Wham!

by Carol Marrs Phipps

  “There are steps,” said Daniel. “Do take care to feel your way down. Let's go.”

  They had to tug at her a bit, but she quickly relented and they trotted right down to the dark landing before the Fairy paths.

  “Tak us to Meri Grenewode whan wit leeft,” said Teeuh.

  “Wow!” said Tess. “I never imagined going down into a giant space ship.”

  “Space ship?” said Daniel. “That's different.”

  “Aren't we going into outer space?”

  “The past is a different world,” said Daniel. “Shall we be on our way?”

  Chapter 16

  “Why are we walking?” said Tess.

  “Ther nis no oother way the Ffairye pathes to travayle,” said Teeuh, sharing a look with Daniel.

  “But how can there be paths in the space ship?” said Tess. “How huge is this thing?”

  “I'm not certain that I understand what you mean by 'space ship,' truth to tell,” said Daniel.

  “Aren't we going into outer space? Aren't we going to this planet where my grandfather is?”

  “Hise tyme a different woreld ybe,” said Teeuh.

  “Wait a minute,” said Tess. “We're walking on a Fairy path right now?”

  “Wel yis,” said Teeuh.

  “Certainly,” said Daniel.

  “All right,” said Tess. “Then where exactly is this Fairy path?”

  “Under the Northeren Contynent Londe in the Woreld Restorid,” said Teeuh.

  “Wait!” said Tess. “Does she mean earth?”

  “Of course,” said Daniel.

  “Underground, on earth?” she said, wheeling about. “Then those are roots all over?”

  “The whole way,” he said.

  “Whoa!” she gasped. “Why don't I see anything behind us?”

  “By cause no thyng nis ther,” said Teeuh.

  “You mean...?”

  “There's not a thing behind us,” said Daniel.

  “This is scaring me!” said Tess.

  “Thanne lat ous to kepe goyng,” said Teeuh. “Yonder arne the steyres.”

  Presently they found themselves climbing a long stairway which rose up through a broad carpet of moss. Tess followed Teeuh as they stepped out of a ring of mushrooms to the calls of tanagers, veeries and great crested flycatchers under the canopy of a great oak forest facing the sunshine, grass and asters of a bright summer morning on a vast rolling down of grass and burr oak.

  “This is unbelievable!” said Tess, breathing in the fragrant woodsy air. “This place is positively gorgeous. It smells wonderful. Where are we?”

  “The Forest Primycies,” said Teeuh. “The forest of ffirst fruytes.”

  “How was that?”

  “Forest Primeval is how the rest of us put it,” said Daniel as he stepped out of the Fairy ring behind them. “Primycies is what all the old Fairies call it. Your grandfather's tree is out across the downs, yonder, right before it becomes woods again.”

  They walked out into the grass and the calls of meadowlarks. A bee whined by. Teeuh paused for a moment, opening and closing her wings. “I shal hem to telle yit arne comen,” she said, “See yunc directly.” And with that, she fluttered into a bouncing flight until she disappeared into the downs ahead.

  “Just follow me then,” said Daniel with a smile.

  Tess thought he had a nice smile, much like Drake's. Following him through the grass, she found that she really liked looking at him in spite of his outlandish cape, hose and slashed sleeves. Perhaps she was starting to think he looked good in them. She already liked how he wore his plumed hat and his long blond hair.

  “Cow bells,” he said over his shoulder. “I think I hear Rodon's cows a-coming, yonder.”

  Tess looked away at once. “I hear them,” she said when he turned back ahead. “Wait a minute. Back there, you said, 'Primycies is what all the old Fairies call it.'“

  “Yes?”

  “Just the way you said it, you surely didn't mean my grand dad, did you?”

  “He calls it that...”

  “But you surely couldn't have meant he was a Fairy.”

  Daniel laughed out and waited for her to catch up. “Your grandfather, Tess, is the Fairies' Fairy.”

  “Oh,” she said, suddenly realizing that he was offering his arm. Having never done such a thing before, it took her a moment before she slipped her hand onto his arm. “Well that makes no sense to me. I'm not a Fairy.”

