Quickly Linden rose and embraced the other faery, who burst into tears and clung to her. “How could you go off like that and just disappear and not tell me or Knife or anyone, don’t you know we thought you were dead!”
“I’m so sorry, Wink,” Linden said. “Please forgive me.”
“Of course she will,” said a gruff voice from the doorway, and Timothy recognized Thorn, the faery who had passed him and Linden on the stairs. “Though if you ask me, she shouldn’t. Of all the fly-witted things to do-” Her eyes fell on Timothy. “Great Gardener! Who or what is that?”
“I apologize for the shock, Thorn,” said Valerian’s calm voice from the back of the room, “but I thought it best to summon you here first and explain later. Ah, Campion, there you are. Would you mind shutting the door behind you?”
Timothy had been through some bizarre experiences in the last couple of days, but this had to be one of the oddest: sitting at a table with five faeries-all of whom had noticeably pointed ears and long, translucent wings-while they took turns looking at him as though he were the strange one.
“I am grateful to you all for coming here at such short notice,” said Valerian. “The news of Her Majesty’s passing will soon spread throughout the Oak, and this may be our last opportunity to meet together for some time. Linden has brought us a human visitor, as I am sure you could not help but notice. I realize that this act is unprecedented, but there was reason for it, as you will soon hear. Linden?”
As Linden stood up and began telling their story, Timothy took a sip of his drink and nearly choked, it was so bitter. The cakes Wink had brought were dry and heavy, with hardly any sweetness to them, and only a generous dollop of honey helped them go down. He would have done anything for a plate of starchy matoke with some fish or beef sauce to flavor it, as he used to eat back in Uganda…
“WHAT?” yelled Thorn, and Timothy jumped, spilling his cup down the table. Wink grabbed a napkin and began mopping up the puddle, and Timothy was stammering an apology when he saw that Wink was smiling.
“I knew it!” she told him in hushed tones, as though they shared some wonderful secret. “I knew they were real, no matter what anyone said! I even thought you might be a faery yourself at first, only you don’t have wings…”
Oh. Now Timothy understood why Thorn had shouted: Linden had just told the Council there were male faeries. He’d been so focused on filling the emptiness in his stomach, he’d stopped paying attention to anything else.
He forced himself to concentrate as Linden explained what she’d learned from her conversation with Rob: how the Oakenfolk were considered Forsaken by the other faeries, that neither Rob nor any others under the faery Empress’s command would help them, and last of all that the Empress would execute any faeries or humans who defied her. She finished by telling how she and Timothy had fled the city, then dropped back into her chair, rubbing her forehead and looking spent.
“So all the other faeries hate us because they think we’re too friendly with humans?” said Wink in bewildered tones, and Thorn remarked acidly, “Now there’s an irony.”
“This Empress…” Campion toyed with her pencil, frowning. “She must be clever as well as powerful, to have so many faeries under her control. I wonder how she managed it? Especially if she’s been avoiding humans all this time, and they’re where our cleverest ideas come from.”
“Well, she hasn’t been avoiding them, obviously,” said Thorn. “Seems to me that she and her people find humans useful enough, or they wouldn’t be living right in the midst of them.”
Linden nodded. “But human beings are just cattle, as far as the Empress and her people are concerned. They’ve become so selfish and proud, they won’t even consider that it’s wrong to deceive humans and take their creativity by force.”
“Yes, but doesn’t it sound as though this Rob you met knew better?” Wink said. “If he went to the trouble of saving you and Timothy…”
“I thought so, too, at first,” Linden replied sadly, “but it turned out he was just hoping I was one of these Children of Rhys he’d been looking for. I don’t think we can count on him to help us again.”
The Council faeries all looked sober at this, and the room fell silent. Timothy waited for someone to come up with another idea or at least a question, but no one did. At last, frustrated, he spoke.
“Don’t tell me you’re all giving up already? All right, so you can’t count on the Empress and her people. But they can’t be the only faeries in the world. What about trying to find the Children of Rhys yourselves?”
“Timothy, I already told you-” began Linden, but Valerian held up her hand.
“No, let him speak; I can see by his face he has more to say, and I would not dismiss his words without hearing them.” She turned to Timothy. “Please, go on.”
“You’re assuming that if Rob couldn’t find the Children, you can’t either,” Timothy said. “But I’m not sure that’s true. You’ve been cut off from the other faeries for hundreds of years, so obviously they know a lot of things about the world that you don’t. But your people seem to know some things that the Empress and her faeries have forgotten, too. Don’t you have any legends or history books or something that might tell you about the Children of Rhys?”
Campion pushed back her chair and rose. “There’s nothing about them in the archives downstairs, I know that much. But perhaps there’s something here…” She began inspecting the bookshelves that lined the room, her head cocked to one side.
“Well thought,” said Valerian, inclining her head to Timothy. “If I had any doubt of Linden’s wisdom in bringing you to us, I have none now. Yet if we can find nothing in the Oak’s records to tell us of the Children, what then?”
There was no mockery in her tone, no condescension; she really seemed to believe he might have an answer, and after a moment’s thought Timothy found that he did.
“Then I’ll sneak back into town,” he said, “and look them up in the library.”
Linden looked at Timothy with surprise: She hadn’t expected him to volunteer his services-especially at such risk to himself. Had he decided to join her on her quest to find more faeries after all?
Thorn made a skeptical noise. “How’s that going to help? You can’t think some human writer is going to know more about our own people than we do?”
Timothy opened his mouth, but Campion spoke first. “Why not?” she said to Thorn. “You’ve never read the human legends about faeries, but I have, and you’d be surprised how often they were right about things we Oakenfolk had muddled up or forgotten. And,” she added with a touch of smugness, “there were male faeries in some of those stories, too.”
“All right, fair enough,” Thorn replied. “But Rob didn’t know how to find these Children either, and he’s been living in the middle of a big human city for years. So if he couldn’t find out anything-”
“Unless,” said Timothy, “he made the same mistake you’re making.”
“Oh, really. And what’s that?”
“Underestimating humans.” Timothy leaned forward across the table, his gray-green eyes intent. “If the Empress and her faeries believe they’re so superior to my people, of course they wouldn’t expect us to have any information that they don’t. And there’s another thing I noticed, though I didn’t think much about it at the time: Rob’s place didn’t have a television or a radio or even a telephone, let alone a computer. He’s probably consulted every faery book he could find, but I’ll bet you anything he’s never searched the internet.”
Thorn looked blank, and Linden was wondering how to explain, when Campion broke in excitedly: “That’s a special sort of library in a box, isn’t it, where you can get information from all over the world. Don’t Knife and Paul have it?”
Timothy looked discomfited, and Linden could guess why: He’d been counting on the faeries’ not knowing that particular detail. How could he explain to them that he’d rather walk all the way to the village and risk being caught by the Empress than go back to the House even for a few minutes?