"All right. That's a good one. Add the dog, maybe, and some words. Laughter would be a great choice, and courage. Bestow as quickly as you can. I'll do the same for the woman. I've saved some good ones from that afghan on the sofa.
"I'll add words to her bestowal as well. Peace, I think, for her. And maybe—" He stopped to think. "Family."
There was a noise outside, in the distance. A whinny. Littlest One and Thin Elderly held hands and listened.
"We must hurry," Thin Elderly said. "They're preparing to come."
Littlest One fluttered quietly to the stairs and they started up. "When you're done," Thin Elderly whispered, "meet me—"
"In the corner of the hall, where we always huddle?"
He shook his head. "No. We might get trampled there, when the whole Horde comes through."
"Where, then?" She could tell that he was very nervous, and it terrified her. He had always been so calm and reassuring before.
They were in the upstairs hallway now, between the bedrooms. Outside, in the near distance, the noise was increasing. Hoofbeats. Shrill, agitated whinnies.
"The attic," Thin Elderly said. "Meet me in the attic. Now go. Hurry. Help the boy!"
They separated and Littlest One fluttered quickly to the place where the boy slept, still unaware of the impending danger.
25
John turned over in the bed without waking. One arm clutched the ragged donkey, and the other was curled around his pillow. He slept with his mouth open, but his breathing was quiet and his sleep was sound.
He heard nothing. He never heard the tiny nightly flutters as Littlest One arranged herself carefully by his ear and sent shimmers of sparkles into his consciousness. Ordinarily it was a quick bestowal, a tiny moment when she sent him a dream, wished him well, and fluttered away. But tonight she had much harder work to do.
She tried to put the Horde sounds out of her consciousness, not to be distracted by the danger or by her own fear. She recited to herself the sequence of directions:
Flutter.
Hover (she was already there, hovering).
Center.
Looking down at the sleeping boy, she centered herself, taking deep breaths, ignoring her own terror, blocking out the horrifying sounds of the fast-approaching enemy. Breathe, she thought. Breathe deeply. After a moment she felt calm and composed. Then:
Gather! she commanded herself.
From all her resources she sought the fragments she had been holding. She wrenched them forward, reaching far into herself, pulling them from the deepest corners, unfolding things that had been tucked away, arranging them in sequence. She gathered them and held them, and the volume of them almost suffocated her; she felt as if she might explode. But she held on. Then, one by one, she began the bestowals.
The baseball game: the curved line of stitches on the ball and then the high thwacking sound of the hit; the smell of an oiled leather glove; the rough feel of the fabric of a uniform with its dirt-encrusted knees; the thick pad of first base under his hand; the mingled shouts and cheers of the neighborhood crowd.
She leaned forward and with a shimmer of sparkles bestowed it on the boy. Next, the song. She had found it in the boy's treasured photograph of the young woman: a memory of her singing to the boy curled in her lap. A funny song. Littlest couldn't make out the words, really, but she could the melody, and she heard the sound of the boy laughing, and she felt the rhythmic rocking of the chair.
She leaned forward again, and the tiny sparkling bestowal entered the boy. She saw his mouth move slightly into the curved shape of a smile.
She found that she was breathing hard and it was becoming difficult to hover. She had combined fragments before, to create the complicated dreams that she thought he would like. But she had never done more than one bestowal at a time. Now, after two, she was tired, and still, within her, there was so much more to give. And so little time left.
The dog next. The dog was so important! She gathered the feel of silky warm fur under his collar, around his neck, behind his ears, the places that the boy liked to scratch. She added in the cool moistness of the black nose, the thump of the tail against the floor, and the liquid look of his brown eyes as he gazed upward at the boy.
There! She bestowed it in a tiny radiant burst.
But she could feel that she was beginning to falter. Her hover was weak. She breathed deeply again, collecting what strength remained in her. She sorted in her mind through the remaining fragments, in case she had to stop. What was the most important of those she had left?
The butterfly. Of course! She had never bestowed the butterfly on him before, because it was new to him—and to her, too, with its damp, unfolding golden wings. The dried chrysalis was empty now, just papery discarded pieces at the base of the jar. She hadn't bothered to touch them at all. What mattered was the new and vibrant life, resting there on the twig he had carefully placed for it. Remembering the prohibition against the touching of living creatures, Littlest had known she was breaking a rule. But it had seemed so important. She had used her tiniest, most delicate touch, not wanting to frighten or damage the butterfly. But the fragments she had gathered there were very strong, and she could feel them again now as she gathered them closer and closer to her surface: Flying! Beginning! She leaned down and bestowed those feelings upon the boy.
Then, just the tiniest bit of the seashell; she had given it to him often before, so she needed only a reminder of it. And the donkey, silly old Hee-Haw. She was tempted to leave the donkey out, but then it seemed important: the patchedness of it, the lumpy comfort.
She bestowed those, and with them went the last of her energy. She was very shaky now.
But she knew he needed the words. And so she summoned them and breathed them into his ear:
Laughter.
Courage.
But they took everything she had left, and she could not sustain her hover or flutter away. She heard the Horde stampede coming through the wall as she fell. Her strength completely gone, she curled into a ball, into the smallest she could make herself, and rolled under the boy's bed, just out of the way of the stomping, flailing hooves.
***
The little boy had not heard the pawing at the exterior wall of the house, or the snorting of dilated nostrils as the huge creatures breathed themselves through, sweaty sides heaving and rippled with power. His sleep was undisturbed by the hot whoooosh and hisssss as they transferred the horrors they carried into his small being.
Across the hall, in the bedroom with pink rosebuds and ribbon garlands on its wallpaper, the woman, too, slept unaware, as did her dog. Thin Elderly had bestowed on her every fragment of contentment he could muster before he fluttered back down, slid, exhausted, under the door to the attic stairs, and made his way up to the place he and Littlest had agreed to meet. Behind him he heard the Horde enter, and he thought he must hug Littlest tightly so that she would not be terrified by such a horrible sound: Hundreds of hooves! The snorting and whinnying! And the smell, too, was awful. Tired though he was, he hurried up the attic stairs to find her and reassure her that they had done all they could.