He waggled his arm. A shower of twigs fell out of the sleeve of his leather jacket. "What am I supposed to be, a scarecrow?"
"Quit messing about with the branches — they're supposed to stick out. Same with the leaves in your hair. No, you're not a scarecrow, you're a woodwight. A leshy, some call 'em. Bit big, but if you hunch over…"
"You mean I have to walk with this jacket on? I'll get heatstroke."
"You'll get worse than that if Larkspur and his mates get hold of you. Put you in the wicker man, roast you like a Hy Breasil potato, they will. Now quit squirming till I put this mud on your face."
"Mddd? Whnnuhhll?"
"So you'll look like a little old thing that lives in the woods and hardly ever comes out in the daytime." She buzzed backward a foot or so and hovered, surveying her handiwork. "A few more leaves in your hair would have helped. Ah, well. Keep the collar of that jacket up. Now follow me. No, I told you, walk slow. Like you've got crookedy legs."
"It's hard to remember."
"Tell you what, boyo, I'm trying to save your life and you're not helping. Maybe I should take one of these sticks and lodge it up your back passage. That'd make you walk slow enough."
"You know, on a per-inch basis, you may be the most unpleasant person I've ever met."
He followed her out through the thinning forest fringe. The mud on his face was itching already, but not half so badly as the twigs and dried leaves in his jacket and trouser legs. Theo did his best to keep up the shambling, arm-swinging walk Applecore had shown him, something like a chimpanzee with a broken neck, but it was hard to feel very confident about imitating something he'd never seen. "Are there a lot of these slushies around here?" He saw flat, green-gold land past the trees now. "The thing I'm supposed to be?"
"Hardly any," she said. "And leshies don't come out of the forest much, anyway. Maybe one day a year."
"What?" He pulled up short, rubbing at his face in irritation. "Then how is this going to fool anyone?"
Applecore flew so close to his ear that he winced at the pressure change. "I didn't say it would fool anyone," she hissed. "I said we had to hope it might because, first off, it's the only thing around here big and stupid enough for you to pass yourself off as, and second, on that single day when one of them woodwight fellas does come out of the forest, he walks around honking and whistling and acting mad as an old stick. Don't ask me why because I don't spend much time in the leshy taverns. But when they've got their spring fever on 'em nobody much goes near 'em, so if people think you're one, chances are they'll leave you alone. But just in case anyone does come up looking to pass the time of day, I advise you to start squealing and honking and whatnot, real grumpy-like. Got it? Because I'd say it beats the jabbers out of being roasted like an old spud."
Properly chastened, Theo fell back into his shambling, uncomfortable walk.
The great ocean of trees through which they had been traveling had thinned now to a few small copses dotted along the hillside. As they made their way from one cluster of trees to another, Theo saw that they were descending into a disconcertingly wide plain. It was hemmed on either side by rows of green hills, lush as something in the background of a Maxfield Parrish painting, but those were far away — the nearest at least a couple of hours' walk, Theo decided, and probably more. At the base of the hill they were descending the land had been leveled and plowed, the soil dark as ground coffee, but mostly obscured by a sea of waving, shimmering fronds. Here and there figures moved among the stalks, bending and straightening.
"What… what is all that?"
"Wheat. Bend over more, you're starting to look human."
He crouched, conscious of a nagging pain starting in his back. "But… but it looks like gold. Like real gold!"
"You don't think we make fairy-bread out of the same stuff you mortal fellas grow, do you? Keep walking."
Even as they descended the hillside Applecore led him in a wide swing to one side so they could cross the broad field closer to its edge. After a few minutes she lit on his shoulder — "If they see me flying around they'll wonder why a sprite's keeping company with a leshy," she explained — and nestled in among the twigs and leaves, but continued to issue instructions from her new perch. "Root and Bough, man, can't you remember to gibber a bit? And wave those arms around!"
Theo did not want to die in a wicker man or by any other quaint methods the locals might have devised. He did his best to make appropriate noises and movements. He could see that some of the nearer farmworkers had stopped to watch him over the tops of the rows, but was relieved to see that none of them seemed inclined to do anything but look.
He stumbled along, gratefully aware that the sun was beginning to dip toward the horizon. He had never thought of fairyland as a place where you could get a sunburn, although he supposed the mud and twigs would protect him from that, but it was certainly warm enough to make the leaves down his neck itch like sin and the hot leather jacket feel like a very cruel punishment. There was a tiny bit of solace in the smell of the wheat itself, a rich, heady aroma like freshly unkegged beer, as though there was drunkenness in the grain of Faerie even before any distilling took place.
As he reached the edge of the field and stepped between two rows of golden stalks, a trio of heads popped up only a couple of rows away. Theo let out a gasp of surprise and stopped. As astonishingly small as she was, Applecore still looked quite human, and the fairy-gentry he had seen earlier could also have passed for human at a distance, but the three faces staring at him were not so easy to mistake. All three had huge eyes, faces as wrinkled as a thousand-year-old mummy, and instead of noses just two round nostrils opening straight into their faces.
Something sharp jabbed his earlobe. "Make some noise, you eejit," Applecore whispered.
Theo began to wave his arms and moan. The strange faces regarded him expressionlessly for a moment. He lunged into the wheat as though heading toward them and they vanished down behind the row.
"What the hell were those?" he asked when he could hear them rattling away in the other direction.
"Dobbies," said Applecore. "Not too bright, those lads. But they'll not come back."
"Ugly." Theo shivered.
Applecore laughed sharply. "Ah, if you find those a bit homely, I'd hate to be in your shoes when you meet a killmoulis or one of them fachan. Or old Peg Powler herself!"
"Don't want to meet any of them," Theo said wearily. "Want to go home."
Applecore frowned. "Yes. Well."
It was a long trip across Lord Larkspur's wheatfields, but although they saw many other creatures tending the crops, brownies and hodkins and hogboons and other domestic fairies who, according to Applecore, did most of the rural manual labor, most of them seemed quite willing to keep their distance from Theo the Woodwight. The sun continued to sink lower until it seemed to be sitting atop the hilly meadows to the west. Once, when Theo looked back, he could see the forest stretching behind them all the way back to a line of distant mountains whose peaks were as faint as wind-tattered clouds in the southern distance.
"The forest…" he said. "It's huge!"
"The Silverwood? One of the biggest," Applecore said, "Inside the borders of Faerie, only True Arden and Old Brocéliande are bigger, or that's what they taught me."
"And it all belongs to this Larkspur guy?"
"No, no, he's not that important. Delphinion, the bit his family owns, only runs into one edge of the forest — just happened to be the place we ended up. It mostly belongs to the Six Families, like everything bloody else." She pondered for a moment, then darted ahead and out of sight. Theo slogged on. He could see the end of the wheatfield, now. It was very close.