by Kiki Thorpe
But a second later, she started to sink. She tried to think of light things, as Tink had told her to do. But the ground was coming fast.…
“You’re trying too hard,” Vidia whispered into her ear. She was hovering next to Kate. “Think, but don’t think. Hold the idea lightly in your mind. Feel the air lift you.”
Kate tried to think and not think about flying. She felt the night air on her bare arms. She pushed against it and rose up … up.…
In an instant, Kate was higher than the Home Tree. She swooped through the air. Cool air rushed against her face. She was flying!
How could this have ever been hard? she wondered. It seemed so easy now.
Kate found that she could use her arms like rudders to turn. She dipped down and felt leaves brush against her toes. She shot up through the air again and made a loop.
“You’ve got it, child! Now try going faster!” Vidia sped ahead. Kate chased after her.
“Faster!” Vidia shrieked. Kate sped up again. She was flying faster than she’d ever thought she could.
But Vidia flew faster still, so fast she looked like a shooting star in the night. Kate could hear her tiny voice crying, “Faster! Faster!”
Kate laughed with joy. Below her, Never Land lay spread out like a patchwork quilt. Light patches of sand and rock were mixed with darker patches of trees. Above, stars glittered coldly in the velvet black sky.
“Where should we go?” she shouted to Vidia.
“Anywhere!” came the faint reply.
In the distance, Kate saw a tall mountain. She aimed herself toward it.
Suddenly, a large shape burst out at her. Two yellow eyes flashed in the darkness. Kate screamed and threw her hands in front of her face. She dropped in the air, just missing the owl.
The bird screeched its annoyance at her, then flapped away.
Kate regained her balance. “That was a close one,” she said in a shaky voice. She was trembling all over. “Can we stop for a minute? Vidia?”
There was no answer. She scanned the sky, but she didn’t see Vidia’s glow.
Kate looked down. Her belt loop was empty. Vidia was gone—and so was the rest of the fairy dust.
Tink sat on the bench in her workshop. Sunlight gleamed off the saucepan as she studied the crack in its handle. “A tricky fix,” she murmured. “Very tricky—”
“Tink!” a voice interrupted.
“Not now,” Tink told it. “I’m busy.”
“Tink!” the voice insisted. “Wake up!”
Tink opened her eyes. She wasn’t in her workshop. She was in a hammock in the willow room. Mia and Gabby were staring down at her.
Tink frowned at them. “I was having the nicest dream,” she said.
“Prilla told us to wake you,” Mia said. “Kate’s gone.”
Tink sat up and yawned. “Maybe she went for a walk.”
Mia shook her head. “We asked around. Nobody in Pixie Hollow has seen her.”
Never a moment’s peace with these Clumsies, Tink thought with a sigh. But at least it will be over soon. Today the girls would return to their own homes, and Tink could go back to her workshop. Just the thought of it filled her with energy. She hopped out of bed. “All right. Let’s find her,” she said.
Outside, they met up with Prilla and Lainey. “We just came from the beach,” said Prilla. “We didn’t see Kate there, either.”
“Well, it’s still early,” Tink said. “She can’t have gone very far.”
Just then, they saw Terence coming toward them. Right away, Tink knew something was wrong. Terence’s wings sagged, and his glow was dim.
“What’s the matter?” Tink asked, concerned.
“Someone stole some fairy dust from the mill,” Terence said.
“Vidia!” Prilla said with a gasp. “But how did she get it?” Vidia had stolen dust before, more than once. Because of this, she could no longer go near the mill. The queen had used fairy magic to make sure of it.
But Terence shook his head. “It wasn’t Vidia. Not this time. You’d better come see this.” He glanced at Mia, Lainey, and Gabby, adding, “You come, too.”
They followed Terence downstream to the mill. A pumpkin-canister was sitting outside its doors. Terence lifted the lid. “This was full yesterday.”
Tink and Prilla looked inside. Only a thin dusting—not even a cupful—remained in the bottom.
“A Clumsy stole the rest,” Terence said, looking hard at the girls.
