Faerie Path #6: The Charmed Return

by Frewin Jones

The girl laughed.

  “Come out of the rain or you’ll get no supper!”

  That’s her nanny—her new nanny. Oh god, I know what happens next. . . .

  “Don’t care!” Gracie declared.

  The nanny stamped her foot. “You are the naughtiest child that ever there was!” She drew her coat tight against the rain and marched out from under the tree. “Gracie! I shan’t tell you again.”

  The girl ran to the river’s edge and went stamping along the stones.

  One of the stones is loose. She’ll fall; she’ll drown.

  The girl’s foot came down on the insecure stone. Her arms windmilled, and a look of alarm came over her face.

  Tania and Edric ran—Edric hissing words that made Tania’s skin crawl. Time slowed around them. Streaks of rain hung in the air like flecks of gray paint. The rolling river moved like molasses. Gracie tumbled haltingly through the air.

  Tania was easily able to catch her hand and tug her away from the danger.

  Gracie’s eyes opened wide as she saw Tania, and her expression of alarm was replaced by joy. A moment later the three of them were safe inside the blue bubble.

  “I nearly fell!” Gracie exclaimed, wriggling her hand free of Tania. “Mummy would have been angry with me.” She turned and looked appraisingly at Marjorie. “Hello there,” she said. “I really hate my new nanny!”

  “I ain’t got no nanny,” said Marjorie. “My mum works in the munitions factory.”

  Tania felt a tugging on her hand and suddenly she was passing through the spider’s web for a third time.

  “She—she drowned. . . .” she stammered. “Or did we just save her?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Edric said gently. “She still drowns. And Marjorie is killed when the bombed building collapses on her. All we’ve done is to take them out of their own time for a while. We can’t change what happens to them.”

  “Why do we have to be there just before they die?” Tania choked.

  “Because that’s the moment when the Faerie spirit rises to leave the body and seek another,” Edric said. “The Faerie soul is at its most potent in the seconds before death.”

  “But it’s horrible!”

  Now she understood Zara’s warning. Now she knew why she had to be strong.

  It’s too cruel! These poor children . . .

  She smelled smoke. It clogged her nostrils and made her eyes sting and water. She was in a darkened room. A bedroom. A golden-haired girl lay asleep. Bright blue ribbons were hung from the head of her bed. Blue ribbons from her golden hair.

  Flora Llewellyn. She died in the fire that started in her father’s attic laboratory and swept through the entire house while the family slept.

  Tania stooped over the girl. “Flora?” she whispered. “Come with me, now.”

  The little girl’s eyes opened sleepily. “Are you the White Rabbit come to take me to Wonderland?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Tania could hardly speak for the swirling smoke. “Yes, I am.” She took Flora’s hand. She heard a man shout against a sudden roar of fire.

  And then they were in the blue ball and Flora was blinking drowsily at Gracie and Marjorie as a wide smile of recognition spread across her face.

  Tania let go of Flora’s warm hand and turned quickly away. “Let’s get this over with,” she muttered between clenched teeth. “I can’t stand this!”

  “I know,” Edric murmured.

  Twice more Tania and Edric made the harrowing journey—each time venturing a little deeper into the past.

  There was a fourteen-year-old girl in an Empire line dress, running along a sunken pathway in evening twilight. Instinctively Tania knew her. Georgina Eversleigh—returning late to her mama and papa’s house after a secret tryst with Thomas, the gamekeeper’s son. They had kissed, and Georgina’s mind was full of the secret glory of it when she rounded a corner and found her path blocked by two stampeding horses harnessed to a driverless Clarence coach.

  Tania plucked Georgina out of the road only a moment before the horses trampled her. She came into the blue orb as peaceful and calm as had the others. It seemed to Tania that hers was the only heart being wrung by these events.

  The fifth girl was sickly Ann Burbage, daughter of a great Shakespearean actor from Elizabethan times. An ashen-faced girl with weak lungs and a tight throat. She lay in the cushioning arms of her beloved Bess, gasping for breath. Tania took her hand and drew her to her feet. The girl smiled.

