***
I fell onto something hard and smooth. Polished wood beneath my hands. I lifted my head and peered through my hair. Several people were standing before me. I saw shiny black boots, leggings in solid, dark colours with what looked like skirts of spun metal over them. I didn’t actually make it to the faces of the new people, because I was too busy staring at their wings.
Wings.
Fine, tall, narrow, pale, transparent wings. Extending from their upper back and towering over their heads. Tapering to a fine tip, they broadened as they swept down, equal to the height of the bearer.
I stumbled to my feet and finally looked at their faces.
Pale, pointed, pinched. Proud and peaceful. They looked at me with black eyes; their pale hair scraped back and tied behind their tapered ears. They were wearing that same shining metal-looking armour over their torsos, the kind that looked somehow spun and lightweight.
“Where am I?” I asked, gingerly feeling my wrist with my other hand – I must have jarred it when I landed.
“Welcome to Fairy, young miss,” the lead armoured person said. It was impossible to tell if they were male of female. Their facial features seemed too fine to be male and their armour covered any indication of femininity. His or her voice had an odd timbre to it and I couldn’t figure out the gender just by listening.
“Fairy?” I repeated, skipping from black gaze to black gaze. “As in… fairies?”
The lead fairy nodded. “The Queen is expecting you. Come with us.”
They led me down a sloped, smooth wooden floor – at least, at first I thought it was just a wooden floor. As I looked around, I noticed some enormous leaves drooping over the floor, and the floor itself sloped away at an alarming angle. I was shivering – I was still wet, and the breeze was making me cold.
With a start, I realised I was outside, and following the fairies down a very big branch of a tree. In fact, it was the biggest tree branch I had ever seen.
Either that, or I was suddenly very small.
I glanced behind, and saw a whirling vortex of shimmering colours that must have been where I had come out.
So… what? I had jumped into a mushroom ring in the real world and ended up in Fairyland?
Either that, or I was dreaming.
I pinched myself a few times as I followed the fairies, carefully trying to keep my balance, to the massive broad trunk of the tree. The lead fairy rapped four times on a barely visible arch, and the arch swung open to reveal the interior of the tree. It was completely hollow.
I followed the fairies inside, not knowing what else to do. My pinching hadn’t woken me up. Maybe I wasn’t dreaming. Or maybe I was too deeply asleep because Celeste had kept me awake for so long and I couldn’t wake up.
Before me was a room filled with fairies of multiple colours, dressed in elegant clothes with towering wings, their hair of all different hues pinned back from their pointed faces. An enormous table heaped with fruit and flowers took up most of the space, and way down the other end of the long room, on an ornately carved and elevated throne, sat a beautiful fairy woman with tall, elegant black wings. She was dressed in a long, shimmering, glittering black gown, and her skin was as pale as the other fairies. However, her hair was very long and loose, curling about her shoulders and arms, and as black as her enormous eyes, which seemed to glow with an inner fire.
The lead fairy led me past the long table and my eyes lingered over the food. Raspberries and blueberries bigger than my head. Seeds as big as my hand. Drops of water held in enormous buckets that looked strangely like thimbles. Flower petals in brilliant yellow-gold and deep rose-red rolled and secured with knotted blades of grass. Peanuts as big as my thigh.
I wanted very much to reach out and taste something. All the colours were so bright, so inviting, and I wanted to sink my teeth into a raspberry that was as big as my head.
I snapped my head back around, wrenching my gaze from the feast on the long table when the black fairy spoke. Her voice was so pure and clear, like a bell.
“Welcome to Fairy, my little human. I am Queen Cleona. What is your name?”
“I’m Abigail,” I said, wondering if I should bow or curtsey.
“Welcome, Abigail.”
“I thought the queen of the fairies was Titania,” I said, remembering my picture book Mummy often read to me.
Queen Cleona smiled. “Long ago, she was. I am Queen now. Please – won’t you sit and have something to eat? You must be tired from your journey.”
