"Jeez," he said. "This is all one family's place? It's huge!"
"They're a big, powerful family," she said. "In fact, they've practically been bankrolling the Creepers all by themselves, so if it weren't for them…" She fell silent; Theo realized she had decided against finishing her sentence.
"If it weren't for them, what? Your kind might be busily wiping out my kind?"
"I'm tired, Theo. Let's just try to get off the street before someone catches up to us. Wouldn't you rather be inside those walls than outside just now?"
That was true. He had been out of Tansy's house less than twenty-four hours and felt like he had been on the run for weeks. He was exhausted, frightened, and had no doubt that he smelled pretty rank as well. One of those hollow-men could probably spot him from a mile away. "Okay, yeah. Let's go."
She led him to a tunnel barely higher than he was. It went all the way through a stone outer wall at least twenty feet thick. "The guard station's through here."
"Isn't this a bit of a weak spot in the defenses?"
"Have you ever seen a pastry bag?" Applecore asked. "You know, how you squeeze on it and this little stream of goo comes out the end?"
"Yeah?"
"Somebody in Daffodil House or in the guard tower says a word and these walls slide together." She made a squelching noise. "Whatever's in here — goo."
He thought very carefully about turning around and running back out again. "Is it a word someone might say by accident?"
"Hardly ever happens."
"Oh, I feel much better. How do you know so much?"
"Been here before."
The guard station, which was only the bottom floor of a large guard tower in the front wall, was an odd combination of medieval and modern: the interview room was mostly behind walls that seemed to be transparent glass or plastic. At this time of the night Theo and the sprite were the only people on the visitor side of the barrier, but that did not hasten the approach of the guards, a group of uniformed ogres who were playing some kind of card game on the far side of the room. At last one of them sauntered over and spoke to Applecore through a slot too small for even a sprite to get through, while Theo tried to look interested in the Daffodil — the Dynamic House! and Explore Historic Hawthorn Scathe brochures in a rack by the chairs. After a drearily long time the guard sauntered off, stopping on his way toward what looked like the communication center to kibitz on the card game.
"Aren't they going to figure out pretty quickly that I don't have the right identification — that I'm not really a Daisy?" Theo asked quietly when Applecore came back to him. He was almost too tired to be afraid. Almost, but not quite.
Applecore looked surprised. "Didn't Tansy give you anything?"
"No."
She shook her head, troubled. "Well, no matter. While we were at the comb I called the person we're going to see. Those Jimmy Squarefoots are just double-checking. If she's coming, it won't matter if you're wearing your pants on your head and dancing a jig."
They were kept waiting long enough that Applecore buzzed to the slotted window after a while for another exchange of ideas with the guards. The sprite's main idea seemed to be, "Get off your fat gray arse and call again." Theo did not really want to hear what the object of her disgust — a seven-and-a-half-footer almost as wide as he was tall, wearing something that looked very, very much like a wooden submachine gun on a shoulder strap (and with a dozen or more similarly sized and similarly armed friends ranged around the guardroom behind him) — might think about some of Applecore's more critical opinions, so he huddled on his chair by the brochure rack and tried to look as though he were just innocently waiting to get his work visa for Mother Goose Land stamped or something.
Even this tension couldn't last forever, and at last Theo found himself nodding. He was startled awake by Applecore hovering very close in front of his face, tugging cruelly on his eyebrow.
"Get up," she said.
"Stop it," he mumbled.
She leaned in close. "You don't know how lucky you are, boyo. Her ladyship came herself."
Theo opened his eyes wider and staggered to his feet. Standing just inside the barrier was a slender, handsome fairy woman, indistinguishable at first from any number he had seen in the train stations and on the streets. This one had light brown hair with an actual streak of gray in it, and although there was little else in her features or posture to suggest she was anything but in the bloom of young adulthood, he suspected he might be meeting one of his first older fairies.
"Marvelous," she said, looking Theo up and down. "Just marvelous. We are so lucky to have you." Her voice was deep and fell into the category he would have labeled "no-nonsense" back home — she sounded like the kind of aristocratic woman who would stick her arm up a pregnant horse without a moment's hesitation. "Just think," she said to Applecore. "An actual mortal!"
"She knows?" Theo was a little surprised.
"Of course I know. And I am really thrilled." She extended her hand. "Please forgive me — I am being a terrible hostess, but that's what happens when the thirst of inquiry is on me, I'm afraid. Welcome to our house. I am Lady Aemilia Jonquil. Lord Daffodil is my brother."
It took Theo a moment to realize that the hand he was shaking wore some kind of latex glove. Maybe she really had been helping a horse give birth, he thought. Or, more likely, a unicorn. "Nice to… meet you."
"Oh, and you, too, Master Vilmos. Now, I know this should really wait until tomorrow when we can get the testing under way properly, but before we put you to bed I'd like to perform just one or two small — and, I'm afraid, a bit more than moderately painful — experiments on you."
With Applecore hovering just out of range and ignoring Theo's increasingly nervous questions, Lady Jonquil took him by the hand and led him through the guard tower into the stony fastness of Daffodil House.
19
A HOLIDAY VISIT
The wind had changed and that morning had shifted into the northeast, a stiff breeze from Ys that moaned through the bending treetops of True Arden, a wind with a bite to it, first messenger of still-distant winter. It was the day before Mabon, and many of the staff would be traveling home for the holiday to visit family out in the countryside whom they had not seen in months. The younger employees, including some who could not afford the trip back home, were making the great house festive with corn dolls and acorn mazes and piles of apples on the tabletops. One of the caretakers had made a wine moon out of wicker and birch bark and hung it above the front door where it jiggled in the freshening wind.
It was an exciting day at Zinnia Manor, and not just because of the holiday, or the weather change, or any of the more usual reasons — sympathetic madness among the clinic-hobs nearing retirement, or an escape by one of the Feverfew twins (each time they immediately went to ground in the hilly countryside that surrounded the manor; sometimes the director had to hire a Black Dog and handler to track down the shapeshifting escapee). Instead, what was causing excitement among the nurses as they passed each other in the old halls or huddled over tea and lavender-oil muffins in the break room was the knowledge that the patient they called the Silent Primrose Maiden was going to have one of her rare visitors. The fact that it was almost always the same visitor, and that he came most holidays, did not make him any the less interesting to the manor staff. Not only was Erephine Primrose's visitor handsome even by the high standards of his folk, and also the heir-apparent to one of the most powerful family houses, he was known to be unattached. Dynastic pressures were strong, and he was said to have fathered a child or two on the weft side, but that did not mean he would never marry. And, as one of the youngest nurses pointed out, there was no law in Faerie that said he could not marry a commoner if he fell in love with one.