In a Dark Land Read online

  Peter looked down at her out of the corner of his eye. “I suspected you would. I suppose you broke your other promise not to Change?”

  Izzy twisted the hem of her T-shirt. “I haven’t Changed at all since I’ve been home,” she said, which technically was the truth. “I just wanted to go back to Faerie. But I could never figure out how to get there.”

  “You just didn’t know what you were looking for,” said Peter. “Ah, here we are.”

  He stopped so suddenly that Izzy nearly slammed into him. She looked around. This part of the forest looked no different from every other part they had just tramped through.

  She tilted her head up at him. “Where? I don’t see anything.”

  Peter took his flute out and played three long notes. He motioned for her to stand near his shoulder. Bending down slightly, he pointed one finger straight ahead. “Right there. You see?”

  Izzy followed his gaze. “Holy moly,” she whispered.

  It was the strangest optical illusion Izzy had ever seen. It looked like the forest had been painted onto panels, like scenery in a theater. A moment before, she had been in the audience. Now it was like she had stepped onstage, into the wings, and could see the scenery for what it really was.

  Between the “panels,” a square opening was cut into the ground. Polished stone steps led down into darkness and out of sight.

  Izzy shook her head in awe. “And all this time, I’ve been looking down muddy holes.”

  “I don’t do holes,” said Peter. He held out his hand and led Izzy toward the steps. “Go slowly. The stone is quite worn.”

  Izzy took it slow, careful not to slip on the stairs’ rounded edges. The steps must have been climbed by hundreds of thousands of feet to be polished so smooth. But for now, Izzy and Peter were the only ones. The passage was still and silent inside. Izzy counted thirty steps before they reached the bottom. A hallway stretched out ahead into complete darkness. Izzy followed Peter as he started walking down the hall. It was cooler farther in but not damp. She could hear her breath echoing softly off stone walls to either side.

  Peter didn’t play his flute but held it out in front of him like a torch. As they walked on, lanterns set in the walls flared alight, putting themselves out once Peter and Izzy walked past. Farther in, the passage grew larger, wide enough that a car could have driven down it. A line running down the center gave the impression that once upon a time, there must have been traffic going in both directions.

  Every so often, they passed other halls that branched off from both sides of the main corridor. Most of the halls were unmarked, but some had words carved over the entrances: Bavaria, Ayutthaya, Shenandoah.

  “This is pretty different from the last time I came through,” she whispered.

  Back then, Izzy had slid on her bottom down a narrow dirt tunnel, terrified of what might be at the end. Even though she knew what to expect this time, her heart was still drumming against her ribs.

  “This is a proper fairy road,” said Peter. “Part of the original network of passageways built between Faerie and Earth when they first separated. The hole you wriggled down was a back door, the equivalent of a drainage ditch designed to keep the main roads from flooding when it rains. It’s a good thing you went that way though. If you’d found your way into one of these passages, you’d certainly have gotten lost.” Peter stopped walking abruptly and waved his arm in front of them. “And then there’s the matter of these troublesome cave-ins.”

  Up ahead, the walls on either side of the passageway had collapsed in on each other. A pile of broken stone blocked the way, floor to ceiling.

  Peter sighed, annoyed. “These roads are so old. They’re in desperate need of repair. When I have time, I try to come down and shore them up. But since hardly anyone but me travels between our worlds anymore, it doesn’t seem worth the effort of keeping things maintained.”

  Izzy looked up at the enormous pile of rock. It would take a construction crew weeks to move that much material out of the way.

  She was just about to ask if they had to turn around when Peter held his flute to his lips. A train of slow, rising notes filled the hall. Peter repeated them over and over, picking up the tempo each time. The stones on the pile began to tremble and shift.

  Izzy stepped back and covered her ears. The rocks scraped and crunched against one another as they floated back into place. It was all very smooth and orderly. The stones snapped back into the walls and ceiling, like they just needed a reminder of where they were supposed to be. The whole thing took less than a minute. Even the rock dust swirling in the air settled right where it should be.

