Warden Gordon and the Angel in the Woods

Gryff Gordon, at 29 years of age, had nearly 20 years’ experience working in one park or another. Growing up as a child in a village called Chesterton-Burnleigh on the South Downs, he’d been a Cub and then a Scout, and as a little boy he’d started on walks with him, volunteering picking litter in the parks or on the beaches and taking it as seriously as a little boy could.

He’d actually taken work at the visitor’s centre there even before he needed work experience for his GCSEs and then his Duke of Edinburgh — it was later he’d taken work up in the Peak District.

The Llallwg Park was a different matter entirely.

Gryff’s mother had been a witch — in fact, she was still a witch now, for all she was ostensibly retired, and spent most of her Saturday mornings weaving magic in people’s gardens, topping up their enchantments, stirring ointments and minor potions for the neighbours and her friends. Gryff’s grandmother had been a witch too, of course, and although he’d never been great at it himself, his sister had taken it up.

It wasn’t an occupation in itself, but she was a hobbyist, right enough.

It was her who had pointed out the opening to him and said he should apply. The money was better, in the first instance, even once you took in the rate of exchange and higher magical taxes, and magical national parks were old-fashioned compared to their mundane counterparts — like most magical public service enterprises — and gave equally old-fashioned perks.

For Gryff, applying as a new warden, it meant a cottage with a modest garden on a block with a few of the other employees, in sight of the train station down the hill; it meant decent time off, time out of doors, animals, fresh air.

It wasn’t all good — the retirement age for magical staff tended to be ten years after the mundane one, even though it was often negotiated to allow for earlier retirement, and he wasn’t as up on magical wildlife as he was on the mundane, spent half of his time reading books and magazines and tearing his hair out.

Not to mention, of course, that fae scared the everloving bollocks off him, let alone the People one sometimes came across whilst walking in the Pennines.

The Llallwg National Park spanned a great deal of the magical land across the Pennines and the Dales — it was a wide-ranging spread of woods and hills besides, and walking anywhere you could feel the magic thick in the air. It was a complicated place, impossibly huge, and even studying map after map, Gryff didn’t know that he’d ever understand, ever comprehend, the whole expanse of it.

It was the land thickest with magical portals — primarily to different fae lands, but to avernal ones too — in the whole of Cymru-Loegr, and pathways tripped and crossed over one another, hosted half a dozen different peoples to a village. There were a lot of people, spread over the park’s edges, adjoining the park, twisting off of paths, and then the animals, the animals…

In the very core of the park, where the Llallwg Visitors’ Centre was, with the first few camping grounds closest to hand, you mostly saw mundane animals only — it was only as you started to venture deeper in that you found the places thicker with magic where fae beasts walked casually out from one portal or another and in through others.

What a place it was, where you could see a great fae elk nine feet at the shoulder, glowing moss hanging from its felted antlers, its eyes glowing a strange and supernatural silver and intelligence, besides, and in the next moment, see a pretty ordinary grey squirrel carrying on like the two of them belonged together.

Dhanmeet Singh Bajwa, his new boss, was unlike any man Gryff Gordon had ever seen: tall, plump, and with the thickest, grey-black beard Gryff had ever seen, he was the most impressive man Gryff had ever laid eyes on, and yet somehow managed not to be imposing, even when he was very close to you and — being that tall — he had to lean over you to see your face.

He was a genial man, and even when not actually smiling, his eyes had a sort of kind sparkle to them — he was the sort of person that could set anyone at ease just by looking at them, and when Gryff first arrived off of a bumpy car ride, nauseous from the journey and sweating with anxiety about being late to his first day on the new job, that was exactly what he did.

“Would you like to sit down?” asked Dhanmeet, and Gryff, breathing heavily and half bent over, stared up at his face, at the thickness of his moustache, his beard. He wore a waistcoat of embossed purple and gold threads, and his turban was made in the same plum purple colour; on the sleeve of his shirt, rolled up to the elbow, was a neatly embroidered emblem.

“I don’t know if I’d like to,” said Gryff. “But it might help.”

He felt awkward moving through the empty halls of the Visitors’ Centre — when he’d come in for his interview they were trying to organise an arrival of two hundred Scouts into the different camp grounds, and he’d had to pick his way through them to Dhanmeet’s office.

It was mad, what a difference it made, moving through the tiled halls with no one in them — every wall was painted in one more ornate portrait than the last, many of them centuries old, the paint directly laid onto the stone and the wood panelling.

He’d never noticed the depth and complexity of it before, most of it fit enough to fall into: they looked as easy to walk into, some of the paintings, as the portals he’d seen when he and Dhanmeet had taken a walk around the nearest paths.

