Guardian of the Green Hill by Laura L. Sullivan Page A

Queen Anne’s lace.
    â€œWhat? I don’t see anything,” he said indistinctly from behind her fingers, and was piggy-pinched for his troubles.
    â€œBe quiet!” Meg hissed fiercely. “Don’t you see them?”
    There was a rustle of leaves, a tinkling of silver bells, and the brambles fell aside reverently for a fine dapple-gray horse, which bore the most lovely woman in the world. When Meg had first seen her, she wore a green and silver gown speckled with jewels, but today the Seelie queen had set aside her royal raiments for hunting garb. She wore trousers and a trim green jerkin that might have been leather or might have been leathery leaves. Her hair, that ambiguously pale, shining color that shifted from platinum to gold, hung loose to her waist. A hooded hawk perched on her hand. The bells Meg heard were tied to his jesses.
    Even though she knew it was only a glamour—that the Seelie queen could just as easily appear a wizened hag, or a great tusked sow, or a winged fish—Meg was so awed by her beauty that it was a full minute before she even noticed the queen’s retinue. There was the prince, her friend of sorts, Gul Ghillie, in his grown-up guise, wearing a green and red doublet and puffed bombasted hose over parti-colored tights, looking rather like a jester or a slim Henry VIII. Behind him rode serried ranks of Seelie nobles, arrayed in fantastic variations of hunting garb through the ages, from foxhunting pinks to leopard pelts, and behind them capered creatures of all shapes, some dressed, some furred, some feathered, some wearing nothing but their own skins. One slate-gray sprite with stubby leathery wings played on a multiple pipe and somehow had breath enough to dance to his own lively tune. A creature that looked like a hedgehog without the spines rolled to and fro beneath prancing feet and stamping hooves. Will-o’-the-wisps hovered at the periphery, assisting the moon to light the panoply.
    â€œWhat’s there? What do you see?” Finn asked as low as he could.
    â€œThe court, the queen … Gul Ghillie … all of them. Hush!”
    Finn clenched his jaw, mortified, angry at Meg, though it was no fault of hers. Denied again! The fairy court, the queen, within his sight, if only he could see!
    They laughed and chatted and sang merry tunes as they rode directly into the hill and disappeared from sight, their voices echoing for a moment before they were absorbed into the ground. The train became intermittent after the great lords and ladies entered, as the lesser fairies, some slowed by their odd forms, followed at their own pace. They were almost gone, all but a small green piglet in a stocking cap and a manikin on a horse. It looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy, dressed beyond its years (though who knew how old a fairy might be) in midnight velvet and masses of ruffles at its wrists and throat. Its golden curls glinted in the glow of the last will-o’-the-wisp, and its face was pale as moonlight.
    Why, Meg wondered, did some of the fairies choose to look like men, some like beasts, and some like nothing on this earth? Did they have their favorite forms, like the stubborn Rookery brownie, or did some change all day long? Did they reflect some aspect of their personalities? She would have to ask Phyllida when she began her formal education. That last fairy man, for example, looked remarkably like—
    He turned his round little face to the sky, and Meg froze. It couldn’t be.
    â€œOh! Do you see?”
    But Finn could see nothing except the dark forest.
    Her hand tightened on his again. “Finn, is it … is it?”
    The fairy boy on the pony looked exactly like her own brother James.
    He rode into the arch of the Green Hill, and the earth trembled, settled, and was still. The Green Hill had closed its earthen gates upon its treasures.
    As Meg had learned once before, no amount of ranting and raving and pounding on the grass can