  Peter lowered his flute and continued walking, as if clearing fifty tons of granite was something he did every day.

  Izzy hung back. It’d been a long time since she’d seen fairy magic. She forgot how impressive it was. And how easy. A rockslide couldn’t stop Peter. So what had taken him so long to come find her?

  “I was waiting for you,” blurted Izzy. She hadn’t meant to sound upset, but her voice crackled bitterly.

  Peter stopped and turned around. He looked confused at her sudden change in mood. “Now please don’t be—”

  “Almost every day,” Izzy interrupted. “I went out into the woods after school, thinking that was the day you were going to come. But you didn’t. No one did. We thought Marian would come back at least. She told us she loved us, but obviously, she didn’t. She forgot us.”

  Marian Malloy, Izzy’s neighbor, had been her grandmother’s best friend and Izzy’s first guide into Faerie. The girls had begun to think of her as an adopted grandparent. Hen had taken Marian’s disappearance especially hard, running down the road every other day to see if the old woman had returned to her house.

  Peter folded his hands over his flute. “Now don’t start blaming Marian. She wanted to go back and see you, but she can’t. She can’t go back to Earth again, Izzy.”

  “What? Why?”

  Peter sighed. “Always questions with you.” He glanced nervously over his shoulder at the way they had come. “It’s a long story I really don’t have time to go over at the moment.”

  Izzy folded her arms in front of her. “We can walk while you talk.”

  “Oh, very well then.” Peter rolled a shoulder forward, motioning for Izzy to follow him. He walked on, tapping his flute against his knuckles. Finally, he said, “Managing the Exchange is quite a bit of work. Tedious things that no one appreciates. Everyone thinks it’s all about playing a little tune on my flute and skipping into the forest with a child at my heels. But it’s a tremendous responsibility. I make my selections with great care. I have to be sure that the human families I send the Changelings into will be good matches for them. I usually make the right choice, but it’s impossible to be accurate all the time.”

  Izzy nodded, thinking about her friends: Selden, Lug, and Dree. All of them had been rejected by their human families.

  She started to ask what that had to do with Marian before remembering that Marian was a Changeling herself. The old woman had gone to Earth many years before and had lived most of her life in the human world.

  Peter continued. “Likewise, once I bring human children into Faerie, I have to make sure they get adopted by good fairy families. That part of the arrangement is trickier.” He fell quiet for a moment. His mouth twisted on one side, then the other, like he was wrestling with some private thought. He glanced at Izzy, cleared his throat, and kept going. “Humans have a reputation for being hard workers, and there are some fairies who think that when they adopt one, they’re getting a free servant. They think they’ll be able to kick their feet up the rest of their lives. What they don’t realize is that humans are too independent to abide by that sort of treatment. Some humans also have quite a capacity for vengefulness.”

  They passed an open hall, and a puff of cool air blew onto Izzy. She shivered.


  “I’ve had more than a handful of humans run away from their fairy families over the years,” said Peter. “Some of them find new homes on their own or make their lives elsewhere in Faerie. But some grow bitter. They head north, into the lawless Norlorn Mountains. They learn magic. They become—”

  “Witches,” whispered Izzy.

  “Indeed. Humans have no innate magic of their own, but they have a keen skill for learning fairy magic and turning it to their own uses. Most of the time, the result is fairly harmless—love potions, garden tinctures, and the like. But some learn deep magic. They learn to write their own spells, and they grow very powerful. In the early days, it was quite a problem. Witches took their new knowledge back to Earth. They had too much power over their fellow humans, who had no magic to fight them. There were plagues and wars, and other humans burned anyone they thought was a witch. Those were dark, dark days that nearly destroyed both our worlds.”

  Peter tapped his chest with his flute. “It took help from both sides to finally subdue the witches. We burned their spell books and scattered the ashes. But we knew we had to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.

