My head is pounding when Vivienne shakes me awake. She jumps up
onto the bed, kicking off the coverlets and making the frame groan. I press a
cushion over my face and curl up on my side, trying to ignore her and go back to
dreamless slumber.
“Get up, sleepyhead,” she says, pulling back my blankets. “We’re going to
the mall.”
I make a strangled noise and wave her away.
“Up!” she commands, leaping again.
“No,” I moan, burrowing deeper in what’s left of the blankets. “I’ve got to
rehearse for the tournament.”
Vivi stops bouncing, and I realize that it’s no longer true. I don’t have to
fight. Except that I foolishly told Cardan I would never quit.
Which makes me remember the river and the nixies and Taryn.
How she was right, and I was magnificently, extravagantly wrong.
“I’ll buy you coffee when we get there, coffee with chocolate and whipped
cream.” Vivi is relentless. “Come on. Taryn’s waiting.”
I half-stumble out of bed. Standing, I scratch my hip and glare. She gives
me her most charming smile, and I find my annoyance fading, despite myself.
Vivi is often selfish, but she’s so cheerful about it and so encouraging of
cheerful selfishness in others that it’s easy to have fun with her.
I dress quickly in the modern clothes I keep in the very back of my
wardrobe—jeans, an old gray sweater with a black star on it, and a pair of
glittery silver Converse high-tops. I pull my hair into a slouchy knitted hat, and
when I catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror (carved so that it
seems like a pair of bawdy fauns are on either side of the glass, leering), a
different person is looking back at me.
Maybe the person I might have been if I’d been raised human.
Whoever that is.
When we were little, we used to talk about getting back to the human world
all the time. Vivi kept saying that if she learned just a little more magic, we’d be
able to go. We were going to find an abandoned mansion, and she was going to
enchant birds to take care of us. They would buy us pizza and candy, and we
would go to school only if we felt like it.
By the time Vivi learned how to travel there, though, reality had intruded
on our plans. It turns out birds can’t really buy pizza, even if they’re enchanted.
I meet my sisters in front of Madoc’s stables, where silver-shod faerie
horses are penned up beside enormous toads ready to be saddled and bridled and
reindeer with broad antlers hung with bells. Vivi is wearing black jeans and a
white shirt, mirrored sunglasses hiding her cat eyes. Taryn has on pink jeggings,
a fuzzy cardigan, and a pair of ankle boots.
We try to imitate girls we see in the human world, girls in magazines, girls
we see on movie screens in air-conditioned theaters, eating candy so sweet it
makes my teeth ache. I don’t know what people think when they look at us.
These clothes are a costume for me. I am playing dress-up in ignorance. I no
more can guess the assumptions that go along with glittering sneakers than a
child in a dragon costume knows what real dragons would make of the color of
her scales.
Vivi picks stalks of ragwort that grow near the water troughs. After finding
three that meet her specifications, she lifts the first and blows on it, saying,
“Steed, rise and bear us where I command.”
With those words, she tosses the stalk to the ground, and it becomes a
rawboned yellow pony with emerald eyes and a mane that resembles lacy
foliage. It makes an odd keening neigh. She throws down two more stalks, and
moments later three ragwort ponies snort the air and snuffle at the ground. They
look a little like sea horses and will ride over land and sky, according to Vivi’s
command, keeping their seeming for hours before collapsing back into weeds.
It turns out that passing between Faerie and the mortal world isn’t all that
difficult. Faerie exists beside and below mortal towns, in the shadows of mortal
cities, and at their rotten, derelict, worm-eaten centers. Faeries live in hills and
valleys and barrows, in alleys and abandoned mortal buildings. Vivi isn’t the
only faerie from our islands to sneak across the sea and into the human world
with some regularity, although most don mortal guises to mess with people. Less
than a month ago, Valerian was bragging about campers he and his friends had
tricked into feasting with them, gorging on rotten leaves enchanted to look like
delicacies.
I climb onto my ragwort steed and wrap my hands around the creature’s
neck. There is always a moment when it begins to move that I can’t help
grinning. There is something about the sheer impossibility of it, the
magnificence of the woods streaking by and the way the ragwort hooves kick up
gravel as they leap up into the air, that gives me an electric rush of pure
adrenaline.
I swallow the howl clawing up my throat.
We ride over the cliffs and then the sea, watching mermaids leap in the
spangled waves and selkies rolling along the surf. Past the fog perpetually
surrounding the islands and concealing them from mortals. And then on to the
shoreline, past Two Lights State Park, a golf course, and a jetport. We touch
down in a small tree-covered patch across the road from the Maine Mall. Vivi’s
shirt flutters in the wind as she lands. Taryn and I dismount. With a few words
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