“You think we stole it?” Lainey squeaked, stunned.
“We didn’t steal anything!” Mia said. Her dark eyes flashed. She put her arm around Gabby protectively.
“Then explain this,” said Terence. He pointed to the mill door. There, outlined in fairy dust, was a girl-sized handprint.
The girls looked at each other with round eyes. “You don’t suppose …?” Lainey began.
“Kate wouldn’t steal,” Mia said. But she didn’t sound certain.
“Kate’s missing,” Tink explained to Terence. “Since last night.”
“If she took the fairy dust, she could be on the other side of Never Land by now,” he said. “It could take days to find her.”
“Today’s the day the girls are supposed to go home!” Prilla said. She turned to Tink. “What should we do?”
Tink tugged on her bangs. She thought of the saucepan waiting in her workshop. Then she looked around at the girls’ worried faces. She imagined Kate, lost in Never Land. Suddenly, the saucepan didn’t seem so important.
“Gather up all the fairies you can find,” Tink told Prilla. “Kate’s somewhere out there.” She swept an arm toward the forest. “It may take all of Pixie Hollow to find her.”
Prilla hurried to tell the messenger-talent fairies about Kate. The messengers alerted the scouts. Within minutes, the scouts had fanned out across the forest, searching for a sign of the lost girl.
The water-talent fairies joined the search, too. They paddled their leaf-boats along Havendish Stream, calling Kate’s name up and down the banks.
Meanwhile, animal-talent fairies took to the skies. They rode on the backs of blue jays and starlings. They circled high in the air, hoping to catch a glimpse of Kate.
Prilla waited at the Home Tree with Mia, Lainey, and Gabby. Tink hadn’t wanted them to join the search. “You can’t get far walking,” she’d said. “And it’s too easy to get lost in the forest if you don’t know the way.”
“I want to fly and look for Kate, too,” Gabby said as they watched the fairies fly high above them.
“We can’t,” Mia told her. “There isn’t any extra fairy dust for us to fly with. Kate took it.”
Gabby stuck out her lower lip. “That’s not fair.”
“No, it isn’t,” Mia agreed with a frown.
“Anyway,” Gabby said, “I don’t need fairy dust to fly. I can use my wings.”
“Mia, you don’t think Kate left us on purpose, do you?” Lainey asked.
“I don’t know,” Mia said, her frown deepening. It was clear she’d been thinking the same thing.
Lainey squinted up at the sun. It was high in the sky now. The day was passing quickly. “What will we do if we can’t find Kate before we have to leave?” she asked.
Nobody answered. No one knew. “We’ll find her,” Prilla said at last, trying to sound confident. “All of Pixie Hollow is out looking for her now.”
“Where’s Gabby?” Lainey said suddenly.
“What do you mean?” asked Mia. “She was right here a second ago.”
The girls and Prilla looked all around the Home Tree. Then they looked around the trees nearby. Lainey even ran back to the willow room to check. There was no sign of Gabby.
“I should have been watching her,” Mia said. “Where could she be?”
“She said she wanted to fly,” Lainey remembered. “You don’t think she went looking for Kate, do you?”
“She can’t fly,” Prilla said. “She doesn’t have any fairy dust.”
“But she believes she can fly,” Mia said.
They all turned toward the forest. “Oh, no,” Prilla said. “Now we have two lost girls.”
Tink and her friend Beck, an animal-talent fairy, were sweeping over the forest on the back of a starling. It was their third pass that morning. But they still hadn’t spotted Kate.
“Do you think she could have gotten as far as Torth Mountain?” Beck shouted over the rushing wind.
Tink stared at the tall mountain in the distance. It was hard to say how far away it was, or whether Kate might have reached it. Never Land was always changing in size. That was part of the island’s magic. Sometimes it might take days to cross it. Other times it might take only hours.
“I guess we could have a look,” Tink said with a last glance at the forest.
Just then, something shiny on the ground caught Tink’s eye. She looked closer. At first she thought it was a giant dragonfly. Then she realized it was Gabby’s shiny wings.
