Puck smiled wickedly. "Well, that's my beloved master. Mayhem with a dirty twist."

"I was counting on Ceese still being a giant when we got to the grove."

"Maybe he will be, when we go up the other side," said Mack.

"If there's any chance my clothes will get exploded when I get bigger, I'm taking them off down here," said Ceese.

Since nobody offered him any guarantees, he took off everything except his underwear. Then he jumped over the water, with Puck holding his hand. Mack brought Yolanda over the water, too.

By ten feet up the cliff on the other side, Ceese's underwear had burst open. He was growing again. And the two fairies were shrinking. Only there weren't any pockets this time.

"You're sweaty and you stink," said Puck.

"You want a bath," said Ceese, "we got running water down there."

"I was just saying: Wear some cologne."

"I do."

"What, eau de pig sty?"

"It just said 'toilet water.' "

Puck laughed—well, chirped, his voice being very high by now.

Of course, to a naked guy—even a giant—any size cat was plenty dangerous. Those claws.

Those teeth. Ceese's scrotum shriveled. "What if he goes for my dick?" asked Ceese.

"Then ten thousand women will mourn!" shouted Puck. "Let's get a move on!"

"It's not fair that Mack gets clothes and I don't," said Ceese.

"What are you, six?" asked Puck.

Ceese didn't bother answering. The birds were really going at him now, and with no leather jacket to protect him the branches were almost as bad.

They were at the edge of the clearing.

The two lanterns were still there.

"There I am!" shouted Puck.

"Wait!" cried Yolanda. "Let me at least look for traps."

In reply, Ceese handed Puck to Mack and crawled into the clearing.

The panther leapt.

Ceese swatted it away. It struck a tree trunk and dropped in a heap at the base.

Ceese reached out for the nearest floating lantern. It shied away from his hand. When he tried for the other one, it did the same.

"All right, Miss Fairy Queen, what do I do now? Keep playing this game till I die of old age?"

"Be patient," said Yolanda. "When I say the counterword, they'll stop evading you. But the moment I say it, you have to get them both at once. One can't be opened without the other. That's the way Oberon thinks. He'd make sure we can't figure out which soul is mine and then leave Puck imprisoned. So if I get free, Puck gets free, and then my darling husband will try to make Puck do something."

Puck just stood there and grinned.

Ceese asked him, "You couldn't just tell us what will happen, could you?"

"Of course he can't," said Yolanda. "He is not his own fairy. Don't worry. Now be ready, because as soon as I say the counter-word, we have to move very quickly."

"I'm ready," said Ceese.

Then she slumped to her knees and her voice also became audible as the scream lowered in pitch and faded to a sigh.

Ceese reached out both hands at once and snatched at the lanterns. They held still. He caught them.

Kneeling in the grass, he got his thumbnails under the lantern roofs and tried to pry them off at exactly the same moment. "Somebody needs to bring pop-top technology to Fairyland," he said.

"Just break them. Crush them," whispered Yolanda, exhausted for the moment by the word she had uttered. "You can't hurt us. That's our most immortal part inside that glass."

"How can one part be more immortal than another?" grumbled Ceese as he pried.

"Immortaler," said Puck, correcting him like an English teacher. "Do what the lady said."

Still kneeling in the grass, Ceese pinched both lanterns between thumb and forefinger and crushed them.

With a sharp crack and a crunch of shards of glass rubbing together, the lanterns exploded.

Two tiny lights arose from the lanterns' wreckage between Ceese's fingers.

There must have been a thousand birds waiting in the trees. And now they all swooped out and down, darting for the lights.

Mack moved just as quickly. Holding Puck in one hand and Yolanda in the other, he thrust their tiny bodies toward the hovering lights.

As they neared each other, they became like magnets. The lights crossed each other's path and caught the bodies of the fairies in midair.

There was an explosion of light.

The birds veered and now were circling the clearing, around and around, like a whirlpool of black feathers. But as they flew, their colors changed, brightened. Suddenly there were as many red and blue and yellow birds as black and brown, and among them were fantastically colored parrots, and their calls changed from harsh caws to musical sounds.

The leaves on the trees changed, too, from the colors of autumn to a thousand different shades of green, and many of the trees burst out in blossoms.

In the middle of the clearing, Yolanda stood, normal size again, with her head bowed and her arms folded across her chest. Then, as she raised her head, moth wings unfolded from her back, thin and bright as a stained-glass window. She opened her eyes and looked at the birds. Then she opened her arms, opened her hands, and the birds rose up again into the green-covered branches and sang now in unison, like an avian Tabernacle Choir. The Fairy Queen opened her mouth and joined in the song, her voice rising rich and beautiful like the warm sun rising on a crisp morning.

Mack took a step toward her. She smiled.

Then she whirled toward the strong and tall young black-winged manfairy that Puck had just become. With a quick movement of her hand and a brief "Sorry, doll," she shrank him down and her finger hooked him toward her as surely as if she had just lassoed him. As he approached, he shrank, until he was grasped in her hollow fist, the way a child holds a firefly.

"Give me a film canister," she said.

Mack had them in his pockets.

She held the open canister under the heel of her fist and then blew into the top. In a moment she had the lid on.

She blew another puff of air onto the film canister, and it became a small cage made of golden wire, beautifully woven.

Inside, Puck leaned against the wires, cursing at her.

Another puff of air and his voice went silent.

Then she turned to Ceese and offered him the golden cage that contained Puck. "Oberon is free now," she said. "And Puck is his slave. He must have known I'd have no choice but to do this."

"If Oberon is awake," said Mack, "we don't have much time."

"Take it," she said to Ceese. "Take him back to the house. Don't let him out of your sight. I don't want anybody stealing him and trying to control him like the poor fairies that gave rise to those genie-in-a-bottle stories."

Ceese took the cage, looking at the raging fairy whose wings fluttered madly as he ran around and around inside the cage, treating the walls and ceiling of the spherical cage as if they were all floor and there were no up and down.

"Be gentle with him," said Titania. "I owe him so much. And when this is over, he will be free.

Not just from that cage, but from Oberon as well. His own man again. A free fairy." And softly, tenderly, she leaned toward the cage. "You have my word on it, you nasty, beautiful fairy boy." She looked up into Ceese's face. "Get going. The animals should leave you alone now, but you want to be out of Fairyland before the dragon comes."

"Good idea," said Ceese.

As he neared the place where the brick path began, he stopped one last time to look around over the beautiful green of springtime in Fairyland. He knew that he would probably never see this land again. Nor would he ever be so tall, or see so far.

When he looked south, toward where Cloverdale climbed the mountain in his home world, he saw a hot red shaft of light shoot upward, surrounded by smoke.

And in the shaft a huge black snaky thing began to writhe upward. Even at this distance, Ceese could see how the creature's slimy skin shone in many colors, like a slick of oil on a puddle.