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  She slumped down with her back against the trunk and licked her ice cream. It didn’t taste as good as she remembered. Perhaps it was just because she was older now. The day had warmed up, and the ice cream was melting fast. She licked it all the way around the sides, but no matter how quickly she ate, the melting ice cream kept dripping through her fingers. Splat! A big splash of pink landed on her faded dress. She jumped up to try to stop it spilling further, but that knocked the whole ice cream scoop off the top of the cone, and it fell forlornly into the dirt. The day just wasn’t working out like she’d hoped at all. Actually, her whole life wasn’t really working out like she’d hoped. She knew it wasn’t anyone’s fault. She had to look after her dad, and she had to take care of her sister, but since her mother had disappeared, there was no one to look after her. There was no one to turn to when Jade, Jasmine, or Jessica said something horrible to her at school. No one to say that they loved her as they gently closed her bedroom door last thing at night. She knew that plenty of kids had a worse time than her, and she didn’t want to complain, but she just wished that . . . well . . . somebody cared about her.

  She sat back down against the tree trunk, holding her empty cone, and stared out through the canopy of leaves at all the happy people. She felt that lump rising in her throat again, and knew that the tears would come soon. She did her best to stop them, but there was nothing she could do. She curled up against the tree, and one by one, small tears slid down her cheeks. She was too sad to wipe them away. The droplets gathered, trembling on the tip of her chin, and then dripped onto the bark of the tree. She closed her eyes tightly, trying to shut out the happy noises of children splashing in the lake nearby. Tired from all the walking and sobbing, she drifted off to sleep. She didn’t see her tears slipping through a crack in the bark, straight into the tree’s ancient heart. . . .

  • • •

  A gust of wind made the hairs stand up on Rowan’s arms. Shivering, she opened her eyes. It was hard to say how long she’d been asleep, but the sky had clouded over. Her cheeks were stiff and salty where the tears had dried. Everything was much quieter than before. And . . . bigger. Gigantic, in fact.

  Stiffly she climbed to her feet, craning her neck back to gaze up. The tree towered over her like a cathedral. Leaves waved in the gentle breeze above her like giant sails on a pirate galleon. She tried to move, but her feet were stuck in a lake of pink goo. What on earth was it? Surely not . . . the ice cream? She waded through it as best she could and scrambled out the other side. This was all just too odd. But then she noticed the cone she’d dropped earlier. It was so enormous, she could have curled up in it and been mistaken for a scoop of ice cream. That was when she realized. It wasn’t everything else that had grown big. She was the one who’d grown small. Tiny, in fact.

  Rowan felt for her necklace, and was relieved to find it was still there. She tucked the acorn pendant back inside her dress and stumbled out from under the tree. Her breath caught in her throat. The park that had been so familiar only a few hours before now seemed like a vast, endless jungle. Giant trees loomed over her, more dark and ominous now against the dusky rose-colored sky. The grass looked like a tangled field of green wheat.

  “Hello!” she shouted. “Can somebody help me? Anybody?”

  Her voice was so tinkly and small now that a grown-up would hardly have heard it—even if there had been any around. But there weren’t. Rowan was on her own in a very strange world.

  Or was she?

  Something made a fluttering sound in a bush nearby. A bird? The something was moving, making a sound like a violin. Suddenly it darted out from the bush behind her. She spun round. The shape was moving too quickly to make out. Then it made the violin sound again, this time over her head. Perhaps it was a bat whirling around like they did sometimes when she stayed out too late?

  A voice sounded from above her head. “Who are you?”

  Rowan jumped back and spun around, searching to see exactly where the voice was coming from.

  “You there! I said: Who. Are. You?”

  Perched high on the uppermost branch of the weeping beech was a boy. He was probably about the same age as Rowan, and roughly the same height. At least, the same height as she was now. His clothes were rusty-brown and crinkled like a fallen leaf, broken up by chunks of armor made of gnarled bark, with a number of small sticks tucked into a belt around his waist. He stood on a branch, shoulders pulled back, apparently not caring in the slightest that he was so high above the ground.

