The Moorchild Read Free Page A

allowed to lurk behind things while an elder pointed out a Man, a Woman, a Shepherd Boy, a Cross Dog and a Silly Dog, and warned them of cats—which could always see the Folk and were to be avoided. Instead they were abruptly turned loose to go where they would, in plain sight of each other and the human world.
    “But mind now, if one of Them comes along, hide ,” warned Pittittiskin, who was instructing them that day. “Not while they’re gawking straight at you, wait till they blink. Then you can do a shape change, or a color change, or go dimlike, or run up a tree, or just wink out—that’s best, if you hold your breath till you can slip behind a rock or something. But don’t let Them see, you hear? You’ll endanger the Band.” He strolled away, turned back casually. “If you muff it and get caught, remember about the gold.”
    “What if They’re on our path, though?” Moql asked him, peering uneasily over her shoulder. She found this much freedom scary.
    A chorus of youngling voices piped up. “Pinch ’em!” “Trip ’em!” “Pull their hair!” “Change into an adder!” “A hornet!” “A bear!”
    “A bear ?” echoed somebody, and the belligerence dissolved in laughter.
    But Pittittiskin snapped, “The paths are ours! However you do it, keep Them off!” He turned away again, took a flying leap into a chestnut tree and began to tease Jinka,with whom he had paired off lately, and wind the long leaves into her silvery hair.
    The younglings, left to their own devices, drifted apart, some joining playmates higher up the moor, others searching for mushrooms at the edge of the woodland. Moql found a few wild berries and wandered from bush to bush, with no heed to where she was straying until she all but fell over a big, brown, gray-faced ewe lying in the shade of a clump of bracken. The ewe stumbled to its feet with a noisy blaa-aa-aat and galumphed off. Moql, equally startled, looked around to find the flock scattered about the hillside, and herself in its midst, with every woolly gray face turned her way. The shepherd—not a Boy, either, but a full-grown Man carrying a dangerous-looking crook—was striding across the flank of the hill straight toward her, with his jaw dropped and his eyes half starting from his head.
    “Hide! Hide! Hide!” shrilled a voice from somewhere, but it called in the secret tongue, which the Folk understood well enough, but only made humans gawk about trying to spot the unknown bird.
    Every youngling Moql could see obeyed. The dozen playing a ring game near the crest had vanished, though quite a number of crows, with a chicken or two oddly mixed in, now pecked in the same spot among the grasses. Out of the corner of her eye Moql glimpsed Tinkwa running like a red-capped lizard up an outcrop, with Zmr, already rock-colored, right behind.
    With the shepherd’s eye full on her, she herself dared only shrink a bit and go bluish like the shadows under the bracken, fighting off panic as she waited for him to blink.Suddenly a near-transparent shape—it was Els’nk—darted from behind a berry bush and flung a handful of dirt into the shepherd’s staring eyes, and then he had to squint and rub them. Thankfully Moql gulped in her breath to wink out, held it hard, and left the flimsy shelter of the bracken to dash in invisible safety across the open space toward Els’nk’s bush.
    She had scarcely started when a large hand grasped the back of her hooded jacket and yanked her off her feet to dangle like a puppy held by its scruff. She gasped, realizing the trick must not have worked. Why not? She was sure to be visible now, for the jerk had shaken her held breath loose. In terror she kicked and struggled, trying to change to an eel, to a horned toad, trying to turn a fearsome bright yellow with red spots, trying desperately to hold her breath again, whether the Man was watching or not. But nothing would work while he held her. From all around came the cries of the unknown