“Oh, well, nothing much,” Finn stammered. The boy’s unblinking eyes made him uncomfortable. Did Gul know his secrets? Finn preferred to reveal things in his own good time. What was this boy about?
“You’ve watched the Asrai bathing in the willow’s shadows,” Gul said, his voice low and intense, not at all a little boy’s voice.
“You’ve seen the Glastig in her wild dance, heard the hammers of the Knockers as they mine for ore in the valleys. Things that are meant to be hidden are known to you, Finn Fachan.” He leaned close, conspiratorially. “You’ve been to the Green Hill—I know you have!” Finn couldn’t quite suppress a grin. He was proud of his accomplishments. “And you’ve seen the Seelie queen and all her court. Tell me…” He bent to whisper in Finn’s ear. “Tell me, in which eye did you put the ointment? With which eye did you witness the forbidden things?”
Finn did not see the danger. “My right eye,” he said, and was about to pull Gul to the side to talk about it further. Here was a confidant at last. Gul might know the way to the Green Hill. Maybe he would lead him back.
Gul laughed, a wild sound that made Finn tremble. Though he was still a boy in appearance, it suddenly seemed as if there was something unnatural about Gul Ghillie. He tossed the ring he played with high in the air, and all eyes followed it. Then, shifting the sharpened hazel twig in his hand, he lunged forward. Swifter than an adder’s strike, keener than an adder’s tooth, the hazel point struck home in Finn’s right eye. He fell back, clutching his face and screaming as if he were dying.
“That eye shall never see again,” Gul Ghillie said. “Count yourself fortunate I didn’t take both.” With that he disappeared.
Everyone’s thoughts were still with Bran, and I’m afraid Finn didn’t get all the sympathy he deserved (however much that was). But, obedient to triage, they turned from the stable Bran to the screaming Finn and comforted him as best they could. Phyllida brewed him a draught from a dark-leafed shrub that grew in one shadowy corner of the herb garden, and though he choked at its bitterness, it seemed to quiet him and dull the pain of his blinding. They put him to bed, then refocused their attention on Bran, bringing him into the Rookery and helping him take a few swallows of rich beef broth.
Meg was the only one who stayed at Finn’s bedside. Part of her felt he had gotten what was coming to him—for which she was immediately ashamed of herself. No spying, no trickery should bring such a punishment. What harm had he done to the fairies? She herself had brought him to the Green Hill. Why wasn’t she punished? Her sense of fairness rebelled, and her humanity recoiled from the fairy way of justice.
But whereas her ancestress Chlorinda had run in fear from all this, it filled Meg with a sense of purpose. Here was poor Finn (for whom, as you know, she’d always harbored a soft spot) lying injured only because he was seduced by the fairy glamour and didn’t know enough to keep himself safe. For all his cleverness, he didn’t really understand the fairies. Well, Meg thought she understood them by now. She could have kept Finn from harm. She had come to appreciate Phyllida’s role, the good she must do in mediating between the foolishness and ambition of humans and the mercurial nature of the fairies. It seemed a worthy profession, a noble calling.
Then such thoughts vanished in the general ickiness of eye injuries, and she sank to a back corner as the doctor, fetched at last from the next village beyond Gladysmere, tended Finn’s eye. Very lucky, the doctor said, that the stick hadn’t pierced through to his brain. Gul Ghillie’s vengeance had been precise—Finn’s right eye was blind, but no more damage was done.
The next morning when he awoke, full of the strange dreams Phyllida’s potion had brought him along with oblivion, Finn examined himself in the mirror. He couldn’t quite bear to look at the actual injury, but he rather fancied himself in the dashing black silk eyepatch Phyllida had sewn for him overnight.
