by Shelby Bach
est changed before he let me introduce him through the magic mirror. Not just into another outfit, but into a whole new body. The surfer was replaced with a tall slender man, clad in a pin-striped suit, pink shirt, and silver tie. He looked very distinguished, especially with the gray hair.
My jaw hit the floor, along with Ben’s and Darcy’s. Even Mia’s eyebrows rose. Chase explained that West wasn’t a person so much as a personification. He could pretty much change his appearance at will.
“The only limitation is that East and I have to be opposites. He probably looks like a young tobacco farmer right now,” West said, straightening his tie. “Okay, I’m ready.”
On the magic mirror Lena was extremely flattered when she realized who the dapper old man was. He wanted advice. Apparently, the ring I had used to smash through his prison was his first successful invention in two and a half millennia. He told her all about his many experiments-turned-explosions as he led us questers outside, grew eighty feet tall, stuck us into his suit pocket and rose into the air, flying low over the trees. West’s voice boomed so loudly the pocket shook with every word—that made it impossible to figure out what he was saying as the forest slid by in a blur of green below us.
Chase leaned so far out of the pocket that I thought, kind of panicked, he might fall out. “When we’re around the Fey, it’s better if you guys don’t speak. Not at all. Not even English. Half the Fey understand it. You won’t know what’ll tick them off.”
Ben didn’t look like he minded, and Mia was still too dazed to offer an opinion, but Darcy said, “Why? We’re not at the Unseelie Court yet.”
“We might as well be. A lot of Fey will be on their way to it. The last station on the southern line is about a half morning’s flight to the court.” Chase probably knew from experience. The thought would have weirded me out much more if West hadn’t just swooped upward over an extra-tall tree.
“So you expect us to just sit there for the whole ride?” Darcy scowled, obviously not going to take part in any plan where she couldn’t talk all day.
“No, just at the station and during boarding. We won’t sit with them, but it could seriously suck if you insulted a Fey at the platform,” Chase explained. “They view us as playthings, especially us Characters. They’ve been better since the war, but it’ll be a miracle if we make it out of there.”
I rolled my eyes. Clearly, Chase was trying to spook Darcy into shutting up.
“No, Rory—I’m serious. Going to the Unseelie Court will probably be the most dangerous part of the quest,” Chase said, like he knew what I was thinking. “They might turn you into a statue. They might steal your voice, or scar your face. They might kill you outright, or they might set you an impossible task and then execute you when you Fail. You know the phrase ‘like trying to find a needle in a haystack’? It came from the Unseelie Court. It was King Klarion’s favorite task for humans who accidentally wandered through a portal. One hundred fifty-seven mortals died in the fifteenth century because they couldn’t find a needle in a haystack.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Chase so serious. Even during Lena’s Tale, surrounded by man-eating giants, he hadn’t talked like this. Atlantis had knocked all the wisecracks straight out of him.
Then the West Wind swooped down toward an empty clearing. My churning stomach forced all thoughts out of my head except the fact that I couldn’t vomit in the pocket of an eighty-foot personification.
Darcy scooted as far away from me as the fabric would let her go, whispering, “You’re not gonna hurl, are you? God, how did you manage the beanstalk?”
But when West touched down, she helped me out of the pocket and watched with concern while I had some quality bonding time with solid ground.
I couldn’t see any sort of platform or ticket counter, but we weren’t the only group waiting. When West landed, the other passengers all reacted in different ways: A small army of dwarves with silver chains braided into their beards turned their backs to us. A few witches did that cheer-squawk thing—this version sounded angry. Some goblins adjusted greasy wigs over their triangular ears and clanged the manacles that chained them together, looking hopefully over at West, but their jailer—a smallish Fey with slate-colored wings and armor to match—snapped at them.
West shrank down to a more manageable twenty feet and strolled over to the trees to finish talking with Lena. I wondered if we should stick close to him, if those witches might attack us when his back was turned.