How in the name of Never Land did she get all the way out here? Tink wondered.
Tink didn’t know it, but Never Land was exactly how Gabby had gotten there. The island had felt Gabby’s belief. It had shrunk itself to help the little girl.
Gabby looked up and spotted the fairies. She waved her hands and shouted something.
Tink and Beck swooped closer on their bird. Finally, they heard what Gabby was shouting.
“I found Kate! I did! I found her!” Gabby pointed to a nearby tree.
And there, Tink saw, was Kate, tangled high up among its branches.
Once Kate had been found, Tink and Beck sent a call out to the rest of the fairies. Everyone, including Mia and Lainey, hurried to the big oak tree. They could all see Kate high in the branches. She looked tired and scared.
Of course, the next problem was how to get her down. Luckily, this was just the sort of problem Tink enjoyed solving. After much tinkering, she rigged up a pulley system. She made the pulley herself, using old mouse-cart wheels. The harvest fairies attached it to the highest branches. Then everyone helped to hoist Kate down.
On the ground, Kate hugged her friends. When she heard that Gabby was the one who’d found her, she gave the little girl an extra hug. Kate told them about her flying lesson with Vidia and how she’d ended up in the tree.
“When I couldn’t find Vidia, I got scared. I tried to land, but it was dark. I couldn’t see where I was going, and I crashed into the oak tree,” she explained. “I couldn’t fly anymore, either. I guess I’d used up my fairy dust.”
“Why didn’t you use the dust you took from the mill?” Terence asked.
“It’s gone,” Kate said. “I had it tied to my belt loop, but now it’s missing.”
“Vidia took it, I bet,” Tink said.
“So that’s what Vidia was up to,” Prilla said with a frown. “She got Kate to steal dust from the mill so she could have it all for herself.”
Kate was shocked. “I didn’t steal! Vidia said …”
Kate trailed off. From the looks on her friends’ faces, she knew that Vidia hadn’t told her the truth. “I wouldn’t have taken it if I had known it was stealing,” she said. “I just wanted to learn how to fly. I thought if we all knew how to fly, we could find our way back to Pixie Hollow.”
“You wanted to come back?” Prilla asked.
“More than anything,” Kate said. The other girls nodded. “But now I’ve gone and messed it all up, haven’t I?”
To her surprise, Tink flew over and landed on her shoulder. To Kate, it felt as if a butterfly were resting there. “You haven’t messed anything up,” Tink said. “And you might find your way back here still. I would be glad to see you.”
“Oh!” Prilla said then. “Look how late it’s getting! If we don’t go now, we may miss our chance to get you to the mainland!”
The sun was low in the sky. It was time for the girls to go to the fairy circle—and then home.
Before they could leave, though, they had to say good-bye to Queen Clarion. They found her waiting for them at the fairy circle. She was perched on the snow-white toadstool, looking as queenly as ever.
One by one, the girls said their good-byes. Kate stepped forward last.
“I’m sorry I lost all your fairy dust,” she said to the queen.
“We’ll get it back—most of it, anyway,” Queen Clarion replied. “Vidia will return eventually. Pixie Hollow is her home. No Never fairy can stay away for long.”
That made Kate feel a little better. There were many other things she wanted to say about how much she loved Pixie Hollow and Havendish Stream and the orchard and the willow room and all the fairies she’d met. Instead, she said, “Thanks for being so nice to us.”
The queen smiled and said, “You are always welcome in Pixie Hollow.” She held out her tiny hand. Ever so gently, Kate grasped it between her thumb and forefinger and shook it.
Kate stepped into the center of the fairy circle, where her friends and Prilla were waiting. Rain was there with her funny little pinwheel. “The tide is forwarding. Mark is aflay,” she said.
“She means,” said Skye, “it’s time to go.”
The girls joined hands. Prilla landed on Gabby’s upturned palm. They were all together, just as they had been when they arrived in Never Land.
“Bye-bye, fairies!” Gabby shouted.
