by Kim M Watt
“As it happens,” Beaufort said, “we were looking for you. Have you seen much going on at the farm?”
The dryad was hunting for more wood lice. “Not a lot. They put some machines about the place, but didn’t do anything much with them. A bit of digging, all well away from the trees.”
Mortimer swallowed a sigh. It really was hard to get a dryad to worry about anything other than trees.
“And you mentioned there were other empty farms to Gilbert?”
“Gilbert?” The dryad had given up on her chest moss and was inspecting the tree.
“The young dragon with the piercings.”
“Oh yes. No, those farms are leaving the trees alone, too.”
“Well, that is good news,” Beaufort said. “We shall endeavour to keep it that way.”
The dryad stared at him, chewing something that crunched unpleasantly. “Yeah,” she said. “Good-oh.” And then she was gone, the way dryads do. Not vanishing like a cat, but simply stopping being there, so one was never quite sure if they had been there at all, or if it was just a trick of light and shadow and leaves.
Mortimer didn’t think she’d been particularly helpful, but Beaufort nodded to himself, and said, “Come along, then. We’ll head straight across the fields to the house. It’s still a bit too light to risk flying.”
Mortimer sighed. It was a bit too light to be running about the fields, too, but what else were they going to do? Leave the W.I. to it?
Amelia scratched her cheek and said, “Where is Gilbert?”
“Gilbert?” Mortimer called, but not too loudly. There could still be ramblers about the place. There was no reply, just the quiet noises of the woods, leaves against leaves and small lives playing out old dramas.
“Oh dear,” Beaufort said, not sounding very surprised.
“He can’t just be gone,” Amelia said. “He wouldn’t! Well, he might, but this whole farm deal was kind of his thing. Why would he run off now?”
Mortimer had a horrible feeling he might know why, but he wasn’t about to say. He might be wrong, and anyway, the other two knew Gilbert just as well as he did. They’d probably already guessed what a young, protest-minded dragon would do when he didn’t feel things were happening fast enough.
“Well,” Beaufort said. “I rather think we shall just have to manage without him.”
“He’s not even a toadstool,” Amelia muttered, trotting after the High Lord. “He’s a sneaky little earwig.”
Mortimer followed, thinking that he wouldn’t mind sneaking off, as far as that went. But he couldn’t. Not with the W.I. out there. Not when Alice had been kidnapped and Miriam had been in a car crash. What hideous sort of people would do something like that?
Like it or not, they weren’t the sort of people you sneaked away from. They were the sort of people you sneaked up on.
They slipped across the empty road and over the drystone wall on the other side, landing softly in the long grass and padding in the direction of the farmhouse. Mortimer felt horribly exposed. Even with the sun dipped below the hills, the sky was still high and pale above them, and every dimly seen bird made him want to cower down among the wildflowers. The grass was strangely long in the absence of livestock, grown high and full of blooms that were still attended by the odd sleepy bee. The green parted around the dragons like a viscous sea, and they left trails of crushed and fragrant vegetation behind them.
It was quiet, too, without the bleating and rumble of the sheep, the clatter of their hooves on stone. A bird cried somewhere, and Mortimer shivered hard enough to make his scales clatter. He really wasn’t cut out for this sort of adventuring and intrigue. What if the whole place was protected by armed men? What if they rushed out shooting? Were dragon scales resistant to bullets? He didn’t imagine anyone had ever found out. And what if they had tasers? Or just ran them down with the earthmoving machines? He supposed they could take flight if it came to that, but what if the men shot holes in their wings? And who would be left to look after the W.I. then? It could happen!
He almost yelped as Beaufort stopped in front of him, raising his nose over the next wall to check the field beyond. “All clear,” the High Lord said. “And I can see the van. They’ve stopped for the gate.”
“They’re going to get there before us if we keep going this slowly,” Amelia said.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Beaufort scrambled over the wall and padded off into the next field, and the two younger dragons followed him. The grass wasn’t as long in this field, soft under his paws, and Mortimer examined it as he walked.