Somewhere to our right, metal clanged on metal—Ben, Darcy, and I jumped about a mile. I thought for a second that an actual fight had broken out among the passengers, but then I spotted them. Small figures leaped together, clashed swords, and sprang apart with an aerial sort of grace that reminded me of circus performers on silk ropes—impossible-looking tumbles and soaring sorts of spins.
Others stood in a circle around them, waiting for their turn. I saw delicate white wings, and ones that were grayish and stumpy like a moth’s, and others as bright and intricate as stained glass. Fey kids. I’d never seen any, unless you counted Chase.
“Sword class,” Chase said before we could ask. “A field trip so the students get experience fighting on a bunch of different terrains.”
No wonder Chase always looked so good when he fought. He’d probably had way more years of practice, just like these two duelers.
One stumbled away, straightening quickly before he fell over on his little fairy behind. The fight paused. I wasn’t sure why. It didn’t look like the Fey kid was hurt.
Someone moved in the shadows, a full-grown fairy with slender light-green wings. He held something that looked suspiciously like a wand.
“Don’t do anything, Rory. It won’t help them,” Chase hissed. I stiffened.
The Fey child waited with wide eyes, his slender tangerine-colored wings fluttering nervously, watching the grown-up Fey approach. The Fey instructor just kind of lightly slapped the kid on the shoulder with the stick. But the fairy child screamed, so full of agony that Ben sprang back and almost knocked Mia over.
“The Iron Hemlock method,” Chase said quietly, as the tangerine-winged kid trudged to the back of the class, his hand pressed to his shoulder like it still burned. “Same concept as the one behind invisible fencing for dogs. One jolt of pain to make sure you don’t make the same mistake twice.”
“But he didn’t make a mistake. He didn’t even fall down,” Ben said, hushed.
“No talking,” Chase said, with a significant look at the Fey jailer twenty feet away. “And the mistake was stumbling. Perfect form is important to the Fey.”
He said this like it didn’t matter—but this was how Chase had learned to fight.
He wasn’t a good fighter because he wanted to be. He fought like the perfect Fey soldier because someone had electrocuted him if he tripped. And his mom asked him to go back there?
Horror washed over me.
They were so young. They looked like they could be in kindergarten. That one there, he was even sucking his thumb, clutching the sword to his chest as tightly as some kids held security blankets.
I took a step toward him, to do . . . something, but Chase shook his head.
Right. The quest had to come first.
Chase pointed behind me. “Train’s coming.”
I spun around, looking for the train tracks. I wanted to make sure they didn’t leave the ground.
They did.
A vine as thick and leafy as Lena’s beanstalk twined through the tree canopy, then stepped down through the branches and slid across the forest floor before climbing up again. West noticed and ambled back over to us. The actual train chugged in a minute later.
“Pumpkins? We’re traveling by pumpkin?” Ben said, shocked.
A chain of them traveled along the vine like the monorail at Disney World—the one in front as white as a cauliflower, the one behind it a very pale yellow, and each one after it a little darker, until the sixth and final pumpkin—the ca
boose—which was such a vibrant shade of orange it seemed to glow in the trees.
“Oh! Is that the Fey railway? Let me see!” Lena cried from the mirror. Amused, West turned the M3 around so she could watch its approach.
“The Pumpkin line! It travels from north to south. The Apple line travels from east to west, and the Leaf line travels intercontinentally,” she explained, as the pumpkins bumped down the branches to the forest floor.
As they slowed to a stop, you could see that these were hollowed out. If a luxury passenger train dressed up like a very artistic jack-o’-lantern for Halloween, it would look like this.
Lena happily told us that all of the human inventors of trains and railroads had been Characters. The Fey hadn’t been very happy when humans had stolen their idea.
One Fey with turquoise wings, a uniform made of peacock feathers, and a snooty expression flew out to meet us, clipboard in hand, but most of the fairies sat in the first and second cars, still as statues in thronelike chairs. Long, slender branches fell from the scalp of the nearest Fey, almost covering the whole body underneath, even her wings.
