The Faerie Path

by Frewin Jones

  After breakfast, the tour of the palace began.

  Rathina led Anita up a long winding stairway in a narrow tower. They squeezed through a small doorway and emerged onto a flat, walled rooftop. The warm breeze whipped their hair around their faces as they looked down on the palace grounds.

  Anita leaned over the battlements and gasped. The palace was even larger than she had imagined. She had seen it briefly before, during her flight, but it had been dark then and she hadn’t been able to grasp the scale of the place.

  The red-brick buildings and courtyards immediately below her were laid out exactly like Hampton Court Palace, with long lawns that sloped gently down to the river. Yet the Faerie Palace was far more expansive than the historic house Anita had seen on her school trip; here, they stretched way beyond the confines of Hampton Court in twenty-first-century London. The great red-brick buildings with their cream-colored stone ornamentations and their arched windows and slotted battlements extended eastward along the river into a hazy blue distance, tower beyond tower, wall after wall, bastions, turrets, and gatehouses, spreading out alongside the winding river as far as she could see. On the very edge of sight, the river became wider, and she could just make out large wharves and jetties and great sailing ships with tall masts and rigging like cobwebs under the blazing sun.

  To the south, across the river, the land seemed to be one great green forest that went on forever. A few bridges spanned the flowing blue water, including the one with the white towers that she already knew. Where the bridges met the far bank, there were always a few clustered houses and mooring places, and Anita got the impression of roads pushing their way in under the trees.

  “What do you call the river?” she asked, gazing down at the crystal water as it glinted and sparkled in the sunlight.

  “The Tamesis,” Rathina replied, leaning over her shoulder.

  “Tamesis?” Anita echoed. “That’s quite like Thames.” She looked into Rathina’s inquiring face. “That’s the name of the river that runs through London,” she said.

  “London?”

  Anita shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  She made her way over to the other side of the tower. To the north, the land was more open. Close under the wall of the palace, she saw wide, ornate gardens with yellow pathways and colorful flower beds. Farther away there were scattered clumps of woodland, but there were also wide-open stretches of grass, like a vast park. There was a lake of clear blue water, encircled by reeds and willows. In a ring of tall trees, she glimpsed the slender white spires of a solitary building. And beyond that the land rose into rolling hills of purple heather.

  Anita leaned farther over the parapet wall and stared down at something that had caught her eye, close under the tower where she was standing. It was a triangular clump of greenery. As she looked more carefully she saw that it was a tight network of neatly tended hedges.

  “Is that a maze?”

  “It is,” Rathina said. “Do you remember it?”

  “Well, yes,” Anita said. “But not from here.” She looked at her sister. “I remember it from back home. From Hampton Court.”

  Rathina smiled uncertainly. “I have never heard of that place. Is it far from here?”

  “That’s the whole point,” Anita said. “It’s not here at all. Or at least, it is, but it’s different. It’s back in the world I come from—the real…I mean, the Mortal World.” It felt odd to use that phrase.

  “Ah yes, I have heard of such things,” Rathina said, to Anita’s surprise. “Sancha would be able to explain it more clearly.”

  “Explain what?”

  Rathina held her hands up, palm to palm but not quite touching. “The Realm of Faerie and the Mortal World lie close together,” she said. “But there are places where the veil between the two worlds is very thin, where Faerie and the Mortal World almost touch.” She brought her hands together, linking her fingers. “Maybe this is such a place.”

  “I suppose that would explain how I ended up here,” Anita said. And keep slipping back, she thought. She smiled at Rathina. “So, where to now?”

  “To the Queen’s Apartments,” Rathina said.

  They went back down the winding stairway and walked arm in arm through a seemingly endless succession of function rooms and gorgeous sun-filled courtyards and shady ivied cloisters and enclosed formal gardens. Anita recognized some of it as being part of Hampton Court, but there was far more that she didn’t know and had never seen. They came into a wide, grassy courtyard, and for the first time, Anita found herself in the presence of Faerie children.

  Two young women in sky blue gowns were watching over them as they played. The children ranged from babies to a few that Anita guessed must be about nine or ten years old. But what struck her with a jolt was the sight of long slender gossamer wings sprouting through slots in the backs of the children’s clothing.

  Wings!

  They looked exactly the same as the ones she had grown and lost that night in the hospital.

  A toddler of about eighteen months was sitting in the lap of one of the women, playing with a straw doll. Every now and then, he would toss it away, and then clap his hands and rise up out of the woman’s lap and fly awkwardly on straining wings to fetch it back. Once his little wings failed him and he plopped down into the grass and cried so that he had to be gathered up and comforted.

  A group of older children was playing with a ball, throwing it high into the air so that each in turn had to spring up and fly to retrieve it. Others were playing tag, chasing one another around the courtyard, flying into the air to escape being caught, their fine wings iridescent in the sunlight.

  Anita felt a pang of loss that her wings had withered so quickly. It would be wonderful to fly again.

  Then she noticed that the eldest children were playing games that did not involve flying, and one or two of them were even wearing clothing that covered their wings, creating lumps in the backs of their clothes.

  She looked curiously at Rathina. “You haven’t got wings, have you?” she asked.

