The Fairy Rebel (5 page)

Neither Charlie nor Jan slept much that night. Charlie walked up and down the room while Jan lay in bed, worrying aloud:

“Poor Tiki! Poor, poor little thing! Shut up alone in the dark waiting for the wasps …”

“We don’t
know
that. Maybe she’s gone abroad for the winter. She could be lying in the sun on some lovely beach for all we know.”

“She’d never have gone off and not told me if she’d fixed it about the baby.”

“We can’t count on a fairy to behave like a responsible grown-up human being. Maybe she just forgot about it. In which case, it’s not
poor Tiki
, it’s
poor us
.” He stamped up and down the room a few times more and then burst out: “A fairy child with funny-colored hair! It would be better not to have a baby at all.”

“Oh, Charlie! But I never asked for one. It was her idea. I’m much more worried about her than about us just now. After all…,” she said thoughtfully, “we could always dye the baby’s hair some ordinary color, even if it was blue or green.”

“You did say you wanted her to have pink skin?”

“Yes, oh yes. Like rose petals, I said.”

Charlie turned round and stared at her. “Like rose petals!” he said. “What if she thinks you meant an orange rose? Or a dark red one? Or a red and yellow striped one?”

Jan let out a wail and turned her face into the pillow.

    Jan’s bed was still pushed up against the window. When she woke the next morning, Wijic was astride her arm, kicking her as if her arm were a fat horse.

“Wake up! Wake up!” he was squeaking. “I’ve found her!”

Jan shook Charlie awake and they both jumped out of bed. “Where?” they cried. “Show us! Quickly!” And they started rushing about, trying to get dressed in a hurry; but Wijic was too impatient for that.

He pointed his two forefingers at them and shouted, “Dijiwig!” and they found themselves fully dressed and with their coats on. It was the first bit of actual magic they’d seen and they both felt rather stunned, but Wijic was appearing and disappearing as he danced up and down on Jan’s shoulder, crying, “Come on, come on!” So they hurried out of the house.

It was still very early, and it was a freezing cold, misty morning. No one was about. Wijic grabbed Jan’s scarf and flew ahead, pulling at her to follow.

“Where are we going?” Charlie asked, panting after them.

“Not far! Up on the common!”

“Jan can’t walk that far. Let’s go by car,” said Charlie.

Wijic stopped so suddenly that Jan bumped into him.

“Oh yes! Much more fun than flying,” he said.

So they got the car out of the garage. Wijic insisted on sitting on Charlie’s hand as he steered, and kept shouting, “Wheee! This is great!” every time they turned a corner.

“
Is
she in a wasps’ nest?” asked Jan anxiously.

“Yes.”

“How brave of you to find her!”

“Oh,” said Wijic, “I didn’t find her. I asked a pal of mine, a gnome. Their skins are so thick they don’t care about wasps. They don’t care about anything much. I had to promise to do something for him.… Well, never mind that. He got the other gnomes on to it, and at midnight they sent a runner to tell me they’d found her.”

They had reached the common by now. It all looked pale, frozen and mysterious. The air was very cold, and the ground was icy. Charlie held Jan’s arm carefully as Wijic, holding Jan’s scarf so as to stay visible, led them, with wings whirring, to a stunted oak tree in a snowy hollow.

If the Fairy Queen had wanted to make sure Tiki would never be rescued, at least by a human being, she had chosen the right place. The oak tree stood in the middle of masses of blackberry bushes. Their trailing briars, bristling with sharp thorns, spread in all directions. When Charlie and Jan came up to them, the highest briars reached their shoulders.

“How are we going to get through this lot?” muttered Charlie.

“We should have brought clippers!” cried Jan in dismay.

“Clippers or no clippers,
you’re
not going in there,” said Charlie. “Wait here. I’m going to try to push through.”

He tried. The briars seemed to have a plan of their own. Their thorns clutched at his coat and scratched at his face. Jan, watching, saw them swaying, reaching for him like thin snakes. There was no wind, so it could only have been some awful magic.

Wijic was crouched on her shoulder.

“Please, Wijic, help him,” Jan whispered.

He shook his head.

“You don’t understand,” he whispered. “If the Queen knew … It’s bad enough that I brought you here.”

Charlie was pushing farther and farther in. Jan could hear him swearing at the briars and letting out little shouts every now and then as a thorn clawed at him or tore his trousers. It seemed to Jan that the opening he had forced through the bushes was closing up behind him.

“He’ll be trapped!” she whispered. She felt very frightened suddenly. “Wijic, oh, please! Just a little magic—nothing that would show! Please! Don’t you want us to rescue Tiki?”

“Oh—all right,” said Wijic, not at all willingly. He shut his eyes and clenched his fists and Jan could see his lips moving slightly. Suddenly Charlie began to
move faster. The rude words stopped. And in another few minutes he’d reached the oak tree.

“I’m through!” he called back. “Now, where’s the nest? Oh! I see it—it’s right up at the top of the tree!”

Jan looked up, and now she could see it too—a thing like a gray football, stuck among the highest branches of the leafless oak. It had a lid of snow on it. Jan shivered when she thought how cold, as well as frightened, hungry and lonely, Tiki must be.

“Fairies can’t be lonely,” she reminded herself. But it didn’t comfort her. Tiki didn’t have her magic anymore, so perhaps she had some feelings fairies don’t usually have.

Meanwhile, Charlie was struggling to climb the tree. He seemed to be having trouble. The tree wasn’t very tall and the branches looked to Jan as if they would be easy to climb. But every time Charlie put his foot on one of the lower branches, it slipped off again.

“Everything’s covered with ice,” he shouted. “I can’t get a grip.” His hands kept slipping too. Jan looked down at Wijic, who was now standing up on her shoulder, watching Charlie.

