“Have you no teachers,” the first fairy asked, “that you have not learned what harm the wrath of the fair folk can bring?”
“I have heard a few stories, yes,” Gar said slowly.
“And do you intend as much harm to us as others of your kind have wreaked upon one another?”
“We most surely do not!” Alea said indignantly. “What of your mate?” another fairy demanded. Alea colored. “He is not my mate!”
“It is as she says,” Gar said with a sigh. “Nonetheless, I intend no harm to your kind either.”
“But to your own?”
“I never intend harm, no,” Gar said carefully.
The leader frowned. “Surely you do not say that you do harm without intending it!”
“When I am attacked, I defend myself—and when I see others oppressed, I defend them,” Gar explained.
“So say all your kind,” spat another fairy. “Nonetheless, they lie in wait for their enemies and strike them dead with their stinking smoke-tubes! What manner of defense is this—to ward yourself before they can think to strike you? Can you truly call that—”
“Softly, Cailleach,” the leader said in an undertone.
Gar held his face steady to hide his recognition of the word. “Cailleach” meant “hag,” and the third fairy was indeed more pale than the others, its skin wrinkled, but it bore no other signs of age—nor of gender, come to that.
“Her point is well taken, though,” the leader said. “What assurance can you give that you will not ‘defend’ yourselves against us before we strike?”
“Their assurances would be meaningless, Ichorba,” Cailleach snapped. “What they say when they are only two to our twenty, and what they will do if they come upon one of us alone, may not be…” Her head snapped up; she looked off to her right with a puzzled frown.
So did the rest of the troupe—except Ichorba. “So you have a guardian spirit.” He was silent a moment, pupils dilating, then shrinking again. “You are avouched.”
Then they were gone in a flurry of huge gauzy wings, shooting up among the limbs of the trees, darting into coverts, a few gliding away between trunks, their glow lighting a long avenue between trees.
Gar and Alea stood silent a moment, staring after them, dumbfounded. Then Alea breathed a sigh and said, “Well! All praise to our guardian spirit! Who is it, Gar?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Gar said. “Unless it’s Herkimer—but I’ve never known him to be telepathic.”
“I didn’t hear any thoughts.”
“Neither did I, but the fair folk certainly did.” Gar started forward again but held his staff in both hands, keenly alert. “It would seem we’ve been adopted by a local intelligent life-form.”
“That would explain it,” Alea said dubiously, “and would explain why the fair folk accepted its vouching for us. After all, I would guess they’re native to this planet, too.”
“They certainly don’t look like Terran imports.” Gar nodded. “Five centuries of evolution can’t make all that great a change.”
“Extra limbs would take considerably longer to grow,” Alea agreed. “Their remote ancestor must have had six limbs for them to have been able to free two for wings.”
“We’ll have to keep an eye on the local wildlife,” Gar said, “that is, assuming it hasn’t all been exterminated by the birds and beasts the colonists brought with them.”
“That’s been known to happen.” Alea had been cramming history, Terran and colonial. “Placental mammals wiped out most of the marsupials in Australia.”
“I don’t think these are mammals,” Gar said. “At least, I didn’t see any evidence of mammary glands.”
Alea shrugged. “Nature is under no obligation to produce the same life-forms on every planet. For all we know, they lay eggs.”
“Or reproduce by fission.” Gar nodded. “No matter how they do, though, they’re clearly native. We’re the aliens here.”
“Yes, and they’re not too happy about it,” Alea said grimly. “Do you think their ancestors really did retreat to make room for the colonists?”
“I suspect there was some fighting that their legends have conveniently forgotten,” Gar said, echoing her grimness, “or maybe even outright extermination. Still, they could be remembering accurately that they didn’t start fighting until people started invading their final sanctuary. By the way, what did you think about the Earthlings coming into the deep woods to search for oaks and mistletoe?”
“With golden sickles? They sound like Druids,” Alea answered.
“They could well be,” Gar said. “Maybe the original colonists were neo-Druids, looking for a place to set up a Celtic world.”
“Not much chance of that back on Earth anymore,” Alea agreed.
“Of course, we don’t carry golden sickles,” Gar said, “but I can see that the fair folk might have become nervous about any Earthlings coming into their domain.”
“Serves us right for landing in the deep woods! And we thought it would keep people from noticing us.”
“It did,” Gar said. “Human people, anyway.”
“Those fairy folk were as human as any of us,” Alea said flatly. “From now on, we should talk about our own kind as Earthlings.”
“That’s fair enough.”
“No, they are.”
“Well, no, they didn’t actually say they were fairies,” Gar pointed out. “Still, if we hear Earthlings use the word, we’ll know we’re up against something more than superstition. I wonder what kind of trouble they thought they could make?”
“We’ll have to ask to hear the local version of fairy tales,” Alea said, “when we find some people—Earthlings, I mean.”
“At any rate, we won’t have to worry about the fairies making trouble for us,” Gar said.
“Yes, since they seem to trust our guardian, whatever that is.”
“That is something we can worry about,” Gar said. “When and where did we acquire a guardian spirit?”
“And how?” Alea shrugged. “Maybe we have an aura of good intentions about us.”
“Intentions, yes,” Gar said with a wry smile. “I’m not always so sure about my accomplishments.”
Alea glanced up at him with a frown. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard him make disparaging comments about himself. How could so valiant and gentle a man not think well of himself? More to the point, how did it affect the way he dealt with her? She decided she’d have to work on it.
The fairies must have been overly sensitive, or the forests not as extensive as they had once been, for they came out of the trees to find the sun newly risen. A broad meadow stretched before them. They followed a deer track to a river; they knew it was a deer track because they saw a doe with two fawns.
“More immigrants.” Gar nodded toward the animals. “Druids would have brought deer, I suppose,” Alea agreed. They followed the river for an hour before they came to a dirt road, tilting downward to the shallows. “Roads mean people,” Alea said. “Which way?”
Gar shrugged. “One is as good as another, and I don’t feel like getting my feet wet.”
They followed the road up the riverbank, under trees vivid with falling leaves of red and gold, between fields guarded by split rail fences, raw with the stubble of harvest and dotted with the upside down cones of corn shocks.
“Fall here, I’d guess,” Alea said. “They do seem to be good farmers.”
“And herders.” Alea pointed her staff at some cows wandering out of a grove to graze in a field off to their right.
“All we need now are their owners,” Gar said. “You’ve found them,” said a deep gravelly voice.