And also, you must understand, this ritual of the Midsummer War had been a part of Phyllida’s life since her earliest years. She might not like seeing a young man die every seven years, any more than the shepherd likes selling his lambs for chops. But that was the natural order of things, and Phyllida told herself she’d be a terrible hypocrite if she suddenly protested against it just because two of the people she loved best in the world were involved. It was different—how could it not be different—but she made herself act as though it weren’t. It had been going on for centuries, and there was no stopping it unless the participants themselves chose to.
Already Phyllida was in a state of mourning, for one or for the other, and somehow that made it easier. If you see your friend struck down by a bolt of lightning, the grief is so sudden, so shocking, that it can cripple you. But if you see your friend fall sick, and nurse him through the weeks before his end, why, you’ve spent those weeks already crying for him, and when the end does come, the sadness is somehow quieter, and the rawness of the grief has already been covered by time.
To keep them occupied and oblivious, she gave Finn and Dickie permission to attend the Gladysmere Midsummer festival on their own. Finn strolled to the village in the afternoon, but didn’t see anything particularly interesting about a straw man covered in flowers, so he went back to the Rookery to amuse himself. It would just be another bonfire and a bunch of carousing peasants, he thought, neither of which held much appeal for him. Dickie likewise declined the offer, preferring to stay immersed in study with the Wyrm. If Phyllida hadn’t had so much on her mind, she might have worried about his being cooped up so unsociably, away from his friends and the fresh air. But as long as he was comfortably out of the way, she didn’t much care what he did on this day.
In the painstakingly planned ritual of the Midsummer War, the spectators—the Guardian and her associates, who served as official witnesses—were to arrive an hour before sunset. The reigning fairy court, the Seelie, would emerge from the Green Hill as the sun touched the horizon, and the challengers, the Host, would ride out of the woods at the moment the sun set. When the last rays hurtled through space, a few minutes after the sun himself had disappeared, the two champions would declare themselves, and the battle would commence. It would last until one of the humans had fallen, his blood shed on the Green Hill.
Meg emerged from her room late on Midsummer morning. She’d finally managed to snatch a few hours of sleep after the larks began their matins, but her eyes were red and her face was puffy from more than want of sleep. She walked despondently downstairs and found her siblings already gathered in the garden kitchen, talking furiously. Unnoticed, she stood in the doorway and silently despised Silly for being so callous, James for being so young, and Rowan for being such a fool, before she drifted away. She had virtually given up hope, and now only longed for it all to be over.
She wished she had someone to talk to, someone who might offer some words of comfort, or advice she’d be more willing to heed than Gul Ghillie’s or the Ashes’, who only told her again and again that she was powerless. But there was no one. She knew beyond a doubt that Finn was not one to offer her succor in this crisis. Dickie might have kind words, but when she sought him out in the library he looked so startled at the company that she could do no more than stammer a few senseless phrases and beat a retreat. Better, she thought, not to burden him with her troubles. Let him stay with his studies while she was left to deal with the painful reality. It never occurred to her that he might have uncovered something useful in the pages he perused.
Next she sought out Lemman, but the girl wouldn’t even stay in the same room with her. No doubt she knew it was Midsummer. Did she grieve for Bran? Meg wondered. Or did she only wish that she were back with her own people on this, one of the fairies’ most important days?
Eventually, in the afternoon, Meg went back to the kitchen, to find Rowan and his entourage gone. She forced herself to drink a glass of milk, which calmed her somewhat, then automatically poured a bowl for the brownie and left it on the counter. Much to her surprise, he appeared immediately and took a deep swig before settling down on a stool to wind a bundle of spun hemp into a ball.
“Here,” Meg said, “let me help you with that.” She took the bundle and began to untangle it as the brownie wound the free end with his long, clever fingers. There is a magic to working with fibers. It is said that weavers see visions, and spinners will go into trances if they spin too long. Meg realized that convincing the strands to untangle helped to untangle some of the turmoil in her own mind. She found herself telling her troubles to the brownie, who through the tale said nothing, only wound the cord with hypnotic concentration.
