Lose Yourself in Another World

Once upon a time, a girl was born.

It was rather uneventful.

Her parents were happy enough, the mother glad to be done carrying it, and the father glad to be done with the mystery of it all. But then one day they realized that their baby, the one they’d named Alice, had no pigment at all. Her hair and skin were white as milk; her heart and soul as soft as silk. Her eyes alone had been spared a spot of color: only just clinging to the faintest shade of honey. It was the kind of child her world could not appreciate.

Ferenwood had been built on color. Bursts of it, swaths of it, depths and breadths of it. Its people were known to be the brightest—modeled after the planets, they’d said—and young Alice was deemed simply too dim, even though she knew she was not. Once upon a time, a girl was forgot.

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And So It Begins

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The sun was raining again.

Soft and bright, rainlight fell through the sky, each drop tearing a neat hole in the season . Winter had been steady and predictable, but it was quite poked through now, and spring was peeking out from underneath it. The world was ready for a change. The people of Ferenwood were excited for spring, but this was to be expected; they had always been fond of predictable, reliable sorts of changes, like night turning into day and rain turning into snow. They didn’t much care for night turning into cake or rain turning into shoelaces, because that wouldn’t make sense, and making sense was terribly important to these people who’d built their lives around magic. And squint as they might, it was very difficult for them to make any sense of Alice.

Alice was a young girl and, naturally, she was all the things you’d expect a young girl to be: smart and lively and passionate about any number of critical issues. But Alice was also lacking

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a great deal of something important, and it was this—her lack of something important—that made her so interesting, and so very unusual. More on that soon.

B The afternoon our story begins, the quiet parts of being alive were the busiest: wind unlocking windows; rainlight nudging curtains apart; fresh-cut grass tickling unsocked feet. Days like this made Alice want to set off on a great adventure, and—at almost twelve years old—she’d very nearly figured out how to fashion one together. The annual Surrender was only a single pair of days away, and Alice—who was determined to win— knew it was her chance to set sail for something new.

She was on her way home now, occasionally peeking over her shoulder at the glittering town in the distance. The village square was undergoing no small transformation in honor of the upcoming festivities, and the clamor of instruction and construction rang out across the hills. Alice jumped from flagstone to flagstone, her face caught in the rainlight glow, her hands grasping for a touch of gold. The town’s excitement was contagious, and the air was so thick with promise Alice could almost bite into it. She smiled, cheeks appled in delight, and stared up at the sky. The light was beginning to spark and fade, and the clouds were still hard at work weaving together, breaking and building as they had been all week. One more 4

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day of this, Alice thought, and everything would change.

She couldn’t wait.

She’d moved on to the main road now, a dirt path flanked by green. She held tight to her basket as neighbors passed, nodding hello and waving good-bye, happy to have remembered her clothes today. Mother was always bothering her about that.

Alice plucked a tulip from her pocket and bit off the top. She felt the petals pressing against her tongue; she could taste the velvet, the magenta of it all. She closed her eyes and licked her lips before biting into the stem. Not quite green but brighter, more vibrant; there was a song in that color and she could feel it singing inside of her. She bent down to greet a blade of grass and whispered, Hello, me too, me too, we’re still alive.

Alice was an odd girl, even for Ferenwood, where the sun occasionally rained and the colors were brighter than usual and magic was as common as a frowning parent. Her oddness was evident even in the simplest things she did, though most especially in her inability to walk home in a straight line. She stopped too many times, wandering off the main path, catching deep breaths and holding them, too selfish to let them go.

She spun until her skirts circled around her, smiling so wide she thought her face would break and blossom. She hopped around on tiptoe, and only when she could stand it no longer would she exhale what wasn’t hers to keep.

Alice would grow up to be a wildflower, Father once said to 5

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her. A wildflower in flowing skirts, braided hair dancing from head to knee. She’d always hoped that he was right, that maybe Mother had gotten it wrong, that Alice was never meant to be such a complicated thing with all these limbs and needs. She often wanted to plant herself back into the earth to see if she’d grow into something better this time, maybe a dandelion or an oak tree or a walnut no one could crack. But Mother insisted (the way she often did) that Alice must be a girl, and so she was.

Alice didn’t like Mother very much. She found her a bit old and confusing, and didn’t like the way Mother worried about walls and doors and the money that put them there. But Alice loved Mother, too, in the way that children did. Mother was soft and warm, and Mother’s smiles came easily when she looked at Alice. Anger and tears, too, but those Alice never cared for.

Alice gripped her basket tighter and danced down the road to a song she found in her ear; her toes warmed the earth, and her hair, too heavy for her head, tried to keep up. Her bangles mimicked the rain, simple melodies colliding in the space between elbows and wrists. She closed her eyes. She knew this dance the way she knew her own name; its syllables found her, rolled off her hips with an intimacy that could not be taught.

This was her skill, her talent, her great gift to Ferenwood. It was her ticket to greatness. She’d been practicing for years and years and was determined that it would not be for nothing.

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It would not b— “Hey there! What are you doing?”

Alice startled. Something tripped and fell, and she looked around in dismay to realize it had been her. Crumpled skirts and silent bangles, the rainlight gone from the sky. She was late. Mother would be upset again.

“Hey!” The same voice as before. “What are you—” Alice gathered her skirts and fumbled in the dark for her basket, reaching blindly as panic set in. Don’t talk to strangers, Mother had always said—especially strange men. Being afraid meant it was okay to forget your manners. If you’re afraid, you never have to be nice. Do you understand?

Alice had nodded.

And now Mother was not here and she could not explain why, exactly, but Alice was afraid. So she did not feel the need to be nice.

The stranger wasn’t much of a man at all, it turned out.

More like a boy. Alice wanted to tell him very firmly to go away, but she’d somehow gotten it into her head that being quiet meant being invisible and so she prayed that her silence would somehow make him blind, instead of louder.

Unfortunately, her wish seemed to work on both of them.

The sun had folded itself away and the moon was in no hurry to replace it. Darkness engulfed her. Alice’s basket was nowhere to be felt or found.

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She was very worried.

Suddenly Alice understood all about being worried and she promised herself she would never judge Mother for being worried all the time. Suddenly she understood that it is a very hard thing, to be afraid of things, and that it takes up so much time. Suddenly she understood why Mother rarely got around to doing the dishes.

“Does this belong to you?”

Alice turned just a bit and found a chest in her face. There was a chest in her face and a heart in that chest and it was beating quite hard. She could hear the pitters, the patters—the blood rushing around in ebbs and flows. Don’t be distracted, she told herself, begged herself. Think of Mother.

But, oh.

What a heart.

What a symphony inside that body.

Alice gasped.

He’d touched her arm, so, really, she had no choice but to punch him. Her bangles were helpful in this regard. She punched and kicked and screamed a little and she wrenched her basket from his hands and she ran all the way home, out of breath and a little excited, so glad the moon had finally decided to join her.

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Alice never did get to tell Mother her story.

Mother was so upset Alice was late that she nearly bit off her daughter’s hands. She didn’t give Alice a chance to explain why her skirts were dirty or why the basket had broken (only a little bit, really) or why her hair was so full of grass. Mother made a terrible face and pointed to a chair at the table and told Alice that if she was late one more time she would knot her fingers together. Again.

Oh, Mother was always threatening her.

Threatening made Mother feel better but made Alice feel bored. Alice usually ignored Mother’s threats (If you don’t eat your breakfast I will whisk you into an elephant, she once said to her, and Alice half hoped she really would), but then one time Alice took her clothes off at the dinner table and Mother threatened to turn her into a boy, and that scared her so dizzy that Alice kept on her outerthings for a whole week after that.

Since then, Alice had often wondered whether her brothers

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had been boys to begin with, or whether they’d just been naughty enough to deserve being tricked into it.

B Mother was unpacking Alice’s basket very carefully, paying far more attention to its contents than to any of her four children sitting at the worn kitchen table. Alice ran her hands along its weathered top, the bare boards rubbed smooth from years of use. Father had made this table himself, and Alice often pretended she could remember the day he built it. That was silly of course; Father had built it long before she was born.

She glanced toward his place at the table. His chair was empty—as it had grown accustomed to being—and Alice dropped her head, because sadness had left hinges in her bones. With some effort she managed to look up again, and when she did, she found her brothers, whose small forms took up the three remaining chairs, staring at her expectantly, as though she might turn their tunics into turnips. On any other occasion she would’ve liked to, had she been so inclined, but Mother was already quite mad and Alice did not want to sleep with the pigs tonight.

Alice was beginning to realize that while she didn’t much like Mother, Mother didn’t much like her, either. Mother didn’t care for the oddness of Alice; she wasn’t a parent who was predisposed to liking her children. She didn’t find their quirks 10

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endearing. She thought Alice was a perfectly functional, occasionally absurd child, but on an honest afternoon Mother would tell you that she didn’t care for children, never had, not really, but here they were. (There were plenty of nice things Mother had said about Alice, too, but Mother was never very good at making sure she said those things out loud.)

Alice picked out a blossom from her dinner and dropped it on her tongue, rolling the taste of it around in her mouth.

She loved blossoms; one bite and she felt refreshed, ready to begin again. Mother liked dipping them in honey, but Alice preferred the unmasked taste. Alice liked truth: on her lips and in her mouth.

The kitchen was warm and cozy, but only halfheartedly.

Alice and Mother did their best in the wake of Father’s absence, but some evenings all the unspoken hurts piled high on their plates and they ate sorrow with their syrup without saying a word about it. Tonight wasn’t so bad. Tonight the stove glowed lavender as Mother stoked the flames and tossed in some of the berries Alice had collected. Soon the whole house smelled of warm figs and peppermints and Alice was certain that if she tried, she could lick the air right out of the room.

Mother was smiling, finally content. Ferenberries always succeeded in reminding Mother of happier times with Father, of days long ago when all was safe and all was good. The berries were a rare treat for those lucky enough to find them (they 11

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were a fruit especially difficult to procure), but in Father’s absence Mother had become obsessed. The trouble was, she needed Alice to find the ferenberries (I’ll explain why later), and Alice always did, because life at home had been so much better since the berries. Alice had been late and she’d been lazy, messy and argumentative, but she had never not come home with the berries.

She almost hadn’t tonight.

Alice always felt Mother was using her for the berries; she knew they were the only medicine that helped Mother’s heart in Father’s absence. Alice knew Mother needed her, but she did not feel appreciated; and though she felt sad for Mother, she felt more sorry than sad. She wanted Mother to grow up— or maybe grow down—into the mother she and her brothers really needed. But Mother could not unbecome herself, so Alice was resigned to loving and disliking her just as she was, for as long as she could bear it. Soon, Alice thought, very soon, she would be on her way to something better. Something bigger. The seasons were changing in Ferenwood, and Alice had waited long enough.