  Daniel threw back his head with another laugh and patted her hand. “You're not joking, are you?” he said, looking at her again. “I'd never think of teasing you. But I do believe there are things that need being discussed.”

  “Hoy!” came a holler.

  “Rodon!” cried Daniel.

  Here came a Fairy with a long green braid down his back, leading an Orin white face dairy cow with a large bell and brass knobs on her horns, followed by a half dozen other cows. “And is this praty maistresse ycomen my verray graunt-nece?” he called out as they approached.

  “Rodon, this is Tess Greenwood,” said Daniel. “And she is indeed your grand- niece. Tess, this is your great-uncle, Rodon.”

  Tess went wide eyed. She had never curtseyed in her life, but it suddenly occurred to her that something of the like was required. She held her arms away from her hips, bobbed her head and blushed, wondering how she must look with her Mohawk, lip ring, shorts and banged up knees as Rodon graciously bowed with twinkling eyes.

  “Wel,” said Rodon after a few pleasantries. “Tyme to sene Pansy and thaire ladyschipes the reste of the way to pasture. Telle hem Ich wol bese in whan Ich hem ther do gete.”

  “Is this a farm?” said Tess as Rodon and his cows sauntered out of sight.

  “It is indeed,” said Daniel. “See that grove of trees, yonder? That's a wonderful orchard. You'll have pies by and by. And then you'll see.”

  As they got beyond the orchard, Daniel began talking about Greenwood Castle as if they had arrived before it.

  “Where?” said Tess. “All I see is this piddly little tree house.”

  Suddenly its door came open. “Halow!” called a beautiful green haired Fairy who trotted excitedly down the wooden stairway to greet them.

  “Tess,” said Daniel. “This is your grandmother, Celeste Greenwood.”

  It was strange enough for Tess to discover at the top of the steps that she did not have to duck to go in the door, but it was a shock indeed to find herself stepping into an enormous and wonderful smelling kitchen with a huge hearth flanked with ovens baking cherry pies and a long wooden table with benches. She had not managed to remark about it when her great-aunts, Nacea and Alvita set aside their pans of cherries and came up for introductions.

  “Thine knees aren hurte,” said Alvita, squatting at once and wiping away her injuries with the palms of her bare hands.

  “Myn worde!” said Nacea, looking Tess over closely. “Thou hast hadst a journe. What to thy skirt hath happede?” And she began tugging here and there at her clothes.

  By the time Tess was aware that Alvita was also tugging at her clothes, she saw to her astonishment that they had dressed her in a soft buckskin kirtle with hanging sleeves and a fringed yoke. Suddenly she looked up and gasped. “Dad!” she cried. And she rushed up to the man who had just walked in. Just as she was throwing her arms about him, she stopped short. “You're not my father!” she said with a whimper and stepped back.

  “Soo verray sory am Ich!” he said with eyes of sympathy, “for no moore thanne thy grauntfadyr am Ich. But weo arne getynge redy hym for to fynden.”

  “Find him?” said Tess. “Did he say that? I can't tell for sure.”

  “That's what we're going to do,” said Daniel.

  Tess lunged at Meri with a hug. “Grandpa!” she hooted into his collarbone. “I love you already!”

  “She needeth a nyce coppe of tay,” said Celeste.

  “With hir nyce pece of chery pye,” said Alvita as she picked up a heavy cloth and went to the oven to
see about the pies.

  “Weo to fynden thy fader arne goyng to tryen,” said Meri, giving her a pat. “But what wol happe weo do nat knowen. Weo konne to travayle the pathes in-to the futur tyme, but som thyng verray wrang ybe and weo konne nat to seen that way atte al.”

  “What did he say, Daniel?” said Tess. “Grandpa, I can't understand you at all.”

  “Then the modern style I shall have to use,” said Meri, “for you will need to understand me.”

  “Thank you,” said Tess. “So what were you saying about Dad?”

  “Remember when you turned about on the path and there was nothing behind us?” said Daniel.

  “We in the direction of the future can travel,” said Meri. “But see that way we cannot. We can not see Kellen. Therefore, a way for you, Teeuh and Daniel to find him we must devise.”

