Changeling (4 page)

Like the brownie had a choice. Cleaning is what brownies do, if you ask, until you give them some old clothes, which makes them go away. That was my fairy godmother: as good as she was beautiful and always considerate. It was possible she hadn't told me about the changelings who died because she didn't want to freak me out.

I felt a tug on my shirttail. “Earth to Neef!” Astris said. “Show the brownie your room and explain to it why your magazine collection isn't trash. Don't give it your old clothes until the place is spick-and-span—by my standards, not yours. And go straight to bed when you're done. You look exhausted.”

Which showed how distracted she was, because Astris is usually good at telling when I'm upset. Which I was. Very. In fact, when the brownie wanted to throw out my rocks and my leaf collection as well as my magazines, I yelled at it not to touch my stuff.

I apologized right away, of course—insulted brownies can do a lot of damage. The brownie sighed deeply, then used the rocks and magazines to build a kind of bench under the south-facing window. It decorated the walls with the leaves, it polished my silverware, and it cleaned the glass. To make up for yelling, I swept the stone floor and sprinkled it with rosemary.

When the room was as tidy as it was going to get, I bundled all my too-small clothes into the brownie's spindly arms. “Here you go,” I said. “Thank you for organizing everything.”

The brownie shrugged and vanished.

I wasn't even slightly sleepy, so I perched on my new window seat and looked south, toward Midtown. Evening was drawing in. The shadows were taking over the Park and the trees of the Ramble rustled and murmured to one another below my window. A hazy light pulsed in a thicket—a will-o'-the-wisp waiting for a traveler it could lead astray. Brighter lights began to wink on in the buildings beyond the Park. Everything in Central Park was peaceful and ordinary. Except me.

I knew about the Solstice, of course. There were, as Peg Powler had reminded me, two: one on the longest night of the year and one on the shortest. Astris had taught me that the Solstices were big juju, with lots of magic floating around. Everybody went a little wild, she'd said, and then she'd done that thing with her whiskers that meant, “Don't ask questions, because I won't answer.” I didn't actually remember her saying mortals were banned, but she certainly let me believe it. Which made sense: Astris's big thing was keeping me safe. Mortals, she always said, are fragile and hard to fix when they break.

But I had to wonder: What was the point of letting me think that other mortals weren't even allowed to visit the Park? And why keep me from even knowing that every creature in New York Between spent Solstice Nights dancing their brains out while I was—what? Under a forgetting spell? Turned into a rock?

And why hadn't anyone else mentioned it?

It's not like Astris and the Pooka are the only Folk I hang around with. There's my dancing teacher Iolanthe and a fairy called Bugle and the undines and nixies and water nymphs in the Lake and the Reservoir, not to mention the fictional characters like the Shakespeare Fairies and the Water Rat and Stuart Little, who lives at the Boat Pond. I couldn't believe there was some huge conspiracy to make me the only changeling in New York who wasn't invited to the Solstice Dance. Even if there was, why would Peg Powler tell me about it? Not because she cared about my social life. And all that stuff about Astris and her bad luck with changelings—why would she tell me
that
? To warn me? Peg Powler?

I didn't know what to think.

The trees of the Ramble and the lights of the City beyond got kind of blurry. I wiped my eyes and told myself that the waitresses in Astris's stories didn't get to be debutantes by being all weepy and sorry for themselves. No, they figured out what they had to do and they found magical helpers and talismans and things to help them do it. Plus, they mostly lived Outside, where magical helpers aren't all that easy to find.

I was lucky, really. In Central Park, you can hardly take two steps without bumping into a magic animal or a wish-granting fairy of some kind. If I wandered around the Ramble for a while going “Alas and alack” and “Woe is me” to show that I was unhappy, I'd soon be surrounded by moss women asking what they could do for me. Moss women hate for anyone to be unhappy, which is why more mortals don't get lost in the Ramble forever.

By now, the moon was hanging over the City like half a silver apple. I asked Satchel for a snack (it gave me an orange and a handful of nuts), and then I went to bed, feeling a little less awful. It was good to have a plan.

