~A Wild Heart~
Chapter Seventeen
~~~ooooo~~~
Zack let out a grunt as he drove the shovel into the ground and brought the heel of his boot down upon it hard, pounding it deeper into the dirt. His chest heaving, he threw the ground a look of disgust and bit out harshly, "This is ridiculous."
His eyes swept over the other men gathered silently around the shaft, sweat pouring off of them despite the cool breeze, the same grim expressions on all their faces as though they were laying a body to rest inside the pit they'd dug.
Ivan sighed heavily, his face as red as his beard. "Take your time and enjoy your meal, boys. This hole will be waitin' for us come next year if we don't get back to it before then."
"Too bad it can't dig itself," Zack heard one of his neighbors grumble. "Save us the trouble, eh?"
There was a weak chuckle from another farmer but nobody else uttered a word.
Zack left the shovel standing straight out of the ground beside the hole and stalked off toward a tree set a ways from the others where he flung his hat onto the ground beside his lunchbox and sank down. Grabbing his canteen, he wet his handkerchief and began wiping his face and neck as Hans strode up toward the tree.
"What's got you in such a foul mood today?" The red-haired farmer asked, throwing his lunch sack carelessly onto the grass under the shade and flopping down beside it onto his stomach with a grateful groan.
Zack tensed. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean," he replied, his voice stiff.
"And I guess you haven't noticed how we've all been tripping over each other trying to keep out of your way the whole week either," his friend intoned dryly.
Zack looked blankly at him.
"What is it, Zack? What's been bothering you?"
"This." He jerked his head back toward the hole. "All this...nothing but dirt and rocks...dryness." But that wasn't the whole truth. Zack knew Aeris was seeing the fairy again today. And to make matters worse, things at home had been cold. She was civil to him but distant, the warmth and laughter in her green eyes slightly cooled when she spoke to him. That, more than anything, certainly more than this wretched gods-forsaken ground, ate at him and gave him no peace.
Hans' forehead wrinkled. "It's no different than what we've been dealing with since we were boys."
"No, it's worse," Zack disagreed.
"It just seems that way. Our fathers probably felt as we do now back in their day." Hans had pulled himself up into a sitting position and was rifling through his lunch bag, an intent expression on his face.
"You know what's at the root of all this, don't you?"
"It's the land," Hans said easily. "And the weather doesn't help."
Zack shot the artless young farmer a look of disbelief. "It's more than the land."
Hans looked up from the bag. "You're not saying..."
"I am."
"I didn't think I'd ever hear that from you. Not seriously anyway."
"Maybe I've...seen something."
There was a slight pause. "I'd like to see one, too. Just once." Hans' voice was almost wistful.
Zack frowned. He would have expected such an answer from Tifa or Aeris or any other female, and maybe even some of his fellow men, but not his friend. "Be glad you haven't."
"You're lucky, Zack."
"I don't feel lucky," he muttered.
"I don't think they're bad."
"What makes you say that if you've never seen one?"
"Ma and Pa say so." Hans gave him a funny look. "Besides, I feel them watching me sometimes. Watching us. I never get the impression that it's with any ill intent."
Zack shook his head. "Maybe not. But I don't like the thought of them watching us freely at anytime and not knowing why."
~~~ooooo~~~
"There is a new name, or title, I should say, for the fairy queen that some humans have come up with recently. Have you heard of it?"
"A new title?" Golden eyebrows drew together. "No, I haven't."
"It has to do with her favorite form of punishment," Aeris said humorously. "Anyone who gets on her bad side is turned into a dung beetle."
"I take it it's not very flattering."
"No, not very."
"Then it's probably better not to tell me."
Her smile disappeared. "It is only said in jest, Cloud."
"Is it?" he questioned. "It seems to suggest quite the opposite if you ask me. It is disrespectful, not to mention that it is clearly based on tales that are either fabricated or grossly exaggerated, and therefore, is unjustly earned and wrong."
Aeris was taken aback by the heat in his words. She contemplated his profile, noted that he kept his eyes firmly on the ground.
"I think you misunderstand," she said gently. "It is not meant as an insult. Not toward you or her or any fairy."
"It is in poor taste. She does not like punishing anyone, human or fairy. How mean-spirited and ungrateful to mock her when she has done so much for mankind, and been nothing but kind and generous to them."
