Light footsteps echoed quickly through the dark corridor. The torches lining the walls extinguished themselves as a tall figure moved through the shadows toward a lone wooden door sunken into the wall ahead of her. A glimpse of silvery hair long enough to touch the floor could be caught as the woman slipped through the doorway, momentarily bathing the corridor with light. At the sound of the door's latch closing, an old, wrinkled woman lifted her milky eyes just enough to see her visitor. She looked up at the beautiful woman standing against the door and smiled, the moonlight from the single tiny window glinting off the only remaining tooth in her mouth.

"Ah, Niamh. So yeh managed to escape, did yeh?" the old woman chuckled, her voice low and gravelly as if she hadn't spoken in a long time.

Niamh averted her eyes, but couldn't prevent a grimace from shadowing her perfect features. None could have looked on the Magicker's wizened face with anything but disgust. A Magicker needs to practice her art otherwise her purpose is gone and she decays. Her imprisonment in this dank, dark cell and complete isolation from her powers had done nothing to help her rotting features. "I don't have long," Niamh whispered. She held a flowing sleeve up to her face to try to drown out the smell of waste. "And you will address me as 'Majesty'."

The old woman nodded once. "Did yeh bring my mixings?"

Niamh moved gracefully toward where the Magicker sat against the stone wall of the cell. She pulled a small bag from under her loose dress and handed it to the woman, being careful not to let the leathery fingers touch hers. She glanced into the Magicker's clouded eyes and shot her gaze away just as quickly. Fear and superstition made her begin to regret her decision to ask for the cursed one's help.

The Magicker opened the drawstring bag and stuck her face into the opening, sniffing deeply. She cackled at Niamh again. "Well, Majesty, I can't quite make yeh out."

Niamh tried to straighten her back, but bumped her head on the low ceiling. She tried to look as dignified as she could while hunched over. "What do you mean by that?" she asked under a mask of condescension.

The Magicker leaned her head back against the wall and smiled. Niamh forced herself to meet her gaze. "Just trying to figure why yeh want your son dead, is all."

Niamh's eyes filled with anger and she spit through her teeth, "How dare you? I love Jareth more than anything, I'm doing this for him."

"Tiernus'd never let him choose a human." The Magicker's smile disappeared and she studied Niamh for a moment, the small bag clutched to her chest. "I don't doubt yer love for Jareth, Majesty. Only wondering if maybe yer hatred fer the king is drowning it out."

Niamh went completely still at the Magicker's words. Ever since the High King had allowed his hatred of the Above to extend to all those connected with it, the Magicker had been forbidden from practicing her art. Her unique talents were, after all, a threat to the very thing that Tiernus hoped to conserve: separation between the worlds. In an effort to dispel her growing uneasiness, Niamh sliced her hand through the air and snapped, "Enough! The only thing that should matter to you is that I'm allowing you access to your power. Perform the spell or I will take your "mixings" and go."

Those old eyes stared intensely at Niamh's. "…Yer toeing a dangerous line, Majesty," the Magicker said, but she set to work picking out different herbs and other items from in the bag and mixing them together in the bowl, stirring them with her fingertips. Niamh noted a slight breeze in the previously still air and backed away from the woman until her back was pressed to the door. Once the contents of the bag were all in the bowl, the Magicker licked her fingertips and placed them into the mixture. So softly that Niamh couldn't even make out the words, the Magicker started to chant down at the bowl, her body rocking slightly. As time passed, her chanting became louder and she rocked faster. The woman was chanting so loudly that Niamh said, "You must lower your voice, someone will hear!" The Magicker ignored this and kept on chanting and with every rise and fall of her voice a white light grew from the bowl. Niamh fell silent and her worries left her as she stared at the sorcery. The light grew brighter and brighter until the entire cell was illuminated and had Niamh not been mesmerized, she could have seen a barren shelf against the south wall, and a filthy mat of straw in the corner where the old woman must have slept. Once the light was so blindingly bright that Niamh had to shield her eyes, the Magicker abruptly stopped her chanting. The light in the bowl pulsated and began to slowly rise. It hovered just in front of the Magicker's face for a moment, illuminating her features. Niamh's jaw dropped open when she saw that the woman's skin was no longer rotting, and in fact looked just as youthful, if not as beautiful, as her own. Before she could study the transformed features for more than a moment, the light shot away from the Magicker and straight out the window. Niamh ran to the opening and leaned her hands on either side, following the light's progress as it streaked across the sky and finally disappeared in the distance, bound for another world.

"Find him someone worthy," she whispered into the night.

""""

A world away, a baby girl wrapped in a soft, yellow blanket laid asleep in a white bassinet while her parents stared lovingly at her. The new parents kept the apartment warm against the threat of the winter winds outside, but still made sure that their daughter was wrapped tightly against any arrant chill.

"She's so beautiful, Linda," the man whispered, afraid to break the silence from within the crib. The woman smiled, never taking her eyes off her daughter. "Wonder where she got these green eyes, though," he continued.

"My money's on the milkman," Linda quipped with a quick grin at her husband, who glared back at her playfully. "Just joking, Robert. My mother has green eyes, maybe they came from her."

"Hopefully that's all she got from your mother." Linda smacked her husband softly on the arm with a roll of her eyes. Robert chuckled and reached down to carefully tuck the blanket more closely around the baby's shoulders. With a hand on his wife's shoulder, Robert led Linda out of the room, whispering, "Good night, Sarah," as he shut off the lights and closed the door.

