Summer, Picnics and Books –– New Upcoming Novels This June 2021

It didn’t open.

Red’s eyes flickered over the iron as she nervously wiped her hands on her torn skirt. If there was a latch, it was too small to see. No hinges, either—the gate was one unbroken piece of iron. It rose to two swirling points, as if to mark an entrance, but the bar down the center was as solid as the rest of it.

“Kings on shitting horses.” Teeth bared, Red slammed her hands against the metal. She’d made it through a fanged forest, she could find a way to open a damn gate.

A rustle. Red glanced over her shoulder. Only two of the white trees were visible in the gloom, but both of them looked closer than they had before.

Red tried to lift her hands to pound on the gate again, but they wouldn’t obey. Her palms refused to move, like they’d somehow grafted onto the iron. Sliding in the leaves, Red tried to wrench free, but the gate held her fast, the rasp of her breath loud in the silent fog.

She felt the trees’ regard, heavy on her shoulders, lifting the hair on the back of her neck. Watching. Waiting. Still hungry.

Something shifted under her hand, breaking the cycle of shapeless panic, crystallizing it into sharpened, focused fear.

The surface of the gate was moving, slithering like she’d cupped her hand over an anthill. Rough metal rippled against her skin, tracing the lines in her palms, her fingerprints.

As suddenly as it started, the crawling feeling stopped. The solid bar of iron split slowly down the middle, bottom to top, like a sapling growing from the ground. With a quiet hitch, the gate fell open.

A moment’s pause, then Red stumbled forward. As soon as she was through, the gate closed behind her. She didn’t have to look to know it was solid again. When she peered at her palm, it was unblemished but for a few spots of rust.

The ruined castle rose from fog and shadow, reaching almost as tall as the surrounding trees. Once, it might’ve been grand, but now the walls looked to be more moss than stone. A long corridor stretched to her left, ending in a jumble of broken rock. Directly ahead, a tower speared the sky, a weathered wooden door in its center. What looked like a large room was built onto its right side, in considerably better repair than the corridor. Crumbling piles of stone dotted the landscape—remnants of collapsed battlements, fallen turrets.

No white trees grew past the gate.

The tremble in her legs steadied. Red wasn’t sure what safety looked like here, but for now being away from the trees was enough.

The slice on her cheekbone still stung. Hissing, Red gingerly touched the cut. Her fingertips came away stained with watery blood. Ahead of her, the weathered door loomed.

He was somewhere in there. She could feel it, almost, an awareness that pricked at the back of her neck, plucked at the Mark on her arm. The Wolf, the keeper of the Wilderwood and alleged jailer of gods. She had no idea what he’d do with her now that she was here. Maybe she’d escaped his forest only to be thrown back in, the Wolf making sure the bloodthirsty trees finished whatever they’d started.

But the only other option was to stay out here, in a chilled, unnatural twilight, waiting to see if the iron gate would be enough to hold the Wilderwood back.

Well, damn the myths. She was just as much a part of those stories as he was, and if her destruction was imminent, she’d rather be the architect than a bystander. Hitching her bag on her shoulder, Red strode forward and shoved the door open.

She expected darkness and rot, for the inside of the castle to look as uninhabited as the outside. And it would have, were it not for the sconces.

No, not quite sconces—what she’d thought was a sconce was actually a woody vine, snaking around the nearly circular walls. Flames burned at equidistant points along its length, but the vine itself wasn’t consumed, and the flames didn’t spread farther. She couldn’t even see char marks, as if the flames were simply being held there, anchored to the wood through some invisible bond.

However strange the light was, it illuminated her surroundings. She stood in a cavernous foyer under a high, domed ceiling.  A cracked solarium window filtered twilight over her feet. Emerald moss carpeted the floor, clustered with toadstools. Before her, a staircase, moss covering the first few steps, leading up to a balcony ringing the top of the tower. She could barely make out the impression of vines through the shadows, twining over the railing, dripping toward the floor. The corridor she’d seen from outside stretched to the left of the staircase, and the sunken room to the right, its arched entrance broken at the top.

All of it was empty.

Red’s boots made soft shushing noises against the moss as she stepped forward. When she looked more closely, there were signs of occupancy—a dark cloak hung on the knob of the staircase, three pairs of scuffed boots sat by the broken archway into the other room. But nothing moved in the ruin, and everything was unnaturally silent. Red frowned.

Behind her, a light blinked out. Slowly, Red looked over her shoulder.

Another flame along the strange vine extinguished.

She almost tripped in her haste toward the staircase, noting as she put her foot on the bottom step that there was no light up there at all. Red backpedaled, changed direction, wheeling around the stairs. Light glimmered ahead of her, flames lining another staircase, this one leading down instead of up. Red ran toward it, the room around her plunging rapidly into twilight.

The last flame blinked out as she reached the stairs. She paused, breathing hard, waiting to see if the lights before her would do the same. But the flames remained upright and glowing, lit along another strange, unburnt vine.

The carpet of moss covered the first few steps here, too, but soon it gave way to thin roots, crisscrossing over the stone like veins. Red kept her eyes on her feet to keep from tripping, counting her steps as a mainstay against panic.

The stairs ended on a small landing, housing a wooden door and nothing else. Red pushed it open before she could talk herself out of it.

It didn’t creak. Warm, friendly light flooded the edges of the door, seeped onto the landing like a rising sun. Red stepped in as silently as she could. She froze, familiarity first a blade, then a balm.

A library.

Back—she stopped herself before she thought the word home; it would hurt too badly and didn’t feel wholly accurate, anyway— back in Valleyda, the library had been one of the places she spent the majority of her time. Neve had lessons most days, things beyond the simple writing and arithmetic Red had been taught, so Red was left largely to herself. She’d read most everything in the palace library, some things twice. It was one of the few ways to soothe her mind when it started churning and spilling over itself, connecting fears in spiderwebs she couldn’t disentangle. The scent of paper, the orderliness of printed words, the sensation of page edges beneath her fingers smoothed the waves of her thoughts to placidity.

Most of the time, anyway.

The presence of books was really the only similarity between the palace library and this one. Overstuffed shelves stood in straight rows. Books cluttered small tables, and a pile of them stood precariously by the door, topped with a half-full mug of what smelled like coffee. Candles with strangely unwavering flames gave the room a golden glow—wait, not candles. Shards of wood, curiously unburnt, same as the vine above.

Her bag fell to the floor with a muffled thunk. Red held her breath for half a second, but nothing stirred in the stacks. The sound she made might have been a laugh had there been more force and less fear behind it. A library, in the depths of the Wilderwood?

Cautiously, she stepped forward, trailing her hands over book spines. The scent of dust and old paper tickled her nose, but there was no trace of mildew, and all the books seemed cared for, even the ones that looked impossibly old. Someone was minding this library, then. Much better than they seemed to be minding the rest of the castle.