 
I woke to a beautiful day and a new pair of jeans and a T-shirt draped over my clothes chest. The T-shirt had a winged cat on it. I put it on, wondering why I felt so crabby. And then I remembered yesterday's adventure.

Come on, I told myself. Who are you going to trust? Astris, who brought you up? Or some bogeywoman you've never met before?

That should have settled it. But as I ate the oatmeal Satchel gave me, I couldn't stop thinking about the dance and how one of Astris's changelings had fallen off Belvedere Castle. Finally I decided it wouldn't hurt anything to find out what somebody besides Peg Powler said about it all. So I slung Satchel over my shoulder, put the Pooka's tail hair into my pocket, and went downstairs.

If Astris had been home, she would have noticed right away how weird I was acting. But the kitchen was empty except for a round, golden cookie on the table and a note in Astris's scratchy handwriting telling me that she was having lunch with the werebears in the Zoo.

I can't live on fairy food, because I'd starve to death if I tried, but Astris's sun cookies are my favorite snacks. Just one makes everything look brighter. It says something about how confused I was that I left the cookie where it was and headed straight to the Ramble.

The Ramble is not as wild as the North Woods, but it's still a very tricksy place. The paths shift and hide themselves, and the trees get their kicks out of sticking their roots under your feet so you'll trip and fall. It's where the Pooka took me for lessons in basic questing and wish-making. I also learned the Riddle Game from him, plus bargaining with supernaturals, fairy-tale patterns for all purposes, and fairy law. Tricksters, oddly enough, are experts on rules. The Pooka always says you can't break a rule properly unless you really understand it.

Once I was good and lost, I started to call out “Alas and alack” and “Woe is me.” For all the good it did, I might as well have been crying “Hot cross buns.” After a while, I got frustrated.

“Alas, alack, and woe!” I shouted. “Hey! I'm unhappy here.
Really
unhappy.”

At this point, I tripped over a root that hadn't been there a minute before and fell on a rock and skinned my knee.

“
Now
you're unhappy,” a gentle voice said. “Before, you were mostly pretending. I can't help you if you're pretending.”

The voice came from a clump of twigs that looked like a nest built by a bird who wasn't very good at nest-building. It was perched unsteadily on the root I'd tripped over.

“That's a nasty scrape,” the moss woman said sympathetically. “You want me to put a bit of spiderweb on it? Or a burdock leaf? There's nothing more cooling than a burdock leaf.”

“No, thank you,” I said as patiently as I could.

The moss woman blinked. “You're the mortal changeling, aren't you?”

“Uh-huh.” There was something about the way she'd said it that made me uncomfortable. It almost sounded like she was sorry for me.

“Oh, my goodness. You really
are
unhappy.” The moss woman stood up, which made her look like a nest propped up on twigs, and got into wish-granting position. “Okay, shoot.”

I bit my lip. Of my two questions, the one that was bothering me the most was what had really happened to Astris's other mortal changelings. But I was having trouble phrasing it as a wish. “I wish I knew if Astris was a murderess”? I just couldn't! The second question was a lot simpler.

“I wish I could go to the Solstice Dance,” I said.

The moss woman's twigs turned a pale beige. “Do you know what you're asking?”

As a matter of fact, I didn't, but I wasn't going to admit that. “Sure I do. I want to go to the ball, like Radiatorella. What's the big deal?”

“OdearOdear,” the moss woman muttered. “What to do? What to do? She's very unhappy—miserable, in fact. It's coming off of her in waves. Most unpleasant. I have to fix it. But I can't tell her about . . . O dear. OdearOdearODEAR!”

As she muttered, her voice got higher and faster and her twigs rattled furiously. Afraid she'd fall apart completely, I told her I withdrew the wish.

The moss woman settled her twigs with a nervous clack. “Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“How about another wish? I'd do anything—almost—to make you happy. How about a nice puppy?”

“I don't want a puppy,” I said crossly.

“O dear. I'm sorry, I really am, but I
can't
, you see. It's a geas. You do know what a geas is, don't you?”