She would win the Surrender and she would show Mother she could make her own way in the world and she would never need a pair of stockings again. She would be an explorer! An inventor! No—a painter! She would capture the world with a few broad strokes! Her hand moved of its own accord, making 12

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shapes in her honey-laden plate. Her arm flew up in a moment of triumph and her paintbrush fork flew from her hands only to land, quite elegantly, in her brother’s hair.

Alice ducked down in her chair, the future forgotten, as Mother came at her with a ladle.

Oh, she would be sleeping with the pigs tonight.

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The pigs weren’t so bad. They were warm and shared their straw and made little pig noises that helped Alice relax.

She pulled her only two finks from her pocket and snapped one in half, saving the other, and suddenly the pigs smelled of fresh lemons and glass apples and soon there was nothing at all to be bothered by. The night was warm and fragrant, the sky sneaking through a few broken boards in the roof.

The twinkles looked merry enough, but the planets were the true stars tonight: bright spots of color seducing the sky. Six hundred and thirty-two planets dotted Alice’s upside-down vision, spinning their bangles just as she spun hers.

Her two arms were bangles and bangles from elbow to wrist, her ankles similarly adorned. She’d collected these bangles from all over, from most every market in every neighborhill she’d ever climbed into. She’d traveled the whole of Ferenwood after Father left, knocking on door after door, asking anyone and everyone where he might’ve gone.

Anyone and everyone had a different answer.

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All anyone knew was that Father took nothing but a ruler when he left, so some said he’d gone to measure the sea. Others said the sky. The moon. Maybe he’d learned to fly and had forgotten how to come back down. She never said this to Mother, but Alice often wondered whether he hadn’t planted himself back into the ground to see if maybe he’d sprout taller this time.

She touched her circlets of gold and silver and stone. Mother gave her three finks every month and she always spent one on a bangle. They weren’t worth much to anyone but her, and that made them even more precious; Father had been the one to give her the first bangle—just before he left—and for every month he stayed gone, Alice added another to her collection.

This week, she would have thirty-eight altogether.

Maybe, she thought, her eyes heavy with sleep, her bangles would help Father find her. Maybe he would hear her looking for him. She was sure that if he listened closely, he would hear her dancing for him to come home.

And then she rolled over, and began to dream.

Now, while our young Alice is sleeping, let us make quick work of important details.

First: The magic of Ferenwood required no wands or potions you might recognize; no incantations, not really. Ferenwood was, simply stated, a land rich in natural resources, chief among them: color and magic. It was a very small, very old 18

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village in the countryside of Fennelskein, and as no one ever went to Fennelskein (a shame, really; it’s quite lovely in the summers), the people of Ferenwood had always kept to themselves, harvesting color and magic from the air and earth and building an entire system of currency around it. There’s quite a lot to say on the history and geography of Ferenwood, but I shouldn’t like to tell you more than this, lest I spoil our story too soon.

Second: Every citizen of Ferenwood was born with a bit of magical talent, but anything more than that cost money, and Alice’s family had little extra. Alice herself had never had more than a few finks, and she’d always stared longingly at other children, pockets full of stoppicks, choosing from an array of treats in shop windows.

Tonight, Alice was dreaming of the dillypop she would purchase the following day. (To be clear, Alice had no idea she’d be purchasing a dillypop the following day, but we have ways of knowing these things.) Dillypops were a favorite—little cheekfuls of grass and honeycomb—and just this once she wouldn’t care that they’d cost her the remainder of her savings.

It was there, nestled up with the pigs, dreaming of sugar, skirts up to her ears and bangled ankles resting on a nearby stool, that Alice heard the voice of the boy with the chest.

He said something like “hello” or “how do you do” (I can’t quite remember), and Alice was too irritated by the interrup19

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tion to remember to be afraid. She sighed loudly, face still turned up at the planets, and pinched her eyes shut. “I would not like to punch and kick you again,” she said, “so if you would please carry on your way, I’d be much obliged.”

“I can see your underwear,” he said. Rudely.

Alice jumped up, beet-red and mortified. She nearly kicked a pig on her way up and when she finally managed to gather herself, she tripped on a slop bucket and fell backward against the wall.

“Who are you?” she demanded, all the while trying to remember where she’d left the shovel.

Alice heard a pair of fingers snap and soon the shed was full of light, glowing as if caught in a halo. She spotted the shovel immediately, but just as she was crafting a plan to grab it, the boy offered it to her of his own accord.

She took it from him.

His face was oddly familiar. Alice squinted at him in the light and held the sharp end of the shovel up to his chin.

“Who are you?” she asked again angrily. Then, “And can you teach me how you did that just now? I’ve been trying to snaplight for years and it’s never worked for m—” “Alice.” He cut her off with a laugh. Shook his head. “It’s me.”

She blinked, then gaped at him.

“Father?” she gasped.

Alice looked him up and down, dropping the shovel in the 20

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process. “Oh but Father you’ve gotten so much younger since you left—I’m not sure Mother will be pleased—” “Alice!” The perhaps-stranger laughed again and grabbed Alice’s arms, fixing her with a straight stare. His skin was a warm brown and his eyes were an alarming shade of blue, almost violet. He had a very straight nose and a very nice mouth and very nice eyebrows and very excellent cheekbones and hair the color of silver herring and he looked nothing at all like Father.

She grabbed her shovel again.

“Impostor!” Alice cried. She lifted the shovel above her head, ready to break it over his skull, when he caught her arms again. He was a bit (a lot) taller than her, which made it easy for him to intimidate her, but she wasn’t yet ready to admit defeat.

So she bit his arm.

Quite hard, I’m afraid.

He yelped, stumbling backward. When he looked up, Alice hit him in the legs with the shovel and he fell hard on his knees. She stood over him, shovel hovering above his head.

“Goodness, Alice, what are you doing?” he cried, shielding his face with his arms, anticipating the final blow. “It’s me, Oliver!”

Alice lowered her shovel, just a little, but she wasn’t quite ready to be ashamed of herself. “Who?” 21

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He looked up slowly. “Oliver Newbanks. Don’t you remember me?”

“No,” she wanted to say, because she’d been very much looking forward to hitting him on the head and dragging his limp body inside for Mother to see (I’ve protected the family from an intruder! she’d say) but Oliver looked so very scared that it wasn’t long before her excitement gave way to sympathy, and soon she was putting down the shovel and looking at Oliver Newbanks like he was someone she should remember.

“Really, Alice—we were in middlecare together!”

Alice considered him closely. Oliver Newbanks was a name that sounded familiar to her, but she felt certain she didn’t know him until she noticed a scar above his left ear.

She gasped, this time louder than before.

Oh, she knew him alright.

Alice grabbed her shovel and hit him in the legs so hard his snaplight broke and the shed went dark. The pigs were squealing and Oliver was squealing and she chased him out of the shed and into the night and was busy telling him to never come back or she’d have her brothers eat him for breaksnack when Mother came into the yard and announced she was going to cook her for breaksnack and then Alice was squealing and by the time Mother caught up to her, Oliver was long gone.

Alice’s bottom hurt for a whole week after that.

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Alice’s evening had left her in a foul temper.

She’d woken up this morning with the smell of pig fresh in the air, straw sticking to her hair and poking at her toes. She was angry with Mother and angry with Oliver and one of the pigs had licked her face from chin to eyeball and, good-griefand-peanut-pie, she very desperately needed a bath.

Alice shook out her skirts (stupid skirts) as best she could and set off for the pond. She was so preoccupied with the sorts of thoughts that preoccupied an almost twelve-year-old that even a perfect morning full of rainlight couldn’t soothe her.

Stupid Oliver Newbanks—she kicked a clump of dirt—had the gooseberries to talk to her—she kicked another clump—no good ferenbleeding skyhole! She scooped up a handful of dirt and threw it at nothing in particular.

Alice hadn’t seen Oliver Newbanks since he told the entire class that she was the ugliest girl in all of Ferenwood. He went on and on about how she had a very big nose and very small

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eyes and very thin lips and hair the color of old milk and she thought she might cry when he said it. He was wrong, she’d insisted. Her nose was a nice nose and her eyes were quite lovely and her lips were perfectly full and her hair looked more like cotton flowers but he wouldn’t listen.

No one would.

It was bad enough that Father had left, bad enough that Mother had become a prune of a person, bad enough that their life savings consisted of only twenty-five stoppicks and ten tintons. Alice had been having a rough year and she couldn’t take much more. Everyone had laughed and laughed as she stomped a bangled ankle, furious and blinking back tears. She’d decided that perhaps she’d leave more of an impression on Oliver if she spent all her finks pulling off his ear and making him eat it in front of everyone. That will teach him to listen to me, she thought. But then Alice was kicked out of school because apparently what she did was worse than what he said, which seemed awful-cruel because mean words tasted so much worse than his stupid ears and anyway, Mother has had to hometeach her ever since.

Alice was starting to understand why Mother might not like her very much.

Alice sighed and gave up on her skirts, untying the ties and letting them fall to the grass. Clothes exhausted her. She hated

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pants even more than she hated skirts, so on they stayed, as long as Mother was around. It was indecent, Mother had said to her, to walk around in her underthings, so Alice decided right then that one day she would grow a pair of wings and fly away. Were it up to Alice, she would’ve walked around in her underthings forever, barefoot and bangled, vanilla hair braided down to her knees.

She pulled off her blouse and tossed that to the ground, too, closing her eyes as she lifted her head toward the sun. Rainlight drenched the air, bathing everything in an unearthly glow. She opened her mouth to taste it, but no matter how desperately she’d tried, she never could. Rainlight did not touch the people, because it was made only for the land. Rainlight was what put the magic in their world; it filtered through the air and into the soil; it grew their plants and trees and added dimension and vibrance to the explosion of colors they lived in. Red was ruby, green was fluorescent, yellow was simply incandescent. Color was life. Color was everything.

Color, you see, was the universal sign of magic.

B The people of Ferenwood were all born with their own small spark of magic, and the food of the land nurtured that gentle flame of their being. They each had one gift. One great

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magical talent. And they would perform this magical talent—a Surrender, it was called—in exchange for the ultimate task. It was tradition.

B Alice opened her eyes. Today the clouds seemed puffed into existence, exhalations from the mouth of a greater being. Soon the clouds, too, would rain, and Alice’s life would thunder into something new.

Purpose.

She would be twelve years old. This was the year.

Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow.

She let herself breathe, casting off the Oliver Newbankses of the world, casting off the pain Mother had caused her, casting off the pain Father had caused them, casting off the uselessness of three entire brothers who were far too small to be of any help when help was needed most. So what if she wasn’t as colorful as everyone else in Ferenwood? Alice was just as magical, and she’d finally have the chance to prove it.

She picked up a fallen twig and tied its bendy body around her neck, pinching it together with her thumb and index finger as she hummed a familiar song. Eyes closed, feet dancing their way toward the pond, she was her own music, her body her favorite thing she’d ever owned.

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Oh, life had been a lonely one, but she knew how to pass the time.

