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Wellspring of Magic
By Jan Fields Annie's
Copyright © 2014 Annie's
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57367-464-5
CHAPTER 1
Mysterious Presents
"Are you ready to go?" Rachel poked her head into her sister's room and shuddered at the number of plants hanging from the ceiling. They reminded her of an Amazon expedition on the Discovery Channel. Aly (short for Alysa) turned from where she was sketching flowers on the wall.
"Hey, does Mom know you're drawing on the wall?" Rachel asked.
Aly sighed. "Yes, of course Mom knows. I'm going to paint a mural."
"Cool." In their tiny apartment in New York City, they hadn't even been allowed to push tacks into the walls, much less paint pictures on them. It seemed everything had changed when they moved to Portal, Connecticut.
"What's it going to be?"
"A garden with a fountain," Aly said. "I've been dreaming about it."
Rachel glanced at her watch. "You need to dream later. We're going to be late if you don't hurry up." Rachel turned and dashed down the stairs, knowing her sister would follow eventually. She'd given up on getting Aly to live life at more than a snail's pace. They might be identical twins, but they were totally different in many ways. "Mom, we're heading to the clubhouse!"
"Check the mail first," her mom called from inside her office. Just then, Rachel heard a crash that sounded like another pile of books toppling over. Mom's home office looked like she built models of the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of 10-pound law books.
"OK!" Rachel headed for the mailbox at top speed, opened it and scooped out the contents. To her surprise, there were two small packages — one addressed to her and the other to Aly. She glanced toward the house to see Aly stepping out the front door. She held up the boxes. "We got presents!"
Aly frowned. "Like what? Soap samples?"
Rachel shrugged and tossed Aly her package, then began tearing open her own. She reached into the box and pulled out a small metal triangle. It was a little bigger than a quarter and had a picture of a bear engraved on it. Rachel looked up to see Aly holding a similar triangle. "What do you suppose they are?"
Aly shook her head and shrugged. "Paperweights? They're kind of heavy."
"The bear is cool," Rachel said, rubbing her thumb across the engraving. The grizzly was frozen mid-step as he lumbered across the triangle. She could almost imagine him turning to look at her. Rachel was wild about bears. In her huge stuffed animal collection, she had more than a dozen bears. She had even made a cute bear family out of polymer clay.
Aly held her triangle up. "Mine has a flower." Rachel rolled her eyes.
Just then their mom stepped out onto the porch. "Are you girls going to bring in the mail or just stand around until I come get it?"
The sisters held out their triangles. "This is all there was," Rachel said.
The twins' mom squinted against the sun and walked across the front yard. She looked at the odd triangles, running her finger over the cool metal. "They're pretty. Whoever sent them sure seems to know what you girls like best. Maybe they're something Grandma found on her vacation."
"Grandma would put in a note," Aly said. "Wouldn't she?"
Mom nodded. "Probably, but you never really know with Grandma." She looked at the twins. "I thought you girls were going to the clubhouse."
"Oh no!" Rachel screeched, shoving the metal triangle into her pocket and dashing down the sidewalk. "We are so late!" For once, even Aly ran to keep up.
The clubhouse was the place where all the girls in the neighborhood met to swap magazines, gobble snacks, work on craft projects, and just hang out. It was a small stone building in the middle of the tiny park that sat in the exact center of a ring of six houses. The park was filled with strange statues and surrounded by a high iron fence, and that was just one of the weird things about their new neighborhood.
All five of the houses in the circle were ancient. Rachel's dad said he thought the houses might be more than two hundred years old. Until a couple months ago, all the houses had been empty, maintained for years by some mysterious foundation, and then, bang! they'd all been sold to families with kids. Aly and Rachel's parents had bought the last house in the neighborhood at the beginning of the summer.
The foundation still owned the weedy, overgrown park. Anyone who lived in the neighborhood was welcome to use it. All the families had daughters close in age; the girls had taken over the small building in the middle of the park and made it their clubhouse.
When Rachel and Aly reached the clubhouse door, they were panting from the run. As they pushed it open, they were met with a chorus of hellos from the girls sitting around a large wooden table inside.
"Sorry we're late," Rachel said.
"That's OK," Larissa answered. Rachel immediately noticed that Rissa, as the girls had nicknamed her, had given herself a new look. This time it looked like she'd gathered random clumps of hair and dyed each one a different color. Rissa loved temporary hair dye, so the girls never knew what to expect. She gave an exaggerated yawn. "Shaylee was justmaking us look at another of her scrapbooks."
"No one said you had to look," the petite blonde said, pulling the lacy pink book away from her friend.
Kaida laughed and put down her latest project — a brightly colored cross-stitch picture of a fierce dragon. Kaida was always trying new crafts; she said she liked mastering new things. "Rissa is just miffed because there aren't more photos of her in Shaylee's scrapbook!"
"Well, you know I'm stylin'," Rissa said, hopping up to strike a pose. Rachel grinned at the way Rissa's rainbow hair matched her tie-dyed T-shirt. Rissa had never met a color she didn't like, and she used as many as possible to decorate her clothes and make them as unique as her hair.