“I’m sorry,” Gryff said. “The regular bus was late, so I took one of the ones that went around the country paths? And the journey was…”

“The fae roads are bumpy,” said Dhanmeet, phrasing it more politely than Gryff knew how. “There are arguments between the King Regent and the various fae monarchs in the vicinity, I’m afraid, as to who is responsible for paving the roads between fae and fae-dominated villages and the others nearby. The royal coffers could more than stretch, but I’m afraid you’ll get used to these petty quarrels the more time you spend here.”

“Fae don’t believe in spending money on roads?” asked Gryff slowly. He was almost mesmerised at the sight of Dhanmeet pouring him tea from a dark brown clay pot, the pour so smooth and so easy that the tea itself could have been molten gold, and he was grateful when Dhanmeet pushed the cup into his hands.

“Not public roads,” said Dhanmeet, leaning back against the desk as he sipped at his own drink. “Private roads, maybe, but not public ones — and certainly not public ones that are on mundane, English land. They scare you, don’t they?”

When he smiled Dhanmeet’s thick moustache, which curled at the ends, shifted with his lips, and Gryff sighed, sinking right back onto the bench.

“We don’t have any fae lands on the Downs,” said Gryff. “There’s Deadlands, is all, but all the fae nearby live in Brighton or further east, further west. And I was always taught to give the Deadlands a wide berth.”

He had nightmares about them, sometimes.

Growing up in a house with witches, no matter that he could barely stir his tea with a spell of his own, he’d been taught enough to know that hauntings, in most cases, were simple phenomena — sometimes distressing, sometimes confusing or loud, but rarely inexplicable. A ghost was a simple thing, an echo, an imprint, of events or rarely a person passed.

Deadlands were different: once fae kingdoms in their own right, born of the care and love and magic of the fae that had once founded them, they went wrong, once all the fae had left them or died themselves.

Wrong was one way of putting it.

He wasn’t religious, didn’t know that he believed in unholy places — but he believed Deadlands were wrong, that they were anything but right. As a little boy, once, running in the woods with some friends, a friend had taken a wrong turn, crossed the wrong boundary.

He’d come back, eventually, but he’d never been the same. He’d never spoken another word, and to Gryff’s awareness, he still didn’t speak today.

“The Deadlands up here are deeper and wilder than most anywhere else,” said Dhanmeet quietly, his voice taking a sober lilt. “But you won’t need to go anywhere near them, and so long as you’re polite with anyone you meet on the paths. The People, especially, but the fae, too.”

“You’re bringing up the People to put the fae in perspective?” asked Gryff, and Dhanmeet laughed, a warm and wonderful sound, one that made Gryff relax slightly in his seat.

“The People are perfectly polite,” said Dhanmeet. “They believe in custodianship, in respecting wildlife, in manners, just like we do.”

“They’re frightening,” said Gryff.

“Don’t you think we’re frightening to a lot of fae, hm? As big as we are, compared to many of them?”

“You really know how to make a man feel unreasonable, don’t you?” asked Gryff.

“I spend all my days convincing people to respect wildlife and not to litter,” said Dhanmeet. “You get into the habit.”

Gryff laughed, and exhaled slowly, trying to work out the last of the nausea. “I don’t normally get travel sick,” he said. “I’m fine, when I’m the one driving, especially on a bike, but that bus was something else.”

“I didn’t bring you in here to lecture you,” said Dhanmeet. “You just looked about to drop dead, that’s all, and I thought it would be kind to sit with you for ten minutes before putting you to work — especially if I’d only be scraping you off the grass ten minutes after that. May I ask you a question?”

“Please,” said Gryff.

“Did you pick out the job just so you’d be Warden Gryff Gordon?”

He sniggered, shaking his head as he put the teacup aside. “I think that might be why my sister picked it,” he muttered, and Dhanmeet smiled down at him a moment before setting his mug down.

“We’ve assigned you your own bike,” said Dhanmeet. “You can ride it home, if you want to, and pick the roads you drive on — more reliable than the bus, I think.”

“Do you ride?” he asked, and Dhanmeet laughed.

“No, my wife hates to see me on a motorbike,” he said, voice rich with undeniable affection, eyes sparkling once again, and Gryff smiled himself. It was difficult not to smile, when he was smiling.

“She’s scared of the danger?” asked Gryff, and Dhanmeet laughed even harder, patting his own knee.

“No, no,” he said, with a self-deprecating smile. “She seems to believe if I were to be allowed to ride a motorbike I might become a passionate racer and start doing stunts.” He gave a satisfied sigh, and shrugged his portly shoulders before saying, with a confidential air, “Perhaps there is some truth in that.”

“It’s surprisingly easy to imagine,” said Gryff. “It must be nice, though, to have someone who cares about you like that.”