B The warm pond was the color of green amethyst. It smelled of sweet nectar but tasted like nothing at all. Alice untied her underthings and left them in the grass, pausing only to unweave her braid before jumping in.

She sank right to the bottom. She sat there awhile, letting her limbs relax. Soon, she felt the familiar tickles of kissingfish and opened her eyes long enough to see them nibbling at her skin. She smiled and swam up, the fish following her every move. They wriggled alongside her, nudging her elbows and knees in an attempt to get closer.

Alice swam until she was so clean she practically shined, and then the warm air dried her hair and skin so quickly she had time left to wander before her ferenberry picking for the day.

Alice was always trying to find her own adventures while the other kids were in school. Mother was supposed to be hometeaching her, but she rarely did. Two years ago, when Mother was still freshly angry with Alice for getting kicked out of school (and for what she’d done to Oliver Newbanks), she’d left a stack of books on the kitchen table and told Alice to study

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them, warning her that if she didn’t, she’d grow up to be the silliest girl in all of Ferenwood, never mind the ugliest.

Sometimes Alice wanted to say unkind things to Mother.

Still, Alice loved her mother. Really, she did. Alice had made peace with her parental lot in life long ago. But let us put this plainly: Alice had always preferred Father and she had no trouble saying so. Father was more than a parent to Alice; he was her friend and confidant. Life with Father had made all hard things bearable; he’d seen to it that his daughter was so thoroughly loved that she’d never known the depth of her own insecurities. In fact, he took up so much room in her heart that she’d seldom noticed she had no other friends to name.

It was only when Father disappeared that Alice began to see and feel the things she’d been long protected from. The shock of loss unlatched her armor, and soon cold winds and whispers of fear snuck through the cracks in her skin; she wept until the whites of her eyes dried up and the lids rusted open, refusing to close long enough to let her sleep.

Grief was a tangible weight Alice’s small body slowly learned to carry. She was just nine years old when Father left, but even tiny Alice would wake up scraping the bottom of her heart in search of him, and each time she came up raw, hollow, and aching.

Dear reader: You should know that Alice, a decidedly proud girl, wouldn’t approve of my sharing this personal information 28

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with you. I recognize that the details of her grief are private.

But it is imperative, in my humble opinion, that you know just how deeply she loved Father. Losing him had unzipped her from top to bottom, and yet, her love for him had solidified her spirit. She was broken and unbroken all at once, and the longer she stayed in Ferenwood without him, the lonelier she became.

For Alice Alexis Queensmeadow, some things were very simple: If Father had gone, so too would she, because Alice had never wanted anything more than to follow his lead.

Succeeding in the Surrender, you see, was her only way out.

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Chapter One

T

he grave that Lin had made for her friend could not be touched by wind. Above, the dripping rosebush flailed, scratching its thorns at the wall. But

the whittled cross of twigs and string did not so much as shiver. Instead a lick of rime had crept up to cover the wood with white. Later, Lin Rosenquist would remember this as a sign, the first.

Perhaps she might have caught it then, if she hadn’t been too busy watching the storm. It came from the north and roared up the river, wrenching through the cobbled streets of Oldtown, pulling dusk down between the wooden houses in the early afternoon. Lin stood by Mrs. Ichalar’s flower bed, with her hand in her pocket, grinning to herself. At last, a storm that showed some promise! She crouched down to whisper to the cross, “See you later, little one.”

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The front door groaned when she opened it. The house her parents rented from Mrs. Ichalar leaned out over the river, supported by tarred poles on one side. Like the other narrow houses crammed together along the bank, the whole building had been warped by centuries in the bitter mist. It smelled crooked, too. Whiffs of rotten wood and chemicals drifted from floor to floor to hide behind the curtains.

Lin hung her coat next to the grandfather clock in the hallway. A husky recording of gnarled voices and violins seeped out from the kitchen. Her mother was working in there.

“Lindelin, is that you at last?” The music stopped and Anne Rosenquist appeared in the doorway. At the sight of Lin’s drenched coat, her face clouded over with concern.

“Have you been standing by the rosebush again? In this weather?”

“I’m not that wet,” Lin lied as she squelched out of her boots. “I just need to go upstairs and . . .”

“Don’t go up just yet,” her mother said quickly. “I’ve made rice pudding, your favorite.”

Dessert before dinner. That was ominous.

Lin followed her into the kitchen that also doubled as a study. Her mother collected old songs that would otherwise have died with the last people who knew them. In August, she had unexpectedly been offered a teaching position at the university. It meant that she could pass them

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on, all those theories on broken knights and bergfolk. But it also meant that the Rosenquists had to leave Summerhill, the farm where Lin had lived for all her eleven years, where the fields smelled of freshly turned soil and the mountains hugged the stars between their peaks.

“What a nasty squall.” Her mother shoved aside some notebooks to make room for the fluffy pudding and raspberry sauce. The rice cream recipe was ancient, too, a Summerhill tradition with chopped candied almonds sprinkled on top. “There could be snow at the end of it, though,” her mother added. “Wouldn’t you like that?”

Lin did like snow, though she wasn’t sure what good it would do here. At home, she and her best friend, Niklas, would have snowball fights until their fingers were numb and blue, and they would have to warm them on Grandma Alma’s giant cups of hot chocolate. And when dusk crept down the mountain slopes, they would make snow lights, little igloos with candles inside, that sent flickering beams up the frozen stream. “The better to ward off the enemy,” Niklas would laugh, and Lin would laugh as well, scanning the forest edge for eyes.

“I’m afraid there’ll be no snow for you just yet, Miss Rosenquist.” Her father came sauntering into the kitchen, sat down at the table, and dug the serving spoon into the rice cream. “It will rain for another week at least.”

“Surely not a whole week,” her mother said, but of course she knew better. Harald Rosenquist owned a rain

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gauge, four thermometers, and no less than three barometers in well-polished frames. He kept temperature records and checked the forecast several times a day. So if he said it would rain for another week, it would.

“I heard one of your songs today, Lin,” her mother said, and hummed brightly as she heaped pudding into a bowl.

Lin knew the tune, it was the one with the hair. She was named for her mother’s greatest discovery, the ballads of fair Lindelin, who grew enchanted apples, and rescued princes, and spun her locks into gold. My daughter deserves to be the hero of a song, her mother liked to say. But her mother didn’t have to spend the first weeks at a new school explaining why her name was so strange. Picking up her spoon, Lin said, “It’s not exactly my song, Mom. And my hair is the opposite of gold.”

“Remember what I told you about reading songs? Gold doesn’t always mean gold.” Her mother’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Your father and I have some exciting news to share. My class is full for next term already. They want me to stay, at least until next summer.” She saw Lin’s face and amended it to, “Only until next summer. Another year at the most.”

Another year in Mrs. Ichalar’s skeleton-legged house.

Lin put her spoon down. It clattered against the table.

After a brief silence, her father cleared his throat. “You know what? I think it’s time for a riddle.” It was their little ritual, one Lin used to love when she was younger. Every

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night, over tea and sweet buns in the Morello House kitchen, she would decipher badly worded poems and pore over treasure maps or quizzes until she came up with the right answer. “Are you ready?” He winked at her. “How do you spell deadly mousetrap with only three letters?”

“Harald!” Her mother’s face went white. “Don’t . . .”

“What? It’s too easy?”

Lin’s hand went to the left pocket of her cardigan. With one half of his head filled with novel writing and the other half with pudding, her father had forgotten about Rufus.

But she didn’t feel like talking about it, so she answered, “C—A—T.” “Perfect,” her father laughed. “One point to Miss Rosenquist!”

“If you’d like, we could go to the museum again on Saturday,” her mother said. “Or the library? Or the cathedral?

And I could make you peppernut cookies! They’re your favorite, right? You know, they match your . . .”

“My eyes, I know.” Lin pushed her chair back. “Actually, I am soaked through. I’ll go change.” Her parents began to speak in soft voices as soon as she left the room.

On her way up the stairs, she skipped the squeaky steps. She liked to move silently in this house, so the grandfather clocks and hulking furniture wouldn’t hear her coming. The bureau on the second-floor landing seemed especially malevolent. Lin always stopped in front of it, to prove she wasn’t scared. Her mother had

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noticed and dressed it up with a lace runner and two of Lin’s favorite photos.

The first photo, Summerhill viewed from the mountains. It seemed so small from afar, just a patchwork of meadows and potato fields stitched around a barn, an ancient elm tree, and the two houses. Niklas lived with his grandmother and uncle in the long, white main house with many shadowy rooms in a row, too many for such a small family, Grandma Alma always said. Therefore she had invited the Rosenquists to live in the red house in the morello garden, so Anne could work on her song collection, and Harald could work on his novels, and Lin could climb straight from her bedroom window into the sweet cherry tree, to work on her pit spitting with Niklas.

The second photo, Lin and her father sitting on the slopes of Buttertop. He was smiling, completely unaware that he was being tricked, and Lin was frowning, keeping both her lips and her left pocket pressed tight around her secret.

Rufus.

She had just found him when that photo was taken.

He had been lying in the heather, not far from the entrance to a burrow. His left leg had been bleeding, and he was panting so hard his rust-colored back and gray flanks trembled. A mouse pup, Lin had thought, and though she knew she should call to her father so he could put the little thing out of its misery, she had instead lifted the mouse

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gently and put him in her pocket. Back in her room, she had fed him bread crumbs and cheese rinds and watched his wound heal. But it hadn’t taken Harald Rosenquist long to sniff out the secret.

“You do realize, Miss Rosenquist,” he had said in his most serious lecturing tone, “this mouse is not a pet. In fact, it’s not even a mouse, but a Myodes rufocanus, a redback vole. It belongs in the wild, not in a child’s room. You cannot possibly keep it.”

In the end it was her parents who had to realize that Lin would not give up Rufus. They had insisted on a cage, and Lin had agreed, and even kept the cage by her bed.

But Rufus had never lived there. He lived in her cardigan, her favorite blue one that Grandma Alma had knitted, where he nestled in the left pocket and chewed the tassels of the drawstring in the collar. Out in the woods, he rode on her shoulder, whiskers wide and claws dug deep.

On the farm, he kept out of view from everyone except Niklas, and he had a special knack for scrambling into her sleeve two seconds before her father crossed the yard. In the city, Rufus had been her only friend, her only tie to home. He had slept curled up on her pillow, and when she scratched him, he had leaned against her fingers to say he understood.

But as the trees shed their leaves and the afternoons grew dim, Rufus had changed. He stopped sneaking off on nightly expeditions, and he no longer raided Lin’s plate

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for cheese. Once, he had tumbled from her shoulder and fallen hard to the floor, and after that he kept to her pocket, even when they were alone. One crisp Tuesday five weeks ago, there was no brush of whiskers on her cheek in the morning. Rufus had quietly crept into his cage to sleep, and there was nothing Lin could do to wake him.

