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  “I don’t think I need to get off,” Imishi said, sounding nervous. “I don’t weigh very much.”

  I knew Kir would be able to maneuver better across the muck without any riders. I wondered if she was trying to avoid getting her new shoes muddy—mud being something fairies don’t have to deal with as they fly over the landscape—but it was more likely that she was worried that there really were marsh spiders. Why had I said that?

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself.” I took a cautious step onto the first small marsh island. My feet sank into the mud up to my ankles, but otherwise the little hillock seemed stable enough. I was happy that the boots were waterproof. One more step, then another, and I was across the island, ready to go on to the second. With a bit more confidence now, I stepped out onto the next island. My foot slid right out from underneath me, and I fell forward to land face-first—splat—in the grassy, wet muck.

  If I hadn’t been worried for our safety, it might have been funny. But little alarm bells were going off in my head, telling me that this was dangerous, especially for Kir, who was much heavier than I. That was why, when I heard Imishi giggling behind me, I carefully got to my hands and knees and turned to glare at her.

  “This was your idea,” I said. “You should be the one down here in the mud.”

  Her face turned sober, and she looked away. A wave of fear and skittishness hit me as Kir whickered and rolled his eyes. That was when I made the connection: I was actually feeling Kir’s fear! It was his nervousness I had felt so strongly before setting off along this road. I was picking up feelings and images, not words. Just as I had sensed what was bothering the troll.

  I sent Kir calming thoughts like It’s okay, we’re right here, while I said aloud, “We’ll do this together.” We had to—there was no turning back now.

  Kir stepped forward and put all four hooves on the first island. Still on my hands and knees, I went onward, feeling with my hands for the most solid spot. There. “This is solid, but still pretty slippery, and the muck is deeper than on the first island,” I said.

  Where Kir stood, with mud well past the tops of his hooves, reeds and grass grew in the water alongside the islands. I had an idea. Tearing up handfuls of grass, I spread them flat across the mud. “I think this will keep your hooves from sinking in so far,” I explained. I spread another layer on top of that. Kir stepped forward and barely sank an inch into the ooze.

  “It worked!” Imishi said, sounding surprised. “Just one more.”

  I got back to my feet, steadied myself, and faced the next island. The mud road was just a few feet beyond it. I stepped onto the top of the small hillock. This island felt more solid than the first, and I quickly brought my other foot over. I stamped on the mound to show my companions how solid it was. “See? This one’s easy.”

  But when Kir started to follow me, all chaos broke loose.

  Clouds of glowing insects swarmed out of the little island beneath me. In moments, the air was so thick with them I could hardly see. A couple flew into my mouth, and I coughed and spat them out. I pressed my lips together.

  In sheer panic, Kir reared up. I jumped back to avoid his hooves—and plunged into the shallow water between the island and the muddy route we were traveling. Kir leapt onto the third island, reared once more, and jumped over me onto the solid mud. I heard a loud sploosh in the murky water beside me.

  Wiping muddy water from my eyes, I looked in the direction from which the splash had come. I gasped when I saw only a pair of peach butterfly wings sticking up out of the water. Not even the fairy-silk blanket had been able to keep Imishi on a wildly rearing horse.

  “Imishi!” I yelled, choking on a mouthful of gnats. A moment later, she pushed her head above the water, coughing and sputtering, only to breathe in a bunch of the glowing gnats. Her coral hair was plastered to her head, and tiny bugs swirled around it.

  Even though my lips were pressed together, one of the swamp gnats flew up my nose. I sneezed, coughed, and tried to blow it out, all the while flailing my arms against the cloud of gnats that had begun stinging. Holding on to my sopping-wet shoulder bag with one hand, I struggled to get the other hand into my pocket to pull out the fairy-silk scarf. When I got it out, I tied it around my nose and mouth to keep more gnats from flying in. Following my lead, Imishi tore a strip off her dress and tied it so that it covered the lower half of her face.

  Rivers of panic poured from Kir, who reared and neighed on the muddy route. He could have run away to escape the gnats, but he didn’t. With much sliding and falling, Imishi and I scrambled up the slope toward the muddy path.

