‘Oh.’ Sis opened her mouth and closed it again. ‘So what do we do?’

‘I wish you’d stop asking me that,’ the queen replied. ‘I’m the wicked queen, remember. It’s hard enough for me not to be poisoning you or having you taken off to be murdered in the woods without listening to you drivelling as well.’

‘Queen,’ Sis said, biting her lip, ‘what do you think’s happening out there?’

The wicked queen shook her head sadly. ‘I only wish I knew,’ she said.

The shiny red door of the quaint little cottage in the clearing opened, and a man stepped out on to the garden path. In a sense, he struck an incongruous note, dressed as he was from head to foot in lacquered black and red armour, with big rectangular shoulder-guards and a bulky helmet decorated with a shiny black upturned crescent. He was holding a rake, with which he proceeded to mark out a delicate pattern of semicircular sweeps in the thick, evenly laid gravel of the garden path. As he worked, he chanted:

Above him, a tousled head of golden hair appeared through an open casement. ‘Yoo-hoo,’ trilled a silvery voice. ‘Hello! Mr Suzuki!’

The man looked up, saw the head and bowed politely. If there was in his eyes the faintest tinge of fear, it could only have been visible from a few feet away.

‘Mr Suzuki,’ the silvery voice continued, ‘have you been cleaning your armour with my dusters again?’

The man bowed his head.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ said the silvery voice. ‘Dusters are for dusting, Mr Suzuki, not that you’d know much about that, of course. If you must clean your silly old armour in the house, there’s a shoebox full of old socks and things in the cupboard under the sink. All right?’

The man nodded, head still bowed, unable to meet her clear blue eyes.

‘Oh, and while you’re there,’ the voice went on, ‘I’ll just get you to nip into the hall and change the light bulb. It’s gone again.’

(And before you ask, how many samurai does it take to change a light bulb? Easy; seven, of course. One to change the bulb, six to commit ritual suicide to expunge the disgrace of the old one having failed. In this household, however, ritual suicide’s on the forbidden list, along with Zen archery practice in the front parlour and walking on the kitchen floor in muddy wellies.)

Having blown down the little pigs’ house, the big bad wolf glanced up at the sun, noted its position and calculated his estimated time of arrival at his next appointment. Then he dropped his head (aerodynamic efficiency) and broke into a trot.

Grandmama’s cottage lay in a clearing in the south-western sector of the forest; a pretty hairy place for a big bad wolf to have to go into, what with the woodcutters and the Free Foresters, not forgetting the dreaded Greenshirts. Although he knew he was well behind schedule, the wolf slowed down. Any bush or briar patch in this neighbourhood could be hiding a disgruntled timber worker with an axe or a string-happy archer, or any one of a number of talking farmyard animals with an innate grudge against wolfkind. Futile to pretend he wasn’t scared droppingless, but he’d figured out long ago that true courage is the ability to throw fear out of focus just long enough to get the job done. Through these mean glades a wolf must trot, and that was all there was to it.

When he saw the cottage, he stopped where he was and lay down under a bramble-bush, his chin on his forepaws, watching. His wet, delicate nose tasted the air, searching for traces of scent that shouldn’t be there: human sweat, the delicate tang of fresh sap on a steel blade, beeswax on a newly cleaned bowstring, fresh earth where a pitfall trap had just been dug. But there was nothing except what he’d expect — week-old human spoor and wood smoke, the stench of newly baked bread and lavender bags. Nothing unusual.

But in field operations such as this, the unusual is so usual as to be virtually compulsory. There should be other smells, he realised: fresh squirrel-shit, the reek of newly sprouted mushrooms, a dash of unicorn pee and dissolving tree-bark. Something was wrong, and although he couldn’t quite put his paw on it, he knew it was there.

Set-up.

Abort the operation and get out of there, his instincts screamed. But he couldn’t do that, could he? Go back to Wolfpack HQ and explain that he’d abandoned his mission because everything seemed normal. Wolves who did that sort of thing found themselves pulled off active service and assigned to retrieving foundling human babies from riverbanks before their paws could touch the ground. At the very least he had to get close enough to see what form the trap took.

One thing they teach well at Wolfpack Academy is stealthy crawling. Gradually, his ears flat to his skull, his tummy brushing the dirt, he edged slowly forward, pausing every yard or so to taste the air. A small voice inside his head told him he was wasting his time. Elementary tactics demanded that the trap would be sprung close to the cottage, where there was little or no cover and a clear field of fire for archers hidden behind the chintz curtains of the upper storey. Between the edge of the underbrush and the front door there was an open space twenty-five yards wide that he’d have to cross, and while he was in the zone he might as well have a target-boss embroidered on his back in yellow, red and blue fibre-optic cable. Which left him with only one course of action. Stage a diversion.

Oh yes, piece of cake. With no backup and no resources, that was an order so tall they’d have to festoon it with coloured lights to stop aircraft flying into it. In his mind’s eye he could picture his Academy instructor, wagging his tail and saying, ‘Think, Mr Fang. What would Hannibal have done?’ And never once, back in those dear long-ago days, had he pointed out the obvious fact that the recommended technique was fatuous, since Hannibal was never a wolf. Easy enough to guess what Hannibal would have done: he’d have encircled the cottage with his heavy infantry, made a feint attack with his light cavalry to draw off the enemy strike-force and then sent in the war elephants to finish the job. Simple. Problem solved. Give me a thousand legionaries, five hundred horse archers and a dozen trained elephants and I’ll be through here in a jiffy.

Think, Mr Fang. What would you do in this situation?

The wolf breathed in deeply, as if trying to inhale inspiration. And so he did, in a manner of speaking, because a moment later he made a lightning-fast grab with his left forepaw.

‘Gerroff! You’re squashing my ears!’

The wolf eased off the pressure slightly, and the gossamer shadow under its claws stopped squirming. ‘Well now,’ the wolf growled softly, ‘what a surprise. And what’s an elf doing in these parts, so far from the Reservation?’

The elf spat. ‘That’s Indigenous Fairylander to you, Fido,’ she hissed. ‘And you got five seconds to get your goddamn paw the hell off me, or you gonna wish you lived in a kennel and fetched slippers in your mouth.’

‘Easy now,’ Fang replied calmly, not letting go. ‘You don’t need me to tell you you’re in no position to make threats. Instead of trying to scare each other, why don’t we help each other out?’

The elf sneered. ‘And why’d I want to help you, Mister Dog?’

‘Because otherwise I’ll eat you,’ Fang replied cheerfully. ‘Now shut up and listen. I’ve got to get in there and do a job of work, but I have the feeling I’m expected. So I need someone to stage a diversion.’

‘Man, you can stage a Broadway revival of Oklahoma! for all I care. I ain’t helpin’ no wolf. What’s in it for me?’