She had buried the shoe box under the rosebush because that happened to be the sole patch of uncobbled ground on the street, and she had spent so many afternoons there that her parents had taken to hovering like moons in the kitchen window. “Would you like to have someone over?” they had asked, all chipper and hopeful, as if it were that simple. “Someone from school, perhaps?”

Lin shut the door to her attic room. She went straight to her closet, which she kept so messy no one else would bother to go near it. Her trap, the paper clip on the handle, had not been sprung. Under her worn hiking pants, she found the thing that had lured her away from Rufus’s grave.

The troll-hunting casket.

She pulled the carved box out on the floor and checked the contents: A magnifying glass, to make sunbeams strong enough to cut through bark-and-sap armor. A roll of maps that she had drawn, with marks for all three precious oak trees. And a small jar of carefully gathered acorns, the only weapon that would kill a troll outright.

It had all begun with a jar like this, the one she and

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Niklas had found among Grandma Alma’s old fishing gear in the Summerhill loft. The faded label had said Troll’s Bane. From that seed, the troll hunt had grown, game by delicious game, into the Summerhill woods and all the way up to the Trollheim Mountains.

Lin unscrewed the lid, letting out an acrid puff of air. It was her special concoction. Since bright sunlight turned trolls to stone, and since sunburns and nettle welts were much the same, curing the acorns in a brew of nettles and sour leaf made them even more lethal. But she didn’t take any. The acorns were for Summerhill trolls, wood trolls who slept under rock and sniffed under trees. Oldtown trolls lived in sewers and slime, so the acorns would not work on them. Their bane would be different, something that could be found naturally in the area, something very rare. She just hadn’t figured out what it was yet.

She riffled through the map rolls. There were six of them, all drawn after her father had sent Lin and Niklas out to add details to a map of the Summerhill woods. He had needed it as research for his novel. But ever since, Lin had created her own maps for the troll hunt, with legends for sightings and lairs. She picked out her work in progress—a map of Oldtown—and put the casket back into the wardrobe.

Her cardigan had damp stripes along the shoulders, but she pulled it back on over dry pajamas, tied the drawstring, and climbed onto the windowsill. Lin rolled out

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the map, turning it so it fit her view. She had penciled in a few potential lairs, but there were no marks for sightings, because in the three months since they had moved to the city, she had not seen a single troll. But now there was a storm, a terrific one. That always brought the enemy out, to roar back at the wind.

Lin leaned close to the window, peering through the sharp raindrops that pelted the glass.

“Come on,” she whispered. “I’m ready.”

At the end of the street, by the foot of the bridge, there were two flashes.

Lin sat up hard, squinting toward the red pillars. It must have been a coincidence, a bicycle light cut in half by the bridge post or reflected in a sign. But no. There it was again, two blinks in quick succession, this time in the window of the closed coffee shop across the street.

In the troll hunt, this was the fastest and easiest of signals, because it was also the most desperate: Danger.

Trolls nearby.

She pressed her brow to the pane, holding her breath so it wouldn’t cloud the glass. Did something stir in the violent sheets of rain, a billow of cloth, a flitting shape against the cobblestones? The third signal appeared where Lin could only see its halo. Right below her, on Mrs. Ichalar’s steps.

Lin pushed herself off the windowsill, stuck her feet in her slippers, and raced for the stairs. Summerhill was

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a long and expensive bus ride away, and in his last letter, Niklas had written nothing about coming here. Yet he must have, because only he knew that signal.

She hadn’t reached farther than the second-floor bureau when she heard the mail slot creak and clack. And as she rushed down the remaining steps, she got her first glimpse of it, a small, flat parcel, lying facedown on Mrs. Ichalar’s musty doormat.

The slap of wet wind met her when she tore the door open. She looked up the street and down the street. It was deserted. “Niklas!” she called. “I know you’re there!”

But he was not done with his game, it seemed, because he didn’t emerge from the murk. A square of wan light illuminated Rufus’s grave, making it glitter. The thin layer of frost covered almost the whole flower bed now. It must be getting colder after all.

Shivering, Lin retreated into the hallway to examine the parcel. The rough paper was the color of a broken mountainside, and bound in sodden string. She turned it over, and a chill hand caught her heart.

Niklas could not have sent her this parcel. No one could.

On the front, there was no stamp and no address. Only a single word, written not by pen or pencil, but scratched into the wet paper with the sharp tip of a knife.

“Twistrose.”

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Chapter Two

T

he grandfather clocks struck the half hour, one by one and out of rhythm. The third-floor bedroom one first, the upstairs bathroom one second, and

the hallway one last as always, after a grudging effort of whispers and clicks.

Lin’s hands trembled as she held the parcel under the brown silk lampshade. She had thought the letters would shift in the light, that her eyes would adjust and the mistake would be corrected. Yet no matter how hard she stared at the scratched word, it did not change.

The parcel felt heavier than it looked. When she shook it, something jangly slid from side to side within. She paused to listen. In the kitchen, the violins had resumed their yammering, and from the second floor came the faint din of a TV audience that meant her father had stopped writing to call out the answers to a quiz show.

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She ripped the paper and emptied the parcel into her hand.

Out tumbled two keys. One was grimy and had an orange plastic tag that said

cellar.

The other was large,

as large as the length of her hand, and blackened, as if it had grown from ashes and dirt. Its head was fashioned as a petal, and the stem was that of a rose, with three curved, sharp thorns. Engraved across the petal, there it was again: twistrose.

In the troll hunt, they always used code names. For years Niklas had been Summerknight and Lin had been Nettle, because of her special nettle brew. But for the Oldtown hunt, she had taken a new one, inspired by the rosebush over Rufus’s grave.

One day, she had noticed how it hooked its thorns into the paint of the facade, stretching its branches toward the sky. It reminded her of the junipers that clung to the Trollheim Mountains with their twisted roots; they never let go no matter how cruel the wind blew. And that’s when she had thought of it—the perfect code name for a troll hunter who was exiled for the moment, but not forever: Twistrose.

Lin had wanted to wait till their next game to share it with Niklas, so she hadn’t said a thing about it. Not to Niklas, not to anyone.

“So, Miss Rosenquist, what have you got there?”

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Lin whipped around, shoving both the folded paper and the keys in her pockets. How very like her father to know about the squeaky steps. He had his quizzy face on, the lifted-chin one he wore when his curiosity had set in, and she knew she wouldn’t get away with lying. “A parcel,” she said. “But it’s for me.”

He tilted his head. “From a friend?”

Which was of course an excellent question. With the troll-hunter signal, whoever had delivered the parcel had made sure Lin would be the one to find it. And the name Twistrose could only mean that it was for her, and her alone. But for what purpose? Shrugging as casually as she could, Lin said, “I don’t know yet.”

The quizzy face softened. “A little mystery. I see. Miss Rosenquist, you may carry on.” He patted the arm of her still-dripping coat before he started back up the stairs.

“But if your mystery takes you out into the storm, I know I can trust you to dress for the part.”

Only when she heard him shout “What is the Arctic Circle!” from the living room, dared Lin bring the keys out from hiding. Moving deeper into the hallway, she ignored her coat, because she had no intention of going outside of the house. She was going under it.

The cellar door at the end of the hallway had remained locked since they moved in, despite her father’s attempts at wringing the key out of Mrs. Ichalar. All sorts of trouble could be brewing down there, he had argued, fires and

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floods and rodent invasions. Mrs. Ichalar had claimed that she couldn’t find the key, and that she needed the storage space for her little hobby, now that she lived in a retirement home. “What sort of hobby?” her father had asked, but for once, his questions got him nowhere. Lin smiled. If Harald Rosenquist knew that his daughter’s “little mystery” involved the cellar key, there would be no stopping him. But he didn’t know.

She turned the cellar key in its lock and opened the door slowly. Dank air oozed up from below, thick with rot and chemicals. All she could make out was a dented flashlight on the wall, and three tapering steps dissolving into black. She picked the flashlight off its peg, turned it on, and closed the door behind her, muffling the violins.

Below, she could hear the river mumbling by, gusting chilly air up the stairwell. The draft was so cold that Lin’s breath made frost clouds. With a shudder she followed the dust-speckled beam down the stairs. At the landing, the light fell on an animal skull on the banister. It had cracked teeth and large, tilted eye sockets. Lin hesitated for a moment. What sort of old lady would nail skulls to her banisters? But she pressed on, and when she reached the final step and learned the truth about their landlady’s “little hobby,” it all made sense.

She was watched by a hundred eyes.

Among the usual clutter of boxes and crates, there were animals everywhere. Cats curled up on barrels, fer-

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rets peeking out between mildewed coats, and falcons strung up under the crossbeams of the ceiling. They were all positioned to glower at Lin with their glass bead eyes, and they were all dead.

Mrs. Ichalar was a taxidermist.

The old woman’s workbench stood right next to the stairs, cluttered with hooks and scoops and bone cutters, and several bottles of a clear liquid that might explain the chemical smell. Lin took a deep, icy breath, annoyed at how hard she was shivering. A troll hunter did not back away at a little creepiness! Taxidermied animals looked grisly, but they couldn’t hurt her. “Calm down,” she whispered to herself. “And bring your brain to the party!”

That’s what her father always said if she got impatient with a riddle, and he was right. She would not solve the mystery if she didn’t keep her head clear.

With both hands on the flashlight, she looked again, more carefully, letting the beam rove around the room.

There had to be a reason why the two keys had arrived together. One to unlock the cellar door, and the other . . .

The flashlight beam found the back of the cellar. It was overgrown with pale, wet, ghostly roots. They had broken through near the ceiling and crawled down the wall in a tangled mass, crumbling the mortar and splitting the bricks. In the center of the wall, the roots shied away to make an open circle, and in that naked patch, two fissures

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met and formed an oddly shaped crack. Lin could swear it resembled a keyhole.

She had of course expected to find the keyhole in a door, or a cupboard, or a painted chest. But gold didn’t always mean gold. At least the strange crack deserved a closer look. She crossed the rough floorboards, where the river showed through between the gaps. All the boxes that had been stacked in the back lay toppled on the floor, pushed away by the roots. Lin shoved them aside so she could see the entire shrub.

The roots were not pale and wet after all, they were coated in rime. Lin frowned up at the holes, to where the roots had broken through the bricks. If her mapping skills did not deceive her, this wall lay directly beneath the front door—and the rosebush outside. For the first time that evening, it occurred to Lin to wonder why Mrs. Ichalar’s flower bed was covered with frost.

The cold seemed to radiate from the bare, circular patch. Lin leaned forward to study it. Yes. Her first impression had been right: The oddly shaped crack definitely looked like a large, ragged keyhole. One point to Miss Rosenquist! She lifted the Twistrose key for measure.

The roots stirred.

