Changeling Read online

  And then I got it.

  The sandman isn’t Park Folk. He lives in the City, where his job is to go out into the mortal world every night to put little children to sleep. He and Astris were old friends, and he always visited at Solstice. Being a mortal child, I pretty much fell asleep as soon as I said hello to him and never woke up until morning. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t figured it out sooner.

  There was no time to waste. I jumped up and tore across the courtyard into the Castle and up the spiral stair to my room, where I dug the flask of keep-awake out of the window seat.

  The kazna peri’s keep-awake potion was cold and oily and tasted like safety pins and old socks. It was all I could do not to spit it out, but I managed to swallow.

  The potion hit my stomach like a lighted candle. One minute, I was an ordinary changeling. The next, I was Super Changeling, smarter than your average Genius and very, very, very wide awake.

  Just in time, too. Astris was calling me. “Neef. Neef! The sandman’s here. Come down and say hello.”

  I was tempted to yell down to her that I so didn’t care and see what happened next. But now was not the time to start acting weirder than usual. So I yelled, “Coming!” instead.

  The next part was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I felt like I could cartwheel all the way down the stairs and into the kitchen, but I didn’t want to make Astris suspicious. One step at a time, I told myself. Don’t rush.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Astris said when she saw me dragging my feet from step to step. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”

  I thought fast. Really fast. “Tag with the leshii,” I said. “This afternoon. He turns himself into a wolf. I’m pooped.”

  Astris gave me a doubtful look. “You’d better go straight to bed, then. But say hello to the sandman first.”

  The sandman spread his scarlet cloak with both arms, unveiling baggy turquoise pants and a gold shirt. The colors made my eyes hurt.

  He smiled at me sleepily. “Happy Solstice, Neef.”

  With the keep-awake fizzing in my head, it took all my self-control to say, “Happy Solstice to you, Sandman,” and allow him to fold the scarlet cloak around me like a tent.

  Dream sand settled into my eyes and mouth. I yawned and rubbed my eyes. With that much dream sand around, you just have to yawn, keep-awake or no keep-awake. It wasn’t hard to stumble up the stairs, fall on my bed, and curl up with my eyes closed. What was hard was keeping them closed and breathing evenly when Astris jumped up on the bed to make sure I was really asleep.

  I felt her whiskers twitch across my nose. I couldn’t help giving a little snort, but I might have done that even if I had been sleeping.

  “Out like a light,” she said. “I thought I smelled coffee on her breath, but I must have been imagining it.”

  “Coffee?” The sandman sounded shocked. “Not our little Neef!”

  “Not so little anymore,” Astris said. “She’s growing up, Morpheus. I know the signs. Soon she’s going to do something she shouldn’t, and things will get ugly.”

  “Well, it hasn’t happened yet,” the sandman said cheerfully. “Come on, Astris. I can hear the trees tuning up. We don’t want to be late.”

  Just to make sure they were really gone, I stayed on the bed with my eyes closed, twitching as the keep-awake threw off the dream sand, listening to the fairy music drifting through my open window, counting as slowly as I could to two hundred.

  At about seventy-five, the music pulled me out of bed and over to the nearest window.

  With dusk blue among the trees, the dance was just getting started. Folk of all shapes and sizes were dancing on the paths, on the rocks, even up in the sky, where tiny winged fairies and peris floated like dandelion fluff among the Oriental dragons and bright-winged garudas. Fairy lights glittered off polished tusks and scales and horns and jewels. I saw a pair of squirrels prance past, their tails brushed to fluffy boas. A huge black kelpie flashed its gilded hooves. Red Cap’s red cap was shiny with fresh blood, and the swan maidens from Lincoln Center wore their swan skins over their white shoulders like feathery cloaks.

  The music came from everywhere: fiddles and pipes and quick-beating drums. I leaned out my window so far I almost fell out. I couldn’t wait to be down there with the rest of them, do-si-doing with dwarves, cavorting with kobolds, pirouetting with piskies, waltzing with werebears. Maybe—my heart beat faster—maybe even capering with changelings.