  “It does not hurt me anymore when I breathe!” she said gaily. “The pain is gone from my chest.” And then they were in the blue sphere. Ann gazed around at the other girls in delight. “Oh!” she said, her eyes glowing. “How wonderful!”

  Her own eyes full of tears, Tania turned away from the gathered children.

  “It’s as if they’re dreaming,” Edric said, seeing the anguish in Tania’s face. “Their Faerie souls are burning so brightly now that they can’t be afraid or hurt.”

  “Until we send them back to die!”

  “Yes. Until then. . . .”

  Tania and Edric walked together into the glimmering past for the final time. Now they were in a small dark room that stank of filth and disease. Sacking hung over the windows and the light that filtered in was gray and grainy. The room was crowded out with small, low beds. There was straw underfoot, along with slime and rotting garbage.

  Tania didn’t recognize the place, although it sounded an awful alarm deep in her mind.

  She heard wheezing breath. Coughing. The uneasy stirring of sleepless people in pain.

  She felt drawn to a bed in the corner. A figure lay under ragged sheets.

  She leaned close, trying to make out the face in the gloom, and saw tangled and unkempt red hair. Green eyes stared up at her.

  She put a hand to her mouth. “Oh god, no!”

  The dying face was her own face, the cheeks sunken with illness, the eyes feverish in their sockets, lips drawn back, breath gusting weakly from a fluttering chest.

  Now she knew why she remembered this monstrous place. Sancha had spoken of it in the library in the Royal Palace when they had linked their minds through her soul book.

  She could hear Sancha’s voice in her head.

  “I know how you fared when you first entered the Mortal World. You fell victim to some deadly plague almost at once . . . you became subject to all the illnesses and misfortunes of that awful place . . .”

  Tania fell to her knees at the bedside of her dying self. Her hand slipped out of Edric’s. A moment passed before she realized what she’d done.

  She snapped her head around, her heart palpitating, the blood ringing in her ears, her hand reaching toward nothing.

  She heard Edric’s disembodied voice calling from a terrible distance. “Tania! No!”

  Horrified, she snatched at the empty air where a moment before he had been standing.

  But it was too late. She’d let go and the link had been broken.

  Edric was gone.

  Chapter XIII

  For a few moments Tania was so shocked by what had happened that she could do no more than sit there on the dank and stinking floor and fight to get breath into her lungs.

  She had lost grip of Edric’s hand and he had vanished, leaving her stranded in the past.

  A frail shred of hope remained. He’ll find a way back to me. He must. Somehow.

  Gradually she brought her breathing under control. Forcing herself to keep calm, she stared at the spot where Edric had been standing a few moments ago.

  Waiting . . .

  Clinging to the desperate belief that he would reappear.

  She tried to blot out the stink of decay and sickness. Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and she stood up. The low room was crowded with beds. People lay under ragged blankets, some ominously silent, others gasping for breath or groaning in pain.

  She moved silently among the clutter of beds, seeing more than she really wanted to see. A scrawny, scabbed arm hung limp over a bed fr
ame. A head turned on bunched-up rags, the eyes seeing nothing. There were no nurses or doctors—no one here to offer help or comfort.

  Time crawled by as she glanced at face after ruined face. Still Edric did not come.

  A black despair began to seep into her mind.

  He isn’t coming. He can’t reach me. . . .

  She leaned over a bed, reaching down tentatively to shake a thin shoulder. “Where am I?” she whispered into the ravaged face.

  The eyes rolled. Foul breath gusted up.

  The voice was a ghostly croak. “Let me die. . . .”

  She edged away, making her way back to that first bed.

  What century is this? Tania came through—I mean, I came through from Faerie five hundred years ago, so that means I’m somewhere in the sixteen-hundreds. But where? She glanced around the room, but she saw nothing to help her get her bearings.

  I’m guessing London. I would have come through from my bedroom in the Royal Palace, and that’s Hampton Court in this world. But Edric’s in Camden. How do I find it?