Lin gave a cry and lurched backward, stumbling over a crate, pricking her finger on the thorns of the key. A single bead of blood pushed out. She sucked at it, staring hard

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at the wall. Roots couldn’t stir, could they? It may have seemed like they had reached for her, but there had to be some other explanation. Maybe the storm? Maybe it rattled the rosebush hard enough for the tremors to reach all the way belowground? She got to her feet and raised the key again, waving it back and forth in front of the shrub from a safe distance. Nothing.

She cast a look behind her, toward the mounted animals and the banister with its sad skull. If she wanted, she could walk back up the stairs. She could tell her father about the cellar key and Mrs. Ichalar’s hobby and the curious rose infestation. But then the key would be confiscated and the mystery—the whole adventure—would be over.

A faint snatch of music murmured in her ear. It must have come from the kitchen above, except it wasn’t the usual hoarse violins, but a sweet, soft humming that made her think of Summerhill, and deep woods, and secret maps. Lin’s throat clenched. She did not want the adventure to end, not yet. Before she had time to reconsider, she pressed her lips together, stepped forward, and thrust the Twistrose key into the wall.

It fit perfectly in the crack. As she turned it, there was no click, but she felt something slide into place in there.

No. Dislocate was a better word, like something had been pried apart that was never meant to be separated. Freez-

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ing air poured against her fingers, along with a flicker of blue, shimmering light.

Whatever lay on the other side of this wall, it was not the riverbank.

Fear came crashing into her body with painful thumps.

She wanted to turn and run, but all of a sudden, the spindly roots shot out and grasped her, winding hard around her arms, wresting the flashlight from her hand. The bricks split apart with a tremendous crack. A torrent of icy air rushed out to meet her. The roots tightened, pulling her toward the opening, but Lin was too astounded by the sight beyond the wall to put up much of a fight.

There was no cellar, and no riverbank, either. Instead she looked out on a desolate, frozen mountain valley, where winter twilight painted the snow blue, and stern peaks rose into the sky. A creature crouched in the snow before her, facing away, but so close that she could smell it: a musky scent. Now it turned toward her. Lin watched helplessly as an elongated face came into view. Two needlelike teeth glinted in its mouth, and a pair of liquid, black eyes stared back at her.

Then the creature darted forward. With a fast, clawed grip it pulled Lin free of the roots and into its pungent embrace.

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When Niklas was four, he said to his mother: “Mom, I have terrible news. There’s a skull inside your head!”

He’d told her this in the bird room, below the skeleton mobiles that circled slowly under the rafters. He had been looking in the science books, and he had just figured out that the piles of bones that sat on his mother’s desk actually belonged on the inside of living things.

Niklas was twelve now, but he remembered this scene for two reasons. One, because his mother had laughed, and this was his only memory of her laughing. And two, because the next summer, his mother had been buried in the Summerhill graveyard, skull, skeleton, and all.

They were all that remained of her. Her bones, and sometimes, the nightmare.

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Chapter One

2 The apples in the orchard were nothing but sour buds.

No point in stealing those.

Niklas Summerhill frowned at the Molyk farmhouse with its paint of patchy lemon yellow. Mr. Molyk probably lurked somewhere behind the windows, watching through his binoculars. He claimed he used them to watch wild birds, when in fact he watched for wild kids.

Not without reason, Niklas had to admit. In all of Willodale, Mr. Molyk was by far his favorite victim.

Usually, Niklas preferred to do his little raids in the evenings, when Willodale filled with deep shadows under the towering mountains. But the rain had only just let up after two days, and he was too itchy after being cooped up to wait any longer. He just had to be careful.

And he had to figure out where to strike, of course. Not the tractor, because that could get expensive. Definitely

3

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nothing involving the manure pit. Unless . . . He hated to be predictable, but maybe the boot trick again? Just the thought of Mr. Molyk sticking his feet into sloshy, firstgrade muck made Niklas grin. He picked up a small rock, perfect for throwing at the rusty iron roof of the Molyk barn, put it in his pocket, and edged toward the pit.

Down by the river a faint jingling sounded, the source hidden by the orchard. Niklas slipped from tree to tree until he could see the riverbank. Sure enough. The enclosure by the old mink pens held a flock of lambs and the bell sheep Edith, who nipped at the sad grass by the legs of the burnt-out cages. It was mid-August, so the sheep should still be up in the mountain vales getting fat. But Mr. Molyk had brought them down early this year, and that could only mean one thing.

Forget about the boots.

“Come on. We’re letting the . . .” He turned over his left shoulder, but quickly closed his mouth. I’m letting the lambs out, he corrected himself. Eleven months had passed, but for a moment there, he had forgotten.

She was gone. Always his best friend had hovered there, one step behind, ready to tell him about the flaws in his plan. But Lindelin Rosenquist had left with her mother and father, moved to the city to live in a rotten house on stilts.

They claimed they were coming back, but they kept pushing the date for their return. Last he heard, it was another year from now. Niklas rubbed his forehead. No Lin, no one

4

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to stop him from taking a risk or two. Besides, what could be wrong with giving the lambs a final taste of freedom?

Staying in the cover of the fence, he unlatched the gate to the enclosure, fetched a couple of sugar cubes out of his pocket, and clicked his tongue softly.

“Here, Edith, pretty, pretty Edith! Want some sugar?”

Edith raised her long, not-so-pretty head, still chewing.

“That’s right,” Niklas said, holding out his hand. “I’ve got sugar for you, sugar and green woods!”

Edith came jingling through the gate with all the little ones in tow. As she munched up the treats, Niklas reached into the bell around her neck and twisted the clapper stuck so it wouldn’t make any noise. “Keep him off your trail a little bit longer,” he said, patting her scruff. Edith sniffed after more sugar, and when there wasn’t any, she let Niklas nudge her away from the farm and wandered toward the woods with a line of tail-wagging lambs behind her.

They kept each other company up the hill. The sheep ate glittering tufts of grass, Niklas picked wild strawberries with sweet, cool raindrops. The trail rose hard between the trees, sometimes turning into steps held in place by roots.

But neither Edith nor the little ones seemed to mind the climb, and the valley fell quickly away beneath them.

One by one the other neighbor farms came into view.

Slanting fields glowing bright in the dark woods, with long, narrow houses tucked at the back of shelves in the plunging mountainside.

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Fale with its rows and rows of vegetables, where a fleetfooted thief could snitch a fortune in carrots and plums.

Ottem, where only last week Niklas rode the pulley to the top of the granary, but not down again, since Mrs. Ottem insisted on calling a fire truck to come fetch him off the ledge. And Molyk on a strip of sandy ground by the emerald-colored river.

Niklas had chosen it for his favorite target because Mr. Molyk kept lambs that got sent away on trucks at the end of the season. This had been the case since Niklas asked his grandmother where the truck would take them, and got an honest explanation about the fate of most summer lambs. Grandma Alma just shook her head and said, “You should think of something else to do with your life, because you’ll make a lousy farmer.”

As if he had much of a choice. Who else was there to take over the farm when Uncle Anders got too old? But Niklas would rather be a hero than a farmer, and today, he was rescuing the Molyk lambs. At least for a little while.

For the next three turns, the path wound up through an old rock slide. On that bare patch, he’d be easy to spot, say, with a pair of binoculars. So Niklas made himself some armor from maple leaves strung together on skinny twigs.

“If it will fool trolls, it will fool Mr. Molyk,” he told one of the lambs, a little straggler who liked to sniff around a bit before climbing the root steps. She tore off a leaf

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of sourgrass, looking unimpressed, and Niklas shrugged.

“Not my fault you don’t know about trolls.”

To be fair, not many did. Three summers ago, Lin and Niklas had found an old jar behind Grandma Alma’s fishing gear in the loft. The contents didn’t seem like much, just a handful of dusty, smelly acorns. But it had a label that said Troll’s Bane, and when Lin saw that, her eyes had lit up. “This is for hunting trolls,” she had said.

“In the woods!” Niklas scratched a black spot behind the lamb’s ear, and added, “It’s our favorite game, you see. Or used to be.”

He hadn’t been troll hunting since Lin left. No point in that either.

Summerhill lay far enough up the mountainside to stay out of the evening shade, and by the time the path forked, the trees were tipped in gold. Niklas said good-bye to Edith and the lambs and followed the sound of rushing water home.

The Summerchild tumbled down from Buttertop and ran all through the Summerhill lands. “That stream is just like you,” Grandma Alma sometimes told him. “Noisy and wild.” But Niklas had always thought that the stream was like his mother: just passing through. When he was younger, he used to imagine he heard her voice in the water, singing him lullabies.

The sound of a scratchy engine cut into the splashes, and as Niklas entered the yard, he saw the first sign of

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trouble: farmer Molyk’s truck vanishing down the road like a red-eyed creature retreating into a sea of trees. He’d found out already, then.

Usually Mr. Molyk would just call, shouting until Grandma Alma’s phone crackled. Only for some of Niklas’s more inspired ideas did he force his old truck halfway up the hill in order to yell at him in person. But Niklas had let the sheep out before without the honor of a red-faced lecture. Something was wrong.

He skipped up the steps and through the front door, and Grandma Alma called him immediately from the bird room.

Something was very wrong.

His grandmother liked to spend her evenings by the black stove in the new room, which wasn’t new at all, but a cozy den of old novels, camphor candy, and oil paintings of stormy shores. But tonight she had chosen to wait for him in the easternmost of Summerhill’s rooms, in the company of memories.

The room had gotten its name because of Niklas’s mother, who had filled it with birds. Not living creatures, but bones and books and sketches. She puzzled the skeletons together with twine and hung them under the rafters. She braided leftover feathers and beaks into long strings that reached from ceiling to floor. They took it all down after she died, but Niklas remembered how the walls used to flutter and click with the draft, how the

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skeleton birds twirled. Grandma Alma only lectured him there when she wanted to make him squirm.

Before he poked his head in, he put on a mask of innocence. “You need something, Grandma?”

She sat in one of the stern, tall chairs, even though it must make her back ache. In her youth, Grandma Alma had carried so many buckets of water up from the Summerchild that her spine had slowly curled into a question mark. But there was nothing questioning about Grandma Alma’s face tonight. “You were in Mr. Molyk’s fields, stealing his sheep.”

Niklas gave a bow. They had their own way of doing this, like a play they both knew by heart. The neighbors called Niklas the rascal prince, which made Grandma Alma the reigning queen. “Not stealing, Your Majesty!

Do you see me carrying any lambs in my pockets? I was just giving them a little taste of—” Grandma Alma stopped him before he could finish his line. “That was reckless. Reckless and stupid.”

Niklas straightened up, still trying to stick to the script.

“But I have to prove myself worthy if I’m to inherit the realm.”

That ought to earn him a chuckle, followed by a halfhearted scolding. Grandma Alma had once had a town meeting called in her honor to discuss “the slick fingers of that insufferable Miss Summerhill.” But that was more than seventy years ago, and Grandma Alma’s fingers

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had grown knuckled and bent, almost too weak to make hot chocolate anymore, let alone do any mischief. They rested now in her lap, clasped and blue in the evening light.