"She is greatly revered among men." She placed a hand over his, waited until he met her gaze. "She is held in higher regard than many of our own kings and queens, past and present."
"Then you have an odd way of showing it."
"Respecting her has nothing to do with finding something about her to make light of. If you can't laugh at what you love, then how can you really say you love them? Laughter does not necessarily entail mocking. Of all things, I thought a fairy would understand that. It is simply that the punishment is something that comes up fairly often in the stories and someone eventually decided to have some fun with it. You must know of the stories."
"But she is not like that!" he exclaimed, and there was no question he was angry. He clearly viewed the title as nothing more than a criticism of their queen.
"They're stories," Aeris said hastily. "As you said, people exaggerate and embellish them with each telling so that over time, it's a wonder if a story bears anything more than a passing resemblance to the original. Still, her habit of turning people into beetles is quite common in the stories. The name is not completely without merit."
"She probably had a good reason for doing so." His voice had turned defensive. "She does not go around punishing people for the joy of it. Fairies aren't entertained by cruelty. The ones that were turned into beetles probably wouldn't learn their lesson, no matter how many chances she gave them and she had to resort to more drastic measures."
It distressed her to see him visibly upset, but a small part of her was also annoyed that he could be so blindly loyal to someone he wouldn't know very intimately. "I realize that she is your queen but surely you can see that you wouldn't be in a position to know everything about her and say for certain what she would or wouldn't do in any given situation."
"But I do know her!" In contradiction to the tone of his voice, his face softened. "And she is as just and kind and loving as she is beautiful. She is the most beautiful fairy that has ever walked the earth and all that is good in this world. There has never been anyone like her and there will never be again."
"If she is as kind and just as you say she is, she wouldn't have this rule in place keeping humans and fairies apart," Aeris snapped. "It's absurd and it's things like it that prevent our species from learning about and understanding one another and living side-by-side in peace."
"She never does anything without a good reason." The fairy didn't seem to notice that she was striving to keep her own temper in check. "Mortals are always recounting stories about the queen cruelly punishing humans, but where are the stories about her generosity and kindness toward them? Blessing a barren couple with a child in their old age, making a rocky field yield crops for a family on the brink of starvation in winter, having a kindly farmer stumble upon a purse of gold coins in the plot of ground he's breaking—these are far more commonplace but we rarely hear humans tell them. Your own life has been touched by her kindness, but—" he stopped short, his jaw clenching as he turned away from her.
Aeris' anger vanished abruptly. "Kindness? What...what do you mean? What are you saying?" Her voice had taken on an urgent tone as she sensed that there was something he wasn't telling her. "Everyone in the hills, every man, woman, and child... We've all known more than our fair share of struggle and hardship in this land. Sickness, drought, death, hunger, and more; whatever misfortune comes our way, we've learned to just take it all in stride. What kindness am I not seeing here?"
"I've already said too much," he said flatly.
"Cloud, please! I want to understand."
"If all humans see are the bad things in life, or fairies in this instance, and none of the good, then perhaps we are more different than I had thought. Maybe everyone else is right. Maybe we're the ones that are wrong." He rose to his feet. "I should go."
Aeris was also on her feet in an instant. "I've made you angry."
"Fairies don't feel anger, according to your stories," he reminded her.
"You are angry," she said unhappily. "Please, it was not my intention to upset you. I don't want us to part this way. Not with this between us." Afraid he would leave, she grabbed his arm, flinched at the pale eyes that swept toward her. She wished desperately now that she had heeded her own advice and not brought up the name Martha had given the fairy queen, but the last thing she wanted was to keep secrets from him, too. "Cloud," she implored him. "I am sorry I lost my temper. I've been...out of sorts lately but you are not to blame and I am not angry with you. I could never be angry with you. I should not have been so quick to say anything or question what has been since the world began. I was wrong. My anger and jealousy got the best of me and I said things I never meant."
His face remained impassive, the muscles in his arm rigid and unyielding under her fingers. "It doesn't matter—"
"No," she interjected, tightening her grip on him. "It does matter. And I was wrong to say what I did about the fairy queen. There is a reason why she is better known to us than anyone from our own race. She is a prominent figure in the stories of our youth, and for many of us, young and old, represents not just magic but wisdom and grace and everything that a queen or king should be." Her eyes fell and her voice dropped to a whisper. "But I am not wrong in this. Not about us. Please tell me you don't really believe that you and I are wrong."