Most of the titles she recognized. The palace library carried a renowned collection, second only to the Great Library in Karsecka at the southernmost tip of the continent. Monuments of the Lost Age of Magic, A History of Ryltish Trade Routes, Treatises on Meducian Democracy.

Up and down the rows she wandered, letting the familiar sights and smells of a library seep the broken-glass feeling from her eyes. She was almost calm when she reached the end of the fifth row.

Then she saw him.

Red’s breath came in a quick, sharp gasp, ripping the quiet in two. She pushed her hand against her mouth, like she could force the sound back in.

The figure at the table didn’t seem to notice. His head bent over an open book, hand moving as a pen scratched over paper. The lines of his shoulders spoke of strength, but that of only a man rather than a monster; the fingers holding the pen were long and elegant, not clawed. Still, there was something otherworldly in the shape of him, something that hinted at humanity but didn’t quite arrive there.

“I don’t have horns, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

He’d turned while she was staring at his hands. The Wolf narrowed his eyes. “You must be the Second Daughter.”

Imagine, if you will, dear reader, the Louvre in Paris, France, in the days before it became a museum: an enormous marble palace stretching along the banks of the Seine. Then imagine a garden behind that palace, a large expanse of meticulously upkept greenery, fountains, and courtyards. In the back of one such courtyard was a . . . butt. No, dear reader, not a backside-type butt, but an archery butt, which is the thingy with the bull’s-eye on it that archers shoot arrows at. And roughly fifteen paces from the butt, there stood a girl.

But this girl was not just a girl. She was a queen.

Not a princess. Not a lady.

A queen.

Her name was Mary.

At the moment, Mary was concentrating on the butt.

She lifted the bow in her arms, drew it back, and aimed. One brown eye squeezed shut, while the other focused sharply on the bull’s-eye. She blew out a slow breath, then loosed the arrow.

It flew fast and true, striking the butt with a solid thwap.

The four ladies-in-waiting standing around her all clapped enthusiastically.

“Well done, Your Majesty,” exclaimed one.

“You’re getting better,” said another.

“You were always quite good, I thought,” said a third.

The fourth one was not much of a talker, but she smiled approvingly.

The queen strode over to inspect the butt herself. It had been a very good shot, hitting nearly, but not quite, the exact center of the bull’s-eye. She’d been about a thumb’s width off.

“I’ll try again,” she said resolutely, and marched back for yet another attempt. One would have thought she intended to murder that poor defenseless butt by the way she narrowed her eyes and scowled it down.

Thwap.

This time she was a pinkie’s width off.

Mary resisted the urge to stamp her foot, because queens do not stamp.

“One more time,” she said tersely.

One of her ladies-in-waiting sighed. “Again? We’ve been out here for ages. It’s time for lunch.”

(Some helpful backstory: Mary had come to live in France when she was only five years old, to be the fiancée of the dauphin—aka the prince—while her mother ruled Scotland on her behalf. To this new life, Mary had brought along her four best friends—think the world’s longest sleepover—every single one of whom also happened to be named Mary: Mary Fleming, Mary Seton, Mary Beaton, and Mary Livingston. The girls all had nicknames, to avoid confusion, but collectively they were known as “the Four Marys.” The particular Mary who’d just complained was Mary Fleming, whom everyone called Flem, for short. Flem was the one of the four who was most ruled by the dictates of her stomach.)

Speaking of stomachs, the queen realized she was a bit hungry. She’d only nibbled at breakfast.

“It’s getting rather hot,” said another Mary, this one Mary Livingston, also known as Liv.

All of a sudden Mary noticed that she was feeling overheated. The combination of the morning’s exertion and her heavy green velvet gown was causing her to sweat—oh, we mean glow, of course, since queens do not sweat.

“A shipment of lemons and oranges arrived from Spain yesterday,” noted Mary Beaton—nicknamed Bea. “Perhaps there’s lemonade.”

Mary did love lemonade.

The fourth lady, whom everyone called Hush, said nothing but appeared a bit parched and wilted and looked hopeful at the prospect of going inside.

“One more time,” Mary said.

But really she meant however many times it took until she got it perfect.

The next shot was an entire hand’s width from the bull’s-eye. Mary’s foot did a little shuffle forward that was definitely not a stamp. She twisted her amethyst ring around on her finger—a habit she had whenever something displeased or troubled her.

“Oh, look,” Bea said suddenly. “Here come your uncles.”

Mary turned, and yes, strolling in her direction across the courtyard were Francis de Guise and Charles de Lorraine.

She handed the bow off to Liv as everyone all did the appropriate bowing and curtsying.

“Ah, my dear,” said Uncle Charles, taking her hands and drawing her in to kiss her cheeks, his beard scratchy against her face. “How lovely you look. Did you know that the writer Jean de Beaugue recently described you as ‘one of the most perfect creatures that ever was seen’?”

“Yes, you’re always so exquisite,” added Uncle Francis (kiss, kiss). “And only yesterday I read what Jacques de Lorges wrote about you as being ‘so charming and intelligent as to give everyone who sees her incomparable joy and satisfaction.’ I was so very proud.”

(We, as your narrators, think this is a little much, but we get it: Mary was undeniably beautiful, with dark auburn hair that fell nearly to her waist, a fine complexion, and rich, expressive brown eyes. There was just something about Mary: a regal bearing, a grace and confidence that seemed well beyond her seventeen years. But to us, it seems like a lot of pressure.)

“Thank you,” Mary said humbly, because the best queens are humble.

Uncle Charles looked at the butt. “Are you still playing at archery? I’d have thought you would have given that up by now.”

Mary’s chin lifted. “I quite enjoy archery, I find.”

Uncle Francis went over and examined the butt. “Not quite hitting the bull’s-eye, though, are you?”

“I will,” Mary said steadily.

Uncle Charles smiled. “No doubt, my dear. You keep trying.”

“You’ve got to hold the bow steady,” advised Uncle Francis.

“Yes, I—”

“And stand up very straight, and have you tried closing one eye?”

“Yes, Uncle, I—”

“And you should exhale, right before you—”

“Yes, Uncle,” Mary said more firmly. “I know.”

Her uncles were the only people Mary knew who dared to interrupt her, but she allowed it. These two men were, in essence, her guardians. She knew they only cared for her welfare, even if they could be a bit overbearing at times. They were family.

“I’m so pleased to see you,” she said warmly. “But is there a particular reason you’ve come to visit me?” When she’d been younger they’d done monthly inspections of her rooms, her clothing, her companions and tutors, to make sure she was being brought up properly, but that had stopped more than a year ago. She liked to think that was because now they trusted her to use her own judgment of such things.

Uncle Charles looked grave. “We’ve had a letter from your mother.”

“She wrote to you?” Mary glanced quizzically at her lady Bea, who handled all of Mary’s correspondence with her mother. She’d received no recent letters. “What did she say?”