  “So I set a ban on all the fairy roads, big and small. If a witch sets foot on the paths between the worlds, that path will close up. With them inside.”

  Izzy suddenly felt very claustrophobic, like she could sense the millions of tons of rock surrounding her. She quickened her pace.

  “But Marian isn’t a real witch,” she said. “She’s a Changeling, not a human.”

  “She’s not technically a witch, no. But she performs magic that isn’t her own. And she’s been learning more spells while you’ve been gone. It would be too great a risk for her to chance it.”

  “Will I get to see her?” asked Izzy.

  “Yes,” said Peter cautiously. “But not right away. She’s very busy. You know Marian. Always working on some project or other.”

  “So Marian can’t go back to Earth,” said Izzy. “But that doesn’t explain why you never came to see me. You could’ve come anytime.”

  Peter ran a finger along the inside of his collar. “I’ve been so busy—busier than I have been in centuries. Besides, I thought I should give you some time to settle back in the place you belong. It was your decision to go back to Earth, after all.”

  “I know, and I’m glad I decided to go back. I wanted to stay with my family. With Hen.” Izzy felt another pang of guilt for leaving her sister behind at camp. She dragged her fingers along the cold stone wall beside her. “But the place I belong? I’m not sure that’s on Earth.”

  “Well, take comfort then. You’re about to leave it behind. At least for a little while.”

  Peter took a sudden turn into the dark archway on their left. At the end of a short hall, a shimmering puddle of green liquid threw dappled beams up onto the stone walls. When Izzy’s eyes adjusted to the brightness, she realized the puddle was actually light, shining up through a square opening cut into the floor.

  She stood beside Peter and leaned over the opening. Dizziness overtook her, and she clutched his sleeve to keep from falling in. On the other side of the hole, the trees of a lush forest swayed far below them.

  Or was it far above? It was all very confusing. Everything on the other side was upside down.

  “Is this normal?” whispered Izzy.

  “Every doorway into Faerie opens at a different angle,” said Peter, bending down and placing his hands on the edge of the hole. “Now this part is just a little tricky. It helps if you hold your breath.”

  That wasn’t a problem. Izzy was hardly breathing anyway. She watched as Peter swung himself over the lip of the opening and flipped into the green light.

  She heard his voice from the other side, but his words were too muffled to understand. He sounded even more annoyed than usual. And then she caught the sound of other voices. Her heart skipped a beat when she recognized them.

  The sleek silhouette of a cat’s head appeared over the opening. Its long tail swished back and forth. The cat spoke with a girl’s voice.

  “It’s just like you to be sneaking around, hiding in holes.”

  A wolf with thick black fur joined the cat. “What do you think, Dree? Should we leave her down there?”

  “Make room!” called a booming, kind voice, and the head of a large bear appeared, blocking out the light. Lug’s smile stretched the whole length of his face. “Dearest Izzy! Get up here this moment!”

  He reached his furry arms through the opening. Izzy grabbed his paws. In one swooping motion, Lug pulled her down—or up, she couldn’t tell which was which—headfirst into Faerie.

  5

  Reunions

  Izzy wondered if it were possible to be hugged to death. “Lug…” she stammered. “Hey…I can’t breathe!”

  Lug eased up and held her out at arms’ length. “Sorry, forgot about all this fur!” He waggled his shoulders and Changed from a bear into his normal form, which wasn’t much smaller and almost as furry. “There we go. Now where were we?” He smooshed Izzy into another embrace.

  Izzy had never quite figured out what Lug was. Unlike the other Changelings, he didn’t look like a child in his normal form. He was some mix of boy and beast, with a wide face covered in dark-brown fuzz and a black furry stripe across his eyes like a raccoon. Like all fairies, he had pointed ears.

  “My word, Izzy, we have missed you!” he said.

  Izzy laughed and patted his hairy arms. “It’s OK. I missed you too.” She took a step back to get a better look at him and nearly stepped right into the hole he had pulled her out of.