Her voice had an elegance to it, and a seductive quality – like I very much wanted to do as she offered.
“I jumped into a mushroom ring,” I said suddenly, remembering. “I jumped into the ring, and then I was here.”
“That is how one gets to and from Fairy,” the queen replied, that smile never leaving her red lips. Her teeth were hard and shiny and white. “Please, eat.”
I walked over to the table and looked at the feast, wondering why she was so keen to offer hospitality. The table was loaded as high as my shoulder, the food precariously balanced one on top of the other. I reached over and grasped an enormous raspberry in both my hands. It was bigger than my head, and a deep, bright red.
Everyone seemed to hold their breath as I brought it up to my face to take a bite.
And that’s when I realised. There was so much food on the table, and no one else was eating. Why was there so much there?
I hesitated. The queen fairy, the guard fairies, and all the other fairies in the hall stared at me and held their breath. Waiting. Expecting.
Someone yelled, “Don’t eat it!”
I looked up, alarmed. A young boy with short brown hair had pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He eyes were as blue as the sky on a clear summer’s day.
Then I realised he didn’t have any wings.
Two guard fairies pounced on him and hauled him out of the room. Before he was gone completely, he shouted, “Don’t eat anything: you’ll be stuck here!”
I looked around at the other fairies, all watching me with their black eyes, and glanced back to the queen. She was leaning forward on her throne, eager and very still – like my old next door neighbour’s cat when she was stalking birds.
There was no bell around this Queen’s throat. No warning at all when she would strike.
The boy’s words brought back a memory of Mummy reading me a story about fairies just before Celeste was born and we moved house.
Do not eat the food from Fairyland, or you’ll be trapped there forever.
“I think I’d rather just go home, thank you,” I said in a small voice.
Queen Cleona left her throne and came to stand in front of me. She was taller than me – taller than my mummy, too – and I peered up at her, my belly fluttering. She reached out and plucked a seed from the raspberry in my hands, then held it out to me.
“Eat,” she cooed, her voice soft and alluring. I looked from the seed back up to her black eyes. They were hard and didn’t mirror the smile on her lips.
“No,” I said. “I want to go home.”
“It is very delicious and refreshing,” she said, somewhat more forcefully.
“Please,” I said softly, the nerves in my belly giving way to fear. “I just want to go back home to my parents.”
She paused for all of one minute, staring me down. My gaze didn’t waver, and neither did her offering hand.
Then she just said, “Take her away.”
The two remaining guard fairies leapt at me and I dropped the raspberry. They seized me by the arms and started carrying me out of the hall, through another door hidden in the wood.
“What are you doing?” I cried, struggling. The queen and the other fairies watched silently as I was hauled out of the room and down a longer hallway. My feet scrabbled in the air, and they threw me into a little cell that looked like it was made of twigs. The door clanged shut and something sticky, wispy, and silver locked it shut.
“What’s going on?” I
demanded, and threw myself at the bars of the cell. The twigs held. The lead fairy looked at me and shook his – or her – head.
“You’ll be held here until you do as Her Majesty says.”
“What?” I said. “How long will that be? Just take me home!”
The lead fairy left. I tried to shake the wooden bars of my little prison, but they wouldn’t move. I pushed all my weight against them and they held fast. I inspected the lock, but it was sticky and hard and made me feel gross. Eventually I gave up and started pacing. The sunlight shining into the little wooden room, through the little wooden bars, shifted over time. When it had moved from one side of the prison to the other, and my legs had started aching from all the pacing, I finally accepted that I wasn’t going anywhere and collapsed in the corner of the cell.
I don’t know how long it took, but eventually someone came to see me. The young boy with the short dark hair, the boy who had warned me in the throne room. He was bearing a raspberry – perhaps the one I had dropped, perhaps a fresh one.
He put the raspberry next to my cage, and stood looking at me.
I leapt up from where I was sitting feeling sorry for myself, tucking my chin on my knees. “Who are you?”
