The Children's Crusade

by Carla Jablonski

  The Shimmers are pretty, Daniel supposed. But he didn’t really understand why Marya spent so much time with them. They were hardly even real. You can practically see through them. Marya is far prettier than any of that lot. But girls like shiny little things, and the Shimmers were certainly that.

  He finally spotted her in the distance, sitting on an overturned rowboat. She was a little slip of a thing, really, and just about his age—thirteen—with beautiful long red hair that curled and danced in the breeze. Her skin was pale white, like those dolls that have glass heads, and her eyes were the most sparkly green. Greener even than the greenest grass of Free Country—and that was the greenest Daniel had ever seen. There hadn’t been too much green in Daniel’s world. In fact, where Daniel had come from, there was very little that wasn’t covered with soot and grime.

  Marya was so clean. He liked that, too.

  Daniel ducked his hand into the river and gave his face a scrub. He ran his wet hand through his blond hair, hoping it wasn’t too much of a mess. Kerwyn did sometimes scold him for being so untidy. Usually Daniel felt like clocking Kerwyn for that. But sometimes he thought perhaps Kerwyn was just trying to help him along a bit. To fit in, like. Make a good impression.

  Daniel poled up into the tall grasses of the riverbank. Without his asking, the grass parted for him, so that he could maneuver the raft into place. The long green fronds knew he was in a hurry. Free Country was like that sometimes. You just wanted something and before you’d really realized that you’d made a wish, Free Country gave it to you. It didn’t always happen that way, though. Daniel wished and wished for Marya to kiss him and she never did. Not even once. He was still puzzling over why Free Country gave him some things but not what he wanted most.

  He leaped onto the bank and hurried toward Marya.

  “Marya,” he called. “I’m back!” He wondered if she had missed him. Maybe he’d impress her with how many of the little kiddies he had brought back.

  “I’ve done it!” he boasted as he made his way to her through the long grass. “We reeled in the lot of ’em.”

  He clambered onto the overturned boat that Marya sat on and sprawled beside her. “You ought to see the world they’s from,” he told her. “They got these boxes they string to their ears that makes music and games like you never seen.”

  Marya nodded a little, and she gave a small smile so Daniel knew she had noticed he was there. That was a start, at least.

  “There’ll be more of ’em scarping over any time now,” he continued. “Kerwyn’ll be picking missionaries for the last crossing soon as he gets the new ones tucked away.”

  “That’s good,” Marya murmured.

  Daniel laughed. “You don’t give a fig, do you? Not really.”

  Now Marya gave a real smile, even though she still didn’t look at him. “No,” she answered. “I don’t.”

  Daniel tore his eyes away from Marya’s pretty face and followed her gaze. The Shimmers were putting on a splendid show.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what they were. They looked like little cherubs, only they weren’t chubby. They were silvery and pink and glowing, and the air around wherever they were glowed, too. They didn’t touch the ground but floated above the river, dancing. They were always dancing. Daniel had to admit they were very impressive—all fluttery and floaty like that. Marya always said they were the most delicate, graceful dancers she’d ever seen. Daniel had never seen any other dancers so he took her word for it.

  He stood up and dug his bare toes into the soft wet riverbank. “I don’t care about that stuff, neither,” he told Marya. “It was fun, being picked for the mission and all, but after that…”

  He glanced over his shoulder. He was going to tell Marya something he had never said out loud to anyone. “It weren’t so bad over there, you know. Not so bad as Kerwyn says. The air weren’t that bad. It was a sight better than where I came from. The water, too.” He thrust out his bottom lip as he thought about things. “And only a few of the little ’uns looked like they was getting the stick at all regular.” He shook his head. “That Kerwyn. He’s such a jerk.”

  Marya didn’t respond—not even to this bold statement. She just stared at the Shimmers. He’d never get her attention with them about. He would have tried running them off, but this was their spot. He figured they’d never go.

