Changeling Read online

  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.

  I picked up the flask and sniffed gingerly. The smell that had led me to the kazna peri’s clearing curled around my nose—toasty, sharp, exciting. My mouth watered, and I lifted the flask to my lips.

  “You don’t want to do that,” said the kazna peri around a mouthful of pigeon feathers.

  “Why not?”

  The kazna peri swallowed. “Drink it now, you won’t have it when you want it. And why I’m telling you this instead of letting you waste it, I don’t know. I must be getting soft in my old age. New York’s not what it used to be, either. In the old days,” it went on wistfully, “my treasure was molten gold, distilled from sunbeams. But you can’t get decent sunbeams any more: too much soot.” It sighed and spat out a wing bone. “You can go away now.”

  It chomped into the pigeon again, getting feathers and blood and stuff all over its beard.

  “Thank you,” I said respectfully, and ran.

  CHAPTER 4

  TO MAKE A BIG OMELET, YOU HAVE TO BREAK A BIG EGG.

  Neef’s Rules for Changelings

  I hid the kazna peri’s stone flask among the magazines in the window seat. At first, I kept taking it out and shaking it so I could hear the keep-awake sloshing inside, then unstoppering it and sniffing. After a few days, the potion didn’t smell as good as it had at first—not bad, exactly, but kind of metallic. There wasn’t anybody I could ask whether it could go rotten except the kazna peri, and I wasn’t about to do that. So I tried not to think about it.

  Instead, I thought about the Solstice Dance, and I thought about how the other mortal changelings got to attend it and I didn’t. I thought about how when I’d complained to Astris about how hard it was to be the only mortal around, all she’d said was that I should be glad I was special. And I thought about the “special” Park changelings who had come before me, the ones she’d had such bad luck with.

  With all these questions buzzing around in my head, I hardly dared to talk to Astris for fear I’d blurt out the wrong thing. I spent more and more time away from the Castle, hanging out at the Dairy and sitting for hours in Willow Bay with my feet in the Lake. My daily lessons in Folk lore were not as much fun as they used to be.

  “Neef, what’s wrong?” Astris asked me one morning when things had gone worse than usual.

  “Wrong?” I asked, my heart thudding uncomfortably. “I can only remember two ways of outwitting a piskie, that’s all. Why do I need to learn three ways anyway? Isn’t one enough?”

  Astris’s whiskers were severe. “Not if the moon’s full. And it’s not just that. You left three of the most important storm spirits off this list of destructive nature spirits. I haven’t seen you this distracted since you were very small.” She fixed me with her ruby eyes, her whiskers quivering with worry. “Whatever’s on your mind, pet, you can tell me.”

  When I was little, I learned that when I cried, it made the Folk fall over laughing, even Astris. Needless to say, I didn’t cry much. Lately, however, I’d been choking up over nothing. Mortified, I got up and went to the kitchen window so I could dry my tears and come up with a story that would answer Astris’s question and get me out of the Castle.

  “I’ve got a date with Puck and Ariel,” I said. “They’re going to race around the earth. I’m supposed to judge who gets back to the mulberry tree first. They’re waiting for me. That’s why I’m distracted.”

  I didn’t really expect Astris to fall for this. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe her whiskers were suspicious, but I didn’t look at them. I just stood there with my back to her until she said, “Very well, Neef. Go ahead and meet your friends. But I’ll expect you to spend the evening on your piskie lore and reviewing the storm spirits as well as the six signs of a demon and the short list of traditional bogeymen. You need to know these things.”

  “I know, Astris,” I said. “Thanks.” And I pelted out of the kitchen and across the courtyard as if the Wild Hunt was on my heels. Then I climbed the mulberry tree and stayed there the rest of the day, feeling awful.

  After that, Astris pretty much handed over my education to the Pooka. I thought this would be better. He never made me memorize lists or write essays comparing and contrasting the protective spirits from three different Folk lore traditions. He was more into the fun s
tuff, like catching leprechauns and tricking demons. But he wasn’t nearly as patient as Astris, plus I pitched so many fits at him that he threatened to take back his tail hair.

  All in all, it was a good thing that the Solstice was getting nearer. The days grew gradually longer and the Folk grew busier and more excited—the way, I realized, they always did twice each year. The water nymphs went on and on about the fancy gowns they were making out of waterweed and leaves. The leprechauns were snowed under with orders for dancing shoes. The clincher was when I saw Folk lined up outside Iolanthe’s door, waiting for dancing lessons. One evening I even saw her twirling with an ogre in sweatpants, dodging his clawed feet and yelling, “Lightly, I said. Trip lightly.”

  When I asked them what was doing, they all pretended they were too busy to talk to me.

  Finally it was the day before the Solstice. I still didn’t know how Astris put me to sleep every year, and I wasn’t completely sure the keep-awake hadn’t gone bad. Astris had exploded when I knocked her bowl of cookie dough onto her newly scrubbed floor and threw me out of the Castle until bedtime. I was sitting on the rock overlooking the Turtle Pond, trying to read a rain-swollen copy of a book I’d found under a bush.

  It was about all these weird kids who get to be friends because the popular kids hate them, which kind of reminded me of me and the Folk, only without any other changelings to make friends with.

  The book stopped suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, leaving all the weird kids’ problems unsolved.

  I threw the book into the pond, propped my chin on my hands, and watched the sunset gild the windows of the Metropolitan Museum across the meadow. My eye caught a flutter of scarlet crossing Central Park Central toward me. Oh, I said to myself. There’s the sandman.