Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
Return to the magical world of Faerie Hill in this fantastical middle grade adventure. Twelve years ago, a child vanished from his cradle. He was never seen nor spoken of again. Saga is desperate to discover what happened - did he really just disappear? Or was he whisked away to the Faerie kingdom, to be raised as one of their own? As she searches for the truth, her best friend Alfred has his own vital mission. The mayor's relentless construction projects are devastating the natural world, and now the fearsome faeries want revenge. Only Alfred, a demi fae, can restore peace between the two realms. But as he journeys deeper into the magical kingdom than ever before, the two friends start to suspect that the lost child could be the key to everything... PRAISE FOR THE CHANGELING CHILD: 'A magical ticket bringing us back to the unforgettable and enchanting world of Faerie Hill' Eve McDonnel, author of The Last Boy 'Bewitching and beautiful... Love it!' Nicola Penfold, author of Where the World Turns Wild
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 351
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
![Tintenherz [Tintenwelt-Reihe, Band 1 (Ungekürzt)] - Cornelia Funke - Hörbuch](https://legimifiles.blob.core.windows.net/images/2830629ec0fd3fd8c1f122134ba4a884/w200_u90.jpg)
1
2
3
4
For Dorte and Henrik
5
Contents
8
1
SAGA
Entirely Ordinary
Saga squinted through her misty glasses at the faerie creature. She shivered and tightened the hood of her red waterproof jacket. A cold October rain bounced on the puddles and lashed at the back of the bus shelter where she was waiting. The road remained deserted.
‘Guess it’s just us. Again,’ she said to the creature—a tree sprite she called Mr Tumbleweed—who lay sprawled in her bicycle basket. He was the size of a nursery-school child, and his twiggy, stick-insect-like legs hung out over its side.
The only answer she got was a snore. A snore that sounded like a gurgle, because her bicycle was outside the shelter in the pouring rain, and the tree sprite’s mouth—a gash in his log head—was wide open.
Exactly one bicycle stood in the long row of bike racks by the boarded-up lakeside kiosk.10
Last Saturday, only two others had joined her litter-pick walk in the woods. But right after the summer, right after she’d become a little bit famous, more than twenty kids from school had turned up.
‘Come on. Let’s go!’ she said, as much to herself as to her companion, and stepped out from the shelter. ‘Wake up!’
When the tree sprite didn’t stir, she reached out to shake him. However, before she even touched his gnarled shoulder, he emitted a high-pitched whine and shot up, as if she’d set him on fire. In one leap, he was atop the bus shelter roof.
‘Somebody should not touch this one body with some iron thing,’ Mr Tumbleweed complained in his creaking wooden-floorboard voice.
Saga turned her arm and glanced down at the metal button on her sleeve. ‘Sorry. I didn’t think.’
‘Then somebody should try thinking!’
‘Sorry. Will you help me, please?’ At least he could do that when they were alone.
With a grumble she couldn’t catch for the pounding rain, he leapt down and jumped across the empty car park. Saga trotted after him in her wellies, splashing straight through the deepest potholes, towards the dense greyness that she knew must be the lake. Before she’d picked up the first plastic bottle, raindrops were already sliding down past the knitted rainbow scarf and inside her jumper.
Mr Tumbleweed reappeared out of the sheeting rain, extending both hands, his twig fingers spread wide. Each of them pierced a piece of litter—bits of sweet wrappers, torn 11magazine pages, soggy tissues. Saga plucked them all off and stuffed them in her bin bag.
On hot summer days, the grass embankment would be crowded with people who came to swim in the cool water. Even off-season, when the little kiosk was closed, it was a popular place for picnics and bonfires. In the month since she’d last been here, quite a lot of litter had accumulated on the sandy strip by the water’s edge and under the gorse bushes. Saga couldn’t understand how some people had no problem bringing their own food and drink but didn’t take their rubbish with them when they left.
While they made their way along the lake, Saga let her thoughts wander. As usual, whenever she was bored, they wandered back to Faerie and to the adventure she and her best friend Alfred had been on in that other realm. They had encountered sprites and tiny butterfly faeries, vicious pixies, fearsome high faeries, helpful shapeshifters and terrifying beasts. Some of them had even appeared nearby in the real-world forest.
But, in the two months since Alfred had left, Saga hadn’t seen a single faerie creature. Except Mr Tumbleweed, of course. And she’d been collecting rubbish in the woods most Saturdays, half hoping for a sighting. There would be no sightings today, not here by the lake. She stomped on a plastic container and picked it up, before she carefully tackled the shards from a broken glass bottle.