“You don’t need to sound so downcast,” said Dhanmeet. “You’re only young.”

“I’m not quite that,” said Gryff, and Dhanmeet chuckled.

“Younger than me. Come on,” he said, tipping his head one day for Gryff to follow him, and Gryff stood to his feet to follow him. When they went outside, they came into a wide picnic ground, the grass dotted with daisies and buttercups.

In the morning light, Gryff saw a tall, lithe man walking toward them, a basket under one arm, and he felt his lips part at the sight of him. He was impossibly, painfully, ethereally beautiful, and even were it not for the silver wings that sprouted from behind his ears like a built-in crown, it would be impossible to mistake him as human.

He was handsome in the most delicate way: the silver shine of his well-oiled feathers matched the pale grey of his eyes, and more than that, it matched the silver flakes of silver that shone over his cheeks and down his neck, flaked too up and down his bared arms in shining scales.

His hair was a bright, burnished red, falling around his wings in neatly cut waves, but all his lovely appearance he dressed very drably: he wore a beige woollen vest over a short-sleeved white shirt, and the trousers he wore were brown, too.

“Mr Percy, this is our new warden, Mr Gordon,” said Dhanmeet as the angel walked closer. “This is Mr Percy.”

“Hullo, Warden Gordon,” said Mr Percy pleasantly, in a sweetly fruity voice. “Good morning, Dhanmeet. You recall Mrs Kaur was asking after my preserves?”

“It’s difficult not to recall, Mr Percy,” said Dhanmeet, and Gryff got the impression there was at least some irony in his voice — Dhanmeet’s voice was rich and plummy, but he had a Northern accent, and Gryff had been worried his voice sounded a little posh, Southern as he was, but it was nothing compared to Mr Percy’s breathless, carefully clipped vowels and consonants, as though he were neatly trimming every single word. “She won’t stop talking about it.”

“Oh, good,” said Mr Percy, a pink flush burning under the silver scales on his cheeks and making them turn to lilac under the shining sun. “She’ll be glad of the recipe, then, not to mention another jar.”

Even as he handed another small basket from inside the one under his arm, packed not just with a jar of jam but also a neatly scrolled piece of parchment paper and several wildflowers, Mr Percy kept Gryff’s gaze instead of Dhanmeet’s. He was smiling faintly, and Gryff found himself mystified by the single silver scale that reached his lips from the few dappled on his chin, one the size of an apple pip that found itself cut in half whenever he parted pink, cupid’s bow lips.

“She will be, Mr Percy, thank you,” said Dhanmeet, and to Gryff’s interested surprise, Mr Percy actually bowed his head to him, the feathers on his little wings twitching and fluttering. When he raised his head, he met Gryff’s eye again, and then turned neatly on his heel and walked away. “He’s an odd duck, that lad,” Dhanmeet murmured. “He lives in one of the largest cottages here on the core land, with his own gardens. He’s been here since before it was a park, I’m afraid, for about five hundred years.”

“Five hundred?” Gryff repeated, and Dhanmeet let out an amused huff.

“Age difference put you off, does it? Didn’t seem to put off him.”

Gryff huffed out an awkward laugh, rubbing the back of his neck, and followed Dhanmeet around the corner.

* * *

Llallwg National Park — Parc Cenedlaethol Llallwg — was the biggest national park in Loegr even if you only counted, in terms of square miles, only one dimension of space, but once you started including other magical dimensions and thoroughfares, it became almost impossible to count.

It wasn’t quite the same as working for mundane national park authorities in England, and he knew that when he applied for the job — as a Park Warden, he took on some of the managerial duties in the core of the park, helping work out schedules and calendar obligations as he settled more into the role. He was mainly focused on internal rather than external obligations, ensuring maintenance of different park resources and liaising with other internal offices like the ones that ran the campgrounds or the bicycle hires, but over the years, he worked a lot with the public as well.

Six years at the Llallwg National Park had left Gryff feeling at home in a way he’d never felt at home anywhere, and it was incredible to him that no matter where he was within its wild-ranging span, he felt like he belonged.

The fae still unsettled him at times, yes, when he met them outside one portal or another; the People he’d learned to live with. The Deadlands, as ever, he avoided completely.

There were villages and a handful of towns within the park’s wide-ranging territory, but for the most part it was public, undeveloped land. That wasn’t to say domestic animals didn’t sometimes graze on it or come through, as it was commonly owned land, but most of the time when you saw them it would be to the edges of the territory, closer in to the settlements.

That wasn’t the case all over, of course.

As well as the campgrounds, there were a few caravan parks that were open at all times of the year, and some people lived in them or on other plots of land permanently, or regularly travelled through the park proper, but people weren’t meant to build anything permanent. You could build temporary structures of wood or clay — “temporary” didn’t mean impermanent in the sense of staying in place, but in the sense of how easy it was to take apart when you did move on, and Gryff knew half a dozen people who lived in the park to avoid things like property tax — but there were a handful of houses and farms that had been there since before the park was established.