  I skinned out of my jeans and T-shirt and into my only dress. It was green spidersilk with a floaty skirt and leaves and flowers woven into it, and I’d found it a few days earlier, laid out on a bench in the Shakespeare Garden. I had an idea that the moss woman must have left it for me because of not being able to grant my real wish. It smelled a little of damp leaf mold, but it was the prettiest thing I’d ever worn in my life.

  Downstairs, I paused to check myself out in the hall mirror. My hair was its usual explosion of frizzy curls, I was definitely round in the middle, and my legs and feet were not as clean as Astris would have liked. But the spidersilk dress turned me into a woodsy Park fairy.

  I ran out into the courtyard. The Shakespeare fairies were dancing gavottes in lace ruffs and doublets and stiff, drum-shaped skirts. Puck winked at me, then whirled away. Had he recognized me, or was he just being Puck? Who cared? I was going to dance in Central Park Central, and nothing was going to stop me.

  I edged past the revelers and made it down the steps to the foot of the cliff. I was almost past the Turtle Pond when something caught my leg and hung on tight. Looking down, I saw the Water Rat, almost unrecognizable himself in a black dinner jacket and a red bow tie.

  “What are you doing, Mr. Rat?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Joining the dance,” I said. “Or I will be, if you’ll just let go.”

  The Water Rat tightened his grip. “Oh, you don’t want to do that, youngster. Central Park Central’s full of tourists at Midsummer. Giants. Wyverns. Vampires. Much better to observe from a distance. I understand there’s an excellent view from the Castle. Shall I take you up?”

  “No way,” I said. “This is my first Solstice, and I want to dance.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t like that at all.”

  I was tempted to kick the Water Rat away, but I wasn’t that crazy, quite. “Why not?”

  “You are a mortal,” he said carefully. “Mortals are delicate, and the Folk get wild as the night wears on. I didn’t like to mention it before, but unsupervised mortals can dance themselves to death at a Solstice Dance. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you? Think how upset Astris would be.”

  Everything seemed to click into place: the sandman, Astris hiding the dance from me, even the fate of the other Park changelings. It was like the story of the Sleeping Debutante, where the mayor passed a law against books because an evil fairy had said that his daughter would die of a paper cut. Those Park changelings must have done something stupid and got themselves killed, so Astris had decided to keep me away from the dance entirely. Didn’t she trust me? Didn’t she know I could take care of myself?

  “I know what you’re trying to do, Mr. Rat, but really, it’s okay. I’m not a complete idiot, and I won’t dance myself to death. I’m going to look for other mortal changelings. I’ll be fine.”

  The Rat’s whiskers weren’t as expressive as Astris’s, but I could tell he wasn’t convinced. “Why should you want to do that? They won’t know anything about the Park, you know. What would you talk about? And what if they hurt you? Mortals don’t always get along with other mortals, I hear. No, it would be best all around if you returned to the Castle.”

  “With all this going on? Are you nuts? Listen, Mr. Rat. I appreciate the warning and everything, but you’re not my fairy godfather. Just butt out, okay?”

  The Water Rat looked grave. “Listen here, Neef. I’m just trying to keep you from making an awful ass of yourself. But if you’re determined, you’re determin
ed, and I can’t change your mind. It might be wise, however, for you to watch for a while before joining in. The Solstice Dance is powerful magic, and you need to understand the pattern or there may be serious consequences. Besides,” he said practically, “you’ll never find a changeling by leaping into a huge, moving crowd and hoping to bump into one.”

  Even hopped-up on music and keep-awake, I had to admit that the Water Rat had a point. In the end, I promised that I’d climb a tree and watch from above until I was sure I saw the pattern, and then he let me go. I was a little hurt that he waited until I’d found a suitable tree before he joined the dance himself. I may not like rules, but I do keep my promises.

  I swung myself up to a nice sturdy branch at about giant’s eye-level and put my back against the trunk. The music ran through me like keep-awake. Water Rat hadn’t said anything about sitting still, so I bounced until the whole tree creaked and shook.

  “Stop that,” rustled the tree angrily. “I shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of nonsense, not on Solstice Night. Keep it up, and I’ll snap.”