Geases are a Folk lore basic. “It's when you're not allowed to do a certain thing, and if you do it, something really bad happens to you.”

“That's right,” she said. “And I'm under one. About the—what you said. So is everybody else around here. Please don't mention it again. Wish for something else instead. How about a nice new dress?”

This would have been the time to ask her about Astris, but I still couldn't find a good way to put it. And I did want to go to the Solstice Dance instead of just sleeping through it.

“I wish I had an antisleeping charm,” I said.

“An antisleeping charm?” The moss woman sounded surprised. “I don't know any antisleeping charms. Let me think.”

She settled back down to her nest-on-a-root mode and closed her eyes. I waited and waited and waited. You can't rush Folk. The trees rustled peevishly and a toad with a ruby in its head hopped over my foot. I waited some more.

Finally the moss woman stood up. “Okay. I got it. You know the kazna peri over by Huddlestone Bridge?”

“Not personally, no.”

“That doesn't matter—you'll know it when you see it. It has a nose you could roll a marble down. Gray, I think—the kazna peri, not the marble. But I could be wrong. It's tending a silver pot over a blue fire. Ask it for some of what's in the pot. Bye.”

And the moss woman was gone before I could ask for anything else. I had to find another moss woman to show me the way out of the Ramble.

 
Huddlestone Bridge is tucked away on the southwest edge of the North Woods. Yesterday, I wouldn't have gone to the Reservoir without telling Astris, much less gone way out-of-bounds looking for a supernatural whose name I recognized from my lesson on minor-league devils and demons. Today, I would have done worse than that if it meant getting one of my questions answered.

It was hot under the trees and I couldn't find anything that even resembled a path. I crashed around in the bushes for a while, grumpy and lost, on the theory that if I looked long enough, I'd surely find
something.

What I found was a smell. It was toasty, sharp, and sneeze-making, unlike anything I'd ever smelled before, and it led me to a rough stone bridge over a swift, deep stream.

This time, I knew better than to rush into a trap without checking it out first. Crawling cautiously to the side of the bridge, I peered down into the clearing below, trying to look as much like a lump of granite as possible. A small, grayish devil was poking at a fire under a pot. The pot was silver, the fire was blue, and the devil's nose poked out of the darker tangle of its beard and eyebrows like a long gray carrot. I'd found the kazna peri.

I slithered down into the clearing and marched up to the fire, looking, I hoped, more heroic than I felt. The kazna peri gaped up at me, its mouth a black ring studded with sharp teeth.

“Good afternoon, kazna peri,” I said. “I am a changeling under the protection of the Green Lady and I've come to ask a boon.”

The kazna peri grinned. “And you think this comes as news to me? Would you be here if you didn't want something? Let me guess: You want the magic treasure I'm cooking here in my silver pot.”

“Yes, please,” I said. “I don't need all of it, though. A mouthful's fine.”

“Well, you can't have any at all. You're too young. It'll stunt your growth. It'll grow hair on your chest. It'll keep you awake for days. It'll give you ulcers, a sour stomach, the shakes. I live on the stuff from the Feast of St. Michael to Midsummer Eve. I know. You want to end up like this?”

The kazna peri stuck out its leathery claw; it shook like a leaf in a high wind.

This might have put me off, if I'd believed it. Maybe the Folk can't make things up, but they can exaggerate. “I can handle it,” I said. “Will you give me some, please?”

“ ‘Will you give me some? Will you give me some?' ” the kazna peri mocked. “This isn't just any ordinary treasure, you know. It's pure black gold. Why should I give it to you just because you say please? What's in it for me?”

Life among the Folk is all about getting what you need without giving up a pot of gold or an arm and a leg or your firstborn child in exchange. The Pooka had spent a lot of time dinning the principles of bargaining into me, and I was sure he would have been proud of how I talked the kazna peri down from a pint of my heart's blood and my little-finger bone to a dead pigeon I'd seen lying at the edge of the North Meadow. When I brought it back, wrapped in a chestnut leaf, the kazna peri was so happy that it threw in a stone flask to keep the potion in at no extra charge.