“Niklas, Niklas,” she said at last. “Not all pranks are funny, and not all paths are safe. There were hunters in the woods today. Hunters with guns.”

“Oh.” Niklas felt his mask fall. The hunters could have seen him darting between the trees, all stealthy in his maple armor, and if they got nervous . . . He knew enough to be careful in the hunting season. Except it wasn’t hunting season. “What were they after?”

Grandma Alma’s voice dropped. “Something has been marauding deer in the woods. Could be a bear. Could be that sneaky lynx. Whatever it is, it’s big and out to kill.”

Niklas bit his lip. Edith and the lambs were still out there. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

“I know you are,” Grandma Alma said. “But sorry won’t save those poor sheep. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you may not. The hunting party is still out. You could get shot if you go into the woods again tonight, so you may not. Do you hear me?”

Niklas nodded. He heard.

Grandma Alma frowned at him with her wet-rimmed eyes. “Sleep,” she told him. “Think on your sorry. Tomorrow you may help Mr. Molyk gather his sheep.”

Or what is left of them, Niklas thought as he crept up the

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stairs, all twitchy with regret. He had led a whole flock of lambs and their mother into the maw of a predator.

At the top landing, he sat down by the window to watch the yard. Sure, he had heard. But that didn’t mean he was going to listen.

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Chapter Two

2 The night was not black.

Sometime in late spring, all darkness bled out of the Willodale sky and settled in the trees below, leaving everything blue. The white long house, the red barn, the little cottage in the morello garden where Lin and her family used to live: all glowed ghostly pale around the yard. The elm tree stretched inky branches across the grass.

Niklas waited. He didn’t worry about Uncle Anders, who had gone to bed early, even for him. But a patch of yellow fell from Grandma Alma’s bedroom and onto the grass, and Niklas sat quietly until the light winked out.

Then he snuck down the stairs. The hunters may have found the sheep already; he hoped they had. But unlike the hunters, Niklas knew where Edith and the lambs had been heading. He wanted to be sure.

The air felt chill as he slipped under the fence. The

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electrical wire was supposed to mark the line between outlying fields and the farm, but Niklas knew better. The fence was not the border.

The true border ran through the screaming stone.

The Summerhill woods were dotted with boulders and rocks fallen from Buttertop. Some were huge, like the very tips of mountains. Others were standing stones that sometimes, when the light slanted in just so, scowled at anyone who passed.

Niklas had scaled each and every one of the bigger stones and leaned against the scowlers. But there was one stone he never touched. A ways up the trail, so close to Summerhill that Niklas could see it from his bedroom, stood the six-foot-tall screaming stone. It had a narrow hole through the middle, and when the wind blew through the slit, it made a sound like a thin wail.

The Willodalers had all sorts of stories to explain why the stone screamed. Most said it keened for the dead, and those doomed to die.

“That’s everyone, then.” Lin had shrugged, and this was true. But Niklas still kept to the other side of the track when he passed that stone. Lin had asked him why once, but he hadn’t told her. He didn’t want to invite the nightmare back by talking about it. So he made up a new explanation.

“This . . .” he had said, poking a finger as close to the stone as he could bear. “. . . is the border.”

“Which border?” Lin had asked.

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“Between the farms and the forest. Between our world and theirs. Right through this troll heart.”

“Aha! This is a petrified troll,” Lin had said, because she was good with words like that.

“Turned to stone by sunlight,” Niklas had said. “Like all the other scowlers. But that’s not what killed it. See the hole? That’s what troll’s bane does. It melts through their flesh. One perfect hit and they’re dead.”

This night and every night, as Niklas passed the stone, he patted his shirt pocket. Even if they didn’t play the game anymore, he always carried some acorns with him into the woods.

From Edith’s impatient pace, Niklas guessed she had headed for one of the two perfect spots for grazing on the Buttertop trail. The first was Oldmeadow, a sloping field no more than half a mile up the mountainside. He found it deserted. But he discovered two pebbly piles of dung where the trail curved back into the woods.

That left only one place to look.

Sorrowdeep.

Niklas stared up at the snowcapped peak of Buttertop.

To get past it and up into the grassy mountain vales, you had to climb a ragged trail along a lip of cliff, left shattered by the big avalanche almost two hundred years ago.

The herds of Willodale rarely went up that path except when their humans made them at the beginning of every summer. But before the trail, on a wide shelf just above

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the tree line, cradled by slopes of lush mountain grass, lay the black pond of Sorrowdeep.

In the entire valley, it was the place where Niklas least liked to go. Because in those waters lived a darkness that wanted to pull you down. Or so Grandma Alma had told him countless times. It was her favorite scary story. “Stay away from that pond, my boy. It’s made of death and sorrow. If you try to swim in it, it will freeze your limbs and still your breath. It will weigh you down with every wrong you’ve ever done. It will drag you to the bottom and keep you in a cage of regret.”

The problem was, sheep didn’t care about stories, and neither did predators.

Niklas ducked his head and kept climbing, following the path as it carved its way from ledge to ledge through ever-thinning woods. On the final shelf before Sorrow­ deep, the wind came down to meet him, setting the ferns to shivering.

He stopped and wrinkled his nose. The wind carried a faint stench. He left the path and made his way to the end of the ledge, where the Summerchild flew off a cliff. Probably a dead deer, but he should look. If the carcass was in the water, it would poison Summerhill’s water supply.

At the top of the waterfall, flat stones formed a dotted line across the stream, like worn-down teeth. Once, before the big avalanche changed the face of Buttertop, the path

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had crossed over here. But no one used this ford anymore, and the track was nearly lost under roots and dry twigs.

Niklas stepped out on the first stone. The Summerchild rushed past him, misting the air where it fell. He saw no deer, but he heard a rumble, so soft his ears strained to pick it up under the splashing of the stream. He felt it too, a tremor under his feet that brought out goose bumps on his arms.

A howl cut through the mist. Niklas froze, stunned by how strange it sounded. Sharp like the scream of a fox, but so dark it had to come from the throat of a much bigger creature. On the far bank, behind some slender rowans, a single light appeared. Round and big like a flashlight, except there was no beam, and it looked somehow . . . hungry.

Twigs began to snap, the rowan trunks creaked and yielded, and suddenly there were two lights instead of one.

Eyes.

Niklas Summerhill was no coward, but neither was he a complete idiot.

He turned and fled.

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Chapter Three

2 The beast ran faster than him.

Niklas took all the shortcuts he knew, pivoting around the right branches as the path jackknifed down through the woods. The creature behind him was not so limber.

For every turn it made, he heard it crash into a tree or thump against a stone. Even so, it gained on him.

When they emerged onto the Oldmeadow, the path looped through the grass in a wide curve with nothing to slow the beast down. Niklas had to think of something, now, or it would catch him.

He veered right and plunged into the thigh-high grass.

Nettles licked at his hands as he cut across the field, dodging stones and grooves in the ground. The wind made the grass hiss, bringing the foul smell with it. The bear—it had to be a bear; Niklas couldn’t think of any other animal this big and heavy—must be very sick or hurt. He felt a cold

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tug in his belly. There was nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal.

The beast howled behind him, the same eerie, distorted scream, and so close now. Niklas wanted to look over his shoulder, but he couldn’t afford it. The beast came closer for every step. He needed to hide.

They were coming up on the southwest corner of the Oldmeadow, where the path crossed the Summerchild over Oak Bridge.

Niklas knew he wouldn’t make it to the bridge. He broke right again, down into the streambed, hurtling into the water. On the far bank, he slammed down on his belly and scrambled under a dense mass of juniper brambles. Dry needles crackled as he crawled in between the bushes.

The beast splashed into the water and stopped. Niklas couldn’t see it, but he could smell it, and he could hear it, snorting and wheezing, sniffing at the shrub.

It could smell him, too.

A slithering breath gusted under the juniper. Under the branches, the eyes appeared again, pale green discs, broken into pieces by the twigs. The beast grunted and began pulling the bushes out of the ground, roots and all.

Niklas pushed himself up the bank, squeezing deeper and deeper into the shrub, until he rolled out between two knobby juniper limbs and saw a latticed canopy far above.

The oak tree!

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He stumbled across the path and clawed his way up the gnarled trunk until he got high enough for the branches to thin. Only then dared he to look down.

A bare wedge of ravaged earth cut into the shrub, reaching almost to the other side. The far bank of the stream was strewn with torn and tossed junipers. But there was no hulking shape, no green eyes. The beast had disappeared.

Niklas tried to keep his gulps of air quiet. This didn’t make any sense. A wounded animal would attack; maybe give chase if it felt threatened. But this thing didn’t act like a creature crazed by pain. It was hunting him. And bears did not have green eyes that glowed in the dark.

His hands shook too hard to hold on properly, so he slid down a few yards and settled where three branches met to form a chair of sorts. Lin used to call it his throne.

He had sat in it hundreds of times because the oak tree was their troll-hunting headquarters.

“Best place to get acorns for the troll’s bane,” Niklas had pointed out. Oak trees rarely grew this far north, and there were only three in all of Willodale. But that wasn’t the only reason they had chosen it. The oak tree had branches that stretched over the stream, and reached out beyond the cliff upon which the tree perched. If you moved around in the canopy, you had as good a view of the Summerhill lands as you’d ever get.

The wind shifted, and hushed voices blew across the

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stream from Oldmeadow. Niklas eased out of his throne and moved a notch up the trunk to see better.

The hunting party. They approached quickly along the trail, flashlight beams roving over the grass. “I swear I heard a scream,” said a voice, and Niklas winced. Mr. Molyk.

“You’re sure it wasn’t young Master Summerhill trying to pull our legs?” another voice said. Mrs. Ottem. “He’s always lurking around this neck of the woods.”

“Well, if it was, maybe I should give him a taste of my peppercorns.” Molyk patted his shotgun as he stepped onto Oak Bridge. “He deserves it tonight, that’s for sure.”

Mrs. Ottem grunted. “It was a shame with his mother, but it’s past time everyone stopped coddling him.”

“They’re just pranks,” a third man said, joining them on the bridge. Niklas recognized the voice of one of the Fale brothers.

“Tell that to your wife,” Mrs. Ottem said. “It’s her plum jam that keeps vanishing.”

“Oh, we don’t know it’s him,” Mr. Fale said. “We keep our jam behind locked doors, and Niklas is just a lad. I hardly think—” “Tell that to my sheep,” Mr. Molyk cut him off. “You saw Edith, half-mad with fear, and the lambs, too. We’re lucky we got them before they fell off the mountain trail.”

Up in the tree, Niklas leaned his forehead against the trunk. The Willodalers didn’t get it at all. He might fill their boots with muck when they deserved it, but he would

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never hurt an animal on purpose. He felt tingly with relief that the sheep were safe. But then Mr. Molyk added, “And that’s not even mentioning the last poor wretch. Or was that just a prank, too?”