The other girls joined her. “Good-bye! Good-bye!” they called.
“Fly safely!” The queen and Terence waved. Tink just reached for her bangs. Not because she was annoyed this time, but because she wanted to hide her misty eyes.
Then Prilla blinked, and the world blinked, too.
But when the girls opened their eyes, nothing had changed. They were still standing in the fairy circle.
“It didn’t work,” Kate murmured.
“What?” Rain frowned and shook her pinwheel. Then she said a lot of jingly things the girls couldn’t understand.
“She means,” said Skye, looking embarrassed, “that we may have made an error or two.”
But the girls were all smiling. “It didn’t work,” Kate said again, more loudly. “We don’t have to go home! Not just yet.”
The girls stood hand in hand. Tink fluttered over and landed on Kate’s shoulder. Together, they watched the sun sink below the horizon.
Not one of them doubted that they would make it home someday. But in the meantime, they had many adventures ahead of them in Never Land.
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Excerpt copyright © 2013 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Published by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Lainey Winters was soaring.
For a brief moment, her heart seemed to stop. The ground fell away, and she rose up, up, up … and over the fallen log.
An instant later, she touched down again, bounding through the forest on the back of a doe. Trees flashed by in a blur of green. Lainey dug her hands deeper into the doe’s fur. She held on tight as they darted around bushes and flew over stones.
Leaves crashed above. Lainey looked up and saw a squirrel racing through the trees. A tiny fairy sat on its back, her long brown braid swinging behind her. The squirrel leaped from branch to branch, keeping pace with the doe.
Lainey leaned forward, urging her doe on. The fairy did the same.
Ahead was a small clearing. In its center stood a tall maple tree, bigger than any other tree in the forest. From a distance, its branches seemed to sparkle and move. This was due to the many fairies who hummed around it like bees around a honeycomb. The maple was called the Home Tree, and it was the heart of Pixie Hollow, the Never fairies’ world.
Lainey steered the doe toward the Home Tree. Even without looking up, she could sense the fairy on the squirrel following above.
A few feet from the tree, the squirrel shot past Lainey. It landed on a branch and came to a stop just as Lainey and the doe pulled up at the Home Tree’s roots.
Lainey la
ughed. “You beat me again, Fawn!” she called to the fairy on the squirrel.
“I wouldn’t be much of an animal-talent fairy if I couldn’t win a race against a Clumsy, would I?” Fawn replied, smiling.
Lainey slid off the doe’s back, pushing the big glasses she wore up her nose. She didn’t care about winning or losing. For her, the joy was in riding the deer, feeling it turn when she wanted to turn, knowing when it would leap. In her real life, the one where she went to school and lived with her parents, Lainey had never even had a pet, not so much as a goldfish. But here in Never Land, she’d played hide-and-seek with wild hares. She’d listened to the songs of loons. She’d cradled baby hedgehogs in her hand. Things she’d never dreamed possible seemed to happen every day.
As Lainey patted the deer’s back, Fawn flew down and landed on its head. She whispered something in the doe’s ear. The doe ducked its head once, as if nodding. Then it turned and bounded away into the forest.
“What did you say?” Lainey asked.
“I told her next time I’d ride with her, and you could ride the squirrel,” Fawn joked.
“I want to learn to do that,” Lainey said.
Fawn raised her eyebrows. “Ride a squirrel? Don’t you think you’re a bit too big?”
Lainey giggled. “No, I want to learn how to speak Deer.”
“You have to wriggle before you can hop,” Fawn replied.
“I have to do what?” asked Lainey, confused.
“It’s an animal-fairy saying,” Fawn explained. “It means you have to start slowly. Talking to deer is tricky. They can be pretty snooty about accents. Let’s hear how your Mouse is coming along.”
Furrowing her brow, Lainey squeaked, “Eeee-eee!”
Fawn had been teaching Lainey how to speak the language of mice. So far, Lainey had only learned one squeak. Loosely translated, it meant “Are your whiskers well?”