  Rathina gave her a shocked, slightly offended look. “Indeed not,” she said. “Fie, Tania! Do you think me a child?”

  Anita tapped her forehead with one finger. “No memory,” she said. “Remember?”

  Rathina laughed. “Then you are forgiven, but to suggest that a grown person still has their wings is to call them childish.”

  “Why is that?”

  “We are born winged, and for the first ten or twelve years of our lives the wings grow with us, but as we near adulthood, the wings wither and fail until at last they are quite gone.” She squeezed Anita’s arms. “I remember you as a child, flitting through the corridors like an errant damselfly, full of mischief and waywardness. You told me once that you never wanted to lose your wings, that you wanted to be able to fly forever.” She smiled. “But on your tenth birthday, you ordered a gown without the back slashes and you never flew again.” She nodded. “And that was as it should be. We cast off such childishness when we are grown.”

  Anita looked at her without saying anything. She had been intending to tell Rathina about that marvelous flight of hers, of how breathtakingly wonderful it had been to soar and swoop through the night air. But now she decided not to. She didn’t want Rathina to think she was childish. Maybe later, when they knew each other better, she could make the confession. Or perhaps Zara was a better person to confide in; fun-loving Zara might understand.

  They watched the Faerie children for a little while longer. Anita was saddened a little that their joy in flying wouldn’t last.

  At last, Rathina led Anita out of the courtyard and on through the boundless expanse of the Royal Palace.

  At the top of a wide flight of white marble stairs, they came to a high-domed lobby with pure white walls. A pair of tall white doors stood closed ahead of them. Rathina had been quiet for several minutes, and now she stood in front of the doors with her head bowed.

  “Our mother’s apartment
s,” she murmured. “We come here seldom. It is too sad. But you should see them, I think.”

  She touched the doors with her fingertips and they swung silently open.

  Anita stepped over the threshold and gazed around. The room was very large, with a high ceiling of intricately decorated plaster. The rugs and furniture were all either white or ivory-colored—the wood as pale as cream, the upholstered chairs and couches as white as snow. Several doors opened from the room, and at the far end were tall windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, draped with white lace. Anita saw that one of the long windows was partly open. A gentle breeze wafted into the room, scented with lilies, making the drapes shiver like falling water.

  Scattered around the room were personal items: a sewing frame with white linen stretched over it, the embroidered pattern half finished. In one corner stood a harp. A book lay open on a low table.

  Rathina walked over to a glass dome set on a small circular table. Under the clear glass lay a white crystal crown inlaid with black jewels. Rathina touched the glass with gentle fingers.

  Anita stood at her side. She had seen that delicate crown once before, on the head of the Queen when she had first arrived in Faerie and Gabriel’s enchantment had given her a glimpse of the palace before five hundred years of twilight descended.

  Rathina sighed and turned away.

  It felt to Anita as if the room had only been left empty for a few seconds, as though the Faerie Queen might walk in there at any moment. It was almost impossible to believe that all this hushed beauty had been frozen in time for five hundred years and that its owner was long-dead.

  “Do you remember our mother at all?” Rathina asked her in a subdued voice.

  Anita frowned. There was certainly something about this room that stirred up feeling in her—sorrow and loss and a kind of regret, almost. But she could not see Titania in her mind’s eye, and she had no real sense of connection with the Queen who had once lived in these apartments.

  Then she remembered her own mother and felt a pang of homesickness. She wondered how long it would be before she woke up and found herself back with her real family.

  She shook her head. “No, not at all,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  The melancholy of the Queen’s apartments seemed to linger as they retraced their steps through the palace, and it was a while before Anita felt like speaking.

  “Where to now?”

  “Would you like to see Cordelia’s menagerie?” Rathina suggested.

  “That would be great.” A menagerie sounded fascinating, and maybe spending time with some animals would help to lighten her mood.

  The interiors of the palace were far too complex for Anita to be able to tell where she was, with narrow winding corridors and rooms that led into other rooms, and twisty staircases where the dazzling sunlight shone through curiously shaped windows. But she knew Rathina was leading her back more or less the way they had come. Walking along a high gallery with windows to one side, Anita was startled when hands slapped at the outside of the glass near her and a small impish face looked in and grimaced at her for a second.

  The face dropped away and Anita looked down through the window and saw that they were above the courtyard with the children in it. The child who had surprised her at the glass was flying back down to the grass in long, lazy circles while one of the women called up to her.

  Anita recognized something as they walked across a long cobbled courtyard with a stone fountain in the middle. At the far end of the courtyard was a square tower with a pointed roof, its walls overgrown with a dense blanket of ivy. “Isn’t that where Eden lives?”

  “Indeed it is,” Rathina said. “But we do not go that way. Our path lies through this gateway here.” She indicated an exit that led off in the opposite direction.

  But Anita stopped and gazed up at the gloomy tower with its leaf-mantled walls and small, dark windows. She tried to imagine what it must be like for Eden to have locked herself away in that place for such a long time.

  She couldn’t understand why Eden hadn’t come out of her tower when she had arrived in Faerie. Everyone else was delighted to see her; why not Eden? Maybe she didn’t even know her long-lost sister was back. Well, she could soon change that.

