Hexwood. Diana Wynne Jones

      As he pointed to the dank little hole in the rocks behind the shelter, Ann saw that there was a dark red slash on his wrist, just beginning to look puckered and sore. That’s where he cut himself to make Hume, she thought. Then she thought, hey! – what’s going on? That cut was slightly less well healed than the cut on her own knee. Ann could feel the soreness and the drag of the sticking plaster under the jeans she had sensibly decided to wear this afternoon. But Mordion had had time to grow a beard.

      “I know it gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘lean-to’,” Mordion said apologetically. He was hurt and puzzled. Just like Hume, he thought of Ann as a good friend from the castle estate. Yet here she was looking grave, unfriendly and decidedly sarcastic. “What’s the matter?” he asked her. “Have I offended you?”

      “Well—” said Ann. “Well, last time I saw Hume he was twice the size he is now.”

      Mordion pulled his beard, wrestling with a troublesome itch of memory when he looked at Hume. Hume was pulling Ann’s sleeve and saying, like the small boy he was, “Ann, come and see my sword Mordion made me, and my funny log. And the nets in the water to catch fish.”

      “Hush, Hume,” Mordion told him. “Ann, he was this size when I found him wandering in the wood.”

      “But you said, if I remember rightly, that you weren’t going to bother to look after him,” Ann said. “What changed your mind?”

      “Surely I never would have said—” Mordion began. But the itch of memory changed to a stab. He knew he had said something like that, though it seemed now as if he must have said it in another time and place entirely. The stab of memory brought with it sunlit spring woodland, a flowering Judas tree, and Ann’s face, smudged and green-lit, staring at him with fear, horror and anger. From somewhere high up. “Forgive me,” he said. “I never meant to frighten—You know, something seems to be playing tricks with my memory.”

      “The paratypical field,” Ann said, staring up at him expectantly.

      “Oh!” said Mordion. She was right. Both fields were very strong, and one was also very subtle and so deft at keeping itself unnoticed that, with the passing of the weeks, he had forgotten it was there. “I let myself get caught in it,” he confessed. “As to – as to what I said about Hume – well – I’d never in my life had to care for anyone—” He stopped, because now Ann had made him aware his memory was wrong, he knew this was not quite the case. At some time, somewhere, he had cared for someone, several someones, children like Hume. But this stab of memory hurt so deeply that he was not prepared to think of it, except to be honest with Ann. “That’s not quite true,” he admitted. “But I knew what it would be like. He can be a perfect little pest.”

      Hume just then cast down a bundle of his treasures at Ann’s feet, shouting at her to look at them. Ann laughed. “I see what you mean!” She squatted down beside Hume and inspected the wooden sword, and the log that looked rather like a crocodile – a dragon, Hume insisted – and fingered the stones with holes in. As she inspected the doll-thing that Mordion had dressed with a piece torn from his robe, she realised that she approved of Mordion far more than she had expected to. Mum had tried to make her stay at home to rest, but Ann had set out to find Hume and look after him. It had been a shock to find Mordion was already doing so. But she had to admit that Mordion had really been trying. There were still strange – and frightening – things about him, but some of that was his looks, and the rest was probably the paratypical field at work. It made things queer, this field.

      “Tell you what, Hume,” she said. “Let’s us two go for a walk and give Mordion a bit of a holiday.”

      It was as if she had given Mordion a present. The smile lit his face as she got up and led Hume away. Hume was clamouring that he knew a real place to walk to. “I could use a holiday,” Mordion said through the clamour. It was heartfelt. Ann felt undeserving, because she knew that, as presents go, it was not much better than a log that looked like a crocodile.

      As soon as Ann had towed Hume out of sight, Mordion, instead of getting on with his house, sat on one of the smooth brown rocks under the pine tree. He leant back on the tree’s rough, gummy trunk, feeling like someone who had not had a holiday in years. Absurd! Centuries of half-life in stass were like a long night’s sleep – but he was sure he had had dreams, appalling dreams. And the one thing he was certain of was that he had longed, with every fibre of his body, to be free. But the way he felt now, bone-tired, mind-tired, was surely the result of looking after Hume.

      Yes, Ann was right. Hume had been bigger at one time. When? How? Mordion groped after it. The subtler of the two paratypical fields kept pushing in and trying to spread vagueness over his mind. He would remember this. Woodland – Ann looking horrified—

      It came to him. First it was blood, splashed on moss and dripping down his hand. Then it was the furrow in the ground, opening to show bone-white body and a tangle of hair. Mordion contemplated it. What had he done? True, the field had pushed him to it, but it was one of the few things he knew he could have resisted. He must have been a little mad, coming from that coffin to find himself a skeleton, but that was no excuse. And he had a very real grudge against the Reigners, but that was no excuse either. It was not right to create another human being to do one’s dirty work. He had been mad, playing God.

      He looked at the cut on his wrist. He shuddered and was about to heal it with an impatient thought, but he stopped himself. This had better stay – had to stay – to remind him what he owed to Hume. He owed it to Hume to bring him up as a normal person. Even when Hume was grown up, he must never, never know that Mordion had made him as a sort of puppet. And, Mordion thought, he would have to find a way to deal with the Reigners for himself. There had to be a way.

      

      Ann led Hume away, hoping that the weirdness of this place would cause Hume to grow older once Mordion was out of sight. It would be confusing, but she knew she would prefer it. Small Hume kept asking questions, questions. If she did not answer, he tugged her hand and shouted the question. Ann was not sure she should tell him the answers to some of the things he asked. She wished she knew more about small children. She ought to, she supposed, having a brother two years younger than she was, but she could not remember what Martin had been like at this age at all. Surely Martin had never kept asking things this way?

      They crunched their way up a hillside of dry bracken, littered with twisted small thorn trees and, before they were anywhere near the top, Ann found she had explained to Hume in detail the way babies were made.

      “And that was how I was made, was it?” asked Hume.

      This was one of the times he pulled Ann’s arm and kept shouting the question. “No” Ann said at last, mostly out of pure harassment. “No. You were made out of a spell Mordion worked out of my blood and his blood.” Then Hume pulled her arm and shouted again, until she described it to him, just as it had happened. “So you got up and ran away without noticing either of us,” she finished, as they came to the top of the hill. By this time she was resigned to the paratypical field keeping Hume as he was.

      As they entered woodland again, Hume thought about what he had been told. “Aren’t I a proper person then?” he asked mournfully.

      Now she had damaged Hume’s mind! Ann wished all over again that the field had made Hume older. “Of course you are!” she told Hume, with the huge heartiness of guilt. “You’re very particularly special, that’s all.” Since Hume was still looking tearful and dubious, Ann went on in a hurry, “Mordion needs you badly, to kill some terrible people called Reigners for him when you grow up. He can’t kill them himself, you see, because they’ve banned him from it. But you can.”

      Hume was interested in this. He cheered up. “Are they dragons?”

      “No,”