Something about that seemingly simple statement made Emilie’s heart skip and her blood turn a degree or two colder.
She faced Winter. “What story?”
Winter took her down to the first floor and through a long corridor to a set of enormous double doors. Emilie pushed one open and found herself in the most magnificent private library she’d ever seen in real life or pictures. Rows upon rows of books sat on rows upon rows of bookshelves, their spines making a thousand rainbows.
She glanced at a few of the books and recognized some of the titles—The Wind in the Willows and A Christmas Carol and The Princess and the Goblin…
“These are all books from…where I’m from.” She turned and looked at Winter. “What’s going on?”
The door rattled and opened. Emilie barely recognized Skya at first. Gone was her leather armor, her torn and dirty clothes. She wore a loose gown of forest green with long flowing sleeves and her blond hair in a braided crown.
“I thought I heard voices in here,” Skya said.
“Hello, Majesty.” Winter bowed. “The princess wanted to see our story.”
“I’ll show her,” Skya said. “Thank you.”
After another bow, Winter left them alone together.
“What story is she talking about?” Emilie asked her.
“Over here.” Skya crooked her finger and Emilie followed her to another door that led to a smaller room. “My private salon. Rafe and Jeremy and I would hang out in here on cold nights.”
A beautiful room, intimate and cozy with a pale blue fainting sofa and large armchairs, and tapestries on the walls. One armchair sat at the corner of the rug by the fireplace, a side table next to it stacked high with books.
One of them was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a bookmark with an emerald-green tassel between the pages.
“I never showed this to them,” Skya said as she pushed aside a tapestry to reveal a secret wall niche. On a bed of white velvet sat a golden box. “Don’t remember why. Maybe I didn’t know how to answer all the questions I knew they’d ask. I don’t even understand it all myself.”
With a key that hung on a cord at her waist, she unlocked the box.
Emilie looked inside and saw something she never dreamed she would see in this strange, magical kingdom.
“A Trapper Keeper?” Emilie asked, laughing in her surprise.
“Got it at the Goodwill on Hunters Way,” Skya said. “Down from the Arby’s.” She took out the Trapper Keeper—the picture on the front was of a neon sun setting into a neon sea. She opened the Velcro flap with a satisfying ssst.
Inside the binder lay dozens of pages of notebook paper, slightly yellowed, and covered in a girl’s looping cursive handwriting.
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.
