Putting your foot in the door should not be used as a literal term when one does not wear shoes. Captain Partlet did not realize this fact until the little maid slammed the door on them for a second time. Fancy talk and captainly persuasion had come to naught, but it did earn him one very fat toe, and a good ten seconds worth of hopping on one foot and whimpering.
On the third attempt, Wendy, feeling no small amount of frustration welling in her gut, simply took hold of the little handles and pulled. The tiny lock snapped with hardly any effort at all, but unfortunately so did the hinges, and both panels came away in Wendy's hand. Directly inside the tiny opening, the maid stood with her jaw slack and eyes as wide as pennies (which is very wide indeed for a fairy).
"Sorry." she said quickly, dropping the doors onto the ground. "NOW will you let us see the storyteller?"
The maid stared for a moment, then turned on her heels in a panic and ran further into the palace, shrieking "There's a GIRL at the door!!! GRAMMA JESSI!!"
Mab snorted and flitted down into the door. "Trust my sister to hire cowardly help." she said smugly. "Just be a minute."
She vanished into the door. Captain Partlet stuck his head in after her, and a whole minute later (to the sounds of indignant protests from within the palace) the door to an upper balcony flung open. Out scurried the little maid, who was now as white as feather down, a pair of emerald colored beetles wearing gold collars, and an old fairy in a bathrobe looking tired, miffed, and generally unhappy at it all. Queen Mab strutted out beside her and stood with her arms crossed, looking entirely pleased with herself. Wendy tapped Captain Partlet on the rump to try and discretely tell him to stand up, but he startled, whacked his head on the ceiling of the entrance hall, and waddled backwards out of the doorway, rubbing his crest with a wing.
"What was so important that it couldn't wait until the sun came up?" the old fairy asked, trying to smooth back her white hair into some semblance of decency. There was something odd about her. Wendy couldn't quite place what it was, though.
"We're sorry, but it really is quite urgent." Wendy said, giving a polite curtsy. "We need to know something about a story."
"Well at least you had the wits to come to the best." she said with a tired smile "But I still don't see why this couldn't have waited until the sun was up."
"We need to know about the human boy who kidnaps children. The Queen was able to tell us a little bit of it, but I think it may be a matter of life or death!" Wendy said, probably using that phrase in the literal for the first time in her life. The storyteller frowned and knotted her bathrobe tie more tightly.
"A human boy who steals children?"
"Yes." the girl said with a nod. "He comes to their home pretending to need help, and once they give it to him he puts the parents to sleep and takes the children away."
The storyteller had gone completely and utterly quiet. After a moment she raised her wary gaze to meet Wendy's face.
"Why do you need to know about that?" she asked carefully.
"Because the same thing happened to my little brother!" Wendy burst. "Peter went missing this morning, and tonight a boy came to the house and said he was lost out in the cold! I let him in and the next thing I know I'm waking up on the floor and Michael is gone! And now Nibs told me that the Twins are trapped at Crooked Mountain and I think you can tell us what's going on!"
Much to her misery, Wendy found herself sniffling, and she swallowed and stretched her neck to try and keep it from getting worse. The storyteller looked at her blankly for a moment before dropping her head with a heavy sigh. "Already." she said softly, mournfully. "The boys only out a day and he's doing it already."
"Doing WHAT? Tell me what you know!" The girl insisted.
The story teller waved her hands. "Let me get dressed first. I'll put on my dress and we can move away from the palace, away from listening ears. I don't want the council to know what's going on."
Mab looked startled "Why not? The council is the ruling body while my sister and her husband are gone. If it's so important that you have the city locked down, don't they need to know?"
She shook her head "It's enough that they trust me to do what I tell them. They won't be able to handle what's happening, and I don't want them to try. Let someone else take care of him this time." She rubbed her forehead. "Maybe they'll do a better job than we did."
Before Wendy could press her again, the storyteller swept back into the palace, followed quickly by the nervous little maid and the two emerald beetles. Mab looked after her with a confused tint to her glow. "This doesn't make any sense at all." she said. "Why would the council listen to that old woman if she won't even tell them what's going on? My sister would never put up with such foolishness if she were here!"
"But she isn't here." Wendy pointed out.
"Well, she should be. I have my own affairs to deal with, you know. Last thing I need is secrets and storytellers and two silly deputies that got themselves locked in a cave."
With what seemed surprising speed, the storyteller reemerged to the balcony still buttoning the front of her pink dress (or was it a coat? It was impossible to be sure with fairy fashions). The maid followed with a metal crossbar in her hand.
"Lets go to the eastern shore then, shall we?" she said briskly, gesturing with a hand to the beetles. They scuttled to stand side by side, the maid fitted the crossbar over their collars, and the story teller sat herself on it. "The Night Watch should be heading off soon, the Badger Knights will be taking their place. I'm sure they can be delayed for a few minutes."
The beetles powered their wings and lifted the entire thing into the air, and it suddenly occurred to Wendy what was different about the storyteller.