“That’s not ordinary ice,” he muttered.

Charlie had just managed to pull himself up onto the lowest branch. He seemed to have a good grip. Then suddenly, for no reason, he fell off again. Luckily he landed on his feet.

“What’s wrong with me today?” he said angrily.

“Nothing’s wrong with you, mate,” muttered Wijic. “You need a bit of help, that’s all.” And he pointed
both forefingers across the brambles and said, “Bili-wiki!” in a high, ordering voice.

There was a cracking noise, and suddenly all the ice and snow broke off the tree and came crashing and tinkling to the ground. A lot of it fell on Charlie’s head.

“Hey—!” he said, brushing a big bit of ice, like glass, off his hat. He looked at Jan. “What’s going on around here?”

“Tell him to climb. Quick!” Wijic whispered into Jan’s ear.

“Climb, Charlie! Get the nest, hurry!” called Jan. She still felt frightened. It was so cold and still now that the noise of the falling ice had stopped—it was as if nothing were alive anywhere except them.

Wijic was hugging his own shoulders and jumping up and down.

“I’ve done it now! She must have heard that!” he cried. “Listen, I can’t stop here, I must go. Wish I could ride back in the car, but I daren’t wait. G’bye!” And he leapt into the air and was gone before Jan could say a word more to him.

Charlie was near the top of the tree now. He leaned along one branch and stretched his right hand up for the nest. As he did it, Jan heard something. It was a very strange noise, a sort of whining hum. It was coming from behind her.

She turned her head and saw something like a small, dark cloud hanging over a clump of trees near the road. As she watched, the cloud grew quickly bigger and bigger. And the whining, humming noise grew louder.

Suddenly, she knew what it was. It couldn’t be—not in the middle of winter—but it was.
Wasps
. A huge, deadly swarm of them, sent by the Fairy Queen herself to attack them and stop them rescuing her prisoner.

“Charlie!” screamed Jan. “Charlie! Look out!”

He turned in the tree and looked toward where she was pointing. A less brave man would have leapt straight out of the tree and started running. But Charlie didn’t. He put his foot one branch higher, reached the nest with his hand and tore it away from a clinging cluster of twigs.

“Jan! Catch!”

He threw it as hard as he could. It flew through the air across the blackberry bushes. Their snakelike briars swayed upward as if to trap it in its flight, but Charlie had thrown it too high for them to reach. As the shrill, furious buzzing of the wasps drew nearer, Jan made a little jump into the air.

She couldn’t jump high because of her lame leg. But it was high enough. She felt the cold, papery thing land safely in her hands. She saw Charlie jump down from the tree and start to push his way back through the clinging, clawing brambles, his arms in front of his face.

Then the wasps were overhead and diving down at them.

Jan didn’t waste time trying to run. She tore open the nest, scattering bits of it on the frozen ground, calling all the time, “Tiki! Tiki! Come out; it’s me, Jan!”

As the first wasps landed on her head and hands and covered Charlie like a black and yellow cloth, Tiki
suddenly appeared between two huge wasps on Jan’s fingers and screamed out, “Filimizi! Filimizi!”

Her little voice cut like a sharp silver needle through the heavy, angry buzzing of the wasps. And
suddenly their noise changed. They didn’t vanish or fly away. It was as if they suddenly felt the icy cold for the first time. Their shrill whining turned dull and slow, like the buzzing of a fly after you’ve sprayed it
with poison. The wasps on Jan’s hands, which had been just about to sting her, started to blunder around in circles, and then to fall to the ground. Those still in the air began to fly in circles, too, bumping into each other in a sleepy, drunken sort of way. Some of them dropped and lay on their backs, waving their legs among the frosty blades of grass.

Jan looked fearfully for Charlie. He was standing on her side of the blackberry bushes, looking white and shaken. The black blanket of wasps was falling away from him.

“Charlie, did they sting you? Are you all right?” Jan cried anxiously, hobbling to him as fast as she could.

He put his arms around her.

“I’m okay, what about you?”

“I’m—I’m fine,” she said shakily. “Tiki saved us.”

They both looked at Tiki, standing on Jan’s hand. She looked pretty shaky, too. She was wearing a bright pink tank top, fur-lined boots, stripy leg warmers over her jeans and a woolly hat pulled down over her ears.

“Tiki, what happened?” said Charlie. “How did you do that? I thought you’d lost your magic.”

“I didn’t use any magic,” she said.

“So how did you stop the wasps?”

“Oh, that. All I did was take away the magic that
they
had. Wasps can’t fly about in this weather without some magic, you know. It’s not natural for them. I just took it away, and the cold did the rest.”

“I’m glad to see the Queen let you dress warmly, anyway,” said Jan, “before she put you in prison.”

“Let me? She didn’t let me. Nobody can stop a
fairy making her own clothes. About all I had to do in there was to change clothes. What do you think?” she asked, turning round in Jan’s hand. “Do you like my new gear?”

“Very smart indeed,” said Charlie. “But now let’s be getting home. Jan shouldn’t be out in this.…” He looked around uneasily, and Jan knew he didn’t just mean the cold.

Putting his arm around Jan, he led her back to the car. On the way, they both looked back toward the oak tree. The thousands of wasps were lying on the white frozen ground, making a dark patch.

“I wonder what the Queen’s going to think about
that
,” he said.

“Somehow, I don’t think she’s going to like it,” Jan replied.

7
Sugar Tears

When they were safely home and had taken off their outdoor clothes, they found that Tiki had changed too. Now she was wearing green tights with a pale pink tunic to her knees and round her neck a huge scarf, colored all shades of pink and red, which hung down in front and behind.