Three hours later, Saga cycled home to the farm, while Mr Tumbleweed snored in her basket. She was soaked to the bone, despite her waterproof gear. Inside the boot room, she 12left her drenched clothes in a pile and headed directly to the upstairs shower. So she was only wearing knickers and her inside-out vest and a towel wrapped around her wet hair when she discovered Oliver was home.
He stood in her room, by her desk, turning the pages of her notebook. Her Faerie Investigation Society notebook, where she’d sketched and described all the faerie creatures she’d seen.
‘Hey! That’s private!’ Saga stormed at him, snatching the notebook out of his hands so quickly one of the pages tore. ‘And this is my room!’
‘Nice to see you too.’ Oliver sniggered in that annoyingly overbearing big-brother manner of his. He peered at the torn paper pinched between his fingers. ‘Is that supposed to look like a dog with antlers?’
Involuntarily, Saga shuddered. ‘A wolf,’ she muttered, a memory of those antlered wolf beasts clear in her mind. She rubbed her bare arms where goose pimples sprang up. ‘A faerie creature that me and Alfred—’
‘Oh, grow up and stop that faerie nonsense. How old are you? Ten?’ After Oliver had turned eighteen and now thought he was an adult, he’d become even more self-important.
‘You know I’m twelve. And faeries are actually real.’ She glanced up at the wardrobe, where Mr Tumbleweed was shaking his log head from side to side.
‘Tell someone who cares. I just came to borrow your scissors.’
‘Steal, more likely,’ Saga muttered under her breath, as she pulled a desk drawer out and found her scissors. ‘Why are you here? Did your fancy school throw you out?’13
‘Ha, ha. I have two weeks off. You have one, right? And still a whole week of school to go first.’ He left her room, calling, ‘You’d better be quiet in the mornings…’
Saga gritted her teeth and decided that early Monday morning she’d get Poppy and Daisy—their two younger sisters—to come upstairs and play their shrilly recorders right outside his bedroom door. With Oliver at home from boarding school, the coming weeks would be less boring, but not in a good way.
‘I wish I could tell someone who cares,’ she said, sinking down on her chair. But, unfortunately, whenever she mentioned faeries, most people reacted like Oliver. Or worse. ‘I wish I could tell the whole world about faerie creatures.’ Leaning back, she tapped the bridge of her glasses. ‘I wish I could become the David Attenborough of the faerie world…’ She imagined herself walking through the twilit faerie landscape, speaking to a TV camera in stage whispers, filming a documentary.
‘Faerie bodies will not be happy to have somebody talking about them to human nobodies,’ Mr Tumbleweed said from the top of the wardrobe.
‘How would they even know?’ she said, dismissing the tree-sprite’s warning. He was always so negative.
She tried to return to her documentary fantasy, but, in her mind, antlered wolves appeared and chased her camera crew away. Saga shook her head to get rid of the image.
It was no use daydreaming anyway. She had to do something concrete. Something people would notice and appreciate—like stopping the construction of a motorway tunnel through the Faerie Hill.14
That was what she and Alfred had done a couple of months ago. On their expedition to Faerie, they’d found an enormous dripstone cavern inside the hill. A cavern so spectacular that even the mayor realized preserving it would be more valuable than his beloved motorway tunnel.
The fact was that that one week of frantic action had put the rest of her life into perspective. After the initial media buzz, which Alfred was only too happy to let her handle on her own, interest in Saga and her nature group projects had petered out.
The rush of having had a real impact on the world had been incredible. And now… Nothing. The past month, since it had all died down, had been the most boring period of her entire life.
With her bare feet, Saga pushed off from the leg of her desk. She tucked her knees up, wrapping her arms around them as the chair swivelled, wishing she could swirl herself into that other realm.
The chair stopped, facing the window. Outside, rain slid down the glass in steady streams, blending the darkening grey sky and the bare brown fields.
‘Nothing ever happens here! I wish Alfred was coming for the autumn break. I wish something exciting would hap—’
‘Somebody should take care what they wish for,’ Mr Tumbleweed groaned.
‘Or what?’ Saga sighed. She had to do something. Anything.
Luckily, she still had one idea. One idea that could grab people’s attention, whether they believed faeries were real or not. An idea that had sprung from her belief that there might be other humans in the faerie realm.15
In addition to documenting everything about faeries in her notebook, Saga had also been to the library and searched the microfilm archives for information about the Faerie Hill and its surroundings. Specifically for information about disappearances and suspicious occurrences. Unfortunately, all the instances that were marginally interesting had taken place long before she was born. All except one.
