It felt most peculiar to Fraina to be so far removed from the grass and the trees, with such clothing shielding her from the wind and the occasional spatter of rain from the gray clouds now scudding across the blue sky. These people were supposedly coming out here to enjoy the beauties of nature. But humans were very strange. The dryads had always known that.
Strange, but as it turned out, oddly passionate about preserving the oak grove.
“It’s an absolute disgrace,” the horse rider told Fraina. “There’s no good reason why the bypass can’t follow the old railway line on the other side of town. Except that the developers want to open up more land for housing.”
“Of course.” Fraina nodded sagely and hoped this nice woman in the green coat didn’t see how little she understood. She really must start listening to these radio voices of Mora’s.
“He’s perfectly safe,” the woman remarked. “If you want to pat him, go ahead. I can see you like horses.”
“I do.” Fraina smiled but couldn’t see how to stroke the glorious chestnut’s neck without getting too close to the iron rings and buckles of his harness. It was such a shame.
“We need to gather as much evidence as possible,” the woman continued briskly, “to put before the planning enquiry. Any evidence of special scientific interest hereabouts and as much proof as possible of the history of this right of way.” She gestured with her short whip, indicating the path through the fields.
“History?” Fraina knew that’s what the humans called everything that went before their own short lives.
“The more, the better.” The brisk woman gathered up her horse’s reins. “Well, we’d better get on. It’s a bit chilly to keep the old boy standing here. Will we see you at the town hall meeting opposing these wretched plans?”
“I’m not sure.” Fraina smiled apologetically.
“Do try and make the demo,” the woman urged as she rode off.
Fraina watched her go, still sad that she couldn’t have petted the horse. Then she hurried back to the grove. “Adleria?”
“Yes?” Even in these uncouth clothes, Adleria looked winsomely beautiful as she stepped out of her tree.
“Your curate, what was his name?”
“The Reverend Quintus Norris,” Adleria said promptly.
“Did he ever mention anything—” Fraina paused to recall the horsewoman’s words correctly, “—of special scientific interest in our grove?”
Adleria thought for a moment. “He was very taken with our slipper orchids and the fritillaries.”
“So was my soldier, and he wrote about them too.” Vaseya appeared beside them. “I’ve been talking to a gentleman who’s going to look for his diaries in the library at the university. Apparently that’s just the sort of evidence they need, to persuade the planning authorities to send the road another way.”
Fraina looked at her in awe.
Vaseya grinned. “No, I don’t know what all that means either. But you know how devoted the humans are to writing everything down.”
Fraina nodded. They had all done it; Adleria’s curate, Vaseya’s soldier, Prina’s poet. Perhaps it was because their lives were so fleeting. If they didn’t leave such records, who would know that they have ever lived?
Adleria had grasped the essential point. “So if we can show them where those plants still bloom, that should make a real difference?”
Vaseya nodded. “And the butterflies and just about anything else.”
“Quintus used to study at the university.” Adleria smiled mistily before looking bright-eyed at Vaseya. “Could your new friend look for his notebooks there?”
“I’ll suggest it.” Vaseya nodded.
“And they want to know how long the footpath has been here,” Fraina remembered. “Oh, by the way, does anyone know what a demo is? Because there’s going to be one, apparently.”
“We had better ask Mora,” Adleria said uncertainly. “Here she comes.”
“With a human.” Vaseya froze like a deer scenting trouble on the breeze.
“We should hide.” Fraina was abruptly convinced of it. “Let Mora handle him.”
Adleria’s chuckle was surprisingly earthy. “She seems to be doing that well enough.”
The others vanished and Fraina stepped inside her own tree. Feeling his unease, she did her best to soothe him as Mora and her companion reached the grove.
The two of them sat down, their backs against Mora’s tree. The young man was very good looking, Fraina observed. As handsome as any lover a dryad had ever brought to the grove.
Adleria slipped into Fraina’s tree, pressing close beside her. “Do you suppose they—”
“He certainly wants to.” Vaseya joined them too.
“By all means, step in.” Fraina’s half-hearted rebuke died on her lips as the young man wrapped his arms around Mora and kissed her long and deeply.
“There seems to be much less metal in clothes these days,” Vaseya observed.
But Mora still pulled abruptly away.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the young man said hastily. “I just—”
“It’s okay.” Mora’s smile reassured him with the allure that came as naturally to dryads as the leaves came to their trees. “But what have you got in your pocket?”
“What?” The young man hastily searched his coat. “Sorry, my penknife.” He held out a folded blade. “Did it—”
“Never mind.” Mora waved a hand. “Just keep it away from me. I don’t approve of metal.”
“You don’t approve?” The young man was bewildered.
“Metal, oil, mining. It all damages the earth.” Mora smiled, still more seductive.
“You’re really hardcore.” The young man seemed impressed. “Vegan?”
“What do you think?” Mora grinned.
“Vegan?” Vaseya looked at Fraina and Adleria, baffled.
“Hardcore?” Adleria was completely at a loss.
