The Perilous Crossing

by L. R. Patton

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Crossing: Episode 3 (Fairendale, #3)

  Love

  Fortune

  Gone

  Journey

  Bridge

  Traitor

  Light

  Captain

  Morad

  Rounds

  Step

  The End

  How to Survive an Encounter with Mermaids

  About the Author

  A Note From L.R.

  Read all the books in the Fairendale series!

  Book .5: The Good King’s Fall (a prequel)

  Book 1: The Treacherous Secret

  Book 2: The King’s Pursuit

  Book 3: The Perilous Crossing

  Book 4: The Dragons of Morad

  Book 5: The Fiery Aftermath

  Book 6: The Mysterious Separation

  Collector’s Editions:

  Books 1-6: The Flight of the Magical Children

  To see all the books L.R. Patton has written, please click or visit the link below:

  www.lrpatton.com/store

  BATLEE Press

  PO Box 591596

  San Antonio, TX 78259

  Copyright ©2016 by L.R. Patton. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing. I appreciate your taking the time to read my work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought it, or telling your friends how much you enjoyed it. Both of those help spread the word, which is incredibly important for authors. Thank you for supporting my work.

  www.lrpatton.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition—2016/Cover designed by Toalson Marketing

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  To the ones

  who made me

  brave enough

  to try

  Love

  MAUDE and Arthur tried to save the children, and now they have failed. They have failed in all the ways that matter, in all the ways that end in children staying alive. They do not know where their son is. Their daughter is, daily, losing the strength of her gift, for every day she spends without the brother born mere minutes after she was is another day her magic weakens, at the risk of vanishing. The other children are hungry, thirsty, weak, unable to summon magic as well, for when children hunger, magic does not obey.

  Magic has its rules, after all.

  And now they are trapped beneath the earth, while the world moves on and they ration what food they have and watch it, still, diminish. They are no closer to finding a solution than they were before, though it has, in truth, been only a day since they discovered themselves trapped beneath the ground in a secret hiding place that no one, now, will ever be able to find, for there is no longer a portal leading back to the land above. It feels, to the children, that they have been trapped beneath the earth for weeks.

  Whatever will they do?

  Arthur knows they will not exist long without food and, especially, without Mercy’s ability to draw water from the ground, for she has grown far too weak. They have done what they can, kept the food portions small, turned everything they have into more food, but it is the water that confounds him. Mercy, you see, is the most powerful among his students, particularly since his daughter’s magic has, in effect, dried up outside the presence of her twin brother Theo, who disappeared in the king’s roundup, but even Mercy struggles to bring drops into the cup a girl named Ursula holds against the dirt.

  “Come,” Ursula says. “You must try again.”

  Arthur watches Mercy lower her staff to the place where the cup meets dirt, watches her eyes glaze, looks at the way her flaming red hair has grown dull in her hiding. He takes a deep breath. He looks at his wife. “Enough,” he says.

  Mercy drops to the ground. Maude, Arthur’s pale wife, moves to lift the girl onto a chair. Mercy does not sit, though, so much as she slumps.

  “But what shall we do, Father?” Hazel says. Her eyes, once the color of a spring morning sky, are now the color of fog. She is graying. They are all graying. Arthur cannot bear it. They will die, trapped beneath the very land they love.

  “Hush, child,” Maude says. It is unclear whether she is speaking to her daughter or the girl who sobs in her arms.

  “We shall rest,” Arthur says. “We shall rest for a time. Then we shall try again.”

  “But we need water,” says one of the boys, Chester, a trickster among the group who plays tricks no longer. One can understand, perhaps, that the reality of finding oneself trapped beneath the earth with no way out leaves no room for trickery and games. His twin brother, Charles, who has always been a quiet sort where his brother was loud, puts a hand on his brother’s arm, as if to stop the words after they have already met the ears of all those gathered in the room.

