Freddy had gone only a few steps when she realised the people near the fire had fallen silent. Mika was looking straight at her.
There was a strange moment then, as Freddy gazed into dark eyes that gleamed in the moonlight, and Mika smiled and waved. Somewhere in the dimness, Freddy heard the soft whir of wings.
And the sun shone brightly over the neat little road and the hedgerows lining it on either side.
13
“Oh, not this one,” said Josiah. “I didn’t know we’d have to come here.”
Freddy took four giant steps back towards Josiah, seized him by the throat, and crushed him up against the hedgerow. She vaguely remembered doing something like this before, when she had still been at the beginning of her time-travelling career. It was easier this time.
“Something important just happened,” she said. “You’re not going to weasel out of talking about it.”
He tried to pry her hands from his throat and couldn’t. She waited until he had shaded all the way to a deep plum colour before she let him go.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said when he could speak. “It was just a story.”
“It was a story of your beginning,” said Freddy, “wasn’t it?”
“I have absolutely no idea what you mean by that,” said Josiah. “You need to eighteenth-century yourself.”
Before he could stop her, she took him by the throat again.
“All right. All right,” he said when she had let go for the second time. “It’s possible that was … near the beginning of my existence. Mika may have been telling a true story, even. I’m not trying to weasel out of talking about it. I just don’t remember that far back. I don’t understand what we saw any more than you do. You really need to eighteenth-century yourself now.”
She almost told him she was done taking orders from him, but unfortunately, what he was saying made a certain amount of sense. The problem was that it almost always did.
Freddy sighed. “Fine. Boy?”
“You don’t have the material for girls’ clothes in this period. Tuck your hair under the hat.”
Her hair was long now. Long hair for both sexes was more common, historically speaking, than short hair for either. In societies where men wore their hair short, she hid hers beneath a hat or dressed as a girl. She could pass less easily as a boy than she had a year and a half ago, as her shape had changed a bit, but she did find that people often saw what they wanted to see. If she wore boys’ clothes, she was a boy.
Following Josiah’s directions, she made the alterations to her basic outfit that would help her blend in here. He was simultaneously doing the same thing to his own clothing. There was no one in sight, though Freddy could hear cows lowing in the distance. They were standing on a dirt road leading to some sort of farmhouse.
“Three’s in there?” said Freddy, nodding towards the farmhouse.
“I’ll bet he is,” said Josiah gloomily. “He does a lot of writing. And sleeping. Sometimes, he writes while he’s asleep. He thinks it’s inspiration, but it’s opium, really. Judging by where we are, it’s 1797.”
“Well,” said Freddy, “do we interrupt him?”
“I’d rather not,” said Josiah. “He thinks I’m a fairy.”
Freddy had been standing there with her mouth open for a good ten seconds too long before she managed to say, “Excuse me?”
“It’s Robin Goodfellow’s fault,” he explained, kicking moodily at a stone in the road. “He’s calling himself Robin Goodfellow at the moment. He thinks it’s funny. I told him it would have been hilarious in Shakespeare’s day, but it’s just stupid now. But no … it’s all about the giggles with Robin Goodfellow. So Sam has got it into his head that we’re both fairies. He’s … not quite right. Very smart man, very imaginative, but just a little bit off. Leaves out bowls of milk for me whenever he notices me hanging around. I’ve tried to explain the truth, but he thinks it’s fairy guile.”
Freddy was having to bite her tongue hard to keep from smiling. She thought she was doing a decent job. “So we’re in England?”
“We’re definitely in England,” said Josiah. “We’re English fairies. He’ll think your name is Titania.”
She clapped her hands over her mouth to stop herself from guffawing out loud. Their last jump seemed to have got her into a strange mood. Josiah made a sour face at her.
They walked up the hill towards the farmhouse. It was a beautiful day, cool and brisk; it felt like autumn to Freddy. The house in front of them was a sprawl of grey buildings. There was no one in sight, though Freddy could still hear the cows. Josiah led her around to what seemed to be the kitchen door. She had learned from experience that it was never worth going to the front doors of large houses; she and Josiah didn’t look respectable enough for that.
“You knock,” said Josiah. “I recognise the need to hang around with Three, but I would rather pull out my own teeth than have a conversation of any length with this man. At any rate, I doubt we’ll be here long. I never saw us when I was here.”
Freddy had grown used to this sort of tangled grammar. It took her only a couple of seconds to decipher it. At the same time, she experienced a stab of irritation at even having to figure it out. She really did seem to have had enough. He squirmed out of that last one, she thought. We haven’t talked about what happened at all. Josiah had been shaken by Mika’s story, but the second they had jumped, he had pulled back into his usual sardonic, detached self. He hadn’t even mentioned Freddy marching off to confront Mika herself. Something had changed for her, but he was pretending nothing had happened. Now he was ordering her around as usual, and in normal circumstances, she wouldn’t even have noticed.
Freddy thought, I’ve fallen into a rut. It was a strange rut, but a rut nonetheless. She had been trusting that Josiah knew what was going on and would eventually get her out of this. And yet he hadn’t understood what was happening with Mika. What if Josiah was ultimately as clueless as she was and had simply been getting by on a tone of authority and a really good memory?
She knocked, but she felt she was biding her time. Maybe she could do this one a bit differently.
The knock brought a woman in a cap and apron to the door. “What is it, lad?”
Freddy realised, a bit late, that Josiah hadn’t told her Three’s full name. “Sam” wasn’t going to cut it in eighteenth-century England. She glanced at Josiah, who had pressed himself flat against the house beside the door. “Message for Mr.…” she said, “uh…”
“Coleridge,” hissed Josiah. Freddy blinked. Hadn’t Josiah once made a fuss in class about a poet named Coleridge? There was something else about the name, too—something obvious that she was going to kick herself later for forgetting—but there wasn’t time to try to think of what.
The woman leaned out and glanced around at Josiah. “Oh,” she said flatly, “it’s you.”