“But you eat eggs,” said Jan, remembering about the acorn cups.
“Only sugar ones,” said Wijic. “Human children only have to eat them once a year, but we have to eat them all the year round. Chocolate ones and marzipan ones and ones with runny white cream stuff inside … Yuck! Once,” he went on in a whisper, “I went inside a house—we’re not meant ever to go indoors, but I did—and I had a nibble of a little boy’s boiled egg. It was absolutely the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. But of course, it’s not allowed. We’re not supposed to get mixed up with humans at all, for fear of getting earthed, or of getting friendly with them.”
“Why aren’t you allowed to be friendly with humans?”
“Oh, because they’re dangerous. They want you to do magic for them all the time, and then things get all mixed up and there can be awful trouble with the Queen.”
Jan and Charlie looked at each other.
“Do you mean,” asked Charlie slowly, “that if, for example, a fairy, like—well, like Tiki, became friends with a human and wanted to do a magic favor for her—er—or him, of course—that might get her into trouble?”
“Might? It would,” said Wijic. “Without a doubt. You wouldn’t catch me doing any human a favor, no matter what.”
Jan and Charlie looked at each other again.
Then Charlie said, “Listen, Wijic. Would you like a boiled egg now?”
Wijic jumped to his feet, his face, under the school cap, shining.
“Would I!” he cried. “Wow! I mean, I’m already indoors, so I can’t make things any worse if I eat some human food, can I?”
Wijic stayed with them for an hour. Even a caterpillar couldn’t have eaten more than he ate. He ate toast and jam, and boiled egg, and peanut butter, and some celery, and a whole pea (a small one), and a good nibble of a chip (cheese and pickle flavor). The funniest thing was that while he was eating all this, he was standing on the table, untouched by human hand, so of course they couldn’t see him—they could just see the bites of food disappearing and sometimes hear his appreciative grunts, and the crunch, crunch, crunch as he chewed. If they listened very hard, that is.
At last the crunching stopped, and Wijic hopped—or rather, crawled—onto Charlie’s hand and became visible again. He was now almost as fat as Tiki.
“Now I know why Tiki eats so much,” he gasped. “She likes sweet things. I’d be fat if I was a boy and could eat all this lovely not-sweet food.” He sank down onto Charlie’s hand. “Phew! I can’t fly for a while. My wings won’t lift me. I think I’ll just have a little zizz.”
“Wijic,” said Jan, leaning over him. “I want you to do me a favor.”
“Anything,” said Wijic sleepily. “Name it.”
“I want you to find out where Tiki is and ask her if … if she fixed it.”
“Fixed what?”
“The … the nuisance.”
“Ask her if she fixed the nuisance,” mumbled Wijic. “Okay. No harm in that. Leave it to me.” And he started to snore.
They wrapped him up in the cotton wool and left him on the kitchen window ledge so he could fly away when he woke up.
5
The Queen’s Rules
Three days later, Charlie was taking the rubbish out when Wijic appeared on his shoulder. He’d slimmed down again after his huge meal of forbidden food. He was jumping up and down in a mad sort of way and shouting at Charlie in his thin, high voice.
“What’s the matter with you lot? Don’t you even put your noses outside when it’s a bit cold?”
“What’s your trouble?” asked Charlie.
“I’ve been hanging around here for days waiting for you to come out! I’m freezing! I’m supposed to be a summer elf!”
“I come out every morning to go to work,” said Charlie.
“Oh. Well, maybe you go out too early. I’m not very good at getting up,” said Wijic, calming down a bit. “Anyway, I’ve got something to tell you, and I have to tell it to you secretly. If the Queen knew … !” And he glanced all round him anxiously.
“Come indoors,” said Charlie.
“Oh no, I couldn’t—”
“We’re just going to have some hot buttered toast,” said Charlie.
“Oh,” said Wijic. “Well. Perhaps just for a moment.”
Soon they were all sitting round the kitchen table (except Wijic, who sat on Charlie’s hand). Wijic, between bites of toast and grunts of delight, told them his story.