“I’ve no idea what he means.” Fraina wondered if Mora understood these strange words. Her smile was sweetly confident, as though she and the young man shared a secret. Of course that could just be Mora bluffing. She did seem very good at that.
“You say your group’s called The Friends of Aston Quercus—” the young man hesitated.
“Aston Quercus Medieval Village.” Mora pointed over the hill toward the ruined church. “It’s a very important site and really should be scheduled as a monument.”
“What is she talking about?” Adleria was still more bemused.
“History,” Fraina guessed promptly. “The humans want to know everything that’s gone on in this place.”
Vaseya looked askance at her. “We can hardly tell them what we know.”
“Quintus’s notebooks should help,” Adleria said hopefully.
“Perhaps they can find out something from the church’s graveyard. We must suggest that to the dog walkers and horse riders.” Though as Fraina recalled, the engraving on the few remaining stones was worn almost to oblivion. Still, these humans must have kept records.
Aston Quercus had been the name of the village where her loving swineherd had lived. All that remained of his cottage was one of the lumps and bumps rising in the field beyond the church, the long-dead hearths marked by flourishing clumps of nettles.
Adleria nudged her elbow. “She’s kissing him again.”
“We won’t let them cut down these trees,” the young man said breathlessly as he pulled reluctantly away some while later. “Even if we can’t get them to change the plans, we can set up a camp here, break their chainsaws with nails driven into the wood—”
“No!” The dryads’ collective gasp of horror sent Fraina’s tree into a frenzy of rustling leaves.
While the young man looked up, startled, Mora looked straight across at the three of them and scowled.
“Wow, I thought a branch was about to come down.” The young man tried to cover his embarrassment with a laugh.
Mora looked upwards. “Not today.�
�
“You really know about this place, don’t you?” The young man was intrigued.
“So will you get all your friends involved?” Mora shifted closer, pressing against him. “Here and in London? Can you get the story on the radio and in the papers? It really needs to go national.”
“We’ll see it go viral.” The young man promised her fervently. “Look, can I ring you? Email?”
Mora shook her head. “I don’t have a phone or a computer.”
“Totally off the grid?” The young man marveled. “Right. But when will I see you again?”
Mora leaned forward to kiss him. “At the demo. I could do an interview there?”
“OK. And after?” he asked hopefully.
“Maybe.” Mora’s smile promised untold delights.
“What are they talking about?” Vaseya wondered.
“I really have no idea,” Adleria said helplessly.
“Mora seems to know what she’s doing,” Fraina observed.
She never did find out exactly what a demo was. Mora did invite her, saying it was a gathering to oppose the planned road, but Fraina really couldn’t bring herself to mingle with so many humans at once.
So she sat in the crown of her tree and searched the radio voices just as Mora had taught her. Finally she lit upon Mora’s own voice, eloquent and impassioned. The dryad talked about the ancient woodlands so brutally stripped from the lands and how vital it was to save these last precious remnants.
Hearing Mora’s voice, all the trees shook their branches in fervent agreement. Their golden autumn leaves fell in thick showers. Looking down, Fraina saw all the other dryads in the grove looking up with desperate hope.
Mora’s young man came to the grove regularly after that. Her tree swiftly colored his leaves with autumn’s hues and shed them to make a soft bed in the sheltered hollow of his roots. Even though the weather was growing colder, the young man and Mora would make love swathed in long woolen coats, their ardor burning all the hotter for such constraints upon it.
One afternoon, while the two of them were occupied, Fraina slipped out of her tree and carefully borrowed the mass of folded sheets of paper which the young man had brought with him. Of course he couldn’t see her, so she had to make it look as though his paper was blowing away, not being carried by some unseen sprite.
She hurried to the far side of the grove and spread the sheets on the fading grass. Whatever was in here must be important. Mora was rewarding her young man with sensual enchantments that few living humans had ever enjoyed.
“What’s that?” Adleria appeared beside her.
“A newspaper.” Fraina was proud of knowing that now. “It’s a human thing.”
“Oh, poor thing.” Adleria stroked the white expanse sprinkled all over with blackness. “It was once a tree.”
“I know.” Fraina had just about got used to the lingering echoes of the paper’s mistreatment, pounded and crushed between great iron rollers. This was a far cry from the paper which the curate and the poet had used. “But see, it can tell us so many things.”
As she ran her fingertips across the words, the paper eagerly gave up their meaning.
“The Hawbury Bypass Campaign has successfully persuaded the County Council to adopt the western railway route rather than risk the considerable environmental damage that the Aston Quercus option would entail. The proposals for the establishment of the Aston Quercus Country Park have also won council endorsement and will be presented at a series of public consultations before the end of the year.”
“But what does that mean?” Vaseya had joined them.
“It means that we’re safe.” Fraina looked up at the oak trees and smiled.
Mora was late with her leaves again, when the spring arrived. No one said anything, not even Gamella.
