by Amy Wilson
‘No,’ I whisper. ‘My house is quite close by, but not actually in the forest.’
She looks like she’s going to say more, but then Yanny careers into the cafeteria and swooshes through all the other kids to land with a clatter and a grin at our table.
‘How’s day one going?’ he asks, sliding into the chair opposite us. He pulls a battered tin out of his bag and opens it. Tiny golden pastries nestle in waxed paper along with a shiny red apple and a wedge of dark, sticky-looking cake.
‘Yanny has the most ridiculous lunches.’ Zara sighs. ‘But he is very good at sharing.’ She gestures to her own box, and Yanny takes some of the crackers, shoving his tin towards us.
‘Help yourself,’ he says with a smile. There’s a pull in the air when he does it, which makes the world darken for just a second. My chest aches. And then it’s gone, and the buzz of the cafeteria returns.
But it was there for a moment; I’m sure I didn’t imagine it. Magic. Forest magic, dark and alluring. How can that be? He’s human. Isn’t he? I stare at him, and he stares back, and Zara reaches over and takes one of the pastries, putting it whole in her mouth.
‘Mmph,’ she says, closing her eyes. ‘So good . . .’
‘I don’t have much to share,’ I say, looking down at my meagre spread. I wish I’d thought to bring more. I could have made a cake . . . or brought some of the good cheese.
Zara shakes her head and charges off, returning quickly with a knife. She smooths out my paper bag and lays everything out, sausage and pear neatly divided. The pastries collapse into layers of buttery goodness in my mouth, and Zara’s salty crisps are delicious, too. The pear from our orchard is smooth and tastes of summer. One of Nan’s favourite stories is the one where her human grandfather built our home and planted the orchard, and of how he’d trade with the creatures in Winterspell Forest: golden pears for the rich, dark berries that made his favourite wine.
Of course, that was before he met the fae queen and became a part of their world. Long before even Nan was born, and an age before the Shadow King – my father – began to destroy all the goodness there . . .
I stare at Yanny. His food tastes incredible, but the way it dissolves makes me wonder if there’s magic in it. If he lives in Winterspell, he must know all of its secrets. He doesn’t look much like a fae warrior to me. Especially not with pear juice all over his chin.
‘So,’ begins Zara, scrunching up the crumb-festooned bag and throwing it with an expert flick of her wrist into the nearest bin. ‘Are you going to tell Stella about your secret lessons?’ She grins as she says it, but there’s an edge to her voice, and Yanny’s dark eyes glint.
‘They’re not secret,’ he says. ‘Just extra languages – that sort of thing.’
I think it’s meant to fend me off, but it doesn’t, because a lot of magic is about language. Many spells are written in Latin or Ancient Elvish, and there are books full of Greek and Norse in our library. One of Nan’s favourite lectures is about the study of language being the most powerful there is.
‘I like languages,’ I say. ‘Who’s your teacher?’
‘Miss Capaldi,’ he says. He closes his lunch tin and shoves it back in his bag, just as the bell rings. ‘Come on. We have art together.’
‘If you find out,’ hisses Zara as we head off through the corridors in his wake, ‘you will tell me, right? I’ve been trying to get it out of him for weeks, but he’s immune to my questions. You already have him rattled. Maybe he can see you’re on to him. Are you on to him? Do you know what’s going on?’
‘No idea!’ I manage. And it’s true, but this whole thing is disconcerting. If Yanny is a creature from the forest, if there’s some kind of magic going on up there, I can’t share that with her. The fae and the human worlds don’t mix. Or at least, I didn’t think they did. Here, anything seems possible, and it’s not what I wanted on my first day. I wanted a normal school, not one with magic on the top floor, and secrets that seem to make awkward spaces between friends.
Even as I think it, I smile. Because however complicated today might have been, it’s been a day. A day of school. Of lessons, and lunch, and new friends who talk and share, even though they hardly know me at all.
No matter what Nan might say, I know I won’t regret that.
