by Molly Ringle
This time they came. The wind gusted, and dark shapes popped up out of the snow: mushrooms, growing fast. They formed a dotted line leading between bushes and trees. Somewhere down the path, a frog-like voice said, “Come, Olivia Darwen.”
Livy held onto the ring and did what she was told to never do: she took the path. It wasn’t a long path, just five yards or so, but when she looked back at the end of it, Kit’s cabin and all other signs of civilization were gone. Fear and wonder shivered through her. It was the wild version of Crabapple Island.
Some of the mushrooms were moving. Walking, coming up to form a circle around her, where they were joined by a few of the locals she’d glimpsed before. The flying clump of spruce needles zoomed in along with the grotesque-faced dragonfly, and the golden, luminous frog floated down to face level again.
“The goblins have taken your tribemates,” the frog said. “It is time for you to be brave. Are you willing to walk a path to reach them?”
Livy nodded. “How do I do it?”
“The goblins have protected their lair with many enchantments. To guide you through them, we can open a fourfold path, one for each element.”
Livy understood almost at once. She wore them on her ankles, after all. “Earth, air, fire, water.” The ring’s four symbols, too, now that she thought about it.
“Yes. If you take this path all the way into their dwellings, we can follow you and change the goblins into new shapes, different fae, so that they will do less harm and more good. We have long wished to be able to, but we could not break through. We needed someone from your tribe, with a rightful claim to retribution, to walk this path for us.”
“Then I will. And Skye and Grady will be saved?”
“Only if you complete the task before dawn. They are beginning to be transformed into goblins now. We can change them back if we reach them before the night ends. Otherwise…” The frog pursed its wide lips. “I cannot guarantee they will ever be the same again.”
Livy shivered, not wishing to ponder what that meant. “Then show me the path.” She took out her phone and checked the hour. “It’s just after midnight. I suppose that means I have seven or so hours.”
“Time moves differently in our realm,” the frog warned. “Often faster. You must not delay.”
“We’re on the island, right? How do we get across the water? Is there a bridge?”
“Yes, the goblins have taken your tribemates to the mainland. Our path will guide you there. As long as you stay upon it and keep hold of the ring, you will remain safe and end up where you need to be.”
“So when I get to their dwellings, what do I do?”
“You must capture their central source of magic and give it to us. The token of their leader: the ring with the red stone.”
“I have to steal Redring’s ring?” Livy almost shouted it, remembering too clearly the blood and bruises that resulted from Kit’s attempts to fight the goblins. “They’re strong, they’re immortal! How can I?”
The frog looked grim, twitching its sparkly wings. “You must be clever. And quick, and brave.”
“Oh, holy crap.” She looked down in near-panic at her phone.
“There must be no contact with your world,” the frog added. “It will break the spell and strand you, and your opportunity will be lost.”
Livy turned off her phone, and zipped it into her coat pocket. Mentally she said a farewell to the human domain, which she half suspected she’d never see again. But Skye was worth the risk. “Then let’s get started.”
“The first element of your path.” The frog drifted aside. “Earth.”
The ground tore itself open before Livy’s feet. The coating of snow gave way to the black soil of the forest, in a yawning hole that reminded her of the ragged craters left behind when trees fell over and ripped their roots out of the earth. But this hole went deeper, and as she watched, green glowing worms and centipedes squirmed out of the dirt and formed themselves into two parallel lines, with a foot of space between them: a path, pointing straight into the underground darkness.
“I…follow that?” she said.
“You must not leave the path,” the frog cautioned again. “The fae of each element will guide you. I will see you again only when you have completed the four parts. You may walk, crawl, or climb as need be, but the path is the only place you are sure to be safe.”
“Safe.” She pulled in a deep breath. She could think of plenty of safer approaches than crawling through a pitch-black tunnel of dirt under the forest floor. Then again, the fae’s rules weren’t going to make sense. Kit had warned her of that. She stepped closer, examining the opening.