Twelve years ago, a baby had vanished. In the newspapers, the case was referred to as ‘the kidnapping of Baby L’. She’d found out precious little about the family, but it was clear that the child was never returned to its parents and had never been found.
To Saga, the obvious explanation was that the baby had been taken by faeries. The faeries would’ve exchanged the child for a changeling—that was what faeries did in stories. All she had to do was return to the faerie realm, find the child, who must be her age now, and bring them home. Simple. Well, simple if she had any means of returning to Faerie… But without Alfred, no chance.
At first, she’d actually thought Alfred might be a changeling, but he was something far more fascinating. They’d discovered he was a demi-fae: half human and half faerie. Half water-sprite, to be precise.
With her whole being, Saga wished it was her. But she was just an entirely ordinary human, with ordinary human parents, living a boring ordinary human life.
She sighed again and did the one thing that always cheered her up. After powering up her laptop, Saga clicked on her saved shortcut to the local TV station’s website. It opened a video 16from the protest march against the motorway tunnel through the Faerie Hill. A memory she relished.
She was watching herself tearing free of a police officer’s grip, when she noticed a photo of Mayor Underwood in the sidebar news section. He was smirking at her from above a headline that read: UnderwoodCavernGrandOpening.
Forgetting the video, she tapped the photo, right on the mayor’s long nose. An even larger photo of his smug face popped up. She quickly scanned the text, muttering, ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no,’ as she read.
At the same time, a thrill surged though Saga’s body. Because surely something exciting was about to happen.
2
ALFRED
Empty Promises
The three boys took a detour to walk Alfred home. When he stopped outside the building where he and Dad lived in their new flat, his teammates came to a standstill too. They all continued talking, analysing the day’s water-polo match. They’d won.
Ignoring the vibrations of his ringing phone, Alfred commented on a particularly spectacular goal that Wesley, their team captain and centre forward, had scored.
‘All down to your pass,’ the older, taller boy said and slapped Alfred on the shoulder. ‘And that spiral turn when you evaded the defender! You gotta teach us, man.’
‘Anytime,’ Alfred answered, although he wasn’t sure he could. He did, after all, have special abilities in water.
They all called versions of, ‘See you, Al,’ after him as they walked on, and he unlocked the front door. As he started up the stairs, Alfred was smiling. He couldn’t wait for all the extra training during the autumn break.18
Water polo was so much more fun than swimming. His teammates weren’t his competitors any more. And these new teammates appreciated that he was the most agile swimmer in the pool. He was getting better at throwing the ball too, though he still preferred to pass it so others could score the goals. It made him a popular team player.
Obviously, his teammates didn’t know that there was a reason he moved with such ease in the water. Nor did they know that he could breathe and see clearly under the surface. Water was his element, because his mother was a water sprite, a faerie creature called Nereida.
Until this summer, Alfred had believed his mother was human—that he was human—and that she’d died when he was a baby. But she hadn’t died. In addition to discovering she was a water sprite, he’d learnt that she’d vanished without a trace before he was two weeks old. Vanished into the Faerie Hill. He chose to believe in the possibility that somehow, somewhere in Faerie, she was still alive or could be revived.
Halfway up the stairs, he stopped to alleviate the twitch in his shorter right leg. While he stretched his calf muscle, his smile widened as he remembered how easy it had been to join the team.
From his first day at the new school, he’d tried to follow Saga’s example and not care about being different. When his form teacher introduced him, Alfred had stood up, without trying to hide. Calmly, at least on the outside, he’d told them all matter-of-factly about his limb length discrepancy and his right leg being 5.3 centimetres shorter than the left and having to wear special shoes. ‘So, if you need to pick a team for 19football or something else that involves running, you should pick me last. But—’ Alfred had held up the printed photo of his seventy-eight medals and trophies. ‘—I’m pretty good at swimming.’ To widespread chuckles and a frown from the teacher, he’d also offered to teach them words that weren’t taught in schools in Italian, French, German or Japanese. He hadn’t mentioned that he’d been called many of those words by bullies in faraway countries.
Several kids had surrounded him after that first lesson, asking for a closer look at the photo or about the translation of specific swear words. By lunchtime the news had spread, and both Wesley and the captain of the swimming team had invited him for tryouts. The choice had been easy.
