#1: TRUST NO ONE
Reggie frowned, torn between wanting to read more and listening to what Mary had to say. He finally decided that the book could wait, while they only had a short time to pump Mary for information. He closed the book and put it away.
“So what’s the scoop, Mary?” Ryssa was polite, but her voice held a tentative eagerness.
Mary arched an eyebrow and glanced into the rearview mirror.
“Here’s the scoop. Your full names, before Debra had your surnames temporarily changed to Chambly, are Maryssa Delzia Starborn and Reginald Aurelius Starborn.”
“Starborn,” Reggie let the name roll off his tongue. “That must be what the S stands for. Mom never told us. Cool.”
“I kinda like it.” Ryssa smiled.
“Reggie, your middle name is taken from your uncle Aurelius Trenton Starborn, who was your father’s brother. He is the one who brought you to me for placement with your foster mother. And Ryssa, your middle name comes from your mother, Her Majesty, Queen Delzia Alycone Starborn.”
“Queen?” Reggie and Ryssa croaked from the back seat.
“Yes. Your mother and father were the King and Queen of New Faery.” She paused. “Actually, that’s not quite accurate. Your father was the King of the Seelie Court and your mother was Ard Ri, or the High Queen of New Faery. Of course that was unprecedented, and I’ll bet it caused quite the stir—”
“Fairy?” Ryssa interrupted with a laugh. “Are you trying to say that I’m a fairy princess?”
Mary blinked.
“Well, um, yes. I guess that’s what I’m saying. But it’s not quite that simple—”
“Fairy?” Reggie’s eyes widened in disbelief, “as in little, tiny, glittering Tinkerbells with wings?”
“No, no, no.” Mary shook her head with a look of dismay. “Not fairy—Faery.” The only difference was that the first sounded like fair-ree and the second like fay-ree. She bit her lower lip at seeing the lack of understanding on the children’s faces reflected in the mirror. “Oh, dear. There’s not enough time to explain all of this. We have to be at the rendezvous point in—oh, dear.” She fretted and fussed, mumbling under her breath while she tried to figure out the best way to explain. “Where do I start? The Courts—yes, they need to know that. History? But there’s so much! The magic? Oh, dear—”
“Magic? There’s no such thing as magic.”
At Reggie’s proclamation, Mary’s eyes grew big and held a look of pure horror. Without a word, she pulled the car out of traffic in the midst of honking and yelling from the other drivers weaving around her suddenly erratic line of driving. She came to a stop on the side of the road and slammed the lever into the park position.
“Don’t you ever say that again.” She turned her short, bulky frame around toward the back of the car to face the children, but her glare was for Reggie.
“You’re kidding, right?” Reggie gave Mary one of those deadpan looks that said this-woman-is-nuts.
“Child, I have never been more serious in my entire life—and if you can’t find some way to open up that narrow little mind of yours to fully believe in what I’m saying, you could be the downfall of Faery.”
Mary stared at him so hard that Reggie could almost feel a hole being bored through his head.
“Okay, look.” Reggie held up his hands. “How about this? I promise to listen—”
“With an open mind.”
“With an open mind.” Reggie nodded the concession. “And as long as you’re around I won’t say those words, since it seems to stress you out.”
Mary narrowed her eyes. Reggie could tell she wasn’t entirely satisfied, but was willing to accept his compromise.
“He already double-speaks like the Faery Court,” Mary grumbled under her breath. “But to have a child of the Ard Ri not believe—” She shuddered, turning back around. Putting the car into drive, she waited for an opening to ease back into traffic.
Ryssa gave her brother a haughty glance. “I believe in magic.”
“Let’s hope your belief is enough for the both of you.” Mary pulled the car back onto the road.
“Suck up,” Reggie mumbled to his sister. She stuck her tongue out at him.
“I’m still not sure where to begin,” Mary said once they were back safely on the road. “There’s so much to tell.”
“How about at the beginning?” Reggie suggested. When he saw the look of panic rising in Mary’s eyes, he patted the book in his lap, out of her sight. “Just the Cliff Notes version—you know—an overview.”
Mary thought about it, seeming to mull the idea over in her mind. She nodded, satisfied, but shot Reggie a wary look. “You’ll keep an open mind?”
“I’ll listen to everything you have to say.”
“Oh, he’ll do well in the Courts,” Mary mumbled under her breath. “If I can get him there—
“Okay,” she blurted, cutting short her ramblings. “We don’t have much time, so I’m going to cover this as best I can and hope that it’ll be enough.”
“Enough for what?” Ryssa asked.
“Enough for—” Mary sighed. “Sweetheart, if you keep interrupting, we’ll never get through this.”