Always the peacemaker, Aly slipped into a seat beside Shaylee. "I'd like to see your scrapbook."
Shaylee beamed and opened the book. Rachel glanced at the pages as she slid into a chair. Lots of pink. Lots of ballet photos. Shaylee loved two things: dancing and making crafts about dancing. Right now, she was in a very pink scrapbook phase. "I see the problem, Rissa," Rachel said with a grin. "You need to wear more pink."
"As if," Rissa said, but then she leaned over to get a closer look. "I don't see any pictures of Jacob and Connor," she said.
Shaylee sniffed. "I see my brothers enough in person. This morning they're putting an ugly basketball hoop above the garage door. They woke me up with all the nail pounding — nobody needs to pound nails before 9 a.m.!"
"You should get a portable goal," Kaida said. "Like ours. That way you can take it down or move it if you need to."
"Do they make them in pink?" Rissa asked.
Rachel slouched down in her chair as she listened to her friends tease each other. Then, remembering the odd present from the afternoon mail, she dug through her pockets and pulled out the heavy triangle. "Hey, look at the cool thing I got in the mail today. Aly got one too."
"I got one of those today too," Marisol said. She pulled over her huge tote bag and began rooting through it, the bracelets on her arm tinkling like wind chimes. Marisol was seriously into jewelry — if she wasn't making it, she was buying it. "Mine has a different picture though."
"Mine too," Rissa said. She held out a triangle with a book carved into it. Rachel was secretly glad she hadn't gotten a boring picture like that. So far, she definitely liked hers best.
"Mine has some kind of fairy or elf. It's in there," Shaylee said, nodding toward her own bag, a pale pink canvas tote with fuchsia ballerinas in different poses stamped all over on the front and back.
Marisol finally whooped in triumph, "Found it!" and pulled out her triangle. It had the weirdest picture of all, like a cross between a dragon and mermaid with a long snout and lots of wavy fins. "I don't know what it is, but it's very cool. I love mermaids."
Kaida leaned forward to put her elbows on the table, and held out a triangle with a winged unicorn on it. "I bet I'm the only one who knows what these are."
"Paperweights?" Aly suggested.
"Magnets," Kaida answered. "I tried it on our fridge."
Aly frowned. "But they're so heavy."
"It's a pretty strong magnet. I had to pry it off with a butter knife."
"It's cool that we all have one," Rissa said. "They could be our club emblem or something." She flipped her magnet in the air like a coin and tried to catch it, but just missed. The triangle hit the table with a dull thunk — and stuck. "Hey, what kind of magnet sticks to a wooden table?"
"That's weird." Kaida placed her triangle on the table, then gasped as her triangle scooted across the table until one of its points touched Rissa's triangle. When it stopped moving, it seemed to be stuck fast to the table, just like Rissa's. "Definitely freaky!"
CHAPTER 2
The Secret Portal Opens
The girls stared at the two triangles on the table. Kaida reached out and tried to nudge one, but it was stuck. "You'd think I could slide it a little," she said.
"Well, magnets have poles," Rachel said, remembering something from her science class. "That's probably what made them move by themselves, and, if they're really strong magnets, they could be really trying to keep those poles touching." Her voice trailed off a little as she added. "But magnets definitely aren't attracted to wood."
"Maybe the table is magical," Marisol said, smiling.
"Oh yeah, that's got to be it," Rissa laughed.
Marisol grinned. "OK, maybe the table's made of metal sandwiched between wood?"
"And those dinky magnets are sticking that hard right through the wood?" Kaida asked. "I still say that it's seriously freaky."
Rachel put her triangle on the table near the other two, and it also slid until it touched only one point of Kaida's triangle. Without saying anything, Marisol and Aly added theirs and watched them slide into place, making a hexagon with one empty spot.
"Where's yours?" Rissa asked Shaylee. Shaylee rummaged through her bag until she found it. She laid it on the table at least six inches from the other pieces, and it practically flew into place, completing the hexagon. The six triangles opened like a flower and the circle of wooden table between them vanished. The girls could see through the table. But they didn't see the worn gray carpet of the clubhouse floor. Instead, they saw dirt and moss and rock.
"Whoa!" Rissa breathed.
Rachel ducked down and looked under the table to see if there was a hole in the floor, but the floor looked perfectly normal, as did the underside of the table. Whatever they were looking at through the hole, it wasn't really there.
"It looks like you could reach right in," Marisol said in an awed voice.
"Yeah, sure, I would totally stick my hand in there — never!" Rissa shook her head so that hard a clump of purple hair fell over her eyes.
Kaida leaned forward, chewing on her lip as she stared into the hole. Then she unclipped a barrette from her thick black hair and tossed it into the hole. It fell to the ground below. They watched it bounce off a rock before landing in a patch of moss. "It's a real hole!" Kaida exclaimed.
"I vote we all go home now," Shaylee said, scooting her chair away from the table.
Rissa looked at her. "You can go home if you want, but I want to see what this is."
Shaylee's lip crept out as if she might cry, and Aly slipped an arm around her. "If you're scared, I'll go with you," Aly said. Shaylee shivered slightly, but she shook her head.