Inside the sports bag, his phone buzzed again. Alfred sped up the last few stairs. He heard the incoming videocall on his computer, as he opened the front door. Only one person was this impatient.
Half-running through the flat, he called, ‘Hey Dad! We won.’
‘Congrats, Alfie!’ Dad called back, popping out of the kitchen. ‘Dinner’s ready in fifteen.’
‘Just gotta talk to Saga.’
‘Where were you?’ Saga said, the moment he answered the call. ‘I tried for ages.’
‘Water polo match. Just came in the door.’ He shrugged out of his jacket before sitting down.
‘Ah… Is it still better than swimming?’
‘Definitely! It’s totally different to be part of the team that…’ He trailed off when he noticed Saga was drumming the fingers of one hand impatiently on her cheek.20
‘We have a problem,’ she said, leaning forward. ‘The mayor has announced plans and activities for the grand opening of Underwood Cavern. It’s next Saturday. There’ll be pumpkin-carving competitions and all kinds of Halloween nonsense in the forest. It’s going to attract a lot of people.’
‘Oh.’ Alfred was glad he wouldn’t be going. He hated crowds.
‘Do you think… Do you think we’ve made everything worse? For the faeries, I mean. Obviously, it’s better for nature this way. Even if they’re using the old tunnel building site as a car park, it won’t damage the pond or harm its inhabitants. But if people are going to flock to the cavern and swarm the woods—and not just on opening day—I can’t imagine the faeries will be happy.’
‘We didn’t have a choice,’ he said, when she stopped to breathe. ‘And it’s still better than the motorway tunnel, for everyone, including the faeries.’
‘I’m just worried they will do something—the faeries, I mean—if there’s going to be an invasion of families in the forest. And I think you ought to be here, if that happens. You can talk to them. You’re the alfrät.’ As if to emphasize her point, she straightened and tightened the ginger bunches on top of her head while she said the last two words.
Alfred’s name, alf rät, meant elvish advisor, a formidable high faerie had explained. The faerie called herself Amanita, and she’d both helped and tricked them. She’d also told him what it meant to be a demi-fae. He tried not to think too much about it.
When he didn’t speak, Saga continued. ‘And perhaps we could even go to Faerie… There’s someone I’d like to look for. 21A baby who I think the faeries switched with a changeling twelve years—’
‘I can’t,’ he said, not wanting to hear what changeling theory she had thought up now. ‘Granny’s coming here, while Dad’s travelling.’
‘I’m sure your granny wouldn’t mind if you came to hers instead.’
‘I have extra water-polo training.’ Alfred picked up the little water-sprite figurine that stood on his desk and held her in his hand. She was carved of wood and she depicted his mother. And, he believed, the figurine somehow sheltered her spirit. It was his most treasured possession.
‘This is more important than water polo.’ Saga pushed her glasses up on her nose and leant in close to her webcam, staring right at him. ‘You’re afraid of coming back, aren’t you?’
Alfred looked down, not answering. He stroked the carved hair of the mouse-sized figurine and exhaled. His breathing slowed. A warmth spread inside him until he felt as if he were floating in a cocoon of soothing water.
‘You can’t stay away from here for ever,’ Saga said softly.
‘I know,’ he muttered.
Although he actually liked his new school and the water polo team, Amanita had offered him a different life. A life where he wasn’t an outsider. A place with others who were just like him—half human and half faerie—in a group of demi-fae, where she’d said he truly belonged.
Saga knew that, and she’d guessed how tempted he’d been by the offer. Saga knew everything. Even the bit about his potentially exceptionally long life, and the fact that his mother 22had enchanted Dad and Granny to erase her from their minds. Their thoughts usually skipped away from thinking about her. They remembered that she’d disappeared when he was a baby, but they seemed to have forgotten Nereida wasn’t human.
‘I don’t know why you’re afraid, but what if… what if I promise to keep you away from Faerie?’ Saga asked. She was still so close to her camera he could see a fingerprint on one of her lenses. ‘I’ll forget about looking for that abducted child.’
‘I’ve got to go help Dad with dinner,’ he said.
‘Please just think about it…’
Alfred shook his head and ended the call, before Saga could say anything else to persuade him, before she could make any more empty promises.
He wanted nothing more than to go to Granny’s in the autumn break. Every single day, he longed for the stream that ran through Faerie and out into her garden.
Saga was right—he was afraid. Because if he went back, how could he not jump in the water? How could he not return to Faerie? Worst of all, what if he wanted to stay?
