(Of course, a larger question was why were the faeries warning me of anything anyhow? Larger, odder, more worrying. Adjectives abounded.)
“Hey, Enid?” Amber broke in, an unwelcome disruption as always.
“What?”
“Does Margery know you’re out here?”
Amber’s question was like a kick in the shins, whether from the mention of my mother or the fact that her query revealed her lack of confidence in me going it alone, I couldn’t say. “I’m fine,” I told her.
“That’s not an answer to the question I just asked.”
“It’s not your problem.”
“No.” Amber swung down, looking graceful as she did so. Apparently Amber could do everything with grace. Stupid, perfect, possibly-but-very-unlikely-to-be-lying Amber. “It isn’t my problem. But I can still be concerned.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Why are you always so suspicious?” Amber asked. “I’m just trying to be nice.”
“I know,” I said slowly. “It’s just …” My brain was overloaded. I couldn’t talk to Amber while trying to figure out what lies the faeries were trying to draw my attention to. I needed her gone ASAP.
“Amber,” I said. “Is that your phone over there in the weeds?” I pointed to the field. This seemed as good a way as any to get her to leave me alone for a few minutes, which would be better than nothing.
“I don’t see anything,” Amber said.
“Yes, you do. See, right there.” I pointed again vaguely at the field. “Maybe you can’t see from your angle. If you go over there, you’ll be able to see it no problem.”
Amber pulled a rectangle from her pocket. “My phone’s right here.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not your wallet or a rock or something?”
“Why would I carry around a rock?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” I panicked. “For ballast?”
“That’s weird, Enid. Even for you.” She handed me her phone. “I think you should check in with Margery.”
“I wouldn’t want you to miss a text from your friends because I was using your phone.” Lame, but I was thinking on my feet here.
Amber shook her head. “I don’t want to talk to them. They wouldn’t understand.”
For a moment I thought Amber was going to turn to me and say, in the sappiest voice imaginable, “Not the way you understand, Enid.” Instead she pursed her lips and asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”
“The water’s off and drained in the house, so —” I pointed to the trees.
Amber looked appalled.
“Too good to pee in the woods, princess?” I asked.
She was. “I’m going to walk to the town’s campsite,” she told me, “to use their toilets.”
The campsite was all the way on the edge of town. It would take Amber forever to go all the way there then all the way back. “I won’t look or anything. I promise.”
Wait, why was I dissuading Amber from leaving? I wanted her to go.
“Never mind,” I said. “See you soon.”
Amber did that cutesy frown she often did and shook her head before stepping out onto the road. I watched her closely, to check for faerie interference.
“You doing okay?” I called out, as if she were fifty feet away rather than five. “Feel any different?”
Amber stopped. “Unless you want me to pee myself, we can have whatever conversation you want when I get back.” She turned and primly, stepping in bizarre patterns to avoid the letters marked in the road, walked off.
No faeries jumped out and grabbed her.
Maybe it was safe for me.
I went to edge a toe out onto the road.
My heart pounded.
Almost there.
Nope.
I pulled my foot back in. Just because the faeries weren’t messing with Amber didn’t meant that they wouldn’t mess with me. I’d get my new plan thunk-out before risking any further interactions with the faeries.
And what was my mother lying to me about?
f course, now that I had my peace and quiet, I was stumped regarding particulars: I gave myself up to the faeries and then dot dot dot fizzle out. Without knowing precisely what the faeries would do to me once I was in their clutches, the only way I’d succeed required planning for each and every possible outcome. And to write down all these possibilities, I needed my notebook.
So, I took a detour from planning to go retrieve my notebook from the farmhouse. Then I took a second detour to go back and get my pencil before finally settling myself back down right at the end of the drive. I needed to hide myself from view while at the same time being able to see a fair distance down the road; I assumed I’d be faerie-bound before Amber returned, but if not, I wanted to spot her before she spotted me so that I could skedaddle. To accomplish this (the hiding part, not the skedaddling part), I needed cover.