  “Your wings!” I shouted to Imishi.

  “Are fine!” she yelled back, but I could see the pain on her face.

  When we reached the muddy path by Kir, the fairy girl’s weightless shoes barely left an imprint. A flat yellow worm clung to her calf and she shook it off. I was glad to have fairy boots protecting my feet and legs. Who knew what else lurked in the slime Imishi and I had just climbed out of?

  Kir stopped rearing. His flanks twitched and he shook his mane, but he stood still while Imishi and I climbed onto his back. It was clear that he wanted us to hurry.

  The moment we were seated, Kir took off. I leaned forward, twining my fingers in his mane, and closed my eyes to avoid getting mud and gnats in them. Imishi held on to me tightly. It seemed to take forever—or maybe it was only minutes—before we left the insect cloud behind. Finally Kir stepped onto the solid land on the other side of the swampy lake.

  The horse stopped and looked back at me, waiting for my direction. I untied the fairy scarf and took the map out of my bag. Although the bag was wet and muddy, my map was still dry. More fairy magic, I thought as I studied the map and looked around us for landmarks.

  “There! That wasn’t so bad, was it?” I could tell Imishi was trying for a light tone, but her voice shook. “I bet we saved lots of time.”

  “I don’t know.” I rubbed my forehead with one hand, massaging it to try to ease the headache that had just blossomed, not even caring that my hand was covered with mud. “I have no idea where we are anymore.”

  6

  The Jungle

  Another thing people usually don’t tell you about traveling by horse: if you’re not used to it, you get sore. I mean sore. I mean really, really sore. You learn that there are muscles in your body that you’ve never used before. So there I was in the middle of Aventurine, tired, headachy, hungry, filthy, and sore in a million different places, with one companion who couldn’t talk and another who seemed to blame me for everything that went wrong. Now that we were no longer in an emergency, we had fallen into an uncomfortable silence. To top it all off, we were lost.

  I drooped over Kir’s neck and let my hair fall forward while a few tears coursed down my cheeks. One day. One measly day and I was ready to give up! I couldn’t believe I was that much of a wimp. I didn’t offer Kir any direction, but he started walking again, and I didn’t protest.

  I was grateful that Imishi stayed silent. I didn’t bother to look up while Kir plodded along, up and down low hills. The air cooled, and somewhere nearby birds were singing. I must have lost track of time. Kir finally came to a halt and stamped his feet. I looked up.

  The sun was setting. We were in a flat area dotted with pools of clear water that gave off a faint aquamarine glow in the fading sunlight. On the far side of the pools, a dense stand of trees formed a sheltering half circle. Low, thick grass covered the ground between and around the pools.

  An image rose in my mind: Kir resting and riderless. The image was clear, but with blurry edges, as if I were looking through a tunnel made of fog.

  “Kir would like us to get off his back,” I said.

  I let Imishi dismount first, her feet touching the ground as lightly as a feather. My own dismount was more clumsy, because I was so stiff and sore.

  “How do you know he wanted us to get off his back?” Imishi asked.

  “He told me.” Picking up a new image fr
om Kir, I removed the saddlebags and blanket. Kir shook himself, whinnied, then walked over to a pool and began to drink.

  Imishi made a skeptical sound. “The horses of Kib Valley do not speak in words. I often understand what my cousin wants, but only because I have known him so long. Do you claim to understand Kir’s language?”

  “Not exactly.” Then I explained, as much as I could, about the emotions and images that I could pick up from Kir’s mind and how I had figured out what was bothering the marsh troll. When Imishi actually looked impressed, I told her about my rapport with stray animals in the waking world. I wondered if I would be able to sense their feelings when I got home, like I could sense Kir’s in Aventurine.

  I sat down on the grass, which was soft and springy. It felt amazing to lie back on it. I had to force myself to sit up and remove my boots. “We might as well have supper and spend the night here,” I said.

  “Did Kir tell you that, too?”