  There are twenty-four children squeezed in this underground home, along with Maude and Arthur. They hide for their lives. They hide, they believe, right alongside Death, though we, dear reader, can see that he is not here at all.

  You see, a tiny shoe was found on the outside. A shoe that held a very large portal that has, now, been broken. Their way out no longer exists.

  “We shall find water,” Arthur says. He puts on a brave face for the children, for Arthur has always been the hopeful sort. His wife, however, knows him better. She sees the uncertainty that hides in the wrinkle between his eyebrows. She knows what certainty they face.

  “Rest, Mercy,” Maude says to the girl still shaking in her arms. “It is the best thing you can do for now.”

  The children grow silent. The candlelight wavers around them all, huddled in a tiny kitchen carved from the earth. Maude has put a pot on the fire with the last of the water. She will fill it with the last of the vegetables so they can have something to eat, though it will not be much.

  Maude looks around. So many children. So many faces. So many eyes looking desperately for a way out. Maude shivers, though it is anything but cold in this room beneath the ground. Arthur crosses the room to her side.

  “We have some food stored away,” he says. She looks at this man who is her husband, this man who has seen her through every other danger in their lives. Surely he will be able to get them out of this one. Arthur looks at her and knows what she is thinking. It is not an easy knowing, this one, that someone depends on you to pull a miracle from wherever it is miracles come.

  Their eyes hold for a moment, and then Maude says, “Not nearly enough. Not nearly enough to live for long. We must find a way out.”

  “Yes,” Arthur says, gazing back toward the children. “We must.” He clears his throat. “In the meantime, we shall live as long as we can. Let the children eat first. They need their strength.”

  “No,” Hazel says, for she has been listening to her parents, along with the others, for children know how to listen without seeming to. “We all eat, or none of us eat.”

  Was there ever a braver child who lived than this Hazel? She cannot imagine a life without Maude and Arthur, the mother and father she has always admired and trusted and, most of all, loved. She knows that if they do not eat, they die, and if they die, the children shall die. All of them, for no one knows as much about magic as Arthur and Maude, though they cannot themselves practice it.

  Hazel thinks of her brother, Theo. She knows
he is not dead. She can feel it. He is out there somewhere. Perhaps he will find them. She knows, dear reader, that this is quite a fantastical hope, but hope does not always listen to reason.

  “Yes, we all eat,” the children say, murmuring their agreement, for they know what little chance they have without Arthur and Maude.

  “Perhaps I could crawl out?” says a tiny boy named Tom, whose shoe was used to create the portal that has been broken. He is the size of a thumb, so small the children must watch their steps always. “Perhaps I could crawl through the cracks in the earth.”

  “And I,” says a tiny girl named Thumbelina, whom the children call Lina. She steps forward. Her blue dress is so small it looks as if it is a scrap of fabric, which it likely is, for her mother and father were very poor, and stitches this small are very hard to make, though one might argue it would take only a few stitches to make a dress to fit a girl so tiny.

  “And what would you do when you escape?” Chester says. “Dig us all out?”

  They grow quiet once again, though it was Chester’s attempt to make light of the situation in which they find themselves. The children though, including Chester, feel that the situation is anything but light. Laughter does not exist in this hole beneath the ground. Perhaps it once did, before a soldier of the king stumbled, with quite extraordinary luck, we might all agree, upon the tiny shoe and carried away to King Willis what link Arthur, Maude, and the children had to the outside world. But now, well. It is a somber mood that settles upon the place.

  “It is too deep,” Arthur says. “We are down farther than one might imagine.” His eyes darken. “And much too dangerous. There are far more dangerous things than the king’s men in these woods. You could not travel alone.”

  The children shiver, as if the same breath of ice has crossed their chests. They know the stories of these woods. They know of the boy the fairies stole once upon a time, who never returned, and the girl and her father, who disappeared in their time. They know of the goblins that turn a child into a slave. They know of the animal creatures that walk on two legs and speak with human voices.

