"Why did you bring him?" The voice was distant to Gary, but he recognized it as Kelsey's, and the elf did not sound happy.
"I telled ye before," Mickey replied. "It's bigger than yer spear and yer armor, bigger than Robert himself."
"Enough of your cryptic babble," Kelsey demanded.
"He did get us out of there," offered another voice, Baron Pwyll's. "He dishonored himself, and us!" Kelsey snarled back.
Gary had been trying to convince his sleepy eyes to open, trying to shift his prone, weary body so that he could get up and join in the conversation. But now he knew what his friends were talking about, who his friends were talking about, and he was not so eager to join in. "Ye couldn't expect the lad to fight it through," Mickey reasoned. "He didn't even have on the armor!"
"He challenged the man," Kelsey declared, and his words sounded with the finality of a nail being driven into Gary Leger's coffin. "Honorably." "He fooled the man," Mickey corrected. "Fittingly. Besides, ye're the only one o' the group who's angry with the lad. Even Geno, who'd fight yerself to a draw, feels he owes the lad his thanks."
"Dwarfs don't mix honor and stupidity," came another voice, Geno's voice, from a different direction. "That's an lfish trait, and one for humans, though you cannot trust any human, even on his word."
Gary blinked his eyes open. He was lying flat on his back, sunk deep in a thick bed of soft clover and looking up at the most spectacular display of twinkling stars he had ever seen. To his left, he saw the horses, and saw Geno and Gerbil ride up on the gnome's quadri-contraption. Across the other way sat Gary's remaining companions, circling a pile of glowing embers, Baron Pwyll eagerly digging the remaining food out of a small bowl.
"Is he alive?" Geno asked with his customary gruffness as he and the gnome crossed by Gary's feet.
"Oh, sure," Mickey answered. "His wound's not too bad, and the salve should fix it clean."
Gary instinctively dragged his hand to his side, felt a poultice there, and realized that the sharp pain had become no more than a distant and dull ache.
"Did you note any signs of pursuit?" Kelsey asked.
"Plenty of signs," Geno replied with a chuckle. "But all going in the wrong directions. Geldion's bunch lost the trail altogether when Mickey made the horse bells sound back to the north."
Gary had seen and heard enough of the leprechaun's tricks to understand what had occurred. Redarm and his minions were probably twenty miles- away by now, chasing illusionary bells through dark fields.
"And we can keep goin' to the south," the leprechaun reasoned.
"East," Kelsey bluntly corrected. There came a long pause, as all of the others waited for Kelsey to explain. Gary wanted to hear it, too.
"We shall cross Dvergamal," the elf decided. "The dragon was last seen near to Gondabuggan. Perhaps he will still be about, or perhaps some of your folk" - Gary knew that Kelsey was speaking to Geno - "have seen him crossing the mountains."
"Oh, yes, yes, a fine plan," Gerbil interjected, above the stuttered protests of Baron Pwyll. "If Robert is still about my town, then won't he be surprised - oh, his dragon eyes will pop wide! - when a whole new group of heroes arrives to battle him!"
"If the wyrm is still about your town, then your town is no more a town," Geno put in, and from his tone, it didn't seem to Gary that the dwarf was particularly fond of Kelsey's plan.
"Have you a better idea?" Kelsey demanded, apparently thinking the same thing.
"I have an idea that chasing a dragon, a dragon that can fly," the dwarf emphasized, "across mountains, will get us nothing more than tired.
Besides, whoever said that the plan was to catch up to the damned wyrm?" "We have not the time to go all the way to Robert's lair," Kelsey reasoned, his voice firm and even. "And you won't catch a flying wyrm crawling along mountain trails!" Geno said again.
"He's right," Mickey interjected. "We won't be catching Robert by going where the dragon's last been seen. We'll find charred trees and charred bones, to be sure."
Gerbil groaned.
"But not a sight o' the fast-flying wyrm," Mickey finished.
Gary chanced a look to the group, saw Kelsey, obviously agitated, jump up to his feet and stalk a few steps away.
"More than that," Geno said roughly, "the dragon is nowhere near to Gondabuggan anymore."
"What do you know?" Kelsey demanded, spinning about.
"The Buldrefolk have seen him," Geno answered. "In a foul mood, soaring across the peaks of Dvergamal. Robert is out and flying free with Ceridwen banished to her island for the first time in centuries. He has a lot to see, elf, and a lot to conquer. Did he destroy the gnome town? Will he go for the Crahgs next, try to find some allies out of the pile of monsters lurking in there? Or might he go straight for Connacht, to burn the castle and the King? Robert knows as well as we that Kinnemore is Ceridwen's puppet. With the witch banished, if he can bring down the throne, then what might stop him?"
How true rang every one of Geno's suppositions, and how hopeless the desperate task seemed then to Kelsey. His scowl became a look of dread and resignation, and he turned back away, staring out into the empty night.
"We'll catch him," Mickey said to him. "But not by going where he's been - by going where he's sure to be."
Kelsey turned about once more, his eyes, shining golden even in the dim light of the embers, narrowed with an expression that seemed to Gary half anger and half intrigue.