Uncles Charles reached into his doublet and pulled out a slightly damp fold of parchment bearing a royal seal on one side, and the handwriting of Mary’s mother on the other. He handed Mary the letter.

She took it and unfolded it right away, walking off a few paces while she read quickly. “She says there’s trouble.” Her brow furrowed. “Some malcontent named John Knox stirring up problems.”

“He’s a filthy E∂ian,” Uncle Charles muttered. Uncle Charles was a religious man, a cardinal in the Verity Church, which meant that he wore the red robes and the oblong red pointy hat, and also that, more than anything, he hated E∂ians.

“He means to instigate a full-out rebellion against your mother,” added Uncle Francis.

“Yes,” Mary murmured, continuing to read. “He claims that she is not the rightful monarch of Scotland.”

“No, he claims that you are not the rightful monarch of Scotland, being a woman,” said Uncle Francis. “And your mother, as regent, is even more of an abomination in his eyes.”

“He seeks to overthrow the power of the Verity Church in Scotland.” Uncle Charles looked grim. “Starting with you.”

“But—” This was just so frustrating, considering. “What’s to be done about it? He won’t succeed, will he? Is Mother in danger? Perhaps I should—”

Uncle Charles took her hand and patted it. “We’ll take care of it, my dear. We always do.”

Mary nodded. They always did.

“Yes,” said Uncle Francis almost gleefully. He was a military man, a general who had led many a battle in his time, and he relished any chance to use his strategical prowess. “We can handle Scotland.”

Mary was grateful for her uncles, even though she knew they could be a bit wicked in the pursuit of their goals. They were wicked, she knew, on her behalf. She probably would have lost her crown a hundred times by now if her de Guise relatives hadn’t been there to intervene for her. Still, it went against her better judgment, letting others take care of what Scotland needed. Part of Mary always felt that she should go back there and take care of it herself.

Otherwise it was like she was a queen in name only.

She twisted her amethyst ring.

“Now, don’t worry your pretty head about all of this dreary political nonsense,” said Uncle Charles. “Why don’t you come inside and read to us for a while? I simply love to hear the dulcet tones of your sweet voice.”

“Thank you, Uncle,” Mary said, er, sweetly. “But I’d like to stay out here and continue my practice.”

Both uncles frowned.

“But it’s so hot out,” said Uncle Francis.

“And it’s almost lunchtime,” Uncle Charles said.

“That’s right!” exclaimed Flem, and the other Marys murmured their agreement.

“Nevertheless,” said Mary. “I will stay.”

“Very well,” said Uncle Francis finally. “You should join us for supper, then. We’re dining with the king tonight.”

Mary inwardly groaned. She’d been looking forward to a quiet evening in with her ladies, doing embroidery by the fire, perhaps some knitting or shoe design if things got crazy. The last thing she wanted was to be stuck at a stuffy dinner with her uncles and the king. Of course, Francis (her fiancé Francis, we mean) would undoubtedly be there too, which would make it all more bearable, as the two of them always came up with amusing things to do to pass the time.

“You must come,” Uncle Francis said. “We insist.”

All four of the Four Marys caught their breaths.

Mary smiled tightly. She never did like to be told she must anything.

“I’ll consider it,” she said softly.

After her uncles retreated into the palace, Mary picked up her bow once more. She swept her hair over one shoulder, adjusted her stance, drew, and let loose.

The arrow struck the bull’s-eye hard, burying itself deep into the straw at the exact center.

Mary handed the bow to Liv.

“Now can we have lunch?” asked Flem in relief.

“Yes.”

They moved toward the palace, the Four Marys flanking her on every side.

Mary was frowning.

“You’re worried about your mother,” Liv said.

“Of course.” She was always worried about her mother these days. Things were heating up between the E∂ians and the Verities everywhere, but especially, it seemed, in Scotland.

“Would you like to draft a letter for me to take to her?” asked Bea.

“Yes. Not tonight, though,” Mary said. “I want some time to think about what I should say.”

“Do we really have to go to dinner with the king?” whispered Hush.

“The food will be good,” said Flem cheerfully. That was true. The king did like to eat.

“Yes, but the king and the uncles together are quite insufferable,” said Mary. “They can’t seem to stop congratulating themselves on being the masters of the universe.”

“But they insisted that you attend,” said Bea.

Mary’s lips pursed. “They can insist as much as they like. I am not theirs to order about. I am the queen of Scotland.”

Sometimes it was good to be queen.

“We could use a girls’ night out,” Liv said lightly.

All five Marys stopped and looked at each other.

“Oh, let’s!” Flem clapped her hands.

“You mean a boys’ night out,” said Bea, tucking a strand of her black hair behind her ear and smiling slyly.

“It’s been ages,” said Liv.

“I like the music,” murmured Hush.

Mary smiled. A night on the town sounded like just the remedy to her worries. “All right,” she agreed. “Let’s.”

“I want to be the one to wear the false mustache!” Flem exclaimed a few hours later, as the queen and the Four Marys put the finishing touches on their disguises.

“You got to wear it last time,” argued Bea.

“I don’t want to wear it,” said Hush softly. “It itches.”

It was decided that Flem would wear it, because she really, really wanted to, and besides, she looked so funny wearing a mustache that they all couldn’t help but giggle at the sight. Flem was the shortest and stoutest of the ladies, with curly chestnut-colored hair and wide brown eyes.

“Well, gentlemen,” Mary said as they donned their feathered hats. “We make a fine company of men.”

Liv had been right—it felt like ages since they’d played this game, in which they dressed up as boys and sneaked into the city to their favorite tavern. They always had a merry time chatting with the townsfolk, drinking ale, and dancing to the lively music, a much better time in general than they did at the palace’s most lavish parties.

And even though Mary’s bosom was wrapped up tight in layers of cloth to flatten her curves, as they helped each other climb over the garden wall, she felt like she could finally breathe.

Tonight, she’d push her worries for Scotland and her mother from her mind.

And for just a few hours, she’d forget she was a queen.

There’s something about lounging in a bath of blood that makes me want to stay until my fingers shrivel enough to show the outlines of my bones.

My toes peek out of thick ruby ripples. Slick drops slide off my fingers and splash with an echo in the tub like spicy pumpkin pone batter dripping off a mixing spoon.

“Sorry to stop you waxing poetic, but you need to get out of the tub.” My cousin Keis slouches against the doorframe of our bathroom. The toilet is so close to the bathtub that you have to prop your feet on the ledge when you pee.

She blows a breath out of her nose and crosses her arms. The powder-blue robe she’s wearing is embroidered with a K for Keisha. Our oldest cousin, Alex, made one for everyone in the family last Christmas. My canary-yellow robe with a V for Voya is hanging up in my room.

“Don’t call me Keisha, even in your head,” she says, casually reading the thought off the top of my mind.

Sorry. Even a year after Keis got her mind-reading gift, I still sometimes forget that she has it.

