The Fairy Rebel by Lynne Reid Banks Page A

Queen. “It’s useless trying to make spells. I’ve kept your magic well cropped. Nothing can save you now!” And she began to raise her arm.
    “Wait!” cried Jan. A strange, crazy idea had begun to form in her mind. “Don’t you—don’t you have any—civilized customs?”
    The Queen’s arm dropped.
    “What are you talking about?” she asked coldly.
    “Before they die, can’t they make a last request?”
    “So you think my fairy realm is not civilized,” said the Queen. “We are far more civilized than humans!” She turned to Tiki and Wijic. “You may have a last request, both of you, before you are stung to dust.”
    “I want—I want a hair off Bindi’s head,” whispered Tiki. And she looked at Wijic and nodded at him.
    He looked quite puzzled, but he said, “That’s what I want too.”
    And Jan knew that her crazy idea was right.
    “That’s not much to ask,” she said. “I’m sure your Queen won’t refuse. I’ll pluck out the hairs myself.” And she bent over Bindi, fumbling with her hair.
    “Ow!” cried Bindi, and a second later, “Ow!” again.
    Then Jan wrapped each hair quickly round her fingertip till it made a ring, and handed one ring to Tiki and one to Wijic.
    “Let me look at those hairs,” the Queen said suddenly in a suspicious tone. “They are not the same color as—”
    But it was too late.
    Clinging to the ring of blue hair, Tiki cried out in her piercing little voice:
    “Tilidiki! Tilidiki!”
    And Wijic, suddenly understanding, waved his blue hair-ring in the air and shouted the same word.

8
The Great Gathering
    There was one terrible moment when the very air around Jan’s head seemed to hold its breath. The Queen’s wings snapped forward and the fearsome masklike eyes glared, and Jan felt Bindi go limp in her arms. Her own blood began to chill in her veins. The Queen’s arms rose slowly—her face was twisted with fury—but Tiki and Wijic, with a lightning movement, threw their hair-rings over her arms like lassos, and they seemed to drag first her arms, and then the Queen herself, down, until she lay crumpled at the foot of her wasp throne.
    The tower of wasps seemed to tremble, then totter. Then it began to break up. Tiki and Wijic spread their wings. Tiki was screeching with delight. She was looking pinker every minute. Her hair, standing up on end, was already its normal color, and as her wings beat the air in excitement, they seemed to get back all their lavender pink and their furry shine. As for Wijic, he was dancing up and down; he had changed into his favorite schoolboy clothes and was waving his red cap in circles above his head.
    As the tall black wasp tower crumbled and broke up, the wasps half flying, half falling, fairy and elf took off, hovering in the air above the ruin.
    The Queen crashed five feet to the ground and lay there, the blue hair-rings still circling her arms.
    But she was not dust. The wasps’ bodies had partly broken her fall. She sat up slowly, trying to shake the rings from her arms. Her wings hung behind her like broken kites, and the eyes on them were hidden.
    Jan crouched on the ground with Bindi in her arms. She could hear Charlie shouting somewhere behind her, and guessed that the evil magic toys in Bindi’s bedroom had somehow lost their power and that Charlie was free. She called him: “Charlie! We’re out here!” And she heard his footsteps pounding toward them.
    Then she heard something else.
    It wasn’t quite hearing. And it wasn’t seeing. She sensed it. It was as if the air around her and the ground under her were humming and trembling with the movement of a million pairs of wings and a million pairs of feet. They could not be the wings or feet of the dreaded wasps, because one glance around showed Jan that all the wasps were dead or had escaped. In any case, she felt no fear, but a wonderful feeling of excitement, a thrill all through her as that humming and trembling came closer and closer until she could