Mr Percy’s house was one of these.

In the main core of the park, where the central Visitors’ Centre was, there was a space of about thirty square miles of undeveloped land. The campgrounds were revolved every year to make sure that the land wasn’t impacted by the regular tents and constant tread over them, but there mostly weren’t any stone or built structures beyond the buildings that belonged to the park — the Visitors’ Centre, the public toilets, the bike hire places, a little interactive natural history museum, the block of cottages for staff, and so on.

Mr Percy’s house was the exception to that.

It was only a mile’s walk from the Visitors’ Centre, but it was impossible to miss. Built of off-white and grey stone with visible wood beams, it had a thatched roof and a brightly red-painted door, and rambling roses trailed around the windows in careful pink borders, looking very neatly trained.

There was no moss on the walls of the house whatsoever, the thatch always kept in perfect repair, and he was informed Mr Percy spent most of his days either walking through the woods or doing repairs and work on his property.

The walls around his garden were extremely short, didn’t even come up to Gryff’s knee, and were so overgrown with moss and ivy that you might believe they weren’t intentionally laid at all, if not for the fact that Percy groomed an intensive, obsessive border between the public paths that ran either side of his property and the little border, not to mention between the border and his own rows and rows of growing flowers and vegetables.

In six years at the Llallwg National Park, Gryff didn’t often see him unless he actually approached the house and he happened to be home — Percy grew his own food, and apparently he’d never been known to leave the bounds of the park, but for all he apparently was constantly walking one way or the other, gathering mushrooms or ingredients, he and Gryff never seemed to cross paths.

He stayed away from the campgrounds, of course, and most of the more developed parts of the park. Gryff didn’t know that he could be called shy, but he didn’t seem to like being wherever people might be.

Visitors came to Mr Percy, but not the other way around — other angels or fae came to see him sometimes, or other members of the park staff, like Dhanmeet Singh and his wife. Every once in a while, a tall, handsome man with a subtle smile would come through to visit him, and he always greeted Gryff by name, although they’d never been introduced.

It wasn’t as if Gryff was jealous: if he wanted to be invited to tea at Percy’s, he doubted it would be difficult, but he never went to the trouble of hanging around.

That wasn’t to say they never saw one another, of course.

“Don’t feed the animals, Mr Percy,” growled Gryff as he stopped outside Mr Percy’s cottage, and Mr Percy stood up straight and looked at him with his hands behind his back, wings angling backwards like a cat’s ears, his eyes wide as saucers. It was a very innocent look, one that he’d fallen for, for the first few months he worked at Llallwg. He didn’t fall for it anymore — he especially didn’t fall for it when half a dozen squirrels were hopping away from Mr Percy even as Gryff stopped to talk to him. “You’ll make them reliant on humans.”

“I’m not a human,” Percy pointed out, and when Gryff’s eyes narrowed, he added, “and I don’t feed them!”

Gryff had never caught Percy actually feeding the animals, or even caught any of them eating food laid out for them. Now and then, he sees an enterprising squirrel or other small animal rushing off with fruit from one of Percy’s bushes, and once, he’d seen a deer standing on the public path, leaning right over the little fence to carefully pluck a low-hanging apple from the tree.

And yet, every time Gryff stopped nearby, animals would be hurrying away from the house and the garden as if they’d been told to scatter — depending on the time of day, over the years, he’d seen foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, mice, polecats, rabbits, squirrels, all manner of birds, but that was nothing compared to the bigger animals like deer and elk, even boar.

“Mr Percy,” growled Gryff one morning, and the angel appeared in the kitchen window, innocent as anything, cheeks flushed.

“I’ve not done anything,” he said immediately. “All I do is keep to myself, Mr Gordon, you know that.”

“I just saw a squirrel run down your guttering,”

“Tremendously gymnastic, aren’t they?”

“Mr Percy,” said Gryff.

“I’d never ignore your instructions, Mr Gordon. On my honour!”

With that, the angel disappeared.

A lot of the other people in the park were a little odd about Percy. Gryff didn’t think anybody actively disliked him, but everyone definitely found him odd, and he was one of those people that just wouldn’t blend in amongst mundies, even if he hid his wings away and covered up the scales on his skin.

He’d asked Dhanmeet, a few months after he’d started: “What’s wrong with him?”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” said Dhanmeet, laughing.

