One was a tall man all in green, armored in a battered green breastplate and a battered green helmet and a green carriage-driver’s cloak and hardy green boots. One was an enormous Leopard with a curling green saddle on her back. The man smoked a long green pipe, and wherever he went a fresh green wind followed. This was not surprising, for he was the Green Wind, and his cat was the Leopard of Little Breezes. Together they brought storms and sighs to all the six corners of the world. The third creature looked something like a dragon. But he could not be a dragon, surely not, for he had no forepaws. His body curved back against his powerful hind legs like a capital S. He was the color of the very last embers of the fire, and his belly was the color of old peaches. He was graceful and gallant and gregarious and grim. His huge claws were very black, his eyes were very orange, his horns were fierce and sharp, he had long whiskers hanging from long snouts, and enormous wings like bats, if bats were far bigger than houses, extremely bony, and not in the least blind.
If you have not guessed it already, this dear and daring beast was a Wyvern. A Wyverary, if we are to be taxonomically accurate, for though his mother was a proper Wyvern, his father was a library. That only sounds strange if both of your parents were precisely the same sort of animal, which hardly ever happens, when you really think about it. He had been named for the family business, for a library has ever so many encylcopedias, and the beast was called A-Through-L. He knew just everything about everything, so long as it began with the letters A through L.
They were all very young, really, too young for all they had seen, but too old not to have seen it. They had only just met today, having fought on the same side, and after today, they would not meet again for a very, very long time. But they had become fast friends, for that is what three people who have survived something dreadful together always do.
The Wyvern looked down from their pincushion hill of swords and arrows into a long, deep valley. It had been very pretty down there once. Lots of blue stones and violet flowers and rabbits and foxes and minks who realized long ago that they all had soft ears and moist noses and hated hunters, and so, rather than fight each other, formed a collective for the Betterment of Us Who Gets Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Our Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy, and lived in reasonable happiness. None of that was down there any longer. No flowers, no stones, no softness. A great battle had been fought in the Valley of Soft Ears. The last battle of the war, in fact. A stranger had come, an outsider, a mysterious girl with untold riches and untold fury. She had sent her armies screaming through the meadows and forests to seize Fairyland for herself.
It had been a ferocious fight, all against all. One side sent Witches and Magicians and Unicorns and Manticores and Gnomes, whoever would stand, whatever would serve, until, in the end, the last warriors had no more to hurl at one another but their shoes, and then they hurled those, too. The other side sent Pookas and Dragons and their own Witches and their own Manticores, but most of all they sent Redcaps, in wave after wave, some riding great beasts of the air, some charging on great beasts of the earth, stout and furious creatures who kept their hats red with the blood of those they hated. Stray flashes of spent magic still burbled and rumbled through the valley. Dragons, Wyverns, Sphinxes, Griffins and Harpies, the Flying Ace Corps, wheeled in long, exhausted circles, looking for stragglers to carry off. Below, the fallen lay where they had lost their last struggles against the army of Redcaps, and even the clouds had begun to weep.
“We lost,” said A-Through-L. His strong voice went all funny in his throat.
“Looks that way, Ell,” said the Green Wind. He did not sound very concerned. “May I call you Ell?”
Ell nodded and sniffed in the cold autumn wind. “The Marquess is going to rule over all of us forever and ever, and she is… she is… terrible.”
“Suppose so.” The Green Wind blew smoke out of both his purple nostrils. The Leopard purred and said nothing. Cats are not terribly talkative.
“But how could we lose, Mr. Green? It’s not possible. All the Sirens and the Witches said we’d win as easy as supper and twice as quick. They said no one so wicked and cruel and so awfully angry could ever rule Fairyland. They said that sort of thing only happens in other worlds that are not so full of magic and wonder as ours. All the prophecies agreed on it.”
“I think I see a Witch in that cage by the big oak tree,” the Green Wind noted, pointing with his pipe. “Being menaced by a lion.”
It was true—down deep in the Valley of Soft Ears, a gargantuan blue lion roared into a silver birdcage, where a young man all in black cowered with his arms curled protectively over his cauldron. Witches brew up the future in their cauldrons, you see. They take up a wooden Spoon and boil a soup out of everything you did today and everything you did yesterday and all the days before, and everything anyone you ever met did, too, and that is how you get a prophecy. This is very much like what statisticians and journalists do in our world, only with more tasty onions and mutton and incantations. None of the Wyverns could hear anything over the din of the battle’s end, but I am a Narrator, and my powers of hearing are extremely keen, for I must listen through every closed door, every secret meeting, every whisper in every corner of a tale. I shall tell you what the lion roared. It roared: you will make a new future in your stupid bowl, and it will say all the things we want it to say and none of the things we do not! The new future will say that everything good in Fairyland is down to us and everything that goes sideways is down to our enemies. It will say that we are the best people, with the best plans, and the best words, and the best rulers in the history of bestnesses. Make it say the old King and Queen are liars and villains but the Marquess is a truth-teller and a champion who has released the world from sorrow forever. Make it say she is the only one who can fix Fairyland and make it great.
And to this the Witch said: But none of that is true! Fairyland isn’t broken! The Marquess lies and steals and cheats and snatches folk up for her own use and hates a great many more people than is healthy for a growing girl. Our old King was marvelous! The Queen just wasn’t very good at parties, that’s all. The worst thing she did was accidentally burn up a book of spells one time.
The lion snarled: if you say it, if you boil it up in your bowl, it will become true. Everyone believes Witches. You will be rewarded with gold and jewels.
And when the Witch still refused, the lion thrust a paw through the bars of the cage and swiped away the young man’s wooden Spoon, the great emblem of a Witch’s power. Then we do not need you, laughed the lion. We control the Spoon! Everyone will believe us now!