  “No, but he’s making himself at home, we don’t have any flashlights, and we could all use some rest. So I just figured it was a good idea,” I said. “And I need some time to work on my map, plus I’m starving.”

  “We should get clean first,” Imishi said, picking up the horse blanket, which was caked with mud from the swamp. She dipped the blanket in the pool nearest her, just once. As she pulled the material out of the water, dirt streamed away until it was clean. The fairy girl took a step back from the pool and shook the blanket so that it snapped in the warm evening air. “The magic of Willowood cloth,” Imishi said, showing it to me.

  The cloth was dirt free and completely dry!

  I went to a pool close to the ones Imishi and Kir were using. I dipped a toe into the water, which was just cool enough to be refreshing. Throwing caution to the wind, I jumped in, fully clothed, and ducked my head under the water. After the swamp, with its murky water and moldy smells, this was absolute heaven.

  I surfaced, rubbed my hands over my skin to remove any lingering traces of mud, dunked my head again, and swished my hair around. I got out of the pool feeling clean and revived. I removed several articles of clothing, shook them out to dry them, then dressed again. It was the most fun I’d ever had doing laundry.

  We gathered for dinner, eating the food from the Willowood Fairies, except for Kir, who munched on mouthfuls of grass. After supper, Imishi found what she called a cinder oak and broke off a glowing twig that I could use for light while working on my map. She dug into the saddlebags as I worked.

  “Look, Zally!” Imishi said.

  I glanced up, and by the light of the twig, I saw that she was holding a silver comb. “Pretty,” I said, looking back at my map.

  Imishi started humming and I looked up again. She was combing her coral hair. Then she took a narrow section, wrapped it around one finger, and made a swirling motion from the root to the tip. As she twirled her finger, slender tendrils of vines grew around the strand in a spiral. Miniature yellow flowers blossomed on the vines. The comb was pretty, but this was enchanting.

  Malia and her parents took me to a Renaissance fair once in New Jersey. There had been a booth where you could get your hair braided into lots of little braids and decorated with flowers. But it had been too expensive, so we had just watched for a long time. I watched now, my map forgotten, as Imishi repeated the process until her hair was held back in a dozen flowery hair vines.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  Imishi smiled. “I could do the same with your hair,” she offered.

  “Really?” I asked.

  Imishi nodded, her grin growing.

  “I’d love that. But would I have to take them out to sleep?” I asked.

  “No, hair vines are very comfortable to sleep in, and they don’t tangle. You can keep your hair like this for days. It keeps your hair out of your eyes, too.”

  I wasn’t about to turn her down. “Can I work on the map while you do it?” I asked.

  Imishi nodded again. “That is a good idea. That way no time is wasted.”

  So while Imishi twisted my long hair into vines, I let my mind follow its inspiration to sketch the next part of the map. When we finished, we were both in a much better mood than we had been earlier at the swamp.

  “We’d better get some sleep now,” I said, looking at the terrain on my newly drawn map. “We’re going to have some hard traveling tomorrow.”

  Kir looked up and snorted.

  As I put away the map and the quill, Imishi folded her wings carefully behind her, curled up with her head on the saddlebags, and fell instantly to sleep, snoring very gently. I covered her with Kir’s blanket and smiled at her. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.

  I put my head on the other side of the saddlebags and tried to sleep. The sky filled with stars as I watched. The constellations were different from what I was used to, and the stars were brighter than any I had ever seen. I fell asleep wondering what stories the fairies told about their constellations.

  I woke up to Kir snuffling in my hair. Imishi was already up and had put out breakfast for us, including fresh water in what looked like bark cups. The sky was pinky gold.

  “So you know which way we’re headed today?” Imishi asked as I ate an eggy pastry.

  “Let me look at the map,” I said.

  Imishi handed me my woven bag and I took out the map. We looked at it together, Imishi brushing the crumbs from my pastry off of it.

  One of the coolest things about my map of Aventurine was the way parts of the map would expand to show us close-ups of the areas we were going through. When we left a region, it would shrink again, leaving more room on the map to see where we were at the time. In that way, it was like a map on a Web site.