“Has this been cut?” he asked.
Beaufort and Amelia looked at him, then at their feet. “I think you might be right, lad,” the High Lord said after a moment. “How curious!”
“You think that’s curious,” Amelia said. “Look.”
The followed her pointing paw down the length of the field, to where the earth had been gouged and torn, piled up in a dark raw wound. A bright red digger had its front wheels on the piled dirt, like a victorious hunter. Mortimer ducked, then realised there was no one there. They looked at each other, then trotted down the field. The digger and its earth sat unmoving, an odd little still life, and they sat in front of it for a moment. One of the drystone walls had been knocked over, the rocks piled into a messy cairn as well as scattered on the cropped grass. But the scatter was wrong – there was no crushed grass to mark the path of the rolling rocks, and they were placed in a pattern that wasn’t nature’s. Stones just didn’t fall so tidily.
“This is strange,” Amelia said. “What’re they doing?”
Beaufort put his head on one side. “Do you think it’s art?”
“It kind of feels like it,” Mortimer said. “But why kick everyone off a farm to make art?”
“Maybe it was the farmers’,” Amelia suggested.
“No, it’s new,” Beaufort said, and got up. “Come on. They really will be getting away on us now.” He trotted through the broken wall and padded down the gentle slope of the fields to the next gate, and, with a final dubious glance at the digger, Mortimer followed him.
There was another machine in the middle of the next field, the grass here left long so it half-obscured the big tyres and whispered against the thing’s glossy body. There was a faint path to mark where it had been driven onto the field, the long grasses already recovering.
“Humans are so weird,” Amelia whispered.
“Not all of them,” Mortimer felt obliged to point out.
“The ones who did this are.”
That he couldn’t argue with.
Beaufort skirted the machine and waded through the grass to the next gate, standing on his hind legs with his front paws on the heavy wooden crossbars. “Oh dear,” he said.
“Oh dear?” Mortimer echoed, looking up from the machine. “Oh dear? What? What’s oh dear?” He broke into a trot.
“Oh dear,” Amelia agreed. She’d followed Beaufort, and had scrambled up a couple of rungs of the gate to see over the top.
“What? What’re you talking about?” Mortimer could hear panic in his voice, and swallowed hard. Both of them were just standing there, which seemed to indicate they hadn’t spotted men waving shotguns or enraged tractors charging toward them across the next field. He took a deep breath and scrambled up next to Amelia as the gate groaned warningly. “What?”
“They seem to be stuck.” Beaufort nodded at the lane, downhill from their vantage point and off to the right of the fields and the farmhouse ahead. It had rained since they’d come up in Alice’s SUV, and her car had been much better equipped – and less heavily loaded – than the ancient van. It had come to a standstill in the centre of the path, and as they watched the engine roared, and with a lurch it slewed sideways and buried its nose in the bank.
“We could help,” Amelia said.
“Too risky.” Beaufort folded one front paw over the other, watching with interest. Rob had run around to the back and opened the rear doors, and every
one was spilling out, milling about excitedly. They seemed to have armed themselves with various garden implements and branches, and Angelus was bounding about the place, barking in delight. Pearl’s Labrador wandered a little further down the path and flopped down on her belly, promptly falling asleep. Primrose was yapping steadily. “They may have lost the element of surprise.”
There was a lot of arm-waving going on, and people trying to shush the dogs, then everyone huddled behind the van. There was a pause, then the engine revved and the mass of people surged forward. Three promptly vanished onto the ground, and the van’s wheels spun and spat dirt at everyone else. Amelia snorted laughter.
“Oh dear,” Beaufort said, and there was a tremble in his voice. “That’s not good, is it?”
The van roared again and lurched forward, sending four more people stumbling to their knees, then stalled and settled further into the mud. One of the figures hauled itself out of the muck and started waving furiously, and now Mortimer could catch scraps of argument as their voices started to rise.
