Guardian of the Green Hill (13 page)

“It is not an easy life for you, is it?” Lysander said, and the
you
stretched back hundreds of years.

“But it must be done. There must always be a Guardian. And now … I don't know if Meg's heart is in it. It is a broken heart now, that's for certain, until she saves James. If only I could tell her. She thinks we are trying to get him back, but the burden is hers, all hers! I am not allowed to help her—it is forbidden. The ancient law says it must be her test alone. How she would hate me if I told her. Oh, Lysander, what would I do without you?” She leaned against him, and he supported her like an old oak, strong and steady.

She rested there, and Rowan, who thought things might get mushy, took advantage of the lull to go back downstairs. He did not hear their affectionate murmuring, did not hear when Lysander said, “I wish I could take more of the weight from your shoulders, beloved. If it were allowed, I would take your place, if only for a day, and chance the consequences, just so you could get a little rest.”

She kissed him. “Ah, and I think I would let you, if only for a day. I grow so weary, Lysander. So old. You are my strength. Ha! Wouldn't that be something, if you ran the Green Hill and I could lie back and eat bonbons and read Angela Thirkell novels for the rest of my days? What luxury! But no, it cannot be. Llewellwn Thomas tried to take the Guardianship, and it was almost the rack and ruin of all. But thank you, dear. As long as you are at my side I will have strength enough for anything. I hope when Meg stands in my place she has a man half as good at her side. Leave me here for a while, though. I feel like being among memories for a time.” She gestured to the books that surrounded her.

“But these aren't your memories,” Lysander said.

“Mine or theirs, it is all my past, all my history, all my blood. Good-bye, my love.”

Rowan found Gwidion Thomas pacing the croquet lawn, with Pazhan pacing a contrary course.

“Well?”

“I found a place where you can watch her, if she stays there. A room with a peephole.”

“Take me at once!” he cried, grabbing up his art supplies.

*   *   *

“This?” he hissed in a whisper, getting down on his hands and long, bony shanks and peering at a very uncomfortable angle through the mousehole. “You expect me to paint my masterwork looking at her from this angle? What am I, a worm, a grub?”

“If you lie down like this and press your head flat, you can see most of the room. Lysander left, and it looks like she's going to be there for a while.”

Gwidion made a growling noise.

“It's the best I can do,” Rowan whined.

“Then perhaps you won't care for the best I can do for you, boy! It will have to suffice, for now. Go, and don't disturb me. There's work to be done.”

When Rowan left, Gwidion locked the door and silently set up his easel. He spread his spidery limbs on the floor and peered through the hole at the woman he would control, manipulate, usurp, and if necessary destroy, to claim what his grandfather Llewellwn Thomas had tried and failed to get.

He's the Little Boy

F
INN WALKED SLOWLY AT
M
EG'S SIDE,
though it was almost impossible for someone not mortally depressed to walk as sluggishly as she did. She kicked stones morosely, sending them skittering down the lane, and when there were no stones, she kicked up clods of dirt.

“I have to do something,” she said half to herself. “What can I do?”

“Phyllida will think of something. She got Bran back, didn't she?”

“But not till years and years later. She was a girl when he went with the fairies and an old woman when she got him back. What if James is gone for fifty years? What if he doesn't escape until I'm old, or dead, and he's still a little baby and all alone?” Her voice rose in panic, and Finn was sorely tempted to there-there her again, but controlled himself. Instead, cleverly, he changed the subject.

“What did Phyllida say about that woman we saw washing the bloody clothes?”

Meg stopped short. “I completely forgot to tell her. Come on, let's go back!” She had the perfect excuse for skipping the mowing festival and checking Phyllida's progress.

“We can't,” Finn said. “She needs you to be away so she can work. You know how you'd be. She wouldn't be able to concentrate. Anyway, I don't think that woman we saw is important. Probably just another fairy doing some mysterious fairy business. You're sure it wasn't Moll, right? Then it can wait. Please?”