The peacock fairy waved the Fey kids and their teacher on, and they all flitted up to the second car’s roof with a flutter of multicolored wings.
“What—” I started, as the teacher paired up a copper-skinned Fey kid with a moth-winged one.
Chase silenced me with a glare. “They’re going to practice fighting on a moving surface.”
The Fey jailer stepped up next and pointed at the miserable-looking goblins. “Tithe evaders. Bound for the Muirland work camps.”
I heard something behind the words—almost like an echo, but with a different rhythm. I didn’t realize that Lena’s gumdrop was translating for me until Darcy asked, “What did he say?”
“Shut it, Darcy,” Chase hissed, and both the peacock conductor and the jailer scowled at us.
“Third car.” The peacock fairy made a note on her clipboard, and after the Fey jailer and his prisoners left, she could no longer ignore the twenty-foot-tall personification looming over her. “Yes?”
“Full passage for five,” said West. The peacock fairy narrowed her eyes, but if she was going to argue, she changed her mind the second West paid our fares with a sack of gold as big as Chase’s head.
“I’ll need their full names,” said the peacock fairy.
My heart sank. Names have power. It’s not a good idea to just say them out loud in public, but even worse, telling people my name usually drew stares and whispers. I braced myself for the blush that always came from being the center of attention.
It didn’t come.
“Chase Turnleaf,” said my best friend, and half the Fey in the first two pumpkins turned to stare.
Even the conductor’s gaze snapped to his face. “Second-to-last car.”
Normally, Chase would eat this attention up. He’d grin the smile that took up half his face and wave at all the people watching him.
Chase just walked down the line of pumpkins, face blank. He didn’t seem to notice when a cat-eyed fairy hissed at him from the second car. He didn’t even flinch when pixies swarmed around his head, close enough to stir his hair, as menacing as wasps, before darting back inside to watch.
We mere humans drew closer to each other. So much closer that someone stepped on the back of my heel.
Ben and Darcy exchanged a glance that clearly said, Is that going to happen to us?
West didn’t pay any attention to how unpopular we were. He just put the M3 in my hand. “Take care, Rory. Good luck on your quest, Ben.”
Then Ben took a deep steadying breath and stepped up to the conductor. “Benjamin McCrory Taylor.”
“Aurora Landon,” I whispered, right after him, and the peacock fairy barely batted an eye as she wrote it down.
I rushed past the pumpkins to catch up with Chase—the dwarves tugged their long beards at me angrily—and stomped up the steps to the second-to-last car.
“Characters,” spat a green-skinned witch inside near the front. She and the other three green-skinned witches sitting beside her had the same stiff, matted gray hair, even the smallest one, who was bigger than the Fey children battling on the roof.
“Can’t stand the smell of Ever Afters,” snarled a squat, square-faced imp. Suddenly, I seriously doubted that this was a good idea.
But the train lurched forward. Out the window, West had grown eighty feet tall again to wave us good-bye.
“I can’t believe you get to ride the Fey railway.” Even through the M3, the jealousy was obvious in Lena’s voice, as we followed Chase to seats in the middle of the pumpkin car, between the witches and the army of beard-pulling dwarves. “It’s so hard for humans to get tickets.”
I swung into the seat beside Chase, but he chose not to say anything about how he had ticked off a whole train of Atlantis citizens just by saying his name. He wouldn’t even look me in the face. “Ben, we might want to bump up our trip to the Unseelie Court,” he said.
“I thought we had three sunrises,” Ben said, obviously not a fan of the idea, and I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to see a whole court of people like the peacock fairy conductor either. “We’ve only had one.”
“We do, but by dinnertime news about five human questers on the Fey railway will reach the Unseelie Court,” Chase said. “It’s better if we visit them before they decide to come looking for us.”
“I guess. I mean, we’ll be close, right?” Ben said. Chase didn’t respond. He just stared out the window. “Hey, Lena? If it’s okay—do you think I might talk to my mother? I didn’t get to tell her good-bye yesterday.”