“If you complete the path through the earth element,” the frog said, “the next will open for you.”
“If ? Wait, what happens if I can’t finish it for some reason?”
“It is hard to say. The enchantment will break, and at best you will find yourself back on the surface in the human world. At worst, the element may trap you forever.”
“The element.” She stared at the black tunnel into the ground, full of wriggling bugs and dangling roots. “Earth.” Buried alive, in other words.
She hesitated, trying to calculate how deep this tunnel might go and whether she’d be able to dig herself out with her hands, through earth frozen solid.
The frog drifted closer. “Time is wasting. Set out now, or your tribemates may be lost.”
Skye would tunnel under the earth with her bare hands to save Livy, if their positions had been the other way around. Livy knew that without question.
She walked forward between the lines of glowing creatures, and dropped to her hands and knees. The frozen earth felt hard and sharp under her gloves. The path loomed black inside the hole; the illuminated lines faded a few yards down—for down was the direction the path slanted. Livy took one look back at the hovering frog, the other fae, and the snow-covered landscape. She drew in a last breath of the open air, then crawled forward into the earth.
CHAPTER THIRTY
IT WASN’T TOO BAD AT FIRST. IT WAS PITCH BLACK AND THE AIR FELT BOTH COLD AND STIFLING, AND SMELLED strongly of dirt, of course, but Livy had enough room to crawl at a reasonable pace. The frozen ground hurt her knees through her jeans, and roots sticking out the top and sides of the tunnel scraped slimily against her on her way. She’d be a muddy mess by the end of this. But she wasn’t claustrophobic, at least, so she could manage this element.
Then the tunnel started narrowing as it slanted deeper. She bumped her head against roots more frequently, and her shoulders met the side walls. Her breath came faster. This was a little too much like those dreams where you were trying to squeeze yourself through a small opening for some unknown reason. She couldn’t see a thing at first except the path’s lines, which glowed with a faint green light, but her eyes began to adjust after a few minutes, showing her a little more of the tunnel.
Things whisked past in the corner of her vision from time to time— earth-element fae, she supposed. One moved slower than the rest, and she sucked in a frightened breath when she glimpsed it: a tiny skeleton, like a warped four-inch-tall human, who turned a blank skull-faced stare upon her, then dug swiftly into the tunnel wall and vanished.
Onward she crawled. Clods of dirt dropped onto her head sometimes as she brushed through the dangling roots. Or perhaps not exactly dirt: something was moving in her hair. Livy hissed a breath inward and swatted at the back of her head. A clump of soil dropped down to the base of the tunnel, rose up on root-thread legs, and walked away across the back of her hand, leaving a phosphorescent slug-slime trail on her glove. She shuddered, but she was already so mucked up, she didn’t even bother trying to wipe it off.
She kept forward. Where else could she go? Backtracking at this point wouldn’t be any more pleasant than going onward. The lit-up path of bugs stayed with her, at least. It felt a little bit like company. Not that she cared for it at all when a small centipede—or some fae version of it—dropped onto her sho
ulder, crawled under her collar, and took up residence against her bare skin. She gritted her teeth and slapped at it— gently, not wishing to offend the creature—but it was cagey. Its crawly sensation vanished in the spot she’d last felt it, only to reemerge in a new spot under her clothes a minute later. None of her attempts to find it and get it off her were successful. Another test of her endurance, she supposed. Whimpering, she crawled onward.
Glimpses of white bony fingers and black spiders flickered alongside her as she passed. She tried not to think about them. But they made themselves harder to ignore as she progressed. The finger-bones took to stroking her legs, vanishing when she looked back, giving her only a glimpse before withdrawing into the dirt walls. And on three separate occasions, a spider—not a charming glowing green one, but black and apple-sized and long-legged—dropped down on a silk thread to hang an inch from her nose, forcing her to stop with a yelp. Each one drew upward again, letting her pass, but the centipede hiding in her clothes tickled her each time as if to tease her.