Nan is furious. I round the corner to our house, and she is billowing out of the chimney in a great dark cloud of worry and fear. All the lines I’ve been rehearsing, the stories I’ve held in my head to tell her, vanish completely. I loiter, walking slowly down the lane. I need time to work out how to talk my way around her, and my mind is still working through everything that happened today.
It was chaos. Loud, and hot and completely bewildering. I hardly remembered to breathe for much of it, and I still don’t know anything about any of the lessons, or how to read the flipping timetable. The smells and the sounds still clamour in my mind, and that fizzing feeling of nervous excitement I had this morning is still there in the pit of my belly.
But.
I grin. It was fun. And I made friends.
Peg darts up to me as I bend down to pick up an acorn, searching through dried amber leaves for its cup.
‘Well, I hope it was worth it,’ he says, whirring about my head.
I sigh and plonk myself on to the ground, cross-legged, catching him in my hands and holding him up to eye level. He blinks. His presence is so small, and yet it fills me up. He’s been with me for as long as I can remember; there is no part of my life that he couldn’t sing.
Except today.
‘Peg, I think it was,’ I say through a sudden lump in my throat. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry that it upset Nan, and if it caused trouble for you, but I wouldn’t change it. I won’t change it!’
‘You’ll go back?’ He tilts his head.
‘Tomorrow.’ I look at the dark earth, packed and dry beneath the leaves. Peg flutters to my knee as I start my search once more. ‘And all the days after that.’
‘Every day?’
‘Not weekends. Just Monday to Friday. Nan will get used to it,’ I say, finding the pitted acorn cup and holding it up with a grin. It’s bigger than the silver one around my neck, but even so . . . they’re such small things that the great oaks grow from. ‘She will, Peg. She loves me. She’ll see that it makes me happy . . .’
Funny how such a tiny creature can make such a sound of deep disapproval. Peg manages it, and then he launches off and away into the forest.
He keeps secrets. All the time, off in the forest, and he’ll never tell me anything about what’s really in there. I want to hear news of the centaurides and the sprites, and the mirror lake where golden fish speak bewitching tales to unsuspecting passers-by, just as they do in all Nan’s best stories. I want to know of the shadows, of my father. But all Peg ever says is that the forest is fair, and frightful wild besides.
I tuck the acorn into the earth by the side of the path with a little wish, touching my own silver acorn and hearing Nan’s voice, years ago, on one of the days I yearned for more. ‘It is here,’ she’d said, reaching out and touching it with pale fingers. ‘It is not whole, and it is not the shape we may have hoped for, but there is family here, and if you hold it tight, Stella, you cannot lose it. It will grow . . .’
‘I said no!’ Nan howls when I finally gather up the courage to walk through the back door. She’s writhing around the kitchen table, clasping her mist-thin hands together.
I dump my bag and lean up against the table.
‘How could you, Stella? After all these years of you and me, all the trust, all the lessons . . . How could you just abandon it all?’
‘I haven’t! I can still do lessons here. You can’t just keep me locked up forever. What happens when I’m older? Did you even think of what would happen when I grew up? Am I supposed to live my whole life here alone?’
‘Of course not,’ she snaps, coalescing into her true shape. Nan shape. She reaches out to me, and I feel the chill of her touch, see the regret on
her face when it makes me flinch. ‘I wanted to keep you . . . keep you safe for a while longer. That’s all.’
‘I am safe,’ I tell her. ‘There are hundreds of kids there. It’s a normal school!’ I push away the thoughts of magic and secret lessons. ‘I did maths, and English, and PE, and I shared my lunch with some of my classmates. How can that be wrong?’
‘It is wrong if you go against the wishes of your family. I am not holding you to others’ standards – I am holding you to ours! We are the keepers of this house, the only ones who stand between the shadow forest and the human world. The time will come when that will mean everything. Isn’t that enough excitement for you?’
‘It isn’t exciting! It’s silver wire and books and rules and old, musty things that aren’t even alive any more!’
‘Well, I hope that’s not me you’re referring to,’ she mutters after a shocked silence.
Peg is being a small golden lizard. He stares down at us from the wooden beam where copper spoons hang, catching the firelight, and I feel horrible. Like I turned myself inside out, and they can both see all the messy bits that are normally hidden within.
