The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett [65]
“You’ll never get away,” whispered Roland.
“I got in, didn’t I?”
“Getting in is easy. No one gets out!”
“I mean to find a way,” said Tiffany, trying to sound a lot more confident than she felt.
“She won’t let you!” Roland started to back away again.
“Please don’t be so…so stupid,” said Tiffany. “I’m going to find the Queen and get my brother back, whatever you say. Understand? I’ve got this far. And I’ve got help, you know.”
“Where?” said Roland.
Tiffany looked around. There was no sign of the Nac Mac Feegle.
“They always turn up,” she said. “Just when I need them.”
It struck her that there was suddenly something very…empty about the forest. It seemed colder, too.
“They’ll be here any minute,” she added, hopefully.
“They got trapped in the dream,” said Roland flatly.
“They can’t have. I killed the drome!”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said the boy. “You don’t know what it’s like here. There’s dreams inside dreams. There’s…other things that live inside dreams, horrible things. You never know if you’ve really woken up. And the Queen controls them all. They’re fairy people, anyway. You can’t trust them. You can’t trust anyone. I don’t trust you. You’re probably just another dream.”
He turned his back and walked away, following the line of hoofprints.
Tiffany hesitated. The only other real person was going away, leaving her here with nothing but the trees and the shadows.
And, of course, anything horrible that was running toward her through them.
“Er…” she said. “Hello? Rob Anybody? William? Daft Wullie?”
There was no reply. There wasn’t even an echo. She was alone, except for her heartbeats.
Well, of course she’d fought things and won, hadn’t she? But the Nac Mac Feegle had been there and, somehow, that’d made it easy. They never gave up, they’d attack absolutely anything, and they didn’t know the meaning of the word fear.
Tiffany, who had read her way through the dictionary, had a Second Thought there. Fear was only one of thousands of words the pictsies probably didn’t know the meaning of. Unfortunately, she did know what it meant. And the taste and feel of fear, too. She felt it now.
She gripped the pan. It didn’t seem quite such a good weapon anymore.
The cold blue shadows between the trees seemed to be spreading out. They were darkest ahead of her, where the hoofprints led. Strangely enough, the wood behind her seemed almost light and inviting.
Someone doesn’t want me to go on, she thought. That was…quite encouraging. But the twilight was misty and shimmered unpleasantly. Anything could be waiting.
She was waiting, too. She realized that she was waiting for the Nac Mac Feegle, hoping against hope that she’d hear a sudden cry, even of “Crivens!” (She was sure it was a swearword.)
She pulled out the toad, which lay snoring on the palm of her hand, and gave it a prod.
“Whp?” it croaked.
“I’m stuck in a wood of evil dreams and I’m all alone and I think it’s getting darker,” said Tiffany. “What should I do?”
The toad opened one bleary eye and said: “Leave.”
“That is not a lot of help!”
“Best advice there is,” said the toad. “Now put me back—the cold makes me lethargic.”
Reluctantly, Tiffany put the creature back in her apron pocket, and her hand touched Diseases of the Sheep.
She pulled it out and opened it at random. There was a cure for the Steams, but it had been crossed out in pencil. Written in the margin, in Granny Aching’s big, round, careful handwriting was:
This dunt work. One desert spoonfull of terpentine do.
Tiffany closed the book with care and put it back gently so as not to disturb the sleeping toad. Then, gripping the pan’s handle tightly, she stepped into the long blue shadows.
How do you get shadows when there’s no sun in the sky? she thought, because it was better to think about things like this than all the other, much worse things that were on her mind.
But these shadows didn’t need light to create them. They crawled around on the snow of their own accord, and backed away when she walked toward them. That, at least, was a relief.
They piled up behind her.