3
SAGA
A Convenient Accident
By Wednesday, Saga was getting desperate. At school, all everyone talked about was the cavern opening and the pumpkin-carving and fancy-dress competitions. Mainly, Saga thought, because the first prizes were the latest gaming consoles. Although she’d called Alfred every day to persuade him to come, she still hadn’t succeeded.
On her way home from school, she stopped by Alfred’s granny’s. When she got off her bike outside the gate to Applevale Cottage, Mr Tumbleweed jumped out of her basket and left in a huff. The cottage’s protection against faerie creatures meant he couldn’t enter the garden without having one of his fits. He was annoyed that Saga visited so often. At least once a week since the summer, she’d dropped by for a chat with Anna, Alfred’s granny.
It was nice to have someone besides Alfred who knew about faeries, although Anna preferred not to talk about 24them. Saga knew Alfred had tried to tell his granny about their visit to Faerie and him being half water-sprite, but she never remembered.
When Anna heard the gate creak, she looked up from where she was standing by her garden table, smiled, and waved Saga closer.
‘What’re you doing?’ Saga asked, upon seeing there was a bowl full of conkers and a chopping board littered with their spiky husks on the table.
‘I’m experimenting with yarn dyes. These should give some nice rich browns.’ Anna pointed with a knife at the husks and went back to chopping them into quarters. ‘How are you, dear?’
‘I’m worried about Saturday.’
‘So am I.’
‘I wish Al—’ Saga caught herself from using his real name and cast a glance towards the naked thorny twigs of the hedge. ‘Your grandson ought to be here for the opening, don’t you think? Wefound that cavern!’
Anna sighed. ‘I agree, but he says he wants to stay home for his water-polo training.’
‘What if you told him you had to stay here? Couldn’t you… I don’t know…’ Saga remembered that her own grandfather, who was quite a bit older than Alfred’s granny, hadn’t come to Mum’s birthday recently because his back was acting up. ‘Perhaps claim to have a bad back or something? So you couldn’t travel?’
‘My back is perfectly fine,’ Anna said, her brow furrowing, as she stirred with vigour. ‘And I’m glad he’s settling in. Aren’t you?’25
‘Of course…’ Saga gave up and trudged back along the garden path. She’d just closed the gate when she heard a rustle under the hedge.
‘The sprite boy is not coming?’ a screechy voice said.
‘But she wants him here, Little Mother.’
Saga looked around for Mr Tumbleweed, but of course he’d already gone home. She peered in between the stems of the shrubs and cover of dead leaves, without spotting the rat-sized little people in their filthy clothes. But she knew it was them—the vicious pixies who had stolen her shadow and later been forced to sew it back on. Almost all of her shadow. In a faerie deal, she’d given them the shadow of her left little finger.
‘We could use a second shadow curtain, Little Father. The low winter sun blinds me so,’ Little Mother said, from wherever she was hiding. She raised her voice, saying, ‘Little girl, we could make the old woman want to stay, so your friend would have to come here.’
‘For a small price,’ Little Father added.
Briefly, Saga was tempted. She didn’t care if she lost another snippet of her shadow. ‘And this wouldn’t involve you cutting her shadow or yarn or anything?’
‘No cutting, Little Mother.’
‘I do like the snip,snip,snip, Little Father, but we can promise that there will be no cutting.’
‘A little harm goes a long way,’ Little Father muttered.
‘No! Forget it,’ Saga said. What was she thinking? It was stupid to even consider cooperating with the little people. They couldn’t be trusted. ‘We don’t have a deal.’
‘No deal, Little Mother.’26
‘No new curtain.’
They kept muttering, while she mounted her bicycle and set off.
The next afternoon, after school, Saga had been helping out at the bird sanctuary her nature group was part of establishing. It wasn’t exactly thrilling work, but she loved seeing their plans take shape. As she cycled home, uphill from the lake, a biting wind blowing against her, she recalled the encounter with the pixies. Mr Tumbleweed hadn’t been with her then, and he wasn’t with her now because of his strong dislike of birds. Perhaps his absence explained her first sighting—or at least hearing—of faerie creatures in two months! The thought was exciting, though something about her chat with the pixies gave her the chills.
She couldn’t wait to get indoors to warm up, and she was almost home, when Saga noticed the blinking blue lights. An ambulance was parked in the lane by Applevale Cottage.
‘Oh no!’ she said aloud, and trod in the pedals with renewed energy and a sense of dread.