Granny used to say that Keishas were bad. To fry Granny’s battery, Auntie Maise gave the name to both her twin girls. Keis, as she insists on being called, is pronounced “KAY-ss,” like something you put glasses into instead of the more natural “KEY-shh,” which also sounds like a delicious egg-and-spinach tart. I figure this is a way for my cousin to differentiate herself even more from her sister, who she’s clashed with since birth on account of their shared name.

My cousin clenches her jaw. “Keisha is annoying and obsessed with her feed and dating. That’s why we clash. Taking those pictures with her ass stuck out like she’s some sort of NuMoney tagalong. For what? So some stranger can give her a five-star rating?”

I like Keisha’s feed. She makes living outside the downtown core look glamorous, and I find her open sexuality kind of rebel feminist. It is a lot of boobs and butt, but at least she’s proud of it?

Keis pulls off her headscarf, and curly ringlets bounce out of its hold. The roots are a black 1B and the ends blond 14/88A. I bought the sew-in wig online for her birthday. Yolanda, it’s called. It looks real for fake.

Keis opens her mouth.

Not fake, sorry. It’s real hair, but it’s not yours.

Having someone inside your head constantly is an experience. By now, I’m used to it. Sometimes it makes things easier because I have a best friend who can comfort me about something I feel shitty about before I even tell her. And sometimes it makes things harder, like when I feel shitty because I know I’ll never be as smart or strong or talented as Keis, and I have to see her face shift as she pretends she hasn’t heard the thought.

I press the small button on the bath keypad. It’s embedded, crooked (thanks, Uncle Cathius), in the white tiles lining the tub. The steam icon lights up neon green, and the installed jets feed heat into the blood bath. I shiver as the warmth hits me.

Every minute I spend here is another I don’t have to pass downstairs. I should be enjoying this time, not spending it dreading what comes next.

Keis’s lip curls. “Don’t tell me you turned the heat on.”

Okay, I won’t. I hug my legs to my chest. “Why do I need to get out right now?”

My cousin sags against the door. “I checked on your food, as you bossily messaged me to, an hour ago. It’s been ready. We want to eat, but Granny won’t let us touch anything until you come down. It’s a special dinner to celebrate your Bleeding, after all.”

I don’t know if non-magic girls get excited about puberty, but it’s a big deal in the witch community. At fourteen and fifteen, I was disappointed when nothing happened, but not everyone can be an early bloomer. Or an early-late bloomer, given that witches tend to get their periods later. But I always felt like sixteen would be my time. Every day since my sixteenth birthday a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been in a constant state of anticipation, waiting for the moment that finally happened a few hours ago.

I was in the living room, packaging our beauty supplies with Mom and Granny. It started as a sort of uncomfortable wetness in my underwear. Which, let’s be honest, happens sometimes. I already had two weeks of getting my hopes up over false alarms, so I wasn’t going to be quick to jump to conclusions. Until that feeling expanded to the point where I thought I, a sixteen-year-old girl with a typically functioning bladder, had wet myself. Which, in hindsight, is so embarrassing a thought that I’m glad I didn’t say it aloud. And I’m doubly glad that Keis wasn’t around to hear it. But when I stood up to go to the bathroom and check things out, there was a single trickle of blood that dripped down my loose pajama shorts.

Sometimes, the things that change your life are physically small and mentally enormous. Like that little crimson droplet sliding down my bare leg.

I screamed with excitement.

Mom screamed with pride.

Granny screamed for me to get off the rug before I stained it.

I borrowed a pad from Mom so I could slow the bleeding while I rushed around the kitchen trying to get my own Calling dinner in the oven before finally getting into the bath more than an hour later to properly celebrate. I hadn’t moved for another couple of hours since.

My Bleeding isn’t just a witch’s typical massive overproduction of body fluids brought on by the perfect unexplainable mix of genetic predispositions, hormones, and magic, meant to represent the blood of our ancestors. It’s also the first step in my Coming-of-Age, of the challenge of becoming a witch.

Which was really hacking exciting until I remembered that I could fail and not inherit magic at all. Now my Bleeding is the only bright spot in this situation. An irony that I haven’t missed.

The more Keis pushes, the more I want to stay in the tub. Once I step out, the rest of my Coming-of-Age will start. There won’t be any turning back or slowing down.

“I’m naked,” I whine.

“Wow! I didn’t notice.”

Keis is kind of mean. No, not kind of. She is. The closer you are to her, the worse she gets. I’ve known her since birth and therefore get an equal amount of love and vitriol.

I’m sure it’s because Uncle Vacu did her birthing, and he’s got a strong negative energy. Not because of the Mod-H addiction. He’s just an asshole. Maybe because he’s the oldest. But technically, he did all our births. It’s a miracle someone like him could have a daughter as caring and loyal as our cousin Alex. If proper genetic sequencing was around when Uncle was born, it would have shown a vulnerability to addiction and low impulse control. Employers wouldn’t have been able to stop him from being a doctor, and they shouldn’t—I mean, the human rights concerns would be all over the place—but for his own safety, none would have given him clearance to handle addictive drugs.

Not that we could ever afford detailed medical data like that. Applying for a job would be the only way he could have found out. Even if they did have the technology for it then, they wouldn’t have given him the sequence data. They give you enough genetic info to keep you alive. Why offer more for free when NuGene can charge you a premium instead?

I sink deeper into the bath so only my eyes are visible—two dark, almost-black irises peeking out. The blood glides against my lips like our Thomas Brand lip butter.

I look up at Keis’s unamused expression and say, “Remember when NuGene used to be a dinky start-up white people used to find out how many different types of white they were?”

She cracks a smile and lifts her chin to the ceiling. “I’m four percent Italian, six percent British, two percent Irish, and eighty-eight percent Canadian.”

I snort.

“And that sequencing is yours for a budget price,” Keis drawls.

The “budget price” works out to a month’s mortgage for a fancy downtown condo. And that’s just for basic DNA data. What they charge for genetic manipulation makes my stomach clench.

“Is she still in the tub?” Mom screeches from down the hall.

Hack me.

Mom rips the door open and barrels past Keis into the room. She’s got her hair cornrowed and tucked away under a wig cap. The braids peek through the skin-color nylon. Not the ebony of our skin, but a light, almost-pink beige. Wig caps our skin color exist but somehow never come for free in the package.

I don’t get any privacy here. According to Granny, our ancestors are always listening. Meaning that my family has a long history of being nosy. It’s hard to imagine Mama Orimo, who died sneaking fellow slaves from the scorching sugarcane fields of Louisiana to chilled freedom in Ontario, would spend her afterlife spying on us. Our family lives in secret among people who don’t believe in anything without genetic proof, much less magic. Watching us would bore the hell out of her.

Mom tightens the drawstring on her pale green nightgown and stares down at me with a weary smile. “Congratulations on your Bleeding. This is a beautiful moment. You’re transforming into a fledlging witch. But I’ll be damned if I let you spend the entire night soaking in blood.”

