Free Tigerheart by Peter David

“That…bounder!”
    “Yes.”
    “The heartless cad!”
    “He is rather,” Fiddlefix said carelessly, as if the matter were of little consequence to her rather than the greatest thing in the world. “And this is the person you seek?”
    Paul explained to her as quickly as he could what his intentions were. Fiddlefix listened, nodding thoughtfully. “It’s possible,” she said at last. “I haven’t been in the Anyplace for a while. I’ve no idea of the lay of the land. But perhaps there are young lost girls now who would serve your purpose. For that matter, perhaps there’s a mother Indian who would not miss her papoose if it disappeared.”
    “I would think she would,” Paul said uncertainly.
    “Hard to say. Mothers are difficult to predict.”
    Paul pictured the lady his mother had been and the one she’d become. “That’s true,” he had to agree.
    “The Boy had a very low opinion of mothers,” Fiddle said, “except when he was busy trying to pretend the Gwenny was his mother. He wasn’t happy unless he was either pretending or making himself miserable, and he never knew what he wanted. Except me. He didn’t want me,” she added in that same tragic tone that simply ripped at Paul’s heartstrings.
    “What’s to be done, then?” Paul said. “How am I to seek the help of someone who can treat another so badly?”
    If Paul had been older or wiser or a bit cannier in the ways of pixies in general and Fiddlefix in particular, he might have perceived the scheming in her voice. For Fiddlefix was nothing if not a conniver. She didn’t do it maliciously. It was just the way she was. “You can go to the Anyplace and avenge me against The Boy,” she said with growing excitement.
    Paul gasped at the very notion, and even glanced around to make sure that no one was listening. “Me?” he said. “Go up against The Boy? But…I couldn’t!”
    “If you haven’t, then how do you know you couldn’t?” Fiddle said reasonably.
    “And—The Boy? He killed Captain Hack!”
    “He did no such thing,” Fiddlefix said. “Hack threw himself to the serpent that had pursued him all those long years, after The Boy fed him Hack’s right arm. Perhaps The Boy might have defeated him, perhaps not. I can help you, though.”
    “But I have no experience in adventures. Not real adventures. Adventures when I’m sleeping, yes, but this…”
    “I will aid you,” said Fiddlefix. “We will have the element of surprise. Why, I’d wager my wings that The Boy doesn’t even remember me anymore.”
    “I would never forget you,” he said with full passion.
    “A bargain, then,” said Fiddlefix, twinkling with glee. “Come with me to the Anyplace. Aid me against The Boy. And I shall find you a new sister to set things right and restore your mother to you—presuming, after spending time in the Anyplace, you have any interest in having her back.”
    Paul felt no end of trepidation over the notion, but Fiddlefix was looking at him expectantly, and he felt caught up in forces that were beyond his ability to control. Which is, when one thinks about it, not unlike the first true steps to adulthood. But Paul didn’t see it that way. All he knew was that pleasing the females in his life had suddenly become the most important thing of all. One of those females was a mother who had been there all his life but had emotionally abandoned him, and the other was a female who had been in his life for less than half an hour and made him feel like the most important boy in the world.
    “I am yours,” he said to her.
    Fiddlefix chimed with joy, so loudly, so purely, that Colleen Dear, sitting downstairs in the study—the cobbled-together leftovers now serving as her dinner growing cold on the table—heard it. She had no idea what it was, but despite appearances, she knew one thing it was not: a bell. She responded to it in a primal manner that she would not have thought herself still capable of possessing. She ran up the stairs,