‘What do you mean by the time will come, anyway?’ I ask after a while.
‘The forest grows, and so does your father’s darkness,’ she says. ‘His shadows seek to swallow the world whole. One day, you will be the one who stands in his way.’
‘Me?’
‘Of course you!’
‘We can’t even get into the forest, Nan. We have no idea where his palace is any more, or even if he’s still there!’
‘Legend says you will face him – I’ve told you so before. When you are grown. This house and all the magic we have gathered here is headed for that day.’
‘Well I’m not doing it. I don’t know how to face him. I don’t even know what I’d be facing! Besides, every time we’ve tried to get close, all we’ve done is make it worse. I need to have more than just legends, Nan.’
‘Just legends,’ she splutters. ‘All the world is made of legends!’
‘No! It’s made of people!’ I shout. ‘I need this. I can keep our barriers strong. I can study and make the house safe. I will be here when the time comes. But I need to have this too.’
‘It’s a bad idea,’ she says.
‘Can you stop me?’ I demand.
‘Well. I could lock up the house so you can’t get out . . .’ Her eyes gleam.
‘I could unlock it.’
‘With magic?’
‘I do know a spell or two.’
‘I should think you do! I’ve been teaching you for long enough. And you’ve been reading the books, no?’
‘Of course I’ve been reading the books. The books are all I’ve had for years!’ I fling myself into the old armchair by the fire, and she floats to hers opposite.
‘And your old nan,’ she says with a growl in her throat.
‘And you . . . and Peg. But you’re not . . . You’re not people, Nan!’
‘People.’ She sniffs. ‘I think I’d take a ghost or an imp any day, over people.’
‘I do. I have. But I really want to at least know some people before I decide they’re all rubbish.’
She sighs, and a ravel of her essence puffs out like smoke.
‘Perhaps it will be a relief, not to have you trailing around like a lost cloud,’ she concedes after a moment.
My heart leaps, and I grin, dancing my feet on the floor.
‘A trial period,’ she says, raising a finger. ‘And you must tell me everything.’
So I do. I tell her about the lessons, and how the corridors fill with charging crowds and flapping bags. I don’t tell her about Yanny, or the magic I felt in him, or about the hidden corridors. I don’t really know anything about them, anyway.
‘And there’s a lot of stationery,’ I finish. ‘And . . . good lunches.’
‘I didn’t go to school,’ she says. ‘We had a tutor, my brother and I.’ She folds her arms. ‘What’s this about good lunches? We don’t have good lunches here? Cheese from the cellar and sweet apples? Bread from Mrs Mandrake?’
Mrs Mandrake delivers food every Saturday morning. It’s a standing order Nan has, and she’s paid up to infinity, she always told me. The bread Mrs Mandrake makes herself, and there’s milk and golden butter from her cows. Sometimes, there is elderberry cordial; sometimes, she’ll bring cake. She stays and drinks tea and looks out of the window towards the forest and talks about when she was a girl and she discovered the fae magic in Winterspell, and Nan rescued her from the lake where the mer-fae like to sing. Nan loves to see her; she puts so much energy into being here when she visits that I barely see her on Sundays.
‘They had crisps.’
‘Well, you have brown potatoes and Mrs Mandrake’s salty butter. And you have a whole house of wonder. You don’t need crisps. Or special stationery. What is special stationery?’
‘Bright-coloured rubbers, scented pens, sparkly things . . .’
‘Oh the world does love a sparkly thing,’ she says darkly. ‘Until they see what lies beneath.’
‘What?’
‘We can ask Mrs Mandrake to bring you supplies if you need them,’ she says then. ‘I want happiness for you, Stella. I just didn’t think it would take this route.’ She exchanges a look with Peg and shakes her head. ‘Humans. Let’s hope they’re as good as you think they can be.’
‘Your grandfather was human, and he wasn’t so bad, was he?’
‘Hmph.’ She folds her arms. ‘Make a list of all these stuffins you think you need. And then chores. And an omelette for tea, with some of those lovely brown potatoes . . .’ Her voice drifts as her body pales into nothing. She doesn’t stay as long as she once did, back when I was smaller. She isn’t so solid. She’s wearing out.
