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Chrissy’s wings spanned open and then fluttered impatiently.
“You may have, for example, been paying attention when I told you that the lessons you learn in life are more important than the things you accomplish, or you may remember when I told you that you can’t expect wishes to change the world without them changing you too, or that I pointed out that the purpose of life was not to avoid problems, but to overcome them. Those might have stuck in your mind if you weren’t currently—” She snapped her fingers and the pathetic-o-meter appeared in her hand. Her eyebrows rose in surprise when she read my numbers. “Oh, look. Now you’re only 34 percent pathetic.” She flashed the disk at me so I could see it. “That’s quite good, really.
Mortals are always at least 33 percent pathetic—it’s just your nature.
It’s the reason you like rap music and keep bringing low-rise jeans back into style.” She tucked the pathetic-o-meter into her purse. “Anyway, what have you learned from all this?” I put the pen to the paper, and a single gold dot leaked from the pen, waiting to be turned into a thought. “Do I need to write down everything, or just one thing?”
“One thing will do.”
Robin Hood and the Merry Men came back to the trail then. I heard someone say, “Where is that light coming from?” Little John stopped in his tracks. “Be wary, lads, it’s the selfsame fairy who snatched us back and forth between centuries.”
“Should we flee?” Will asked.
Chrissy flicked her wand and a gust of wind rushed in their direction, blowing off a hat or two. “If I wanted to do you harm,” she said loudly, “it wouldn’t matter where you ran to. You might as well come out, be gentlemen, and offer me proper homage.” To me she said,
“Fairies own the forest in the twelfth century. It’s like, you know, being royalty.”
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The Merry Men shuffled forward. Robin Hood took the lead.
When he reached Chrissy, he took off his hat and bowed deeply. “We have no gifts to offer such a fair one as yourself, but will gladly give you the homage of our praise.”
“I accept praise,” Chrissy said, smiling benevolently at him. “And sonnets will do.”
“Sonnets,” Robin Hood repeated without enthusiasm. He glanced back at the Merry Men, who didn’t look much happier about the request. “We shall confer and compose one forthwith.” They all fell back a little ways away from us, whispering among themselves.
Nick put his hands on his hips. “Come on, Tansy, write something so we can go home. You don’t really want to be around to hear poetry from twelfth-century bandits, do you?” Still, I hesitated. “I’ll be able to change things to gold when I go home?”
She nodded. “The gold enchantment is yours until you take it off.”
“Will the book— The Change Enchantment—will it still work when I get home?”
She nodded again. “But you’ll have no need of magic then to change your future. It isn’t set in stone or book or by any spell. You can make whatever you want of your own future.” Part of me knew this had always been the case. I’d been told the same thing by adults for years, but I’d always been concentrating on the past so intently that I’d never noticed my future, wide and endless in front of me. Now the kaleidoscope of possibilities hit me. I could do anything I wanted. Fate had unchained me.
I glanced back at the Merry Men. Robin Hood was shaking his head. “You can’t stick ‘gorgeous’ at the end of a stanza. Nothing rhymes with it.”
Friar Tuck frowned. “Poor us.”
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Will added, “More fuss.”
Little John grumbled. “Boar pus.”
Robin Hood waved their words away. “Do you want to be turned into something filthy like mushrooms?” I leaned toward Chrissy. “Can I give The Change Enchantment to Robin Hood when I’m done with it? He didn’t like how his story ended.”
Chrissy smiled at the idea. “If that’s what you want to do with it.”
“Good,” I said. “Can you send my family home first, and I’ll stay for a few minutes and explain things to Robin Hood?”
“Sure,” she said, even though neither my father nor Hudson looked pleased about my staying behind for a few minutes.
I turned back to the book and held it up a bit, suddenly too shy to let anyone see the moral I had chosen for the story. I wrote the words, wishing I could have thought up some really elegant phrase to say what I was feeling, but everyone was waiting and I’d never been very poetic or profound.