  “I, I . . . ,” Rowan stammered, wondering how on earth he’d gotten up there.

  “Boring!” shouted the boy as he swung his arms in the air and leapt off the branch in an arcing swan dive. Rowan’s eyes widened as he fell headfirst toward the ground. Only, he didn’t hit the earth below. With wings flashing open from his back, he swooped back up into another tree and hung nonchalantly by one hand from a leaf. His wings buzzed behind his back to keep him aloft.

  The boy wasn’t a boy.

  He was a fairy.

  * Chapter Three *

  THE REALM OF THE TREE FAIRIES

  “Best keep that shut. You never know what’ll fly in,” the boy fairy said. “Don’t you know anything?”

  Rowan realized that her mouth was hanging open. She snapped it shut.

  “She’s new, Aiken,” came a voice. “She doesn’t know anything.”

  Rowan wheeled round. A robin was standing behind her. Only, the robin was more or less the same height as her. And it was talking. Rowan could feel the blood draining out of her cheeks.

  “Sorry,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly gentle—although Rowan had never thought before about how a robin’s voice should sound. “This must be a bit of a surprise.” He took a step toward her, raising a wing in concern. “You should probably sit down.”

  Rowan went one better and fainted.

  • • •

  When Rowan came round, the robin was fanning her with his wings. She looked at the robin and the fairy woozily. Oh, yes. It was still a robin and a fairy. And she was still tiny.

  “I’m sorry. We should have done introductions first,” said the robin. “I’m Harold, and this is Aiken. Welcome to Hyde Park. Realm of the Tree Fairies. And you are . . . ?”

  Aiken smiled, and Harold cocked his head to one side.

  Rowan decided this must have been one of those dreams where you know that you’re dreaming. Normally that happened just before you woke up, so there was no reason to panic. Yet. If she was nice and polite to the leaf-covered fairy-boy and the talking bird, the dream would probably be over soon. All the same, she began to edge away from them.

  “My name is . . . Rowan. I’ve had what you might call a strange day, so maybe you can just show me how to get out, and I’ll be heading home?”

  Harold exchanged a knowing glance with Aiken.

  “It is what it is, I’m afraid, Rowan,” said the bird.

  Aiken dropped out of the tree and landed with a crackle of leaves in front of her. “What my feathered friend here means is that there isn’t a way out.”

  Rowan turned away from them. They aren’t real, she told herself. She pinched herself hard on the tender skin of her arm, but she still wasn’t waking up.

  “What we’re trying to tell you,” explained Harold firmly but patiently, “is that it is very dangerous for a fairy out there, in the human world.”

  If Rowan wasn’t going to wake up, she was going to have to deal with this. She slowly turned back around and began speaking to them the way she sometimes spoke to Willow—big sister to little sister.

  “Mr. Robin, Mr. Fairy. You’ve been very welcoming. Thank you. But you know what? This isn’t really happening. I’m not really small, and I’m definitely not a fairy.”

  “Oh,” said Aiken, pointing to her back. “Then I guess those can’t be wings.”

  Rowan twisted her head round. Sure enough, sprouting out between the straps of her summer dress was a pair of glistening wings. They weren’
t like the papery butterfly wings she had seen on fairies in books. They looked much stronger—like a hummingbird’s wings. But instead of feathers they seemed to be covered in waxy, transparent oak leaves, layered one on top of the other.

  “Why don’t you try them out?” encouraged Aiken.

  “Agh!” cried Rowan. She danced around and wriggled her shoulders, trying to shrug off the wings as though they were a bug that had landed on her back.

  Harold shot a glance at Aiken.

  “I know this is a bit strange right now,” said Harold, “but it’s the same for everyone who falls in. I mean, when they become a fairy.”

