The Children's Crusade Page 6

  “Thank you for everything,” she told Annie. “For getting my bracelet back, and especially for helping me find Timothy Hunter.”

  “You’re leaving? Planning to walk all that way?” Annie asked, a concerned expression on her face. “You don’t even have shoes.”

  “Oh, I do,” Marya explained. “I just don’t wear them. Not for walking anyway. Bye now.”

  Marya strode out the door, ready to resume her mission.

  “Wait,” she heard Annie call behind her. “I get off at eleven. I could take you…”

  Marya waved but didn’t look back. Now that she knew where Tim was, she wasn’t going to let anything deter her. After talking to Timothy’s father, she thought Timothy might welcome the chance to escape to Free Country.

  Marya walked and walked. She stood on a corner beside a woman pushing twin babies who were howling miserably in their pram. Marya noticed that on the other side of the unhappy babies, there was a scruffy-looking dog, sniffing in the gutter.

  Marya grinned. This was an easy problem to solve!

  She tapped the lady pushing the pram. “Excuse me?” Marya said. “The babies want to pet the dog over there.” She pointed to the dog in the gutter. “But they can’t because they’re tied up too tight. That’s why they’re crying.”

  The woman stared down her nose at Marya. “That filthy mutt?” the woman said.

  “Why are they tied up like that?” Marya asked. “Are they crazy? At the palace they tied up Uncle Grigori because they thought he was crazy. He wasn’t, though. Just different.”

  The woman recoiled a bit, as if Marya emitted an unpleasant odor, then hurried away.

  “See you later, alligator!” Marya called after her and her howling children. A girl in Free Country always said that, and Marya loved the phrase. Marya waited for the woman to shout back the proper response—“In a while, crocodile”—but she didn’t. The woman and her babies vanished into the crowd.

  Marya knew she still had a long way to go. She walked along crowded streets. Some of the shops in this area had goods sitting out in front, taking up space on the sidewalk. A little boy reached for an orange on a low display table. Before his fingers closed around the fruit, the man with him jerked the boy so hard the child nearly tumbled over. “Stop that!” the man snapped, smacking the boy’s hand. Marya was surprised that such a little boy didn’t start to cry. Then she realized the boy was used to this treatment.

  Marya rounded a corner. She stopped to let three girls about her age charge past her and up the steps of a small, old building. They were chattering in a lively fashion, and each had a bag slung over her shoulder. Of all the people she’d seen since leaving Annie’s café, these girls were the first to seem truly alive. They glowed with something that lit them up from the inside.

  Curious, Marya peered into the large, dirty window—and gasped.

  If Marya ignored the street around her, she could have easily imagined she was watching a scene from her own, previous life, back home in St. Petersburg.

  A dozen or so girls in identical tight black uniforms stood in the room, waiting for a dance lesson to begin. Each girl had her hair pulled back from her face. Some of the faces looked nervous, others calm. One girl was eyeing another, trying to pretend she wasn’t studying her rival practice pirouettes. Several preened in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, while two girls purposefully kept their backs to their reflections.

  A door swung open and a tiny, thin woman with silver streaks in her severely-pulled-back bun stepped into the room. Instantly, the girls assembled themselves into rows. A young man carrying sheet music followed her into the room. He sat down at a beat-up old piano in the corner.

  The ballet mistress clapped her hands, the man played some chords, and the girls began the familiar opening barre exercises.

  Marya shut her eyes and clutched the railing, her head swimming. It was hard to watch, filled with reminders of her old life. But the pull from that room was impossible to resist. Marya opened her eyes again and watched the girls. When they finally took a break, Marya had to force herself to remember her mission.

  She dragged herself away and continued walking. The streets got dirtier, the houses shabbier and closer together. There were more vacant lots filled with trash, more empty buildings with boards over broken windows.

  The dingy surroundings pushed hard on Marya’s skin, squeezing images of the ballet class right out of her. Her pace slowed, as the oppressive air and the dismal sights weighed her down. Her feet hurt and her muscles groaned. Her pouch now felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds, and the strap etched a groove in her shoulder.

