It was a long day of walking, and Summer was already tired. She had walked for most of the night on a very few hours of sleep and then walked most of the day as well.
She had also been briefly frightened out of her wits. Unless you have ever been really truly terrified, you cannot know how exhausting that is. For a brief period, you are extremely awake and tense and terrified, but afterwards, when all the adrenaline wears off, you feel you could sleep for a week without stopping.
What kept Summer plodding along the dusty road after Reginald was hope that his father, Lord Almondgrove, would be a real honest-to-god grown-up.
Grown-ups are strange creatures, and many of them are useless, but even the worst of them has authority. Summer’s second grade teacher had been a small fluttery woman with watery eyes, but when she cleared her throat and gave the class a stern look, everybody sat down in their desks and opened their books and stopped throwing spit wads. Summer’s face had felt hot, even though she’d been sitting at her desk the whole time and hadn’t done anything wrong.
Summer hoped that Lord Almondgrove would have that same authority. Maybe he could get things sorted out, like a teacher or a principal. If there were police in this world, maybe he could call them and explain about Grub and the tracker and that Summer hadn’t done something wrong. A grown-up could explain things like that and have the police listen, whereas if you were a child, even if you tried very hard to speak slowly and clearly, grown-ups tended to steam-roll over the top of you (or worse, smile and tell you what a vivid imagination you had. Summer did indeed have a vivid imagination, but she didn’t know what bearing that had on anything.).
Reginald alighted on top of a fence post and shook out his wings. He proceeded in a series of short flights, darting this way and that, always coming back to Summer and the valet-flock.
Although Reginald clearly wasn’t a child, he also wasn’t quite a grown-up as Summer understood it. Summer was pretty sure that real grown-ups weren’t supposed to run away into the country to hide instead of paying their bills.
It was awkward that the weasel didn’t seem to like him, though. Summer felt embarrassed. She wanted both her new friends to get along, so she cringed a little when Reginald said something particularly foolish, and cringed again when the weasel muttered something cutting in reply.
She did like the bird, though, no matter what the weasel thought. It was hard not to like someone so cheerful and with such hopeful goals.
“Dancing,” he said, hopping along beside her in the late afternoon. “I was practicing my dancing for the Grand Assembly. I shall take the claw of Miss Merope, of the Lankyshire Bee-Eaters, and we shall stand up together for the country dance and the aerial waltz.” He sighed and clacked his beak. “Not that I wouldn’t dance the sarabande and the cotillion and the reel with her as well, but her chaperones will not let her stand up with a single gentlebird for more than two dances. It wouldn’t be proper, not unless they were betrothed.”
“You must like her,” said Summer.
“Oh, I’m passionately in love with her, of course,” said Reginald, as if commenting on the weather. “Everyone is. She goes everywhere in the best company and has fans made of sugar-spider silk. Her throat is as golden as the sun and her eyes are the color of pomegranates and her feathers are as green as—well, as a deuced green thing, I don’t know, something very green anyway.”
“Grass?” offered Summer.
“Oh, much greener than that. You wouldn’t think much of grass after you’d seen Miss Merope.”
“Peas?”
Reginald thought about this one. “Y-e-s,” he said slowly, drawing out each syllable. “I suppose that’s accurate. Not very poetical, though, is it? If you were writing an ode to her beauty, you wouldn’t want to compare her to peas. She’d likely get offended.” He considered. “Although it does rhyme with ‘bees.’ I tried to write her a poem where I compared her feathers to emeralds, but hardly anything rhymes with emeralds. Had to use ‘them scalds’ and then I had to figure out who was being scalded, and by the end I had an army storming the castle and having boiling oil dumped on them. Miss Merope said it wasn’t romantic and threw it away.” He sighed.
Summer, for no particular reason, was starting to dislike the absent Miss Merope.
The fields were giving way to forests, like the one that Summer had seen from the cliff. At first it was just a few copses of trees, and then the copses got larger and larger and joined together, and soon they were walking through the woods and it was getting dark under the trees. The road led across a number of small streams, and Summer’s feet went clomp clomp clomp on the wooden boards of the bridges.
