Don't Let Them Make a Nest
A few days later, the Emergency Bell blasted William out of bed again. He threw open the shutters and swayed in front of his bedroom window, squinting against the bright morning light. His eyes hadn’t adjusted, so he yelled, “Bite! That bell is for emergencies! Cut it out!”
“It is an emergency!” Tom’s voice boomed and his giant eye filled William’s window.
“What kind of emergency?” William asked, still skeptical. He yawned and his eyes watered.
“See for yourself.” First the eye, then Tom vanished from the window.
“Something just flew into your castle,” Gneiss said at the window. “Came out again—there it goes!”
“Shoo! You little magical mosquito!” Moth shouted.
“Go home! Go away!” said Shale.
Shading his eyes from the bright outdoor light, William squinted at the silhouetted giants. Had his fairy godparents finally showed up? They were a jazz trio and always told him they were short on time.
Bea, Jens, and Cordelia came into William’s room. Jens and Bea flopped on William’s bed.
“Is this a real emergency or not?” Cordelia yawned. “I don’t want to go all the way downstairs for nothing again.”
“The giants don’t think so,” William said. A visit from his fairy godparents weren’t usually an emergency, but something was definitely up. It would be easier to sort out if his family was safely out of the way.
“I’ll be down in a sec,” he said. “The giants are pretty upset, so I’ll meet you under the bridge.”
“Stop overreacting,” Bea grumbled. Jens got up from the bed and appeared to be sleepwalking to the door.
As all three of William’s siblings went out the door, Cordelia was saying, “We’ve got to take the clapper out of the bell while the giants are here—”
Outside, something was buzzing around the giants. They swatted, yelled, and swatted again.
“Swatting is rude!” said a tiny shrill voice.
A silvery something whizzed across the patio, into William’s bedroom open window, around William, and right back out.
Rocks swatted his nose with one hand, still holding his tree trunk picketing sign with the other. “Ow! You called the fairies! That’s not fair at all!” he roared.
The fairy zoomed this way and that, evading the giants like an aerial obstacle course.
The other giants gripped their picket signs, and swatted the air, the ground, and the chapati grill.
“No, wait, stop!” William shouted, “Hey, we don't swat fairies here—the Fairy Kingdom and the Seven Kingdoms are friends!”
The giants paid no attention.
“Get it!”
“Got it!”
“Missed!”
The castle trembled with the heavy blows.
A high-pitched voice pierced the giants’ rumbling. “Stop swinging those trees around, you big bullies! You’re going to knock over the castle!”
Fairy wings buzzed William’s ear. He ducked.
“If you don’t catch it, it’ll nest!” Gneiss said, panicked. “Then you’ll never get rid of them.”
“There it is,” Rocks bellowed.
Carefully, to avoid swatting whichever one of his fairy godparents had come to visit him, William covered his ears against the giant’s bellow. When the roar paused, William offered to take care of the problem.
Gneiss’s finger disappeared from William’s window, and his eye appeared.
“Really,” William said. “I think I can handle this. Watch your eyelashes!” William closed the shutters.
But the jazz trio he’d expected, the one that served as William’s fairy godparents, weren’t there. Instead, where the heavy beams met in an upper corner of the room, a single cupid grinned down at him.
How did a cupid get to the Marigold Kingdom?
“Looks like I came just in time,” the cupid said. “This place is a nest of giants.”
Yeah, and the giants think it’s a nest of cupids.
“The giants are guests. Who are you?” William asked, carefully. Had he been demoted from full-fledged fairy godparents to a cupid? He didn’t want to guess at her name, and he had no idea what she was doing here.
“The giants are guests? You really need help.” The tiny cupid pointed to the satin sash on her shoulder. “I’m Psyche, the Official Cupid Ambassador, from the Fairy Kingdom.”
“And what does an Official Cupid Ambassador do?” William asked.
“Don’t you read the Proclamation?” the cupid asked. “I advise the TFT and the M.E.R.C.Y.”
Psyche was much bigger than a mosquito, but smaller than a regulation fairy godparent. The TFT was the Thinking for Thursdays group. All his friends—the other crown princes and crown princess of the Seven Kingdoms—were in it with him.
When no one had answered his messages, he’d thought the TFT had written him off.
A poisoner. A criminal. A giant killer who would have to appear before the Magenta Educational Royal Court for Youth. The M.E.R.C.Y. was Vlad’s courtroom.
Nice to know they didn’t forget me, but a cupid is . . . ridiculous?
He pressed his lips together, fighting for control, and bowed. “William of Marigold, at your service,” he said, a self-mocking note in his voice.
She landed on his desk and waltzed over his open sketchbook. “Nice comics,” she said, tapping on his artist signature with her toe. “Do you go by ‘Jack’ or by ‘William’?”
His heart stopped, and he rushed over, closed the sketchbook, and stashed it in the cupboard. He’d left it out when he’d written the note to his parents.
“That’s private,” he said in a firm voice. “And I go by William.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m an ambassador now.” Psyche preened.
Uh, oh. Offending a single fairy was dangerous. Offending their ambassador meant offending a whole kingdom of fairies. William started to sweat. The giants had been swatting Psyche. How was he supposed to smooth that over?
But then she said, “Oh, and I checked out your dovecote. You don’t have very many pigeons over here, compared to the Saffron or Magenta Kingdoms. You should get some more.”