  He sighed and flopped back down onto the rowboat. Maybe if he tried harder to care about the Shimmers, he’d be able to spend more time with Marya. He sat silently beside her, watching the fancy creatures dance their fancy patterns. They were kind of mesmerizing. Still, Marya outshone even their glowing presence.

  “You ever try dancing with ’em?” he asked.

  Marya finally gazed straight at Daniel. It made his heart feel all gooshy. “Dance with them?” she repeated. “How could I? Look at them.”

  He watched them for a few more seconds. Marya could do anything, he was sure of it. Why didn’t she see that?

  “Oh, just you wait,” he assured her. “You’re bound to catch on sooner or later. Besides, they’ve been here a long time. A real long time.”

  Marya’s shoulders slumped. “So have I,” she mumbled. “Only I never grow up. I just stay the same.”

  “Who’d want to grow up?” Daniel said. “Not me!”

  Marya stared down at her feet. Her long hair covered her face, but Daniel could tell that she’d gone all quiet inside again.

  Now you’ve gone and done it, Daniel scolded himself. He forgot that Marya wasn’t always happy to be in Free Country. And that she’d probably been trying to dance like the Shimmers as long as she’d been here. “Snaffle me, Marya. I’m sorry.” Do something, he told himself. Make it better.

  He sat back up and felt the weight in his inside coat pocket. Perfect! “Never mind that,” he said, pulling out the ballerina statue. “Look, I brought you something.” He handed Marya the dancing girl. She stared down at it, her green eyes wide.

  His stomach felt suddenly sick. She was supposed to smile when he gave her the doll. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “I thought you’d like it. You’re always thinking about the old palace days and learning to be a ballerina and all.”

  “I do like it. I do,” Marya told him.

  Girls are funny, Daniel thought. Marya’s lips are smiling, but her eyes are still sad.

  “She’s beautiful. I promise I like it,” Marya assured him. As if to prove it, she kissed the statue’s head and looked up at Daniel.

  Daniel wished she had kissed him instead. It made him want to smash the stupid statue. He shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets.

  She still didn’t seem ready to leave the Shimmers, so he lay back down beside her. At least now, though, she was looking at the statue he’d given her instead of at the shining dancers above the pool.

  “Tell me what it was like,” Daniel asked her, “in that Petersburg place of yours.”

  “I’ve told you a dozen times,” Marya protested.

  “But I like hearing the telling,” he said. What he truly liked was the excuse to stay close to Marya. He liked having her tell him stories about her life.

  Marya gave a little smile and lay the statue across her lap. “Once, long, long ago, my mother belonged to the Empress.”

  “Belonged?” Daniel repeated. Marya had never started the story quite like that before—never used the word “belonged.” “Like that statue I just gave you belongs to you?”

  “Yes, exactly like that.”

  “I wouldn’t want to belong to nobody!” Daniel said.

  “It didn’t seem strange at the time,” Marya said. “It was just the way it was. And Mama got to wear pretty dresses, and I did, too, and eat well and live in the palace year-round.”

  “That part would have been all right.” Daniel had spent most of his thirteen years sweating by the coal furnaces of the factory or freezing while scrounging for food or shelter.

  “Yes,” Marya said in her soft voice. “But Mama had to do whatever the Em
press wanted. They all did. So when the Empress went to France one day and saw people dance a way she liked, she came back and told all her servants to bring her their girl children.”

  “No boys?” Daniel always asked that question in the same spot in the story.

  Marya smiled. “No boys. My mother had to make me go. I didn’t want to. The Empress scared me.”

  “She scares me, too.” Daniel shivered.

  “The Empress looked at all the girls and she picked the prettiest ones.”

  “So of course she picked you!” Daniel always said this, too.

  Marya stood and pointed at Daniel. “You are going to dance for me!” she said in a highfalutin, bossy tone.

  She jumped off the boat and sat cross-legged on the grass. Daniel flopped down and stretched out beside her. The Free Country grass came together under him to form a pillow.

