by Holly Webb
As Emily had raced up the stairs, they had changed into something strange and new. She had thought it was her parents trying to stop her, and kept running, until she burst out through one of the secret magical doors on to a riverbank somewhere elsewhere. The fairy world.
It hadn’t taken long for the fairy people to find her. Over the years they had caught glimpses of her through the doors and wondered about this curious human child, almost in their world. Her arrival had been noted at once, and then there had been music, strange sweet singing, and Emily had fallen asleep. She’d woken to find herself in a palace, surrounded by beautiful, terrifying, hungry creatures, the Ladies of the fairy court.
These were the kind of evil ancient fairies who would happily keep human children as pets, as they were so full of energy and life. For fairies, who could live a very long time, the child’s youth was a sort of tonic. Like vitamin tablets, Emily thought now. The Ladies had tried to feed Emily with the most delicious-looking fruit and berries, but her sisters had rescued her before she had eaten anything.
Emily shivered, thinking about it again. It was like Robin had just explained. She might not have got any older in the fairy country, but she would have been used up. Perhaps she would have just disappeared.
Emily had been making a sort of mental list of the things she wanted to know. She liked chatting to Robin, and Lark and Lory, but her dad was the best at explaining things – it was what he did for a living, after all. She opened the study door cautiously. Her dad could be very bad-tempered when he was working. If he was in the middle of a tricky bit, he was quite likely to yell, or throw a pencil at her. She needed to get in with the tea and the muffin quickly.
Ash wasn’t at the computer – he was curled into the battered old armchair in the back corner of the room, scowling down at a notebook. As Emily peered round the door, he scowled at her instead.
“I brought you tea!” She held the mug out enticingly. “And I made muffins!”
“What have you broken?” her dad asked suspiciously. “Please don’t tell me it’s the TV again.”
“I haven’t broken anything.” Emily put the muffin down on top of his notebook and smiled hopefully. “I just want to talk to you. Ask you things. Please?”
Ash looked at her thoughtfully, and took the tea and the muffin, sliding the notebook on to the floor. “I’d been expecting you to ask before, Ems. I know we owe you an explanation. More of one than you got last week, anyway. I’ve been waiting for you to be ready.”
Emily nodded gratefully, and her dad squashed himself to one side of the armchair, making a gap that she could curl into. She leaned against him, catching the dry, smoky scent that she had always thought was soap, or aftershave. Now she suspected it might just be the smell of him.
“So, are there secret things you can’t tell me then?” Emily asked curiously.
“Of course. There always are. Everyone has secrets. But they are things I wouldn’t tell Lark, or Lory, or Robin either.”
Emily nodded. That was reasonable. Her family’s whole life was based on secrets. Some of them would have to be kept.
Her dad took a gulp of tea, sighed happily, and smiled down at her. “And there are some things I just don’t know. Mysteries. You’re unique, Emily – a human child who has lived with fairies all her life – and who’s gone through the doors and come back again. You may have seen things even I don’t know about.”
Emily leaned back against him, wriggling under his arm so that he had to sip his tea carefully around her. “I don’t really understand why you all live here.” Emily’s fingers dug tight into her dad’s sweater, without her really thinking about it. Keeping hold of him. “Why don’t you live … over there? Why is this house so important?” And why did you bring me into it… she added silently.
Her dad took a gulp of tea and reached over the arm of the chair to set the mug down. Then he wrapped his arm around her tightly. “It’s a gatehouse. Full of doors. To our land, and others.”
Emily wriggled round to stare up at him sharply. “Other places as well? What other lands?”
He sighed. “Don’t take it as an invitation to go exploring again, Emily. We never meant for you to be able to get through the first time. Most of the doors are closed. Sealed shut. They only open when they must, and even I don’t know what’s beyond them. But most of the doors are to my own world. This house was built when the town here grew and spread out into the countryside, and the quiet, secret places weren’t so quiet any more. It was built to protect the doors. To protect the lands from each other. I guard the house, for the king.”
“There’s a king?” Emily whispered, her voice suddenly full of excitement. “A fairy king, really? And a queen too?” She imagined a palace, with little towers crowned with flags. Fountains splashing. Games, and dances, and the fairy queen, the most beautiful creature in the world…
“No.” Her father’s voice dropped sadly, and he stroked her hair. “No, our queen died, many years ago.”
“Oh…”
“Which is why the Ladies are so strong, and so dangerous.” Emily’s father moved his hand down to cup her face and lifted it up so he could look into her eyes. She shivered, seeing that his own had darkened again, the way they had done when she’d seen his real form.
“They’re all fighting for power, you see. There’s no queen, and the king might choose to marry again. One of them. Or their daughters, or sisters, or cousins. Everything is about family.”
“I suppose so,” Emily muttered. Everything always was.
Her father was still staring into her eyes, and even though she tried to look away, she couldn’t. “You are part of my family,” he told her seriously. “And I want you safe. Stay away from the doors, Emily.” He sighed at her. “I can’t believe you’ve grown so quickly. It seems only yesterday I found you. You must promise me you’ll stay away from the doors.”
