Free Live and Let Drood by Simon R. Green Page B

day, or until they wore out.
    They formed circles and then rows around us, filling the copse of trees. They wore battered clothes from many periods of history. Dead but not departed, because my family wouldn’t let them go. Just enough life left in them to torment them. Because no one threatens us where we live and gets away with it.
    Molly moved in close beside me. She remembered the scarecrows now.
    My family makes scarecrows out of the bodies of our most hated enemies. Because we can, and because we believe in making the punishment fit the crime. Their faces are weather-beaten skin, stretched taut as parchment and just as brittle, cracked here and there by exposure to the elements. Thick tufts of straw protrude from their ears and mouths, but we leave their eyes. So we can see their suffering. Our enemies may hate us, but my family hates harder and longer. If you listen in on the right supernatural frequency, you can hear the scarecrows screaming.
    “I thought we destroyed them…” said Molly. Her voice was little more than a whisper.
    “They can’t be destroyed,” I said. “That’s the point. Tear them to pieces, burn them up; they just come back again. For as long as they’re needed. They’ll endure for as long as their scarecrow bodies last, and my family makes them well, to last centuries.”
    “Where are they?” said Molly. “When they aren’t here?”
    “Close by,” I said. “Hanging on their scarecrow crosses, waiting to be called. Don’t look at me like that, Molly. These are my family’s worst and most vicious enemies. They deserve this.…”
    “Do they? What about him?”
    She stabbed a hand shaking with emotion at one of the more recent scarecrows. The straw-stuffed thing we’d made out of the Blue Fairy’s body.
    Half elf, half Druid, we took him in and made him part of the family. Even though we knew what he was and what he’d done in the past. I vouched for him. And then we went to war together, against the Loathly Ones, and he struck down a Drood in the middle of battle, from behind, and stole his torc. I trusted him, and he betrayed me. I forgave him eventually. Just before he died in the great spy game of the Independent Agent, Alexander King.
    “He isn’t in there,” I said to Molly. “He was already dead when I sent him back to the Hall. That’s just his body.”
    “But why is he here? He was your friend! How could you allow your family to make him over into…that?”
    “Because he stole a torc,” I said steadily. “There is no greater crime against the Droods. Punishment, like justice, must be seen to be done. The scarecrows aren’t just our defenders; they’re a warning to our enemies.”
    “He was your friend,” Molly said coldly.
    “I wouldn’t have brought him back alive,” I said. “But there are many kinds of duty and responsibility when you’re a Drood. Why do you think I ran away first chance I got?”
    “Sometimes your family frightens me,” said Molly.
    “Sometimes they frighten me,” I said. “But we frighten our enemies more.”
    I turned slowly round in a circle, looking the scarecrows over carefully. More and more of them were still blinking into existence, answering my call. Dozens and dozens of them, maybe hundreds…I hadn’t realised there were so many. All of them standing unnaturally still, waiting for orders. Watching me with the eyes my family left them, hating and suffering and…Apparently there was a limit to what the Alpha Red Alpha field could affect. Or maybe they just weren’t alive enough. At least now I could make sure the Hall and grounds would be protected while I was gone.
    “Eddie,” said Molly. “I have seen and done bad things in my time, but never anything as cold-blooded as this. Enemies forced into half-life, denied the release of death, held as slaves…until they wear out…This isn’t right, Eddie.”
    “No, it isn’t,” I said. “But it’s necessary. There has to be someone here to fight for the Hall