It is odd, though, how ineffective most punishments are. They are meant, I suppose, to instill a sense of remorse in the heart of the wrongdoer…but do they ever? Does the incarcerated felon ever truly regret his actions, or does he only regret being caught? The loss of his eye taught Finn nothing, save perhaps to be more cautious, more crafty. He was not sorry that he had seen the Green Hill, only that he’d been found out. As his left eye stared at his new face, his sightless right eye still beheld the Seelie queen and her court, and the ambiguous wonders that lay hidden in the fairy home under the Green Hill.
A Letter
Dear Mommy,
That part was easy. Meg, alone in her bedroom, chewed on her pen and gazed out the window, looking for words. There were Rowan and Silly, hacking gleefully at each other with sticks, now that their Seelie weapons were gone.
Mommy, I fought in a war. She crossed the line out.
Bran watched the warlike antics from a lawn chair. Phyllida tempted him with tea and biscuits, but he was itching to be up and at work again, and sometimes had to be physically restrained.
Mommy, I killed a man. But it’s okay, he’s alive again. With a rueful little laugh, she drew a heavy mark through that sentence, too.
Finn sat by himself, scowling at everyone.
Finn had his eye put out by a fairy. Yes, Mommy, a fairy. She’ll think I’m mad, Meg mused, and crossed that out as well. There had never been anything she couldn’t tell her mother, and she ached to relieve her own burden by sharing it. Somehow, the words would not come.
Her eyes traveled away from her family, out to the deep forest, where she could just see the emerald crest of the Green Hill. Suddenly she bent and scribbled on a fresh page.
Oh, Mommy, I wish you were here. No, I don’t. If you were here you would have stopped me…but it doesn’t matter. It’s done now. If you could only see for yourself how wonderful it all is. Wonderful and terrible. I never knew…. I wish I was home, but I wish I never had to leave the Rookery. Oh, Mommy, I miss you!
She knew it was vague and troubling, but she could write nothing better. She sealed it quickly and ran downstairs to drop it on the silver tray of outgoing letters.
“Come on, Meg,” Dickie called. “Lysander’s gonna teach us cricket.”
She played, and for a time forgot her worries, while from the shrubbery fairy eyes watched her and spoke in hushed tones of the changes one little girl had wrought.
“The world,” Gul Ghillie said, “will never be the same.”
“Never was the same,” the brownie said cryptically, and spat on the ground.
Three weeks later, Meg’s letter made it across the Atlantic, and Glynnis Morgan, reading it, murmured, “Oh dear…I wonder if I should bring them home.”
But by then, it was already too late.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my agent, Shawna McCarthy, who won me over by comparing my writing to that of E. Nesbit and C. S. Lewis and (after my head returned to normal size) helped my career take off with her amazing talent. You are reading this book thanks to my wonderful editor, Reka Simonsen, to whom I owe the deepest gratitude.
My sister, Marla Jane Sullivan, gave me my first book about fairies—real fairies—and so this book is probably her fault. She’s far more brilliant than I am, and will probably become a great novelist now, just to remind me of that fact. My father, John B. Sullivan, saw to it that I had the best education, bits and pieces of which have been remarkably useful. Thanks, Dad. Incidentally, this book had its first germ in Alison Lurie’s folklore class at Cornell. Thanks also to my husband, Andy DeLay, a NASCAR radio talk-show host who, for my sake, tries very hard to believe in fairies.
My beloved mother, to whom this book is dedicated, deserves all my love and gratitude, because she supported ne’er-do-well me when I quit one of my many jobs and devoted myself to writing this book.
And most of all I must thank my best little friend, Buster, Bubeleh, Robbie.
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Text copyright © 2010 by Laura L. Sullivan
Illustrations copyright © 2010 by David Wyatt
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sullivan, Laura L.
Under the green hill / Laura L. Sullivan.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: While staying with distant relatives in England, Americans Rowan, Meg, Silly, and James Morgan, with their neighbors
Dickie Rhys and Finn Fachan, learn that one of them must fight to the death in the Midsummer War required by the local fairies.
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8984-4
[1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Fairies—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4. Superstition—Fiction. 5. England—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S9527Und 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2009050772
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