“I promise…” Emily blinked thoughtfully. “Are there any others? More doors? Or are these the only ones?”
“There are more…” her father admitted. “Not many. And not all of them known. There are secret doors, hidden here and there. The king would have them all sealed if he could, but our world doesn’t work well with bars and chains. It needs to breathe, so there are little openings that appear, here and there. The doors in this house are the true gateways, where any visitors can come and go.”
“Are there lots of visitors?” Emily asked him, trying to remember people she’d seen in the house, friends of her parents. Had they all been fairies too? Travelling between the worlds?
“Some … but not many. Our world doesn’t mix well with this one. Our magic is too dangerous. A fairy lost or loose out here is a disaster.” He patted her cheek. “And the same for a human child over there, Ems. Only those with permission from the king go through. No one else.”
“But if there are secret doors—” Emily began, but her father interrupted, his voice hardening.
“Anyone who uses those doors is a danger, and must be stopped. The worlds don’t mix.”
“Oh…” Emily hesitated. “But, I mean, I used one of the doors, and I wasn’t meant to. I didn’t have permission from the king.”
“And look what happened,” her father pointed out gently. “It wasn’t your fault but your mother had to go and beg forgiveness from Lady Anstis. Lark and Lory could have been bound over to her as servants for the way they behaved. And who knows what would have happened to you.”
“I’m sorry.” She hadn’t known. She hadn’t realized. Which one had been Anstis? Emily wondered. The dark-haired one, she guessed. The one with the beautiful wings like a peacock butterfly, and that perfect crimson silk dress. The one whose nails had lengthened to dark claws when she had come stalking after Emily, as Lark and Lory flew her away back home. “Did Mum have to – have to do anything bad?”
“No.” Her father hugged her tightly. �
�She said it was all very polite. They drank tea, and discussed how difficult it was to bring up children well in this awful place. But we owe her a favour now, Ems, you see.”
Emily shuddered, remembering the way Lady Anstis had moved, jerky and strange, as though her legs bent backwards like a goat’s. What sort of favour might she want?
“Does that mean I can never go back?” she asked longingly, and her father sighed.
“You want to, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Emily nodded. “All the time.” She glanced up at him warily. “Every time I go past the mirror on the landing, I want to touch it, to see if I can go through. But I don’t even see the girl with the greeny-gold hair in it any more. She’s gone. Some of the other pictures move, and I still see the doors changing around sometimes. But that mirror’s not even misty.”
“We changed the guard spells,” her father murmured, “when we realized that you could get through the doors. You shouldn’t have been able to, but the magic in the house has grown up with you now. The doors know you. And now you’ve crossed over and come back, the magic is even stronger inside you. Be careful, Emily.”
“Careful of what?” Emily frowned up at him, and her father shrugged helplessly.
“Just – be careful.” He shook his head at her anxiously, and Emily slipped off the chair, gently kissing the grey wing of hair over his ear.
“I promise I will.” It was the second promise Emily had made him, and as she took away his empty plate, she thought to herself that she had no idea how to keep either one.
“Did you understand that homework?” Emily’s best friend Rachel asked. “The comprehension? I didn’t think some of the questions made sense. It took me ages, and I still don’t think I got it right.”
Emily stared at her, desperately trying to remember the homework. She hadn’t really been paying attention to Rachel chattering as they walked to school. Now that they were in Year Six, she and Rachel walked together, without their parents – except on days when Rachel had been staying at her dad’s flat, which was on the other side of town. Emily loved the chance to gossip about school. The only downside was they had to take Robin with them. But he was running along ahead of them like he usually did, ridiculously fast. How could I not have noticed how fast he is? Emily thought suddenly, watching him stop and whirl round, almost in mid-air. How could I not have seen that he’s different?
On a normal day, Emily and Rachel chatted all the way to school, but Emily realized she’d hardly said anything this morning. She’d been trying to get her head round everything her dad had told her.
The thing was, even though she knew it was dangerous, Emily desperately wanted to go back through the doors. She could still feel the pull of that strange place. Maybe it was enough to have breathed the air? Part of the fairy world was inside her already. She couldn’t help wanting to understand it better, that tiny spark of magic inside her.
Mostly, she wanted to see more of the people. Not so much those grand, terrifying Ladies. They had been beautiful – like fairy princesses in books. But now looking back, Emily thought an awful lot of their beauty and charm must be built on spells. Emily was more interested in the others: the tree people who had found her on the riverbank, and the brownie creatures who had worked as servants in the palace. Most of all, Emily wanted to see the girl in the mirror again. She had been the first fairy that Emily had ever seen – apart from the fairies she lived with and didn’t know about, anyway. Emily had glimpsed her in the mirror on the landing between Lark’s room and Lory’s. A pale, curious face, trailing odd greenish, flattish sort of hair. The girl had been looking out at Emily, watching her.
