Another light came bobbing up the trail toward us—the wizard hurrying, but not running. He slowed when he saw me. “Where is this statue you said entrapped the girl? What sort of trickery are you up to?”
“No trickery,” Hudson said. “I told you the truth. A leprechaun took the statue away because it was made of gold, but you can look at the mark on Tansy’s arm if you don’t believe me.”
I didn’t expect the wizard to actually care about the proof, but he strode over to me. I showed him the mark on my forearm. It was deep red, almost purple, and my arm was swollen. He wrinkled his nose, then turned back to Hudson. “Very well. Let’s conduct our business directly. Where is the Gilead?”
Hudson opened the pouch at his waist and pulled out the branch. “You can have it if you promise to send everyone here back to our time period. We can pay you gold for your extra trouble.”
The wizard pursed his lips. “Our bargain was for one person. No more.”
Hudson motioned to my family. “All of us need to go home. We don’t belong here.”
“Do you know how much effort, how much magic, that would entail?” The wizard held up a finger. “One person. Choose whomever you desire.”
I didn’t want to hear this, not after we’d been through so much. “Please,” I said, but Bartimaeus probably didn’t even hear me. Hudson was talking again.
“It has to be all of us,” he said.
My dad stepped forward. “If you help us, we’ll give you the things we brought with us from our day—walkie-talkies, flashlights, watches, first-aid kits …”
Perhaps the wizard might have been interested if he had known what any of these items were, but he didn’t bother to ask. He shook his head as though we couldn’t possibly have anything worthwhile.
Sandra walked over to him, still carrying the baby. “Think how you would feel if your own family were stranded in the wrong time. Wouldn’t you want someone to help them?”
A moth flew by the wizard’s oil lamp, and he batted it away. “That is precisely why I have no family. They’re simply more people who need something from you. Annoying insects.” I wasn’t sure whether he meant families or the moth that was still circling his lamp. “The mosquitoes will be out next.” He swung his hand through the air as though swiping away an incoming swarm and glared at Hudson. “Choose who will go, or our bargain is over.”
Hudson turned to me, his dark eyes pained. He was going to say good-bye to me now; he was leaving. The realization caused a spike of pain in my heart that rivaled the stab of the enchantment. I wanted to tell Hudson it was okay, that I wouldn’t blame him for going and leaving the rest of us here. I couldn’t do it, though. My throat felt tight at the thought of never seeing him again.
“Well,” I said, trying to keep my voice light, “it turns out ‘happily ever after’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
He walked over and took hold of my hand. I didn’t want this moment of kindness. It felt like a consolation prize. I couldn’t pull my hand away, though. Suddenly I wanted to cling to him and was afraid I wouldn’t be able to let go.
“Should we send Stetson back?” he asked.
“What?” It hadn’t been what I expected him to say. I couldn’t process it. He wasn’t leaving?
“We could send Stetson back to our day. He’d be safer there—with modern medicine and better food …”
Emotions swirled inside me. Hudson wanted to stay with me. He had chosen the baby to go back instead of himself. But where exactly would we send Stetson? Who would take care of him? I couldn’t send him to the void of the future and never know if he was all right or not. I shook my head. “He belongs with me.”
Hudson nodded then turned to my family. “Nick, do you want to go?”
Nick looked at Sandra and my dad. “Not without the rest of my family.”
My dad put his arm around Sandra. “We go as a family or not at all.”
Tears welled in Sandra’s eyes, but she didn’t let them fall. “We’ll make do in this century if we have to.”
Hudson turned back to the wizard, keeping the branch close. “If you want the Gilead, it has to be all of us.”
The wizard grunted, and a sneer curled his upper lip. “You’ve wasted enough of my time. When you decide who to send, you’ll find me in the carriage. But be quick about it. Once the horses are rested, I’ll leave.” He turned so quickly that his cloak spun around his feet, and he stalked off down the trail to the carriage.