  She glanced up at the street sign. She was close. The streets were emptier now and the few people on them were more careless with themselves. Ragged clothing barely stayed on their slouching bodies.

  Marya stood on a corner and her heart sank. She faced street after street of identical buildings. How would she ever know which was Tim’s? She had forgotten the number.

  “Eeep!” She let out a small shriek as she felt a hand grasp her bare ankle. She shook off the hand and stared at the young man who had grabbed her. He lay on the ground, his back supported by a trash bin. He didn’t look much older than her.

  “What’s in the bag, moggie?” he asked. At least, that’s what she thought he had said. It was hard to tell, his words were so slurred.

  There was another boy, also a teenager, slumped against the wall. He was laughing at nothing, just staring in front of him and laughing.

  “Nice moggie,” the boy in front of her said. “What’s in the bag? Pretty bag.”

  Marya reached into her pouch and tossed an apple at the boy. He picked it up and stared at it as if he’d never seen an apple before. Maybe he hadn’t, Marya thought. He was terribly thin, and his hair was purple and green. But now that he had released her ankle, he didn’t seem that scary. She peered into the alleyway. The boys seemed to live there, so they must know the neighborhood.

  “Do you know where Ravenknoll Estate is?” Marya asked.

  The boy turned the apple around and around in his hands. “You’re lucky, little moggie. Next corner, you’re there.”

  “Thank you.” She took out another apple and handed it to him. “This is for your friend.”

  She turned away from the strange, lost boys and went looking for Ravenknoll Estate.

  “Oh, Tim, poor Tim,” she murmured. “I do believe Kerwyn is right. You will be better off in Free Country.”

  Now that she was here, Timothy Hunter’s house number popped back into her head. She stood and stared at the sad house in front of her. She couldn’t even guess what color it had once been under the grime. A sagging wire fence stretched between two equally dismal lots. A smashed-up car squatted in the run-down driveway.

  He lives here, she told herself. It was hard to imagine anything as wonderful as magic surviving in such a place. The palace was exquisitely beautiful, she reminded herself, and it was full of cruelty nonetheless. So perhaps, even in such squalor, magic can thrive.

  Marya stepped carefully along the broken pavement; her bare feet were now grimy. She knocked on the door. Marya could hear loud voices inside and music. Perhaps they didn’t hear her knock. She tried again.

  Finally she decided no one was going to answer the door, so she sat down to wait.

  She rummaged through her pouch and pulled out the ballerina statue Daniel had given her. “Are you okay?” she asked the small dancer.

  “You can’t help it if you can’t really dance,” she whispered to the statue. She thought back to her dancing lessons in St. Petersburg. It hadn’t been the shoes that had held her down, Marya knew that now.

  “Poor little doll.” Marya murmured. She hugged the statue close. Dolls can’t dance. They can only pretend. That was the reason for Marya’s failure right there. All Marya had been for the Empress was a doll, a plaything. Marya had never believed in herself.

  She remembered the day she had left the palace for Free Country
. Kerwyn had arrived as a missionary. He had been doing just what she was doing now. He had left Free Country to spread the word and bring children in. Kerwyn had found Marya crying after the dancing master had called her an oaf and beaten her. Kerwyn found her and told her that he could take her to a place where dreams could come true. Even dreams like hers.

  So she went. Only it hadn’t turned out quite as she had expected. She never managed to forget the way her mother used to sing to her on summer evenings while she brushed Marya’s long red hair. Or the way that you could draw faces in the frost on the palace windows in wintertime. There was too much she missed. That’s what held her down now. Even in Free Country. She could never dance like the Shimmers. She was too tied up inside.

  And Marya wasn’t in London because Timothy Hunter had somehow cried out to Free Country. He was part of a plan. She looked around at the place where Timothy Hunter lived. Or maybe he is crying out, she thought. Marya knew if she lived in this place, she might be crying all the time.