“—couldn’t organise … ridiculous—”
“Surprise? What surprise?”
“Anarchists? More like—”
“—waste of—”
One of the larger figures, probably Gert judging by the fact she was wearing a mud-caked sundress, lunged at a pot-bellied figure that could only be Rob and chased him around the van, and Mortimer surprised himself with a snort of laughter. It just bubbled up out of nowhere, overtaking his worry for Alice and the W.I. in general, and he clasped his paws over his snout in horror. Beaufort glanced at him, the corners of his mouth twitching to expose old yellow fangs.
“Seriously. Humans,” Amelia said in a tone of wonder, and the terrible hilarity rose like a wave. Mortimer had to drop to the ground and shove his nose into a tussock to keep from bursting out laughing.
“Are you alright there, lad?” Beaufort asked, but his voice was shaking with half-contained laughter, and Mortimer gave a guffaw that scared a small family of shrews out of the tussock and sent them bolting across the field. Somehow that was even funnier than the mud-caked W.I., and Mortimer squeezed his eyes shut, horrified by his own laughter and yet unable to stop.
Amelia looked down at him and added, “And you’re pretty weird too,” and that set Beaufort laughing so much he had to sit down.
“They’ve given up,” Amelia announced.
Mortimer sniffled and sat up, his cheeks hot and steaming with laughter tears. Something else seemed to have been pushed out with the tears, too, some desperate tightness lifted from his chest. The long dusk looked golden rather than threatening. “What’re they doing?”
“Heading this way.” She jumped off the gate. “What do we do?”
“We wait,” Beaufort said. “But come away from there.” He loped toward the far corner of the field and they ran after him, hunkering down in the long grass just as Barry came vaulting over the fence in purple cycling shorts and nothing else. He didn’t spot them, just kept running, grabbing the top of the gate at the bottom of the field and flinging himself over it with a quiet whoop of joy. A moment later Jemima scrambled over the gate and sprinted after him, shouting as quietly as she could, “Barry! Barry, stop, dammit!” She vanished out of the field in pursuit, and for a moment all was still.
Then Teresa swung over the gate with stiff, long-legged grace, lowering herself into the field. Rose scrambled over next as someone boosted Angelus up after her, and now Mortimer could hear Rainbow hissing, “Fan out, fan out!” Rose jogged across to the dragons and flung herself down next to Amelia while Angelus raced around the field with his eyes rolling in excitement, darting at the dragons and tearing away again. Mortimer blinked at Rose. She had used mud to draw stripes on her cheeks and was clutching a pair of gardening shears.
“Hello you lot,” she whispered. “Ready for the assault?”
The dragons looked at each other. Rosemary and Carlotta were still helping each other over the gate when there was a quick, two-tone whistle, and Rose jumped up again.
“Advance! That means advance!” She raced back to the gate she’d just come over, Angelus sprinting to catch her. Rosemary was still clinging to the top, wobbling precariously, and she gave a little squeal of fright as Rose helped Angelus scramble over. Carlotta stopped trying to boost Rosemary up from the other side and started trying to find somewhere for her to put her feet instead.
“I don’t think the gate’s locked,” Amelia said, frowning at the women. “I didn’t see a lock on it.”
“I didn’t see them check,” Mortimer said.
“Why wouldn’t you check?”
Beaufort ignored them, getting up to peer over the wall. He stayed where he was for a moment, then beckoned them forward. Mortimer stood on his tiptoes to peek through a gap in the crowning stones and watched as the ladies of the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute (other than the missing Alice, obviously, as well as Rosemary and Carlotta, who were still having trouble with the gate), elbow-crawled across the short-cropped grass of the next field with varying degrees of effectiveness.