My father rubbed the three-day beard on his chin and glanced over at Hudson. “Are you sure you want to stay? Your family is back in the twenty-first century.”
Sandra shushed my father, but he ignored her. “Hudson shouldn’t give up his trip home without thinking about it.”
Hudson fingered the Gilead, turning it over in his hand. “I’m beginning to wonder if this plant might be more useful than a trip back home. Just imagine the things we might need to fix: leaky roofs, swords, broken arms …”
Hearts, I thought. Could the Gilead fix the gold enchantment that hurt my heart so badly? Could it fix the sadness I felt about never seeing my mother or sister again? Could it fix Hudson’s pain?
Hudson raised his voice as though talking to someone besides those of us standing on the trail. “We might even be able to make some good changes to the Middle Ages. With twenty-first-century knowledge, unlimited wealth, and a bit of magic to fix things, we’ll be able to accomplish anything we want.”
I realized what he was doing and raised my voice too. “Right—we could raise armies, create new countries. Do you think the fairies will mind if we take over, say, Belgium?”
Chrissy popped up in front of me, her wand visible in her crossed arms. Her glow lit the area so brightly that the flashlight beams seemed to dim. She wore modern clothes again: a white miniskirt, a polka-dot blue halter top, and rhinestone-embedded flip-flops. A pair of white sunglasses sat atop her deep blue hair, and a purse with pictures of little beach umbrellas hung from her shoulder. “It’s not nice to threaten fairies,” she told Hudson and me pointedly. “I was going to come talk to you just as soon as my pedicure was over. Look—” She put out her foot to show us her toenails. All but one were painted baby blue with fluffy white clouds swirling all over them. “I had to leave before my last toe was done. I suppose Belgium can thank me later.”
“The story is over,” I said. “You said you would take us back to our time period.”
She sniffed and tossed her hair off one shoulder with a hand that featured the same blue-polish-with-clouds manicure. “In the original contract, I was to take you back once Tansy defeated Rumpelstiltskin, but as you pointed out, you changed things. Now you’ll get back when Tansy writes down the moral of the new story in the magic book.”
She looked at me and sighed in exasperation. “Really, the outfits you keep showing up in. My ball-gown professor would fail me for that dress alone.” She flourished her wand in my direction, and my brown dress turned into a slim-fitting golden evening gown.
I ignored the change, picked up the magic book, and showed it to her. “I wrote down the moral that Clover told me to. It still didn’t work.”
Chrissy took the book and flipped through the pages, checking on the story since she’d seen it last. “He probably told you the moral of the story is that leprechauns are awesome, didn’t he?”
I nodded. “Something like that.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s the moral he takes from every story, but this isn’t his story. It’s yours, Tansy. You need to write your moral.” She reached the page where I turned Rumpelstiltskin into a golden statue, and a smirk stole across her lips. “That’s what he gets for underestimating women. I bet he wishes he’d gone off on that cooking spoon now.”
She handed me back the book, but I could only grip it in frustration. “I already wrote every moral I could think of.”
She tilted her chin down. “Yes, but you wrote them before the fairy tale was finished. For a moral to be accurate, yo
u need to know how the story ends.” She waved a hand at me. “Now then, what did you learn?”
So much that I couldn’t answer right away. It seemed I had learned more in the last few days than I’d learned in all the years before. My family and Hudson were staring at me, waiting for some gem of wisdom to fall from my lips. Instead, I fingered the pen.
Chrissy’s wings spanned open and then fluttered impatiently. “You may have, for example, been paying attention when I told you that the lessons you learn in life are more important than the things you accomplish, or you may remember when I told you that you can’t expect wishes to change the world without them changing you too, or that I pointed out that the purpose of life was not to avoid problems, but to overcome them. Those might have stuck in your mind if you weren’t currently—” She snapped her fingers and the pathetic-o-meter appeared in her hand. Her eyebrows rose in surprise when she read my numbers. “Oh, look. Now you’re only 34 percent pathetic.” She flashed the disk at me so I could see it. “That’s quite good, really. Mortals are always at least 33 percent pathetic—it’s just your nature. It’s the reason you like rap music and keep bringing low-rise jeans back into style.” She tucked the pathetic-o-meter into her purse. “Anyway, what have you learned from all this?”