  And perhaps it is the great tension in this tomb that cracks Maude, for she buries her face in her hands and cries out, “What will we do?”

  They have, perhaps, lived here too long, without venturing into the light of day, but for a simple gathering of vegetables Arthur did every eve. They are, perhaps, too trapped, too exhausted, too hollow of hope.

  No one has magic strong enough to get them out of this, is what they are all thinking. No one can save them. No way out.

  But there is a girl, slumped in a chair, no longer wrapped in Maude’s arms, thinking. Solving. Planning.

  Might she be the very one to save them?

  Yes. Perhaps she will. But first, let us turn our attention to the castle, where there is some long-awaited news.

  WERE we to follow the very man who lucked upon a tiny shoe, we might see him racing out of the woods and into the camp, still spread on the castle lawn. We might, perhaps, see his fellow soldiers turning to look at him, for it is with great shouting and clamoring that this soldier calls for his captain. We might see Captain Sir Greyson standing before the man, looking for all the world as though a soldier of his has gone mad, and then we might see the soldier drop a tiny shoe in the palm of his captain’s hand, after which the captain might lean close for inspection and then, in a great shouting of his own, move toward the castle steps.

  The soldiers, you see, have waited and waited and waited for news such as this, though one might wonder what it is a shoe might tell them. But they are ready to go home, you see, and so the smallest evidence that a foot has tread through the wood brings them one step closer to returning home.

  Sir Greyson bursts into the Great Hall, the shoe in his hand. He clenches his fist around it, to ensure it is still there. “Your majesty,” he says. “Your majesty!”

  His voice is triumphant, hardly able to contain the excitement that takes his legs and shakes them until they nearly buckle beneath him. For so long they have looked. For so long they have found nothing. And then, today, a shoe. A tiny shoe, to be sure, but a shoe all the same.

  Sir Greyson is a smart man. He is not under any illusion that this shoe holds within it the power to send them all home, but hope, as we have agreed, is quite a strange phenomenon. He is already imagining a dinner at home with his mother tonight, if she lives still. He does not consider that this shoe might belong to any being other than one of the missing children. He does not consider that it was a shoe lost in flight, that the children are miles away by now. He does not consider that it means absolutely nothing.

  We know it means something, but what is this shoe to the objectively inclined? There is no portal attached any longer. One cannot see an underground house in a tiny shoe.

  Perhaps the shoe will lead to something else. This is what bursts our captain through the doors of the throne room.

  Prince Virgil sits in a chair beside his father. Sir Greyson has never seen this chair before, nor does he recognize it. But he is too intent on his news to do anything more but notice it. King Willis is eating, as is most often the case, from a plate piled with sweet rolls that his page holds in two hands.

  “May I approach the throne, sire?” Sir Greyson says.

  King Willis does not speak, for once, with the sweet rolls in his mouth but merely inclines his head in the universal sign for “yes” when one is indisposed to say it with a word. Sir Greyson takes the steps two at a time, which puts him before the king in three steps (for the mathematically challenged, Sir Greyson covers six steps in total). He holds out his hand. The king and the prince stare at his palm.

  “Well, what is it?” King Willis says.

  Sir Greyson holds it closer to his king, but the king does not have the eyesight he once did as a boy. He squints but cannot make anything out. It is a very small shoe.

  Prince Virgil, however, sees the shoe quite clearly. It is not one he recognizes. “A tiny shoe?” he says. “Whatever could that mean? It is much too small for the children we seek.”

  In his father’s presence, Prince Virgil does not consider what might happen to the children the king pursues, though they were once his friends. The very boy King Willis seeks most was Prince Virgil’s best friend, but Prince Virgil, under his father’s influence and the mysterious hold of the royal throne (we shall come to this at a later time, dear reader. Do not worry.), cares nothing for details such as these. When he is alone in his bedchamber or with his mother, the guilt steals over him, for he is the reason his father pursues his friends. He is the one, after all, who led his father to Theo. He is the one who told the secret of his friend’s magic. He is the one who set it all in motion.