The two of them were eating lunch together, and Gryff had swapped the second piece of his banana bread for one of Dhanmeet’s corn on the cobs — this was a habit the two of them shared, given that they both liked to cook, and they both swapped recipes from time to time. Dhanmeet and Makali — Mrs Kaur — swapped around packing lunches and liked to surprise each other. It wasn’t often that Gryff looked at two sixty-year-olds and called them cute, but with these two, it wasn’t easy to describe them as anything else.

“There is,” said Gryff. “No one’s scared of him, but no one tells him off, either.”

“Why, what do you want to tell him off for?”

“He feeds the animals,” said Gryff.

Dhanmeet didn’t even answer him, just laughed and started demanding what Gryff put in the banana bread to balance out the sweetness, because his always came out too sickly.

Gryff had been walking down one of the established hikes, checking the trail markers were in place, as a colony of pixies had become very interested in nails and screws in the past few weeks after getting into a maintenance man’s toolbox, and were now pilfering them from wherever they could be found.

The first time he saw Mr Percy off the path for the first time, about three or four miles away from his house, a little after one o’clock in the afternoon. Settled in the long grass in the middle of a clearing, a great fae elk with glow-moss hanging in corded curtains from its antlers was standing still, its eyes closed, and Mr Percy was speaking softly to it, his fingers gently stroking over the creamy white fur on its muzzle.

He didn’t say anything right away, but cleared his throat, and the elk turned to glance at him. It didn’t startle dramatically, but it did swiftly turn its head away and began to jog out of the clearing, rushing up the hillside.

Percy looked at Gryff shame-facedly.

“I didn’t feed him,” he said quickly.

“He’s obviously comfortable with you,” pointed out Gryff.

“They all are,” said Percy, his wings fluttering and twitching either side of his head. He was dressed, as always, in simple, plain clothes, and as Gryff watched he picked up a basket folded with wild garlic and a few other fruits and herbs inside.

“Mr Percy, I will issue you with a fine if I catch you at it,” said Gryff.

Mr Percy’s mask of politeness and innocence faltered at that, and although his was light and airy, its derision remained clear. “Issue all you like, Mr Gordon,” he said. “I don’t have any money. I don’t believe in it.”

Gryff didn’t know what to say to that.

“They like me, the animals,” said Percy. “That’s all.”

“They’re wild animals,” said Gryff. “They like what feeds them.”

Percy’s derision deepened, and the disapproval on his handsome face was strangely fitting, but it was smoothed out almost as soon as it arrived. Gryff didn’t know what to make of the way Percy wore his alien features.

Dhanmeet said that the silver scales were like those a bird had on its feet, which was why they layered in such a way, but looking at them they looked perfectly smooth. Gryff couldn’t help but wonder, from time to time, what the scales would feel like under his fingers if he reached out and touched them, the same as he wondered about the softness and the texture of Percy’s wings — Cole Jones had said that when Percy bled, his blood was thick and silver as mercury, but Gryff didn’t know if he believed it, didn’t know where Cole would have seen Percy bleed.

Percy always looked very humble and modest — except for how handsome he was and how plainly angelic, he wore modest clothes, held himself as though he were a small and meeker thing than he was, bowed and smiled and didn’t always make eye contact when people addressed him.

When the haughtiness came through, in moments like this, it looked very at home in his features, at home on his face, but he smoothed it away like it was something he was embarrassed to be caught doing.

“You’re a very unromantic man for being a park warden, Mr Gordon,” said Mr Percy. “One would think all this beauty would soften you.”

Gryff scowled at him. “I’m not a hard man, Mr Percy. But when you feed the animals, they get too close — they’ll hurt people, and it’s not the people that feed them that end up getting put down.”

“You saw the elk flee when you drew near,” said Percy. “And I’m not human.”

“Mr Percy — ”

“You don’t bother the fae when they come into these English lands,” said Percy glumly, his lips downturned in a little frown. “And I’ve seen you veer off that you might avoid greeting the People on the paths — that’s rude, you know. They’ve cared for this land since before the last Ice Age and they came from below ground.”

Gryff stared at him for a second. “When have you seen me?” he asked sharply.

Percy crossed his arms over his beige-clad chest, looking off into the distance. “You think of the fae as of this land, wiser than you, that you might not chastise or cajole them — why is it that you do not afford me the same trust?”

“I don’t avoid the fae or the People because I think they’re wise, Mr Percy, I avoid them because I value my head, and I know a fae man is liable to take it off me if I step against it.”

Mr Percy gave him a very cool look at that, and clucked his tongue, making his silver-spitted lip shine under the light. “Six years of service in Llallwg, and you have learned nothing?” he asked.

Gryff had difficulty sometimes with the Ll sound — he knew a little Cymraeg from school, from different magical courses, but his Cymraeg was no better than his Gaelic or his Kernowek, which was to say, it amounted to almost nothing. Mr Percy pronounced it with the sort of airy, beauteous ease he pronounced everything.