"You don't have any wings!" she exclaimed dumbly, putting a hand to her mouth.
"Yes, I was aware of that. Thank you." the woman clipped back.
She refused to say anything else on the short trip to the shore. Captain Partlet (who had been on ground level for the preceedings and thus feeling rather left out of the conversation) flew beneath her in the precaution that she might fall off the seat, but the maid was following with the same idea, and the two kept bungling each other's paths.
It was a short trip (for Small Monday Island was indeed small) and they lighted on an accommodating stone as the sun finally pushed it's nose up over the horizon. The beetles, who were the most useful pets Wendy had ever seen anyone keep, immediately pushed themselves up behind the old woman and the queen and made chairs of themselves, while the girl sat neatly on the bare stone and the maid stood at the Captain's feet. The shore was strangely void of the Night Watch, and Wendy did not understand why this shore should be so unprotected while the other was thick with guards. But in only a moment a bark armored head stuck itself out of the trees and sniffed at them: they had reached the shore upon the changing of the guards. Mab shot the badger an awful glare and the poor thing turned it's tail and ran.
The story of the night so far was repeated once more to the storyteller, who took it all in with a thoughtful nod and a stony turn of the mouth. When Wendy and the Queen had finished, she sighed once more and began to scratch the beetle behind it's antenna, much to it's pleasure.
"I wish I could tell you something you wanted to hear." she said finally. The sky was shifting into blue. "I wish I could just tell you that your friends and your brother were all right, but that isn't any certainty anymore. It's been a very long time, you know, since I last met the boy. I'm rather afraid of what the years have done to him." The story teller sighed and patted the beetle finally, her eyes taking on a distant quality. "The story you want to hear begins a very, very long time ago." She began. "I was a very young girl, but I was an adult in my own mind, and I thought I knew all about the world and all the peoples in it. I was just like all the rest of us were back then; foolish, self centered, and unthinkingly cruel. We just didn't know any better.
"I recall that it was winter and a very chilly morning when a several of my friends came back from a trip to the mainland, carrying a bundle between them. It's mother was dead, they said, and they had pried it from her frozen arms as she lay in the snow in the forest. I don't know if that was true, mind you, I think it more likely they stole him, but either way, that morning there came to live with us a real live human baby. It was the same as yourself taking on a puppy.
"We called it "Murhedd". It means 'plaything' in the goblin tongue."
The story teller stood and began to pace, her beetle keeping match at her heels. "We hadn't really thought ahead that he would grow. He kept needing more and more of everything; he learned to talk, even, and we thought that marvelous fun at first. At the novelty of speech, we gave him the gift of languages, so he should never have to learn more than one. We gave him all sorts of little power, things we never thought would amount to anything at all, but were entertaining to see him play tricks with. We gave him the power to put people to sleep just to see who he would torment. We let him control bodies. We weren't thinking! But how were we to know what he could really use them for? He was a pet! Pets don't have the wits to be evil!" She paused and rubbed her forehead again. At the stall the beetle pulled on her skirt, begging for attention, but she ignored it.
"Problems didn't really arise until we realized out plaything was becoming too big." she continued. "We thought he should never stop growing! We didn't know that humans eventually stopped on their own at a certain point, so we decided to stop it for him. He was maybe ten years old at the time. He didn't seem to mind it at all at first, and I don't think he truly understood what we had done to him until many years later, when the Piccaninnies came to the island. Even then, I don't think he should have minded at all if we hadn't become bored with our pet. We lost interest in the games he played and the strange notions he had. We all found new toys to play with, and new games to keep, and Murhedd quietly just vanished into yesterday."
She stopped again. Her listeners let the silence hang for a moment, before Wendy was forced to ask "Is that it? Is that all you can tell us?"
The story teller shook her head. "No, though it would have been better if it were. Just because we stopped playing with him, doesn't mean he went away. There were nearly three years when I don't think anyone even said a simple word to him. He was just like a log, or a chair; he was too big to be a person, he was simply THERE. But it isn't enough for someone to just BE." she sighed. "It started with grasshoppers.
"We didn't know what was happening at first, because it only happened every now and then, and even then it was only one or two. He took the legs off the grasshoppers. Simply pulled them off! Nobody paid it any attention because we didn't know that it was him, and it didn't seem to matter much anyway, I mean, they were only grasshoppers to us. But then he started on water frogs and toads and little garden snakes he's captured. He would do very strange things to them and just leave the bodies where they died so everyone could see. Surely by then we should have done something!
"Murhedd got worse, he started to cut the tails off mice, and the heads of baby birds while they were still in the nests. Their mothers came to the the village in hysterics, demanding justice, but we didn't know what to do about him. We didn't even know what was wrong with him! Maybe all humans did these things! We all sat together and talked one evening, and decided to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.
"We gave him a pet.