  “We all go a little crazy at first!” added Aiken.

  “But I’m a girl. A big, human, totally not a fairy, girl.”

  “If you say so,” Aiken said, shrugging. “Doesn’t look like it from here, though.”

  Rowan tried to shake her head clear, but now the panic was setting in. She could feel her heartbeat going faster and faster, and with it a slightly sick sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  “Look, I really just need to get home now,” she told the others. “Please. Tell me how to get home.”

  “Why would you want to go home?” asked Aiken. “No one wants to go home.”

  Rowan looked at him sideways. She had no idea what he could mean, but she had no intention of sticking around to find out.

  “Thank you. Both of you. But I’ve got spaghetti to cook for my dad, and leggings to sew up for my sister. So I’m just going to head back to the main road and work it out from there.”

  Unfortunately, Rowan had no idea where the main road was. She knew the park very well, but from this height it looked completely different. She was never normally here when it was dark. But she had to do something. She scanned the tree line and caught sight of a path in the distance that looked to be the size of a highway. She was about to head toward it, when Harold hopped in front of her.

  “Do they care about you?” he asked.

  Rowan froze. “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. Do they care about you?”

  Rowan wondered if the robin was some kind of mind reader.

  “They . . . ,” she began, not really knowing what to say next. “They . . . need me.”

  “That’s not the same thing,” said Harold. “If you’ve ended up here, it’s because you cried beneath the weeping beech. Like Aiken here. Like all the other fairies in the Realms.”

  “In the what?”

  “You did cry beneath the tree, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Then, welcome. This is your new home. A place where you will be loved.”

  “Not like the place you’ve come from!” added Aiken. He seemed to think he was being helpful, but that only made Rowan angry.

  “How dare you say that? What do you know about my family?”

  Harold patted the air with his wings, trying to calm things down.

  “Aiken knows that’s why he is here. Because he felt unloved when he cried beneath the weeping beech. That’s how fairies become fairies. That’s how you have become a fairy.”

  Despite herself, tears began to fill Rowan’s eyes.

  “But . . . but I still love them,” she murmured, as much to herself as to the others.

  Aiken put a hand on Rowan’s shoulder.

  “It’s so much better here. I promise.”

  Rowan pulled away from Aiken’s touch, trying not to notice the hurt expression on his face.

  “No, this isn’t going to happen,” she said. “I’m not staying. I’m going home. Right now.”

  “We can’t stop you,” said Harold. “But I really wouldn’t recommend that you go out there on your own.” He glanced over in the direction Rowan had been walking. Rowan could hear the noise of the traffic from beyond the park. It was time to get back to where she belonged.

  Rowan took a last look at Harold and Aiken. “It was nice meeting you,” she said stiffly. Then she strode off alone.

  • • •

  The park boundary wouldn’t have been far at all if Rowan had been her usual size. But for a tiny non-girl-size fairy, she soon realized it was going to take a lot longer to get there. And the longer she kept walking, the darker it got, as night fell all around her. The quiet of the park wasn’t so friendly now, and every little rustle in the bushes was like an electric shock to the back of her neck.

  An owl hooted off to her left, and she spun in its direction, only to see a giant figure looming over her in the darkness. She shrank back and tried to protect herself, before she realized that the silhouette wasn’t moving. It was a statue of a woman with a bow and arrow pointing straight at her, the bronze glinting in the moonlight. Well done, Rowan, she thought. Now you’re scared of a lump of metal. She tried to make herself smile as she walked on, but the grin quickly faded from her face. In the distance she heard something that sounded like a baby crying. Only, she knew it wasn’t a child. That would have been a relief. No, it was the scream of something she knew all too well. Something she wouldn’t want to meet when she was normal-size, let alone when she was no bigger than a small bird. It was the sound of a fox. She felt the hairs prickle on her arms as she forged ahead, one foot in front of the other. She had to get home; that was all there was to it.

