Emilie read the first line on the first page.

Once upon a time in West Virginia…

She looked up in surprise. “Skya? What is this?”

“When I was in the fifth grade,” Skya said, “our teacher taught us about fairy tales. We were supposed to write our own. I’d never tried writing a story before, but once I started, I was hooked. I couldn’t stop. Every other kid in the class turned in a one-page story. Mine was twenty.”

“Twenty? That’s a million pages to a ten-year-old. I couldn’t write twenty pages now.”

Skya smiled. “Mrs. Adler was amazed by all the work I’d done. She asked me to stay after school. I thought I was in trouble. But she handed me this mechanical pencil with a unicorn for an eraser, and she said, ‘Here, take this. It’s a magic pencil. If you keep writing…you can change your whole life.’ I felt like King Arthur with Excalibur.”

Emilie looked at her sister, trying to see the little girl in the face of the woman.

“Was it bad? Your life, I mean?”

“A kid shouldn’t wish her mother away, right? The only good thing she ever did for me was bring you home.”

She turned the pages slowly. The paper crinkled like an old Bible.

“Fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade…I’d work on this story every day. I’d skip lunch and go to the library and just write and write. I wrote until I had a permanent indentation on my finger.” She ran her fingers over the paper. “And that unicorn pencil must have been magical because it never seemed to run out of lead.”

With a shaking hand, Emilie turned the pages and read a few lines here and there.

Queen Skya had a pet crow named Aurora. This was no ordinary crow. Aurora was red, for starters, instead of boring old black. And she was a wonderful spy. You couldn’t think of a single secret without that crow knowing. Even better, she could pass between worlds when she felt like it. She visited one forest in West Virginia so often, they named it after her…

The Bright Boys were the queen’s immortal mortal enemies. Not truly immortal. You could kill them if you doused them in water, but usually it was more fun to shoot them with arrows and turn them to dust and smoke. Then they came back in a week or a month and you got to kill them again…

The day came when a star grew nightsick. It was made of light but lived in the dark, and when it couldn’t take the darkness anymore, it fell a thousand thousand miles. When the star landed it broke into seven pieces. The seven pieces saw that the kingdom where they landed was beautiful and good, so they decided to stay. Each piece turned itself into a girl to fit in, though their hearts were forever made of the stuff of stars—iron, light, and fire. They called themselves the Valkyries because one of them had heard about them in a story a passing comet once told them, and they thought the word had a nice ring to it.

And the Moonstone Palace was a magic palace. Any book you would ever want to read would appear on the shelves of the library. Any clothes you needed hung in your closet, always a perfect fit. And the water in the baths was always warm and the towels were very, very soft…

The queen traveled three days to the Witch of Black Wolf Cave to beg a magic spell to find her missing sister.

“Here is the spell,” the witch said, “and with it you can find a lost child or a lost trinket, but the one thing you can never find with it is that which does not want to be found. If your sister is not truly lost, there is a chance you may never find her.”

“I know, but I have to try.”

There were hand-drawn maps of the kingdom with place-names like Ravencliff and Apple Pie Hill. Lists of made-up imaginary animals too—the cyclops owl, snow deer, silver tigers, and the phantom fox…She’d drawn pictures of the creatures. The phantom fox was nothing but a pale outline with two black, staring eyes.

“Your story came true,” Emilie said. “That’s not how it works. Something happens and you write about it. You don’t write about it and then it happens.”

“I don’t know,” Skya said as she turned another page. “Sometimes you want a story to be real so badly, you almost believe wanting it can make it come true.”

Skya put her hand lovingly on the cut stone walls. “You know why this place is called the Moonstone Palace even though it’s a castle? I didn’t know the difference between palaces and castles.”

“I just…I can’t believe it. Why? How?” Emilie flipped through the pages again, unbelieving and yet believing, because how could she not believe her sister’s story had come true? She was standing in it.

Skya reached out and cupped the St. Agatha medal Emilie wore. Jeremy had gotten it back for her.

“Maybe someone was watching over me,” Skya said. “A tenderhearted angel? Some patron saint? A friendly god of another world taking a stroll through our solar system?”

Skya released the medal. It fell softly against Emilie’s skin.

Aurora fluttered down to sit on Skya’s shoulder.

“Or maybe it was you all along,” Skya said to her bird. “I was running from that guy in the park, and he grabbed me by my backpack. I could’ve just let it go and kept running, but it had my story in it. I couldn’t let him have it. It was more me than me, you know?”

“What happened? Or do I not want to know?”

“He got me by the arm, started dragging me to the ground. But then…” She laughed and it sounded like church bells ringing on Christmas morning. “This huge red bird flew out of nowhere and started pecking at his face, his eyes. When he started to fall, the bird flew into the hollow of the tree, and I followed. I don’t remember what happened next, but when I woke up, I was here. And I wasn’t Shannon anymore. The Valkyries found me in the forest and said this…”

She pointed to a line in her story that read, Hail, Queen Skya! We are your Valkyries if you will have us.

“I just liked the word ‘Valkyrie.’ Wasn’t even sure what it meant.”

Emilie remembered something. The teeny tiny pencil sketch of the girl sitting at her desk…

“I saw your homework assignment about what you wanted to be doing in ten years. You didn’t want to be a queen of a magic kingdom. You wanted to be a fantasy writer. You did understand the assignment.”

Emilie turned another page.

The queen knew she could never leave her kingdom. It would not survive without her. If she wanted to find the lost princess, she would need to send a knight or a prince.

Or both.

Another page.

“Remember this warning, my queen,” said the Witch of Black Wolf Cave. “Only three times may the door into this world be used. After that, it will lock from the inside. You can get out, but no one else may get in. For you can always walk away from magic, but if you turn your back on it, it may never offer you another chance…”

“Three times,” Emilie said. “What does this mean? Three times the door opens before it closes forever? Do you mean the door we came through? The door in the tree?”

Skya sat down on the sofa and laid her head on the arm.

“Now I remember why I didn’t tell Rafe and Jeremy about the story.”

Emilie carried the Trapper Keeper to the armchair, reading the pages before and after, trying to find a loophole or a correction or something…

“But if it’s only three times, that means—”

Easy math. Skya came through. That was one time. Then Rafe and Jeremy fifteen years ago. Then they brought her through. That was three.

“Things always come in threes in fairy tales,” Skya said. “You have three days to guess the secret of the dancing princesses or you die. Three iron bands around the heart to keep it from breaking. Click your heels together three times…I didn’t know when I wrote that line that someday I would have to tell my prince that if he goes home again, he can never come back to me. And if he stays here, he’ll never see his mother again.”

Emilie’s throat tightened with panic. “Change it. Change the story. Can’t you erase it, write over it? Make it four times? Five?”

“Wish I could,” Skya said. “I tried a hundred times. I tried changing everything in the story. I tried erasing death and pain and suffering and sickness. It wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not? It’s your story.”