Finn carried his drawstring hemp bag and desperately wanted to show off the contents. He'd had sense enough to realize last night that a missing brother trumped any mysterious gift of ten-pound notes and skeleton hands, but today he wanted to get his fair share of attention and admiration, and Meg, probably the only one who wouldn't find some way to make fun of him, was a perfect audience. He never stopped to think exactly why Meg didn't make fun of him, and he never bothered to wonder why so many other people did. It certainly didn't occur to him that he was a completely different person around Meg.

“I want to tell you what happened to me last night, before I met you at the Green Hill.” This almost set Meg off about James again, but he leaped into his tale with such gusto that she couldn't compete.

“And you say it was a little kid?” she asked when he was finished.

“That's what it sounded like. His toy said ‘Fenoderee's Mowing and Carting,' so I figured that must be his dad. Then when I left, I found this bag.” He held it up with some effort.

“What's in there, a bowling ball?”

“Here, open it and see,” he said, handing it over proudly.

“Oh, it's not as heavy as it looks.”

He watched her in amazement as she tossed the bag lightly from hand to hand. He checked her arms for bulging biceps, found none, and was forced to conclude that it didn't weigh so much when Meg was holding it.

“Go ahead, take a look.”

She yanked the twisted cord open and pulled out the bill, holding it with apparent ease. “Oh, how nice! What are you going to buy? Wooster said there are some really good pastries, and there's a man who carves—what? Why are you looking at me like that?” She turned half away and tried to remember if she'd brushed the raspberry jam seeds from her teeth that morning.

“Doesn't that bill feel … funny … to you?”

“Funny? No.”

“Heavy?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

Finn took the bill and immediately his hand dropped. If he'd been wearing a beret and stripes and whiteface, she might have thought he was miming carrying something fairly heavy. She picked it up from his palm with the tips of her thumb and forefinger, and the bill wafted in the breeze. She set it down in his hand, and though the tiny balls of muscle in his arm strained to keep his hand steady, it fell several inches.

“So it's only heavy when you carry it, but not for someone else? Well, that
is
funny, and inconvenient.”

“Tell me about it. I'm going to spend it as soon as I can.”

They heard a happy ruckus before them. Despite Meg's best efforts, they had reached Gladysmere. A festival market was set up along High Street, the main and, for practical navigation purposes, only street in Gladysmere. Delicious smells reached them of things roasting and stewing in spices and slick with honey. Folk from all over the county gathered for the harvest days, and the streets were teeming with far more than Gladysmere's few hundred residents. They exchanged gossip with people they hadn't seen since the planting festival, ate things their diets and doctors would firmly forbid, and drove hard bargains with canny merchants for things they didn't need.

“Here,” said Finn, pulling Meg to a booth selling gingerbread pigs. “Let me buy you one of these.”

Meg didn't know how to swoon on command, but the thought of Finn buying her a treat made her legs go watery for some reason she couldn't quite fathom, and her neck got red and her cheeks got hot, and if she'd lived a hundred and fifty years ago, someone would have had to fetch the smelling salts. He only wants to get rid of that heavy money, she told herself, which was in fact the truth, but some tiny little voice in the back of her mind said,
It's almost a date
. She told that voice to shut up.

Finn handed over the ten-pound note to the buxom old woman behind the stall. For the gingerbread seller, the bill was as light as any.

“Well, that's taken care of,” Finn said with relief, fondling his shiny one- and two-pound coins, which fortunately didn't weigh one and two pounds. They leaned against a bookshop that bore the sign
CLOSED FOR MOWING
and ate their pigs. Meg ate hers as though it might have a personal preference about the order in which it was eaten, starting with the feet and leaving the head with its eloquent currant eyes for last. Finn gobbled up his pig's head, then choked before he could chew it.

“Meg, it's back!”

“What is?”

“The bill, the bill! My bag just got heavy again.” He peeked in and closed it quickly. “It's there, like I never spent it.”

“Is your change still there?”

He felt his pockets. “No, darn it.”

“Well, that's a relief.”

“Why? At least it would be worth carrying this dang thing around all the time if I could make a profit on it.”

