Ben felt his grip on his emotions start to slip. “I can still come back, Annie. I have the means to do so. I don’t have to stay in Landover.”
“Ben,” she whispered, her brown eyes sad and empty. “You no longer belong in this world. You chose to leave it. You can’t come back. I know that you have spoken with Miles Bennett. What he told you was true. Ten years have passed, Ben. You’ve nothing to come back to. Everything you once had is gone — your possessions, your position with the firm, your standing with the bar, everything. You made a choice ten years ago, and you have to accept the fact that it’s too late to change it now. You can never come back.”
Ben’s struggled in vain to respond. This was madness! How could it be happening? Then he caught himself sharply. Maybe it wasn’t happening. Maybe it was all part of the illusion he had suspected before, a trick of the mists and the fairy world, none of it real. The enormity of that possibility stunned him. Annie seemed real, damn it! How could she not be?
“Daddy?”
He turned. A small child stood a dozen feet away in the shadow of a giant apple tree, a little girl no more than two, her tiny face a mirror of Annie’s. “This is your daughter, Ben,” he heard Annie whisper. “Her name is Beth.”
“Daddy?” the little girl called to him, and her small arms reached up.
But Annie intercepted her, pulled her back, and held her close. Ben dropped slowly to one knee, his tall form stooped over, his arms folded against his chest to stop himself from shaking. “Beth?” he repeated dully.
“Daddy,” the little girl said again, smiling.
“She lives with me, Ben,” Annie told him, swallowing against her own pain. “We visit the country, and I try to teach her what life would have been like for her if…”
She couldn’t finish. She bent her head into Beth’s shoulder, hiding her face. “Don’t cry, Mommy,” the little girl said softly. “It’s all right.”
But it wasn’t all right. Nothing was all right, and Ben knew that it never would be again. He felt himself breaking apart inside, needing to be with them, wanting to hold them both, unable to do anything but stand there helplessly.
“Why did you leave us, Ben?” Annie was asking again, her eyes searching his. “Why did you cross over into that other world when we needed you so badly in ours? You should never have quit on us, Ben. Now we’ve lost you — and you’ve lost us. We’ve lost each other forever!”
He was on his feet then, a cry breaking from his throat, stumbling blindly toward where they knelt, arms out stretched. He saw Beth’s small arms trying to reach back.
Mist swirled past his face…
He stumbled, pitched forward, and fell sprawling to the ground. There was a moment of dizziness as he fought to regain the breath that had been knocked from his body. A rush of cool air swept over him, and the sunlight was gone. He blinked against the dusk that closed about, and his hands clutched at an earth turned barren and hard.
Annie and Beth — where were his wife and child?
Slowly he pushed himself back to his feet. He stood at the rim of a valley that was shrouded in mist and twilight. The valley had the look of a dying creature whose death had been a long and painful ordeal. Forests were stripped of their leaves and vines, the limbs and trunks of the trees gnarled and rotting. Plains had turned wintry, the grasses stunted, the flowers sapped of their color. Mountains crested against the misted skyline, but their slopes were stark and barren. A scattering of dwellings and castles hunched down against the earth, ill-kept and worn. Steam rose from lakes and rivers turned foul, their waters sluggish with filth.
Ben caught his breath in horror. He recognized the valley.
It was Landover. He looked down at his clothing. It was the clothing that he had been wearing when he had gone down into the Deep Fell.