“I flew all over the place looking for Tiki, to give her your message. I went to all her favorite places. There isn’t an empty bird’s nest for ten miles that I haven’t visited. I tried the ring of toadstools where her dancing group meets, her secret hollow tree … Where didn’t I try! No good. I asked everyone, too. Nobody has seen her for ages.”
He stopped to lick the butter off his fingers.
“This yellow stuff is fantastic.…”
“Go on, Wijic! Never mind the food,” cried Jan impatiently.
“Well, in the end I got worried. Lots of summer fairies curl up somewhere snug and sleep all winter, but still, someone usually knows where everybody is. The frost fairies leap about a lot, freezing everything, and they generally like playing jokes on the summer fairies, like putting icicles on their noses or freezing their bottoms.… Anyhow, soon everyone was looking for Tiki. And nobody could find her.”
“What could have happened to her?”
Wijic shrugged. “She could have gone south for the winter. Lots of summer fairies do that if they can afford to—”
“Do fairies use money?” asked Charlie.
“What?”
“Money.”
“Never heard of that. I meant, if they’ve saved up enough magic to send themselves abroad. If not, you have to get a swallow to carry you, and they’re so selfish they hardly ever will. Anyhow, riding swallow-back is scary, they dive about so much. Tiki’s not very brave. Is there anything else to eat?”
Jan opened a small tin of baked beans and gave him one cold. He stuffed his mouth with a great bite and then went on quite cheerfully: “Then of course, she might be dead.”
“DEAD!” cried Jan and Charlie together. “Surely fairies can’t die,” added Jan in horror.
“Of course they die,” said Wijic with his mouth full. “What do you think makes all the dust you have to wipe off your furniture? That’s dead-fairy dust. If fairies never died, there’d be so many of us you wouldn’t be able to move.”
There was a silence. Then Charlie said, “But isn’t Tiki young?”
“Oh yes,” said Wijic, “so am I, but even young fairies die sometimes if they do something silly. Or if they break the rules.”
Jan swallowed hard.
“Rules?”
“The rules she makes,” said Wijic in a lower voice.
“The Queen?”
“Shhh! Yes. Don’t talk about her as if she was just anybody. She makes the rules and if a fairy breaks them, there can be awful trouble.”
“Surely she’d never kill a fairy!”
“N-no. No, she wouldn’t do that. But she can take away their invisibility. It comes to the same thing, because then birds, or fish, or cats, or—or—or …” He swallowed. “Or some other creature usually gets them.”
“Your Queen,” said Charlie after a long moment, “sounds a bit of a tyrant to me.”
“What’s that?” asked Wijic uneasily.
“A ruler with too much power and not enough kindness,” said Charlie.
Wijic’s face turned from leaf green to whitish green and he dropped the baked bean he was holding. “Oh no!” he said very loudly. “We love her. We love the Queen. We all love her, all the time!”
“Oh,” said Charlie, surprised, and he looked at Jan, whose face had also gone very pale. Wijic grew restless.
“I think I ought to go now,” he said.
“But you haven’t told us what’s going to happen about Tiki,” said Jan.
“How do I know what’ll happen??
?? asked Wijic. “Maybe she’ll turn up again in the spring. And maybe she won’t. All I wanted to say to you is that I couldn’t give her your message. Thanks for the food.” His wings whirred and he was about to take off when Charlie clapped his other hand down, trapping Wijic between his two hands.
“What are you doing? Let me out!” shouted Wijic from inside the dark cave of Charlie’s hands.
“Let him out, Charlie!” cried Jan.
“Do you want a baby with blue hair?” asked Charlie. His face was grim.
Jan sat down very suddenly. She felt sick. Charlie lifted his closed hands level with his face.
“Now, listen to me, Wijic,” said Charlie sternly. “You must find Tiki.”
“How can I?” wailed Wijic from inside the hands.
“If the Queen wanted to punish Tiki for breaking a rule, how else might she do it?”
There was a silence.
“She might … she might put her in a wasps’ nest,” said Wijic in a tiny, scared voice.
“What do you mean?”