  “Careful!” said Lug, grabbing her by the elbow. “Don’t want to break an ankle your first day back in Faerie, do you?”

  Back in Faerie.

  Izzy took a deep breath and looked around. All her senses felt sharper, like she’d been living the past nine months on a flat page and someone had suddenly folded her into shape. This was the Edgewood, the sprawling forest that covered the eastern border of Faerie. She’d been gone so long, she had forgotten the scale of things. The trees around Camp Kitterpines looked like saplings compared with the massive ones that towered overhead, filling her whole view with green.

  Dree Changed into her girl form and pushed Lug aside. “All right, all right, we know you’re cuddly, Lug, but quit hogging her.”

  Dree gave Izzy a tight but brief squeeze. She wasn’t as affectionate as Lug, but then again, not many people were. She stood back from Izzy and smiled, her eyes shimmering in the sunlight. When Dree was in her girl form, she was translucent. Izzy could see through her body as if she were made of cloudy glass.

  “I bet I’ve missed you more than anyone,” Dree said to Izzy. “I’ve had to put up with these smelly boys all by myself.”

  Lug dipped his head and sniffed his armpit. “I know you’re not talking about me. I rolled in a rosemary bush just this morning.”

  Selden hung back in his boy form, running his fingers through his twisty black hair. He wore his shirtsleeves pushed up past his elbows. His dark-brown arms were covered in scratches and scars, probably from climbing trees. A look of mischief glinted in his dark eyes.

  Izzy walked up to him. “Hi. You got taller.”

  Selden grinned and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Can’t say the same for you, shrimp. Don’t they feed you anything on Earth?”

  Izzy tried to push him in the shoulder, but he sidestepped her and flicked her on the forehead. Still the same old Selden.

  “What are you all doing here?” she asked. “Peter didn’t say you guys were coming to meet me.”

  “It’s a surprise for both of us,” said Peter. He stood a few yards away with his arms folded, glaring at Selden. Peter was almost always annoyed about something, but this time, he looked genuinely angry. “I told you to wait for me to bring her back,” he snapped.

  “Why am
I the one you always get mad at?” asked Selden.

  “Because you’re the one I left in charge.”

  Selden nodded importantly. “Yes, and as the one in charge, I made the decision that we needed to bring Izzy these.”

  He reached into a cloth bag slung over his shoulder and pulled out a pair of worn leather boots with brass buckles on the sides.

  “My boots!” Izzy reached out for the familiar brown leather. “You kept them?”

  “I knew you’d come back wearing useless shoes,” said Selden, nodding down at Izzy’s sneakers.

  Izzy smiled as she sat down and unlaced her shoes. She slipped into the boots and wriggled her toes inside the soft leather. Selden was a real snob when it came to anything made on Earth, but he was right about shoes at least.

  Izzy sprang to her feet and marched in place. “I could walk for miles in these.”

  “Wonderful,” grumbled Peter. “The farthest you’ll be walking is a few hundred feet.”

  “That’s it? We’re not going to Avhalon?”

  “We are.” Dree hooked one arm around Izzy’s elbow. “Just wait till you see our ride.”

  “Race you there!” Selden jumped up and arched into a backflip. When he landed, he’d Changed into a sleek black stoat.

  “Show-off,” said Dree as he scampered ahead through the trees.

  Izzy and the others followed, crossing a dry creek bed. Up the other side, taking up most of the room in a wide clearing, sat a huge lumpy basket draped in folds of dark-purple fabric. From a distance, it looked like a giant blackberry pie that had oozed out of its crust.

  As they approached the basket, a man with curly brown hair and rosy cheeks popped up from behind the rim, holding a pair of pliers in one hand. It was Tom Diffley.

  “Izzy! Bless my bones, it’s good to see you!” He leaned over the side to give Izzy a hug.

  “Hi, Tom,” said Izzy, stretching up on her toes to reach him. She patted the basket. “This must be your latest invention.”