“How goddamn wide could this island even be?” she said aloud after a while. She now squirmed forward on her belly, roots clawing at her on both sides.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
Crabapple Island was narrow. So, assuming the geography hadn’t changed too much in the fae world, she had to be getting close to the end of the tunnel, even if she had to crawl the entire width of the island to get from Kit’s shore to the mainland-facing shore on the other side.
A glimmer of purplish-blue at eye level caught her attention. It radiated from what looked like a gemstone in the tunnel’s wall. Though it lay outside her designated line, Livy gave in to curiosity and poked at it with her fingertip.
It dropped away inward, as if there were open space on the other side of the wall. The purplish-blue light streamed from the little hole. Livy put her eye to the spot where the gem had been, and took in her breath in wonder.
This couldn’t be. There weren’t any subterranean cave systems on Crabapple Island; there just weren’t. Anyway, if there were, they’d be full of seawater. But there it lay, fifty feet below her: a cavern from a tale of treasure-hoarding gnomes, all stalactites and rock-hewn stairs and piles of precious stones in a rainbow of colors, glittering softly. In fact, the gems seemed to be the source of the light.
A roar echoed through the cavern, and a green eye as large as her head appeared right up against her hole. Livy shrieked and reared back, hitting the opposite wall of the tunnel. A rock slammed into the hole, blocking the view and quenching the light. Dirt rained down from the impact of the blow, then the earth fell silent again.
Right. Don’t go outside the path. Remember that.
Livy skittered onward.
And upward. The path began to rise up again. She slogged through the frosty grime, grabbing roots to haul herself ahead, her centipede hitchhiker tickling her in the armpit, the hip, the nape of the neck. One arm-length down. Another. Another. Definitely an up-slope to the path now. Oh, please…
A breath of snowy, fresh air swept in, and the tunnel’s height expanded enough for her to rise back up to hands and knees. She moved faster. Another few yards, and after ducking under a tangle of roots, she spotted the exit, a mouth of gloomy night, almost bright after the underground passage.
Livy crawled out of it and rose, feeling as triumphant as a goddess being born from the earth itself, despite the pain in her knees and back. The centipede crawled out the bottom of her shirt and dropped onto the snow. “Thank you,” she muttered in relief, looking down at it. It was only an inch long, and looked about like the ordinary centipedes she’d seen hundreds of times in rotting logs. This one drilled through the snow to vanish beneath, and where it had descended, a tiny mushroom sprouted up within seconds, shining the pale green of glow-in-the-dark toys.
Livy stood still a moment, straightening her spine and looking around at the snowy wilderness. Forest lay behind her, beach in front of her; still no cabins or bridge or other signs of humankind. But from the narrow shape of the waterway she faced, she guessed she had reached the other side of the island and was looking across at the mainland, toward the huge forest where they’d taken Skye.
“Okay.” She closed her hand around the ring, just in case that was necessary. “Now what?”
The path sparkled into view.
The next element was apparently water. Sand dollars and sea stars, glowing blue, blossomed up through the snow to form twin lines. They led into the Sound and vanished a few feet out from shore, under the weight of dark, cold seawater.
This piece of Puget Sound was half a mile across, and over a hundred feet deep through most of it. She didn’t see a boat, a bridge, or scuba gear. Just a path to follow. Underwater.
Livy stared at it in despair.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
KIT WAITED MAYBE THREE MINUTES BEFORE PROWLING BACK TO WHERE HE’D LEFT LIVY. HER FOOTPRINTS IN THE snow vanished into nowhere, just as Grady’s and Skye’s did. The fae had brought her into their world.
Empty and rattled, he walked back to his cabin, but stopped at the door. What was he going to do while the three of them were in the goblins’ hands? Build a cozy fire and heat up a pot of coffee in case they came back? Hang out warming his feet till then? Screw that.
He wheeled around, went to his truck, and dug out the tire chains from the metal box in the bed. He hooked them onto the tires, then climbed into the cab. If Livy did succeed, and broke all of them out of the goblin hideout, then they’d probably wind up in the national forest where those dwellings were.
