“We’re the can-do crow girls today,” Zia assures me.
As they fall back into their familiar ways, it feels like the sun coming out from behind a bank of dark clouds. Even depressed as I am about Geordie and what I’ve done to him, I can’t help but smile.
As I tell them what happened, they peer over the edge of the drop.
“Is that all?” Zia says.
“How much of him do you need?” Maida asks Timony.
I expect them to go clambering down the rock face like a pair of monkeys, magically picking up all the little grains of dirt, the bits of twig and leaf. Instead, they hold hands and sing some nonsense song that trills and rises like morning birdsong, when it’s not squeaky and shrill like the cries of mice and other rodents.
I’m about to ask them to please stop fooling around and help, when something magical does happen.
Once upon a time . . .
I don’t know where they come from, these hundreds of birds and animals and bugs. Pink-winged flickers and spiny lizards. Cactus wrens and little white-throated woodrats. Ground squirrels and sparrows. Shrews and mice and toads and beetles. Tarantulas and a whole column of harvester ants.
I lose track of them all and can only stand there with the others, watching as the animals and birds swarm over the rocks, or fly from one to another, collecting little unrecognizable bits that they drop in a growing pile at Timony’s feet. The crow girls laugh and clap and egg them on.
“That’s it, that’s it!”
“Every changeling bit.”
They look at each other, giggling at the impromptu rhyme.
And when the growing pile seems to encompass every little bit and piece that spilled when my pail went tumbling off the edge, Timony moves his hands over it and mutters something just under his breath. I watch as the seaweed creature falls apart, collapsing into a mess of drying weeds liberally sprinkled with driftwood and shells and other debris. While there, in the pile collected by the wild creatures the crow girls summoned, something stirs.
I realize I’m holding my breath, but I can’t seem to let it out and take another.
Something stirs.
Once upon a time . . .
The debris rises in a ghostlike shape of a man, then slowly solidifies.
Once upon a time . . .
And Geordie’s standing there, blinking in the bright light.
“Oh, my god,” I hear Lizzie say.
“Ta da!” Zia cries.
“La di da di da ta da!” Maida adds, so as not to be outdone.
Their little army of helpers scamper and fly away as quickly as they came, and then the crow girls are birds again, flying loop-the-loops in the air above us.
You see, you see? I hear in my head.
We promised and we did.
Because we’re the can-do crow girls.
Then with a dip of their wings and a chorus of bye-byes, they’re gone, too, sailing away from the mesa on currents of wind, casting two shadows on the red dirt of the plain before them. But I hardly see them go. My whole world narrows to the fact that Geordie’s back. He’s in his own body and he’s okay. Grinning at me.
I don’t have words for what swells inside me.
I close the distance between us and hug him as tightly as I can, my head pressed into his lower chest, because I’m still a child’s size.
“This is weird,” he says. “When I look at you, you’re just a kid, but when I feel you, it’s like you’re an adult. You know, taller and everything.”
I step back from him and look up into his face.
“Really?” I ask.
He nods.
“It’s what Del has done to you,” Timony says. “Geordie sees the illusion, but he can’t feel it.”
I look around at the others, my gaze settling on Honey.
“Do you see through it?” I ask.
She shakes her head. But only because you don’t.
“So is it real, or not?”
“I think it’s both,” Timony says. “Just as the world inside your head doesn’t exist, yet at same time, it does.”
“This is too weird.”
I turn away and give Geordie another hug. I’m being greedy because I know what’s still to come, even if no one else has figured it out yet. And then I tell a little white lie.
“We need to have a long talk when this is all over,” I say to Geordie. “You know, about you and me.”
It’s not a complete lie because if there is an after, I’m definitely going to want to have that talk.
“I know,” he says. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“What do you mean when this is all over?” Lizzie asks. “Aren’t we done here? And talk about anticlimactic. Not that I’m complaining, but after all our struggling, just like that, everything’s okay.”
I don’t know where she gets the “just like that.” Has she so quickly forgotten the Del-world inside my crazy head, and what we had to go through in it? It had taken Honey to rescue us. Timony to restore her and Geordie. The crow girls to bring in their wildlife troops to find all the bits and pieces of Geordie’s changeling self. And these crow boys that Maida and Zia mentioned—they’d killed the bogans that had caused all of this.
That didn’t seem like much of “just like that” to me. But I understood what she meant.
“Everything is okay, right?” she adds.
Then she turns to me and her hand goes to her newly-restored mouth.
“Oh, god,” she says. “I was so totally not thinking.”
“I understand,” I tell her. “There’s been a lot going on.”
“I think you can be restored, too,” Timony says.
“How so?”
“I think when you return to your own world again, the spell your brother put on you will no longer have power over you.”
“Would that have worked with Lizzie and Geordie, too?”
He gives a slow nod. “Probably. If you’d had all of Geordie’s changeling parts in one place.”
“So we can go now, can’t we?” Lizzie says. “We’re all done here.”