  Desolate now, she sat on the floor beside that first bed. If Edric was able to return, he’d surely reappear right here.

  She drew her legs up and rested her forehead on her knees.

  A hand closed around her arm, making her cry out.

  The dying girl with Tania’s face was leaning over the side of the bed, her feverish eyes wide, her fingers curled around Tania’s arm just above the elbow.

  “Are you an apparition sent by the spirits to ease my death?” whispered the girl.

  Tania’s mind reeled. It was her own voice!

  She didn’t know what to say to the dying girl—to this princess of Faerie whose soul she shared.

  The girl frowned. “You have my very cast of countenance, maiden,” she said weakly. “Who are you? How is it that you resemble me so?”

  “What do you remember?” Tania asked, shocked that her voice sounded so broken. “Do you know how you got here?”

  The princess sighed. “I remember playing parlor tricks with Rathina. Blithe games to beguile the hours to my sixteenth birthday . . .”

  “You walked between the worlds,” Tania prompted.

  “Ahh. Did I? Is that what happened?” She laughed weakly, a laugh that turned to a wracking cough. Tania winced.

  “You couldn’t find your way back.”

  “Alack, for evil happenstance!” whispered the princess. “Poor Lord Gabriel, left at the Hand-Fasting cauldron by a bride who would never come. The tears he must have shed.” The princess began to cough uncontrollably, and it was a few moments before the convulsion eased.

  “Is there anything I can do to help you?” Tania asked. “Anything at all?”

  The girl gazed at her. “Your speech is strange to my ears, maiden. And yet, ’tis beyond belief . . . but I know you, do I not? Speak true and do not fear. What are you if not a phantom?”

  Tania bit her lip. I can’t tell her the truth. I can’t.

  The girl released her frail grip on Tania’s arms and her long, wasted fingers moved slowly, probingly toward Tania’s face. Tania was repulsed by the dirty, broken fingernails, but she tried not to flinch as the fingertips touched her skin.

  At that touch the world changed. A marvelous vision ignited in her memory.

  Sunshine. Towering white cliffs. A sea rolling under soft summer breezes. A shining palace upon the cliff top. The music of a flute sweetening the air. Herself, a winged child, running along an endless beach of white sand, seashells crunching under her bare feet. Shouting and laughing. A small unicorn pranced in the surf, its silvery horn threaded with periwinkle shells.

  The unicorn came up on its hind legs, neighing, shining hooves striking the air.

  Tania stooped, picking up a shell. She fluttered her wings, rising a little out of the sand and throwing the shell into the lacy surf so that the unicorn curvetted and ran to retrieve it for her.

  A voice floated on the sea-scented air. “Tania! If Percival comes home with seaweed caught in his mane and tail, it will be your task to comb out the tangles!”

  Laughing, Tania looked to where Sancha, Rathina, and Cordelia sat with the picnic things around them. Zara stood close by, playing on the flute.

  It had been Cordelia calling to her.

  “’Tis no chore to do that!” Tania shouted back as she walked up the beach. “It is a thing most pleasurable!”

  “All the same, we should be getting back,” said Sancha, closing the book she had been reading. “We must not be late for Hopie’s coming-of-age ceremony.”

  Cordelia began to gather the things up and place them in the basket. “What shall be her gift, I wonder,” she said.

  “We must guess!” said Tania.

  “Healing, be most sure,” said Sancha.

  Rathina sprang up, her wings quivering at her back. “When my sixteenth birthday comes, I hope my gift shall be a warrior’s heart!” she cried, shadow fencing across the sand. “Then shall I set out upon great errantry, riding upon a mettlesome steed.”

  “I would that your gift were the desire to be helpful, Rathina,” declared Sancha. “That would be a great wonder, indeed!”

  Tania heard the thud of hooves behind her. She turned as Percival came trotting up. He shook his mane, spraying salt water into her face.

  Tania jerked back from the touch of the sick princess.

  She gasped. “What was that? What did you do to me?”

  The vision had been so vivid that her head was still spinning with it.

  The princess lifted herself on one elbow, staring into Tania’s face.