  One of the not-cool things about the map was the way it didn’t really prepare you for where you were going. You could plan part of the way, but not a whole trip. Although I wondered if perhaps there was away it would be able to show someone more…. If I saw Queen Patchouli again, if I succeeded in my quest, I would ask.

  I traced a finger along the trail we had taken from the marsh, to the comfortable haven where we had spent the night. I closed my eyes, my fingers on the map. I felt that there were more obstacles before the valley, but I had drawn only one thing so far on the way: three trees and a couple of random plants I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t tell by the drawing whether we were about to reach three trees, an orchard, a bonsai garden of miniature shrubs, or a forest.

  “That’s the way,” I said to Imishi.

  “I’ll pack up,” she said.

  She folded everything carefully and stored it all in the saddlebags. Kir found a large rock for her to stand on so she could lift the saddlebags onto his back.

  I was amazed at Imishi’s change in attitude. She didn’t seem angry at me anymore. Could something as simple as fixing my hair have made the change? Maybe my genuine appreciation had helped. Or that we had seen each other as girls, both liking pretty things, enjoying something simple outside of the daunting quest before us. In any case, our cheerfulness made that daunting quest less scary and more exciting.

  It was a good thing I was feeling that way, because as it turned out, our path ran through a jungle—and by “path,” I don’t really mean any kind of real road or trail; it was more like narrow corridors between trees, shrubs, and ground cover. Kir could just set his feet down without tripping over vines and branches, and Imishi and I could barely sit upright on Kir’s back and not get smacked in the face by springy palm fronds.

  One of the definitions of “jungle” is land that is overgrown with tangled masses of tropical vegetation. This jungle was no exception. It looked very much like pictures my parents have shown me of the jungles of Guatemala.

  Plants of every shape and size grew there—trees hundreds of feet tall with countless leafy branches, ferns higher than our heads, thick clusters of bamboo, creeping ground cover that grew between and around the tree trunks, flowers in all colors and scents, and vines dangling from branches hig
h above. The hot air was heavy with moisture, and the light that filtered down through the leaves was tinged a faint green. The smells of the jungle were rich and damp.

  Imishi kept her wings folded tightly out of the way to prevent them from being poked or further damaged by the plants we were passing through. We both stayed alert. Watching Kir’s ears swivel this way and that, I knew he was keeping alert, too.

  “I wish I could have flown over this,” Imishi sighed. I didn’t hear any whininess or criticism in her tone, just wistfulness.

  I could feel Kir’s worry for his sire as we rode on. It was a constant reminder of our need to hurry. We continued in silence for an hour or so. Of course the jungle is anything but silent: birds chirped, twittered, and cawed; frogs croaked; monkeys chattered; water dripped; insects buzzed or clicked; leaves rustled.

  The jungle was filled with amazing sights, but it was what I couldn’t see that began to trouble me. I’m not sure when I became aware of it, but I sensed a new restlessness from Kir. Animals have instincts to tell them when something big is about to happen, like a thunderstorm or an earthquake. So I thought maybe Kir was picking up something like that. The answer slammed into my thoughts a moment later: a feeling so strong that it overpowered my connection with Kir for a moment. A creature was somewhere near us—a creature filled with a wild hunger.

  Pushing the thought away, I cleared my mind. I reached out to Kir and directed him to go faster along the path that, according to my map, would take us out of the jungle.

  Imishi felt the change. “What’s wrong, why don’t we—”

  I held up a hand to caution her to silence. I turned, with a finger pressed to my lips. She went quiet and started looking around more carefully. I had the creepiest feeling that we were being watched.

  Kir picked his way through the trees and underbrush faster than I had thought possible. We broke through the jungle into an open area filled with ruins. My mouth must have dropped open. Some of the ancient buildings looked like step pyramids. Others were little more than foundations raised above the ground with steps leading up to the flat area. The whole scene reminded me of pictures that decorate the walls of our bakery—Mayan ruins like Chichén Itzá, Tikal, and Caracol.