“Unromantic and prejudiced too, Mr Gordon,” he said disapprovingly. “Do you not value the wonder in the world before you?”

Gryff opened his mouth, closed it. “Yes, I do, as it happens,” he said. “You think I’ve devoted my whole life to one park after another because I don’t think we should appreciate the beauty in them?”

“How am I supposed to know how long you’ve worked in parks for?” asked Percy, arching his eyebrows.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Gryff in retort. “If you follow me about and keep a watch on my movements, do you think it’s that odd for me to think you eavesdrop, too?”

Percy wrinkled his pretty nose, and began to walk away.

“Don’t feed the animals,” Gryff called after him, and went back to his bike. Mr Percy disappeared into the trees as though he were part of their leaves.

Gryff didn’t even know he’d slipped on the trail until after it had happened. He distantly recalled seeing the pile of nails and screws scattered over the roadway, knew in an instant what had happened — he’d seen the pixies transporting things in cloths held between them when they’d torn before, but ordinarily when they sent things sailing to the floor it was fruits and berries, not bits of sharp metal — but the instant recognition hadn’t given way to instant reflex.

He woke with an aching head, dizzy and confused and lying underneath hand-made quilts on soft, cotton sheets. Mr Percy was sitting beside him, reading a book that Gryff distantly realised as written in Punjabi even though he was struggling to focus on it, and it looked like a romance.

“Mrs Kaur lend you that?” he asked hoarsely, and Mr Percy slipped a marker between the pages and set it aside, leaning forward on the edge of his chair.

“That’s right, Mr Gordon,” he said softly, and reached out, carefully peeling the wet cloth away from his forehead. He looked nervous as he asked, “Feeling a little confused?”

“Mm,” Gryff grunted, looking blearily around.

Mr Percy’s house, from the inside, was carefully finished with white plaster and wood, old-fashioned, with the beams showing. One of the walls had a beautiful mural of a thick wood, and Gryff distantly recognised the style — perhaps even the artist — as matching the one he saw every day in the Visitors’ Centre.

It was a cool summer’s morning, the wetness of the air adding to the chill in it, and a fire crackled to the side of the room, something cooking in the pot hanging from the spit.

It hurt a little when he shifted in bed, and he felt under the blanket for a woven piece of fabric that was very cool to the touch, some sort of enchanted compression the angel had laid on and wrapped around his chest. When he breathed too deeply, it ached, and this was made worse when he pressed carefully against his side.

“Don’t curse like that,” Mr Percy scolded him when he swore out loud, but for all his stern words he looked more concerned than angry. “Your eyes are focusing alright now, at least, but I’m not a physician and have never been one. I need you to show me how to work your radio contraption, Mr Gordon — I can’t carry you, and I don’t want to leave you alone. And I do apologise, but I believe your mobile telephone has seen its last day, as it came quite to pieces. I think I collected them all, though.”

“Give it me,” Gryff mumbled, and Percy placed the walkie in his hand.

Cole Jones said he’d send someone out with a car to pick him up, and asked if he needed to go to the hospital.

Percy reached out to pull the radio closer to him but refused to actually take it — it didn’t seem to strike him as intuitive, even as Gryff pressed his thumb down on the side button, and he leaned in slightly but kept his body far away, as though he thought it would bite him if he got too close.

“He really should see a doctor, Mr Jones,” he said firmly. “It sounded like something cracked when he fell other than his head, and based upon the bruising I think a rib may be broken.”

Cole said they’d drive him straight to the hospital from Percy’s house.

“Thank you,” said Gryff as Percy took the radio from him, holding it by the very tip of the antenna and looking at it with undisguised disgust as he gently laid it on top of Gryff’s clothes and bag. “You saw me fall?”

“It looked painful,” said Percy softly. “You went over a piece of plating the pixies took off one of the rooves, and it sent your bike careening off the hill. I don’t know if you recall, but you actually hit a branch and it took you off it — the bike kept going while you hit the ground. It did look very painful.”

“It sounds painful,” muttered Gryff, hissing quietly as he reached up to push his hair back from his face. “It’s painful now.”

“My bones are lighter than yours, and they break easier, but they heal easier too,” said Percy quietly. “One sees stardust in the bruises on your chest, Mr Gordon.”

“Well, you’re the one who wants me to see more beauty,” said Gryff, and coughed — it was only because his mouth was dry, but it made his chest burst out in blistering agony, and Mr Percy pulled a horrified face as he poured him some tea and brought it to his mouth.

There were animals in the room, Gryff was aware, albeit distantly.

