You are about to read Chapter 5 of my novel, Changeling. It's the story of a young mortal girl stolen from the human New York by the fairies when she was little and taken to the fairy New York, called New York Between. There she lives in Central Park with her fairy godmother, a beautiful white rat called Astris. Because it's not safe in New York Between for anyone to know your true name, the girl is called Neef.

I myself grew up in the human New York, about two blocks away from the human Central Park. To me, New York was always a place of magic. When I walked with my babysitter from the granite apartment building I lived in to the park, I always headed for the bushes by the Model Boat Pond. Down among the green leaves, it was almost like being in the country. There were fish and frogs in the Lake and turtles and ducks in the Turtle Pond and lots of birds and squirrels everywhere. There are even places where you can't see the buildings, and all the paths lead around in circles and it's easy to get lost — at least for a little while.

The Park wasn't the only place that seemed magic, either. There was Broadway, crowded with people from all over the world, dressed up to go to theatres that were all lit up with colored bulbs, with fascinating posters of plays I was too young to see. There was Chinatown, like a foreign city plopped down in the middle of my city, where I couldn't read the signs and couldn't understand the conversations. There was the Village, where I'd never been, but imagined to be full of cottages and gardens surrounded by stone walls, like the villages in children's books I'd read.

Closer to home, there was the Carlyle Hotel, whose gold-capped tower I could see from my bedroom window. At night, it was all lit up like a golden flame. When my parents were out and I didn't want to go to sleep, my babysitter (who was Japanese) told me about the Funny Man. He had a long nose, she told me, and if I didn't go to bed right away, he'd turn himself into a bird and fly across to my window and take me back to the Carlyle Hotel, and then I'd be sorry.

Did I believe her? Well, there are a lot of strange things in New York. A shape-shifting bogey-man at the top of the Carlyle Hotel didn't really seem much stranger than the hugeness of the Empire State Building or the metallic screeching of the subways or the mummies in the Metropolitan Museum or the fact that so many different kinds of people all live, relatively peaceably, side by side in the same city. Also, I read a lot of fairy tales, and I knew that the best way to live happily ever after was to take such warnings seriously. Come to think of it, it's not a bad idea, even in the real world, to listen to the advice of people (or creatures) who love you.

All this is why, when I heard someone say, at a conference on fairies, that there were no fairies in big cities, my first reaction was, "Oh, yes there are!" My second reaction was to write a story called "Grand Central Park," which was about fairies coming into our mortal world. I didn't think of Neef and New York Between until later, when I was wondering about why fairies would steal mortal children anyway, and what kind of life those mortal children led, surrounded by fairies who couldn't really understand them.

When Changeling opens, Neef is about 11 years old. (I say "about" because fairies don't care about birthdays, so nobody really knows for sure how old she is). It's spring cleaning day, and her room is a terrible mess. Astris, who is very busy scrubbing the turtles who have been hibernating in turtle pond, sends Neef up to the North Woods to fetch a brownie to help clean it, with strict instructions not to leave the path. The Wild Hunt lives in the North Woods, and the Wild Hunt is very, very dangerous.

Since you can't have an adventure without doing something you've been told not to do, Neef leaves the path. Sure enough, she meets a terrifying old woman who tells her about the Solstice Dance, when all the Folk in New York Between dance all night to celebrate the shortest night of the year. Neef has never been to the dance, and of course, she wants to. She plots and plans and keeps secrets from Astris, and on Solstice Night, she creeps out. Her friend the Water Rat makes her promise that she won't join the dance until she can see its complex pattern. She climbs a tree to study the dance, and soon she sees something she's never seen before:

"I noticed an odd kind of ripple moving through the crowd. The ripple came nearer, turning into a line of heads bobbing slightly out of sync with the beat. I wondered what kind of Folk they were. They might have been elves or shapeshifters, except for being red-faced and kind of heavy looking. As they danced past my tree, I noticed that they were panting and gleaming with sweat. A woman tripped, and a man stumbled over her.

"Folk don't trip. Folk don't sweat. Folk don't get tired. I'd found the mortal changelings."

Read Chapter Five of Changeling by Delia Sherman

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