frighteningly beautiful riders.

  The hunt party paused in the clearing for only a few moments, riding around the spot where the stag had stopped, staring down raptly as though something were written there that they had never seen before. One of them, a tall man with long golden hair, dressed in something like modern riding gear (if riding clothes were ever made from millions of pearlescent scales) and carrying what appeared to be a rifle with a bright silver barrel and a bone-white stock, stood in his stirrups and pulled his mount around to face the quarter in which the stag had vanished. He spurred out of the clearing and the others followed him, swift as the crack of a whip, but so quiet that by the time the last of them had passed between the nearest trees Theo could not hear them anymore.

  "That was Lord Larkspur," said Applecore after half a minute of silence. "The one in the lizardy suit. Seen him in the mirror-shows. He's better lookin' in real life, I have to admit, if you like that sort."

  Theo wasn't sure what sort that was, but he wasn't even too sure of his own name at the moment. "Those were . . . fairies?"

  Applecore snorted and drifted down to the ground a foot from Theo's face. "Damn few who aren't around here, 'cepting you. Flower-folk, those were. You might call them the local gentry. Oh, they think they're fine, but."

  "They . . . they were fine." For a moment Applecore only looked at him, something almost like hurt on her little face. "You've never seen them before, 'course," she said at last, then scowled. "Larkspur, right on top of us, and cursed lucky we were not to be noticed. By the Trees! I told you not to come back for me!"

  Still overwhelmed, it took him a long moment to make sense of that. "Wait a minute, you mean back . . . back at the cabin? Are you saying I should have left you there, with that ugly dead thing?"

  "I could have made a door for meself. I made that one just for you — I was planning to keep Old Ugly busy for a bit. But you dragged me through with you and buggered up the landing, so we've come down in the wrong spot." She shook her head. "Right in the middle of Delphinion. Shite and double shite. Even if we're near the edge of the forest we're half a day's walk from Daisy lands, the rate you waddle, and we don't dare go out from under the trees in daylight."

  "We can't go out from under the trees . . . ?" "Because this is Larkspur's land, ya thick. It belongs to him, and so does almost everything on it and a lot above it, including some of the birds. If we come out of the trees, chances are he'll know about it before an hour's passed."

  "Hey, damn it, quit calling me thick. You may have saved my life, but that doesn't give you a license to kick my ass for the rest of it." "Ooh, he's gettin' snappy." "Look, a couple of hours ago I was back in my own world thinking about nothing more earthshaking than hopping on my bike and picking up a burrito to go, then suddenly I'm in the middle of Storybook Land being led through the enchanted frigging forest by Thumbelina — and Thumbelina's kind of bitchy, just between you and me. Anyway, I'd like to see anyone else do any better, so back off!"

  He walked on in silence for a little while. Applecore didn't desert him, or even seem to have taken much offense, so at last he hazarded a question. "What the hell difference does it make whether this guy knows we're on his land or not?"

  " 'Cause Larkspur's a Chokeweed, see? It would be one thing if he were a Creeper, or even a middle-of-the-road fella like Tansy, but I'm guessing every one of them Chokeweeds would be just as happy to slit your throat as look at you."

  Theo was completely baffled. "Larkspur? Chokeweed? Aren't those plants?" Applecore gave out a quite expressive noise of disgust. "Ah, well, I s'pose it's not your fault you don't know anything. Keep walking and I'll try to tell you a wee bit about things. But pay attention! Even if you do think I've been givin' you too much stick — and maybe I have, but then again maybe it's what you need — if I tell you to shut up, stop where you are and shut right up. This world is dangerous for you, boyo, and not just because the way you walk you're liable to trip over a branch and break your nose. Dangerous. Got it?"

  He nodded.

  "Right then," she said, rising into the warm afternoon air. "Get those feet movin'." It would have been hard to absorb so many details of Faerie history and culture if he had been sitting in a quiet classroom listening to a professor or reading it in a textbook. Hearing it from Applecore while staggering through the bizarre and distracting forest landscape was a bit like trying to take a complex course in political science from an immigrant taxi driver during the first half hour in a new city. And his instructor's style was not the most helpful, either: every time he felt he was beginning to see the light, Applecore would suddenly decide to fly ahead and scout the terrain, or would buzz
up in front of his face to comment adversely on his pace or attention.

  What he did manage to grasp went something like this: Fairies here came in all shapes and sizes, but the most powerful caste — the nobility, in a sense, or at least the upper class — seemed to favor roughly human shape and size, like the hunting party he had just seen. Like humans of a similar social position, they generally maintained residences in both the country and the City. (There seemed to be only one big city, as far as he could tell, apparently the same strange metropolis as described in his great-uncle's book.) The noble houses were all named after flowers, and these clans seemed to wield most of the control in Faerie.

  "They own the powerhouses, don't they?" was Applecore's slightly cryptic explanation of why that should be. The Flower-clans moved through a shifting and bewildering set of political alliances and conflicts, but the one that seemed most important for Theo to understand was the struggle between the Creepers and the Chokeweeds, since the subject of dispute was mortals. Applecore did not have a firm grasp on the entire history of the conflict, but as best Theo could make out, the Creepers believed in coexistence with human beings but the Chokeweeds were opposed.

  "Opposed?" he asked. "What does that mean?"

  "I suppose it means they want to kill them."

  "Kill them?" A chill ran through him. "Sweet Jesus, how many mortals have you got around here, anyway?" She wrinkled her little brow for a moment, thinking. "None that I know of, these days. 'Cept you."

  He swallowed. It wasn't easy. "But . . . but why would there be such a big deal made about killing mortals if there aren't any here?"

  " 'Cause it isn't just the ones here they're talking about killing, ya thick." It didn't sink in for a moment or two, but when it did, he stopped walking. "Hang on. Damn it, stop flying! Are you telling me there's a bunch of . . . of fairies who want to kill all the people in the world? The people where I live? Real people?"