The valet birds called a halt by virtue of flying off the road and dropping the packs under a likely set of trees.
“Oh!” said Summer. “Will we be safe here?” She looked around. There might be wolves in the woods, or cougars. Summer was very well read and knew that wolves hardly ever attack humans, but cougars are another matter entirely.
“Sure,” said Reginald. “The flock’ll keep watch, turn and turnabout, and we’ll have a nice fire. Nothing to worry about.”
“What about Grub and the Houndbreaker?” asked the weasel, stirring out of Summer’s pocket for the first time in hours. “They might come back this way looking for us.”
“Oh,” said Reginald, looking worried. “Hadn’t thought of that.” He looked to the valet-birds.
The flock twittered and conversed among themselves, then picked up the packs again. They led the way back down the road a few hundred yards, to the last small stream they had passed, and then flew out over the water.
“Ah,” said the weasel, satisfied. “They’ve got some sense, anyhow. We’re to break our trail so they can’t track us.”
Summer raised her eyebrows.
“Water won’t hold a smell,” the weasel explained. “If you take off your shoes and wade down it, they won’t know where you’ve gone or how far.”
So Summer stripped off her shoes and socks and stuck her feet in the water. It was surprisingly cold for being so near a desert, but her feet were hot and throbbing and the water felt good.
Her mother would never have let her walk on the rocks—they were so slimy with waterweed that she’d likely fall and break her neck, or catch some horrible disease—but Summer went slithering and slipping and sliding over the rocks and didn’t break anything. (She supposed she’d simply have to wait and see on the diseases.)
When the bridge had vanished around a bend in the stream, the valet birds led her up the bank and into a mossy clearing in the woods. They dropped the pack and several of them began hopping about gathering sticks and bits of pine needle.
Summer flopped down and began massaging her abused toes. They looked red and they ached when she wiggled them, but she didn’t seem to have any blisters. By the time it occurred to her to offer to help, the valet-birds had built a small, tidy fire in the middle of the clearing. Several of them helped Reginald out of his waistcoat and into another one, which had candy-red stripes.
One of the birds landed on her shoulder and looked at her very seriously out of one tiny black eye.
“Um?” said Summer.
“Aren’t you going to dress for dinner?” asked Reginald.
“I haven’t got anything else,” said Summer, looking down at herself. Her jeans still looked okay—jeans tend not to show dirt unless you’ve been wallowing around in mud—but her t-shirt looked like she’d slept in it, then sweated in it, then climbed into a cheese in it, then walked down a very dusty road and sweated some more.
Reginald clapped a claw to his beak. “Of course! I’m a wretch. Forget I mentioned it. Not important at all.”
The valet-bird turned its head so it could stare at her out of the other tiny black eye. Apparently it did not feel the same way.
“I could wear the blanket…” said Summer, picking at the blanket that the shapechanger sisters had given her. It did not show the dirt nearly so badly, perhaps bec
ause it came from the desert and was the color of dust already.
“They’d prefer it,” said Reginald. “Sorry. Don’t think anything of it. Many’s the time I’ve sat down to dinner in all my dust, and nobody minding but Great-Aunt Murgatroyd, and she’s a regular Tartar.”
Three more valet-birds landed on Summer’s head, and with tugs and chirps, pulled her behind a tree. She managed to get her t-shirt over her head and the blanket back on, despite their help.
Two of the birds grabbed the shirt and flew toward the stream, joined by another with a scrub brush the size of a pack of gum. The third settled on Summer’s shoulder and began futilely trying to groom down her hair.
Summer giggled. The tiny beak against her scalp didn’t hurt, but it certainly tickled. (Her hair tended to eat hairbrushes, even on days when a weasel hadn't been nesting in it. "Just like your father's," her mother had said once, so Summer hadn't asked about it again.)
