The Wee Free Men

‘You’ll never get away,’ whispered Roland.

‘I got in, didn’t I?’

‘Getting in is easy. No one gets out!’

‘I mean to find a way,’ said Tiffany, trying to sound a lot more confident than she felt.

‘She won’t let you!’ Roland started to back away again.

‘Please don’t be so… so stupid,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’m going to find the Queen and get my brother back, whatever you say. Understand? I’ve got this far. And I’ve got help, you know.’

‘Where?’ said Roland.

Tiffany looked around. There was no sign of the Nac Mac Feegles.

‘They always turn up,’ she said. ‘Just when I need them.’

It struck her that there was suddenly something very… empty about the forest. It seemed colder, too.

‘They’ll be here any minute,’ she added, hopefully.

‘They got trapped in the dream,’ said Roland flatly.

‘They can’t have. I killed the drome!’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ said the boy. ‘You don’t know what it’s like here. There’s dreams inside dreams. There’s… other things that live inside dreams, horrible things. You never know if you’ve really woken up. And the Queen controls them all. They’re fairy people, anyway. You can’t trust them. You can’t trust anyone. I don’t trust you. You’re probably just another dream.’

He turned his back and walked away, following the line of hoofprints.

Tiffany hesitated. The only other real person was going away, leaving her here with nothing but the trees, and the shadows.

And, of course, anything horrible that was running towards her through them…

‘Er…’ she said. ‘Hello? Rob Anybody? William? Daft Wullie?’

There was no reply. There wasn’t even an echo. She was alone, apart from her heartbeats.

Well, of course she’d fought things and won, hadn’t she? But the Nac Mac Feegles had been there and, somehow, that’d made it easy. They never gave up, they’d attack absolutely anything and they didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘fear’.

Tiffany, who had read her way through the dictionary, had a Second Thought there. ‘Fear’ was only one of thousands of words the pictsies probably didn’t know the meaning of. Unfortunately, she did know what it meant. And the taste and feel of fear, too. She felt it now.

She gripped the pan. It didn’t seem quite such a good weapon any more.

The cold blue shadows between the trees seemed to be spreading out. They were darkest ahead of her, where the hoofprints led. Strangely enough the wood behind her seemed almost light and inviting.

Someone doesn’t want me to go on, she thought. That was… quite encouraging. But the twilight was misty and shimmered unpleasantly. Anything could be waiting.

She was waiting, too. She realized that she was waiting for the Nac Mac Feegles, hoping against hope that she’d hear a sudden cry, even of ‘Crivens!’ (She was sure it was a swear word.)

She pulled out the toad, which lay snoring on the palm of her hand, and gave it a prod.

‘Whp?’ it croaked.

I’m stuck in a wood of evil dreams and I’m all alone and I think it’s getting darker,’ said Tiffany. ‘What should I do?’

The toad opened one bleary eye and said: ‘Leave.’

That is not a lot of help!’

‘Best advice there is,’ said the toad. ‘Now put me back, the cold makes me lethargic.’

Reluctantly, Tiffany put the creature back in her apron pocket, and her hand touched Diseases of the Sheep.

She pulled it out and opened it at random. There was a cure for the Steams, but it had been crossed out in pencil. Written in the margin, in Granny Aching’s big, round, careful handwriting was:

This dunt work. One desert Spoonful of terpentine do.

Tiffany closed the book with care, and put it back gently so as not to disturb the sleeping toad. Then, gripping the pan’s handle tightly, she stepped into the long blue shadows.

How do you get shadows when there’s no sun in the sky? she thought, because it was better to think about things like this than all the other, much worse things that were on her mind.

But these shadows didn’t need light to create them. They crawled around on the snow of their own accord, and backed away when she walked towards them. That, at least, was a relief.

They piled up behind her. They were following her. She turned and stamped her foot a few times and they scurried off behind the trees, but she knew they were flowing back when she wasn’t looking.

She saw a drome in the distance ahead of her, standing half-hidden behind a tree. She screamed at it and waved the pan threateningly, and it lumbered off quickly.

When she looked round she saw two more behind her, a long way back.

The track led uphill a little, into what looked like a much thicker mist. It glowed faintly. She headed for it. There was no other way to go.

When she reached the top of the rise, she looked down into a shallow valley.

There were four dromes in it—big ones, bigger than any she’d seen so far. They were sitting down in a square, their dumpy legs stretched out in front of them. Each one had a gold collar around its neck, attached to a chain.

Tame ones?’ Tiffany wondered, aloud. ‘But—’

…who could put a collar around the neck of a drome? Only someone who could dream as well as they could.

We tamed the sheepdogs to help us herd sheep, she thought. The Queen uses dromes to herd dreams…

In the centre of the square formed by the dromes the air was full of mist. The hooftracks, and the tracks of Roland, led down past the tame dromes and into the cloud.

Tiffany spun round. The shadows darted back.

There was nothing else nearby. No birds sang, nothing moved in the woods. But she could make out three more dromes now, their big round soggy faces peering at her around tree trunks.

She was being herded now.

At a time like this it would be nice to have someone around to say something like ‘No! It’s too dangerous! Don’t do it!’

Unfortunately, there wasn’t. She was going to commit an act of extreme bravery and no one would know if it all went wrong. That was frightening, but also… annoying. That was it… annoying. This place annoyed her. It was all stupid and strange.

It was the same feeling she’d had when Jenny had leaped out of the river. Out of her river. And the Queen had taken her brother. Maybe it was selfish to think like that, but anger was better than fear. Fear was a damp cold mess, but anger had an edge. She could use it.

They were herding her! Like a—a sheep!

Well, an angry sheep could send a vicious dog away, whimpering.

So…

Four big dromes, sitting in a square.

It was going to be a big dream…

Raising the pan to shoulder height, to swipe at anything that came near, and suppressing a dreadful urge