“You what?” William asked, thrown by the change of topic. Messages were private. Psyche shouldn’t have been in the royal dovecote at all. “Why would you do that?”
But Psyche was already onto something else. “The first thing we have to do is clear out these giants. Why did you let them stay so long?”
Let them stay?
“You’ll never get rid of them now.” She flew towards the door of William’s room.
That sounded so much like what the giant had just told him about cupids that William let it pass. He had to think this through.
Psyche had already flown through the gap under his door.
William opened it.
Psyche flew over and landed on his nose. “You should close your mouth. Something might fly in there. Let’s go over to your restaurant.”
Carefully, William closed his mouth and—to keep from going cross-eyed—his eyes. When the tickly feeling of her feet was gone, he opened his eyes, and ran downstairs after the cupid.
His family wasn’t waiting inside the front hall, so they must be safely outside, under the bridge, at the second meeting spot.
He opened the door of the main castle and Psyche flew with him out the door and across the patio. His family wasn’t here either, but they weren’t supposed to be. He didn’t see the giants, but he felt the vibrations from their feet, and heard them shouting to each other. He had to go talk to them, but he wanted the cupid to be settled first.
When William opened the restaurant door, she zipped ahead.
“Careful!” he called out to warn her about the swinging doors, but she flew through the narrow slit underneath.
“Also works,” William muttered, but he went cautiously through the door. Who knew who else might have showed up?
But he and the cupid were the only ones there. What was going on? Frankly, the idea that one tiny cupid could chase away seven giants was ridiculous.
If the other members of the TFT had really sent her to him, that meant they were still talking to him, right? Maybe the answers to his messages were still coming. The pigeons must have run into a lot of wind or weather.
Wings beating, Psyche hovered in the air in front of the pantry door. “Your family has a restaurant, right? Do you have cake? Battle plans make me hungry.”
Hospitality was important, especially for blunt cupid ambassadors. William got out a tiny saucer, got a saffron macaron from the pantry and brought it out for Psyche.
After she took her first bite, he said, “You want a battle plan, because . . . ?”
She rolled her eyes, pointed to her mouth full of macaron, and held up a finger for him to wait. But she didn’t bolt down the macaron and answer. She chewed slower, closed her eyes, and got kind of swoon-y in the air.
Was she going into sugar shock or something? William got a tiny cream ladle that was used for the fancy tea parties and filled it with water. It was the smallest “cup” he could offer. He wanted to kick himself for giving her food from the Royal Marigold Restaurant. He’d somehow poisoned Mr. G by mistake. He didn’t need to poison a fairy by mistake too. He brought the cream ladle up to Psyche’s mouth. “Do you want some water?” he asked.
Her eyelids popped open, then narrowed in a needle-sharp glare as if he’d dragged her back from very far away.
William backed up. “Sorry, sorry! I thought you were passing out from the sugar.”
She rolled her eyes, swallowed, and said, “I was enjoying my cake.” She eyed the ladle suspiciously. “You weren’t going to pour that on my head, were you? You can wake up a giant by pouring water over his head, but pouring water over wings is a terrible idea.”
“Sorry,” William said, automatically in restaurant waiter mode. This conversation kept going off the rails. He needed to go talk to the giants before they “rescued” him from this unusual cupid by blowing up the Marigold Castle.
“Look,” William said, “Thanks for coming over, but I’m a little busy right now. I don’t need a battle plan, what I need is a cure for Mr. G”—a sudden stab of hope drove him right over to the cupid.
“Wait, did you say Mr. G woke up? They poured water over his head and that did it? That’s why you’re here?” He would bake a whole tray of macarons just for her.
“No,” she shook her head, sounding totally unconcerned. “He’s still sound asleep. You know giants, they think nothing of a hundred-year-long nap. Lazy lumps.”
From outside, Rocks called out, “Don’t worry, your majesties! We’ll get him out safely—”
That didn’t sound like “lazy lumps”. It sounded like an invasion out there, but he couldn’t risk leaving this cupid until he understood what was going on.
“You don’t know Mr. G if you think he’s a lazy lump,” William protested. He wanted to pour a bucket of water over Psyche.
Fairy wings or no fairy wings.
Mr. G was such a generous and hard-working farmer. He grew the best parsnips in the Seven Kingdoms.
“Never met him.” The cupid preened. “But back to business—there are three basic ways to get rid of giants, okay maybe four if we count your soup—”
“I don’t want to get rid of the giants,” William shouted. “I want to wake up Mr. G, so he can go home and rest in his own bed.”
The cupid jerked backwards in the air. “The TFT told me you were polite, but maybe the giants have been getting to you.”
She went on in a pat-William-on-the-head tone that set his teeth on edge. “You may not realize it,” she said, “but you and your family are prisoners in your own castle. No one can get in and you can’t get out. Either you give them your super-duper sleepy soup or we get these giants to go home as fast as possible, so you can come to the Magenta Kingdom—”
So he could get locked in the dungeon and be useless?
Outside, the giants counted, “One! Two—”
Uh, oh! William ran through the swinging doors and the dining room. Yanking open the restaurant door that led to the patio, he came face to face with a battering ram. “Stop!” he shouted.
“Get out of the way, William!” Rocks shouted.