  But in the throne room, Prince Virgil is merely a prince, nothing more. He is not a friend. He is not a boy who once loved a handful of village children. He is not who he was. And because Prince Virgil has taken to spending more and more time with his father and the king’s golden throne, he is losing more and more of who he was. This is the fate of those who keep foolish company, though one cannot blame our prince for spending time with his father. Is it Prince Virgil’s fault that his father is more fool than wise man? A boy cannot simply forget his father.

  King Willis stands from his throne, though it is growing more and more difficult for him to do every day. “A shoe,” he says. “A tiny shoe.” He makes a sound, as if he is pondering, too, the question of his son.

  “We came upon it in the Weeping Woods,” Sir Greyson says. “One of my men discovered it.”

  “But what does a tiny shoe have to tell us about anything?” Prince Virgil says.

  Sir Greyson looks at his prince, then back at his king. “It is the first sign of any life we have found.”

  “But it could belong to anything,” Prince Virgil says. “There are fairies who wear shoes, are there not?”

  Sir Greyson shakes his head. It is, to be sure, a foolish question. Fairies, of course, do not wear shoe
s. But Sir Greyson is a kind man. He does not answer his prince as if he is merely a child. “No, sire,” he says, for Prince Virgil will one day be his king. “Fairies are not known to bother with shoes.” He clears his throat. “There was a boy.”

  “A boy?” King Willis says. His eyebrows draw low over his eyes.

  “A tiny boy,” Sir Greyson says. Even now, he does not like disclosing the news, though moments ago he felt great relief at having found anything, for he, like his men, is ready to return to his home. Desperation, you see, makes a man forget his reason. And now that Sir Greyson stands before his prince and his king, he remembers the plans King Willis has for the children once they are found, and he hopes, in his heart, that they have fled to a place where his men will never find them, that they are, somehow, safe. Yet, if they are, his men will be ordered to continue searching.

  How does a man walk himself out of such a conundrum?

  Sir Greyson looks at the shoe. He can do nothing about the shoe now. He can do nothing about the words he has already spoken. He must say more.

  “A boy in the village,” Sir Greyson says. “A boy as small as a thumb.”

  The king tilts his head. “And this is his shoe?”

  “There is no way of knowing for sure, sire,” Sir Greyson says. “But I suspect so.” He stares at the shoe in his palm.

  “And what, pray tell, do you think it means?” King Willis says.

  Sir Greyson feels the cloud settle on him. Guilt. Hope. Fear. All of those battling in a storm of thunder and lightning, in the places one cannot see. His mother. The children. His men. Their families. What did they have to return to without their children? What would his mother do without him? What is a man to do?

  “They were in the forest,” Sir Greyson says, for he knows that even though many of his men have lost their children, they have not lost their wives.

  How is it, you ask, that men would follow the orders of a king who has stolen their children from their homes and dimmed the light of the world? It is a quite understandable question. The king, you see, holds all the power in a kingdom like Fairendale. He controls the seeds the people receive for growing vegetables. He controls the flock of sheep that Hazel, if you remember, set free in the Weeping Woods. (We are not sure where the sheep ended up. Perhaps they returned home. Perhaps they were stolen by fairies, taken to the land that does not grow old for the amusement of the Lost Boys and Girls. They are not so important to our story just yet, so we will leave them wherever they may be.) He controls the fire, the provisions, the flow of medicine. He controls everything, except for the rising and the setting of the sun. And why, you ask, do they not leave the kingdom of Fairendale? Well, reader, is it so easy to leave your home? It is all the people have ever known. And there is hope, again. Hope does not let one give up so easily. And no matter how wretched life gets, the people of Fairendale hope. They hope that one day they will have a better kingdom. They hope that one day another king, a kinder king, will sit the throne. They hope that their hopes will come to pass.