  I said I was sorry and stopped bouncing. I couldn’t keep my feet still, though, no matter how hard I tried. The music was like a thousand instruments from a hundred different musical traditions all playing at once. It didn’t have anything that even remotely resembled a tune and I couldn’t quite catch the beat, but I had to move anyway or bust. So I swung my legs and twitched my shoulders and studied the dance for some clue to its pattern.

  There had to be one; the Water Rat couldn’t lie. But I couldn’t figure it out. For all I could tell, the Solstice Dance was nothing but a bunch of Folk prancing around at random, waving their arms or flippers or tails or horns however they felt like it. For a long time, I watched a bunch of leprechauns with emerald-green Mohawks bop-ping up and down in a tight cluster, but I still couldn’t make any sense of it.

  Then I saw Peg Powler.

  She was spinning, her green rags waving like rotten lettuce leaves. As she turned, she looked up and showed me every pointy tooth in her head. My heart thumped uncomfortably under my spidersilk dress, but I grinned right back at her.

  Peg circled away, grinning like a goon, and I returned to studying the dance. I noticed an odd kind of ripple moving through the crowd. The ripple came nearer, turning into a line of heads bobbing slightly out of sync with the beat. I wondered what kind of Folk they were. They might have been elves or shapeshifters, except for being red-faced and kind of heavy looking. As they danced past my tree, I noticed that they were panting and gleaming with sweat. A woman tripped, and a man stumbled over her.

  Folk don’t trip. Folk don’t sweat. Folk don’t get tired. I’d found the mortal changelings.

  CHAPTER 5

  SPIDERS AREN’T TRAPPED BY THEIR OWN WEBS.

  Neef’s Rules for Changelings

  I was out of that tree before I knew it. I felt like I was flying, but I couldn’t have been: Mortals don’t fly, either. I landed on a big furry something that roared and grabbed at me. But I was too quick for it.

  The moment my feet hit the grass, the music caught me up like a newspaper in the wind.

  The knot of mortals was just on the other side of a garland of nymphs, but I couldn’t get to them. My feet had developed a mind of their own. For about a heartbeat, I swear I caught the beat. Everything—the trees, the grass, the stones, the stars, the City, the Folk, the mortals Outside—was part of the same dance, and it never ended. What had been and what was to be were the same as now, and always would be. I forgot about the changelings; I forgot that I’d ever been lonely or angry or even mortal.

  And then it all fell apart. Suddenly I had two left feet, and neither of them had the beat. The mortal changelings were nowhere in sight. I bumped into dwarves and elbowed trolls and stepped on a blue demon who might have been Peg’s friend Blueberry. Werebears growled at me as I stumbled in front of them. Fox spirits barked and snapped. I wished as hard as I could to be home asleep in bed with the curtains drawn, but like all wishes made when it’s too late, it didn’t come true. All I could do was grimly keep on dancing and hope I didn’t get trampled.

  And then I found myself face-to-face with the Green Lady.

  When she’s happy, the Green Lady of Central Park is as beautiful as the most beautiful thing you can imagine. She has greeny-brown skin, long dark-green ropes of hair, and deep-set eyes the color of new leaves after a rain. But she can change shape, and not all of her shapes are beautiful.

  As soon as she saw me, her dreadlocks lifted and began to weave around her head and hiss like snakes. Emerald fire smoldered in her eyes, and her lips lifted over teeth that had grown suddenly needlelike.

  “Can the music, boys,” she yelled. “We have a situation here.”

  The music fell silent and everyone stopped dancing, just like that. All I could hear was the panicked thumping of my own heart and some noisy panting that was probably the mortal changelings.

  The Lady said, “Do you know what you have done?”

  She used the voice the Folk use to ask ritual questions, magic questions, questions you’d better answer carefully or you’re history. Questions asked in this voice are never as simple as they sound. I licked my lips nervously. “Um. Could you repeat the question?”

  “A question is not an answer,” the Green Lady said, the snakes weaving around her head. “You must say yes or no.”