On the ground in the centre of a rug, a doe had its hooves folded under itself, its eyes closed as it dozed in the sun shining in. He’d never seen one up close like this, and he was aware of how long its eyelashes were, how soft its brown coat looked. Lined up on the sills, peeking in under the cracked windows, was a flock of curious sparrows, one or two splashes of colour amongst them showing as finches and tuts, and in a wicker basket beside the fire, two foxes were dozing on top of one another.

“You’re hallucinating,” said Mr Percy half-heartedly.

“Mr Percy,” said Gryff.

“They want to be close to me, Mr Gordon, that’s all — they’re safe here, and I have known every animal in this forest since it was born, and their ancestors for centuries. They like me — I like them.”

“What, you’re Snow White?” asked Gryff, and Mr Percy looked at him curiously, his head tilting to the side.

“I don’t know who that is,” he said.

“From the fairy tale?”

Mr Percy’s blank look turned even blanker.

Gryff leaned back in his seat, looking around the room at the candles on the mantelpiece, and the ones in frames beside the windows and doors. “You didn’t know how to use my radio?”

“Why would I?”

“How old are you again?”

Mr Percy looked at him coldly. “Rude, Mr Gordon,” he said sternly, and once again, his wings had pulled back like the ears of an angry cat. Gryff’s fingers twitched with the want to touch them.

“Sorry,” he said, without much sincerity, and Mr Percy hummed disapprovingly. “Thanks again, for bringing me. You carried me?”

“I employed outside assistance,” said Percy evasively.

“Please don’t tell me forest animals helped carry me in here.”

“Alright, I won’t,” said Mr Percy, and Gryff, helpless, laughed, although it made his bruised ribs ache. “I don’t know your forename, Mr Gordon. What is it?”

Gryff didn’t know if he believed that, but he said, “Gryffin. What about yours?”

Percy blinked long, silver eyelashes. “Mine?” he repeated.

“Everyone calls you Mr Percy — I don’t know your first name.”

“Oh,” said Percy, and he smiled slightly. That pink blush that made the silver scales turn lilac began to bloom in his cheeks again. “No, that’s an affectation you people took on a long time ago, and I felt no need to disabuse you of it. My name is Perseverance-before-God, Mr Gordon.”

Gryff stared up at him, trying to digest that. “Is that an angel name?”

“A Puritan one. Out of fashion, these days.”

“That why you don’t have any electricity?”

“I didn’t need electricity before. What do I need it for now?”

“Heat?”

“I have firewood.”

“Convenience, then. Connection to others.”

“I’m connected,” said Percy. “I send letters, and siblings visit me. Animals.”

“Animals,” Gryff repeated, and as he watched, a third fox snuck into the room, hovering in the doorway as it clapped eyes on Gryff. Looking at him suspiciously, it paused before glancing around the other animals, and then it went to sniff at the wicker basket with the foxes in before hopping up into Percy’s lap instead.

It didn’t push into his hand for pets like a cat might, or demand any sort of attention, and nor did Percy go out of his way to give it any: it curled into a ball and went to sleep, and Percy rested one of his hands on top of his red fur.

“You’ve tamed everything in the forest,” muttered Gryff.

“They’re not any more tame than I am,” said Percy, shaking his head. “I live in a house and farm vegetables, but that doesn’t make me human, Mr Gordon. I’m of this wood, just as they are.”

“I’m not,” said Gryff, trying to keep himself conscious, which was somewhere between impossible — his head felt extremely heavy, his eyelids especially — and ridiculously easy — the pain in his chest made him feel like he’d never be able to sleep again — and looking critically at Percy’s face. “Why help me?”

“But of course you are, Mr Gordon,” said Percy, looking at him with his brow furrowed, his nose wrinkled and his face scrunched up, as though Gryff had said something very strange indeed. “The magpies know your face, you know, when they see you on their rounds, all the corvids do. Every animal here knows the rumble of your bike’s engine. You’re no tourist or wandering thing — you are of this wood.”

“But I don’t do anything with them.”

“You clear away rubbish, help capture injured animals that they might be brought in for veterinary care. You tell the tourists to quieten down when they make too much noise in the campgrounds — you make sure their water sources run, that they are clean, you keep the paths clear. You think all this work, your presence, goes unnoticed?”

Gryff looked at the fox asleep in Percy’s lap, at the deer, the birds, the other foxes. There was a pheasant sleeping beside the deer, he realised, curled in against its side. He heard the snort of a boar close by and wondered if it was inside or outside the house.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Nonsense,” said Percy. “They recognise patterns as well as faces, and they’re more intelligent than you might think. I agree with you, that for humans to go about giving them handfuls of silly little pellets wouldn’t do them any good, but you live alongside them, you know, and they you. You do not need to stroke a creature to coexist with it.”

“But you do,” said Gryff.