  “If the Empress picked you, you couldn’t be with your family very much,” Marya continued. “You spent too much time practicing ways to stand and move. If you didn’t catch on, they’d hit your legs with a stick. They gave you shoes that had wood on the toes. The dancing shoes made your feet bleed.”

  “It weren’t right!” Daniel was furious at Marya’s mistreatment. He hated the shoes that crushed her toes and made them bleed, the dancing master who beat the students. “I’d ’uv flung those biting shoes straight at that dancing fool’s head!”

  “But I wanted to dance!” Marya exclaimed. “It wasn’t all bad. There was something in the dance that was good—like a promise.”

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her slim pale arms around them. Her eyes looked dreamy. “Sometimes you’d feel like you could soar away from everything—just glide, free, if only you knew how.” She tilted her head and looked at Daniel. It made him turn shy—her gaze was so direct for once. “I thought it might make a difference if I took off the shoes. And it did. A little bit. But not enough. It wasn’t the shoes that held me down. It was that I had never learned how to fly. No one else knew either. No one could show me how.”

  Daniel’s eyes went to the Shimmers. He was finally understanding why Marya was always here. “The Shimmers fly, don’t they?” he asked. “They know.”

  “Yes, they do. But I don’t think they can teach me. It’s their own dance.” She faced the Shimmers again. “I think everyone must have to find her own dance.”

  She had never said so much before. Daniel reached over and gripped her hands. “What do you think your dance would be?”

  He must have grabbed her small, cool hands too tightly, because she winced. He instantly released her soft fingers.

  Daniel stared at the dirt, ashamed. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

  “I know,” Marya replied.

  They sat quietly for a few minutes. He couldn’t help her, and it made him sad and a little bit angry.

  “Did you say that Kerwyn will be choosing the next missionary?” Marya asked.

  “Any time now,” Daniel said. Was she hoping that he would go, go away? She wanted to be rid of him, didn’t she? He couldn’t bear to look at her in case that was what she was thinking.

  Marya stood, clutching the statue. “Thank you for the dance,” she said to the Shimmers. “And for my present,” she said to Daniel. And then she ran off, leaving him alone.

  Chapter Three

  TIM STARED, TRYING to grasp the implications of what he was seeing.

  Titania stood there, clear as day, on the sidewalk in a run-down section of London. She looked wildly out of place—her pale green skin was only one of the attributes that made her stand out.

  For another thing, she was spectacularly beautiful. Even her weird green skin didn’t detract from her beauty. Tim could not have said exactly what it was that made her more beautiful than anyone he’d ever seen. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she was filled with magic.

  Her long hair was dark green, and today it was woven through with tiny flowers. She wore a flowing silver gown that shimmered whenever she moved. Her long sleeves were pale, transparent blue—the color of twilight. She had large, almond-shaped eyes that changed color with her mood. They were a deep purple now, and Tim felt their furious glare as if she were actually touching him. He took several steps backward.

  “How dare you?” she shrieked. “You terrible, foolish child.”

  Tim clenched his jaw. “How dare I what? Risk my life to save your world? I suppose a thank-you is too much to ask for.”

  Titania took a step toward him and Tim forced himself to stay put. He felt a cold draft emanating from her and he shivered.

  “You are insolent,” she growled. “No one speaks to me in that manner.”

  Tim’s brown eyes never wavered from hers. After all, what he had said was true: He had saved Faerie and it had cost him plenty. She ought to be thanking him, not shouting at him. But he had discovered that adults didn’t always behave in any normal or rational way.

  Titania made a slow circle around Tim, as if she were studying a specimen. Tim took the opportunity to glance around. No one on the street seemed to have noticed her. Do they think I’m speaking to myself? he wondered. Or has she cloaked us both in some invisibility spell? She could probably do something like that easily enough.

  Titania stopped in front of him again. “It was not only love he spurned for your sake but life as well. You have been the death of your father.”

  Tim’s head snapped back as if she had struck him. The words stung. “Don’t you think I know that?” he shouted. “I live with that every minute of the day.”