"Oh, we'll go east, like ye said," Mickey went on, lighting his longstemmed pipe. "But not 'til we get south around the mountains." "To Giant's Thumb," Kelsey said.
Pwyll groaned again, and Geno's stream of spittle sizzled as it hit the embers.
"Dragons don't like thieves walking into their empty lairs to their backs," Mickey said with a conniving smile. "Robert'll come rushing back as fast as his flapping wings'H fly him when he senses that we're there. And when he sees what we bringed back to his hoard, then he's bound to stay put for a hundred years."
"What you brought back," Geno corrected.
"You have decided not to accompany us?" Kelsey asked.
"I never decided to accompany you!" the dwarf correeled. "I came east because east is my home, to get away from that stupid Prince Geldion and from yourself!" He poked a stubby finger PwylFs way. "Don't you think that I've forgotten who put me in this trouble in the first place!" The fearful Baron blanched.
"Ah, a load o' bluster," Mickey said, and Gary half expected Geno to leap up and spring across the embers to throttle the leprechaun. The dwarf did some mighty glowering, but kept his seat.
"Ye're here because ye got put in the middle of it, that much is true," Mickey continued. "But ye've stayed because ye know ye have to stay. Like our friend gnome, there. He'd like nothing more than to get back to Gondabuggan and his own, but he won't go, not if our best plans don't take him there."
"True enough, I figure. I figure," Gerbil replied, stroking his gray beard, shining more orange in the firelight than Gary had noticed before. "I figure?"
Geno sent another stream of spittle sizzling against the embers, but he did not openly dispute the wise leprechaun's reasoning. The dwarf knew more than the others, though, knew that Prince Geldion and his small band were but a tiny fraction of the resistance stemming from Con-nacht. Geno's companions in the Snoozing Sprite had told him that the King's army was on the march, northeast across the fields, drawing a line between Connacht and Braemar.
"South and east it is, then," Kelsey agreed. "To the Giant's Thumb, to lure the wyrm and to trap the wyrm."
A series of clucking noises issued forth from Baron Pwyll's twisting mouth, obvious protests against the seemingly suicidal course. "You can stay here and wait for Geldion," Geno offered, punching the Baron in the arm. The dwarf spat again and rolled over, propping a rock for a pillow. "Too fat and slow anyway."
Gary shook his head, tried to lift his arms to clasp hands behind his neck, but found that he could only lift his right arm, his bound left side being too sore for the maneuver. He grimaced and tucked his left arm against his side, hoping that it would heal before he found himself in another battle.
That thought led Gary's gaze down between his feet, to the pile of armor and the long black spear, resting easily against it. Gary propped himself up on his elbows - gingerly - and reached his toe down to tap against the weapon.
A blue spark erupted from the butt end of the spear, singeing Gary's toe and coursing through his body, sending his thick black hair into a momentary standstill atop his head.
"Hey!" he exclaimed.
"Coward!"
The message stole all the surprise from Gary's body, stole his strength and just about everything else, as well. He stared blankly at the mighty weapon, confused and distressed.
"I'm not a coward," he replied, quietly aloud, but with the protest screaming in his thoughts.
He waited, but the spear did not dignify the declaration with a response. "Problems?" Mickey asked, skipping over to sit in the clover beside the young man. Gary looked to the spear.
"Damned thing zapped me," he explained.
"Coward! "
"I am not a coward!" Gary growled.
"Ah," muttered Mickey. "The proud spear's not liking yer choice to run from Redarm."
"I didn't run from Redarm!" Gary snapped back, more angrily than he had intended. "I mean ... I just ... we were trying to get away." Mickey stopped him with a low whistle and a knowing wave of his little hand. "I know what ye were doing, lad, and you did well, by me own guess," the leprechaun explained. "The spear's a proud one, that's all, and not liking missing any fight, needed or not."
"Coward!" Gary growled at the spear; images of heaving it over a bottomless ravine in Dvergamal came into his thoughts. The spear responded by imparting telepathic images of Gary going over the edge, and of the spear plunging down behind, chasing him, point first, all the way down the sheer cliffs. And then the connection was broken, simply gone. Gary looked around curiously, suspecting, but not certain of, what had occurred. Had the spear rejected him? Would it refuse his grasp in the morning, and forever after?
"How stubborn can a weapon be?" the young man asked Mickey.
"Less bending than the metal they're forged with," the leprechaun replied.
"Then we might be in trouble."
Mickey nodded and took a long draw on his pipe, then blew a large smoke ring that drifted the length of Gary's body and settled around the tip of the mighty spear.
"Have it your own way," Gary remarked to the spear, and he lay back down in the clover, head in his hand and looked again to the wondrous nighttime sky of Faerie. Hundreds of stars peeked back at him, pulled at his heart. He wanted to fly up there suddenly, to soar out into the universe and play in the heavens.
" 'Tis a beauty," Mickey agreed, seeing the obvious pleasure splayed across Gary's suddenly serene features.
