by Holly Webb
“You’re all fairies…” she said slowly. “Our whole family is. So I must be – something.” Emily let out an excited gasp of laughter, and looked down at herself. She was hoping to see feathers, or at least her black hair grown longer and shinier, like magic. But it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe she was still growing into it, and that was why they’d wanted to tell her. So she was ready. She nodded to herself. She definitely was.
“Is this why all the strange things have been happening? The dreams? Because I’m changing too? Why didn’t you tell me till now, though?”
Then she smiled – she didn’t really care why it had taken so long. She wasn’t just seeing things. She was a fairy! It explained everything: all the odd things she’d been seeing, and the weird way the house behaved. She twisted her fingers together, trying to stop herself laughing. It was all so right. Everything made sense at last. She giggled suddenly. What was she going to tell Rachel?
“It doesn’t matter that you didn’t tell me,” she added quickly. “I just wondered. Will I have wings? You and Dad don’t, so why do Lark and Lory and Robin all have them?” Then she swallowed, a sudden tide of happiness rising up inside her. “Can you fly?” she asked, whirling round to catch Lark’s hand.
“Yes,” Lark whispered, but she didn’t look very happy about it. Her wings had faded a little, and stopped shining, and they were folded flat against her back, tucked up against her purple vest top. Her fingers felt chilly in Emily’s hand.
Emily looked at her worriedly. “Are you OK? I don’t mind if I don’t have wings, honestly.”
“Oh, Emily…” Her mum put her hand to her mouth.
Ash let go of Robin, and Robin wasn’t looking furious any more. He looked – sad.
“What is it?” Emily asked, feeling suddenly scared. She let go of Lark and stepped back, staring at them all anxiously. “Is there something wrong with me?” she whispered. “Is that why it’s taken so long for me to change?”
Her dad came round the table and caught both her hands, holding them tight in his own. They felt soft, and feathery, and very strong. “Emily, little one. You don’t understand. You aren’t like us.”
Emily shook her head. “A different sort of fairy?” she asked, but her voice was husky and breaking.
“No.”
“But why?” Emily’s eyes burned with tears. How could she be a fairy’s child, without any magic of her own? It didn’t make sense. “It – it isn’t fair,” she stammered. “How can you all be magical and I’m not? It can’t happen that way.” She looked round at the rest of her family, all watching her with huge, shining eyes. Lark and Lory had tears glittering on their cheeks, and Lark rubbed one graceful hand across her face. Emily gulped. Fairies never did anything so ugly as sniffing.
“Maybe it’s just taking a long time to show,” she added, trying to sound hopeful. “I have to be like you. I’m your daughter.” She gazed pleadingly up at Ash, gripping his strange hands too tightly.
Eva was standing next to him now, and Emily could feel Lark and Lory on either side of her, the feathery warmth of their wings wrapping around her.
“Emily, you’re not,” Ash said gently.
There was silence as Emily looked at him, trying desperately to make those words not mean what they said. She couldn’t.
“Not yours? I don’t understand. I am your daughter… You know I am,” Emily whispered. It didn’t make sense – except that in an awful sort of way, it did make sense of a lot of things. “I don’t believe you,” she said, trying to sound strong, but it didn’t work. She swallowed, her mouth dry and papery. “Who am I, then?”
Ash glanced at Eva, who sighed. “We don’t know, Emily,” she whispered.
Emily shook her head. It was like touching Lark’s wings all over again – the ground seemed to be swinging and shaking underneath her, except this time it didn’t feel magical and exciting. It was awful. Her whole life had gone wobbly, and everything she knew about herself was wrong. “How can you not know?” she begged. “You have to know! Where did I come from if I’m not yours?” She pulled her hands away from Ash, wrapping them around her middle as though it might help her hold together.
