‘You don’t have to compete.’
‘It’s all I know,’ wailed Cindy. ‘All witches are competitive. We can’t help it.’
‘Is that why you left?’ Denny was amazed at himself. In the middle of all this chaos, he was taking time out to counsel a strung out witch. He could not remember ever having such a long conversation with Cindy before. Perhaps it was necessary, though. Someone had to do it obviously. They could not afford to have any dead weight on board at the moment. Things were too dicey, and if Cindy decided to take off again … He was shocked at his own cynicism. It was the Djinn, though, who was thinking like this, not Denny.
‘Not precisely,’ she said. ‘I left because I felt like I should. No one was talking to me, and no one seemed to care about my son. I wanted to find him, but now …’ she left the sentence hanging.
Denny did not believe a word of this and was judging whether it was a good idea to say as much or not when Cindy burst out. ‘You shouldn’t feel so damn lonely in your own home.’
‘Oh, I did want to find my son,’ she continued in a calmer tone. ‘But only, if I’m honest, because I felt like I should. The truth is I never knew that child. It’s not that I don’t care about what they did. I’m furious actually. But when all is said and done … he’s not my son.’
All this might be the truth, thought Denny, but it was wide of the mark in terms of getting to whatever it was that was eating at Cindy. But he shied away from it. He did not want to know. He had a horrible feeling that it involved him, and the thought made him cringe with embarrassment. So he pulled back, as he did every time he felt as if he was getting too close to the murky waters of Cindy’s feelings, whatever they were. (And it was easier not to hear it out loud, that way he could pretend he did not know.)
‘You don’t want to know the rest,’ observed Cindy. ‘That’s okay. I feel better anyway.’
‘I don’t know why you giving up so much for her should hurt me so much,’ she muttered to herself. ‘You can’t lose what you never had.’
Denny pretended that he had not heard.
* * *
Tamar was sitting on the bed with her eyes closed and a look of intense concentration on her face. She was looking for the Faerie Queen.
Denny had told her about his conversation with Cindy (the relevant part anyway) and she had been dismissive.
‘Premonition?’ she had said. ‘You mean like “fortune telling”? Look deeply into my bosom, that kind of thing? Although,’ she had added, ‘if I catch you looking deeply into Cindy’s bosom, there will be trouble.’
‘You have no idea,’ thought Denny.
‘I can’t find her,’ she said snapping her eyes open.
Denny cocked an eyebrow and said nothing, clearly she was not actually talking to him, he just happened to be there.
‘She isn’t real you see,’ Tamar confided to the bedpost. ‘I think that’s the problem. She’s only a figment.’
Denny frowned at this. For a figment, she had certainly done a lot of damage. But he said nothing. Tamar was clearly working through some train of thought.
‘I can see everything, but I can’t see Faeries, because they aren’t real, well they are real obviously, but not … it’s like gods … they’re only here because we invented them. But I can see the effect they’re having. Ah good, so if I find the… the – epicentre of the trouble, that’ll be her. Right!’ She closed her eyes again.
Denny was amused despite the seriousness of the situation. Tamar did sound so funny talking to herself like a metal patient talking to the voices in her head.
‘Faeries!’ he thought, and he began to laugh at the utter ludicrousness of the situation.
The sudden sound broke Tamar’s concentration, and she opened her eyes and glared at him. ‘I almost had it then,’ she snapped. ‘Shut up!’
Denny lowered his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
She sighed. ‘Who am I kidding?’ she asked the world in general. ‘I’ve got nothing. I don’t understand it.’ Denny realised that this was another monologue. ‘Why can’t I find her? I’m omniscient for God’s sake’
‘Maybe Jack …’ began Denny, but she was not listening.
‘I should have just gone after her when she went through the stones,’ she said. ‘She could be anywhere by now. At least I knew where she was then. I wish I could go back and do it again. I’d do it right this time.’
Denny covered his face with his hands. ‘Your wish,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘is my command.’
Tamar stared at him. ‘Oops!’ she said, then vanished.
~ Chapter Twenty Two ~
Denny cursed loudly and stood flabbergasted for at least thirty seconds before he got himself together enough to follow her. Which meant he was at least thirty seconds behind events. Sometimes thirty seconds are all it takes to make all the difference in the world.
The Queen of the Sidhe backed away from Tamar nervously. In our world at least, the only power they really have is over the mind. They make you believe you are beaten. But Tamar never believed she was beaten. Even if she had still been under the Faerie thrall, it would have taken some spell to break her absolute belief in herself.
Tamar raised the sword and Queen Onagh watched it like a rabbit watching a snake, she was clearly terrified.
Then Denny came crashing through the trees. The queen raised her head and started in astonishment. Tamar was only distracted for a millionth of a second, but it was enough for the Faerie Queen. She stepped lightly aside through a gap in the stones and disappeared.
Tamar let out a howl of rage.
‘No!’ yelled Denny desperately and ran for the stones, but he was too late. Tamar had followed the queen through the portal.
She never let anything go.
