At length, I came to myself. It was chilly with the moist wind blowing, and the fires had been put out. I bid the boots return me to my bed. There I lay quiet and warm and quite awake, my hand on my Giles’s chest, wondering if Carabosse had foreseen what I would attempt to do.
When my great-grandson woke, I told him to put the cap on his head while I explained what was in my mind. When I told him the world, or at least all life was to end in the twenty-second century, at first he protested. However, the thinking cap exerted its influence, and he admitted it was inevitable, given the nature of men. When I told him that Faery might end very soon, he wept. Despite having been turned into a frog by the fairy Carabosse, he had gentle feelings for most of fairykind. After that, he simply nodded, concentrating on my plan.
“It might be done, Grandmother,” he said. “If one really wished to do it.” He looked very wistful, however.
“You’re thinking of the girl upstairs,” I said.
He admitted that he was.
“I am sure we can work something out,” I told him. “But everything else must be done first.”
“It may take years,” he sighed.
“I think not,” I told him. “I’m sure help is available. But, even if it should take years, remind yourself that you are one-sixteenth fairy, a sufficient share of fairy blood to guarantee you an extremely long life.”
“How old are you, Grandmother?”
“One hundred sixteen,” I said, thinking what a brief time it all seemed.
He sighed, but he was a good, sensible boy. Thank God he was Vincent’s son, and not the child of the mad young prince. Thank God he took after his father rather than his mother. Thank God he took after his great-grandma, at least a little. Perhaps beauty does, in time, breed true. I knew he would do as I asked.
I lent him the seven-league boots and the cloak of invisibility, taught him a few enchantments, and thereafter he came and went many times each day. I, meantime, kept the fire burning and food hot in the kettle, and stood ready to admire each acquisition as he brought it in.
Giraffes and lions and rhinoceri. Auks and dodos and passenger pigeons. Elephants, okapis, and pandas. Snow leopards, tigers, and ocelots.
Seeds of great trees and small. Shrubs and flowers and mere herbage, shoot and root, leaf and branch. Robin and sparrow, goldfinch and wren, eagle and falcon and kestrel, and all the birds of the sea.
Those creatures too large to be transported in statu quo, as Father Raymond would have said, were diminished. I taught my great-grandson the spell and he had no trouble with it whatsoever. Evidently even one-sixteenth fairy blood is sufficient for such elementary magic. Once the creatures were in Westfaire, I removed the spell while they lay sleeping two by two, or one by six, or however they properly divided themselves. Herd beasts came by severals, others by pairs, at least two pairs of each, for Giles Edward Vincent Charming had learned his husbandry well. “You have to allow extra so you don’t get too much inbreeding,” he told me. And “I only picked the ones with young, for they have proven fertility.”
Such a good, sensible, intelligent boy.
One day as I sat by the kitchen fire, waiting for his return, I heard a voice calling my name. I tottered out into the garden and found Sariel there among the cabbages. She looked worn and tired. I was afraid to ask her how the battle had gone, but she took me by the hand and told me without my asking.
“We weakened him, but we have not yet killed him,” she said. “All those creatures of horror that men invented have gained strength and a terrible life of their own. We are not fighting only our own darkness. We are fighting men’s darkness as well. Oh, Beauty, the things we found down there! The engines of annihilation! The machines of destruction! The human engineers of hate, laboring in their dens to make greater horrors yet. The human writers, hovering over their pens, creating baser terrors of bigotry and persecution. Oh, we could not have made these things, Beauty. Only God and man can create. All that God makes is beautiful. Why did He give man the choice? In the labyrinth of the Dark Lord, man is his ally. Only time can kill him, and them.”
“Our side?” I asked, barely able to get the words out. “What about our side?”
She smiled, a remote, bitter smile. “Horror is stronger than joy, Beauty. Particularly when it is encouraged to flourish. Still, we have beat him back. He has fled from us, out of Faery and into some other dimension of terror. We are pursuing him with what strength is left. Many of our people are gone.”
“Mama?”
“Your mama. Yes. She perished bravely fighting a thing none of us could have imagined. And Oberon and Mab. And Israfel. And many more.”
Israfel! Oh, such a pain by my heart.
“But not the Bogles?”
“No. Not the Bogles. Sensibly, they stayed out of it. Sturdy. Independent. A little cynical. They do not let pride lead them into folly. They have come behind us, blocking the earths as it were, to keep the horror from returning. They will live a long, long time yet.”
“And Carabosse.”
“When Carabosse saw there could be no victory in time, she left us. She said she had a greater task before her.”
“But some survive.”
“Some survive, yes. But it is the end of Faery. We must leave the world. We must pursue the Dark Lord into whatever place he goes, however long it takes. In the end, we pray the victory will be ours.…”
“Then Bill and Janice were right. It was the last ride.”
“They were right.”
“Will you ever go back to Baskarone? Those of you who are left?”
That remote smile again.
