Word was spreading fast from court as I searched the Greenwood for Serana. But there was no sign of her. All I found was Will the hob, shaking with fear, tucked in between two rocks.
“Where is she?” I whispered.
“Gone,” he answered, his eyes rimmed white.
“Gone where?” I demanded.
“Wherever the Queen has sent her. Quick-like in a shout.” He squeezed out from between the rocks and bolted into the dense bracken.
Those words, how they stabbed me to the heart. Serana gone! I knew she had no time, no chance to reason with the Queen. With naught on her back, she had disappeared and only the Queen knew where.
And I was next. I was sure of it. Fleeing to our quarters, I arrived at my room unseen through the mouse holes we had built as a secret passageway to the little springs where we liked to bathe. Frantically, I gathered up beloved things: a silver dove, milky crystals, a lozenge of copper, a pouch of amber beads. I hid these treasures in a band hastily made from my dam’s torn silk petticoat and tied it around my waist. I thought in all foolishness that these things might be of use when I found Serana wherever the Queen had sent her. I held that thought hard and close to my guilty heart.
Just as I was tying a blue cape around my shoulders, I heard someone enter. Heart pounding, I turned. Of course it was the Queen. Who else dared enter without permission? Perhaps if I begged she might let me share my sister’s place of punishment. At least we would be together. But I quaked before her, my resolve unraveling in fear. She stared at me with an odd mixture of fury and desperation. But there was no mistaking the danger that smoldered in her narrowed eyes.
I threw myself on the floor, reaching out a tentative hand to touch the doe-white skin of her foot.
“Oh Gracious Queen, our Queen, your worthless servant begs you—”
It was useless of course. Even as I had begun pleading, the Queen spit forth a banishing spell that pierced my flesh the way summer hail shreds the tender leaves. Groveling in pain, I wept quicksilver tears, unable to speak further.
A murderous clap of thunder hurled me from light into dark, from mist into mire. I groaned, my cape soaked through, my face pressed into the soggy earth. I turned on my back, and gasped as rain pelted my cheeks, and pooled in my eyes. I reached out a hand for protection from its stinging cold, seeing only the thrashing branches of storm-tossed trees.
“C’mon, Grandma!” a shrill voice shouted. “Get up, damn it! I can’t carry you.” A small hand tugged at mine, now grown swollen and useless.
Dazed, I struggled to my feet, only distantly wondering where the Queen had exiled me.
“C’mon!” the voice insisted and I looked down through the sheeting rain barely able to make out a girl-child, feral from the look of her matted hair and ragged clothing. “Hey, somebody give me a hand with this one!” she whined.
From the rain-soaked bushes came an explosion of small bodies, some human children by their clothes, some spriggets and hobs, their naked pelts slick with rain. I balked like a nag refusing to plow but they shoved, cursed, and finally kicked me into motion.
I lumbered down a steep embankment, the girl-child tugging frantically at my hand as though we were being chased by unseen demons. Infected by her fear, I stumbled over root and mud to catch up to her.
“Get down,” the girl ordered.
Aided by other hands tugging on my cape, I was pulled to my knees and then forced to lie prostrate in the drenched grass. Twin ribbons of light swooped over us and when the night returned to darkness and rain, the children helped me to my feet again.
“Who are you?” I asked, finding the sound of my voice strange—thick and husky, as if I had caught a human chill.
“Later, when there’s time. We have to get you over first.”
“Let’s go! Or we’ll miss the train!” shouted a lanky boy, his hair shaved into spiral patterns over his skull.
“You gotta run,” commanded the girl who was still holding my hand.
I started to trot with a clumsy gait, when I saw again the twin lights approaching. “Wait! Wait!” I shouted, trying to drag my companions to a halt.
“Aw, shit. We got no time for this,” the boy yelled and slapped me on my flanks. “Run, now! Or we’re all dead!”