I wrenched a branch of dried leaves off the tree felled by Amber the previous evening and tried to prop it up in front of me. It fell over. I propped it up again. It fell over. I propped it up again and affixed it with my steeliest, steadiest, intrepidist gaze.
It fell over, catching a few of my notebook’s pages and flipping it partway over the tree-demarcated protection line. Instinctively, since my notebook, filled with pure Enid thoughts, merited as much protection from the faeries as my body, I kicked the branch away, grabbed the side of my note-book that was still firmly in my sector, and yanked my book back in. Cradling my notebook in my arms, I waited for my other voice to chastise me for wasting my time with all my foolishness and tell me to focus, Enid.
Chastisement did not arrive. Right, I’d annoyed my voice by not listening to my own advice, and it had stormed off in a huff. Fine then. I didn’t need my own voice of reason. I would be my own voice of reason myself.
I grumpily lowered myself back down to the ground. As always, I’d dog-eared the next blank page in my notebook so that, when the muse visited, one flip and I could write again without delay. My notebook opened, pencil poised, ready to go: I’d get captured by the faeries and dot dot dot everything would magically work out because magic.
Sigh.
I decided to read over what I already knew about faeries to get my neurons zapping and paged through my earlier thoughts: seeing faeries, protecting your house, all those letters my mother had doodled in when she was secretly reading my private notebook, then back to the mocking blank page.
Wait — where was my discussion about physics? I slowed and forced myself to look at each page for my “Aside for those unfamiliar with the basics of physics,” but it was gone. Not noticing the scratches on the road and now having very precise memories of having written something down only to find that I’d imagined doing so — maybe Amber was onto something with her being crazy. Maybe I was crazy too.
I found the page before my notebook devolved into nonsense and read to the bottom, the last line telling me that “if Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary didn’t require a treatise to,” with the balderdash beginning on the top of the next page. Relief hit me like a sucker punch: I must have seen the nonsense, decided to take a break, and fallen asleep, wherein I’d dreamed I’d finished writing the rest.
Wait. I turned some more pages of my notebook. I knew, 126.437% knew, that I’d detailed my exploits in the field yesterday. I distinctly remembered taking the time to do so, not wanting to rely on memory after the fact. I’d done it, I’d written it down, and now, like my physics thoughts, it was missing, replaced by this mess of letters and lines and squiggles, which seemed less nonsensical the more I stared at them, a few tentative words (LOOK, FRANGIPANI, MOZART) tossed in now and then.
A hunch thrummed in my brain. I ripped a clean piece of paper from my notebook (wincing as I did so, since there’d now permanently be a little edge of paper attached to the binding, and the remaining
pages would now always sit just a nanometre unevenly along the spine) and proceeded to throw the page on the road. This worked as well as expected on a gusty day, in that the paper blew immediately back towards me and landed on my feet. Attempt number two: I used the branch to push the paper along the ground, out onto the road, counted to eight (ten seemed too obvious), then dragged the paper back in.
Blank paper. A bit dusty from the road. Zero words, illuminating or otherwise. So much for my hypothesis that it had been the faeries who had made the word jumbles, both the earlier ones I’d blamed on my mother and the ones on the pages that had just flipped onto the road. So much for the idea that the writing on the road was in part to show me the faeries’ affinity for the written word.
But (light bulb) perhaps the faeries hadn’t written in my notebook. Perhaps they had rewritten. Perhaps the faeries couldn’t create or destroy letters, only repurpose them. The letters for LIES could have come from the phone book the telephone company left underneath the For Sale sign, and, as for my notebook, this hypothesis explained both the word jumble pages and my missing notes. Of course, since I’d found their last missives bewildering (LIES? Sheets of random letter combinations?), I was going to help direct their rewriting by posing a question of my own at the top of the page.
WHO, I wrote, IS LYING TO ME?
This time I counted to seven before dragging the paper back in with my branch.