I put the pen to the paper, and a single gold dot leaked from the pen, waiting to be turned into a thought. “Do I need to write down everything, or just one thing?”
“One thing will do.”
Robin Hood and the Merry Men came back to the trail then. I heard someone say, “Where is that light coming from?”
Little John stopped in his tracks. “Be wary, lads, it’s the selfsame fairy who snatched us back and forth between centuries.”
“Should we flee?” Will asked.
Chrissy flicked her wand and a gust of wind rushed in their direction, blowing off a hat or two. “If I wanted to do you harm,” she said loudly, “it wouldn’t matter where you ran to. You might as well come out, be gentlemen, and offer me proper homage.” To me she said, “Fairies own the forest in the twelfth century. It’s like, you know, being royalty.”
The Merry Men shuffled forward. Robin Hood took the lead. When he reached Chrissy, he took off his hat and bowed deeply. “We have no gifts to offer such a fair one as yourself, but will gladly give you the homage of our praise.”
“I accept praise,” Chrissy said, smiling benevolently at him. “And sonnets will do.”
“Sonnets,” Robin Hood repeated without enthusiasm. He glanced back at the Merry Men, who didn’t look much happier about the request. “We shall confer and compose one forthwith.” They all fell back a little ways away from us, whispering among themselves.
Nick put his hands on his hips. “Come on, Tansy, write something so we can go home. You don’t really want to be around to hear poetry from twelfth-century bandits, do you?”
Still, I hesitated. “I’ll be able to change things to gold when I go home?”
She nodded. “The gold enchantment is yours until you take it off.”
“Will the book—The Change Enchantment—will it still work when I get home?”
She nodded again. “But you’ll have no need of magic then to change your future. It isn’t set in stone or book or by any spell. You can make whatever you want of your own future.”
Part of me knew this had always been the case. I’d been told the same thing by adults for years, but I’d always been concentrating on the past so intently that I’d never noticed my future, wide and endless in front of me. Now the kaleidoscope of possibilities hit me. I could do anything I wanted. Fate had unchained me.
I glanced back at the Merry Men. Robin Hood was shaking his head. “You can’t stick ‘gorgeous’ at the end of a stanza. Nothing rhymes with it.”
Friar Tuck frowned. “Poor us.”
Will added, “More fuss.”
Little John grumbled. “Boar pus.”
Robin Hood waved their words away. “Do you want to be turned into something filthy like mushrooms?”
I leaned toward Chrissy. “Can I give The Change Enchantment to Robin Hood when I’m done with it? He didn’t like how his story ended.”
Chrissy smiled at the idea. “If that’s what you want to do with it.”
“Good,” I said. “Can you send my family home first, and I’ll stay for a few minutes and explain things to Robin Hood?”
“Sure,” she said, even though neither my father nor Hudson looked pleased about my staying behind for a few minutes.
I turned back to the book and held it up a bit, suddenly too shy to let anyone see the moral I had chosen for the story. I wrote the words, wishing I could have thought up some really elegant phrase to say what I was feeling, but everyone was waiting and I’d never been very poetic or profound.
I placed a period at the end of the sentence and watched to see if the words disappeared. They didn’t. They glowed as though I had written them with fire, blazing so brightly that I had to shut my eyes.
When I opened them, my family was gone and Robin Hood stood in front of me. He looked at Chrissy in surprise and frustration. “I have not yet finished composing your sonnet.”
“Relax,” she said. “I brought you over because Tansy wants to give you something.”