One day, maybe she won’t come back at all.
I swallow hard and pull an old notebook towards me and start my list, and I think about tomorrow, and Mrs Mandrake’s visit on Saturday, and I fill my mind, and I pack my heart with all the sparkly things I can imagine, and Peg flutters about me, warm and full of song.
That night, the chores are easier. The chickens – Onion, Basil and Salt – seem pleased to see me; the carrots come out of the loose earth without a fight; and the silver wire that holds the boundary between our garden and the edge of the forest is a bright moonlit line, hung with charms and tatters of spells from generations past. I can touch them when I’m here. My parents, my grandparents, the reality they left behind. Paper they wrote on, folded and tucked into glass baubles, enchanted copper bells and tiny vials of blood and thistle-down, all collected by Nan and used to hide our house from the fae and the shadows that live in Winterspell.
I trail my fingers through it all and let my mind fill with who they were. My mother, the artist; my father, the mechanic. Fleeting images of them appear in my mind as I touch the essence they left behind: moving scenes of laughter and tears and dancing between endlessly tall trees. Splashing through the river, the drift of snowfall. Snatches of their lives before the Plaga, caught in tiny glass jars. My father had a plaited beard with copper strands that fell to his waist. My mother had pale hair that flew out like a starburst around her head.
‘I went to school today,’ I tell the moon, hoping that somehow my mother will know it. I recall my day, as if she can see straight back into me from wherever she is. Yanny, and Zara, and chaos and crisps.
‘You won’t leave for good?’ asks Peg in a tiny voice, fluttering over the wire and making it hum.
‘No, of course not. This is home.’
‘Good.’ He stares at me. ‘Don’t you forget that. I’ll keep it safe while you’re gone – but you must always come back, Stella.’
‘For the day I’m grown?’ I sigh.
‘For me!’
I hold out my hand, and he curls in my palm, a golden lizard once more, and we go back in together. Then he and Nan boss me about the kitchen until I’ve cooked a pretty good omelette and just-soft potatoe
s, and I light a candle on the table and crank up the radio, and Nan tells one of her old stories about the centaur who fell in love with his reflection and was only saved from drowning by the silver birch who threw her seeds into the water to break the spell. The scrape of cutlery is only mine, and it is only me who can clear up afterwards, but right now, it doesn’t feel so lonely. It feels like home.
That night I don’t stay up staring across the field towards Winterspell. I don’t sit on the windowsill while shadows dance between the trees, wondering about the fate of the fae in there, or what my bitter, broken-hearted father is doing. I close the curtains with a shiver and think about tomorrow.
But my dreams are tangled things of forests that grow thick along school corridors, and strange creatures chasing me down endless staircases, and in the morning, while I gather pears and cheese, and I butter the last of Mrs Mandrake’s soft, dark crusted bread, the anticipation of the day sends fizzles through my veins. And there’s something else. A little fear. What is Yanny hiding, with his special lessons and the way he makes the air change? Could he really be fae?
No matter, I tell myself. Whatever he is, I’m not about to miss out on school, after all this, and now that I’ve got Nan’s blessing. I dart through the door before she can take it back, and let myself be soothed by the reflection of the yellow sky in the slow-moving river, the mist still clinging to the moorland that bounds the forest, the weight of my bag on my back, the acorn around my neck that means family.
I’ve got everything I need.
Nothing I can’t handle.
Zara is waiting for me at the gate, the only still point amid the mass of kids’ bodies streaming through the vast wrought-iron gates. A little rush of joy squirrels through me as she raises one hand in a wave. As if I wouldn’t notice her. As if I wouldn’t stop.
‘OK?’ she asks, as I get close. ‘It’s nice that you’re punctual. Normally I wait for Yanny, but he’s always late, and I really hate being late.’
‘Should we wait for him, then?’
‘No – he doesn’t like it much. I can’t help telling him he’s late, and he already knows he is, so it’s not the best start to the day. Let’s go in, and he can sort himself out.’