Long family chats were clearly not what Lena had had in mind when she’d invented M3s, but it was impossible to tell Ben no—he looked too pitiful.
Then Darcy wanted to say good-bye to her brother, the fawn. Then Gretel gave Chase an update on which dwarf cities his father was visiting.
So I watched the green leaves blur out the windows as the train wound its way down the Pumpkin line, through trees and over streams. I tried not to think about how awkward it was to sit with this silent, serious version of my best friend.
Ben and Mia fell asleep in their seats on the opposite side of the aisle, Mia’s dark head on Ben’s shoulder.
Darcy pointed at them. “Are they, like, a couple?”
I shrugged. Probably not if Mia woke up and saw Ben drooling.
“I think the West Wind’s more my style,” said Darcy thoughtfully. “The surfer-dude version.”
Chase and I both snorted at the same time.
“Jinx.” Chase passed the M3, grinning a little, like he was almost back to normal.
“You know what I never got?” said Darcy, peering out the window and trying not to look embarrassed. “If it’s on the Pacific Ocean, why name it Atlantis? Why not Pacifica?”
“It was originally on the Atlantic Ocean,” Chase explained. “They moved it in the tenth century—when the Vikings discovered Canada.”
“So, Rory, did West let you keep that ring?” Lena squealed.
I held up my left hand. I’d placed it on the finger that fit the best, the middle one.
“You have to let me examine it when you get back.” But before I could tell her she got first dibs on all ring research, Chase interrupted, “Are you two going to yammer on all day?”
“Are we bothering you, Chase?” Lena said, lifting her chin. She coughed a little, though, which kind of ruined the tough act.
“Not me,” Chase said grumpily. “Those witches keep looking this way. Either they think we look like dinner, or we’re talking too loud.”
Two of the staring witches had thumbnail-size warts on their noses in exactly the same spot. Maybe they were twins, or maybe they had both gotten in the way of the same unfortunate curse.
“Do you think they might work for the Snow Queen?” I asked, as quietly as possible.
“Doubtful. But we need to put it away soon. Rory, the only reason they don’t have cell phone
rules on the Fey railway is because they don’t have cell phones on the hidden continents,” Chase said.
I scowled. Even West had gotten to talk on the M3 before me. It was definitely my turn. “Since when did you become such a stickler for rules?”
“Since that Fey conductor came in and started glaring at you.”
I turned to the door behind us. The fairy in the peacock uniform watched me, eyes narrowed, her turquoise wings vibrating with irritation.
“They actually do throw people off these trains, you know,” Chase added. “It doesn’t bother the ones who fly.”
“I still need to tell Rory one more thing!” Lena said quickly, stressed out. So she meant one more important thing. I sincerely hoped it didn’t involve my mother and my cell phone.
Chase gave us that why are my friends such girls sigh. “There’s a luggage car back that way.”
The dwarves watched me go, as I peeled back the giant green leaf that served as the door. One of them, a fierce dude with a black beard, met my eyes and gripped his pickax in a meaningful way. I rushed into the next pumpkin hastily, wondering if anyone else thought that the Fey had sent us to the car with the sketchiest crowd.
The baggage car was packed tight, but most of the room was taken up by two leather suitcases about the same size as an SUV. (Were there giants on this train? Where?) Everything else was squished up against the sides—copper-bound chests, ornamental tables, and a stack of rolled-up carpets (probably the magic, flying variety).
I wiggled through, sniffing, until I found an easy place to stand, just beside a bird cage with a gold-feathered wren inside. “Okay, Lena. I’m here. What is it? Is something going on with my mom?”
“No. I texted her last night, and she texted back that she loves you. But I don’t know if it really was the witches,” said Lena, so fast she coughed again. “I mean, you’re not here. You haven’t seen them. They’re really upset. We had to give them their own wing in the infirmary, because they’re always weeping and wailing and threatening to curse us.”