She was almost there when the ambulance drove away. At least it didn’t use the siren. Mum stood by the garden gate.
‘What happened, Mum?’ Saga called. ‘Was that Anna in the ambulance?’
‘She’ll be okay.’ Mum looked a bit shaken. ‘I found her in the garden. Somehow she’d fallen and hit her head. I feared it was much worse, but I think perhaps it’s a mild concussion. And a broken leg or ankle. She must’ve stumbled…’27
Or someone tripped her up, Saga thought. She felt cold all over. Had her talk with the pixies given them a malicious idea?
‘Come on. Let’s go home. I promised Anna I’d call Rob and tell him about the accident.’ Mum began walking. ‘It was lucky she’d said I could stop by for some jars of her rosehip
jam before she went away…’
‘Yeah. Lucky…’ Saga muttered, pushing her bike. ‘What about Alfred?’ she asked. ‘His granny was supposed to look after him next week.’
‘Oh… I’ll tell Rob that Alfred is welcome to stay with us, if he’d like that.’
‘Thanks, Mum!’ Saga didn’t comment on whether Alfred would like to come, and she tried hard to ignore the nagging guilt that came from having had her wish fulfilled at the expense of someone else.
At home, she paced the kitchen while Mum talked to Rob, who was grateful for their help and offer of having Alfred stay. Then she went to her room and turned her new hourglass, planning to give Alfred and his dad half an hour to talk. She watched the slow-moving sand impatiently.
Alfred called before the last grains had fallen.
‘It was them,’ Saga said immediately. ‘The nasty pixies. It’s their fault. I’m almost certain it’s their fault. But I think they got the idea from me and I’m sorry and I want to find them and—How’s your granny, do you know?’
‘Dad just talked to the hospital. Her ankle’s broken; she needs an operation. And she has a concussion, but they think it’s mild. What’s that about the little people? Tell me slowly.’28
After Saga told him what had happened, Alfred was quiet. She could see he was stroking the hair of the water-sprite figurine, which he often did when he was thinking or needed to calm down.
‘Sooo… are you going to come here?’
He nodded. ‘Dad’s driving me tomorrow afternoon, so we can visit Granny.’
‘I’m really sorry, but I’m glad you’ll be here for the cavern opening.’
‘Okay. Just promise me…’ He lifted his gaze from the figurine. ‘Swear that we’re not going to Faerie.’
She’d been right in guessing he was scared. Saga took a deep breath and let go of her dream of ever finding the missing child. ‘I swear we’re not going into the faerie realm.’
It was only later that night, when she was about to doze off, that a thought struck Saga, bolting her awake. She hadn’t made a deal with Little Mother and Little Father. They got nothing from her for tripping up Anna, so why had they done it?
Was it purely out of spite? Or had someone else paid their price?
4
ALFRED
A Suspicious Discovery
Dad had been driving for more than three hours when Alfred began to recognize the landscape. The grey shapes of the extinct volcanoes appeared in the gloom. Through the rapid-moving windshield wipers, Alfred tried to spot the ruins at the top of the one that rose above the Faerie Hill.
He wanted to see it, almost as much as he’d hoped he never would again.
‘I promised to bring Granny some things from the cottage, so we’ll go there first,’ Dad said, while he navigated the curve of the motorway exit. ‘There’s an extra key at the farm.’
‘I have a key.’ Alfred rummaged for his key bundle in the front pocket of his backpack. ‘Right here.’
‘Ah, good.’ Dad looked at him sideways. ‘I don’t.’
‘Granny said I should keep it.’ Alfred remembered sitting on the front step with Granny, at the end of his last visit two months earlier, while Dad was packing the car. When he’d 30wanted to give her his key to the cottage, she’d put it back in his palm, closing his hand around it with hers, saying, ‘The cottage is your home too. One day, when I’m gone, it’ll belong to you.’ Unable to speak, Alfred had hugged her tightly.
By the time they reached the cottage, the rain had become a drizzle. Dad’s phone rang while he parked.
‘Go ahead, Alfie. I’ll just be a sec.’
Alfred zipped up his jacket as he walked towards the dark cottage. He avoided the stepping stones he knew wobbled. Above the thatched roof, atop the high cliff, trees creaked, leaves rustled and branches swayed against the leaden sky. Crows cawed, swooping down around him, welcoming him home.