Her dad – not her dad at all, Emily thought miserably – reached out for her, and she took another step back, tipping over her chair and pressing up against the wall. He dropped his hands and gazed at her sadly, his dark eyes glinting black in the candlelight. “Don’t be scared, Emily. Maybe we should have told you sooner, but we wanted you to be old enough to understand.”
“I’m not scared!” Emily told him shakily. But she was. “I don’t understand. I’m not old enough to understand, I couldn’t be. Where did I come from?”
“I found you,” Ash told her quietly.
“Where? When?” Emily demanded, her voice rising in panic.
Eva reached out a hand, and Emily could see that her fingers were blurring and glittering, as though they were surrounded with magic. But Ash stopped her, gently pushing her hand away. “Don’t… She needs to know all of this – and she’s right to be upset.”
“Where did you find me? Who do I belong to?”
“You belong to us!” Eva almost howled it, but Ash was shaking his head.
“I found you…” He faltered, and then started again. “I found you by the river, and I brought you home.”
Emily gaped at him. That couldn’t be true. It sounded like a fairy tale, she thought to herself – and then swallowed a laugh. “You just took me?” she asked him disbelievingly.
Ash nodded helplessly, and Emily felt her legs give way. She slid slowly down so that she was sitting against the wall and gazed up at them all, standing over her.
They’d stolen her.
Emily rubbed her hand across her face. There was so much she didn’t understand.
“Didn’t anyone notice that you suddenly had an extra baby?” she murmured. “What did you tell people?”
Ash crouched down in front of her. “We didn’t tell anyone anything, Emily love.”
“Oh…” Emily nodded slowly. “I suppose you can just make people believe anything?”
“Pretty much.”
“But we don’t,” Eva put in. “Only when we really have to. We try to live without our magic as much as we can, while we’re here.”
“You could do anything … anything you like.” Emily felt her eyes filling with tears. “What did you want me for? What use could I be to someone like you?”
Ash frowned. “I don’t know, Emily. I wasn’t thinking like that. I couldn’t leave you there, that’s all.”
“But what about my real parents?” Emily gulped. “Did you – did you leave something else behind?”
Then it hit Emily with a sudden force, almost stealing away her breath. The book. This was why Robin had to get her out of the library. They didn’t want her reading that book, because she might remember what had happened.
She was the girl. The stolen baby in the story of the changeling child. Except – the fairies hadn’t taken her to some distant fairy land, they’d kept her here. The wooden baby from the story filled her mind, leering at her with its strange, sharp-toothed smile. What if her real parents hadn’t known, and that changeling baby was still living in her room, taking Emily’s place in her true family?
“She means a changeling,” Robin said. He was sitting on the edge of the table, his wings twitching idly behind him. “She was reading that story, remember? It wasn’t like that, Emily.”
“I didn’t steal you,” Ash said, stroking her cheek, the way he always did when she was sad. In spite of herself, even knowing what he had done, Emily felt better. It wasn’t a spell, she was almost sure. It was just her dad being lovely.
How could he not be her father? Emily’s tears spilled down over Ash’s fingers, and he flinched a little, his lips pulling back over pointed teeth. But he kept going, gently cra
dling her face and talking to her.
“I didn’t have to steal you, Emily. You were on your own. Someone had left you there, by the river. Wrapped up in a blanket. I couldn’t leave you there. Like you said, I just – took you.”
“He went out for a walk and came back with you,” Lark said, patting her knee. “When he brought you home, we thought you were a doll. We were only three, and you were tiny, Emily. Doll-sized.”
“I was abandoned?” Emily asked, her voice hardly above a whisper. “They didn’t want me?”
“But we wanted you,” Eva said fiercely. “We still do. We shouldn’t have told her,” she added in a murmur to Ash. “We were all so happy…”
Emily sprang up, pushing her way past Ash, and feeling the jolt of magic as his power caught at her. “You should!” she sobbed. “You were happy, but it was all a lie. I knew it was. I could feel it. I didn’t fit in. I’m not yours! You shouldn’t ever have taken me in the first place.”