As soon as the door shut, a ball of blinding white light streaked into Sarah's room through the closed window. It hovered just above the baby, bobbing slightly up and down. Sarah was roused from sleep by the light intruding through her eyelids and whimpered. When the light persisted, she started to cry in earnest at the glaring light that was keeping her from sleep.

Robert rushed back into the room at the sound of his daughter's cry and looked down into the crib for a moment. He couldn't see anything that would have made her start crying so suddenly, the light was invisible to him as it bobbed in front of Sarah's face. As he stroked a hand along Sarah's soft scalp, he cooed and whispered comforting words to her. Still she screamed, and so he picked Sarah up and cradled her in his arms, singing softly and rocking back and forth. He checked her diaper and found it clean, so he just continued to rock her in his arms. Unbeknownst to him, the light was now tracing its way from Sarah's toes all the way to the crown of her head, and back again. As Robert was about to call Linda into the room for help, Sarah suddenly stopped crying. The light had finished its circuit and had dissolved into the infant's chest. The instant the last of the light faded into her, Sarah was overtaken with fatigue. Robert placed her back in her crib and Sarah slept the whole night through for the first time.

""""

"It's done," the Magicker grunted from her seat against the wall.

Niamh turned from the window with her brows drawn together. "So soon?"

The Magicker shrugged. "The humans've changed since I was last allowed to magic. They don't believe in our world anymore. Quick work to pick through them and find a woman up there who'd not drop dead at the very sight of anything… not ordinary."

Niamh heaved a great sigh and fixed her gaze on the wall above the Magicker's head, deep in thought, her expression somber. "When can she be made to run?"

The Magicker laughed, revealing white, perfect teeth. "Not for a good while, I'd wager."

Niamh flicked her gaze to the Magicker's face. "Why not?" she asked sharply.

"Well, because she can't even walk at the moment, let alone run through that cursed maze," she cackled. "I told yeh there aren't many worthy humans left. It just so happens that this one was the best of the brood, as they say. She'll grow into a fine little queen."

"You mean to tell me that she is a child?"

"Aye. A babe in her crib."

Niamh put a slender, white hand to her forehead and began to pace in front of the window. "We can't wait that long. The High King is already searching for a bride for Jareth. He's nearing his 200th year as Goblin King and he is no nearer to having an heir than he was the first day he sat the throne."

"Well, Majesty, why not let him have a fae bride? It'd soothe things between yer husband and him. Everybody knows they've hardly got any love for each other."

"All those women are power grabbing witches with their hands down my husband's pants and in his pockets! Any fae who married Jareth would just be a pawn for Tiernus." Niamh snapped. "Besides, Jareth has already declared he will not have any of them," she added quietly.

The Magicker snorted. "So then what makes yeh think that Jareth would like a human?"

Niamh gave the Magicker a wry smile. "I know my son. He has a romantic heart, but the trait he would like best in a wife is submissiveness. He wants someone he can control." She added bitterly, "He has that in common with his father. Given the right choice, he would take a wife."

The Magicker's smile faded. "Yeh really don't know how this magic works, do yeh?"

"Of course, it's going to find the woman who would be the best queen for Jareth."

The Magicker shook her head. "No, it won't. It'll find the woman who would make the best queen for the goblins. It doesn't even take whatever king is on the throne into account…. If Jareth's happiness is most important to yeh, leave him be. He can rule the goblins without a queen- it's been done before. From the rumors I heard before being locked up in this cursed hole, he's not starved for company, anyway."

Niamh shook her head. "The High King wouldn't allow him to rule without an heir. No, we would have to cut him out of our family and remove him from the throne. I'd never see him again."

"The life of a queen's never easy. Yeh've got a tough choice ahead of yeh. Wait fer the human to grow into a woman, and Jareth will have an able queen. However, unless he changes some parts of himself, he'll never find happiness with her. Let him marry a fae and he'll never be free from Tiernus."

Niamh clenched her jaw and tried to calm her churning stomach. "What do I do?" she said quietly to herself.

The Magicker answered anyway. "Afraid I can't answer that for yeh, Majesty. Magic only goes so far."

Niamh's eyes raced back and forth as she thought. She finally looked up at the Magicker with a cold determination. "We will wait for the human. As soon as she's of age, she will run the Labyrinth for the chance to be the Goblin Queen. I'll just have to stall King Tiernus and convince Jareth. He'll have the girl even if I have to tear the barrier between the worlds down."

The Magicker looked at Niamh with an ancient sadness. She finally shook her head and whispered again, "Yer toeing a dangerous line, Majesty."

Without another word, Niamh turned and swept out of the room, closing the door softly behind her.

First off, thank you for reading! This story will be similar in length to my first story, When the World Falls Down, but that's probably where a lot of the similarities will end. Don't worry, this will still be first and foremost a Jareth and Sarah love story. It just may take a twisting route to get there.

Please, please, please review! Reviews are why I'm in the fanfiction game.

This story is co-authored by me, futurejelly, and iknowyou2. I will be doing the majority of the writing, but a lot of the ideas and the main concept of the story come from iknowyou2, so if you end up liking the story, be sure to send some praise her way! Also, questions can be sent to either of us.

And if you're wondering, the title comes from the poem "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti.