The Wee Free Men

'Ach, no!' said one. 'It's the bairn! She's the hag...'

'You're stealing our eggs,' said Tiffany. 'How dare you! And I'm not a hag!'

The little men looked at one another, and then at the eggs.

'Whut eiggs?' said one.

'The eggs you are holding,' said Tiffany, meaningfully.

'Whut? Oh, these? These are eiggs, are they?' said the one who'd spoken first, looking at the eggs as if he'd never seen them before. 'There's a thing. And there was us thinking they was, er, stones.'

'Stones,' said the other one nervously.

'We crawled under yon chookie for a wee bitty warmth,' said the first one. 'And there was all these things, we thought they was stones, which was why the puir fowl was clucking all the time...'

'Clucking,' said the second one, nodding vigorously.

'... so we took pity on the puir thing and—'

'Put... the... eggs...back,' said Tiffany, slowly.

The one who hadn't been doing much talking nudged the other one. 'Best do as she says,' it said. 'It's a' gang agley. Ye canna cross an Aching an' this one's a hag. She dinged Jenny an' no one ha' ever done that afore.'

'Aye, I didnae think o' that.'

Both of the tiny men put the eggs back very carefully. One of them even breathed on the shell of his and made a show of polishing it with the ragged hem of his kilt.

'No harm done, mistress,' he said. He looked at the other man. And then they vanished. But there was a suspicion of a red blur in the air and some straw by the henhouse door flew up in the air.

'And I'm a miss!' shouted Tiffany. She lowered the hen back onto the eggs, and went to the door. 'And I'mnot a hag! Are you fairies of some sort? And what about our ship—I mean, sheep?' she added.

There was no answer but a clanking of buckets near the house, which meant that other people were getting up.

She rescued the Faerie Tales, blew out the candle and made her way into the house. Her mother was lighting the fire and asked what she was doing up, and she said that she'd heard a commotion in the henhouse and had gone out to see if it was the fox again. That wasn't a lie. In fact, it was completely true, even if it wasn't exactly accurate.

Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn't divide easily into 'true' and 'false', but instead could be 'things that people needed to know at the moment' and 'things that they didn't need to know at the moment'.

Besides, she wasn't sure what she knew at the moment.

There was porridge for breakfast. She ate it hurriedly, meaning to get back out into the paddock and see about that sheep. There might be tracks in the grass, or something...

She looked up, not knowing why.

Ratbag had been asleep in front of the oven. Now he was sitting up, alert. Tiffany felt a prickling on the back of her neck, and tried to see what the cat was looking at.

On the dresser was a row of blue and white jars which weren't very useful for anything. They'd been left to her mother by an elderly aunt, and she was proud of them because they looked nice but were completely useless. There was little room on the farm for useless things that looked nice, so they were treasured.

Ratbag was watching the lid of one of them. It was rising very slowly, and under it was a hint of red hair and two beady, staring eyes.

It lowered again when Tiffany gave it a long stare. A moment later she heard a faint rattle and, when she looked up, the pot was wobbling back and forth and there was a little cloud of dust rising along the top of the dresser. Ratbag was looking around in bewilderment.

They certainly were very fast.

She ran out into the paddock and looked around. The mist was off the grass now, and skylarks were rising on the downs.

'If that sheep doesn't come back this minute,' she shouted at the sky, 'there will be a reckoning!'

The sound bounced off the hills. And then she heard, very faint but close by, the sound of small voices:

'Whut did the hag say?' said the first voice.

'She said there'd be a reck'ning!'

'Oh, waily, waily, waily! We're in trouble noo!'

Tiffany looked around, face red with anger.

'We have a duty,' she said, to the air and the grass.

It was something Granny Aching had said once, when Tiffany had been crying about a lamb. She had an old-fashioned way of speaking, and had said: 'We are as gods to the beasts o' the field, my jiggit. We order the time o' their birth and the time o' their death. Between times, we ha' a duty.'

'We have a duty,' Tiffany repeated, more softly. She glared around the field. 'I know you can hear me, whoever you are. If that sheep doesn't come back, there will be... trouble...'

The larks sang over the sheepfolds, making the silence deeper.