Emily darted out of the kitchen door, racing for the stairs. All she could think of was to get away to her room, to think. To work out what she was going to do. To try and understand what was going on.
How could she not have realized before? She didn’t look like Robin and Lory and Lark. She wasn’t brilliant at school like they were. There were so many ways that she didn’t fit in. But she’d thought that meant she was just the odd one out – not that she didn’t belong to her family at all.
It was just too much stuff to take in. She needed her room, and her things. She wanted to wrap herself up in her quilt and think about it all. Lark and Lory and Robin had wings – they could really fly. Who knew what else they could do? Her mum had said they tried to live without magic as much as possible, but maybe Robin and Lark and Lory did it all the time? She smiled miserably to herself. It would explain why Robin always managed to do his homework in about three minutes flat.
Emily blinked and looked around her. She had been blindly rushing up to her room, her eyes so full of tears that she wasn’t really looking where she was going. Now she was halfway up the stairs, and she could tell that something was wrong.
She was cold, and the stairs smelled weird. Emily clutched the banisters, and sniffed, and rubbed her hand across her eyes.
The stairs were growing. The wooden spindles that held the banisters up were sprouting thin little branches and tiny leaves. As she watched, the leaf buds opened out into delicate fans of green. The banister felt rough under her fingers, like bark.
Emily closed her eyes, and opened them again. Was this her mum and dad – Ash and Eva, she corrected herself sadly – using their magic to bring her back downstairs? Honestly, they could have just shouted, she thought. But then, they probably had. She hadn’t been listening.
Emily shook her head angrily. She wanted time on her own. They couldn’t spring something like this on her and expect her not to be upset!
Determinedly, she marched up the last few steps to the landing. If she tried hard enough, she could see through the magic to the real stairs. They were still there, even though she seemed to be climbing a hill with short, sheep-nibbled grass, and rocky slabs laid into it to climb up.
“It’s a spell,” Emily muttered, trying not to be delighted by the flowers growing over the stones. They smelled so beautiful, and their petals were jewel-bright… Emily hissed and shut her eyes again, climbing by feel. The stone slabs didn’t feel like stone yet, though she suspected they might, if she wasn’t quick.
She carefully didn’t look into the mirror outside Lark’s room, but she could see out of the corner of her eye that someone was moving inside it – or something. Emily stomped on with a grim determination to get inside her own room and slam the door on everybody else. When there weren’t fairy sisters fluttering their magic wings at her and filling the air with spells, she would be able to think.
It felt as though she’d taken hours to get across the landing and over to the creaky little narrow staircase to her room. She would not let them drag her back! Emily braced both hands against the walls and half pulled herself upwards. She risked a glance behind through half-closed eyes, and set her teeth. More branches. Twined with dark, glossy ivy now, woven in and out with trails of tiny white flowers that smelled of honey.
“I don’t like honey, Mum,” Emily snarled. “You ought to know.” I bet you would know, if I was really yours, she added silently, hot tears burning her eyes again.
The ivy was wrapping itself around her fingers, wiry stems pulling her in. Emily yanked her hands away, seeing the leaves shiver and rattle in surprise. “Stop it! I’m going up to my room, leave me alone!” She put her hands on to the step in front of her, going on all fours instead, clinging to the steps with her fingertips, even though they groaned and gave underneath her. She was not climbing up a thin lattice of branches, Emily told herself determinedly. It was an illusion. There were stairs underneath, solid ones, and she would not give in.
With a triumphant gasp, she reached up and grabbed the white china door handle – she wasn’t even going to think about what that might be turning into. Her door was glowing; the purple paint she’d chosen had turned translucent, like the amethysts in Eva’s favourite necklace. Emily just hauled the door open and slammed it behind her. “Leave me alone!” she yelled, leaning back against the door and closing her eyes.