“And I can’t stop him,” she said at the end. “I’ve tried every way I can think of to change his mind, but he insists on going through with it.”
Brownies are as a rule taciturn fellows, and loath to speak. They only bother when they have something profound to say, so when they finally talk you’d be wise to pay them heed. The Rookery brownie said, “There’s never a man changed another man’s mind, nor one who controlled another’s actions. All ye have charge of is yerself. Yerself and no other.” And with that he tossed the now completed hemp ball into the air, and disappeared before it hit the ground.
“Fat lot of good that does me!” Meg called into the emptiness. When he started speaking, she’d felt a delicious glimmer of hope. Surely the brownie, one of the fairies, would know some way of keeping Rowan out of the Midsummer War. But no—just a trite homily on self-reliance. Disgusted, she decided to boycott the entire affair. She couldn’t bear to see Rowan fight and perhaps fall, so she would hide away until it was all over, and learn how fate unfolded once it was too late.
When the Ashes began to call for her as evening came creeping, Meg went to her favorite hideaway. Past the thick, luxurious furs of all the hunted animals, up the pitchy stairwell to her bird’s-eye view of the declining orange sun. They’d be leaving any moment: the terrible Ashes who had let this happen though they should have known better; poor, stupid little Silly, who knew nothing of death, and had no idea this was anything more than an elaborate game; James, poor James, who would probably be playing with grubs and spiders in the dirt while his brother was being slaughtered; and Rowan himself, thinking he was an unconquerable hero, whereas she knew full well he was no more than a skinny, foolish boy. Let them go! Her grief had turned almost to anger now, and she hated every one of them for being so blind, so idiotic. Let Rowan go off and get himself killed like the poor misguided fool that he was….
She burst into tears she’d thought were long spent, and ran to the parapet. There were the Ashes, and Silly with James in her arms. She called out to them, but they were already specks on the road and couldn’t hear her. Rowan! Had he left yet? No—he was supposed to go later, on his own, to the Green Hill. She had to find him. She didn’t hate him. She had to tell him how much she loved him, tell him to be careful, remind him not to drop his shield too much in an overhand strike, as he was so apt to do. She wouldn’t see him fight, but it became suddenly vital to see him before he left. He could not go off without her cautions, her advice, her love. It would be bad luck, tantamount to a curse.
“Oh, Rowan, where are you?” she whispered.
From her vantage point, she scanned the grounds, but Rowan was nowhere to be seen. In a frenzy she tore down the stairs, bruising her elbows on the cold stone walls. Furs tumbled to the floor as she pushed her way past, and when she struggled to be free of the fox stoles and beaver coats it seemed that some little animal sank its teeth into her shoulder. She wrenched free, and pulled with her a short cloak of deep scarlet with a collar of thick dark fur. She threw the cloak violently to the ground.
Two empty eyes looked forlornly up at her. Two limp paws trailed over the cloak, and a soft whiskered nose with a creamy chin rested against the ruby wool. It was an otter pelt, whole from tip to tail, fastened like an inconspicuous ruff around a forgotten cloa
k in an abandoned wardrobe. She told herself that it couldn’t be. Surely they had searched the entire house? But even inanimate, the otter fur was somehow unnaturally alive. The holes where its eyes had been pleaded with her, and she’d almost have sworn that there was warmth from within that empty pelt. Rowan was momentarily forgotten. With awe she picked up the otter skin and cradled it in her arms, then went to the dairy.
Meg Morgan charged through the dairy doors, where she was at once confronted by the solemn face and unyielding bulk of the dun cow. She blocked Meg’s path and refused to budge, looking at her in that particularly cowlike way that says, Sorry, but I really know best.
“You have to move!” Meg cried, shoving against the cow’s bulk with her shoulder. But the cow knew that Lemman could bear no company that night, and would protect her against all unwelcome intruders. “Let me by!” Meg said, and then revealed the otter skin she held crushed to her chest. “This is it—it’s been found at last!” The dun cow’s eyes grew even larger and wetter, and with a grunting little moo she stepped back a pace and made a gesture like a bow. Meg rushed past her to the dairy annex, where she found Lemman in the company of a black-and-white kitten. She was holding it up to a large vat of milk so it could drink, and the ripples from the kitten’s tongue were joined by others made by Lemman’s falling tears.