“My name is Deacon,” the boy said in a low voice, hushed and urgent. “I’m a servant to the Queen. What is your name?”
“I’m Abigail,” I told him. “Can you help me out of here?”
He shook his head. “The only way out is to heat the lock, and we’re not allowed access to fire in the home tree until night time for torches. Fairies don’t like fire, so they make us human servants handle it.”
“How am I supposed to get home?” I asked desperately.
“You’re not supposed to go home,” Deacon said, coming closer to the cage. “No one’s ever refused the queen before. And when you eat fairy food, you’re trapped here forever!”
“But I didn’t eat!” I said. “And I won’t. She can’t make me.”
“She can keep you here until you give up,” he pointed out.
“Unless you help me,” I replied. “How long have you been here?”
“A few years. There are others, too. It’s not so bad.”
“You’re some kind of errand boy.”
“I’m a servant,” he said bluntly. “It’s the best life we can hope for.”
“What about your parents?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid they will be so worried you’ve been missing this long?”
“Most of the time the fairies replace the children they take with changelings – if the child is young enough, the changeling can grow up never knowing the truth. The babies are raised here in Fairy as servants as well.”
“They take babies?”
He nodded. “The parents don’t even notice. They take them in the night and raise the babies to be servants. I once heard a rumour that the babies wear glamours so the parents don’t even realise they’re different. The glamours fade over time and the parents think it’s their babies just growing up. You can tell if a fairy’s been visiting because they leave behind mushroom rings. They only appear when a fairy has come through the portal in the last five days.”
I thought immediately of Celeste. After Mummy had taken her to the doctor’s, she had gotten a lot better. She had gotten a lot better overnight. She had stopped crying so much, had gained weight, and generally looked healthier – like a plump baby should look. I’d never heard of a glamour before, but I sure could guess what it was.
“I think they took my sister.”
“And now they have you.”
“You must help me to escape. I haven’t eaten anything yet: I can still find my sister and get home. Please, help me!”
Deacon looked over his shoulder and leaned closer. “I’ll see what I can do. Web-locks aren’t easy to break – spider silk is a lot stronger when you’re only as big as the spider.”
I shivered. Silver spider silk kept me locked away. It must also be what the fairy armour was made out of. They shared the same unique sheen and glitter.
Deacon whispered once more. “I have to go, but I’ll be back when I can. Do your best to refuse their food – drinking water is OK, as far as I’m aware: it’s the food that traps you. That’s why it’s all so yummy. Do your best to say no, and I’ll be back when I can break open the lock.”
Fairies dressed in luscious colours accompanied by the guards came in and looked at me as I sat glaring at them. After three or four had come into my little room and asked questions such as how old I was, what grade was I in at school, did I play any sports, and asking how much I was capable of lifting or how long I could go without food, I realised that they must be some of the people that I would serve when I ate something and was trapped here. Trapped in Fairy, never to see my mummy and daddy again. Trapped, and my parents going to raise a changeling as my sister while I remained missing.
As annoying as Celeste was, I didn’t want Mummy and Daddy kissing someone else goodnight. It was supposed to be me and my sister. She was just a baby: she couldn’t help being noisy, especially if she was sick. I was going to escape Fairy, and I was going to find my sister and bring her back home, too.
I was getting hungry now. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast: crumpets and honey that were delicious at the time, and now I wanted more. I wanted real food, not this fairy goodness designed to trap me here. My mouth was dry and I was thirsty. My head ached as well.
Deacon came back with a thimbleful of water. He pushed it through the bars of my little cage and I drank some, scooping it out with my hand. It soothed my dry throat, but did nothing to relieve the ache in my belly.
“I can’t do anything until they light a fire later tonight,” he whispered through the bars. “They’re very strict about fire in the home tree – it easily burns anything Fairy if it gets out of control.”
“I can last until night time,” I said. A little hunger wouldn’t be the end of me. It wasn’t like I was bleeding to death.