“I need it,” I said stubbornly.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I must make sure Jaybee hurts no more women,” I told him.
He made a face.
I said, angrily, “I know you think it’s only for vengeance, but it’s not only that! It isn’t vengeance when you kill a poison snake in the yard where children play, to keep it from killing someone else. I need to make sure he hurts no more people, fathers no more children like Elly. After that, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go join a nunnery somewhere.” What else was there to do? What had been between Giles and me had been quite perfect. I could never love anyone else in that way.
“You should leave Jaybee to Fate, Beauty. It would be safer. Truly. Listen to me. You have a granddaughter, back then. You could live then, be with her.”
I shook my head at him. “They don’t know I’m her grandmother, Puck. They think I’m a fairly distant relative. I’d be an intruder. She has a grandma, a grandpa, a father. She’ll be a princess.” I shook my head, firmly. “Are you going to stay here with me?”
“I’ll drop in from time to time. I can’t stay, though. We’re still trying to convert Faery before they all dwindle, though they’re a stubborn lot. Well, so are we Bogles.”
“Tell me about it,” I asked him, curling up on the bed the way I had used to do when I was young. My bones protested, but I persevered, wanting that feeling of having a whole long time to just sit and talk about anything at all, with pillows softening the world, and maybe hot chocolate to drink. That feeling of being in a safe nest where nothing could hurt me. The way I used to cuddle into my tower bed, when I was young. Grumpkin half-opened his eyes, crawled over to put his feet up against my leg, and started kneading me as he went back to sleep.
“What are you and the Fenoderee and the others trying to do?”
He cocked one ear at me, like a horse might do, or a dog. “We want Faery to fight the Dark Lord. On man’s behalf, and its own.”
I laughed. “I can see Oberon’s face.”
Puck grimaced. “Well, he’s not receptive thus far.”
“Why do you want Faery to fight, Puck?”
He settled himself on my bed. “I’ll give you my lecture, which I’ve given the Bogles over and over. I’ve given it to the Sidhe, too, but they pay no attention. Mind now. Fold your hands in your lap and pay attention:
“When Faery looks at mankind, it sees him as mostly animal, not immortal and far from perfect. Since those of Faery are immortal, it stands to reason they should feel sorry for mankind, right? Poor little sinful, short-lived thing.”
I nodded. I’d felt sorry for myself, often enough.
“But there’s this unexpected thing about man. He climbs. That’s the thing about him. He climbs. Not all of him, oh no, or there’d be no more living with him than with the angels, but now and then there’s one who does.” Puck folded his legs and leaned against my bedpost, scratching one brown ankle and furrowing his brow. “And when a man or a woman climbs, Beauty, he or she can end up as high as the angels or higher.”
“The saints,” I nodded, thinking I knew.
“Oh, saints,” Puck said. “Whsst. Saints! Martyrs and virgins and what all. Relics in churches, and both the relic and the churches dead as brass. No. I’ll tell you who climbs. Gardeners climb. And farmers. And painters. And poets. People who build beautiful things without destroying to do it. The ones who designed Westfaire, them. And people who live with animals and learn of them until they know every twitch of a tail or an ear. Them, too. And those that study atoms and how they move, and stars and how they move. Those who learn about the Holy One by reading his own book of nature and creation, that’s who climbs.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “How do you know those people climb?”
“Ach,” he said, rubbing his head. “You know how, if you sing a note, sometimes a wine glass sitting in a cupboard sings the same note back again?”
I told him I did.
“Well, sometimes you say the name of a man or a woman and it comes back to you out of the air, singing, and you know that man or that woman has climbed up somewhere.”
“Dead or alive?” I wondered.
“Either,” he said. “Maybe it’s only us Bogles that can hear it, but when you’re in Faery next, you try it. Say the name of the ones who built Westfaire and listen for it to come back at you.”
I didn’t know their names, more’s the pity. “Why is that, do you suppose?”
“Because that’s the way the Holy One wanted things to be, don’t you see? The Holy One created the world beautiful and manifold and complicated, and the way it was made was the way He meant it to be! He wasn’t just playing, making a toy world with the real world somewhere else. No, this is it! Anybody with eyes can see the truth of that. The Holy One wanted mankind to understand creation so he could create in his turn, for man’s the only one among us who can create anything at all! Angels don’t! They burn with a pure flame, like stars, but they don’t create. Faery doesn’t! It grows and flowers, without much thought, and it doesn’t create.”
“Faery is beautiful.”
He rubbed his head and looked at me with saddened eyes. “Ah, nah, nah, you know better, Beauty. It’s all glamour in Faery. All fool-the-eye, like dreams. It’s not real. Without elvenroot and fairy fruit, we’d see no palaces nor fairy steeds. In Faery, it’s all in the eye, not in the heart or mind. You know that.”
“What’s the difference,” I said, being stubborn. “It’s still beautiful.”
“The difference is that nobody builds
