The Changes Trilogy by Peter Dickinson

and realized that he must have been toiling twice as hard as any of them.
    â€œThank you, Ajeet and Gopal and Harpit,” he went on. “Ask your Aunt Mohindar to give you each an apple.”
    The apples in the artist’s cottage garden weren’t ready for eating yet, but the village had paid for some of the last lot of work with a sack of James Grieves. The children sat on the wall around the well and bit into the white flesh, so juicy that there was no way of stopping the sweet liquid flowing down the outside of their chins in wasteful dribbles. Nicky looked over the wide gold landscape, where the swifts hurtled and wheeled above wheat that would never be harvested, and felt the wanderlust on her. Suddenly the close community, busy with its ceaseless effort for survival, seemed stifling.
    Usually she would have gone for rest and calm to sit by the old lady’s cart under the wych elm and watch the babies playing. Even when Ajeet came to translate, she and the old lady did not speak much, though sometimes the old lady would tell her of extraordinary things she had seen and done in that other life before she came to England—not really as though she was trying to entertain Nicky, more to teach her, to instruct, to pass on precious knowledge. And when they didn’t speak, it still was soothing to be near her, in a way that Nicky couldn’t explain; she guessed that the old lady felt the same, but there was no way of asking.
    But today the old lady had one of her little illnesses and had stayed in bed, not wanting to see anybody except her daughters, and then only to complain to them about something. So now Nicky longed to be out of earshot of the clang of the forge and the thud of the flails, away from the pricking and clotting dust which all this hard work stirred into the air, somewhere else.
    â€œI’m going for a walk,” she said as she threw her core away.
    Harpit groaned. Gopal sighed.
    â€œSo I shall have to come with you,” he said, “to slaughter your enemies.”
    He patted the three-quarter-size sword that swung against his hip. He was very proud of it because Uncle Jagindar said it was the best blade he’d made. One corner of the forge held a pile of snapped blades which hadn’t stood up to the cruel testing the smiths gave them. (“What use is a sword,” Uncle Chacha had asked, “if you strike with it once and then there is nothing left in your hand but the hilt?”) Gopal joined the adults for fencing practice these days.
    Now he patted his sword like a warrior and stood up.
    â€œI’m afraid I haven’t got any enemies for you,” said Nicky as she stood too.
    â€œNot even the bad baron?” said Harpit. That was what the children called the giant down in the village. It was funny to think that Nicky was the only one who’d ever seen him.
    â€œNo, he’s not my enemy,” said Nicky. “He’s all right—in fact he’s a hero, sort of.”
    â€œI must tell my mother where we’re going,” whispered Ajeet.
    â€œI’ll tell her,” said Harpit, “and that means I needn’t come on this idiot expedition. Where are you going, Nicky?”
    â€œUp to the common.”
    Despite Gopal’s sword, Nicky was the one who led the way down the curving line of elms and oaks that had been allowed to stay on the boundary between one farm and the next; the ripe barley brushed against their left shoulders; they dipped into the place where the line of trees became a farm track, whose slope took them down to join a magical and haunted lane, untarred, running nearly fifteen feet below the level of the surrounding fields. The hedge trees at the top of the banks on either side met far above their heads, so that the children walked in a cool green silence and looked up into the caverns where the earth had been washed away from between blanched tree roots. In that convenient dark the animals of the