Despite all these noises, one soft sound stood out—the trickling of the spring that ran along the hedge. It flowed out from Granny’s shed, from the underground river, from Faerie. Alfred exhaled. The spring’s music soothed at the same time as it tantalized him, and he longed to submerge himself in its water.
Before entering the cottage, he cast a cursory glance at the wood-carved figurine above the door. In the strange long face, the hollow eyes stared back at him. A forked tongue stuck out of the mouth. It seemed to be licking the air. The figurine resembled the faerie queen’s spies—Alfred had seen their forked tongues and eyes appear on trees in the forest and felt their piercing glares.
Inside, in the kitchen, a plate with crumbs and a half-full teacup stood on the table. Alfred went to the window sills and touched the wood-carved bear’s snout and one of the bat’s ears. 31The two cat-sized figures depicted two shapeshifters—faerie creatures who could change from their animal forms into something that almost resembled humans—the bear-creature, Bjørn, and the bat, Batty.
‘I’m back,’ Alfred whispered, feeling a little apprehensive. Much as he wished to talk to them, he feared what they would say. He’d made a deal with Saga, but what if the shapeshifters wanted him to return to Faerie?
There was, however, no reaction, not even the slightest flutter of Batty’s large ears, but he imagined her saying, ‘No need to shout.’
Before Dad came inside, Alfred sought out the other woodcarvings.
In the front room, he greeted Evie the eagle. He leant over the sculpture, meeting her piercing eyes. The other front room window was empty, but Alfred found Castor the catfish in Granny’s bedroom. The long feelers on the strange-looking fish reached the window sill. Since he’d stayed at the cottage, Alfred had learnt that catfish taste buds were exceptional.
‘There you are,’ Dad said, coming into the bedroom. ‘I have a list here.’ He looked at his phone. ‘I’ll get the clothes, if you find… let me see… her knitting in the guest room. The book she’s reading and her earphones should be by her armchair in the front room… and you can empty the bin.’
In the guest room, the loom took up more space now that Granny was weaving. As Alfred squeezed past it to get to the window, all the blue, green and turquoise threads made his eyes swim. He turned and stood for a moment, gazing at the tapestry above the bed. The woven depiction of the turquoise 32river filled him with such longing that he went to stroke a hand over the water. Exhaling, he felt the same deep sense of calm spread in his body as when he held the water-sprite figurine.
Before picking up the knitting basket, he touched one of the little wood-carved mole’s outstretched fingers. Majorie the mole was the last of the shapeshifters. Their five wood carvings guarded the cottage and protected Alfred and Granny with their exceptional senses—Marjorie’s sense of touch, Castor’s sense of taste, Evie’s sight, Bjørn’s sense of smell and Batty’s hearing.
Back in the kitchen, he rinsed the plate and the cup and filled a saucer with milk. Whatever the little people had done, Granny would want him to bring milk to them, to avoid further sabotage. And perhaps he might find out if they really were the culprits.
After depositing the rubbish bag on the front step, Alfred walked round to the side of the cottage. The light from the kitchen cast the v-shaped shadow of Batty’s wings on the muddy grass and Alfred’s own shadow on to the hedge. Burnt orange rose-hips dotted the leafless, thorny twigs.
‘You don’t deserve it, but here’s your milk,’ he muttered, as he pushed the saucer under the tangles.
The little people didn’t answer. He couldn’t hear anything scuttle around in the hedge either.
Above, wind whooshed through the trees on the edge of the cliff. Alfred shivered. He walked past the stacked firewood by the high cliff face and ran his fingers over the bolted shed door. His granny’s garden shed was tiny, but it opened up into a large natural cave. Here she dyed her yarns, using water from 33the spring that bubbled out of a narrow underground tunnel in the darkest recess of the cave and ran through her working space. On this side of the bolted door, the spring flowed under the shed’s planks and out into the garden. Alfred listened to its music, but he avoided coming into contact with the water. Lillith, the terrifying water sprite who’d taken over his mother’s streams, would know he was back if he touched the surface. And he did not want to alert her—no one had ever looked at him with such hatred.
He was following the cottage wall back towards the front door, when he noticed that one of the heavy wooden garden chairs lay on the grass, overturned, next to a smashed saucer. As Dad turned off the light in Granny’s bedroom, the darkness in the garden spread. Only the light from the kitchen still shone.
The lawn here was flat and even, but Alfred approached the garden chair, gliding his feet over the wet grass as if he were walking on slippery ice. He stopped when his right shin met resistance. Leaning down, letting his hands slide down that shin, he tried to find something he couldn’t see. And then he felt it. A thread, finer and less noticeable than any spiderweb, sturdier than any fishing line. A faerie gossamer thread.