It was when she opened them again that Emily first thought she might have made a mistake. She had assumed that once she got inside her room, the magic from downstairs would stop. Her mum and dad would stop, she’d thought. They’d give up and let her have some time on her own.
But the strange purple glow of the door was just the same on the other side – brighter, if anything. She could see it shining through her fingers where they were pressed against the door – the same way that they glowed red if she cupped a torch inside her hand. Except this light was brighter, and stronger, and it had the same honey-flower smell as the tiny blossoms on her stairs.
It didn’t make her think of Ash, or Eva, or her sisters. And Robin definitely wouldn’t make something like this. Downstairs, even when Eva had looked so odd, with those huge eyes and her fiery hair, she had still felt like herself to Emily. Lark’s wings had been part of Lark. Emily was pretty sure, now that she thought about it, surrounded by this weird, sickly-sweet glow, that she would know a spell that any of them had made.
This was something else. And she wasn’t in her bedroom at all.
Emily swallowed and let go of the door. She recognized this. The odd purple cast over everything had made it look different, but the purple light was fading now, and she could tell it was the riverbank that she’d seen in her dream.
It was darker now, but she recognized it. And even though it was dark, it seemed more real. Clearer. She was actually here, she realized. She shivered a little as a chill rose off the water and rustled the leaves on the willow trees. This was no dream.
She had gone through that purple door to somewhere else. It wasn’t like the stairs, where she could see the real steps beneath the magic. This was another world.
She glanced behind at her bedroom door, wondering how she’d managed to get here when it should have been her room. Then she let out a little moan of panic.
Her door wasn’t there now either. No more weird purple light. The door had disappeared when she let go of it.
Emily stepped forward, making for the very edge of the water, where she’d met the girl with the weed-green hair in her dream. The girl had been friendly – or friendly-ish, at least. She might tell Emily where she was. And how she was supposed to get back home, now that the door had gone.
Emily crept forward, pushing her way through the dangling branches of the willow trees, straining her eyes in the dim, greenish light. It was very eerie. But then, anything would be after the way she’d arrived here, she told herself. It didn’t necessarily mean bad things.
The trees were swaying
, the long leafy trails swinging in the wind. Emily lifted up a handful of leaves and gasped, finding a pale-faced boy staring back at her, smiling. He had the same huge-eyed, sharp-eared look as Robin, but his hair was distinctly green, and Emily was sure that if he leaned back against the willow-tree trunk, his grey-brown skin and the dusty-looking trousers he was wearing would disappear, melting into the bark.
“I – I don’t know where I am…” Emily faltered. “I didn’t mean to come – here. Um. I don’t actually know where here is. Could you show me – I mean, the door’s gone…”
The boy smiled wider, and put his finger to his lips.
“Oh! Oh, sorry…”
This time, he pressed his finger to Emily’s lips instead, and then there was a strange hissing sound from all around her. Emily glanced sideways, and gasped. There were at least ten or so more girls and boys, a little older than her. All touching her, and cooing, and purring, and patting at her gently, as though she were a baby, or a kitten.
The original green-haired boy looked disgruntled, she thought, as though he hadn’t really wanted to share. He was at the back of the little huddle now, his lips crossly pursed, and his hands resting on his bony hips.
What did they want from her? Emily thought in a panic, as the strong, silky fingers ran over her hair and pulled at the sleeves of her hoodie. Anxiously, she started to pull away, or try to, but there were too many of them, wafting their scented hair in her face, and purring at her in words she almost recognized. Words that she’d heard Eva singing, or Lark and Lory, before Ash told them to be quiet. Emily had thought it was because he was working, but maybe he just didn’t want her to hear. Their voices were very sweet…
She stared at them vaguely, trying to remember what was happening, but all she could think was that they were fairies, like her sisters, and that Lark and Lory and the rest of her family probably spoke like this too. When she wasn’t around. It was the saddest thing she’d ever imagined, and tears puddled in the corners of her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
