“Cousin? To whom?” the leader demanded.
“To a hawk,” said the outlaw. “My name is Kerlew.”
The little man gave him a glare that should have bored a hole in his forehead. “Hawks quickly learn to beware of us.”
“I have learned it already,” Kerlew said with complete sincerity, and bowed. “I honor you, Old One. I would never hunt one of your kind.”
“Nor would it do you any good,” the little one retorted, “for we are expert at hiding.”
“You certainly must be,” Gar said, “for you appeared from nowhere.”
“And will disappear as quickly, when we have done with you.” But the little one was clearly flattered, fairly preening.
“Done with us?” Kerlew’s eyes were wide, and a drop of sweat trickled across his brow.
Gar could feel his fear and read the flashes of gruesome scenes from old folktales that flickered through his mind—and Gar noticed that the Wee Folks’ spears and arrows may have been tipped with flint and copper, but looked very sharp nonetheless. “Why, what will you do?”
“Let you go your way, if we decide you are unlikely to harm us or the forest,” the leader answered. “The first of your kind hunted us down one by one, and chopped down the trees to plant your silly crops!”
So, then. They were a native species who had been solitary, as most cats are, but who had learned to band together to survive in the face of human settlement. “And if you decide we are not?”
The leader didn’t answer, only smiled, revealing rows of pointed cat teeth.
Kerlew swallowed thickly. “There are tales. Those who offend the Wee Folk see their cows go dry, their chickens lose their feathers, their hogs go loose to lose themselves in the woods.”
“Those are mere punishments,” the elf said disdainfully, “warnings that the farmer has offended us, and can yet mend his ways.”
“What if he cannot mend his ways?” Gar asked. “Or comes to the forest to hunt?”
The little one dismissed the question with a gesture. “A buck or two we do not mind, if all its meat is eaten. But wholesale slaughter, now, that offends us.”
“Or injuring your own kind,” Kerlew muttered.
The whole band set up a yowling complaint, and the leader, hissed, “It were better for such a hunter to have died on the horns of his prey!”
Gar could see that half their power was simply the superstitious fear that generations of Wee Folk had built up in the humans, but he was very curious as to the other half. “If you can make cows go dry and chickens lose their feathers, you must be masters of herb lore.”
“We are that,” the leader snapped, “and can make humans break out in boils and shingles, too!”
“Or worse.” Kerlew licked his lips and confided to Gar, “There are tales of people who have fallen in their tracks, then wakened to find they had lost the use of one whole side of the body—or even dropped dead!”
So the Wee Folk had spread rumors exploiting strokes and heart attacks—or could their herbs really have caused them? Gar realized that a whole planetful of alien plants might well have produced chemicals that could maim or kill Earth folk.
But that cut two ways; Terran spices and substances could be lethal to the natives. “That may be true, but you dare not go into a house or barn that is protected by Cold Iron.”
Most of the elves hissed and shrank away, but the leader stood its ground and grinned again. “Of course we dare! Cold Iron does not taint the air beneath it, after all.”
“Very true,” Gar said thoughtfully, “but what happens if it touches you?”
More hissing, and the elves who didn’t, spat curses in their own language instead. “We sicken, it is true…”
“Or die, if the iron pierces you?”
The band howled and surged forward, spears jabbing upward.
“Peace, peace!” Gar stepped backward quickly. “I only ask! I didn’t draw my own blade!”
“Why ask if you know the answer?” the leader demanded. “I only guess,” Gar said. “I don’t know. Cold Iron poisons you, doesn’t it?”
“As our shards and points poison your kind, when we have dipped them in the blood of the forest!”
Poisoned arrowheads, then, coated with sap or extracts of plants humanity’s forebearers never knew.
The elves howled approval, shaking their weapons.
“There is no defense against them,” Kerlew said to Gar under cover of the noise. “They shoot tiny darts from hiding that melt in the wounds. No one can ever see their ambush before the point stings.”
Gar could believe it; the Wee Folk must have been adept at hiding and at camouflage. “We can always duck.”
“Do you truly think so?” The leader grinned, raising its spear. “Try it, mortal man! You shall even see when I throw—much good may it do you!”
“But I don’t come to hunt, I come to trade!” Gar dropped to one knee, just in case the elf did hurl the spear, and pulled his pack around as an excuse. He unbuckled the straps, saying,
“If you know so much of the powers of the plants, you should have potions that can cure as well as maim! Surely I have some goods that will delight you!”
“Beware!” cried an elf. “What will he draw from that pack?”
“Leave off!” cried a dozen voices, and an elf toward the back raised a crossbow, leveling it at Gar.
“Treachery!” Kerlew leaped in front of Gar, a knife with a foot long blade appearing in his hand.
Suddenly the air was full of gauzy wings and a crowd of fairies hovered all about them, crying, “Leave the Wee Folk alone!” and hurling tiny objects that winked in the sunlight as they shot toward the outlaw.
Kerlew cried out in horror, twisting and turning aside, but half a dozen of the bright shards buried themselves in his scalp and neck. He fell down as though dead, and a dozen hot needles seemed to pierce Gar’s brain. He clutched his head, screaming, “Chop it off! Chop it off to make the pain stop!”
The Gregor party camped in a sort of three-sided cabin, a trail shelter. There wasn’t room for the whole party, so half of them spread their blanket rolls on beds of evergreen boughs. Resolved to honor Moira’s promise not to preach, Alea asked her, “I’m from very far away, and though I’ve guested at homesteads, I’ve heard no stories save those about the feuds. Are there any others?”
“Oh, a host of them!” Moira smiled, dimpling prettily. “Most are told to lull children to sleep, though.”
“Well, I’m not sleepy yet.” Alea wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned her chin on them. “Tell me one.”
“Oh, I suppose my favorite is that of the two sisters who loved the same suitor.” Moira settled into the telling of the wicked sister who drowned the good sister, and of the minstrel who found the good sister’s breastbone, made a harp of it, and played it at the wicked sister’s wedding feast, whereupon the harp sang the truth of the murder.
The clansfolk fell silent as she talked until all were listening. When she finished, one said, “There’s not too much of peacepreaching in that.”
“There is, if you think about it,” Hazel said, frowning.
“Is there?” Moira asked in surprise, then frowned too. “Well, yes, I suppose there is, if you think of war as murder. I only thought of it as a tale of justice winning out, though.”
Hazel’s frown deepened. “Do you say that peace is justice?”
“Not I,” Moira said slowly, “but I think you just have. I’ll need to think about that awhile.”