Guardian of the Green Hill by Laura L. Sullivan

directions at once. Still clutching hands, they pulled each other this way and that. Meg wasn’t at all sure she wanted to find whoever was making that sound, but it seemed the surest way of making it stop. In the calm between cries, the rest of the forest was silent. No owl or frog dared compete with that outpouring of grief.
    They came to a dark, trickling stream, a small spring that flowed through the wood until it met the river Gladys.
    â€œMeg, look,” Finn said, jerking her to an abrupt stop and nearly wrenching her shoulder out of joint. She followed his finger and saw a green-cloaked figure kneeling at the water’s edge, leaning out across the flow. Her face was hidden by a deep hood, but long, wild strands of red hair fell forward into the moonlight. It might be Moll. It must be Moll. Who else could it be?
    The woman didn’t appear to see them, though they stood to her side and slightly behind her only a few yards away. She had something clutched in her hands. She thrust her arms into the stream and churned them among the rocks. She was washing something as she wailed, something white and red. Meg took a tentative step closer. Something about the red was awfully familiar … red by moonlight, thick and dark with a quicksilver sheen and a taste of copper in the air. Blood! She was washing a blood-soaked shirt.
    Meg squeezed Finn’s hand almost hard enough to pay him back for the wrenched shoulder. She knew that shirt. The fine linen, the silver threads, splashes of other colors that were not bloodred.… It was the shirt Phyllida had given her to paint in. The shirt she had given to Rowan that very afternoon.
    â€œMoll,” Meg began, taking a small step forward.
    The washerwoman raised her head with infinite slowness until the hood fell back just far enough to reveal eyes as bright as blood, eyes red from weeping, and redder. There were no other features, no mouth, no nose.… Surely they were just hidden by the hood? But the woman who stared at them, seeing and not seeing, was all eyes. What else did she require when all her life was about weeping?
    Meg, wanting desperately to run, took another step toward her, but then she wasn’t there.
    â€œWas that her?” Finn asked breathlessly.
    â€œIt couldn’t be.”
    â€œThen what … who?”
    Meg wished she knew more about the fairies. That poor woman must be one—how else could she vanish?—though what her unhappy purpose was Meg couldn’t guess.
    â€œCome on, we should go home,” Meg said. “Phyllida will be so worried, and we have to tell her about this. She’ll know what it was.”
    â€œI left something at the Green Hill,” Finn said. “We have to go back.”
    Meg looked indecisive. This was Finn after all, and for all their sudden burst of camaraderie, she couldn’t forget his fundamental nature. To meet him at the Green Hill was one thing, to lead him there quite another.
    â€œIt’s important. I’ll tell you about it on the way back. It’s something from the fairies.”
    She led him through the darkness back to the hill. It seemed steeper to their tired legs, and they trudged to the summit, grunting and panting like it was any ordinary hill. Finn fumbled through the tall, coarse grasses, on the edge of panic until he found the bag, exactly where he had left it. Meg resisted the urge to ask what was inside and started back down the hill to hurry him along. Then the ground heaved under her, and as she slid to her rump, she had the impression not of an earthquake (which is rare in those parts) but of sitting atop a giant tortoise that had suddenly decided to take a stroll (which is even rarer). Finn staggered on deeply bent sailor legs to collapse beside her as the ground stopped shifting.
    â€œWhat on earth?” Finn began, but Meg clapped a hand over his mouth and pointed down the hill, even as she pulled him lower behind the veil of