She felt the tension in his body slowly ease. "We've both had a lot on our minds. And you've probably been feeling it from all sides." A hard knuckle brushed a tear from her cheek. "It is just that...the queen has so much faith in mankind and it is hard to hear that she is being laughed at behind her back by the very people she protects." His arms closed about her and he lowered his head over hers, shielding her from further anguish and the pain of the last few days suddenly felt lighter to bear. "Forgive me, Aeris. I expected too much too soon from you."
Aeris lifted up on her toes, touched her forehead to his. "There is nothing to forgive." But when she looked into his eyes, she thought she saw sadness lurking in the blue depths that had come to mean so much to her in their relatively short acquaintance. "Cloud?"
"They..." He searched her face, his eyebrows knitted in a frown. "What Zack said before... He was not completely off the mark."
"No." She shook her head at him. "Don't let what anyone else says come between us."
"Now it is you who misunderstands." A faint smile appeared on his lips. "Wrong or right, I would want to be with you."
"Then that's all that matters."
She leaned forward to rest her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes, her body relaxing as she breathed him in. She could face anything, friends, neighbors, fairies, even her family, as long as she knew he felt about her as she did about him. But she wished the world wasn't so set on tearing apart something just because it didn't understand it.
~~~ooooo~~~
"I'm glad one of us will finally have something to be happy about tonight," Tifa murmured, sawing her knife through a mushroom on the fallen tree. "One out of three isn't too bad." With any luck, Zack's pleasure upon being served his favorite mushrooms for dinner would help to relieve some of the strain in the house, particularly between her housemates. For two of the most good-natured and forgiving people she'd ever met, Tifa had never thought she'd see the day when they would be at odds with anyone, let alone with each other. Neither one would back down or admit they could possibly be wrong. "Maybe I can even get them to sit at the table long enough for us to do something together as a family tonight."
She tossed the oyster mushroom into one of the buckets she and Martha had brought with them into the forest, pushed the sweaty bangs off her forehead and scooted farther up the tree trunk, harvesting the white fungus that had cropped up on just about every inch of the tree not crushed against the earth. As she reached out to pull the bucket closer to her, a faint light from behind the bucket caught her eye.
"What's this?" She got on the ground on her hands and knees to get a good look under the tree, and sucked in her breath: a small purple cap with pink dots grew quietly in the shelter of a hollow in the dead tree.
Tifa eyed the strange toadstool warily, noticed there appeared to be some other illumination coming from underneath the mushroom hood. She pressed her face to the ground, trying to see where the light came from, but the mushroom was too low and the grass and weeds too tall, blocking her view of anything under the cap. She inched the knife in her hand forward—
"Don't touch that!"
A blur of sparkling ebony streaked past her and she felt a gust of wind on her clothes and hair, and the mushroom was gone.
Tifa blinked, and slowly sat up on her knees. Her eyes widened at the sight of the small, dark-haired waif clothed in nothing but leaves over her chest and groin, scowling fiercely at her over the mammoth tree trunk sprawled between them.
She licked suddenly dry lips as she rose cautiously to her feet. "You... You're one of them."
"This is my cousin's flower!" The girl stamped a foot hard, causing the crimson flowers dangling from her hair to shake dangerously. "You are not to touch it!"
"I... It was a mushroom," Tifa hurried to explain. "There was no...f-flower..." Her voice trailed off as her eyes flitted toward the fairy's hands, but whatever was in them had disappeared. "Was that what was under the mushroom? What did you do to it? Where did it go?"
The fairy jabbed a finger in her direction. "Humans are not allowed to touch my cousin's flower!"
"Whoa!" Tifa threw her hands up over her face for fear the wild creature would hex her. "Hold on there! I was not touching any flower!"
"I saw you!"
"Listen, child," Tifa tried to say in a soothing tone of voice. "I did not—"
"I am not a child!" The brown eyes glowed with an eerie light. "Don't call me a child or I won't care what my cousin says and make you sorry."
"All right, all right. I won't." She held her hands out in a placating manner. She knew better than to argue with a fairy in an enchanted wood. "Please accept my most sincere apologies. I meant no offense. May I ask what your name is then?"