TO SCRATCH AN ITCH
Avery Shade
Autumn Sky knew that there were three rules she must never forget. One, don’t tell anyone what her daddy was. Two, if she ever got an itch between her eyes, she couldn’t scratch it, but had to tell her parents right away. And three, always, always try to behave like any other normal little girl her age. The first was downright silly (why anyone would care that her daddy was a weatherman was beyond her), the second was pointless since she’d never had such an itch, but the third? Well, out of all their rules, Autumn thought the last was the most important … and the hardest to follow. Yes, her hair was a deep sort of chestnut red, yes, her eyes were a bright sky blue, and yes, she did tend to spend more time hopping about in the air than planted firmly on the ground, but she also thought that if her parents had really wanted her to act normal they should never have given her such a ridiculous name.
She thought their expectation that she live up to the boring simplicity of normalcy was a grievous edict when burdened with such an unusual name. More than once in the past she’d asked her parents why, if they wanted her to be normal, they had named her such an outlandish name anyway? It was their response to this that convinced Autumn she had no hope of ever being normal. Parents were supposed to know everything. But they never had a good answer for her—“your mother has a streak of the whimsy, pumpkin,” was not a good or logical answer when you were touting normalcy—which just convinced her that her parents must be abnormal too.
“Abnormality breeds abnormality, that’s what Aunt Elana always says.” Speaking to no one in particular, or perhaps more truthfully, no particular “person,” she bent down to brush her fingertips over the delicate petals of the newest member of her family. A gerbera daisy. Orange, with the sweetest fringe of rosy pink on the outer edges. The colors hadn’t reached their full potential yet, as the petals had just unfurled far enough to be considered blooming, but the kiss of sun-burnt pink already present carried with it the potential of a masterpiece.
She stepped back, softening her gaze so that she could take in the whole rooftop garden. The mix of colors, scents and shapes was a masterpiece all its own. Better than any of the stuffy portrait paintings her cousin Arleen could do.
Yes, her newest baby was going to fit in just perfectly.
She frowned, fingering the frilly fringe on the shirt her mother had made her wear to school that morning. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly normal to think of her plants in terms of “children” and “family” but that’s how she envisioned them and how she cared for them, too, so that’s what she would call them. Normalcy be boogered.
Boogered. That was normal. She’d heard James say it at school just last week and James was the epitome of a typical boy, least that’s what her second grade teacher Ms. Banks always said. Besides, lots of girls her age played family with things like stuffed animals, Barbies, or even little plastic spring-hinged balls called Zoobles. If they could pretend that such inanimate objects were “alive” and “real” then why couldn’t she attribute personalities to her plants?
Apples to oranges, Autumn. Our plants aren’t toys.
“True,” she agreed, nodding her head sagely.
That settled, she tucked her eyelet skirt up under the back of her knees and knelt down, humming softly as she lovingly topped off her potted children with fresh soil. Being up on the roof meant they were exposed to the elements that habitually erode away the top layers, so it was a constant battle to keep their delicate roots covered.
With the warm midafternoon sun beating down on the back of her head, she had gotten most of the way through the first two tiers when the strangest thing happened. And that was saying a lot for a kid who had trouble with normal to begin with.
Her scalp began to tingle.
Not the I-need-to-take-a-bath kind of itchy-tingle, nor even a someone’s-behind-me tingle (she got those all the time and this was most decidedly not it) but an obscure from-the-inside-out tingle that made her brain squirm as if being tickled in her skull and her hair threaten to leap right out of her scalp. Even though she knew the tingle was caused by neither of these, she found herself twisting around, searching the flat rooftop with her
gaze.
Nothing, of course, but the tickly itch was just as present as before, worse even as she stood staring past the lip of the roof. Sun, blue sky, city skyline—wait, was that a faint smudge? She squinted her eyes and sure enough, there, in the distance, marking the edge of the sky like the smear of charcoal on a painters sketch, were the most ominous bulk of clouds she’d ever spied.
She gasped, leaning forward instinctively to shield her prized gerbera daisy. If those clouds broke over the city, her daisy would never survive a storm such as that, nor would her violets, or her freshly sprouted sweet peas, or her lilies. And that wasn’t even to mention her young cherry tree, sitting proudly in its new pot, the first blush of blooms upon its limbs. The wind would tear the delicate blossoms right off and then … then… .
Tears began to leak from her eyes, running twin paths down each cheek. She knew she could bring in most of her plants. Her mother might sigh and huff and mutter as she helped Autumn drag them down to the apartment, but the cherry tree?
She looked at the proud little tree, measured how much it had grown since last summer. At least six inches, and that was only in height. In that pot? Even if both her and her mother lugged and tugged there was no way they could get it inside and down the stairs without risk. In her mind’s eye she saw it tumbling down the stairs, pot smashing, soil scattering, limbs snapping, blossoms and leaves shredding. Autumn wailed just imagining such a travesty.
Leaping up, she raced across the rooftop garden, throwing skinny arms around the navy-glaze pot. “Don’t worry. It’s not going to happen. I’ll save you.”
The cherry tree shivered, its little leaves rustling, the branches rattling, and the blossoms blushing as they bobbed in the still perfectly calm sunshine.
It had heard her!
A breeze swept up, grabbing one of Autumn’s chestnut curls, tossing it into her eyes.
Or maybe not.
The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity Page 8