“Lemman!” Meg called.
With infinite slowness, as though her slight form was bent under a grave weight, Lemman turned. Her fair hair hung lank in her streaked face, but still she was lovely…all the more so for her wretched sorrow. Meg held the otter fur out to her.
It was as though an incandescence suffused the dark dairy, and it washed over them both. With steps at first halting and heavy, then lightening as she came nearer, Lemman approached Meg and her pelt. Their hands touched, and Meg felt a warmth course through her veins. Then, before her eyes, Lemman changed. For an instant she seemed still a girl, but how altered! Her hair was billowing and clean, bright as a field of mustard flowers. She stood more erect, so lissome that her limbs seemed to float up—gravity and weight were nothing to her. A radiance emanated from her center, and she seemed more beautiful (and yet less terrible) than the Seelie queen herself.
And then she was a girl no longer. She dived into the pelt as though she was putting on a shirt, and as the thick, silky fur fell over her body, it became a part of her. There was an instant when Meg saw an otter head with bright, dark eyes atop human shoulders, and then the transformation was complete. Standing at her feet on splayed webbed paws was a very large, very joyous otter, its sharp white teeth bared in something like a smile.
Have you ever met an otter? Otters—even ones who aren’t fairy girls in disguise—are the most carefree, happy beasts on this earth. Everything is play to them—the world was created solely for their enjoyment. The otter at Meg’s feet shook itself from snout to tail in one delicious shiver, then (as the kitten watched uncertainly from the floor) leaped lightly to the rim of the vat of milk. It wasn’t quite the quartz-clear waters of her natal river, but after years of being trapped in a human body, it was close enough. Lemman the otter dived into the vat with a milky white splash and swam in tight circles. She leaped and sported in her sleek, rediscovered body. At last, the first of her exuberance spent, she pulled herself out and jumped back to the dairy floor, shaking every last drop of milk from her coat (which the kitten, brave again, lapped up).
Meg, amazed, was laughing and crying all at once, and her vision was so blurred she missed the remarkable transformation back from otter into girl. When she could see clearly again, there was Lemman, barely recognizable as the poor pathetic prisoner who had worked the dairy. There was no denying she was a fairy now—no human ever looked the way she did. She might take human form, but no instant of carelessness would ever deprive her of her freedom again. Meg found herself somewhat in awe of Lemman now, and she bent her head and shifted from foot to foot nervously.
Lemman lifted Meg’s chin with one alabaster hand and looked sweetly upon her. When she spoke, her voice was low and melodious, like a flute in its deepest tones. “My little savior!” she said. “My little friend. Always you have been kind to me, and now you have done me the greatest kindness of all. You have set me free, Meg Morgan. What a human stole from me, a human has returned. But for that, I’d have…” And for a moment Lemman’s features shifted to a grisly mask of menace, and Meg fancied she saw sharp otter teeth between those human-seeming lips. It occurred to her that it was a very lucky thing Gus Leatherman was already dead, and beyond any vengeance.
Then Lemman’s face softened again, and she was once more benevolent and beautiful. “Now the humans have my gratitude, and you most of all, little one. Friend to the fairies, friend to me…as long as you live, I will do everything in my power to aid you. Anything, that is, which does not cost me my freedom again.” She gave a musical laugh. “What would you have, Meg Morgan? Riches? Your true love? A life unblemished by sickness or sorrow? Now that I have been restored, very little lies beyond my power.”
“Please,” Meg began, hardly tempted by those lofty offers, “my brother Rowan. He goes to the Midsummer War tonight.”