Except apparently her sword, helmet and all her armour. No iron gets past the Key Stones into the Faerie realm.
Denny sighed. There really was nothing else for it. He took a deep breath (his last for some time as it turned out) and followed her in.
As Tamar stepped through the music switched off suddenly, but there were other sounds, most notably, the sound of laughter.
‘Well,’ she thought, looking around, ‘not exactly what I had in mind, but perhaps this is even better.’
The world on the other side of the stones was nothing like the world she had left behind. This world was bright and cheerful, nauseatingly so. It reminded Tamar of a film she had once seen. The world she had left was in black and white, dreary and colourless, and this world was brightly coloured and dazzlingly attractive. What had that place been called? Oh yes, that was it – “Toon Town”
The sky was a soft, streaky pink and purple sunset. The grass was too green, the lakes too blue, the trees too pretty; the whole place looked like a freshly painted backdrop. Only the standing stones were the same, and they stood out, stark, murky and graceless, an imposition on the landscape, as the Faerie castle had been in the human world, ugly intruders from a harsher world.
Her throat felt strange and she found herself pawing at it, and her chest felt strangely heavy, but it was not distressing, just strange.
The Faerie queen was nowhere to be seen.
Denny appeared behind her. ‘Bloody he…’ then he clutched at his throat rasping and gurgling desperately.
Tamar raised an eyebrow as Denny passed out. ‘No air?’ she thought. ‘That’s interesting.’
Tamar was not really being completely callous about Denny’s condition – she knew he would be all right. He just had to adjust his thinking. After all, he was a Djinn now. He did not need to breathe
This was not a real world then – new rules.
‘Well,’ she thought, ‘I can work with that.’
She gave Denny a kick. ‘Come on lazybones,’ she said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
Denny pulled himself together and looked around. Memories flooded into his head.
‘I’m still me,’ he announced bizarrely. ‘We’re still us, I mean shouldn’t
we be them? He meant the other versions of themselves from this point in time. Tamar understood him though.
‘No. They have a different future,’ she said, ‘the one that led us here.’
Denny thought about this. ‘You mean we’ve created a bloody paradox?’
‘No, not this time,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to explain. ‘Everything that happened stays happened. It’s just that … now there are two presents running side by side, the one where we came back and the one where we didn’t.
‘They (us) are in the other one. The two presents will run together like parallel worlds (only not exactly) until we catch up with ourselves.’ *
*[Not many people can speak in brackets, but Tamar did not know this, so she did it anyway.]
‘But this is the past.’
‘Not to us. This is the present to us now. We’re separate. Just trust me, it’s better this way.’
‘Well,’ said Denny grasping for a solid, incontrovertible fact in this morass of confusion. ‘You can’t change the past.’
‘I’m not going to,’ she said.
‘Good.’
‘I’m going to change the present.’
‘Oh.’
Away in the distance was an exact replica of the Faerie’s castle that had held Denny. He shuddered at it.
He was back on his feet now and felt fine apart from a sore throat because he kept trying to breathe – he had been in the habit of it for twenty seven years after all. Tamar was faring better; she had only recently got back into the habit of breathing having not bothered for five thousand years, it having been more or less optional when she had been living in a bottle.
‘That’s where she’ll be,’ said Tamar following his gaze.
‘It’s a long way off,’ he said squinting at it.
‘Depends on your point of view,’ said Tamar. ‘Come on,’ she added, as he looked sceptical. ‘You’ve been doing this long enough now to know the score. Remember the deleted file? It’s not real, remember, the castle is only as far away as you think it is.’
‘Not real?’ murmured Denny vaguely – he was saving his energy for worrying.
‘Look at this place,’ said Tamar with an expansive movement of her arm. ‘This is,’ she spat the last word, ‘fairyland!’
‘It’s horrible,’ said Denny.
Tamar looked sideways at him. ‘You noticed that?’ she said. ‘Good, don’t get sucked in.’
Denny considered trying to convince her to leave. He was hating this place. It was so creepy. They could go back; it was probably not too late. And as for the Queen …
‘She’ll be back,’ said Tamar as if reading his thoughts – which she probably was. ‘We know she will.’ she added.
Denny shrugged ‘I wasn’t going to say anything,’ he said. ‘What would be the point?’ he added sotto voce.
Tamar ignored him; she appeared to be thinking. After a few moments, she suddenly put two fingers in her mouth and let out a piercing whistle.
Almost immediately, two wild ponies galloped up to them and stood expectantly stamping their hooves.
‘There we are,’ said Tamar. ‘Transport for two, no waiting. This place has it good points.’
Denny looked at the castle, ‘I can’t think of any,’ he said.
Tamar looked at him from her seat on the pony’s back. ‘You don’t have to come you know,’ she said. ‘I can handle this.’
Denny swung himself up onto the other pony without a word. Tamar nodded. ‘Okay, then.’
As they thudded over the grass, Denny wondered what she was planning to do. If this place was not real, as she claimed – and it certainly seemed that way – then neither she nor he would be able to use their powers here. Supernatural powers never worked in places that were not part of the real world as they had both discovered to their cost before this.