“If a fairy is very bad,” whispered Wijic, “the Queen sometimes shuts her up in an empty wasps’ nest, after taking away her magic. Then she just has to live in all those little dark tunnels, eating scraps of old wasp food—”
“Oh, Charlie!” cried Jan. “Not Tiki! Not for helping us! It would be too awful—I couldn’t bear it!”
“For how long?”
“Well, that’s the really bad part,” said Wijic. “Because sometimes the Queen forgets all about it, and then when spring comes, the wasps can come back and open the nest and want to live in it again … and then …”
Jan put her face into her hands with a little cry.
“Oh no! It’s too cruel!”
“Wijic,” said Charlie, more sternly than ever, “I want you to do us another favor.”
“I won’t,” said Wijic. “I daren’t.”
“It’s more for Tiki. Aren’t you her friend?”
After a long time, Wijic said, “Well. What is it?”
“You must go looking for wasps’ nests.”
“Look for them? Why should I look for them? I know where they are. I know every wasps’ nest for miles.”
“You do? Why?”
“What a stupid question. If there were a lot of wild tigers living around London, wouldn’t you make sure you knew where they lived so as not to go near them?”
Charlie lifted his upper hand a bit. Wijic put his face out.
“Are you scared of wasps then?”
“Scared of wasps? SCARED OF WASPS? Of course I’m scared of wasps. Wasps have special eyes. They can see us. So can bees, but they’re not so bad. They’re clever. You can reason with a bee. You know, you can say, I’ll drink from this flower, you take that one. Because a bee knows, if he stings you, he’s done for too, so he’s careful. Wasps are just crazy. They’ll chase you and sting you for the fun of it. And one sting, and you’re dust.”
Charlie stood up, still holding Wijic.
“Wijic. You’re going to show us all the wasps’ nests you know, and we’re going to find out if Tiki is in any one of them.”
“Oh no I’m not!” said Wijic—and before Charlie could bring his upper hand down, Wijic had dived straight off into space and disappeared.
6
The Wasps’ Nest
Neither Charlie nor Jan slept much that night. Charlie walked up and down the room while Jan lay in bed, worrying aloud:
“Poor Tiki! Poor, poor little thing! Shut up alone in the dark waiting for the wasps …”
“We don’t know that. Maybe she’s gone abroad for the winter. She could be lying in the sun on some lovely beach for all we know.”
“She’d never have gone off and not told me if she’d fixed it about the baby.”
“We can’t count on a fairy to behave like a responsible grown-up human being. Maybe she just forgot about it. In which case, it’s not poor Tiki, it’s poor us.” He stamped up and down the room a few times more and then burst out: “A fairy child with funny-colored hair! It would be better not to have a baby at all.”
“Oh, Charlie! But I never asked for one. It was her idea. I’m much more worried about her than about us just now. After all…,” she said thoughtfully, “we could always dye the baby’s hair some ordinary color, even if it was blue or green.”
“You did say you wanted her to have pink skin?”
“Yes, oh yes. Like rose petals, I said.”
Charlie turned round and stared at her. “Like rose petals!” he said. “What if she thinks you meant an orange rose? Or a dark red one? Or a red and yellow striped one?”
Jan let out a wail and turned her face into the pillow.
Jan’s bed was still pushed up against the window. When she woke the next morning, Wijic was astride her arm, kicking her as if her arm were a fat horse.
“Wake up! Wake up!” he was squeaking. “I’ve found her!”
Jan shook Charlie awake and they both jumped out of bed. “Where?” they cried. “Show us! Quickly!” And they started rushing about, trying to get dressed in a hurry; but Wijic was too impatient for that.
He pointed his two forefingers at them and shouted, “Dijiwig!” and they found themselves fully dressed and with their coats on. It was the first bit of actual magic they’d seen and they both felt rather stunned, but Wijic was appearing and disappearing as he danced up and down on Jan’s shoulder, crying, “Come on, come on!” So they hurried out of the house.
It was still very early, and it was a freezing cold, misty morning. No one was about. Wijic grabbed Jan’s scarf and flew ahead, pulling at her to follow.
“Where are we going?” Charlie asked, panting after them.