  “Lord Gabriel was a false love!” she said, her voice shocked. “His desire was not for me—but for the power to walk between the worlds.”

  “What?”

  They stared at each other. A sudden glimmer of understanding ignited in Tania’s mind. As flesh had touched flesh, some kind of sharing had happened. Something from the princess’s memory had filtered into Tania’s mind—and something from hers had gone out to the princess.

  The afternoon on the beach under Veraglad Palace was seared now into Tania’s mind—not as an image or dream but as a specific and clear memory. She had been there. She had done those things.

  More! I want more!

  Trembling violently, Tania lifted her hand and spread her fingers.

  The eyes of the princess grew huge in her ashen face, as if the same understanding had come to her.

  Their hands came together and their fingers interlaced.

  Surrounded by plague and death, all the lost memories of Tania’s Faerie childhood came flooding like midsummer sunlight into her head.

  Chapter XIV

  The princess seemed less sickly now—as though something of Tania’s spirit and strength had bled into her. She still looked ill, but not deathly.

  Two whole life memories burned now in Tania’s mind—running parallel, braided together, and yet quite separate and discrete: sixteen years of life lived in Camden and the lost sixteen years of her Faerie childhood.

  “Right glad I am that Drake met a deserved fate,” growled the princess. “But it hurts my soul that Rathina was used so cruelly by him. She shall never be whole again, come what good fortune may.”

  Tania’s heart ached as Rathina’s words on the golden beach came back to her. “I hope my gift shall be a warrior’s heart!” “No,” Tania said. “She won’t.”

  A catch came into the princess’s voice. “And Zara, sweet Zara, dead and yet not . . .”

  “I know,” said Tania. “I don’t get it, either. It’s like a dream come true, but it’s also really weird.”

  The princess paused a moment, as if trying to decipher Tania’s words. “But a greater peril looms over Faerie now,” she said at last. “Help me up, my friend! I would stand.”

  Tania got to her feet. She helped the frail princess up off the bed. A few faces turned to them, the dying people roused a little by the movement.

  We’re exactly the same height
. Everything about us is the same—down to the gold dust in our eyes.

  “This is so strange,” Tania murmured.

  “It is indeed.” A pale smile touched the princess’s lips. “And stranger still to know my sorry fate. Alas, that a girl’s foolish whims set such events in motion! Five hundred years of twilight cast over Faerie. A Queen lost, a realm blighted. Had I but known . . .”

  Tania put an arm around the princess’s back, ignoring the smell of the rags that covered her—rags that had once been a Faerie gown. She could still see traces of fine needlepoint and hints of lilac through the grime.

  The princess smiled. “You give me strength, my friend,” she said. Tania fought not to be repelled by the sour scent of death that came from her mouth. “But what purpose do we now have? How are we to return?”

  “To Camden, you mean?”

  “Aye. To do what must be done, we must unite with the other children. Only then can we step between the worlds and seek Lear’s downfall.”

  Tania stared at the princess. She seemed so calm, so focused. And yet she knew that she was dying, that nothing either of them could do would change that. Come what may, she would breathe her last breath in this foul place.

  The princess gave an odd, crooked smile. “And how would you act differently, my friend, if your fate was mine and mine, yours?” It was as if she’d read Tania’s thoughts. “Would you faint upon your bed and call upon death to do his worst? I think not!” Her eyes flickered with a bittersweet light. “It eases my heart to know that you are in the world five hundred years hence. And that you will do great deeds!” The smile strengthened a little. “Killed the Sorcerer King upon Salisoc Heath! There’s gallantry. There’s a legacy to be proud of.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And now—to the purpose!” said the princess. “We must act while the little strength you have given me remains. Let’s away from this place of death.” She frowned. “But not via the door—guards stand to prevent any of these poor souls from fleeing.” Her eyes darkened. “They fear this plague greatly—many have died.” She beckoned. “Come. There is another way out.”

  They walked between the beds. An emaciated arm reached out, raking fingers thin as claws. Tania drew away, trying not to look into the faces of the dying.