“Isn’t that part of it?” I ask. For a girl, Bleedings mean you have a long, luxurious bath, and the blood strangely makes your skin extra soft, and then everyone in your family has a special dinner together to celebrate you. Like an extra birthday.

The male equivalent is a lot less exciting. When I asked Dad about his, he shrugged it off as more of an inconvenience. He got the same inexplicable volume of blood everyone does, but if you don’t have a period, it has to come from everywhere else: eyes, nose, mouth, and he said with a cough, “private areas.” He just showered it off without bothering to make the moment special like most guys do.

Showered, like it’s nothing!

Everyone else picks whatever sort of celebration, if any, feels right to them.

“Yes, your bath is a part of it,” Mom says, plopping a hand on her hip. “And no, you can’t stay in there forever just because. It’s time to move on and get ready for tomorrow.”

My chest tightens, and I tug my arms around my knees, tucking my whole body into something smaller as if that’ll help me avoid Mom’s attention. The Bleeding is just the first step of a witch’s Coming-of-Age. Tomorrow I’ll have to face my Calling. One of my ancestors will appear before me and give me a task that I need to complete to come into my magic and get my gift. Any witch can shed blood and do a little spell. A gift is different. It’s unique to each of us, written in the way our genetic code shifts after passing the Calling.

Mom narrows her eyes. “I’m not asking again. Get out of the tub.” She doesn’t raise her voice, but she does use a mini utility blade to slice her thumb, then casts a quick spell with the blood dripping from her cut. Suddenly, the blood I’m sitting in turns frigid. My bath thickens and clumps in a way that makes the homemade Dutch fries and curry sauce I had at lunch rush up my throat.

She points at the tub and swirls her index finger. In response, the bath liquid imitates the motion, and clots the size of tennis balls graze against my legs. I slap my hands over my mouth as pre-vomit churns in my stomach.

She throws her whole arm forward, and the blood and clots get sucked down the drain in one massive wave. The aftereffects of her magic pull against the hair on my body like static cling.

What’s left is me sitting naked in an empty bathtub so dried up inside that I’m sure I’ll never have another period again.

Keis rolls her eyes at me.

Mom’s chest heaves as she lets out a few short, panting breaths. Only she would overstretch her magic bandwidth for drama.

My cousin grabs my towel from the chrome rack on the back of the door and throws it at me. Not that there’s any point in using it since Mom’s spell cleaned the blood off my body.

As I stand and wrap the towel around myself, Mom stabs a finger at me. “You need to get out of your head. This isn’t just a celebration of your menses! It’s the first part of your Coming-of-Age. Your Amplifying ceremony to trigger your Calling is tomorrow night! Get serious.”

Mom is bringing up the exact thoughts that I want to avoid. Now that I’ve had my Bleeding, the ancestors could theoretically Call on me anywhere they want at any time—on the toilet, while I’m doing a product delivery, in the middle of cooking dinner—to have me perform a task of worthiness so they can decide whether or not to bless me with magic.

Which is exactly why everyone is going to be doing an Amplifying ceremony tomorrow. It’s supposed to force my Calling to happen when we decide so I can do my task in a more ideal environment and have a better chance of passing. Plus, having my whole family around will give me a bit of a boost from their magic, which might impress whatever ancestor is conducting my Calling enough for them to give me a stronger gift. If we didn’t do it, I would still have a Calling, but at least this way I wouldn’t have to look my ancestor in the eye and do a task while I’m reaching for toilet paper or something equally mortifying.

Most ancestors won’t Call the same day as your Bleeding, but either way, the countdown to tomorrow has started. In twenty-four hours, I’ll know whether I’ll get to be a witch or . . . not.

I wish I could shrink back into the bathwater.

“Bath blood. Just because it’s in your head, doesn’t mean you can’t at least try to get things right,” Keis says.

I said she was mean. Didn’t I say that?

The mirror flickers when I step in front of it before coming on fully—it’s an older model Mom got on sale. My skin has the smoothness the blood bath promised, but it’s still dry. I pump our Thomas Brand all-in-one face serum and moisturizer into my hands and slather it over my skin, including the freckles spread like sprinkles across my nose and cheeks, just light enough to be seen against my hickory brown complexion.

The reflective surface of the mirror shifts to show the top stories from my feed once my hijacker chip connects. An alert of a new rating comes up. I tap on it and get a small image of a guy who looks Dad’s age, and the rating he gave me at the streetcar stop near our house.

Four stars from Bernard Holbrook.

Beautiful young girl. Could smile more.

Mom stabs her finger on his profile picture. It smudges the mirror. “I’m gonna report this guy. Look at how old he is! What’s he doing sending creepy ratings?” She selects the report button next to his profile. Her eyes continue to rove over his photo, likely looking for a witch mark—the telltale dot within an almond-shaped oval inside a round circle that our kind hide in online profiles, résumés, storefronts, and more so we can recognize our people.

There’s no mark on this guy’s page.

Mom crosses her arms and shakes her head at the mirror as if it’ll relay her disgust to Bernard and fluffs a bit of my hair. “I know this is scary, and you have trouble with choices sometimes, but your Calling is happening tomorrow whether you’re ready or not. It’s important you pass. And I know you will. But just . . .”

Try harder? Do better? Be better?

“Get dressed,” Mom commands, giving up on whatever she planned to say before. “I pulled the dinner you made out of the oven. You’re welcome.”

“Thanks.” It starts as a mumble, but I know Mom hates mumbling, so I force my voice into something normal.

She points at Keis. “Please help her pick out a white dress for dinner. Cathius loves that virginal trash, and he’ll be difficult about participating in the Amplifying ceremony if he doesn’t feel catered to.”

Keis quirks a smile. “Yes, Auntie.”

With that, Mom leaves the room. I slather on a leave-in before grabbing a jar of coconut oil from under the sink and scooping up the white cream. It melts from the warmth as I rub my hands together and massage it under my thick curls into my now desert-dry scalp.

Usually when I wash my hair, there’s a routine of pre-conditioners, natural shampoos, leave-in conditioners, Thomas Curling Custard, gels, and heatless curling rods, but I’ve spent too much time in the bath to do all that. Everyone else can do their hair at four times the speed I can with magic. Eden and I are the only ones who can’t. Not until after we pass our Calling.

I twist my lips into a scowl. “I guess I have to find an uncle-approved white dress.” Or rather, Keis is supposed to help me find one, since according to my mom, I “have trouble with choices,” which apparently also includes decisions at the monumental level of clothing options.

“She didn’t mean it like that,” Keis says. “You know Dad won’t like anything you pick. It would be an annoying choice for anyone.”

Uncle is a frequent stain on the apron that is my life, but there’s no way to leave anyone out of this ceremony. More blood means more power, and everyone is hoping I have a strong gift. The adults use their gifts for income, and pooling our money is how we can all stay together in this house. When Granny and Grandad were young and less established, they got loans against the value of it to help start our family, but the payments and interest grew until managing it was just as expensive as creating a mortgage for our technically mortgage-free home.