“I’m not human,” said Percy again, but he was smiling, sounded like he was in good humour.

He heard the car outside and the animals scattered, disappearing from the windows or rushing out of the door. The fox in Percy’s lap glanced up, lazily opening one eye, and then closed it again, nosing its snout between Percy’s side and the corner of the chair.

“They don’t quite understand what I’m to be scolded for,” explained Percy. “But they know not to be caught, if possible.”

“You weren’t spying on me,” said Gryff slowly as he watched Percy get to his feet, depositing the fox in the basket beside the fire. “They were.”

“Do you think yourself a spy when you see a starling go about its business?” asked Percy sardonically.

When the other wardens came in with a stretcher, Gryff relaxed — he wasn’t certain he needed to be carried, but he was grateful not to have to carry himself. They didn’t even notice the fox sleeping beside the fire.

It was a few weeks later that Gryff was back in the park — he’d only sustained mild fractures to two ribs and nothing more dramatic. The bruising was the worst part, and he wondered if it would be healing forever.

He found Mr Percy in a clearing, asleep against the side of the same elk he’d seen before. He was sitting in the grass with his knees folded up, arms loosely crossed over his chest, and the fae elk’s white fur was so thick that Mr Percy’s cheek sank right into it. In his sleep, his wings were mostly still, but twitched and jumped from time to time.

The elk looked at him warily, and Gryff kept well back, putting up his hands and staying very still.

The elk was gentle about nudging Percy awake, shoving its big muzzle delicately against the top of his red tresses and tugging gently at the hair until Percy stirred. It waited for Percy to sit up, looking sleepily around, before it stood and walked calmly away.

“Out of the infirmary I see, Mr Gordon,” said Percy, yawning against the back of his arm as he pulled himself to feet and looked at Gryff somnolently. “Are you well?”

“Just sore,” said Gryff, and Percy nodded.

Walking up to him, he looked at Gryff expectantly. When Gryff, uncertain, looked right back at him, Percy said, slightly impatiently, “Your arm, Mr Gordon.”

Gryff, baffled, put his hand out, and Percy actually rolled his eyes before taking him by the wrist and turning it back into his body so that his elbow was out. Percy’s hand, smeared and shining under the skin with streaks of showing silver scales, was light where it curled under the inside of his elbow, and when they started to walk, Percy stayed close to him, moulded against his side. Gryff was the same height as Percy, maybe a little shorter, but Percy still leaned his cheek against Gryff’s shoulder.

It was very strange, wasn’t the sort of thing he’d experienced before. There was something nice about it, about the way Percy’s naturally meandering steps kept pace with Gryff’s own.

“I have a confession to make,” said Percy.

“Isn’t that best kept for church?”

Percy laughed softly, sweetly. “I don’t go to church very often,” he admitted. “But that’s not my confession.”

“No?”

“I do feed some of the animals.”

Gryff waited for the catch. “Okay,” he said slowly.

“We trade from time to time, the birds and I, and sometimes pixies and little demons, too. They bring me little pieces they find here and there, normally buttons or shiny pieces of jewellery, and I give them fruit from my garden. I actually think some of the birds have been inspired watching you and Mr Singh exchange pieces of your lunch, because recently they’ve taken to bringing me berries from farther afield, and fae grains and flowers.”

“You’re not the reason the pixies have become fascinated with nails recently, are you?”

Percy wrinkled his nose. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, I do hope not. They do bring me nails sometimes, but not often.”

“God, you’re weird.”

Percy pinched the inside of his arm. “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Mr Gordon.” They walked for a little while longer, in silence from there, and then he asked, “Do you really think so?” He sounded, to Gryff’s surprise, quite hurt.

“Think what?” asked Gryff.

“That I’m very weird?”

“I, no,” said Gryff. “Perseverance. I just, I mean, I… You surprise me, that’s all.”

“You’re not working?”

“You can tell?”

“No radio contraption.”

“Ha. No, I just, um. I wanted a walk. Fresh air.”

“You’ll join me for lunch, then?” asked Percy. “Mr Singh and Mrs Kaur will be joining me for a sit-down in a few hours, but we’ve time first for a meal, some conversation. Perhaps something more.”

“What a bold suggestion, Mr Percy,” said Gryff.

“Is it so bold?” asked Mr Percy.

“Maybe not,” said Gryff. “Yes. Yeah. I mean… Please.”

“Please,” Percy repeated, and he laughed a merry, breathless laugh. When he went quiet again, the smile lingered on his face, his gaze focused on the path ahead of them.

Gryff smiled himself and then realised, only now, that there was a field mouse in the breast pocket of Percy’s shirt, fast asleep.

He tried to stop smiling, tried to look stern, and didn’t manage either.

Beside him, Percy’s own smile widened.

FIN.