  Finally she caught sight of orange streetlights ahead. This will all be over soon, she told herself, taking a cautious step out of the park gates and onto the pavement. But the instant she set foot outside the park, a sudden wind whipped up to a howl and nearly knocked her off her feet. She struggled forward, pitching her body against the wind. Then an almighty roar rose in the air as the piercing bright lights of the biggest black London taxi in the world came racing toward her. As it whisked by, it created a whirlwind so strong that it sucked Rowan up and threw her back onto the ground with a huge thump, covering her with grit and leaves.

  “Oof!” she cried as she fell onto her wings, a jolt of pain shooting through her shoulder blades. She picked herself up, dusted herself off, and nervously started walking away from the park again. But before she knew it, there were the lights and the roar of another car, then another coming from the other direction. It was like standing on the runway of an airport with huge airplanes taking off right next to her. On all fours she scrambled over toward a stone and clung on to stop herself from being flung up into the air again. She squeezed her eyes tight shut against a blast of grit. She started to sob quietly to herself, wishing she’d just stayed at home—where it was safe.

  Finally everything turned still again. Too still. She slowly opened her eyes. A huge, rust-colored fox stood only meters away. Its beady orange eyes were fixed on her. As the two of them made eye contact, its body went rigid. Before she could move, it bounded toward her, saliva dripping from its jaws, tongue lolling out of the side of its mouth. Rowan braced herself for the snap of teeth. The creature’s muzzle was centimeters from her face, the stink of stale fur and rubbish bins filling her nostrils, when all of a sudden the beast jerked sideways and hit the ground. Something had barreled into its side, catching the fox by surprise. That same something was now pecking at its face, and the fox rolled and yelped, struggling to brush the thing off.

  “Not that I should care about someone as rude as you,” came a voice from behind Rowan, “but if I were in your wings, I’d get back into the park while Harold is distracting that fox.”

  Rowan scrambled up and raced back to Aiken and the safety of the park. Behind her she heard a final howl and the fox running off into the night.

  “Sometimes I suppose you have to see something to believe it,” said a slightly bedraggled-looking Harold when he hopped back through the gates. “As I explained, it’s dangerous out there for fairies. In the future it will save us both a lot of time if you just take my word for it.”

  Aiken pulled Harold aside for a second and whispered into the robin’s ear. Not very quietly—Rowan could hear every word.

  “Was it one of his?” Aiken hissed.r />
  Harold looked at his clawed feet. “Undoubtedly,” he said.

  Rowan felt a shiver run through her body. She had no idea what they were talking about, but right now there was only one question on her mind. “So there’s no going back?”

  Harold met her gaze. “It is what it is,” he said. This time Rowan didn’t try to argue.

  * Chapter Four *

  THE PARROT AND QUEEN VICTORIA

  “First things first,” said Harold as they hopped back through the park. Aiken buzzed round overhead. “The world that you come from—the human world—is very, very dangerous for a fairy. That’s why none of us live there.”

  “None of us . . . ?” began Rowan.

  “As I was saying,” Harold said stiffly. He didn’t seem to like being interrupted. “There are cars and cats and foxes and—worst of all—people. Any number of things that could be the end of a fairy.”

  “But my dad, my sister—they’re people. They could help?”

  Harold stopped dead.

  “You need to understand a few things, and you need to understand them right now.” Harold looked about as serious as a robin can look.

  “Number one. Maybe you didn’t understand when you were nearly run over and eaten, but it’s dangerous out there. You took one step outside the park, and that all happened. How many steps are there between you and this family of yours? How many more opportunities to get blown away, swallowed, or crushed?”

  Rowan really didn’t like where this conversation was going.

  “Number two. Let’s just say you survive all those thousands of steps, and you finally make it back to your family. What are you going to do then? If you don’t give your dad a heart attack when he sees you, what’s he going to do with a daughter who can sit in the palm of his hand? Keep you in a birdcage? Pack you off to the circus?”