Niklas’s tingles went cold. What had happened to the last poor wretch?

But he didn’t find out, because instead Mr. Fale gave a cry. He leaned over the side of the bridge, pointing his flashlight up the stream. The hunters filed down to the water and out of Niklas’s line of sight. He heard them arguing over the torn shrubs and whether or not they could have anything to do with the beast. Then they all fell silent.

Niklas craned his neck, but he couldn’t see anything.

When the hunters started speaking again, the words were harsh hisses that he couldn’t make out over the Summerchild. He eased out on a branch that leaned over the stream.

“I’m telling you, it’s warped,” Mrs. Ottem said.

“No it isn’t,” Mr. Molyk said. “It’s clear as day. It’s just too big to be possible.”

What were they looking at? Niklas needed to get closer, but the branch he perched on was on the slim side and yielded slightly every time he shifted his weight. He glanced behind himself to gauge how far he could go, and just like that, he forgot all about the hunters’ discovery.

There was something in the tree with him.

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It sat crouched and tense in his throne, watching him with slanted eyes that were rimmed in black and white.

A lynx.

For a long moment, they stared at each other, boy and cat. Below them, the hunters came clambering up the bank under Niklas’s branch. He only had to call out and the men would have both him and the lynx at close range.

But Mr. Molyk spoke first. “If I catch this thing, I’m going to make it pay for my lamb.”

The lynx turned away, looking out over the valley. It had paws as big as saucers. Even a male that size would be reckoned as large, but Niklas was sure this one was female. He took in her long whiskers and white chin fur, the elegant curve of the flecked back and the tall tuft that crowned the right ear. The left ear had a split down the middle, a nasty old wound that had robbed her of the tuft.

Huge or no, this could not be the same creature that had chased him. She wouldn’t crash into trees on the path. She didn’t stink. And though he had no idea how or why, Niklas had the strangest feeling she felt sorry for the lamb.

So he didn’t call out. He stayed still until the hunters had passed under them and disappeared down the trail.

When their voices had completely drowned in the Summerchild’s noise, Niklas edged farther out on his branch, until it creaked under his weight. If it snapped, he would probably break his neck, but he wanted to put whatever

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distance he could between and himself and the giant cat.

One thing was certain: The lynx had to leave first. Niklas could not climb down until she was gone. He didn’t want to be pounced from above.

The lynx didn’t make him wait. She slid out of the tree, melting from limb to limb and onto the path without ever snapping a twig or shaking a leaf. Before the woods swallowed her, she turned and looked up at Niklas one last time.

She opened her mouth and a voice came out, slurred and rough, but clear enough to almost send Niklas tumbling from the branch.

“Thhhhank you.”

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PART I

Exploration

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1

Closing an Age 1891, June 14: 7-Hour 51 New Occident began its experiment with elected representation full of hope and optimism. But it was soon tainted by corruption and violence, and it became clear that the system had failed. In 1823, a wealthy representative from Boston suggested a radical plan. He proposed that a single parliament govern New Occident and that any person who wished to voice an opinion before it should pay admittance. The plan was hailed—by those who could afford it—as the most democratizing initiative since the Revolution. They had laid the groundwork for the contemporary practice of selling parliament-time by the second.

—From Shadrack Elli’s History of New Occident

The day New Occident closed its borders, the hottest day of the year, was also the day Sophia Tims changed her life forever by losing track of time.

She had begun the day by keeping a close eye on the hour. In the Boston State House, the grand golden clock with its twenty hours hung ponderously over the speaker’s dais. By the time the clock struck eight, the State House was full to capacity.

Arranged in a horseshoe around the dais sat the members of parliament: the eighty-eight men and two women rich enough

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to procure their positions. Facing them sat the visitors who had paid for time to address parliament, and farther back were the members of the public who could afford ground-floor seating. In the cheap seats on the upper balcony, Sophia was surrounded by men and women who had crammed themselves onto the benches. The sun poured in through the tall State House windows, shining off the gilt of the curved balcony rails.

“Brutal, isn’t it?” the woman beside Sophia sighed, fanning herself with her periwinkle bonnet. There were beads of sweat on her upper lip, and her poplin dress was wilted and damp. “I would bet it is five degrees cooler on the ground floor.”

Sophia smiled at her nervously, shuffling her boots against the wooden floorboards. “My uncle is down there. He’s going to speak.”

“Is he now? Where?” The woman put her pudgy hand on the rail and peered down.

Sophia pointed out the brown-haired man who sat, straightbacked, his arms folded across his chest. He wore a linen suit and balanced a slim leather book on his knee. His dark eyes calmly assessed the crowded hall. His friend Miles Countryman, the wealthy explorer, sat next to him, red from the heat, his shock of white hair limp with sweat. Miles wiped a handkerchief brusquely across his face. “He’s right there—in the front row of speakers.”

“Where?” the woman asked, squinting. “Ah, look—the famous Shadrack Elli is here, I see.”

Sophia smiled proudly. “That’s him. Shadrack is my uncle.”

The woman looked at her in surprise, forgetting for a 6

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moment to fan herself. “Imagine that! The niece of the great cartologer.” She was clearly impressed. “Tell me your name, dear.”

“Sophia.”

“Then tell me, Sophia, how it is that your famous uncle can’t afford a better seat for you. Did he spend all his money on his time?”

“Oh, Shadrack can’t afford time in parliament,” Sophia said matter-of-factly. “Miles paid for it—four minutes and thirteen seconds.”

As Sophia spoke, the proceedings began. The two timekeepers on either side of the dais, stopwatches in their white-gloved hands, called for the first speaker, a Mr. Rupert Middles. A heavyset man with an elaborate mustache made his way forward. He straightened his mustard-colored cravat, smoothed his mustache with fat fingers, and cleared his throat. Sophia’s eyes widened as the timekeeper on the left set the clock to twenty-seven minutes. “Look at that!” the plump woman whispered. “It must have cost him a fortune!”

Sophia nodded. Her stomach tensed as Rupert Middles opened his mouth and his twenty-seven minutes commenced.

“I am honored to appear before parliament today,” he began thunderously, “this fourteenth of June of the year eighteen ninety-one, to propose a plan for the betterment of our beloved New Occident.” He took a deep breath. “The pirates in the United Indies, the hordes of raiders from the Baldlands, the gradual encroachment of our territories from north, west, and south—how long will New Occident go on ignoring the realities of our altered world, while the edges of our territory THE GLASS SENTENCE

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are eaten away by the greedy mouths of foreigners?” There were boos and cheers from the crowd, but Middles hardly paused. “In the last year alone, fourteen towns in New Akan were overrun by raiders from the Baldlands, paying for none of the privileges that come with living in New Occident but enjoying them all to the full. During the same period, pirates seized thirty-six commercial ships with cargo from the United Indies. I need not remind you that only last week, the Gusty Nor’easter, a proud Boston vessel carrying thousands of dollars in payment and merchandise, was seized by the notorious Bluebird, a despicable pirate who,” he added, his face red with exertion, “docks not a mile away in Boston harbor!” Growls of angry encouragement surged from the crowd. Middles took a rapid breath and went on. “I am a tolerant man, like the people of Boston.” There were faint cheers. “And I am an industrious man, like the people of Boston.” The cheers grew louder. “And I am loath to see my tolerance and my industry made a mockery by the greed and cunning of outsiders!” Clapping and cheering erupted from the crowd.

“I am here to propose a detailed plan, which I call the ‘Patriot Plan,’ and which I am certain will be approved, as it represents the interests of all those who, like me, believe in upholding our tolerance and our industry.” He braced himself against the dais.

“Effective immediately, the borders must be closed.” He paused for the piercing cheers. “Citizens of New Occident may travel freely—if they have the proper documentation—to other Ages.

Foreigners living in New Occident who do not have citizenship will have several weeks to return to their Ages of origin, 8

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and those remaining will be forcibly deported on July fourth of this year, the day on which we celebrate the founding of this great nation.” More enthusiastic cries erupted, and a flurry of audience members stood to clap enthusiastically, continuing even as Middles charged ahead.

Sophia felt her stomach sinking as Rupert Middles detailed the penalties for foreigners who remained in New Occident without documents and the citizens who attempted to travel out of the country without permission. He spoke so quickly that she could see a line of foam gathering at the edge of his mustache and his forehead shining with sweat. Gesticulating wildly, without bothering to wipe his brow, he spat across the dais as he enumerated the points of his plan and the crowd around him cheered.

Sophia had heard it all before, of course. Living as she did with the most famous cartologer in Boston, she had met all the great explorers who passed through his study and heard the much-detested arguments championed by those who sought to bring the Age of Exploration to an end. But this did not make the vitriol of Rupert Middles any less appalling or his scheme any less terrible. As Sophia listened to the remaining minutes of the speech, she thought with growing anxiety of what the closing of the borders would mean: New Occident would lose its ties to the other Ages, beloved friends and neighbors would be forced to leave, but she, Sophia, would feel the loss even more acutely. They won’t have the right documents. They won’t get in and I will lose them forever, she thought, her heart pounding.

The woman sitting beside Sophia fanned herself and THE GLASS SENTENCE

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shook her head in disapproval. When the twenty-seven minutes finally ran out and the timekeeper rang a loud bell, Middles staggered to his seat—sweating and panting—to wild applause that filled Sophia with dread. She could not imagine how Shadrack stood a chance of swaying his audience with only four minutes.

“Dreadful spitter,” Sophia’s companion put in with distaste.

“Mr. Augustus Wharton,” the first timekeeper called loudly, while his colleague turned the clock to fifteen minutes. The cheering and clapping subsided as a tall, white-haired man with a hooked nose strode confidently forward. He had no notes. He clasped the edges of the dais with long white fingers.

“You may begin,” the timekeeper said.

“I appear before this assembly,” Mr. Wharton began, in a deceptively low tone, “to commend the proposal put forth

by Mr. Rupert Middles and persuade the ninety members of this parliament that we should not only put it in place, but we should carry it further,” he shouted, his voice rising to a crescendo. The audience on the parliament floor clapped ecstatically. Sophia watched, agonized, as Shadrack’s expression grew hard and furious.

“Yes, we must close our borders, and yes, we must enact a swift deportation of foreigners who leech this great nation of its strength without giving it anything in return, but we must also close our borders to prevent the citizens of New Occident from leaving it and undermining our very foundations. I ask you: why should anyone wish to travel to other Ages, which we know to be inferior? Does not the true patriot stay home, 10

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where he belongs? I have no doubt that our great explorers, of whom we are so proud, have only the best intentions in traveling to distant lands, pursuing that esoteric knowledge which is unfortunately too lofty for many of us to comprehend.”

He spoke with condescension as he inclined his head toward Shadrack and Miles.

To Sophia’s horror, Miles jumped to his feet. The crowd jeered as Shadrack rose quickly, placing a hand on his friend’s arm and easing him back into his seat. Miles sat, fuming, while Wharton went on without acknowledging the interruption.