I ran nearly insensate with terror, as the children dragged me by the hand over a gravel path and across a hard road to the other side. Midway, blazing lights captured us in a net of silver rain, a horn blared an alarm, and the monster screeched and swerved, but still we ran, our bare feet pounding the unyielding roadway, until we had crossed over.
Crossed over . . .
I was panting, the breath knocked from my chest, my feet burning from the hard slab of the road. But the children continued to push and pull, curse and cajole, dragging me farther into the woods on that other side until again we were on the crest of a hill. Below us on the edge of an open field, I could just make out the rails of iron gouging the earth. Even on the hill, I tasted the bitterness of rust.
Looking around wildly, I realized that I was now alone with the children, for the spriggets and hobs had not ventured onto the road. They had been there only to see me off into my exile, no doubt to report back to the Queen that I was now fully lost to the Greenwood.
“Let’s go,” said the lanky boy, grabbing my arm at the elbow.
I resisted his grasp and stumbled back onto the ground. “I pray do not kill me thusly. Do not tie me to the iron that her hands may be clean of such a shameful death. For though I have wronged the Queen, I do not deserve this. Give me a dagger of silver and let me end my disgrace with some honor.”
Another girl, this one with hair rolled into a hundred braids like the mane of a fairy horse, clasped my face in her small hands. She leaned in close so that I could see her simple, heart-shaped face in the dark. “We’re supposed ta help you. Not kill you. You gotta trust us. There will be wood over the rails and you’ll sit on that and the iron won’t burn you. I promise.”
“You’re changelings, aren’t you?”
“Once, but not anymore.” She shrugged, releasing me.
“Tossed out like the trash,” retorted a third girl in a dress of pieced furs.
“Shut it,” snapped the boy. “Didn’t she promise to bring us back if we helped?”
“Who promised?” I asked.
“No time for talk. The red-eye’s almost here,” the boy said. He grabbed at my cloak, roughly bringing me to my feet again.
A shrill whistle screamed over our heads. The children were moving at once, dragging me in their tow to where the path of rails curved away into the forest again. An iron dragon screeched as it rumbled over the rails, steam exploding around the long segmented body snaking across the field.
Now we were running toward it, and though I gagged at the stench of its bellowing breath, I let the children pull me alongside its slow-moving flanks. The boy was searching as each armored segment passed, until at last a long wooden tail appeared. A door slid open in its side and a stout pair of arms reached out with expectant hands.
“Take a hold and jump in,” the children shouted.
Before I could protest, those broad-fingered hands grabbed my wrists, and I was forced to run faster alongside the open door or fall beneath the dragon’s churning belly and onto the iron rails.
“Jump! Jump!” came shouts from all sides.
I pulled in a gasping, painful breath and jumped . . . landing hard on the threshold of the door. My legs dangled uselessly over the edge behind me, my arms nearly wrung from their sockets, my stomach roiling against the poisonous iron. I flailed like a reluctant mermaid. But the grip on my wrists remained tight, nails digging in and cutting the flesh.
The iron dragon picked up speed, and I was relieved when at last I felt the planks of dried oak beneath my cheek and thighs. Effortlessly, the huge hands hoisted me up until my back rested against a wooden wall that rattled and bucked as the iron dragon galloped over the rails.
“Good. You have come,” said a gruff voice, chuckling. Actually it was more of a growl and the sound of it lifted the hair on my beck.
I stared up at my rescuer, visible in the flashes of distant lightning. Long hair billowed in the wind, sweeping across the rough-hewn features of a hag. In the middle of her broad forehead, thick brows met over a bulbous nose. The mouth was a wide grin filled with glimmering teeth above a knobbed chin. Between the black strands of drifting hair, the eyes flared red like embers ignited by a gust of wind.
“Who are—?”
“Shut the door!” a man’s voice barked and two others rose from the shadowed recess of our hold to push their shoulders into the heavy wooden door, so that sky, the rain, and even the faintest hint of light were obliterated.
Only the eyes of my rescuer, still holding my gaze, continued to burn.