Lemman looked as though she was retrieving a distant memory. “Ah yes. Your brave brother, and poor Bran, who longs for what is lost to him.” All that had happened in her mortal years was rapidly fading away. Humans’ cares were not hers, their fears and sorrows did not touch her anymore. Bran had offered her a measure of solace in her torment, but now even his life meant very little to her. She was immortal again, inhuman, and as far removed from them as a chilly mountaintop. But kindness always has a stronger hold than cruelty, and though she would shortly forget whatever pain and indignities she might have suffered at the hands of Gus Leatherman, her jailer, she could still feel a vague interest in the fleeting lives of Meg and Bran and those they loved.
“Please…Lemman…” She did not know if she could still call her that, now that she’d reclaimed her glory. “Can you keep him from fighting? Is there any way you can keep him safe?”
“Child, you know the laws of the Midsummer War. He is bound to fight unless he refuses to come and a willing substitute takes his place. The Seelie queen’s power is such that he will never deny her. And who will stand in his place?”
“I will!” Meg said impulsively, though in truth the thought had been building within her ever since that night at the foot of the Green Hill when that little voice inside her cried, Me! Let it be me!
The epiphany was as shocking as diving into a glacial spring—her entire body seemed to gasp, and she trembled in astonishment even as her eyes opened with a startling new clarity. I want to be the Seelie champion, Meg thought. It was what she had wanted all along, not just selflessly, for Rowan, but selfishly, for herself.
The fairy looked down at her skeptically. “You would deny him his right, as the chosen champion, to fight, to kill or die, with honor?”
“I would protect him!” Meg said grandly.
“You would kill Bran, beloved of the fairies, your own ancestor?”
Meg gulped. She’d hardly considered that. At last she said, “If there is a hard thing to be done, I’d rather do it myself.”
Lemman smiled at her. “Yes…after all, you are a woman, however young. Would it stop you if I told you I believe your brother will prevail in this battle?”
“Do you know that for sure?”
“I know nothing for sure,” she said. “I do not know if the moon will rise tonight, or if the world will end tomorrow. But I believe your brother will take the field for the Seelie Court.”
“That’s not good enough. I have to protect him.” She squared her shoulders and said again, resolutely, “I will fight in his place. Can you help me?”
“Call it not help, child. Call it merely granting your wish. I fear I do you harm in this, but, yes, I will do as you ask. I will keep Rowan from the fighting, and let you take his place.”
“But can you really?” Meg asked, assailed b
y doubts now that there was finally hope. “He must refuse to come, of his own free will. How can you make him?”
Lemman laughed in a silvery lilt. “He is a man, and a child. If I care to, I can make him believe he’s a locust or a grandfather or a statue of stone! He will see what I tell him is there, believe whatever world I choose to create for him. Have no fear for that, Meg Morgan. The fairy glamour has never yet failed with any living man. Do you think the Seelie queen the only one to hold such power?” She closed her eyes briefly. “He is in his chambers, thinking great thoughts, with his sword and shield spread before him. I will go to him now, and tell him pretty things, and sing him secret songs, until his mind is not his own. I will tell him that the Midsummer War is over and won, that he has acquitted himself like a champion and now reaps a hero’s rewards. I cannot change his mind, but I can make him believe his duty is done. Thus, willingly, he will not go to his appointed place, and you will be there in his stead.”
As she preceded Meg to the Rookery, Lemman offered one final piece of advice: “The minions of the Black Prince have been watching you all for quite some time. It will not take them long to divine the change of champions, nor would it be past them to attempt some treachery. The battle will be dangerous, but your journey to the battlefield may be just as hazardous. Go with care.” And she went to find Rowan, to lull him with pretty lies and cozen him with unearned praise. Ere long, he found himself in a pleasant, proud stupor, and he lay content under her glamour without a thought of his obligations.
Meg ran to her own room to collect the Hunter’s Bow, and as she strapped the full quiver to her back, she found that the dull target tips had changed of their own volition to wicked wedge-shaped points. The Seelie relics knew that war was upon them, and though they’d thought to have no part in this fray, they now made themselves ready. She touched the tip of one lightly, and it pierced the pad of her finger. First blood, she thought as she sucked her fingertip. If they can do that to me with a touch, what will they do to Bran?
Under the Green Hill Page 20