“Are you going to say something?” said Fable.
The queen straightened. She glanced at the children. “You should not have brought them here,” she said.
Fable swallowed. “I went to the people village,” she said. “I know I wasn’t supposed to. But I did—I had to. It’s bad, Mama, and it’s about to get a lot worse.”
The queen shook her head. “Their world is not our world, Fable.”
“It was your world, though,” Fable said. “Before the goblins took you away from it. It could be your world again. It was grandma’s world, too.”
The queen bristled. “Endsborough turned their backs on your grandmother,” she hissed. “The world of men is monstrous, child. They drove her away when she needed them most, and she denounced them in return. I will not discuss this any—”
“But they didn’t,” Fable said. “Not all of them. While you were gone, some of them were awful, sure, but some of them made up songs for grandma when she was all alone, and they sang them at the forest’s edge to cheer her up.”
The queen hesitated. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Fable.”
“I do. I met somebody who remembers her. You should meet her, too. Grandma didn’t turn her back on people. Not all of them, anyway. She left them gifts. She believed in them. There are places where the forest meets the town. What if that’s our world?”
The queen stared at Fable, and a million melancholy thoughts played across the woman’s eyes.
“I need you to remember that,” Fable added nervously, “when I tell you about the other thing.”
The queen listened in horror as Fable recounted the rapidly unfolding situation. The whole of the Wild Wood bristled as she finished.
“And the humans are on their way?” The queen looked pale. “Now?”
Fable nodded. “They’re planning on making their stand where it all started. That’s why we need to get there first. We need to warn the whole forest.”
Hooves pounded across the earth behind them. Beyond the bushes, a snow-white stag leapt through the trees. Lights whipped along in the branches behind it, and all around sounded the grunts and growls of countless unseen beasts joining the race in a steady current, descending on the northwest corner of the Wild Wood. A pair of beady eyes glinted in the foliage, and for a brief second the queen caught sight of a flinty spriggan looking down on them, his mouth cracked upward in a wry grimace. A moment later he, too, had vanished into the woods.
“I think,” said the queen numbly, “that maybe the forest already knows.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Fable.
“You are going to take these three back to their homes.” The queen took a deep breath. “And under no circumstances are you to go anywhere near that Grandmother Tree. I forbid it, Fable.”
Before Fable could even open her mouth to protest, her mother was gone.
The children stood in stunned silence for several seconds.
“What happens now?” said Evie at last.
Tinn and Cole looked at Fable.
“She forbade us from going to the Grandmother Tree,” said Fable. She took a deep breath. “But there is no Grandmother Tree out there. Not anymore.” She looked at her friends. “Of course we’re going.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The queen’s lungs burned as she burst out of the trees and into the open field. She tried to breathe evenly. This was no time to show weakness.
The clearing bristled. Oddlings and fair folk of all sorts peered up from the tall grasses: lumbering trollkin, shifty gnomes, and solemn spirits. Skoll, the fiercest wolf of the Warg, had come from his den in the far south, flanked by the strongest of his pack. Pholon, high general of the centaur herd, stood with a spear in his hands. Even Lutin, a usually cheerful hob, had draped himself in a chain mail vest and leaned on a knotted cudgel in place of his customary cane. Hundreds of creatures crowded around the edge of the ruined field in a motley crescent, and hundreds more shook the nearby branches and rustled the ferns just inside the cover of the forest. This assembly had converged for a single purpose.
“You would enter into battle without informing your queen?” The queen kept her voice steady and even, but she wondered if the more perceptive beasties around her could hear her heart pounding.
A chittering, scratchy voice cut through the noise. “The queen knows all that happens in her forest, does she not?” it asked in Spriggan. A figure with a face like a broken flint emerged from the grasses and swung itself gracefully up onto a tree stump. “Does the all-knowing queen now need to be informed?”
The queen pursed her lips.
“A queen of almosts,”Flinty said in sardonic English, eyes fixed on hers, but his chattering words loud enough for the whole assembly to hear. “Almost fairy. Almost human. Now it is almost time. Does she know what she is, in the end?”
“You dare?” the queen growled through gritted teeth.
“The humans are coming,”Flinty said. “Time to make choices. Will you stand with us? Or with them?”
Fable, Evie, and the boys raced through the forest. Now and then a fairy buzzed past their heads, and vibrant yellow eyes shot them glances through the leaves.
“I’ve never seen this many creatures in one place at a time,” Tinn whispered. He slid across a wide tree trunk that spanned a babbling stream. They had almost reached the Roberson Hills.
“I could fill a hundred journals with all this,” Evie said, hopping down after him.
“We’re almost there,” said Fable. “It’s just over this ridge.” She scrambled up a mossy embankment. “The field should be just—oh. Oh dang.” She stood up, eyes wide.
Trolls and pixies and enormous wolves filled the field ahead. A beast with a horse’s body and the torso of a man clutched a long spear beside a woman whose lower half melted into the iridescent scales of an enormous snake’s tail. Fable knew the centaur and naga clans were anything but allies, and yet here