  “So what does it mean, being all black that way?” said Tess.

  “A doom lies that way, but what it be we can't tell,” said Meri. “And I see your face, Tess. And I say: be thee not sore afraid, for we may well shine a light ahead. And the earth may yet have a future.”

  “That blackness is the end of everything?” she said as a scald of fear swept through her.

  “Do not be afraid,” he said, giving her a squeeze across the shoulders. “Our task may well change that. And our first step is to find Kellen.”

  “Pye,” said Celeste, speaking out. “The bord is yset.”

  At a gesture from Meri as he sat in his chair at the head of the table, Tess sat on the bench next to him and across from Teeuh and Daniel. Celeste sat in her chair at the far end while Alvita and Nacea served the pie and tea.

  “Um!” said Tess. There was no question at all about this actually being the very best pie that she had eaten in her life. And she had never before eaten any pie smothered with sweet fresh cottage cheese, either. “My!” she said at the milk in her tea skimmed that very morning.

  “You'll have to excuse me,” said Daniel, wiping his mouth and getting up from the bench. “I need to send a message globe to Ariel and Abby. It won't take but two shakes and I'll be right back.”

  “He's married,” she thought. And she was surprised at how very disappointed she felt as she waited for him to return. “Silly me.”

  Soon Daniel was back at his pie.

  Tess looked at her pie. She thought it interesting that they were eating pie with desert spoons instead of forks, but it certainly did not matter when it was so unbelievably delicious.

  “How bethe thy pye?” said Alvita.

  “You must mean my pie,” said Tess. “It's wonderful. I think it tastes better than anything I've ever eaten.”

  “Woldest thou lyche a nothere pece?”

  “Oh yes, please,” she said. She glanced at Daniel. She was still disappointed that he was married.

  Alvita returned her saucer with more pie and cottage cheese.

  Tess studied her next bite. “So Grandpa and Grandma and Aunt Alvita and Aunt

  Nacea, you're all Fairies, then?” she said, setting off chuckles all 'round the board.

  “Yis, evene that thyng,” said Celeste as Rodon tramped up the steps and came inside.

  “Hey that is my pye as thynke ye al bethe soo mirthful to eten,” said Rodon as he stepped over the bench. There were more chuckles.

  “So...” said Tess. “Could this possibly mean that I'm really a Fairy?”

  Meri gave a whoop and covered his mouth as everyone broke out in laughter. He gave Tess's hand a squeeze.

  “Then I'm a Fairy,” she said to more laughter. “But those were serious questions. I thought I was an Elf for my whole life until I came here. Everyone calls me an Elf in my time. Fairies are all supposed to be dead and gone. Extinct. Why would they do that?”

  Meri had a very sober look. “I have no idea,” he said as he shook his head and squeezed her hand again. “It may have something to do with fearing magic. People take spells of that.”

  “Magic?” said Tess.

  “Yes magic. The very way you got here.”

  “Then I knew nothing about it until I came. But I still wonder about Fairies. What makes us Fairies and not Elves, just the green hair?”

  “Elf magic and Fairy magic are different. Some Elves have no magic at all...”

  “Do you?” she said, looking at Daniel.

  “Daniel is a powerful wizard by anyone's reckoning,” said Meri.

  “Then I'm probably a Fairy without magic,” said Tess.

  “That's impossible,” said Meri. “All Fairies are magic.”

  “I still bet I'm not,” said Tess. “Mom is a Human.”

  “When an Elf marries a Human, you get a half Elf, half Human child, like unto Daniel, here, who is magical. He has magic,” said Meri. “But Fairies are magic. So if a Fairy marries a Human, you get a child who is all Fairy. Even if you have your Human mother's looks, you are entirely Fairy.”

  “Wow!”

  “Fairies are also immortal, so long as they are neither murdered nor have a catastrophe. Did you know that?”

  “Me?”

  “Time will tell, won't it?” said Meri, pushing away his empty saucer. “And it's time you learnt these things. And speaking of learning things. It's time I found out what happened to your father. And I understand we have another granddaughter, too, aye?”