M WISHLING TO YO
Well, M WISHLING TO YO was right up there with LIES and LOOK FRANGIPANI MOZART in terms of comprehensibility. But TO YO did seem on the way to TO YOU and WISHLING might be interpreted as LYING (wishing for something to be true, but you’re lying to yourself, plus an extra L to distinguish the word from plain old WISHING). That seemed believable. Sort of.
Clearly, we weren’t going to get anywhere unless I gave the faeries more letters with which to work.
I began filling the page, a string of As, a string of B’, all the way down to Zs (I probably could have skipped the Zs, as well as Xs, but perhaps the faeries needed to warn me of ZOOTOXINS or something needed to be OXIDIZED with the American, rather than British, spelling; I had to be prepared.)
Then, on the top, in the space I’d left blank for just this purpose, I chose to get straight to the point. LEAVE ME, I wrote, AND MY MOTHER ALONE.
And I figured it wouldn’t hurt to add PLEASE.
I pushed the note out onto the road and then pulled it back in. Pure, wonderful, unadulterated success: the faeries had replaced what I’d written and left a chaotic tumble of letters at the bottom of the page.
As much as I wanted to celebrate, I couldn’t waste any time; communication was afoot!
SHE IS BEING LIED TO THEY WILL HARM HER PUNISHMENT FOR THE THIEF, said the faeries’ note.
I assumed the SHE was my mother, but just in case, I, in note form, asked. The reply was neither yes nor no, but I couldn’t see how it applied to anyone but my mother:
CHANGELING IS TROJAN EQUUS TASKED WITH VENGEANCE
Equus meant horse, but why use HORSE when you can use a word with two Us instead?
In any case, from this exchange I inferred that the changeling was not being given to my mother out of the goodness of the faeries’ hearts (perhaps this was one of the lies the road had warned me of), but rather she was being given to my mother in order to exact some sort of retribution for my mother’s theft.
WHAT DID SHE STEAL? I asked.
SONG FOR THE HATCHLING NOW HER POWER EXCEEDS
Well, that was as clear as storm-swirled-up mud in a pond.
The top of the page, having been erased and rewritten too many times, was a damp smudge of tearing paper. I ripped another page free (wince × 2) and rewrote my alphabet list on the bottom.
WHAT’S THE PUNISHMENT GOING TO BE? I asked. Faeries were such nonsensical creatures; they were probably only going to do something like make her keys never stay in the place where she set them down.
BREATH HEART OURS
Hmmm. That sounded more ominous than HER KEYS NEVER STAY IN THE PLACE WHERE SHE SET THEM DOWN.
WHEN YOU SAY THAT HER BREATH AND HER HEART WILL BE YOURS, IS THAT MORE OF A FIGURATIVE GESTURE OR SOMETHING LIKE DEVELOPING ASTHMA (I hoped the faeries were well-versed in human ailments) AND A HEART MURMUR?
SHE WILL BE LIKE THE BRANCH AND NOT LIKE THE TREE
SO, SMALLER? ATTACHED TO A TREE TRUNK?
THE BRANCH IN YOUR HAND
Oh. The branch in my hand, the one I used to push the paper back and forth, was dead. It was a lot of other things too (desiccated, rotten, brown), but dead struck me as what the faeries were getting at with LIKE THE BRANCH.
YOU’RE GOING TO KILL HER BECAUSE SHE STOLE SOMETHING?
NO TOO POWERFUL
SHE’S TOO POWERFUL TO KILL?
NO TOO POWERFUL IS REASON
BUT YOU SAID SHE WAS BEING PUNISHED FOR BEING A THIEF?
THIEFING GAVE HER POWER
WHY CAN’T YOU JUST ASK HER TO GIVE WHAT SHE STOLE BACK? Not that I had any clue what it was.