Ryssa held up her hands in response, tightened her lips and mimed zipping and locking them shut.
“Thousands of years ago when the Earth was young, all of the human race, such as it was, were magical, and, in a sense, immortal. Even some of the old history and religious texts speak of how men lived for hundreds of years and even more.”
Reggie was skeptical, but nodded as though conceding to the overall statement.
“People knew how to use magic back then. This was because of their connection to the land. The land holds magic. It is magic. I mean, think about it,” she said, a trace of wistful excitement in her voice. “Think of the magic of the cycle of life. Something is born, it lives, and it dies. Its physical remains rot away to fertilize the soil, leaving it rich for new life to begin again. Think of the wonder of a rainbow, a ribbon of color across a gray sky, giving a promise—”
“Mary—Cliff Notes, remember?” Reggie prompted.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “Okay, Cliff Notes. Where was I—? Oh, yes. So, in the beginning, humankind, at its very essence, were all Faery, so to speak.
“As their numbers increased, struggles cropped up that had never existed before—such as greed, the need for control, and so on. It was chaotic. In order to create some structure, a system of laws, Courts, and naturally, leaders to enforce those laws, were installed. Then came a new concept—war—as one group would want to take something another group had by force.
“Now, since the Earth needed to maintain balance to survive, magic wars tended to end in stalemate, with neither side holding an advantage over the other. Humankind turned to technology to combat the magic. It was successful to a degree unforeseen by most. With the coming of technology came the beginning of the end to belief in magic, because it appeared that technology was stronger than magic.”
“Now you’re starting to make some sense.”
“They were wrong,” Mary scolded him. “First of all, what do you think happened when humans pulled back from the magic of the Earth?”
“They gained a sense of reality?” Reggie suggested.
“They lost their connection to the Earth?” Ryssa frowned in thought.
“They lost their connection to the magic. The reality that they found,” Mary looked pointedly at Reggie, “was that they lost their longevity of life—just for starters—along with quality of life, because they were no longer connected to the one thing which gave them life to begin with.”
“They became mortal.” Ryssa lit up with understanding.
“They became the human race. And they threw away the beauty of the natural magic of the Earth for the false sense of power that technology gave to them.”
“Why do you say false sense?” Reggie was confused. “If technology won out over the magic, wouldn’t it mean that tec
hnology was the more powerful of the two?”
“Humankind has always given in to the habit of over-thinking and over-simplifying matters,” Mary sighed. “And with that habit, they decided that magic was too unpredictable—primarily because of the Earth’s inherent need to maintain a balance. So humankind chose to believe that the magic controlled them and they had no control over their lives. They felt that technology, because it was of their own making, simplified their lives and gave them control, because they controlled the technology.”
“That makes sense to me.”
“All right. Let’s take the two different sides of the coin and see which gives you more control over your life.
“The first side, we’ll call heads for the sake of argument. On the heads side, you have a natural world where you don’t grow old and there’s no real sickness that’s not magically created. When you want something to eat, there it is, with no more effort than a thought. Anything you want, you can have, within the natural order of things. You don’t need airplanes to fly or cars to get from point A to point B. Basically, anything you need is at your fingertips and only a thought is necessary to bring it to you. The rest of your time is your own.
“On the second side, tails, you have a world where there are wonderful machines, widgets and gadgets to get you through everyday life—to help you farm and raise food, to cook, to build houses and furniture, to get you from point A to point B. But unlike magic, these machines need to be built, and then more people need to maintain and operate them. Now you have to physically grow your food or come up with a way to trade services to purchase food from someone who does—”
“I see where you’re going with this,” Reggie said thoughtfully. “What you’re saying is that on the heads side, other than not being in total control of the source of magic, because balance for survival is the Earth’s job, you are in control. While on the tails side, you get so caught up in maintaining the technology, that it actually controls you.”
“Precisely.”
“But we live in a world of technology.” Ryssa frowned. “So where do magic and the fairies fit in?”
“Faery, dear, not fairy.”
“Whatever. Same difference.”
“Faery is all around us.” Mary smiled. “But since most people have forgotten to believe in magic, they can’t see what is right in front of their eyes.”
Reggie thought about the opening note in the journal and nodded. When people couldn’t make sense of things, they tried so hard to pretend it didn’t exist, that for them it really didn’t.
“Not all of humankind went the way of technology,” Mary continued. “There were those who saw that the Earth’s survival was directly linked to the magic—that the Earth is magic.”
“So if people got totally caught up in the technology craze,” Ryssa puzzled out loud, “and they stopped believing in magic entirely, then the Earth would sort of stop existing because they couldn’t see it anymore?”