“Ew!” Jasmine yelped. She’d finally abandoned her dog carrier and had let Primrose out, which seemed to Mortimer a rather bad idea. The yippy little monster was currently worrying at Rob’s leg as the man tried frantically to kick her off. “That was a cow pat!”
“Oh, I don’t think so, dear,” Pearl said. “This is a sheep farm.”
Angelus bounded from one woman to another, convinced it was all a game for his benefit, and rammed his head so hard into Gert’s side that she squawked and rolled into a thistle. Martha was, presumably, still asleep in the lane. Mortimer looked up at Beaufort. “What do we do?”
“I really have no idea,” the High Lord admitted.
“Humans,” Amelia said again, with such wonder in her voice Mortimer almost started laughing again.
23
Alice
Alice pressed her hands against the constriction of the cable ties and said, “Is this really necessary?”
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten what a sneaky old bag you are,” her missing-presumed-dead husband said. He was leaning against the wall of the farmhouse bedroom in what he obviously felt was a very louche manner, his arms folded over the small hint of a pot belly.
“Well, that’s a little harsh. Just because some of us haven’t been keeping the plastic surgeon in holiday money.”
He snorted. “I needed a fresh start after you drained me of the very will to live.”
“By propping up your failing businesses and keeping a roof over your head?” She looked at Lily, who was perched on the edge of the bed with her arms folded, scowling at both of them. “I hope you didn’t give him all the money from your shops. He’s not very good with it.”
“You wouldn’t know a good business idea if you fell in it.” Harvey pushed dusty-blond hair out of his face. It had been glossy, grey-streaked brown when she’d last seen him, and his nose had been a slightly different shape. She was also fairly sure that he had less crow’s feet now than he’d had eleven years ago, so that was just vanity rather than necessity. Silly man.
“Do you mean the car dealership selling stolen cars? Or the antique shop selling fake antiques?”
“You didn’t tell me about those,” Lily said. “And why’s she calling you Harvey?” Alice couldn’t quite tell from her body language who Lily was upset with, but she was definitely upset with someone. That seemed a good sign.
“She’s full of crap. Silly, superior cow. Always the same. Always looking down at me. I had to change my name just to get away from her.”
“I was mostly upset with myself for marrying him,” Alice said to Lily. “I may have taken it out on him a little.” The words tasted truthful, and bitter. She was still angry at herself. It wasn’t even as if she’d been young and silly at the time. Hearts were so ridiculous.
“You’re lying!” Harvey shouted, jabbing a furious finger at her. “You’re just upset because I left!”
“Oh no, that was fine. I didn’t want to have to pay divorce lawyers and settlements and so on anyway. Although leaving without so much as packing your toothbrush did have the police asking me some awkward questions.”
Lily had been looking back and forth between them like a spectator at a slow but exceptionally interesting tennis match. Now she said, “No! Really? That was him?”
“Lily, focus,” Harvey snapped. “She’s just trying to distract you. We’ve got work to do.”
Lily frowned. “I want to know about this. You never told me any of it. You said your first wife was a horrible person who took all your money and threw you out.”
“Oh, I wasn’t his first wife, dear,” Alice said, before Harvey could answer. “She was very nice, though.”
“Shut up,” Harvey snarled, but Alice ignored him.
“I looked her up after Harvey vanished. She knew him as … was it Frank, Harvey? Do you remember? Or are there too many names to keep track of?”
“I swear to God, I’m going to gag you.”
“You’re not doing anything of the sort,” Lily said.
“I am quite interested to know what you do plan to do, though,” Alice said. “Induce a heart attack via cocaine overdose, I presume?”
Lily gave a horrified little gasp, and Harvey took a step toward Alice, raising one fist. “Shut. Up.”
Alice stared up at him, holding her face in calm lines. Harvey’s hands were shaking. “This isn’t like you,” she said. “If I remember, you preferred to run from your problems, not get your hands dirty.”
“You don’t know me,” he hissed. “You never did.”
“That became quite obvious when you disappeared.”