"Better than anything I've ever seen in my own world," Gary agreed. "The same sky," Mickey replied.
Gary shook his head. "No!" he said emphatically, and then he took a moment to figure out where that firm denial had come from. "It's different," he said at length. "My world is too full of cities, maybe, and streetlights."
"They burn all the night?"
"All the night," Gary answered. "And dull the sky. And the air's probably too dirty for the stars to match this." Gary chuckled resignedly, helplessly. It was true enough, true and sad, but there was even something more profound that made Gary believe that even without the night lights and the dirty air, the stars of his own world would not shine so brightly.
"It's different," he said again. "We have a different way of looking at stars, at all things." Yes, that was it, Gary decided. Not just the actual image of the night sky, but the perspective, was very different. "We have science and scientists, solving all the mysteries," he explained to a doubtful-looking Mickey. "Sometimes I think that's the whole problem." Another pitiful chuckle escaped Gary's lips. He considered the demise of religion in his world, when the mysteries of faith became not so mysterious. He thought of the Shroud of Turin, long believed to be the actual cloth covering the body of Jesus. Only a few days ago, Gary had watched a show on PBS where scientists had dated the cloth of the shroud to sometime around a thousand years AFTER the death of Christ. It was an inevitable clash, science and religion, and one that Gary was just now beginning to understand that his people had not properly resolved or accounted for. Religions hung on to outdated myths, and science ruthlessly battered at them with seemingly indisputable logic. "Explaining everything," Gary said again, and again, he laughed, this time loudly enough to attract the attention of Kelsey and Pwyll, sitting by the glowing embers. "Do you know what it feels like to be mortal, Mickey?" "What're ye talking about?" the leprechaun replied sincerely, honestly trying to understand this thing that was so obviously distressing his friend.
"Mortal," Gary reiterated. "You see, when you take the mysteries away, so too goes the spirituality, the belief in something beyond this physical life."
"That's a stupid way to live."
Gary chuckled yet again and could not disagree. But neither could he escape, he knew. He was a product of his world, a product of an era where science ruled supreme, where no balance between physical truths and spiritual needs had been struck. "It's ..." Gary searched for the word. "... despairing. When the physical world becomes explained to a level where there is no room ..." Gary let the thought drift away and simply shook his head.
"Ye think yer scientists got all the answers, then?" Mickey asked. Maybe not for this trip of mine, Gary thought. Whatever the hell this placed called Faerie might actually be.
'There is no magic in my world," Gary answered solemnly.
"Oh, there ye're wrong," the leprechaun replied, taking the pipe from his mouth and poking Gary in the shoulder with its long stem. "There ye're wrong. The magic's there, I tell ye - yer people have just lost their way to seein' it!"
"No magic," Gary said again, with finality, and he looked away from Mickey and stared back up at the incredible night canopy.
"Can yer so-smart scientists tell ye then why yer heart leaps up at the sight o' stars?" the leprechaun asked smugly, and he snapped his little fingers right in front of Gary's nose.
"Thought not!" Mickey continued in the face of Gary's incredulous stare. "Yer science won't be telling ye that, not for a long while. It's a magic common to all the folk - never could a man or a sprite or even a dwarf look up at the stars and not feel the tug o' magic."
Gary wasn't sure that he bought Mickey's description of it all, but the leprechaun's words were, somehow, comforting. The man from the other world stole a line from a song, then, again from that haunting Tusk album, a quiet song by the group's other woman singer. "Oh what a wonderful night to be," he half sang, half chanted. "Stars must be my friends to shine on me."
"Ah, the bard McVie," Mickey said with obvious pleasure.
Gary's forthcoming reply stuck in his throat. The bard Me Vie! How the hell could Mickey . . .
Gary shook his head and let out a cry that startled Mickey and sent Kelsey leaping to his feet. Seeing that nothing was askew, no enemies nearby, the elf threw a threatening glare Gary and Mickey's way and slowly eased himself back down.
"What?" Mickey started to ask, but Gary cut him short with a wave of his hand.
"Never mind," was all that he cared to say at that time.
"As ye wish, lad," Mickey answered, hopping to his feet. "Get yerself some rest, then. We've a long road in the morn."
Gary continued to look at the stars for a long time, thinking hard. The bard Me Vie? The last time Gary was in Faerie, when he had brought The Hobbit along with him, Mickey had hinted that the author of that book, J.R.R. Tolkien, had probably crossed into Faerie, as Gary had done, and that the books that Gary considered so fantastical might be the true adventures of that remarkable man, or adventures told to him by another visitor to Faerie, or by one of Faerie's folk.
Now the leprechaun had inadvertently expanded upon that possibility. Could it be that many of the artists, the sculptors and the painters, the musicians penning haunting songs, the writers of fantastical works, had actually crossed into this realm, had found the magic and brought a little piece of it back with them to share with a world that so badly needed it? Might the artists of Gary's world be people who could find the magic beneath the dulling cover, who could see the stars despite the city lights?
It was a comforting thought, one that led weary and wounded Gary Leger into a deep and much-needed sleep.