CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Sarah Jane

let Aunt Lillian and the Apple Tree Man take the lead and followed behind with Li’l Pater at my side. The little cat man still seemed put out that I hadn’t wanted to include him in our party and wasn’t speaking to me, but that was okay. I didn’t really want to talk to anybody. I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to think. I just wanted my sisters to be safe again.

The only thing that made any of this even remotely bearable was seeing how well Aunt Lillian and the Apple Tree Man were getting along. It was as though she’d shed a whole mess of years—her back was straighter, and she had a spring in her step and was giggling. Maybe it was something in the air of this place, but more likely it had to do with the fact that the Apple Tree Man was finally back in her life.

Personally, I don’t know what she saw in him. Now, he wasn’t butt-ugly, but he sure wasn’t going to win himself any prizes for handsomeness, either. I guess it’s that he just wasn’t human, not with his gnarly limbs and that barky skin with all those twigs and leaves and such growing out of him every which where. I’d have thought that maybe at Aunt Lillian’s age, courting wasn’t so important anymore, but she was acting just like Adie or the older twins do when they’re flirting with some fellow.

“How come you’re so mad at me?” Li’l Pater said.

I turned to him. “What?”

“Well, you must be, the way you’re giving me the silent treatment and all.”

I didn’t really want to be talking about this with him, but I supposed it would be a distraction from worrying about my sisters.

“I’m not mad at you,” I said. “I don’t even know you.”

“And that’s why you don’t want my help.”

“Look,” I told him. “The Apple Tree Man vouches for you, and Aunt Lillian vouches for him, so here we all are.”

“But you don’t want me to be here, do you?”

“I just want my sisters to be safe.”

“We’ll rescue them,” he said with a confidence I didn’t feel. “We’re in the middle of a story now and since we’re the heroes, it has to all come out right for us in the end. You’ll see.”

“Except in their minds, the bee fairies and ’sangmen are the heroes. Who’s to say that the story won’t go their way?”

“I never thought about that.”

“Well, don’t,” I told him, already regretting that I’d put the notion in his head. Mama often said that putting bad thoughts into the air by speaking them aloud was a sure way to call bad luck to you. “I like the way you think it’ll all work out.”

I was so busy talking to Li’l Pater that I bumped right into the Apple Tree Man, never having realized that he and Aunt Lillian had come to a stop.

“What is it?” I asked.

But I guessed pretty quickly, by the stony ground underfoot and the thick canopy of poplar and beech and oak. We were on familiar ground, standing at the top of a slope running down into a ’sang field, the plants growing thick and tall below us. We could have been in the same one that I found the ’sangman in yesterday. I suppose some places aren’t that much different from one world to the other.

“I’m going to call the ’sangmen to us,” the Apple Tree Man said. “Unless they ask you a question directly, let me do the talking.”

I gave him a reluctant nod, still not trusting him as much as Aunt Lillian apparently did.

“And if you do have to answer a question,” he added, “give them the answer and nothing more.”

“Do you know these people?” I asked.

“We’ve met, but I’ve never spent much time with them. I don’t cotton to the whole idea of courts and royalty and all the way some of the fairies do.”

“Why not?”

“Well, the trouble with courts,” the Apple Tree Man said, “is you’re stuck with a king or a queen, and they almost always think that the whole world turns around them.”

I knew a few folks like that back in our own world.

“I like to go my own way,” he added, “and not be beholden to anyone else.”

I knew a bunch of folks like that, too, starting with pretty much my whole family.

“I’ll follow your lead,” I told him.

He called out, making a sound that was like a cross between the nasal yank-yank of a nuthatch and a fox’s bark. I gave Aunt Lillian a look, but she was studying the land below. When I turned to have my own look at the ’sang field, I saw them come popping up all over the patch, little ’sangmen and women, all gnarled and rooty like the wounded fellow I’d rescued—the one that had gotten us all into this mess in the first place.

It was eerie to watch. One minute there was just the ’sang, growing taller and with more prongs than I’d ever seen back in our own world, and the next we had a whole mess of these little people in among the ’sang, and not much taller than the plants, looking up at us. It was like they’d sprouted right up out of the ground and, for all I knew, that’s exactly what they did.