brush of his hand and the pieces of it fell to the ground. He expected that girl—he had no way of knowing which it was, since they weren’t good enough yet to put their face on the clants they made—to drop her outself back to the ground and form the clant again, so he didn’t wait around to see. Instead he gripped the tee-shirt in his teeth and began to climb the nearest branchy tree.
No one climbed trees better than Danny, and this time he moved so fast it seemed to him that he was flying, just tapping the branches with his hands and feet. Meanwhile the fairies in the bag kept trying to jump and spin so they could shed their clants and return to their bodies, but they didn’t have the strength to do much more than jostle the bag a little.
At a high branch, Danny stopped climbing, took the tee-shirt out of his mouth, and tied it so tightly to a slender branch that there was hardly room for the clants to move at all. Then he let himself back down the tree, taking much longer jumps downward than he had managed on the way up. When he reached the bottom, the third girl’s clant was nowhere to be seen.
So Danny walked back to the house, to tell Uncle Poot what he had done.
But it was Great-Uncle Zog and Grandpa Gyish who intercepted him on the path, and they gave him no chance at all to explain that he was only teaching the girls a lesson.
“Where are they!” screamed Grandpa Gyish.
“What kind of drekka bags a child!” Great-Uncle Zog bellowed at him. “I’ll have you up the hill for this, you fairy-thief, you child-abuser!” And then he was shaking Danny so hard that he was afraid his head would come clear off. Years of flying with the eagles had caused old Zog’s arms and shoulders to bulk up and he had so much strength that he could break a big man’s neck with a swipe of his hand—he’d done it more than once in the wars. So it was a relief when Auntie Uck and Auntie Tweng showed up and clung to both Zog’s arms, dragging him away from Danny.
As it was, Zog didn’t let go—the Aunts dragged him, but he dragged Danny, his grip like a talon on Danny’s shoulder. He staggered to keep his feet under him so that he didn’t have his full weight dangling from Zog’s massive grip. Who would have thought an old man could be so strong?
A few minutes later, the adults who were in the compound had gathered, and Danny found himself in the midst of something like a trial—but without the legal forms they saw in the TV shows. There was Danny and there was his accuser, Crista, the oldest of the girls, and there was Gyish, presiding like a judge in Baba’s absence, with Zog as the prosecutor.
But that’s where the resemblance to a fair trial left off, for there was no one to speak in Danny’s defense. Not even Danny—whenever he tried to speak Zog slapped him or Gyish shouted him into silence. So the only story anyone could hear was Crista’s.
“We were trying so hard to make our clants big,” she said, “that we didn’t even see that Danny was sneaking up on us with a giant sack. He caught all three of us but I just barely managed to get out before he sealed the neck of it with Tina and Mona inside. And then he broke my clant in pieces and before I could put myself together he was gone, up in the sky.”
“He flew?” demanded Gyish.
“Yes!” cried Crista. “He flew away and dropped the bag outside the compound and now we’ll never get them back!”
It took a moment before she realized that she had pushed too hard. For the adults were all shaking their heads and some were laughing derisively.
“Danny? Fly?” said Uncle Poot. “If only he could.”
“You can see that Crista’s lying,” said Uncle Mook. “Maybe everything she said’s a lie.”
“It’s not a lie!” shouted Gyish—he had made no pretense of impartiality. “I saw the poor girls’ bodies lying helpless in the house! Children so young don’t have the strength to bring their outselves back when their clant is captured! Nor the skill to wake up their own bodies when their outselves are clanting! They might never wake up!”
“Let’s hear from Danny,” said Aunt Lummy mildly.
Zog turned on her savagely. “A drekka