I shut the book. The spinning wheel on the cover still spun in a way that shouldn’t have been possible for an embossed illustration. “This is The Change Enchantment. If you accept it, then you’ll be able to change your story. Your ending won’t have to be like the one in the novel I gave you. I don’t know if it will be better or worse, but it will be yours.” I held the book out to him. “Do you want it?”
He hesitated, then slowly took the book from my hand. “I’m not sure whether it is wisdom or folly, but yes, I want it.”
The spinning wheel vanished from the cover, and a green feathered hat appeared. He flipped open the first page. It showed a painting of Robin Hood, rugged and handsome, surveying the forest. He read the text under the picture. “Robin Hood was wise and generous.” He nodded. “Quite true. And …” He peered at the picture more closely. “I cut a dashing figure in that tunic. I will have to procure one like it.”
“You’re quite wealthy now,” I told him. “You could help the villagers around Sherwood Forest if you wanted. You could be the Robin Hood so many generations will love—or now that we’ve changed things, your story could disappear from my culture altogether. Someone has to love you enough to record your good deeds for posterity.”
Robin Hood flipped to the next page of the book. It was another picture of him. “It does seem a pity to disappoint future generations, doesn’t it?”
“And just think, somewhere along the line you’ll probably get to meet a very pretty woman named Maid Marian.”
He chuckled, then swept a hand toward Chrissy and me. “If she is half as fetching as either of you, my dear ladies, I shall deem myself a fortunate man.”
Chrissy let out a tinkling laugh. “That is quite enough poetry from you. You may return to your men.” He smiled, bowed, and walked back to the Merry Men with the book tucked under his arm.
“Now to get you back home—” Chrissy raised her wand.
I held up a hand to stop her. “Wait, there’s something else I want to talk to you about.” I had been thinking about this since I walked into the forest. I would only have one chance to ask.
Chrissy paused, her wand still lifted. “What?”
“This gold enchantment I have is valuable, even to the magical community, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Like I said, the leprechaun union has a monopoly on them.”
“I propose a trade. I’ll give you the gold enchantment if you let me make a detour through time on the way home.”
Chrissy lowered her wand, tapping it against the palm of her hand as she considered my proposal. “And what sort of thing would you be doing while you made your detour?”
“I want to save Hudson’s mother.”
She let out a pati
ent sigh. “You realize that if you alter the outcome of that event, it will have a ripple effect on the events around it. Anything and everything could change when you get home. Hudson will still have his old memories, but his alternate self—the self he would have been if his mother hadn’t died—will have lived a completely different life during the last year. He’ll have no memory of that life. And he’ll most likely have another girlfriend. Nothing will have stopped his alternate self from being social over the last year. Do you really want that?”
I had to think about this for several moments. She was right. If I changed that one event, Hudson’s life would be completely different. What if he liked his alternate life and alternate girlfriend better? Would that still be worth it?
“Will it change Stetson’s future?” I asked. “Will he still be born?”
Chrissy’s wings opened, shimmering with a light all their own. “Maybe. Right now, the baby is at your house with your family. I was going to let you say good-bye to him before I sent him back to the future. But if you change things too drastically, he might have no future to return to.”
I pondered this, already missing his dimpled cheeks and toothless grin. “Then I’ll keep Stetson with me in the present day. Can I do that?”
Chrissy put her fingers to her temple and let out a small groan. “Do you have any idea of the paperwork involved in permanently transferring a mortal to—”
I didn’t let her finish. “I got rid of an evil ex-fairy—one who didn’t like you or the Alliance. Just think what he might have done if—”
“Oh, all right.” She let out a begrudging huff. “But only because fairies don’t like being indebted to mortals. It’s unnatural. And embarrassing.” She held a hand out to me in a conciliatory gesture. “If Stetson wouldn’t exist in the future, he can stay with you in your present. That’s the only consequence I’ll be able to adjust for you, though. If things are worse off because of your efforts—if Hudson doesn’t care about you anymore, you’ll have to live with it. The only thing I can guarantee that won’t have changed are your wishes and their consequences. Magic is beyond the grasp of time.”