Any dismay she’d felt at being dusty and dirty rapidly vanished when she stepped out from behind the tree to see the dinner set out for them. Apparently bread and cheese was fine for lunch, but the valet-birds felt that dinner was a special occasion. There was a white linen tablecloth laid over a stone, thin metal goblets full of spring water, and little bone china plates. There was even a little saucer for the weasel.
“Cat-lap,” muttered Reginald, hooking his beak over the goblet and taking a sip. “Can’t offer you much better—didn’t pack any ratafia or negus, not thinking, you understand, that I’d be encountering a little chit fresh out of the nursery here in the wilds—not that I’m not glad of your company! Not at all!” He took another sip. “But it’s a shockingly mean drink for a proper dinner.”
“I don’t mind at all,” said Summer. “I’ve never had—err—ratafia?”
“You won’t like it,” said Reginald. “Shocking stuff. All the ladies drink it, but I’m sure I don’t know why.”
The valet-birds brought out a little tin of ham and another little tin of some kind of meat paste, and little squares of bread and cheese. One roasted slices of apples on a stick over the fire. Two birds flew in from the woods with blackberries in their claws—only a few, but enough to make a lovely dessert.
This was the sort of adventuring that Summer could get behind whole-heartedly.
“We’ll have a proper feast at Almondgrove Manor,” said Reginald. “Roasted fish and Beef Arvington and potatoes as big as your head and a hundred sauces and lobsters and stuffed eggs—”
“You eat eggs?” asked Summer, a bit shocked.
“Not from anyone we know,” said Reginald. “Chicken eggs, same as anybody. Chickens aren’t much for conversation, you understand, and the eggs wouldn’t hatch anyway. Not like going into somebody’s nest and stealing a proper egg. They’ll have you up on charges for that, or someone’ll call you out before the Dawn Chorus, and heaven help you.”
The weasel muttered something into his tinned ham.
After dinner, alas, things were not quite so pleasant. While the valet-birds had stocked Reginald’s pack with many good things to eat (and a spare waistcoat) they had not included any bedding. Reginald simply hopped to a low branch and put a wing over his head.
Summer was left to curl up between the roots of a tree (which despite the moss was not very pleasant) and pull the blanket around herself. She had to take off the cheese-sword so it didn’t dig into her ribs. The valet-birds twittered and hopped around her, apparently quite upset that they could not make her any more comfortable.
Eventually, after much discussion, four of them picked up the corners of the linen tablecloth and dropped it across her shoulders.
Summer smiled a little, touched, and was asleep before the birds had finished twittering.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Poets and even ordinary people make much of dew. They point to it on grass and sing its praises on spiderwebs. Words like “silver” and “gossamer” and “a thousand glittering diamonds” are thrown about whenever dew comes up, often by people who should know better.
Occasionally, they will even go so far as to speak of “nymph tears sparkling on the grass” or some such. When it has gotten to this stage, they generally need to be sat down and given a stern talking-to, and perhaps a settling cup of tea.
What these people forget, or never knew, is that dew is real and solid and if you are sleeping out of doors, you can go to bed warm and dry and wake up cold and soaking wet and not at all inclined to admire the sparkling of a thousand dewy diamonds.
The only good thing about waking up cold and soaking wet is that you don’t much feel like going back to sleep.
Summer sat up. Her neck hurt where it had been wedged on the tree root and her feet hurt and her calves hurt and the heavy muscles on top of her thighs hurt from nearly two days of walking.
If she had been at home, she would have tried to convince her mother that she was feeling much too miserable to go to school. But she wasn’t at home, and two of the little valet-birds were pressing a mug of hot tea into her hands.
“I’m cold,” she grumbled. “And my feet hurt.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised,” said Reginald cheerfully. “You go walking about on them instead of flying.”
She tried again. “I may die.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Nowhere near sticking your spoon in the wall just yet.”
When you are looking to have a good whine, this sort of response is unsatisfactory. She tried the weasel instead, but he gave her a weaselly look and said, “What do you expect me to do about it?” so she stopped and drank the tea instead.
