The Quicksilver Faire

To Brian and Sandy, my liaisons at the High Court of the Shining Ones, Minnesota Division. And to my family, including the dogs and cats, who put up with deadline-induced frenzy with good spirits.

THE FAIRE FOLK SAGA: TRILOGY 2

GILLIAN SUIVIXIERS

THE SCIONS OF SHADOW TRILOGY

It was like having study hall on a roller coaster. Keelie Heartwood could hardly read the spidery lines of the Elven Compendium of Household Charms before her, thanks to the wild motion of the impossibly tiny airplane she was riding in.

Don't throw up, don't throw up, don't throw up. She swallowed hard. Her mantra wasn't working. The thick pages of the ancient book swayed back and forth as if she were reading on a swing, and the writhing letters jumped on the moving page. It seemed to be a recipe for a charm to turn flowers into weeds.

Pointless, except that the book was written by elves. Keelie was half elven, but she knew that a lot of what the elves did made little sense in the modern world. Case in point: Lord Elianard, her stuffy lore teacher, would be proud of her for reading Elvish writing but he would never stoop to tell her so. She wondered if she'd get extra points for reading on a plane that was staggering through the clouds like a kid in high heels on a sandy beach.

Her seat dropped a foot, roller-coaster style. She grabbed the book's thick covers to keep it from flying into the aisle as her stomach contents rose into her mouth. She swallowed hard and turned to look out the little window by her elbow, staring at a cloud landscape and the plane's silvery wing. She wished her boyfriend, Sean, was in the next seat, rather than the bulky carrier that contained Knot the cat. But Sean was sitting in the seat in front of her to allow Knot to stay near Keelie. She could just see the gilded top of one sun-bleached lock of Sean's hair.

It was the stupid cat's fault. She had to keep an eye on Knot, who had a fairy's wicked and inappropriate sense of humor and the power to wreak havoc, a dangerous combination on an airplane of any size. Her old frenemy Elia, Lord Elianard's daughter, was also on the plane, even farther to the front thanks to their last-minute tickets. Keelie did not miss having her nearby.

The plane dropped again, and then a persistent chime sounded. Her heart pounded as a light began blinking above her head. Seat belt. She took a deep breath. The one thing she could ignore, since she'd never unbuckled hers. Her lips moved with the other words she'd chanted since they'd left Portland: I am safe, I am safe. But this mantra wasn't working either. She didn't believe it.

Keelie hated airplanes. They reminded her of her mother's death last spring, and this commuter jet must be a lot like the one in which Mom had spent the last moments of her life.

She closed the book and put it into her pack, even though it was her only source of distraction. She just couldn't concentrate. Instead of seeing the tiny picture of flower leaves in the Compendium, she'd envisioned Mom's plane breaking up in the sky, the passengers cartwheeling like Lego people into the fathomless Pacific. She shook her head, trying to clear it of bad thoughts, and wished once more that she'd checked inside her backpack before getting on the plane. Someone had dumped out her copy of Hall Pass, the novel she'd been dying to read and had finally snagged at the bookstore in town, and replaced it with the Compendium, a massive volume of spells and charms guaranteed to put anyone to sleep in five minutes.

"Someone" was probably Lord Elianard, since her grandmother was still in California, serving as the newly installed tree shepherd of the Redwood Forest.

It was because of her time in the Redwood Forest that Keelie was now headed to the Northwest Territories-to Big Nugget, a dot on the Canadian map, and to the Crystal Faire held there. Unlike the Ren Faires that her elven father, and now she, worked at every summer, which lasted anywhere from a week to the whole season, the Crystal Faire went on year-round, rain or snow. And from what Keelie had heard, they usually got a lot of snow in Big Nugget, along with seriously sub-zero temperatures. But that was months away; it was springtime now. And apparently it had been unnaturally warm, too. Bears had not hibernated over the winter and were wandering the Northwoods, grumpy. Scientists were blaming it on everything from global warming to sun spots.