The Tangle Box by Terry Brooks

She came forward a step. “Do not leave me, Dirk. Whatever happens, do not. Will you promise me that?”

Edgewood Dirk shook his head. “Cats do not make promises. Are you ready or not?”

Willow straightened. “I depend on you.” The cat stayed silent. “Yes,” she said then. “I am ready.”

They moved into the narrow passageway and the mists that clogged it and were immediately swallowed up. Willow kept her eyes lowered to where Dirk walked before her, vaguely visible in the haze. The mists were dark at first, and then lightened perceptibly. The walls of the buildings fell away, and the smells of the city disappeared. In the blink of an eye, everything about them changed. They were in a forest now, a world of great old trees with canopied limbs that hid the skies, of thick brush and tall ferns, and of smells of an ancient, forgotten time. The air was thick with must and rot and with a misty gloom that shrouded everything, turning the forest to shadows and half light. There was a suggestion of movement, but nothing could be certain where everything was so dim.

Dirk walked steadily on, and Willow followed. She glanced back once, but there was nothing left of the city. She had come out of that world and into this. She was within the fairy mists, and it would all be new again.

She heard the voices first, vague whisperings and mutterings in the gloom. She strained to understand the words and could not. The voices rose and fell, but remained indistinct. Dirk walked on.

She saw their faces next, strange and curious features lifting from the shadows, sharp-featured and angular with hair of moss and corn-silk brows, eyes as penetrating as knife blades when they fixed on her, and bodies so thin and light-seeming as to be all but ethereal. The fairy folk darted and slowed, came and went, flashes of life in the shifting gloom. Dirk walked on.

They arrived at a clearing ringed by trees, fog, and deeper gloom, and Dirk walked to its center and stopped. Willow followed, turning as she did to find the fairy people all about, faces and bodies pressed up against the haze as if against glass.

The voices whispered to her, anxious, persuasive.

Welcome, Queen of Landover

Welcome, once-fairy, to the land of your ancestors

Be at peace and stay with us awhile

See what you might have here with the child you bear . . .

And she was walking suddenly in a field of bright red flowers, the like of which she had never seen. She carried a baby in her arms, the child wrapped carefully in a white blanket, protected from the bright light. The smells of the field were wondrous and rich, and the sunlight warm and reassuring. She felt impossibly light and happy and filled with hope, and below where she walked the entire world spread away before her, all of its cities and towns and hamlets, all of its people, the whole of its life. The child moved in her arms. She reached down to pull back the blanket so that she could peek at its face. The baby peeked back. It looked just like her. It was perfect.

“Oh!” she gasped, and she began to cry with joy.

She was back in the clearing then, back within the fairy mists, staring out into the gloom.

The voices whispered once more.

It will be so, if you wish it

Make your happiness what you would, Queen of Landover. You have the right. You have the means

Keep safe within the mists, safe with your child, safe with us, and it shall be as you were shown

She shook her head, confused. “Safe?”

Stay with us, once-fairy

Be again as your kind once were

Stay, if you would have your vision come true …

She understood then, saw the price that she was being asked to pay for the assurance that her child would be as the vision had shown. But it was not really so, for they would both end up living in an imaginary world and the vision would be nothing more than what they created in their minds. And she would lose Ben. There had been no mention of Ben, of course, because he was not to be included in this promised land, an outsider, an other-worlder who could never belong to the fairy life.