Living in Toronto isn’t cheap, and we’re only managing to break even while other witch families thrive. Our homemade beauty products appeal to the types who want non-modded handmade products, but modded beauty supplies are more popular by far, and we sure as hell can’t afford genetically modified ingredients. That’s the thing about modded stuff. Some of it is cheap as hell and costs much less than something non-modded, and some of it is so hacking expensive you could never hope to afford it. Which means that most of our customers are witches and a small amount of non-magic families who know our powers are real and our products are the best, even without mods.

If we had money, real money, we could rub elbows with the sorts of people who hire for the exclusive and frequently illusive internships or can afford the expensive university education reserved for company-funded and rich kids.

Sure, we all went through the government-mandated minimums. Got our elementary school credits with Johan, whose witch school was accredited and able to give them. And then we got our minimum high school credits, which was really only two years of work, half online and half in person. I just finished mine a little while ago.

Keis is the only one of us who takes classes beyond the minimum, and that’s solely in defiance of being pigeonholed into using her gift to make a living. She still goes to high school to get extra credits, mostly online but sometimes in person, with the same stubbornness that drives her refusal to use or hone what should be a strong gift to get ahead in life.

She scowls at that thought.

“You’re doing amazing for someone fueled by spite. Your grades are higher than any of us have ever gotten.” For real. She does at least a dozen courses every year and aces them. Sometimes, I’m sure she has a bigger ambition, something she’s trying to achieve, but she pretends like it’s 100 percent to piss off the family.

“It’s not spite, it’s a protest of this family’s insistence that your worth is determined by your gift.” She gnaws on her lip. “Not that it matters if I can’t do anything with my education. I have no connections for the sort of internships that send you to university and no money to go on my own.”

She’s echoing everything her parents and the rest of the adults have said before. High school credits are well and good, but if you can’t get an internship at a good company, the amount of high-paying jobs available drops way down. Not to mention, the chance to go to university is basically zero. We could never afford it. Keis would need to find a company willing to pay for her to go. The barrier between having and not having a legitimate internship has always been too high for the rest of us to bother. It’s why we rely on magic. But Keis is different.

“You need to put yourself out there.” I don’t get why someone with the potential of a gift like she has wouldn’t want to use it, but I support her. “There are a ton of internship Q&As out there. I’ll help you find stuff.” I scroll through my phone and sign up for notifications from places I know have great placements.

My cousin raises her eyebrows. “Why can’t you do that for you?”

“Do what?”

“Find courses and internships. Create a backup. Stop being so worried about your gift and focus on something you can choose.”

“Because I’m so great at choosing.” My mom wasn’t wrong. I’ll do anything to help my family, but I’ve always been terrible at making decisions for myself.

“Vo.”

“And do what? Fight with hundreds of applicants to get a minimum-wage internship that goes nowhere? I could never land something with a good company.” I don’t know why she hits me with spam like that. If you’re not good enough to get into a major corporation, you’re wasting your time.

A strong gift is all I have to hope for. It’s the special sauce we witches have to turn plain potatoes into gourmet mash. And right now, mine aren’t anything more than dirt-covered russet.

I glance at Keis. “Nothing to say about that?”

She crosses her arms. “You don’t need me to pump you up. Your Calling will be fine, and you’ll end up with a great gift.”

Doubtful.

Sam let the first door chime go unanswered, occupied as she was with the stack of delicate books cradled in her arms. The second chime earned a grunt of displeasure from her as she scanned the shelves for the first edition of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding she had repaired last week. She spotted it, tucked safely between Kant and Machiavelli. The third chime rang so insistently that she tipped the book forward too hard and it dropped to the floor with an ominous crack.

“Oh dear,” she said, crouching down to retrieve the book. “Mr. Locke, I apologize. And I swear to you if it’s the butcher’s boys again, I will take the broad side of his cleaver to their rear ends myself.”

The spine appeared unmarred, which was more than Sam could say for her disposition as she stacked the book on top of the others and jostled to a standing position. She tottered to the front of the shop and set them down on the desk. In the window stood the rounded figure of Clement’s postman, his face pressed to the glass and obscuring the gold lettering across the door. She checked off each book on her inventory list, letting him freeze in the early January snows of rural Illinois, before crossing to the door and unlocking it. A blast of cold drove it open like an unwanted guest.

“Yes, Georgie, what is it you need?” she asked, shivering back from the chill.

“Got your mail,” Georgie huffed, bustling past her to drop his sack on the desk. He trod in drifts of snow across her pristine carpet and she swept the more offensive piles back out the door as she swung it shut.

“That’s why I had the package drop put in, Georgie,” Sam said.

“So you can leave them in a protected box without them getting soaked by the melting snow you’re tracking in.”

“It’s colder than a brass toilet seat in the arctic out there,” Georgie replied, leaning against his mailbag like he planned to stay. He peered into the stacks behind Sam. “It’s toasty in here, though. Must be nice for you, being tucked up in this place all day.”

“We keep the temperature stable for the books,” Sam said, her patient tone fraying at the edges. She had plenty to do before her long walk home in that same snow, and she couldn’t do it as long as Georgie was here chewing the cud. “Extreme heat and cold damage the leather. You said you had my mail?”

“Oh, sure.” Georgie ducked his head into the thick canvas sack. “Couple of these are too big, wouldn’t fit through the slot.”

Sam was sure his bell ringing had far more to do with the warm interior of the shop than with any oversize packages, but it was too late for that. Here he was already, invading her space and upending the careful equilibrium she maintained. He didn’t care that there was the rest of the inventory list to get to, plus the packages to prepare and send to Mr. Peltingham in London and Mr. Burnham in Oslo, never mind the repairs to the copy of Medieval Remedies for Cistercian Monks they had received at the shop last week. She didn’t have time for Georgie Heath and the trail of muddy snow he dragged everywhere.

He pulled a small collection of boxes from his sack—none of them, as Sam suspected, too large for the mail slot—with an exotic array of stamps across the front. Sam’s heart rate picked up when she spotted Mr. Studen’s scrawled handwriting. He always had the best finds in Paris. She grabbed her letter opener and sliced through the thick paper.

“Books,” Georgie said, in the same tone his father used when talking about the neighbor’s marauding hogs. “Always books, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Sam said with a happy little sigh, extracting Mr. Studen’s letter along with his latest find. “We are a bookshop, Georgie.”

Oh, clever Mr. Studen. She smiled at the first few lines of introduction, a jumble of letters and pictographic marks. He’d sent her another cryptogram, with a small note dashed at the top that read I’m sure to stump you this time.

He wasn’t, but she appreciated the challenge.

Georgie gave a snort. “I don’t know what we need with a bookshop here in Clement, anyhow. We’ve already got a library.”