“Not far! Up on the common!”
“Jan can’t walk that far. Let’s go by car,” said Charlie.
Wijic stopped so suddenly that Jan bumped into him.
“Oh yes! Much more fun than flying,” he said.
So they got the car out of the garage. Wijic insisted on sitting on Charlie’s hand as he steered, and kept shouting, “Wheee! This is great!” every time they turned a corner.
“Is she in a wasps’ nest?” asked Jan anxiously.
“Yes.”
“How brave of you to find her!”
“Oh,” said Wijic, “I didn’t find her. I asked a pal of mine, a gnome. Their skins are so thick they don’t care about wasps. They don’t care about anything much. I had to promise to do something for him.… Well, never mind that. He got the other gnomes on to it, and at midnight they sent a runner to tell me they’d found her.”
They had reached the common by now. It all looked pale, frozen and mysterious. The air was very cold, and the ground was icy. Charlie held Jan’s arm carefully as Wijic, holding Jan’s scarf so as to stay visible, led them, with wings whirring, to a stunted oak tree in a snowy hollow.
If the Fairy Queen had wanted to make sure Tiki would never be rescued, at least by a human being, she had chosen the right place. The oak tree stood in the middle of masses of blackberry bushes. Their trailing briars, bristling with sharp thorns, spread in all directions. When Charlie and Jan came up to them, the highest briars reached their shoulders.
“How are we going to get through this lot?” muttered Charlie.
“We should have brought clippers!” cried Jan in dismay.
“Clippers or no clippers, you’re not going in there,” said Charlie. “Wait here. I’m going to try to push through.”
He tried. The briars seemed to have a plan of their own. Their thorns clutched at his coat and scratched at his face. Jan, watching, saw them swaying, reaching for him like thin snakes. There was no wind, so it could only have been some awful magic.
Wijic was crouched on her shoulder.
“Please, Wijic, help him,” Jan whispered.
He shook his head.
“You don’t understand,” he whispered. “If the Queen knew … It’s bad enough that I brought you here.”
Charlie was p
ushing farther and farther in. Jan could hear him swearing at the briars and letting out little shouts every now and then as a thorn clawed at him or tore his trousers. It seemed to Jan that the opening he had forced through the bushes was closing up behind him.
“He’ll be trapped!” she whispered. She felt very frightened suddenly. “Wijic, oh, please! Just a little magic—nothing that would show! Please! Don’t you want us to rescue Tiki?”
“Oh—all right,” said Wijic, not at all willingly. He shut his eyes and clenched his fists and Jan could see his lips moving slightly. Suddenly Charlie began to move faster. The rude words stopped. And in another few minutes he’d reached the oak tree.
“I’m through!” he called back. “Now, where’s the nest? Oh! I see it—it’s right up at the top of the tree!”
Jan looked up, and now she could see it too—a thing like a gray football, stuck among the highest branches of the leafless oak. It had a lid of snow on it. Jan shivered when she thought how cold, as well as frightened, hungry and lonely, Tiki must be.
“Fairies can’t be lonely,” she reminded herself. But it didn’t comfort her. Tiki didn’t have her magic anymore, so perhaps she had some feelings fairies don’t usually have.
Meanwhile, Charlie was struggling to climb the tree. He seemed to be having trouble. The tree wasn’t very tall and the branches looked to Jan as if they would be easy to climb. But every time Charlie put his foot on one of the lower branches, it slipped off again.
“Everything’s covered with ice,” he shouted. “I can’t get a grip.” His hands kept slipping too. Jan looked down at Wijic, who was now standing up on her shoulder, watching Charlie.
“That’s not ordinary ice,” he muttered.
Charlie had just managed to pull himself up onto the lowest branch. He seemed to have a good grip. Then suddenly, for no reason, he fell off again. Luckily he landed on his feet.
“What’s wrong with me today?” he said angrily.
“Nothing’s wrong with you, mate,” muttered Wijic. “You need a bit of help, that’s all.” And he pointed both forefingers across the brambles and said, “Bili-wiki!” in a high, ordering voice.