Holding on to it, he knelt until he was almost down by its height. From here, the row of glittering raindrops it had caught were visible in the light from the kitchen. His eyes followed the thread first to one of the overturned chair’s legs and then to the wall of the cottage. He tugged hard, but the tread didn’t snap. His action just made the raindrops fall, turning the gossamer invisible.34
In an awkward crouch, holding on to the thread, he made it to the cottage, where he found it attached to a silver needle stuck into the wall. A silver needle exactly like the one Little Mother had used to reattach Saga’s shadow.
If they needed proof of who’d caused Granny’s accident, he’d found it.
Half an hour later, he and Dad entered Granny’s hospital room. As soon as he’d given her a hug, Alfred asked if she remembered how she’d fallen.
She was a little muddled. ‘My foot was under a garden chair, but I don’t remember how that happened.’ She pointed at her bandaged foot, which was raised and hanging from a sling. ‘They can’t operate until the swelling goes down.’
‘I think a… a hedgehog… tripped you up,’ Alfred said, using the code name Granny herself had used for the little people until she found out he could see faeries too.
‘Nonsense,’ Dad said. ‘You must’ve been sitting on the chair and somehow tipped it over and stumbled while getting up.’
Granny shook her head. ‘Robbie, why don’t you find a vase for those beautiful flowers you brought?’
The moment Dad left the room, Alfred told Granny about the gossamer thread he’d discovered. Out of loyalty to Saga, he didn’t say anything about her fear that she was at fault.
‘It’s odd,’ Granny said. ‘The little people haven’t bothered me in such a long time. Some days they don’t even drink the milk. But please remember to put milk out for them while I’m in here. Will you do that?’35
‘Of course,’ Alfred said, as Dad entered the room, carrying a vase with the bouquet.
They sat for a while, chatting. The woman in the next bed snored loudly.
‘You hear why I needed earphones,’ Granny whispered.
Alfred nodded, thinking. If the pixies hadn’t bothered Granny recently, then why had they suddenly harmed her? Was Saga to blame? She wasn’t used to making faerie deals—had they tricked her, despite her claim that there wasn’t a deal? Or did the little people have their own reason for wanting Granny out of the way?
5
SAGA
Unfamiliar Relations
‘He’s here! Saga! He’s here,’ Poppy and Daisy yelled from the front room, where they had been keeping watch for headlights in the darkness.
Outside, the geese-alarm, as Dad called it, went off with loud honks. Rufus barked. After putting her notes about the kidnapped baby into a desk drawer, Saga sprang downstairs.
‘Alfred, Robbie, come in, come in,’ Mum was saying, as Saga reached the boot room. ‘Girls, give them a little space. Didn’t I tell you to get ready for bed?’
Saga waited until all the others had said their hellos before she gave Alfred a hug. He almost hugged her back.
‘How’s your granny?’ she asked.
Her mum was asking Alfred’s dad the same thing, and leading him into their kitchen, where Dad was making tea. The apple pie Saga had helped Mum make earlier stood, steaming, in the centre of their large dining table, next to a plateful of sandwiches.37
‘She’s okay, but…’ Alfred lowered his voice, although no one would’ve heard him if he’d shouted. Poppy and Daisy were chasing each other, and Rufus was still barking. ‘You were right about the pixies.’
In a hurried whisper, Alfred started telling her about the gossamer thread attached to the cottage, but of course they were interrupted.
Oliver opened the front door and kicked off his wellies, letting a fresh whiff of muck from the stables into the house.
‘Hey, you must be Alfred,’ he said, as he pushed past them. ‘Lily talks about you non-stop,’ he called while he washed his hands in the downstairs bathroom.
‘Who’s—’ Alfred began in a low voice.
‘Don’t call me that! My name’s Saga.’
‘I bet she never even mentioned me,’ Oliver said. Luckily, he headed straight for the kitchen and didn’t see Alfred’s nonplussed expression.
‘That was one of my big brothers,’ she said. ‘The annoying one. I wish Florian was here instead. He’s two years older and much nicer than Oliver. But he won’t be home until Christmas.’
‘You have brothers? And your real name is Lily?’
‘Typical Mum. She loves flower names. Please forget that you know—I don’t want to risk that you ever call me that name when there are faeries around. And come on, let’s get some pie before Oliver eats the whole thing.’