SONG
Right — the earlier note said she’d stolen a song, and I doubted that what my mother had stolen was a page of sheet music that could be easily handed back. So, my mother stole a song that made her powerful. I could see that, what with her recent increase in magical skills. But to kill her for it? That was extreme, too extreme, and I was done with this; it was time for me to put those faeries in their place.
I AM NOT, I wrote as forcefully as I could, GOING TO HELP YOU KILL MY MOTHER. Yes I was mad at her. Furious. Incensed. Livid. Her willingness to give me up wrenched my heart so violently that it was taking all my willpower to keep myself from vomiting up all my internal organs. But there was no way I was going to engage with the faeries the way she had, for my own ends.
WE DON’T WANT YOUR HELP TO HEART BREATH OURS HER
THANKS FOR THE HEADS-UP THEN. The tone didn’t come across. *SARCASM* I added before pushing the note back.
HELP US
I groaned when I saw this.
YOU JUST SAID YOU DIDN’T WANT MY HELP.
HELP US STOP THEM
But they were them, weren’t they? The next section in my faerie book was obviously going to be called, “Faeries Need to Take a Basic Writing Class Because Their Written Communication Leaves Much to Be Desired.”
Third wince. In as small a print as possible, I filled a new page with letters.
EXPLAIN, I wrote, NOW. EXPLAIN EVERYTHING.
SHE STOLE FROM HER HER NEEDS
I dragged the page back in, mid–faerie sentence, and added a bunch of periods, commas, and semi-colons down the margin.
PUNCTUATION, I wrote, IS THE MOST VITAL COMPONENT OF COMMUNICATION. I made my period thick and round and drew an arrow towards it for emphasis.
PUNCTUATION INCONSISTENT IN YOUR EARLIER SENTENCES, the faeries pointed out.
As if I had the time to have a pedantic discussion with the faeries regarding why I was insisting on them using punctuation when I had slacked off using it myself earlier. I chose, however, to be ingratiating, in an attempt to get us back on track.
I APOLOGIZE FOR MY EARLIER LACK OF PUNC-TUATION. BUT NOW, PLEASE, JUST WRITE. I NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON.
WILL TAKE TIME.
I’LL WAIT.
I did, letting my mind wander. A breeze whipped through the trees, and the paper flew out down the road because, in my wandering-mind state, I obviously hadn’t been holding the branch down as forcefully as I should. Without thinking, I stepped out past the tree line to grab the paper before it blew away further and found myself on the wrong side, out on the road, where any faerie could grab me. How could I have been so stupid? After everything, how could I forget the one big thing I was trying to avoid? This is what happened when I lost my voice of reason. Stupid Enid. Foolish, moronic, brain-dead Enid.
> My only hope was that faeries, like bears, wouldn’t notice me if I stayed perfectly still.
The wind switched directions, and the paper fluttered up against my legs. Slowly, I moved my eyes from left to right, up to down.
A bird twittered somewhere in the trees.
Three clouds, all puffy, strode purposefully across a clear blue sky.
And no faeries latched onto me, stealing me away to faerieland and giving my mother a changeling assassin for the vengeance of faeriedom.
The page hit my legs again. Slowly, even more slowly than I had moved my eyes, I bent at the waist and gathered the paper up to an appropriate reading level.
WE ARE PROTECTING YOU FROM THOSE THAT WANT TO SPIRIT YOU AWAY. THERE ARE FAC-TIONS. THE OTHER FACTION. SEE.
It was as if the note had an arm that pointed. I knew exactly where it wanted me to look, down the road whence Amber was returning. She was giving me an overenthusiastic wave (the type you give when trying to get your friend’s attention in a crowd when the friend has no idea that you are there. We were not in a crowd. Her overenthusiasm was one of Amber’s typical attention-grabbing moves.)
But behind Amber, where the faeries meant for me to look, the world shuddered slightly after every few of Amber’s steps. Not even really a shudder. More a ripple, like in a shallow pond. There was no scenario where such shuddering was a positive sign.
The note swung in my hand. I looked down.
Enid Strange Page 14