This is my home, Honey says. I’ll stay here and go back to my family. Unless you think you still need my help.
I hadn’t even thought of her having a family. It hadn’t occurred to me that the crap of my life had spilled over not only onto her, but her family as well.
“No, we’re good,” I say. Then I turn to the others. “We should go back, except . . . I can’t go with you.”
For once Geordie reads me wrong. I can see it in his face. He thinks I’m scared of going back to being the Broken Girl again, but that’s not it. That’s not it at all. I’m a little scared of that, sure, after having had the freedom of not being the Broken Girl. But the problem is, I’m the Broken Girl here, too. It’s just not so easily seen. I’ll always be broken—until I face the monster that’s set up house in my head.
“I have to back and . . . you know. Deal with Del. Just me and him.”
Everybody’s shaking their heads.
“You can’t face him again,” Timony says. “The moment you reappear, he’ll have you under his thrall again.”
“I don’t think so,” I tell him.
Translation: I hope not.
I look to Honey. “You understand, don’t you?”
I do, she says, but I still think your going alone isn’t the wisest of decisions.
“But if I don’t go alone, nothing will have changed. I’ll still be dependent on others for my safety from him.”
Is it so bad to accept the help of others?
“No. Of course not. But if I don’t deal with it myself, how do I get him out of my head?”
I know. But—
“I think I’ve got it all figured out. You know, what you were telling me about not believing in his power. I can do this.”
She just looks at me.
“What?”
If that’s true, she says, then why are you still a human pup instead of a grown woman?
I look around at them. No one wants to let me go.
I’ve been blessed with friends—ever since the day I stopped living on the streets. Real friends. True friends.
That’s never seemed a liability until this moment.
I can’t let any of them come with me. I just can’t.
I can go, Honey says. He can’t hurt me.
We both know that’s a lie. If I hadn’t shoved Del, if she’d caught that shotgun blast, she’d be dead. He might not be able to manipulate her the way he did the rest of us, but he could still hurt her. He could kill her.
I shake my head.
Lizzie and Timony both want to help, but I know I can get them to stay. Geordie’s a whole other matter. Even with what he’s just been through, that Riddell loyalty won’t let him allow me to face this by myself.
“You’re not going alone,” he says. “I won’t lose you again.”
“You don’t understand. I have to do this alone. I can’t do it if I have to worry about anyone else.”
“But he’s—”
“I know what he is. I know how powerful he can be. I just have to be stronger. I have to really believe that I’m stronger. That no matter what he does to me, it’s only real if I let it be real.”
“But I could be your Tamlin,” Geordie says. “You know, holding on to you no matter what he changes you into.”
“Except he’ll change you first.”
“Well, what about you?” Geordie asks Honey.
There’s some disagreement as to how safe it would be for me, she says. And I would argue it more, but in the end, Jilly’s right. I can’t do what needs to be done. No one can . . . except for Jilly.
“It’s true,” I say. “Everybody’s been telling me this from day one. Joe. Nokomis. The crow girls. This is the thing I’ve got to deal with before I can work on anything else.”
“I don’t like it,” Geordie says.
I have to smile. “I don’t like it either, Geordie, me lad. What’s to like about it? But it’s what has to be done.”
I look away from him across the badlands. The combination of the red rocks vibrating against the complimentary greens of the pines, with the wide blue sky above it all, does a funny thing to me. It makes me feel physically small, but big inside. I understand now why Sophie is so enamoured with this landscape—escaping to it whenever she can, not just to paint it, but to be a part of it.
The religions have it wrong. God isn’t in holy books and churches. God’s out here where the sky feels like it goes on forever.
Unfortunately, I have to go back to the close woods and the claustrophobic confines of the house I grew up in.
I turn to look at Honey and Timony.
“Can one of you send me back?” I ask.
“I could,” Timony says, “but it would send you back to what you’ve just left behind. It would be better for you to make your own way, to choose your own time and place to meet him again.”
“I can do that?”
Timony smiles. “It’s your mind.”
“But I don’t know how to go.”
“The easiest way to enter the fairy realms,” he says, “is to walk widdershins around a place or object of power. I sense one at the top of this mesa.”
Joe called it a vortex, Honey says. It’s what we used to try to get to you.
Widdershins, I think. Which is counterclockwise, the opposite way of how the sun moves.
It’s like how I finally opened my heart to Geordie, coming at it all backwards. But then I’ve spent the better part of my life coming at things from an unexpected direction, so why change now?
“Okay,” I say. “I can do this.”
I give Geordie another hug, then put a finger across his lips when he starts to speak. Honey gets a pat. More hugs for Lizzie and Timony. Then I go back up the trail to the top of the mesa, the others trailing along behind me. My gaze is drawn to the petroglyphs and I wonder how I’m going to walk around the big stones that they’ve been scratched into, but then I realize that the vortex is right in the middle of the open ground.