  “Nia. And they took my mother, too.”

  “Who took them?”

  “The Children and Family Assistance police.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “I have no idea. I don't even know what they did with Mom and Dad. But when the police took them, they were talking about taking Nia to the capitol to be a slave whore...”

  There were gasps and faces of wide-eyed shock all 'round the board at this.

  “Please give us every particle of this tale,” said Meri.

  Tess told everything she could remember from the shouts in the kitchen which woke her to finding Maud in the house hours later. And though she had lived with the dull pain inside her throughout every waking moment thereafter, she was taken by surprise at finding herself sobbing in the midst of her story. But when every Fairy in the room crowded round to hold and comfort her, she knew she had found the family she never knew she had.

  “Bastardes!” growled Rodon, pacing about the room in agitation, twisting his long braid of hair, after everyone else had been seated.

  Soon the conversation centered on Maxi. “If anyone knows where to begin looking for them, it will be him,” said Tess. “He seems to know about everything that goes on and he's more independent than anyone I know. The only thing the government manages to do is keep the trolls in a guarded compound. But beyond that the trolls get away with all kinds of things. They won't have anything to do with skinnies, and the government doesn't try to make them, the way they make everyone else...”

  “Skinnies?” said Meri.

  “Stone balls they watch you with...”

  “Skinwelers.”

  “I guess,” said Tess. “And Maxi gets away with chickens and a garden and a milk cow right there in Broadstreet...”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Well nobody's allowed to have a garden.”

  “Gracious! How vile.”

  “And he also hunts government cows and shares the meat with everyone...”

  “Good for him.”

  “And he has a barber shop,” said Tess. “And it's a big status symbol for the high school kids to have him cut their hair, especially since he's really expensive. He did mine.

  I wasn't going along with all the awful things which the other kids were doing like smoking sukere or getting drunk and having recreational sex, even if the school and Children and Family forced me to have my shots.”

  “Shots?” said Daniel amidst the scandalized gasps.

  “Yeh,” she said. “To keep from getting pregnant. And even so, I refused to sleep with anybody, and the watcher in the skinny told me that my not conforming was why Children and Family took Mom and
Dad and Nia. So I had Maxi cut my hair so I could get them back.” She paused in the dead silence to glance from face to face in the room of stunned looks. “Well I still refuse to sleep with anybody.”

  Meri gave Tess's hand another squeeze.

  “Weo shal a late dyner to haven,” said Alvita. “May be aboute oon or half passed.”

  And with that, everyone got to his feet.

  “Ich shal to shewen thee to thy roume so that thou kanst confortable to geten,” said Celeste.

  “I don't understand,” said Tess. “I'm staying overnight?”

  “We'll have you back when we left,” said Daniel, “but we may be here for a few days before we do.”

  Their dinner of venison, lima beans, hot acorn bread and more cherry pie came and went and they spent the afternoon deep in a discussion of everything Tess could tell them about Maxi and the trolls and about Drake, the Alliance, Gollsport and even Jasmine and Trent. They were still sitting all about the board when Alvita and Nacea set out tea, potato and onion soup and of course, more cherry pie.

  Tess sat on her canopy bed, admiring the silky feel of the goose down mattress as Nacea scurried in with a pitcher of fresh water, set it in the basin on the night stand and hurried out in time for Daniel to appear.

  “Getting settled in then?” he said, raising his knuckle as if to knock and ambling in.

  “Yes,” said Tess, rubbing the quilt she was sitting on. “And I've never in my life been in a place this huge. Did you know that this bedroom is bigger than the entire flat I share with two other people in my barrack? I can't believe it. I mean, am I mad or didn't we go up these wooden steps to a teensy tree house when we came?”

  “Yeap,” said Daniel with a shrug. Meri's not too keen on ostentatious manor houses cluttering up his beautiful woods. And he likes room for all his family.”

  “So if we went outside, we'd actually see nothing but a piddly little tree house?

  Even when you have to go down this huge hallway, cross a huge banquet hall and come up a huge staircase to get to the hallway with all the bedrooms, including this one?”