“That about covers it. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that—these things always are—but that’s the short of it.” She bit her lip in distress. “Oh, dear.”
“What?” Reggie and Ryssa asked at the same time, sitting up and looking around.
“You’ll have to learn more while you’re in New Faery, children. I’m afraid I haven’t even begun to tell you enough, but we are out of time. We’ve reached the rendezvous point.”
Mary pulled the car into a large parking lot that looked out onto one of the Gulf of Mexico beaches. A fog began to roll in from the water. Reggie frowned. That wasn’t a common sight for the area. The air was almost the same temperature as the water, which didn’t tend to allow for fog. A concrete ramp jutted out toward the water from the beach, not quite reaching it. It was unfinished, leaving a drop off as it reached the water’s edge.
“Is there anything important we should know—like at the top of the list—that you can pass along quickly?” Reggie leaned forward with urgency.
Mary parked the car and opened the door. She swung around to face the children. “There are strange things happening in New Faery—actually in all of Faery. Your father and mother were killed in what many think was an accident. A ball of fire caught in some of the unpredictable, wild fields generated by the Earth’s need for balance destroyed half the Seelie Court—including your parents. It certainly destroyed all of the potentials, um, heirs for succession.
“But there are those who believe it was no accident. Once a new set of successors was chosen for all of the now empty positions of the Court, they began to turn up dead or just disappear. That was why your uncle brought you to the Silverwood’s Adoption Agency for fosterage—to protect you until the Court trials that will begin to strengthen those meant to be the future leaders of New Faery.”
Mary looked around as though checking to make sure that no one was close enough to hear.
“There are strange happenings in New Faery,” she repeated, lowering her voice to an urgent, conspiratorial whisper. “The best advice I can give you is this: Rarely is anything in the world of Faery as it seems, and above all else—trust no one.”
Reggie could feel the chill rush through his body as she uttered the same warning Terry had seen fit to give them.
“Now, come along, children.” Mary lumbered out of the vehicle. “We can’t be late.”
Reggie and Ryssa grabbed their bags, climbing out of the car to scramble after Mary across the sand. She headed for the unfinished concrete pier and started up the short incline that would put them slightly above the level of the beach. About halfway up, she stopped and turned back toward them.
“Your crystals—take them out and put them on.” Mary looked at the fog bank that had almost reached the water’s edge. “Hurry now, we don’t have much time.”
Reggie and Ryssa glanced at each other. Neither had a clue as to what she was up to, but they dropped their bags and dug around to find the boxes that held their crystal pendants. When they had them out, Mary gave them further instructions.
“Okay, now close your eyes and place the pendants around your necks.”
They did as directed, lifting the chains of their pendants over their heads to let them drape around their necks and fall to their chests.
“Now open your eyes.”
“Wow! Way cool!” Ryssa clapped her hands in delight. Stretched out ahead of her, the concrete ramp now ended in a crystalline bridge that vanished into the fog closing in on them.
Reggie stared at the fog bank in front of him while a bridge that seemed to be made of crystal wavered in and out of his vision. He rubbed his eyes, figuring it to be a trick of light. He picked up the crystal star, holding it up in front of him to peer through the prismatic facets. The bridge appeared solid, no longer wavering.
A faint, roaring wind sound started from somewhere overhead and they all looked up. Through the hazy mist of the fog, a bright spot appeared, reflecting off the rolling gray. Reggie turned his crystal star in that direction, peering through it like a magnifying lens. Dim, but growing brighter as it drew closer through the fog bank, appeared to be a ball of fire. For one brief moment, Reggie could have sworn he saw a miniature face in the obscured flames, but Mary grabbed his arm and he lost hold of the crystal.
“Run!” Mary shouted, pushing both of the children toward the upper edge of the concrete ramp. Ryssa needed no second warning. She took off running toward the fog that concealed the drop-off at the end of the ramp.
Reggie balked. “There’s nothing there!”
Mary whipped him around, grabbing hold of both shoulders to face him with determination.
“Look—in your mind you may need more proof to believe in magic, but believe me, it exists. It’s not your mind you need to open, it’s your heart—and child, you’d best do it fast, because you’ve just run out of time.”
Mary pushed Reggie toward the concrete edge, still hidden from sight. Reggie scooped up his bags along with Ryssa’s. He turned his eyes skyward. The ball of fire
was descending from the clouds. With certainty now, he knew he saw a face in the flames.
He hit the edge of the fogbank and felt compelled, for some unknown reason, to draw a deep breath and hold it before he entered the wall of clouds.
He ran, eyes closed, waiting for the drop at the edge of the ramp. His feet found the solid purchase of the bridge as he launched himself into the fog.