  A nasty smile spread across Titania’s face. “Well, at least you suffer,” she said.

  “Did you ever think maybe he sacrificed himself so he wouldn’t have to be trapped in a world with you any longer?” Tim retorted.

  Now Titania looked wounded, as if Tim’s words had the prick of truth in them. She quickly recovered. “You do your father no honor, changeling,” she spat at him. “Had you an ounce of skill, you would not have needed such a sacrifice from him. You walked blindly into that lair. You know nothing, and your ignorance is your curse. You are not just a fool, you are dangerous.”

  Tim was not going to let this horrid woman get the best of him. “Are you quite finished yelling at me? I really have to be going now.”

  “Go where you will, Timothy Hunter,” Titania said, her voice nearly a growl. “Prowl these gray and dingy streets or sink all the way to Hell. But go knowing what you are: a cursed fool.”

  Fury and pain made Timothy brave—or at least bold. “Oh, I know what I am all right, your royal bitchiness,” he declared. He jerked a thumb toward himself. “I’m the fool that saved you and your world—and lost a father for my troubles. You would be dead without me. You owe me. Live with that!”

  Without a backward glance, Tim spun around and left the Queen of Faerie standing on the London sidewalk. He forced himself not to look back, to keep moving forward, to move as if he had some idea of where he might be going. He didn’t even care if she followed him, or sent gremlins on his trail or whatever the Queen of Faerie might do when raving. He didn’t care about anything at all. She was right about one thing: His father was dead—and it was all his fault.

  He found himself in a familiar location—the cemetery.

  Everything had gotten so confusing after his mother died; everything had changed. He missed his mum so much, but he never felt like he had anyplace to express it. He was always worried about his dad’s—Mr. Hunter’s—feelings. Mr. Hunter already blamed himself for Tim’s mother’s death, for not being the one to die. He was completely adrift without her. How could Tim add his own loss to that? So Tim had hidden his hurt and kept things to himself.

  Tim took the familiar winding path until he came to his mother’s grave. He sank down beside the gravestone and leaned his head against it, feeling its hard coolness.

  Tim noticed scrawny little weeds poking skinny shoots up out of the dirt covering his mum’s grave. “What are these?” he
muttered. He reached to pluck the pathetic-looking things. Then his hand froze as he remembered.

  When Tim had been dying in Faerie, he had been whisked out of his body by a pretty young woman who just happened to be the incarnation of Death. They had a long talk, and when Tim woke up back inside his body, he had found a packet of seeds in his pocket. A packet he had seen Death find in her messy apartment. When Tim returned to his own world, he had visited his mum’s grave and planted the seeds.

  The infant plants didn’t look like much, but Tim knew that appearances could be deceiving. Besides, he figured seeds given to him by Death herself must be pretty important. She’d gone through a lot of trouble to find them. It would probably be a bad idea to pull them up. Better to wait and see what they turned out to be.

  Tim stood up stiffly. Sometimes he felt better after visiting his mum’s grave. Not today, though. Today, he felt weighed down by Titania’s words. He had tried to drown them out, but they hit too close to home. He had caused Tamlin’s death, and there was no way he could argue himself out of that one. And she was right about his ignorance—it made him dangerous. But then why didn’t anyone teach him anything? It made no sense that the Trenchcoat Brigade would dump this ability into his lap without an instruction manual.

  No, nothing made sense to Tim. Least of all the adults who seemed to be bent on ripping his reality to shreds.

  Chapter Four

  MARYA CRADLED THE BALLERINA statue in her arms as she hurried to her tent. The conversation with Daniel had unsettled her.

  He needs so much, she thought. She felt bad but she knew his need was a bottomless pit, and nothing she said or did could ever fill it.

  There was something else, too. She felt she had finally hit upon a truth when she talked to him about the Shimmers. They couldn’t teach her what she needed to know. Only she could discover how to dance in the way she wanted to.