She thought, down in her very private heart of hearts, that she wanted to go home.
She felt immediately guilty for thinking it. In books, nobody who found themselves in a fantasy world ever wanted to go home. (Well, nobody but Eustace Clarence Scrubb, in Narnia, and you weren’t supposed to agree with him.)
She was definitely not feeling grateful enough for being on a superb magical adventure. She told herself this sternly several times and then wanted to cry, because it doesn’t help to yell at people who are cold and wet, even when the person yelling at you is you.
But the fire was warm, and the valet-birds built it up until it was warmer yet, and Summer crouched down next to it and felt the heat on her face.
There were scones. They were rather hard, but they tasted good. Summer began to feel a bit better. Her shirt was dry and clean (if smelling a little of campfires) and putting it on made her feel better still, and then the valet-birds began ferrying more blackberries in from a distant bush, and she started to think that perhaps she didn’t want to go home quite yet after all.
After all, when you go home in the books, sometimes they make you forget. And I don’t want to forget this.
She made sure to say, “Thank you,” to each valet-bird, as it perched on her finger and dropped a berry into the palm of her hand. She felt very grown-up saying it, and each bird dipped its beak in acknowledgement and chirped before it flew away.
The forest was different this morning. Fog puddled in the hollows and lay like milk across the road. Moisture dripped off the trees, onto the pine needles and the tree roots and the back of Summer’s neck.
They walked for most of the morning. After an hour, Summer took off the blanket and looped it over her arm. The air was cool and tingly, but walking had warmed her up, and even her sore feet didn’t feel quite so sore anymore.
The valet-birds had spent part of the night redesigning her shoelace scabbard for the cheese-sword. The knots were much neater now and it didn’t bang into her thigh when she walked.
It was getting on time to stop for lunch when the valet-birds suddenly halted and the weasel said, “Hsst!”
Summer tensed. Was it Grub again?
“Eh?” said Reginald, who had been practicing his aerial waltz.
“Something up there, to the left,” said the weasel. “Big. And jangling like metal.”
“Elk?” asked Reginald. “We
do get ‘em up here.”
The weasel shook his head. “Not stomping. Padding. But not very far.”
Reginald and Summer looked at each other helplessly. Summer put her hand on the hilt of the cheese-sword.
“Well,” said Reginald. “No sense being pudding-hearted!” He took to the air and flew forward determinedly.
Summer took a deep breath. It made sense for Reginald to go ahead—he could fly, after all—but he also barely came up to her waist and he wasn’t terribly sensible. She hurried after him.
Reginald fluttered down to the ground. He stopped with his beak open and his wings half-extended in surprise.
It was a wolf.
When Summer had been nine years old, her mother took her to the zoo. It was a very good zoo, and the animals were behind deep moats and high fences, so there was no chance that they would escape and rampage through the crowd. Summer had been enchanted by the spotted skunk and the clowning of the otters and the comical faces of the puffins—but the wolves and lions and bears had disappointed her.
The problem was that they were so small.
The black bears weren’t much bigger than humans. The lions looked nothing like Aslan. Their hips and shoulders were so narrow that you couldn’t imagine riding one anyway.
And pictures in books always showed wolves as huge, but the wolves in their enclosure looked like rather large dogs, no bigger than Buddy the chocolate Lab down the street. When you looked at these wolves, sleeping contentedly on their rocks, you could believe the signs that said that wolves were shy and avoided people.
Summer had gone home, very thoughtful, and put her book with Little Red Riding Hood in it behind some others on the shelf. She felt embarrassed for the story.
And now here she was, in a fairy tale world. If she made it home, Summer thought that perhaps she would pull the book out again, because here was a wolf worthy of the name.
It was enormous. It was easily the size of a pony, with paws like dinner plates and a skull as broad as a frying pan. It met her eyes with icy green ones, and it did not look shy or evasive at all.
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