  She walked toward the tower.

  “Tania—come away,” Rathina called.

  Anita lifted a hand without looking around. “I’ll only be a minute,” she called back.

  At the base of the tower she saw three gray stone steps that led up to a square black door, over which the ivy hung in long tendrils. There were no windows at ground level. She walked around a corner of the tower. Now she saw a large circular window. It was half overrun with ivy, and the glass was dark and grimy. She could make out that it was divided into some kind of pattern, and that the glass was colored, like stained glass windows she had seen in churches. She stood under the window; the curve of the lower sill was at shoulder height. The daylight reflected gray off the glass so that she could not see through it very clearly.

  She rubbed the glass with the heel of her hand and peered more closely. She let out a breath. She thought she could see something now: a dark figure standing in the room beyond, shrouded in some kind of dark habit or hooded cloak.

  “Eden?” Anita breathed. Such an air of despair and grief came from the vague shape that she felt a coldness fingering its way up her spine and a darkness seeping into her mind.

  Suddenly a hand snatched at her wrist and she was dragged away from the glass.

  “We must not linger here, Tania,” Rathina scolded as Anita stood blinking at her, astonished to find that it was still bright daylight in the courtyard. “Come away.”

  “I saw something,” she said as Rathina drew her across the courtyard. “Through the round window. I’m not sure what it was.”

  “The room was our sister’s sanctum,” Rathina said. “It was there that she practiced the Mystic Arts long ago.” Her voice was insistent. “We do not go there, Tania. The place is shunned.”

  “Yes. I understand. Sorry.” She looked back at the tower. For a moment she thought she saw a face at the upper window, but it was gone in an instant and she couldn’t be sure that it was anything more than a trick of the sunlight.

  They walked along a corridor and through a large airy room with doors that opened onto the sunlit palace gardens. A network of yellow paths was divided by clipped lawns and teeming flower beds, flanked by statues and fountains and rows of slender, neatly trimmed trees.

  Rathina led the way along a path that ran under the palace walls. It wound through an aisle of tall rhododendron bushes, and at the far end, it opened out in front of the maze.

  It looked eerily similar to the one Anita had seen at Hampton Court—an exact copy, in fact, except that here there were no signs and no black metal turnstiles barricading the entrance. She walked closer and peered through the towering, rustling hedges.

  “We were on a school trip,” she said. “I just walked in and found my way to the middle as if I’d done it a hundred times before.” She looked at Rathina. “Weird, huh?”

  “We used to play hide-and-seek in the maze,” Rathina said. “Zara and Cordelia and you and me, when we were children.”

  “Not the others?”

  “Sancha sometimes, when we could tear her away from her books,” Rathina said. “But Hopie and Eden were too solemn for such pastimes.” She smiled. “You were always the best at such games, although you would often cheat by flying above the hedges.”

  “I was a bit headstrong, then?” Anita said.

  “Indeed you were.”

  As she gazed down the leaf-lined walkway, she had a fleeting memory of herself zipping along between the bushes on fast-beating wings, her feet skimming the ground, her arms outstretched, her body lying flat in the air, yelling with laughter as her shouting sisters chased after her.

  She shook her head. Not real. Not real!

  She heard children’s voices calling out from inside the maze.
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  “They are playing, as we once did,” Rathina said. “Do you wish to enter?”

  Anita shook her head. Seeing the maze had brought the school trip back to her more vividly than ever. It had been immediately after that trip that she had first met Evan. In this dreamworld Evan didn’t love her—he had betrayed her, lied to her, made her look like a fool—and she didn’t want to think about that.

  They walked on through a grove of fruit trees and came to a cluster of low wooden buildings with thatched roofs. The buildings stood at the edge of a network of paddocks and small ponds divided by rows of trees or by low fences of wickerwork panels.

  Anita saw roe deer grazing alongside goats and sheep and small, long-horned cows with shaggy coats of brown and white. There were beavers and otters in the pools, and squirrels and martens and long-limbed monkeys in the trees. Round eyes peered and long tails whisked as Anita and Rathina walked past. Swans glided on the ponds and geese and ducks waddled to and fro beside the water. Ravens and kestrels and kites perched watchfully on the fences, and gray doves fluttered prettily in and out of a large dovecote.

  A small brown goat came and nuzzled Anita’s hand, gazing up at her with gentle, questioning animal eyes. She stopped for a moment to fondle the long soft ears.

  “Tania, do not dawdle,” Rathina said, walking on. “By my troth, you were ever thus.”

  “I like animals,” Anita defended herself as she ran to catch up with her sister.

  She heard a scampering sound and saw a large brown crested lizardlike creature darting through the tall grass. Including the whipping tail, she guessed that it must be almost four feet long.

  “It’s a salamander,” Rathina told her. “Beware, it has fiery breath. It will burn you if you venture too close.”

  “Really?” Anita stared in amazement as the animal flicked out of sight.

  A few moments later, she noticed a thatched hutch with a closed and barred door. As she approached it, a glittering red eye regarded her from a small window about four feet from the ground.