“But surely these explorers are on occasion naive,” he continued, to loud calls of agreement, “or perhaps we should say idealistic, when they do not realize that the very knowledge they so prize becomes the twisted tool of foreign powers bent on this great nation’s destruction!” This was met with roars of approval. “Need I remind you of the great explorer Winston Hedges, whose knowledge of the Gulf Coast was ruthlessly exploited by pirates in the siege of New Orleans.” Loud boos indicated that the memory was, indeed, still fresh. “And it may not be lost on anyone,” he sneered, “that the masterful creations of a certain cartologer gracing us with his presence today make perfect research materials for any pirate, raider, or tyrannical ruler with an eye toward invasion.”

The audience, taken aback by this direct attack, clapped somewhat reluctantly. Shadrack sat silently, his eyes furious but his face calm and grim. Sophia swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, dear,” the woman murmured. “That was very much uncalled for.”

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that will put into effect a complete closure of the borders not only for foreigners but for citizens as well. Middles has the Patriot Plan, which will protect us from foreigners. I say good—but not good enough. I therefore propose here, in addition, a measure to protect us from ourselves. The Protection Amendment: Stay home, stay safe!” The cheers that met this were few but enthusiastic. “I propose that foreign relations be restricted and trade with specified Ages be facilitated, respectively, as follows.” Sophia hardly heard the remainder. She was watching Shadrack, wishing desperately that she could be sitting beside him rather than gazing down from the upper balcony, and she was thinking about what would happen if Wharton’s plan passed and the Age of Exploration came to an end.

Shadrack had warned her already that this might happen.

He had done so again the night before, as he practiced his speech for the fifteenth time, standing at the kitchen table while Sophia made sandwiches. She had found it impossible to imagine that anyone would hold such a close-minded view.

And yet it seemed, from the response of the people around her, that it was all too possible.

“Does no one want the borders to remain open?” Sophia whispered at one point.

“Of course they do, my dear,” her benchmate said placidly.

“Most of us do. But we’re not the ones with the money to talk in Parliament, are we? Don’t you notice that all the people who clap for the likes of them are on the ground floor—in the pricey seats?”

Sophia nodded forlornly.

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Finally, the bell rang and Wharton triumphantly left the stage.

The timekeeper called, “Mr. Shadrack Elli.” There was a smattering of polite clapping as Shadrack strode to the dais.

While the clock was being set to four minutes and thirteen seconds, he glanced up at the balcony and met Sophia’s eye. He smiled, tapping the pocket of his jacket. Sophia smiled back.

“What does that mean?” her companion asked excitedly. “A secret sign?”

“I wrote him a note for good luck.”

The note was really a drawing, one of the many Shadrack and Sophia left for one another in unexpected places: an ongoing correspondence in images. It showed Clockwork Cora, the heroine they had invented together, standing triumphantly before a cowed Parliament. Clockwork Cora had a clock for a torso, a head full of curls, and rather spindly arms and legs. Fortunately, Shadrack was more dignified. With his dark hair swept back and his strong chin held high, he looked self-assured and ready. “You may begin,” the timekeeper said.

“I am here today,” Shadrack began quietly, “not as a cartologer or an explorer, but as an inhabitant of our New World.”

He paused, waiting two precious seconds so that his audience would listen carefully. “There is a great poet,” he said softly, “whom we are fortunate to know through his writing.

An English poet, born in the sixteenth century, before the Disruption, whose verses every schoolchild learns, whose words have illuminated thousands of minds. But because he was born in the sixteenth century, and to the best of our THE GLASS SENTENCE

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knowledge England now resides in the Twelfth Age, he has not yet been born. Indeed, as the Fates would have it, he may never be born at all. If he is not, then his surviving books will be all the more precious, and it will fall to us—to us—to pass on his words and make certain they do not disappear from this world.

“This great poet,” he paused, looking out onto his audience, which had fallen silent, “wrote: No man is an island, entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

“I need not persuade you of his words. We have learned them to be true. We have seen, after the Great Disruption, the great impoverishment of our world as pieces fell away, washed into the seas of time—the Spanish Empire fragmented, the Northern Territories lost to prehistory, the whole of Europe plunged into a remote century, and many more pieces of our world lost to unknown Ages. It was not so long ago—fewer than one hundred years; we remember that loss still.

“My father’s mother Elizabeth Elli—Lizzie, to those who knew her well—lived through the Great Disruption, and she saw that loss firsthand. Yet it was she who inspired me to become a cartologer by telling me the story of that fateful day and reminding me, every time, to think not of what we had lost but what we might gain. It took us years—decades—to

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realize that this broken world could be mended. That we could reach remote Ages, and overcome the tremendous barriers of time, and be the richer for it. We have perfected our technologies by borrowing from the learning of other Ages. We have discovered new ways of understanding time. We have profited—profited greatly—by our trade and communication with nearby Ages. And we have given.

“My good friend Arthur Whims at the Atlas Press,” he said, holding up a slim leather-bound volume, “has reprinted the writings of John Donne, so that his words can be known to others beyond our Age. And this learning across the Ages is not at an end—much of the New World is still unknown to us. Imagine what treasure, be it financial”—he looked keenly at the members of parliament—“scientific, or literary, lies beyond the borders of our Age. Do you truly wish to wash that treasure away into the sea? Would you wish our own wisdom to fall out of this world, imprisoned within our borders? This cannot be, my friends—my fellow Bostonians. We are indeed tolerant, and we are industrious, as Mr. Middles claims, and we are a part of the main. We are not an island. We must not behave like one.”

The clock ran out of time just as Shadrack stepped away from the dais, and the timekeeper, caught up by the stirring words, somewhat belatedly rang his bell into the still silence of the State House. Sophia jumped to her feet, clapping loudly.

The sound seemed to rouse the audience around her, which broke into applause as Shadrack returned to his seat. Miles

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pounded him heartily on the back. The other speakers sat stone-faced, but the cheers from the balcony made it clear that Shadrack had been heard.

“That was a good speech, wasn’t it?” Sophia asked.

“Marvelous,” the woman replied, clapping. “And by so handsome a speaker, my dear,” she added somewhat immaterially.

“Simply stupendous. I only hope it’s enough. Four minutes isn’t very much time, and time weighs more than gold.”

“I know,” Sophia said, looking down at Shadrack, entirely unaware of the heat as the members of parliament withdrew to their chamber to make a decision. She checked her watch, tucked it back into her pocket, and prepared herself to wait.

—9-Hour 27: Parliament in Chambers— The hall was stuffy with the smell of damp wool and peanuts, which the audience members bought from the vendors outside. Some people went out to get fresh air but quickly returned. No one wanted to be away when the members of parliament returned and rendered their decision. There were three options: they could take no action at all, or recommend one of the plans for review, or adopt one of them for implementation.

Sophia looked at the clock over the dais and realized that it was ten-hour—midday. As she checked to see if Shadrack had returned, she saw the members of parliament filing into the hall. “They’re coming back,” she said to her benchmate. Several minutes of rushed scurrying ensued as people tried to find their seats, and then a hush descended over the audience.

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The head of parliament walked to the dais, carrying a single sheet of paper. Sophia’s stomach seemed to knot of its own accord. If they had voted for no action—as Shadrack recommended—they would not need a sheet of paper to say so.

The man cleared his throat. “The members of parliament,” he began slowly, emphasizing that he, for one, did not pay for his time, “have voted on the proposed measures. By a vote of fifty-one to thirty-nine we have approved for immediate implementation”—he coughed—“the Patriot Plan proposed

by Mr. Rupert Middles—” The rest of his words were lost in an uproar. Sophia sat, dazed, trying to comprehend what had happened. She pulled her satchel strap over her shoulder, then stood and peered over the balcony railing, anxious to find Shadrack, but he had been swallowed by the crowd. The audience behind her was expressing its collective disappointment by means of missiles—a crust of bread, a worn shoe, a half-eaten apple, and a rainstorm of peanut shells—hurled down at the members of parliament. Sophia felt herself being pressed up against the lip of the balcony as the enraged crowd pushed forward, and for a terrible moment she clung to the wooden ledge to avoid being pushed over it.

“Down to chambers, down to chambers!” a timekeeper cried in a piercing tone. Sophia caught a glimpse of the members of parliament hurrying past him.

“You’ll not get away so easily, cowards!” a man behind her shouted. “Follow them!” To her relief, the crowd suddenly pulled back and began clambering over the benches for the THE GLASS SENTENCE

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exits. Sophia looked around for the woman who had sat beside her, but she was gone.

She stood for a moment in the thinning crowd, her heart still pounding, wondering what to do. Shadrack had said he would meet her in the balcony, but now he would surely find it impossible. I promised to wait, Sophia said to herself firmly. She tried to steady her hands and ignore the shouts from below, which seemed to grow more violent by the second. A minute passed, and then another; Sophia kept her eye on her watch so that she would not lose track of time. Suddenly she heard a distant murmur that became clearer as more people chanted in unison: “Smoke them out, smoke them out, smoke them out!”

Sophia ran to the stairs.

On the ground floor, a group of men was battering the doors of the parliament chambers with the overturned dais.

“Smoke them out!” a woman shrieked, feverishly piling chairs as if preparing for a bonfire. Sophia ran to the front doors, where seemingly the entire audience had congregated, choking off the entrance. “Smoke them out, smoke them out, smoke them out!” She hugged the satchel tightly against her chest and elbowed her way through.

“You bigot!” a woman in front of her suddenly shouted, flailing her fists wildly at an older man in a gray suit. Sophia realized with shock that it was Augustus Wharton. As he swung out with his silver-tipped cane, two men with the unmistakable tattoos of the Indies threw themselves against him, one of them wrenching the cane from his hand and the other pulling his arms back behind him. The woman, 18

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her blue eyes fierce, her blonde hair clinging to her face, spat at Wharton. Suddenly she crumpled into a pile of her own skirts, revealing a police officer behind her with his club still raised. The officer reached for Wharton protectively, and the two tattooed men melted away.

There was a shout followed by a cascade of screams. Sophia smelled it before seeing it: fire. The crowd parted, and she saw a torch being hurled toward the open doors of the State House.

Screams burst out as the torch landed. She pushed her way into the crowd, trying vainly to catch a glimpse of Shadrack as she inched down the steps. The smell of smoke was sharp in her nostrils.

As she neared the bottom, she heard a shrill voice cry out, “Filthy pirate!” An unshaven man with more than a few missing teeth suddenly toppled against her, knocking Sophia to the ground. He rose angrily and threw himself back against his assailant. Sophia pushed herself up from hands and knees unsteadily; seeing a clear path down to the street, she hurried down the remaining steps, her knees trembling. There was a trolley stop right by the corner of the State House, and as Sophia ran toward it a car was just arriving. Without stopping to check its destination, she jumped aboard.

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