The fairy glared at her, but was apparently mollified by the apology as she did not fly into another rage as Tifa had assumed she would.
"Fine, you don't have to tell me your name if you don't want to. I don't suppose you'll tell me why you were following me either?"
"I was not following you." The words were uttered with such derision and coming from such a young-sounding voice, it made Tifa flush. "I was following my cousin, but he eluded me again. He doesn't know that she knows and I have to..." she paused, eyes scanning the woods around them. "She has eyes and ears everywhere. But if anyone was watching you, they're long gone. You're no threat."
"Of course I wouldn't threaten anyone." Tifa looked nervously around them, searching for the unseen eyes that had to be watching her from behind every shrub and tree. "Why would anyone think I would be a threat? Are you sure no one is watching me?"
The girl straightened her spine and lifted her chin. "I am the greatest tracker in these woods!" she announced. "Even my aunt says so. I can find anyone if I put my mind to it. I would know if someone else is here."
Except, as you yourself admitted, your cousin did manage to lose you, Tifa almost blurted out. But one look at the face raised haughtily in the air and she decided it would not be wise. She tried another tact. "Why are you following your cousin? Does someone mean to do him harm? Are you protecting him?"
"Do him harm?" The child, for she was clearly a child, despite her protestations, screeched. "No fairy would harm him, least of all his own mother! Only a human would harm him! Humans," she added contemptuously, crossing her arms over her chest. "You can't even see what's right in front of you, but you think you know everything. If I hadn't shown that friend of yours the way out of the forest just now, you would both be in here for weeks and weeks. But you're important to her and my cousin is important to me. She already took him away from us. I will not let you take his flower, too!"
"I'm telling you, I wasn't taking anything."
"Yes, you were! I saw—"The fairy's eyes suddenly grew wide. She tilted her head to one side then the other, as though she was listening for something, and backed up a few steps. Pointing a finger at the dead tree then at the woods, she hissed, "Get what you came for and begone from here! These are her woods, not yours! You don't belong in here!"
"Wait!"
One moment Tifa was facing the fairy, and the next she was simply admiring a lone creamy white blossom on a branch drooping low to the ground.
"No emotions, my foot," she muttered, shaking her head.
"Tifa?"
The sound of her own name made her jump. Glancing dazedly around until she saw a blond figure standing behind her, it slowly sunk in that Martha had returned with the wheelbarrow she'd returned to the farm to fetch.
"Is something wrong?" Her friend was breathing heavily as though she'd ran the whole way. "Are you all right?"
Tifa pushed her hair out of her face, forced a smile. "I'm perfectly fine. Why do you ask?"
"Because you look like you've just seen a ghost," Martha said succinctly. "Did I hear you talking to someone?"
"Don't be silly." She waved a hand toward the bright white caps still covering nearly the entire lower half of the tree they'd discovered. "Ready to get back to work? We have a lot of farms to visit this afternoon."
"Yeah, sorry took me so long." The other farm girl wheeled the cart over to the tree. "I thought I was lost for sure back there. I didn't know we'd come so far inside the woods. Luckily, I saw one of the children playing just outside the trees. Though why he was running about without a stitch of clothing on, I can only guess." She gave a rueful chuckle. "Aeris says there's nothing to be frightened of, but I think I'll be glad just to get out of here."
"There's no need to worry about getting lost again." Tifa nodded in the direction the fairy had pointed. "We just need to go straight that way."
"What?" Martha sounded astonished. "H-how do you know that?"
She worked her knife through the base of a mushroom, careful to keep her eyes on the blade. "I've been here before. I remember this tree. Besides, you can see the hills from here."
"Well, why didn't you mention that before I went back to the farm?" Martha asked in exasperation.
Tifa shrugged. "I thought you knew another way." She froze as it suddenly hit her. "Cousins," she whispered. She smacked herself on the forehead. "Of course! Fairies. I should have known. She's his—"
"Tifa? What are you going on about? What's going on here?"
Her head shot up and she found soft, brown eyes watching her with gentle concern. She offered Martha an apologetic smile. "Sorry, I was just mumbling to myself." Fairies, she thought, her mind reeling from everything that just the word implied. Man had little use for them, but if one was foolish enough to appear before a human, Tifa didn't see why she should have any qualms about taking advantage of its abilities. "But you're right. The sooner we get out of the forest, the better."