TWELVE

QUEEN REE flew to face Mother Dove, who said, “Send everyone home while they can still fly.”

Ree had no intention of obeying. Mother Dove was in danger, and her fairies wouldn’t desert her. Ree turned and found Tink at her side. The queen issued instructions.

Tink picked a dozen of the fairies who were pressing in toward Mother Dove. They stationed themselves at intervals around the nest. After shaking a little fairy dust onto the nest, they began to lift it off its branch. The plan was to lower the nest and place it under a log, out of the wind.

But before they had raised it an inch, a gust rolled through and blew away Tink, her helpers, and the nest’s outermost twigs. Beck saved herself by hugging Mother Dove’s neck. Ree was above the wind, but her shoes were blown off.

A second squad of fairies surrounded the nest. But a bigger gust got them, and Ree and Beck as well. Only Mother Dove herself, who was three times the weight of a fairy, kept her place.

In the fairy circle, a lantern went over and set off a small blaze. Two fairies doused it with pitcher after pitcher of punch.

Meanwhile, the cooking-talent fairies began wrapping up their things as fast as they could. Bess hugged her painting close and tried to battle the wind. A nursing-talent sparrow man tended a fairy who’d been slammed into a tree.

More fairies surged toward Mother Dove, but before they reached her, a fresh wind barreled through, a wind that made the others seem gentle. In a wink it swept away every last fairy.

The hurricane had arrived.

Mother Dove cried for the fairies and begged for mercy for her egg.

The hurricane tossed giant boulders about as though they were Ping-Pong balls. It slammed Tink into a birch tree at the edge of the fairy circle. She slid down the trunk, the breath knocked out of her.

Not far from the fairy circle, Rani was caught by an updraft and borne above the canopy of trees. Then the wind veered, and she fell.

It would have been the end of her if a branch hadn’t caught one of the wing slits of her dress. She was saved, but she couldn’t free herself. She dangled, lurching this way and that in the wind, praying that her branch would hold.

The wind carried Queen Ree a mile beyond Fairy Haven. It blew her into a tree hole and stopped up the opening with a lost boy’s leather shoe. Ree squirmed into the shoe and pushed against the sole. It didn’t budge. She rammed it with her shoulder. It still didn’t budge.

She pushed aside the laces. Then she sat on the edge of the shoe and tried to ignore the smell. She wondered if the shoe was being held in place by the wind, or if it was wedged in so tight she’d never get out.

The hurricane tore a mast off the pirate ship and blew the ship out to sea. A mermaid was catapulted fifty feet up the beach, and her friends had to dive to the ocean floor for safety. Inland, even the dragon Kyto cowered in his prison cave.

Beck skimmed along the ground. She tried to stop, but she was less than an eyelash in the storm. She could feel Mother Dove’s distress and was desperate to help her.

The wind blew Beck into a burrow. She sat up, bruised and scraped, and faced a clutch of terrified baby moles. Her mind reached out to them. There, there, she thought. It’s all right.

She couldn’t leave them.

There, there. You’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.

She wondered, But will we?

Terence found himself rolling down a slope, along with grass and stones. Below surged a river of mud. If he kept going he’d be swallowed up. He thrust himself toward a tree root and was able to grab it with one arm. He got the other arm around it and hung on, trying to keep his head up, trying to breathe in air and not mud.

And all the while he worried about Tink.

At the birch tree, Tink got her breath back. She was too wet to fly, so she ran, hunched over, trying to get below the wind. She couldn’t see Mother Dove’s hawthorn, but she knew where it was.

She was halfway across the fairy circle when the hurricane sent another wind. This wind picked up a copper saucepan and thwacked her on the head with it. She passed out and was whisked out of the circle along with the fairy-dust sacks, the tablecloths, and Bess’s portrait of Mother Dove.