The girl had known who Lark and Lory were, Emily now realized. She’d helped them escape the Ladies’ huntsmen, who had been set on them after Emily had decided that she didn’t want to be a fairy’s pet, that she wasn’t eating those strange, oozing berries, and that she was going home with her sisters, thank you very much. The girl had shown them a door back to the house. A door that appeared somehow in the middle of a river. Emily thought the girl must be some sort of water sprite – she had webbed fingers, as well as that weed-like hair.
“Ems? Homework? You know, that reading comprehension?” Rachel was staring at her.
Emily blinked. Rachel was starting to look annoyed, which wasn’t surprising. Even before last weekend’s bombshell, Emily hadn’t been the best of friends. She’d already worked out that there was something odd going on at home, and she was angry, and teary, and just plain weird – all three taking it in turns.
Secretly crossing her fingers in the folds of her skirt and apologizing to Rachel, she decided the best thing to do was lie. She couldn’t remember the homework at all. When she’d got up that morning, school had been the last thing on her mind – again. She’d realized at breakfast that there was homework and she hadn’t done it, but Lark had grabbed the sheet of paper and dictated the answers to her in between bites of toast. Then Lory had stared over her shoulder at Emily’s homework book and made her change a couple of answers because, as she put it, they were too good to believably be Emily’s. The only part of the homework that was actually hers was the spelling, and she could hardly remember the story the questions had been about.
“Mmmm, it was hard, wasn’t it…” she murmured.
They were just walking in through the school gates when Rachel nudged Emily. “Ugh. Don’t look now, but Katie Meadows is giving you the evil eye again.”
Back before Emily had learned that there were such things as fairies after all, she and Rachel had decided that Katie Meadows was probably a witch. They couldn’t work out how else she managed to get everything her own way all the time, and make everyone else’s lives so miserable. She was one of those people who had a talent for spotting weaknesses. Even tiny things, like a bad hair day, or tripping over in PE. She always noticed. And then she found the perfect chance to say something that wasn’t just horrible, it was perfectly horrible, and it made you feel about a million times worse.
“I think she’s got some weird power that means other people feeling awful makes her stronger,” Emily said grimly. “She feeds off it. She’s like a misery-sucker. Whatever the proper name for one of those is.”
Katie was also very clever at spotting the people to pick on. The only good thing about how dazed Emily had been feeling all last week was that she’d been too far away inside her own thoughts to notice the mean things Katie was saying to her. And about her. Katie had several girls who hung around with her, mostly because they wanted to protect themselves, Emily and Rachel thought. If they hadn’t been members of her little coven, she would have picked on them mercilessly. Katie had noticed that Emily had something strange going on before anyone else. It was like she had antennae, tuned for it.
“She’s got Ellie-Mae and Lara with her, and they’re all whispering,” Rachel muttered. “We should have gone and found that tree!”
Rachel had read a book about witches that said they could be frightened away with the branches and berries from a rowan tree. It was because there were little stars on the ends of each berry, stars with five points, which were some sort of symbol of protection. Rachel had even looked up trees in the school library and found out what rowans looked like, but then Katie had found another victim, and they’d never bothered to search out a tree. It was probably a good thing, Emily realized. Fairies might not like rowans either. Who knew what might have happened if they’d tried to take rowan branches inside her house? Splatted rowan berries all over their clothes, probably, or worse.
Perhaps Katie really was a witch? Emily shivered. If there were fairies, why not witches too? Perhaps strange creatures were everywhere? She needed to drag Dad away from his book again and force him to make her a list of all the different types of magical creatures. She could ask Lark and Lory and Robin, but she wouldn’t put it past them to make stuff up just to see if they could get her to believe it. It w
ould be just like Robin, and Lory was always trying to make out that Emily was her silly little sister. She’d love to convince Emily that there were such things as ogres, or mermaids, or unicorns. Emily forgot Katie again for a second, as she hoped to herself that unicorns were real.
Emily could feel Rachel beside her – they weren’t close enough to be touching, but she could tell that Rachel was keyed up and waiting, expecting something horrible to happen. Rachel minded Katie’s bullying much more than Emily did. Even though Rachel was clever, much cleverer than Emily, she was useless at thinking of things to say when people were mean. She said her mind just didn’t work like that. She thought up the perfect thing to say hours later, when she’d been worrying over the whole fight for ages and ages and making herself feel totally miserable. Emily usually managed to think of something to say at the time, even if it was only rolling her eyes and telling Katie to shut up.
“You look even more stupid than usual.” Katie eyed Emily with her head on one side, like a hungry bird. It was odd, because Katie wasn’t the slightest bit bird-like to look at, Emily thought. She had a round, pale face, and her eyes were so dark you couldn’t see the pupils. She wasn’t pretty, but there was something about her that made you want to look.
“I suppose a whole weekend with your weird family does that.” Katie leaned in closer to her, and Emily vaguely noticed that Ellie-Mae and Lara were watching her eagerly, as though they were waiting for something that had been planned.