I don’t know why, because I’ve never been sensitive to this kind of thing before, but I can almost see the flow of energy rising straight up in a glittering column of amber and smoky green. Maybe this time in the otherworld’s changed me. Maybe it’s responding to something in me—this light inside me that Nokomis keeps telling me I have.
Whatever it is, I know exactly where the vortex is and all my doubts flee.
I start to walk backwards around it, giving Geordie and the others a last wave.
I can do it, I’d said cockily, because that’s usually me: the I-Can-Do-It Girl. But you know what? I can do it.
I do.
There’s a weird shifting under my feet, the bright desert fades into the cool green of an Eastern forest, and then I’m back in the world inside my head, standing in a copse of cedar and spruce. A squirrel, startled by my sudden appearance, scolds me. I glance in its direction, then look out across the field. The house rears up out of the weeds and grass at the far end, worn down, shutters askew, ugly.
I don’t want to go there—not for a moment—but I know I need to finish this.
I won’t pretend that I’m not scared. You want to know the truth? I’m terrified. I’m sure this is the hugest mistake I’ve ever made.
But it’s too late to turn back now.
I don’t know how to get back, and the only things waiting for me there are all the arguments that brought me here.
So I do what I have to do. I set off across the field to find my brother Del.
Galfreya
Galfreya could only shake her head in admiration as, from the safety of Tatiana’s conference room, she and the other council members watched Christiana work the war chief of the buffalo. After her first meeting with the shadow back in the mall, Galfreya’d had Edgan find out what he could about her. So she knew Christiana was physically capable of carrying out the threats she’d made to the queen’s guard earlier. Now she realized that the shadow was smarter than most would give her credit for—at least those who didn’t see past her brash and cocky manner.
“How did she do that?” Tatiana asked as the buffalo army dispersed. “Minisino wasn’t going to listen to any of them. Not Anwatan’s father or Joe. Not Raven. Not even Ayabe—and when was the last time anyone saw him? But she just waltzed in there and the next thing I see is Minisino standing alone on that plain and the threat gone.”
Galfreya shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“She’s a shadow,” Granny Cross, the other seer said. “They’re both more and less than the rest of us.”
Tatiana turned to her. “How so? I can see how there might be more to them, but in what way are they less?”
“Consider their origin,” Granny Cross replied. “Born from what another has cast off, they carry inside them the conviction that they were never meant to be, and that what they are will always be of less worth than their twin. It’s why so many of them fade away like the Eadar, except what they need to sustain them is a belief in themselves, rather than the belief of others.”
Tatiana nodded, her gaze going back to the scene playing in the between.
“That one will never fade,” she said.
Granny Cross made no reply, but Galfreya could see in her eyes that she wasn’t as certain herself. Unless Granny Cross’s seer vision had shown her something the rest of them couldn’t see, Galfreya tended to agree with the queen. This shadow was so sure of herself that it would take a battalion of self-doubt battering away at her night and day for a year, and even then she would probably prevail.
As Galfreya returned her own attention to the between, she was just in time to see Christiana’s approach. A moment later the shadow appeared back in the fairies’ conference room as suddenly as she’d left. She stood on the middle of the table once again, her arms spread wide and grinned at how every one of Tatiana’s guardsmen had either a sword or crossbow point
ed at her.
“What?” she asked. “No parade? No ‘All hail the returning hero!’?”
The guardsmen didn’t lower their weapons until Tatiana made a dismissive movement with her hand.
“How did you do that?” she asked Christiana. “How did you get the army to disperse?”
Christiana shrugged, which was no answer at all, then got straight to the point.
“I delivered what I promised I would,” she said. “More, really. So now it’s your turn to deliver. Where’s Geordie? And if you can’t give him to me, then where do I find these bogans?”
“I didn’t say we had either,” Tatiana replied. “Only that we would help you find them.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’s all we can offer because we don’t know.”
“Fine,” Christiana said, though it was obvious she was anything but appeased.
Galfreya understood. Throughout the drama of what had unfolded in the between with the buffalo soldiers, her own mind kept returning again and again to worry at the mystery of Geordie’s disappearance. If he’d been killed, they should at least have been able to sense his spirit slipping out of his body. But he was just gone.
“Get those seers of yours to start working on it,” the shadow went on, as though she were the queen of this court, not Tatiana. “Get your gruagaghs and seekers and finders and whatever it takes. I made your problem go away without the loss of a single fairy life—or even your pride. Now you’d better make my problem go away.”
Tatiana sat straighter, her eyes flashing.
“We are not servants,” she said stiffly, “to jump at your beck and call. I have said we will do all we can to help, and so we will.”
Christiana glared right back at her. “Then what’s the hold up? If you think I’m just going to—”
She broke off before she could finish her threat and lifted her head. Everything about her changed. The anger drained away from her features and she grinned. It was such an abrupt and startling transformation. A moment earlier and one only wanted to slap some manners into her. Now her good humour filled the hearts of everyone in the room with an echo of her joy.
Though the others were puzzled at her sudden change of demeanour, Galfreya understood it immediately. Because she felt it, too.
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