Your Adequacy

Morning in the hollow arrives from the top down. The light finds the Stair first, all six floors of it, and the Stair, being full of the Above in its many boots, takes a while to notice, and then the light finds the hedge, and the hedge, being a range of green hills full of things that would rather it didn't, takes a while to pass it along, so that by the time the sun reaches the flat stones of the path the fliskies have already been up for an hour and have opinions about it. The Occupant knew there were fliskies by now because Grizel had said "fliskies" in the tone of someone naming a weather condition, and because in the night a wing had brushed her face, and because her bootlace was gone and in its place, tied to the boot with great care, was a note that said RELOCATED in a hand the size of a seed.

"That'll be the small one," said Grizel, who was at the table with the ledger open and a cup of something that steamed. "Wings like a moth that's been through a letterbox. Pockets. You will not see her unless she wants something, and she will not want anything you would think of. It's not stealing," she added, in the voice of someone quoting a ruling she disagreed with. "It's relocating. Fliskies hold that a thing belongs to whoever is holding it. Grumlins hold that a thing belongs to whoever wrote it down." She tapped the ledger. "You will notice which side of that argument keeps the records."

The beans, meanwhile, were being counted by a grumlin the Occupant had not met, who turned out on closer inspection to be roughly the shape of one of the beans, if the bean had been left out in the rain and grown a beard. Nettie was round and low and wide in the way of things that are hard to knock over, and her beard, which was the longest in the hollow and of which she was, Grizel said, "aware," was braided from the chin down with acorns, so that when she moved it clicked like an abacus doing sums it did not like. She was counting the beans and arriving, each time, at three, and each time she arrived at three she said "Gnomesby" under her breath, in the way other people say a word they were brought up not to.

"Gnomesby didn't eat the beans," said the Occupant, because she was new.

Nettie looked at her for a long moment with the expression of a farmer who has been told by a townsperson that soil is just dirt. "Not personally," she said. "They took the patch, mind. Fourteen winters back. Half my mushrooms are growing on their side of a line I never agreed to, and folk that'll take a patch will take a bean."

There was a fliskie at the gate.

The Occupant knew this because Mungo had said "Nobody comes in" three times in a rising key, which for Mungo was an aria, and because when she got to the gate there was, hovering a precise ten feet from him on the far side of it, a foot in the Anunder being the length of Mungo's boot, that being the one thing in the hollow that has never changed size or position, a creature that could only be described as a collar that had decided to bring a person along. She was tall for a fliskie, narrow as a paper knife, and upright in the manner of someone who has been told her whole life that she has excellent posture and has taken it as a duty. The collar stood out around her head like a cathedral window that had been folded and starched. Behind her, her wings caught the low sun in panes of lilac and rose and a green the hedge did not have a name for, and it was clear, from the angle at which she held them, that they were catching it on purpose.

"You may address me," she said, to the air roughly a foot above the Occupant's head, "as Your Adequacy. It is a rank. Look it up."¹

Nobody looked it up. Grizel, who had followed the Occupant to the gate at the pace of someone who does not run for fliskies, wrote it down instead, which is not the same thing.

Lady Pettigrew, envoy of the Court of the Fliskies, had come about an acorn. The acorn had belonged to the Court's oak. It had been removed from the Court's oak by a person or persons unknown to the Court but, she observed, glancing at the hedge above the gate in a way that made something in it go very still, known to everybody else. The Court required its return, an apology, and a written undertaking that it would not happen again. The Court was aware it would happen again. The Court required the undertaking regardless. She produced a scroll from somewhere in the collar and let it fall, and it unrolled down the gatepost and along the path and into the mushrooms, and would have gone on into the hollow had a large soft shape not drifted out of the shadows and sat on the end of it.

The large soft shape was a fliskie the approximate size of three fliskies, round and furred and dust-coloured, with wings that were less like sails than like a blanket somebody had thrown over a chair, and he had sat on the scroll not to stop it but because it had stopped near the lantern, and Mungo's lantern was, the Occupant was beginning to understand, the fixed point around which this fliskie's whole existence revolved. He looked at the lantern. He looked at Pettigrew. He looked at the lantern again, having found it the more restful of the two.

"Mothy," said Grizel, in the ledger, without looking up. "He is drawn to lamps. Mungo has the only one. This is continuing."

Pettigrew chose to interpret being sat on as an act of homage and swept on. The apology, she made clear, was owed by the hollow, and the hollow had no keeper, and a hollow with no keeper could not apologise, which was, she said, a most convenient state of affairs for a hollow to be in, and one she would be reporting. Then she looked at the Occupant, for the first time, directly, from a height, and it was the look of someone who has just noticed that the chair she has been complaining about has a person in it.

"You are the Occupant," she said. It was not a question. Word travels in the hedge faster than beetles. "You will be needing the Court's seal, I imagine, before the frost." She let this sit. "How very interesting for us both."

The Occupant had been in the hollow one day. She did not know who took the acorn. Every creature in the hollow knew exactly who took the acorn, and every one of them was looking at the sky, except Mothy, who was looking at the lamp, and Mungo, who was looking at nothing, on principle.

Behind her, from the direction of the shed, came a sound of hammering, a pause, a sound of something falling over, and a small satisfied voice saying, "Nearly."

She did not get to the shed that day; Pettigrew took the afternoon, as Pettigrew takes most things. Whatever fell over in there was set upright again by someone who said "Nearly" a good deal, and a mushroom went missing from the patch and was found on the gatepost with a note on it that said RELOCATED, and Nettie said "Gnomesby" and then, after a moment, "or the small one," which for Nettie was a concession. Grizel, meanwhile, timed the pause between Mungo saying "Nobody comes in" and Pettigrew not coming in, and recorded it as "shorter," and looked dissatisfied with the word. Gnomesby's second letter arrived at dusk by the same beetle, whose hat was, the Occupant was almost certain, slightly larger than yesterday. The letter was shorter than the first. It said the Provost looked forward to the frost.