“But what about that poor woman? If you have your ten pounds back, she can't have it, and since she gave you change that means she'd be out almost twenty pounds. Or wait, just the change. My head is getting muddled.” Math wasn't her strong suit, and she was working on only a few hours' sleep. “In any case, I know you got the gingerbread pigs for free, and they're very good, and thank you.”

“Well,” he conceded, “that's something. How can I get rid of it, do you think?”

“You could just throw it away, or give it to someone,” Meg suggested.

“I can't throw so much money away! Are you crazy? What if I buy something that costs exactly ten pounds? Maybe it's because I didn't spend the whole thing.”

Meg had no idea, but she accompanied him on his rounds of the stalls. There wasn't a video game or designer shirt in sight, and Finn couldn't find anything he wanted to buy. Finally he spotted a stall selling knives. “Here, how about this?” It was a little folding pocketknife with a creamy, textured deerhorn handle. He haggled the merchant down from twelve to ten pounds even.

“Ha!” Finn said, strolling down High Street with his new pocketknife open, looking for something to carve or stab or cut. People gave him a wide berth in case he was a lunatic. “I did it! I got rid of that—oh, no!” He dropped the hemp bag, for it had suddenly gotten heavy. He looked inside and pulled out the bill. “Look!” It wasn't a ten-pound note—it was a twenty-pound note, doubly valuable, doubly heavy.

“Wow.” He made a mental calculation of the value in dollars. “Come on!” he said, excited. “Let's shop!”

He no longer wanted to get rid of it. Awed by the idea of free and never-ending money, he visited every stall and bought almost indiscriminately. He soon had a felt hat with a feather, a belt with small, pinched faces twisted into the leather, and a clockwork cricket in a tiny cage. Each time his bill returned to him, and after the third time, it was a fifty-pound note.

“I can hardly pick it up,” Finn said, stooping to hoist the little hemp bag. “Here, help me, and I'll buy you something.” Meg tried to help, but it wasn't heavy to her, and her assistance didn't seem to lighten his load. “Ugh, I can't keep this up,” Finn said, dropping the bag and panting. “Will you carry it?”

“Why don't we just leave it here?”

“No, I can't throw fifty pounds away. That's about a hundred dollars.” He looked around. “Here's a dress shop. Pick out something inside, and I'll buy it for you.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Then I promise I'll leave the money for some other poor sucker to find. If it goes to a hundred pounds, I won't even be able to get it out of the bag.”

Finn waited outside while Meg went into the store. It was very small, and the dresses were handmade, but they all had lovely needlework. The shopgirl helped her find her size, and she chose a green and cream dress with drooping sweet peas embroidered around the waist and trailing down the hips. “Oh, how lovely!” the shopgirl said, clapping her hands. Meg looked in the mirror and saw another person. It was like seeing herself in Gwidion's portrait, only this was the real her. No, she thought, it can't be. Why, that girl is beautiful. No, it's just the dress. The dress is beautiful, and I happen to be in it.

Meg peeked outside and saw a man bearing down on Finn. It was the knife vendor.

“There ye are, ye sly pickpocket. Hand it over!”

Finn scuttled backward toward the shop, dragging his precious hemp bag. A small crowd was gathering, wondering if there was going to be a play or a fight. The merchant, pleased to have an audience, hammed it up a bit and pointed dramatically at Finn. “'E stole my knife, one of the best on me table.”

“No I didn't! I paid ye—er, you—for it.”

“Ah, but then ye stole the money back, didn't ye, ye rascal ye? Soon as I turned my back, that ten pounds was gone. Hand it over or hand over the knife, ye young rapscallion.” He advanced on Finn menacingly. The crowd grew more interested, and a delicate matron screamed, then looked embarrassed.

“Here, take it!” Finn said, and though he tried to fling the bill at the merchant, at fifty pounds it was more of a two-handed roll. Finn grabbed his bag and slipped inside the dress shop while the knife seller, a very portly man, adjusted his legs and then his pants until he was limber enough to bend over to retrieve his bill.

“Hey, this is too much!” he called into the shop, for he was fair. The man tried to open the door, but Finn had locked it.