“A collection of old family bibles does not count as a library,” Sam said, reaching for a pencil and paper. It looked to be a straightforward monoalphabetic cipher despite the distraction of the pictographic marks, but she didn’t want to underestimate Mr. Studen so quickly.

Georgie shrugged. “I was happy enough to give that stuff up the second I walked out of Mrs. Iris’s schoolroom for good.”

“Madame Iris,” Sam corrected.

“Madame,” Georgie said in a gross mockery of the French madame’s accent. “Pa says a book is only good for propping open a door or knocking a fella out.”

“Well I would expect no less from the man who led a town-wide protest when Mr. Steeling hired a Frenchwoman to teach at the schoolhouse,” Sam murmured, making a list of the most frequent letter appearances and the most common letter groupings in the cipher. Georgie craned his neck around, squinting at Mr. Studen’s neat handwriting.

“What is that?” he asked. “Some kind of gibberish?”

“It’s a cipher,” Sam said. “A code. It’s meant to keep a message hidden.”

The last word she said pointedly, looking up at the intrusion of his person on her space. If Georgie noticed her intention—which Sam was positive he did not—he didn’t do anything to resolve it. Instead he scooted in closer, wrinkling up his nose like his father’s prize hog.

“Well, how do you know what it says?” Georgie asked.

“You need a key,” Sam murmured, writing out a few attempts at the letters she thought she might have deduced.

“Do you have the key?”

“No.”

“Well then how do you know what it says?”

Sam let out a sigh. “I don’t, Georgie. Not yet. I have to decrypt it, which would be much easier to do without so much distracting chatter.”

Georgie rocked back. “I get it, this is like those things you and Jo and Bennett used to do, out at the Manor, right? Those treasure hunts you’d make up.”

“We didn’t make them up, Mr. Steeling did,” Sam said, setting down her pencil and folding the letter closed along with her deciphering attempts, away from Georgie’s prying eyes. “And I haven’t done those in years, not since we were children.”

Georgie shrugged. “Maybe you and Joana can put one up now that she’s in Clement again.”

Sam drew back. “Jo’s in town?”

“Yeah, didn’t you know it? I figured she would have come to see you straightaway. You were the only one she ever bothered with. Maybe she’s too good for you now, too, after being at that fancy academy in Chicago.”

Joana Steeling was back in Clement and she hadn’t come to see Sam. So, she was still mad about the fight. Sam had tried so many times to explain why she couldn’t go to the academy with Joana—first in person, and after Joana left, through half-finished letters—but Joana couldn’t understand. It was so easy for her, the heiress of the Steeling fortune, to spend late nights in shady speakeasies flirting with the boys, getting into and out of trouble. But Sam could never live like that. Most likely Joana had found her people at Marquart Academy. It didn’t surprise her that Joana had moved on, but it did surprise her how much it hurt hearing about it from Georgie Heath.

“If you see Jo, tell her we’re out at the old barn most nights, me and Pete and the gang,” Georgie said, oblivious to Sam’s discomfort. “They might have those swanky speakeasies up in Chicago, but nobody’s calling the G-men on us. We do what we want, all night if we want it.”

“Sounds a dream,” Sam said tiredly. “But I’ve got work to do, if there’s nothing else.”

“Oh, right, got your newspaper here,” he said, ducking back into the bag and pulling out a copy of the Chicago Daily News. Sam’s attention snagged on a small headline tucked into the right corner of the front page: TUT OPERATIONS RESUMED.

“The curse of the mummy has been lifted,” she murmured, leaning closer to read the rest of the article.

“Are they still writing about that thing?” Georgie asked, glancing at the paper. “The grave or whatever?”

“Yes, they’re still writing about the tomb of Tutankhamen,” Sam said dryly. “It’s the greatest archaeological discovery of our time.”

Georgie waved her off. “I don’t see any point in all that old stuff, who cares? They’re all dead anyway.”

Sam had no intention of explaining the historical significance of Howard Carter’s recent discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. No one in Clement would understand, except her boss, Mr. Steeling. He shared Sam’s fascination with all things ancient and lost. He spent much of his time traveling overseas to exotic places like Greece to join archaeological excavations. Places she would only ever read about in the Daily News. She snapped the paper closed and placed it on the desk, looking at Georgie expectantly.

“Well, I suppose that’s all,” Georgie said, gazing forlornly out at the brutal white of the main street of Clement.

“Yes, well, enjoy your evening in the barn with the other boys,” Sam said, picking up his sack and putting it on his shoulder, using the movement to push the rest of him toward the front door. They both squinted against the cold wind that burst through the opening.

“All right, all right, I’m off,” Georgie said, the winter wind turning him chapped and irritable again. “You tell Jo—”

“Will do, thank you, Georgie,” Sam said, swinging the door shut and throwing the dead bolt.

She took a deep, cleansing breath of the temperature-controlled interior of the store, the soft scent of the oiled leather covers restoring her sense of self, before turning her attention to the stack of recent arrivals. Her eagerness to discover new friends outweighed her obligation to the packaging list or the pang in her gut about Joana returning home and not coming to see her.

She had just begun to sort the packages when a smaller one slipped out from the press of the others, the paper soiled and the corner torn away. It looked as if it had been through a monsoon, the writing so faded it was a wonder Georgie had known where to deliver it at all. And judging by the various interpretations of the address scribbled across the front, she wasn’t sure the bookshop had been the package’s first delivery attempt. How long had it been in the system, knocked from one place to the other, before it got to her? There was no return address. She held it up, a small puff of dry earth sifting onto the desk.

“What a terrible journey you’ve been through,” she tutted. “Let’s get you fixed up.”

She carried the package to the repair room in the back. The work lamp there glowing a bluish white. A humidifier hummed beside it, giving the occasional ping in the relative silence. She sat at the worktable and opened the package. A little avalanche of dust and desiccated plant parts came sliding out along with the enclosed item.

The book was small, barely larger than her hand, the cover in such disrepair that Sam feared it would disintegrate if she so much as gave it a stern look. She had seen plenty of books in a variety of conditions since she started working at Steeling’s Rare Antiquities, but this had to be the worst state of deterioration she’d ever witnessed. It looked as if the book had been buried in someone’s back field and dug up by a stray goat.

“Who would do such a thing to you?” she wondered, her chest aching at the violence the book had encountered on its journey. “Well, whatever ills have befallen you, you’re safe here now.”

There was nothing in the package to indicate where it had come from, no letter of provenance or introduction from a buyer explaining what the book was or why they had sent it. The mystery of it had her pulling out her tools, for the moment abandoning the other new arrivals. She took her brush and went to work, tilting it up to sweep softly along the outside edges, collecting a tidy pile of earth and sediment.

Already she knew it would need a rest in the humidifier to loosen up the pages and hopefully restore the faded writing within. Once she had sufficiently cleaned the outside, she began her preliminary inspection of the interior. The pages were so waterlogged she could hardly pry them apart, but with the aid of a scalpel and a level of patience bordering on stubbornness, she managed to loosen one enough to pull it open.