Also, if they—goblins and his loved ones alike—thought he was going to sit here pointlessly while they did all the important stuff, they were sorely mistaken. He was summoning them and going in, whether anyone else liked it or not.
He drove down the bumpy, icy lane to the loop road, then out to the even icier bridge, and eased the truck across it. Bellwater slumbered on the other side, everything covered with pristine snowfall, lit up by streetlights. It was 12:30, though the timing might be different in the fae world.
He drove past the closed-up shops, up Shore Avenue, and on into the woods. His truck’s weight and the tire chains kept him from skidding too much, and he arrived at his traditional stopping point without sliding into any ditches. He got out. The snow lightened the world; he saw more than he usually could when he came out here at night. But everything was quieter too. The trees still creaked in the breeze, but they sounded muffled by the blanket of snow. The winter wind rose with a moan for a moment, like a tundra soundtrack, then died away again.
Kit whistled a few notes.
It took a minute, but someone whistled them back, and a voice taunted in falsetto, “Who is it?”
“It’s me.” He used a neutral, conciliatory tone. After all, going in swinging hadn’t turned out so well lately. “I want to come visit the dwellings. Just want to be there, for the big night. Just to see, okay?”
This was so dumb. Even if they brought him up there, what chance would he have to accomplish anything brave and useful? They’d throw him out of the treehouse the second he made a move against them. But if it bought Livy even a few seconds to do whatever she had to do, or if it inspired Grady and Skye to resist and not become goblins, then he was going in.
They opened the path for him: snow sculptures tonight, knee-high mushroom shapes leading him into the woods. They didn’t glow; the snow made things light enough to see without it.
Once he reached the end of the path, three goblins crawled down the snow-dusted trunks to meet him. He glanced up at their dwellings, a hundred feet up in the trees. Things looked livelier than usual up there, like a party was going on. Lanterns and lightbulbs blazed. Bouncy music, eerie voices, and laughter floated down.
“He wants to come up,” one of the goblins said.
“Yeah.” Kit glanced at the three. Redring wasn’t among them. “Where’s your leader? She usually comes to talk to me.”
“Tonight is a big night, as
you say,” another said. “She is quite busy. She sent us to get you.”
“Super. How do I get up there?”
“Like this.” One of them jumped onto his head, faster than he could anticipate, and knocked him sideways into a bank of ferns and snow.
“Hey! Get off—” But while he tried to pry loose the one on his head, the other two wrapped a gag around his mouth—a grimy cloth whose dirty-laundry taste made him shudder. They seized his hands and bound them with a chain, and whipped more chains all around his body, pinning his arms down. God damn, the goblins were strong for such puny creatures, and fast too. It always surprised him.
“Rrmmf!” He made the growl of protest as menacing as he could, glaring at them as they stood to beam at their handiwork.
“Redring’s orders,” one said. “You are far too troublesome to be unbound in our dwellings. But you may come and watch, she says.”
“Your blood contract does not allow us to use magic to immobilize you,” another said, sounding regretful about that. “So we must use clumsy human ways.”
“Up we go!” the third said. She picked up Kit like he weighed about twenty pounds, and threw him over her shoulder.
They scaled a huge tree trunk. Dangling over the creature’s shoulder, tied up and with his mouth stuffed with disgusting cloth, Kit watched the snowy ground sink away from him.
At this rate, Livy and Grady and Skye were definitely not going to thank him for showing up.
Livy stood between the lines of glowing sea creatures, her boots a few inches from the lapping edge of the water. Was she supposed to swim? In Puget Sound, the hypothermia could kill a person even on a summer day. This was a frozen winter night.
Trust the path.
“But the path’s underwater,” Livy said, to no one in particular. She stared at the illuminated blue lines rippling under the clear, dark water, until they faded a few yards out. As far as she could see, the path stayed on the bottom for the whole span.