"It was a strange thing that had been skulking about on the edges of carnivals and digging holes in the ground where we wanted to build. It was a nuisance! We thought if we gave the animal to him either he would kill it or it would kill him, and either way we had one less problem to deal with. We had NO idea that the thing we had given him was only a baby itself."
"What WAS it you gave him?" Partlet asked, head cocked.
The old woman frowned. "I honestly don't know. A piece of a dream, I suppose, something that didn't fade away with the morning light, though why it didn't go below with all the other nightmare things I can't say. Perhaps it just didn't know any better. In hindsight we were rather unthinking in the matter, because it had never even occurred to us that they might NOT hurt each other. Murhedd was so lonely and the beast was so young that they took to each other immensely, and after that you never saw them apart. We were rather proud of ourselves then, you know, because we had solved the problem anyway. Murhedd stopped hurting things.
"We seemed to have bad luck with our choice of pets, though. The thing just kept getting bigger, and growing more claws, and teeth, and horns, and we almost did to it what we did to Murhedd, except that he seemed so pleased we hardly dared to. It became ENORMOUS. If I recall, the top of it's head was more than forty feet from the ground, and that's not even considering the arms that came from it's back. Disgusting thing. He loved it far too much for his own good, I think.
"It seemed like the problem had been solved, though. But that lasted only until the Piccaninnies came to the island."
She sat herself down on her beetle again, holding her chin in thought. The little maid came up beside her and scratched the beetle's head while they waited expectantly.
"When we first heard they were on the island of course we all had to go look at them. Even Murhedd came, though how he'd heard of them in the first place I can't be sure, because he hadn't been near the fairy village in weeks. I remember that evening very well. The indians were setting up their camp in a clearing, over on the western corner of the island. The trees were filled with all manners of things, just sitting there, staring at them. I think they must have known we were there, but they did a most marvelous job of hiding it, if they did. I remember I was sitting on the branch of an ash tree, and I looked down below me, and leaning against the trunk was Murhedd, with the strangest expression I have ever seen on his face. To this day I can't quite find the word to describe it. Horror, I suppose? Maybe joy? Despair? He watched the human mothers with their human children, and didn't move from that spot, even after the rest of us grew bored with the newcomers and went home." There was an uncomfortable pause as she tapped her chin, eyes glazed with remembering.
"I know that the next morning there was a fight. I wasn't there and I don't really know what was said, but Murhedd went storming away from the fairy village with tears on his face, and I didn't hear another noise from him for nearly a month. But then....one morning the Piccaninnies were searching the island from end to end, and everyone wanted to know what they were looking for.
"They told us their children, some of them, were gone."
"Murhedd stole them?" Wendy asked.
The story teller shrugged. "We didn't know at first. But as the day wore on and the news circled the island, it seemed there was only one person unaccounted for that day, and the same person was nowhere to be found. Murhedd was simply gone. It took us...." She bit her lip. "far too long....to find him. Many children disappeared before we found his monster's tracks in the mud, and followed them back to a cave in the mountains."
Wendy's eyes went very large "You mean under Crooked Mountain?! Where the twins are?!"
She nodded uncomfortably. "I'm afraid so. But please, you have to understand. I know now we should have gotten rid of him that day, and I think it might of been a kindness of we had. But everything that had happened was our fault! We couldn't kill him for something that we ourselves had caused, but we couldn't let him loose. We...CONTAINED him. And far too late. From the things we saw in his home, it was obvious he had allready found a way to the mainland, and it wasn't only the redskins who were suffering him. We put up barriers. We sealed the door. We.....we lost a lot, when that door slammed shut. We had to close it before he came up after us! We held it as long as we could, you understand, but he had come to the top of the stair, and there were still many fairies and Piccaninnies down in the darkness with his monster. It...it was.....a sacrifice that had to be made." she said, fiddling her fingers nervously.
"We covered the door with earth, and placed a keystone on the top to seal it off. As long as the stone was in place, they would not be able to break the walls or door and dig their way out. We grew a briar over the stone to protect it and we made the land around it dead and barren, so nothing would go near it. Something must have happened to the stone, today. Something to break the spell and reopen the valley. I-I thought Murhedd would come after the fairies that imprisoned him, or even the Piccaninnies, but he hasn't come near either of us yet. It seems he wants something else."
"And what is that?" Mab asked.
The old woman paused "I....I think he wanted Wendy."
"ME?!" the girl yelped. "What could he possibly want with ME?"
The shocked look the Queen was giving the storyteller caused her to quickly wave her hands "Oh, no! Nothing like what you're thinking! The story you knew, the one you came to me about? That was what he did to families on the mainland, HUMAN families. I only heard about it decades after the fact, but he went IN with the intention of taking their children. But it doesn't sound to me like that was what he intended when he came into your house last night. You had to become angry at him. You had to chase him away, to REJECT him from you. Do you think he would have reacted the same had you let him stay?"
Wendy wavered, but shook her head.
"He didn't want your boys this time." she said with a sad sort of smile. "He wanted Mother Wendy."