The Athame would be no use here – except as an exceptionally sharp knife – and they did not have any iron.
‘I could always sing again,’ he thought. But as a long-term plan, this had its drawbacks.
Not that there was not magic here of course. The place reeked of it, but it was a magic that belonged to this world, Faerie magic, the kind that messes with your head. And there was no way they could use that.
And yet, he realised with a start, Tamar had already used it. They could not use their own powers to teleport to the castle, so she had used the Faerie magic to summon horses to take them there. He relaxed a little. If they could use the Faerie magic then at least they were not defenceless. Trust Tamar to find a way.
Of course, the Faerie queen had a lot more practise at using Faerie magic than Tamar had; he tensed up again.*
*[Denny, by the way, was dead wrong here, on all counts.]
Overhead, Denny noticed a dragon was flying with single-minded determination in a straight line, head down and wings back as if it was in a tremendous hurry.
‘Dragons?’ he thought idly. ‘Well I never.’
But after it had flown away, making a sound like a demented buzz saw, he did not think much about it. For instance, he did not notice that the direction it was headed in was directly towards the Key Stones.
* * *
When Hecaté had surmised that the point of the changelings was infiltration, she was only half right.
In fact, there is a much more practical reason why Faeries do this. It is because they have to.
Everything has a balance in the universe, if you add something then you have to take something away and vice versa. Otherwise, the balance is thrown off.
Faeries cannot just enter the mortal world. They have to make space for themselves. They have to take something out. If they do not, they will be pulled back to the Faerie realm. Usually they take children, because it is easier.
But when a Faerie child is born into this world, it belongs here just like a mortal child would. New life is easier; the universe makes room for it.
So now, when a human child is taken to the Faerie realm it can be replaced with a Faerie child that was born in the mortal realm and still leave room for another Faerie to cross over, leaving the Faerie children to grow up among the humans, and no one the wiser.
Infiltration is just a bonus.
So, when Tamar and Denny went into the Faerie realm they left a gap behind in this world, a sucking void that was calling out to be filled, a void that was, weight for weight, about the capacity of a smallish dragon.
* * *
‘I’m sure this will create a paradox,’ complained Denny as they rode along. He just could not leave this alone; it had been preying on his mind. It may have had something to do with him having been trapped in a time paradox before. This sort of thing made him nervous
‘If they – the other us-ess, are out there now doing the same things that we did before, then aren’t we just going to keep ending up back here?’ he added.
‘That’s right,’ said Tamar cheerfully. ‘But it isn’t a paradox, it’s a time loop. We’ve probably had this conversation before.’
‘I don’t remember it,’
‘Well you won’t. We’ll never know the difference.’
‘So we just keep going round and round in time forever? That’s a paradox!’
‘No. A paradox is when you don’t know that you’re going round and round forever. We can break the cycle anytime we like because we’re outside of it.’
‘Now would be a good time don’t you think? Let’s just …’
‘No. I’m going after her. You don’t have to come.’
‘Look, how the hell do you know all this?’
Tamar stared at him as if he was daft. ‘I know everything.’ she said eventually.
Denny had forgotten this. He blinked. ‘Everything?’ he said. ‘Really everything?’ this was a worrying thought.
‘Everything I want to know, yes.’
Denny relaxed. There are some things a person does not want to know.
Tamar reined in the pony and jumped off.
‘Look,’
she said. ‘When we get back to the point in time that we left from, we’ll remember all this, we can remember the future now, can’t we? It’s not a paradox when you can do that. I’m not explaining this very well, but basically, we’re visiting this time, we are not part of it (nice job by the way. You probably did it instinctively this way). And we can go home again, and everything will be the same, except one thing. I’m going to kill her.’
‘And if you do that, it’ll change things,’ pointed out Denny.
‘Not enough,’ she said. ‘It’ll just save us the bother of doing it later.’
‘You’re crazy,’ said Denny.
‘No I’m not. Listen to me. The Faeries will still attack, Jack will still find the gauntlet and Cindy will still run away. It’s already happened. We can’t change that unless we change what they do.’ She meant the other versions of themselves.
Then what’s the point?’
‘We can stop her. This is the point in time when we can do it, when she’s vulnerable. Can’t you just accept that?’
‘No, because if we stop her now, it will change things. The Faeries attacked under her command. If we stop her now …’ Denny stopped as his brain caught up with his ears. ‘Oh!’ he said.
‘It’s all already happened,’ said Tamar gently.
‘I see,’ said Denny. ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’
* * *
Back in the present or the future or whatever Jack Stiles was having problems of his own.
He had not told the others because they seemed nervous enough as it was, but the gauntlet was having a strange effect on him. At first, it seemed like a faint buzzing in his ears. Then it upgraded to a ringing, and now he was certain. He was hearing things. Faeries to be exact, every Faerie in the world, he could hear what they were thinking. It could be useful he realised, if he could only control it, separate out the sounds but all he was getting currently was a cacophony of thoughts and he could not shut it off.
Faerie Tale Page 14