  “The thing is,” I said, “it’s not that simple. I mean, I know what I did, but I don’t know why it’s a big deal. If that’s what you’re asking.”

  The Green Lady burst into howls of nasty laughter that were echoed by what sounded like every supernatural in New York. It was a horrible sound, full of the promise of blood and crunching bones. I looked around for Astris or the Pooka or the Water Rat or even a friendly moss woman to rescue me, but I was surrounded by open mouths and pointed teeth, tongues of red and blue and purple and black, eyes like red sparks and eyes like soup plates, all of them hungry, hungry, hungry.

  “You’re a pistol, kid,” the Green Lady said at last. “You knew you were doing something wrong, right?”

  Another trick question? I wrenched my mind from the hungry eyes and tried to concentrate. Sure, every benevolent supernatural in the Park had warned me away from the Solstice Dance. But I’d never thought about whether I might actually be breaking a rule. So I’d be lying a little whether I said yes or no. I thought it might be safest if I shrugged.

  The Lady’s hair snakes all twisted around to get a good look at me. My stomach turned over. “I didn’t mean to do anything wrong,” I explained.

  “Geddouttahere,” the Lady snapped. “You think I was born yesterday? The squirrels tell me you’ve been breaking rules right, left, and center since spring cleaning day. Besides, it doesn’t matter what you meant. It only matters what you did.”

  “But what did I do?” I meant to yell, but it came out more like a sob.

  “What did you do?” the Green Lady echoed back at me. “You just broke the geas I laid upon you at your Changing, that’s all.”

  I felt like I’d opened a door and gotten bonked by a brick. All I could think was It’s not fair and I want Astris.

  Something cold and wet touched my hand. I jumped about a mile and screeched. The Green Lady and the Wild Hunt howled with laughter.

  Astris patted my knee with a small pink paw. “Hush, pet. It’s only me. I did my best to keep this from happening, but mortals are so curious. Didn’t I warn you that curiosity killed the cat?”

  Her voice was brisk, but her whiskers were worried. I let my legs fold and put my arms around her.

  The Green Lady smiled graciously at us. “What a good fairy godmother you are, Astris. Aren’t you going to fill your changeling in on what’s going down here?”

  Astris’s whiskers twitched angrily. “Perhaps the Lady will recall that she laid a geas on me, too.”

  “Not to speak of Neef’s geas in her hearing,” the Lady said helpfully. “Too bad you remembered. Th
e Hunt would have had a ball with the pair of you.” She turned her leaf-green eyes to me. “Okay, kid, here’s the scoop. The Hunt loves to hunt mortals. But mortal changelings are under my protection. So we have a deal. I put a geas on every mortal changeling that comes to the Park, and when—er, if—they break it, the Hunt gets a crack at them.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d heard her right. “Are you telling me that the Wild Hunt is going to chase me down for breaking a geas nobody was allowed to tell me about?”

  “Technically,” the Lady said, “breaking the geas only removes you from my protection. But since my protection is the only thing keeping the Wild Hunt off you, yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

  The Wild Hunt cheered. My throat felt tight. Astris pressed against me, warm and furry and solid. The Hunt loves the taste of fear, I reminded myself. Freaking out would just bring them down on me faster. I swallowed hard.

  “Get up,” the Green Lady said, and I did, shakily. She lifted her slender hand, and her voice rolled like a bell over the mob of New York Folk. “The changeling Neef, having broken the geas laid upon her at her Changing, is no longer under my protection. She is without home, without sponsorship, and all the paths of the Park are closed to her. And this I swear by my name and hers.”

  At the last word, she disappeared, taking Astris with her.

  The Wild Hunt began to circle widdershins, from right to left. No surprise: It’s an unlucky direction. With every rotation, the Hunters got a little closer to me and I got a little closer to breaking down and running until they’d worked up an appetite.

  Another circuit, and I could smell their blood-breath, hear their eager, hungry whines. My jaw hurt from clenching it; my legs trembled. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I opened my mouth and took a breath so I could scream and get it over with.

  And that was when a big black thing came swooping down, grabbed my shoulders in strong, sharp claws, and carried me away.