  She sighed. And wondered how much longer she would have to wait.

  Chapter Six

  TIM HAD LEFT THE PLAYGROUND and the strange girl with the missing brother ages ago. Titania’s stinging words kept spinning around in his head. His shoulders sagged with each footstep, thinking what a mess he’d made of things. What’s the good of having magical abilities if you mess things up? And now he had the Faerie Queen on his case. As if Bobby Saunders at school wasn’t bad enough.

  As he turned onto his block, Tim spotted a slight, pretty, red-haired girl sitting on his doorstep. The sun was going down, and she shivered a little. Her arms and legs were bare and her pink dress looked thin. She stared down at a little statue. Her wide green eyes looked sad. Maybe she had a missing brother, too.

  “Excuse me,” Tim said. “Are you all right?”

  “Are you Timothy Hunter?” the girl asked.

  “Uh, yes.” How does she know my name? he wondered. She looked nicer than the girl in the playground. There was something gentle in her eyes.

  “Then I am all right,” she said. “I’ve been trying to find you all day. But I don’t think your father wanted me to. When I talked to him on one of those phone contraptions he sounded angry and then he buzzed at me.”

  “He buzzed?” Tim sat down beside her. He was having trouble making sense of what she was saying.

  She nodded. “Uh-huh. Then I walked here and found your house, but I knocked and knocked and no one answered. Even though there were voices inside.”

  Okay, that part he could figure out. “He probably never heard you over the television,” Tim explained. “Sorry about the phone part. He can be a real jerk sometimes.” Tim glanced over his shoulder at his front door. I guess the sensitive pseudo-dad act is over, Tim thought.

  “Well, maybe he can’t help it,” the girl suggested. “He’s a grown-up. They have problems.”

  “True.” The pretty girl had no idea how true that was. Especially all the grown-ups around Tim. “What’s your name?”

  “Marya.” She took two apples from her bag and held one out to Tim. “Here.”

  Tim eyed the apple warily. In Faerie it was dangerous to eat anything or to accept gifts from the Fair Folk. This could be doubly dangerous: It was a gift of food offered by a stranger. But this girl was human, not fairy, no matter how odd she seemed. And this was the real world—or at least his world, and not Faerie. Besides, if she had been magical, she would have bristled at being asked her name.

  Tim had learned that names carried power. He was supposed to ask What are you called?—it was considered more polite. But the girl never noticed his error in magical etiquette. That gave him confidence.

  He watched as she took a crunchy bite of her apple. They were probably okay then. Tim hesitated one more moment, then bit into his. It was the most delicious apple he’d ever eaten. Nothing seemed to happen to him, so he took another bite.

  “You haven’t told me why you’ve been looking for me,” he said.

  The girl seemed very surprised. “You don’t know?”

  Tim shook his head. “How could I?”

  “I thought when you were magic you knew all kinds of stuff.”

  “Don’t I wish.” Ever since Tim had discovered that he was magic, he’d continually felt like a sham. Everyone acted like he had all this power, and maybe he did—or would—but he sure didn’t know how to use it. Or how to do anything much. He shook his head. “That’s not how it is. All it really is is confusing. And complicated. And people all seem to want something—like to kill me.”

  Then it sunk in—she knew he was magic. He went back on alert. Could she have been sent by Titania? “You don’t want to kill me, do you?” He peered at the apple through his glasses.

  The girl giggled. “Of course not.”

  “Then why are you here? And how do you know I’m, well, magic?”

  “There’s a place,” she said, “a place where we can go when we need someplace to go. That’s why I’m here.”

  “We?”

  “People who aren’t grown-ups yet. Kids. Us. Kerwyn says it’s a sanctuary, but it’s really just a place. We call it Free Country.”

  Something about this sounded familiar to Tim. Not in a I-read-this-in-a-fairy-story way. No, something more recent. More real. Tim chewed slowly, thinking it over. Of course! Free Country. The girl in the playground, Avril, had mentioned a free country. That’s where the strange child had wanted to take her friends.