Just then a girl's face appeared in the hole, looking as if she were twisting nearly upside down to peer up at the girls above the table. Shaylee screamed and jumped back from the table, knocking over her chair. The face vanished.
"OK, I'm definitely ready to go home now," Shaylee said to Aly, backing away from the table so quickly she nearly tripped. By now, all the girls were on their feet, and clearly Shaylee wasn't the only one who thought leaving might be a good idea.
Then the face popped up again, but this time, it appeared that the strange girl had stepped under the table and thrust her hands through the hole and somehow pushed the hole open to make it bigger. A second later, her head popped through the hole. She squirmed a bit and the hole grew large enough for her to pull herself through to the shoulders and then to the waist. Then she pulled herself up so that she was sitting on the edge of the hole in the table with her legs dangling into it. She didn't look scary, but seeing her wiggling up out of hole in a solid wood table in their ordinary old clubhouse was too much for all of the girls, and they ran for the door.
"Don't go, Princesses!" the strange girl begged. "Please don't go." She reached out a hand beseechingly.
Aly stopped, her hand still holding the handle of the half-open door. "Princesses?"
Rissa was the first to take a small step back toward the table. "Who are you?" she asked. "What are you?"
One look showed that the girl was something unusual. Her skin had a slightly green tint, and she had dark green hair — if you could call it hair. Her head looked like it was covered with downy green feathers that lay close to her head, exposing finely-pointed ears. Her slightly slanted eyes were green as well. "I am Eidermoss of the Folk, Princess. We need your help. Please, please, don't go!"
"You need our help?" Kaida replied, crossing her arms and frowning. "Help with what?"
"You have to open the Wellspring," Eidermoss begged. "Only the Princesses can restore the magic!"
"Um, we don't know anything about magic," Rachel said.
"Except what we've read about in books," Marisol added, "and seen in movies."
"And we are not princesses," Rissa said firmly. "I didn't even do the princess thing when I was little!"
The strange girl looked at her in astonishment. "Oh, you are a princess. You are Larissa, Princess of Spellcraft." She turned toward Shaylee and spoke softly, as if awed. "And you are Shaylee, Princess of the Folk." She bowed her head slightly. "We have waited so long for the Princesses to open the door. Without the fresh flow of magic, my people are weak. My world is dying." Her voice rose shrilly. "We don't even dance anymore. You are all Princesses. Please, come and help!"
"You want us to climb through the hole in the table?" Shaylee asked.
Eidermoss looked down at the tabletop. "It would be easier if you had put the realm keys on a wall."
"They're stuck," Rissa said. "Besides, we didn't know they were keys. They didn't exactly come with instructions."
"Can you climb through?" Eidermoss asked anxiously.
Rissa put her hands on her hips. "Not can we — the question is will we."
"I will," Kaida said. "I'll help. Besides, you've got to admit, this has to be the biggest adventure in Connecticut today!" She scrambled up onto the table and Eidermoss smiled. Kaida turned back toward the others. "Anyone else want to play extreme princesses?"
Rachel shrugged. "I'm game."
One by one, each of the girls agreed. Aly held Shaylee's hand for courage when it was their turn to crawl up onto the table and slip down through the hole. It required some undignified wiggling to get through the hole, but soon they all stood in a small, mysterious wooded clearing.
"Where's the hole?" Rachel yelped. It had vanished after the last girl was through.
"There isn't enough magic to hold it open on this side," Eidermoss said. "And now that you've left your world, there isn't enough magic to hold it open there, either."
"You mean we're stuck here?" Shaylee wailed.
"Oh, no, Princess. Once you find the Wellspring and release the magic, you can open the hole in this world or the door in your world, again."
"So we can only get home again if we succeed?" Rissa asked.
Eidermoss opened her eyes very wide. "Yes, I think so."
CHAPTER 3
The Guardians
The girls stood silently for a moment, absorbing the fact that they were trapped. Rachel shuddered. Adventures seemed a lot more fun when you watched them on television — in real life, they were just scary.
"Once again, it really would have helped if this adventure thing had come with instructions or at least a map," Rissa said. Then she sighed. "Are you going to tell us where to find the Wellspring?"
Eidermoss shook her head. "I do not know where it is, Princess. Only the Guardians know."
"Great," Rissa said. She dropped her voice and muttered, "Who wants to bet the Guardians are drooling two-headed monsters?"
Rachel glanced at Aly, who was acting a bit strange. Ever since she'd stepped into the clearing, Aly had been turning around slowly, looking at the trees. "What's up, Aly?" Rachel asked.
"Everything is glowing." She kept turning, eyes wide in amazement. "Why is everything glowing?"
"You are Alysa, Princess of the Earth," Eidermoss said, her tone puzzled. "You see the energy of all things. It's part of your magic."
"Not usually," Rachel said.
"It's beautiful," Aly breathed.
Suddenly the girls heard movement in the forest shadows. "Friends of yours?" Rissa asked Eidermoss.
The green girl shook her head hard. "No, the Guardians are coming."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wellspring of Magic by Jan Fields. Copyright © 2014 Annie's. Excerpted by permission of Annie's.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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