Free The Faerie Path by Frewin Jones

since time froze. But I will grow toward my maturity now, I am sure.”
    Anita gulped. “So everyone here is going to get old and die now—and all because I came back?”
    “Do you not remember, Tania?” Zara said. “Wepeople of Faerie do not die.”
    “Never?”
    Zara shook her head. “Never of old age; we die only by mischance or ill fortune.”
    “So, we’re all kind of…immortal?”
    “Indeed we are!” Zara nodded and ran back to loop her arm around Anita’s again. “Come,” she said. “We will go to the library. Sancha will be there.”
    Anita decided to save thinking about being immortal for another time. It was a bit too much to take in right now.
    “I’m guessing Sancha is another sister, yes?” she said.
    Nodding, Zara pulled Anita along the hallway. “And then, away to the seamstress,” she said excitedly. “For we will all need new gowns for the ball.”
    Smiling, Anita surrendered herself to Zara’s enthusiasm.
    She followed her sister through high, ornately furnished rooms and along wood-paneled halls and down wide stairways. All around them as they walked, Anita could see the palace coming back to life.
    Servants in holly green livery swarmed everywhere, wielding brooms and brushes and cloths for polishing. Windows were being thrown open and gray sheets were being drawn back off the shrouded furniture. The corridors echoed with a buzz of happy, laughing voices.
    As the two of them passed, servants and maids bowed and curtsyed with lowered heads. Once, ayoung servant boy glanced up at Anita, his eyes filled with timid curiosity. Anita grinned at him and went cross-eyed. He looked so startled that Anita laughed out loud.
    Zara stopped at a pair of tall, arched doors. She pushed one of the doors and it swung slowly inward. She glanced back at Anita, her eyes sparkling. “Sancha has become even more studious since you have been gone,” she said, putting her finger to her lips. “She insists that all be silent upon entering her library.”
    Anita followed Zara through the part-open doorway.
    She found herself in a huge circular hall with a high-domed ceiling. Shafts of sunlight poured in through tall, slender windows, brightening the great well of air. The floor was patterned with spiraling rings of black and white tiles, and tiers of ornate wooden galleries soared upward around them, linked by winding staircases.
    Anita stared around in amazement. The curving walls on every level of the hall were clad in shelf after shelf of books. Thousands upon thousands of them. And there was a kind of brooding, scholarly hush in the hall that reminded her of a cathedral and made her walk softly on her bare feet.
    A solitary figure sat with its back to them at a round table in the center of the room.
    Zara tiptoed forward. Anita followed quietly behind her.
    It was another young woman, with long chestnutbrown hair drawn back off her face and tied so that it hung down over the back of her simple black gown. She seemed to be totally absorbed in reading a large book that lay open on the table in front of her.
    Zara crept up behind her and leaned in close.
    “Sancha!”
    Sancha almost leaped out of her chair. “Oh! The sun, moon, and stars!” She gasped, her hand to her chest. She turned, frowning at her sister, and Anita saw that she had a long, slender face and deep-set, dark brown, intelligent eyes. “Zara! What naughtiness is this, you foolish child?”
    Zara turned and pointed, and Sancha’s black eyes came to rest on Anita.
    “Oh!” She stood up and walked toward Anita, her eyes wide, reaching out with both hands. “Welcome home, Tania. It has been long, too long.”
    “Thanks,” Anita said, taking Sancha’s extended hands. “You’ll have to forgive me—I don’t remember any of this.”
    “I doubt it not,” Sancha said. “It is wonder enough that you have been brought back to us at all. The long dark waters of Lethe lie between us, but time will surely reveal a boatman to ferry you