  Marya had a faraway look in her eyes as she continued speaking. “Nobody hurts you there,” she said wistfully, “or makes you do things you don’t want to. Nobody ties you up or beats you. Or tries to kill you, like they do here.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” Tim asked. He stood and paced in front of her. Was she offering him a different world to live in? Had she guessed that it was grown-ups who seemed to be ruining his life? Could Free Country be a sanctuary for him, too? Away from Titania’s threats and his own confusion?

  “They need you,” Marya said. “I mean, we need you. We need your magic to help us let all the children in this world cross over to Free Country.”

  So this wasn’t about what she was offering him—it was about what he could give them.

  Tim whirled around, his hands on his hips. “Why?” he demanded.

  “Because this world is getting so bad that pretty soon it might not be a world anymore.”

  “Oh, you’re sure about that,” he scoffed. Those were some seriously dire predictions. And Molly accuses me of being all doom and gloom, Tim thought. She should hear this girl.

  Marya shrugged. “You live here,” she said. “What do you think?”

  Tim looked around and tried to see his environment, really see it. He blotted so much out as a daily habit.

  When he allowed himself to see it, the misery and the poverty, the anger and the sadness could be found everywhere. In his dad’s smashed-up car that still haunted the driveway, the ruined lives in the surrounding flats, in the very air he breathed.

  Tim sank down beside Marya on the step. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess I see some problems in this world.” He looked directly at her. “But what if I don’t want to go?”

  “Then you don’t go,” Marya replied. “You don’t have to do anything. That’s the point. That’s why it’s ‘free’—you’re free to choose.”

  Tim studied her face. She seemed to be completely sincere. It was up to him. He could go or not. Having the decision left to him—and him alone—made him much more willing to go.

  Maybe I should, he thought. Maybe I actually can help. There should be a place for kids to go if they’re not safe here. And even if I don’t save their whole world, at least I can track down those missing kids, like Avril’s brother, Oliver.

  Tim thought back to something he had learned from his real father, Tamlin: that he shouldn’t let fear get in the way of trying. That was the way with magic—and the only hope of getting better at it.

  “Okay
,” Tim said finally. “Uh—I’m not sure I can actually help, so don’t get all bent out of shape if I fail. But I’m game if you are.”

  The girl smiled a beautiful, sunny smile. She pulled chalk out of her bag and drew a hopscotch grid on the pavement. Tim stared at her. Now what is she doing? She is certainly full of surprises.

  “You go first,” she instructed. “It’s easy. You just hop the hopscotch squares three times and then you’re there. Nothing to it.”

  Tim pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose. He raised an eyebrow at the girl. How could playing hopscotch land him in another world? He’d seen the little kids doing it in the schoolyard regularly and none of them had vanished. She must be using special chalk or something.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Marya assured him. “And it’s not hard.”

  Tim shrugged. There was no use trying to figure it out now. He stepped up to the hopscotch grid. “Um. I just jump?”

  “Well, there’s a rhyming, too.” She cocked her head and looked at him a moment. “People who say ‘uhm’ a lot have trouble with rhymings sometimes. I’ll chant for you. Ready?”

  Tim glanced around to be sure no one was watching. Only girls played hopscotch in this neighborhood. Satisfied that they weren’t being observed, Tim nodded. “Ready,” he declared.

  Tim heard Marya chanting an old nursery rhyme:

  “Half a pound of tuppenny rice,

  Half a pound of treacle.

  Mix it up and make it nice,

  Pop goes the weasel.”

  Tim concentrated on hopping the pattern correctly. Two feet, one foot. Two feet, one foot. Marya continued chanting more nursery rhymes, some Tim knew, like “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,” and others he’d never heard before, all about kings and queens and emperors.

  For one moment Tim wondered how he would get back home. Marya had traveled back and forth, he assured himself. It must not be too hard getting between our worlds.

  Two feet, one foot. Two feet, one foot, two feet, one foot. Gone!