"Count Tansy, yes. One of the Daisy clan, but a good bit less stupid than most of your landowning shower." She pursed her mouth in distaste. "Still, I don't owe him nothing and I wouldn't have done this for him if he weren't paying me, even if he did say it was important."
Theo shook his head again. "Me? You're talking about me again. Important."
"Important to someone, yeah, or they wouldn't have sent ol' Bag-of-Bones to suck your brains out through your nostrils, would they?"
"Speaking of sending, why did this Tansy send you? Why didn't he come himself?"
"He's used his exemption already, I guess."
"He's used… what?"
She stopped, hovering, and held a finger to her lips. At first he thought she just wanted him to stop asking so many questions, but then he realized she was listening to something. His skin suddenly seemed to fit poorly, his heart to grow a little too big and violent for his chest.
"Is it… that thing?" he whispered. She shook her head, but did not seem very happy. He did his best to stay still so she could hear whatever it was she was straining her tiny ears after.
"Follow me," she whispered at last. "Quick but as quiet as you can. That means pick up those great clumping feet!" She zigzagged away toward the edge of the clearing and he half-ran, half-pranced on tiptoe after her through the wildflower-sprinkled grass. "Down here." She pointed to a gully shielded by undergrowth. Theo scrambled down into it, pressed himself into a mat of fallen leaves that glimmered silver and gold and smelled like something that came in expensive bags from a posh gardening store, then cautiously raised his head to look back at the clearing. It was empty. "Didn't expect I'd have to spend my last charm so soon," Applecore muttered.
"What… ?" Theo began, but Applecore flew up beside him and gave him a surprisingly solid kick on the jaw.
"Shut it!" she hissed.
Long seconds crept by, then what looked like a horizontal flash of sunlight burst from the trees and streaked halfway across the clearing in a heartbeat, then stopped, changing from blur to solid shape so abruptly that he almost gasped in surprise.
It was a deer, a huge white buck, with a spreading rack of antlers like two leafless trees carved out of ivory. It stared at the spot where Theo was hidden. The dark liquidity of its gaze seemed to mark him easily despite his held breath and tight-clenched muscles.
Beautiful, beautiful… was all he could think as it stood frozen in an angled stab of sun like a statue made of burning phosphor. It blinked, then leaped away into the trees on the far side of the clearing, a movement so swift and effortless that Theo could not at first entirely understand what had happened.
His mouth worked as he tried to express even a halting appreciation for the vision he had just been given, but Applecore's wings were buzzing beside his ear. She prodded him with her foot, more gently this time.
"Ssshhhh." Her whisper was so close he thought he could even feel the tiny puff of her breath inside his ear. To his surprise, she began to sing. Her voice was scratchy but tuneful. He could not make out the words, but the repetitive melody was oddly compelling, so much so that he did not at first notice that another noise was growing all around him, a sound that even at its loudest never became more than a flutter like rain on hard-packed earth.
The riders stormed into the clearing.
Again, he found himself dumbstruck, but it was a less simple awe than that which had pierced him at the sight of the stag. There were close to two dozen of the newcomers, male and female, dressed in costumes that seemed to come from completely random times and places, both modern and ancient; even the colors of the cloth were elusively inconstant, changing like mother-of-pearl, like sunlight on the water of a moving stream. The riders' faces were fine and proud and strangely ageless — every one of the hunting party could have been twenty or forty in human age, or neither. He found it was as hard to look at them as it had been to look at the land around him when he had first come through. His brain searched desperately for measurements, categories, ways to make these creatures into mere humans, but could not find the mechanism: they confused his familiar ways of judging people just as surely as the stag had turned him into mud and stone by the mere fact of its lightning-swift loveliness.
Even their horses were strange, although he could not say what was different about them — they had four legs, manes, eyes, flashing teeth. But that did not make them horses, at least not the sort of horses he knew, any more than elaborately curled and arranged hair, jewelry, and quiet conversations made people out of these frighteningly beautiful riders.
The hunt party paused in the clearing for only a few moments, riding around the spot where the stag had stopped, staring down raptly as though something were written there that they had never seen before. One of them, a tall man with long golden hair, dressed in something like modern riding gear (if riding clothes were ever made from millions of pearlescent scales) and carrying what appeared to be a rifle with a bright silver barrel and a bone-white stock, stood in his stirrups and pulled his mount around to face the quarter in which the stag had vanished. He spurred out of the clearing and the others followed him, swift as the crack of a whip, but so quiet that by the time the last of them had passed between the nearest trees Theo could not hear them anymore.
"That was Lord Larkspur," said Applecore after half a minute of silence. "The one in the lizardy suit. Seen him in the mirror-shows. He's better lookin' in real life, I have to admit, if you like that sort."
Theo wasn't sure what sort that was, but he wasn't even too sure of his own name at the moment. "Those were… fairies?"
Applecore snorted and drifted down to the ground a foot from Theo's face. "Damn few who aren't around here, 'cepting you. Flower-folk, those were. You might call them the local gentry. Oh, they think they're fine, but."
"They… they were fine."
For a moment Applecore only looked at him, something almost like hurt on her little face. "You've never seen them before, 'course," she said at last, then scowled. "Larkspur, right on top of us, and cursed lucky we were not to be noticed. By the Trees! I told you not to come back for me!"
Still overwhelmed, it took him a long moment to make sense of that. "Wait a minute, you mean back… back at the cabin? Are you saying I should have left you there, with that ugly dead thing?"
"I could have made a door for meself. I made that one just for you — I was planning to keep Old Ugly busy for a bit. But you dragged me through with you and buggered up the landing, so we've come down in the wrong spot." She shook her head. "Right in the middle of Delphinion. Shite and double shite. Even if we're near the edge of the forest we're half a day's walk from Daisy lands, the rate you waddle, and we don't dare go out from under the trees in daylight."
"We can't go out from under the trees… ?"
"Because this is Larkspur's land, ya thick. It belongs to him, and so does almost everything on it and a lot above it, including some of the birds. If we come out of the trees, chances are he'll know about it before an hour's passed."
"Hey, damn it, quit calling me thick. You may have saved my life, but that doesn't give you a license to kick my ass for the rest of it."
"Ooh, he's gettin' snappy."
"Look, a couple of hours ago I was back in my own world thinking about nothing more earthshaking than hopping on my bike and picking up a burrito to go, then suddenly I'm in the middle of Storybook Land being led through the enchanted frigging forest by Thumbelina — and Thumbelina's kind of bitchy, just between you and me. Anyway, I'd like to see anyone else do any better, so back off!"