The writing was, as she suspected, faded and illegible in many places, but that wasn’t what drew her attention to the book. It was the hasty sketch of a cat on the open page, the graphite strokes thick and dark and tearing through the paper in some places. She could even see smudges where the lead must have broken. Whoever drew this cat must have had very strong feelings about it.

Except that, the longer she stared at the image, the less it actually looked like a cat. At least, not like any ordinary house cat. The proportions were all wrong—the ears too sharp and pointed, almost like horns; the jaw too long and narrow, more fitted to a dog. And then there were the eyes. They were nothing more than blank page, but the longer she stared, the more they seemed to burn, two desolate holes radiating a promise of danger. Awareness prickled down her legs and across her arms, as if a wayward slip of icy January wind had found its way into the shop. But it wasn’t the wind. It was the way the cat kept staring, even when she slid the book aside. Those sightless eyes were on her, always on her, and in a fit of fear she slammed the cover shut.

“Don’t be such a fool,” Sam muttered, though she made no attempt to open it again. “It’s only an old book. What’s the harm?”

Georgie was putting her on. He must be. This was exactly the kind of prank he and Pete and the other boys would pull back in Madame Iris’s schoolroom. Leaving notes with rude poems, knowing she would mistake them for clues to a new treasure hunt at Steeling Manor, the hunts Mr. Steeling created for his children and Sam. They must be bored to tears after the last snowstorm, getting pickled out there in his father’s barn every night. They were probably watching through the front window, waiting to see her come tearing out of there screaming.

But there was nothing at the door save the whistle of the winter wind and the last rays of a dying sun. The darkness looming outside made the malevolence emanating from the book so much worse, and Sam was acutely aware of how alone she was just then. She hovered in the doorway of the workroom, not wanting to come any closer to the odd little book.

“What are you?” she whispered.

But whatever secrets the book had, it held them as tightly as the dust wedged into its pages. Sam chewed at one corner of her lip, weighing her options. She could try to chase down Georgie, force the book back on him, and make him deliver it out to Steeling Manor. But the shop was the last stop on his route; he was probably halfway back to the barn by now, and halfway into a flask of his awful bathtub gin. The boy could be surprisingly agile when getting away from work. She could leave it until the next time Mr. Steeling came by to check on the new arrivals, but that could be weeks from now and Sam didn’t want it hanging around.

No, there was nothing for it. She would have to deliver it to Steeling Manor herself. Which meant facing her fears, and potentially her former best friend.

“Oh, Sammy girl, what have you gotten yourself into?” she sighed, tucking the book into her satchel and pulling the strap across her chest like a battle shield.

The trees have to be tied down by sunset. When the Woodsmen come, they always try to run.

The girls who are skilled forgers fashion little iron stakes to drive through the roots of the trees and into the earth, anchoring them in place. With no gift for forging between the two of us, Boróka and I haul a great length of rope, snaring any trees we pass in clumsy loops and awkward knots. When we finish, it looks the spider web of some giant creature, something the woods might cough up. The thought doesn’t even make me shiver. Nothing that might break through the tree line could be worse than the Woodsmen.

“Who do you think it will be?” Boróka asks. The light of the setting sun filters through the patchy cathedral of tree cover, dappling her face. Tears are pearled in the corners of her eyes.

“Virág,” I say. “With any luck.”

Boróka’s mouth twists.

“Though I suspect halfway through their journey the Woodsmen will tire of her babbling about weather omens and dump her in the Black Lake.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Of course I don’t. I wouldn’t wish the Woodsmen on anyone, no matter how much they lashed me, how meanly they chided me, or how many hours I spent scraping their cold gulyás out of yesterday’s pots. But it’s easier to loathe Virág than to worry I might lose her.

The wind picks up, carrying the voices of the other girls toward us, as silvery as the bone chimes hanging outside of Virág’s hut. They sing to make their forging gift stronger, the way the great hero Vilmötten did, when he crafted the sword of the gods. As their song falters, so does their steel. Almost unconsciously I move toward them, bow and arrow shifting on my back. Instead of listening to their words, I look at their hands.

They rub their palms together, gently at first, and then with greater ferocity, as if they might scour their skin right off. By the time the song is done, each girl is gripping a small iron stake, as slick and sturdy as any that might come off a blacksmith’s blazing forge. Boróka notices me watching—notices the look of jilted longing she’s seen on my face a hundred times before.

“Ignore them,” Boróka whispers.

It’s easy for her to say. If Isten, the father-god, cast his smiling face down on the woods right now, he would see a mottled rainbow of gray and tawny smeared against the green bramble. Their wolf cloaks gleam even in the ebbing sunlight, the individual hairs turned almost translucent. The teeth of the dead animals, still fully intact, form an arc over each girl’s head, as if the animal were about to eat her. Boróka’s wolf cloak is a bleached ochre—a healer’s color.

But when Isten saw me, all he would see is a cloak of plain wool, thin and patched with my own lazy threadwork. I can always feel the humiliating weight of it, clothed in my own inferiority. I turn to Boróka to reply, but then I hear a hushed giggle behind me, and the smell of something burning fills my nose.

I whirl around, my hair trailing blue fire. Biting back a yelp, my impotent hands fly up to try to smother the flame. It’s all they want from me, that wild-eyed panic, and they get it. The fire is out before I know it, but my throat is burning as I march toward Katalin and her lackeys.

“I’m terribly sorry, Évike,” Katalin says. “The skill of fire-making is hard to master. My hand must have slipped.”

“What a pity that you find such a simple skill so difficult to perform,” I snap.

My comment only earns another chorus of laughs. Katalin’s hood is pulled up over her head, the wolf’s mouth twisted into an ugly snarl, eyes glassy and blind. Her cloak is precisely the same color as her hair, white as a carp’s belly, or, if I’m charitable, the winter’s first snow. It’s a seer’s color.

I want to tear her pristine cloak off her back and make her watch as I drag it through the muddy riverbed. A small, mute part of me wants to hang it over my own shoulders, but I know I would only feel like a fraud.

“Perhaps I do,” Katalin says with a shrug. “Or perhaps I can have another girl make my fires for me, when I am the village táltos.”

“Virág isn’t dead yet.”

“Of course it won’t be you, Évike,” she presses on, ignoring me. “It will have to be someone who can light more than a spark.”

“Or heal more than a splinter,” Írisz, one of her preening wolf pack, speaks up.

“Or forge a sewing needle,” Zsófia, the other one, adds.

“Leave her alone,” Boróka says. “None of you should be so cruel, especially on a Woodsman day.”

In truth they’re no crueler than usual. And, of course, they’re right. But I would never give them the satisfaction of admitting it, or of even flinching when they enumerate my failures.

“Évike doesn’t have to worry on a Woodsman day, does she?” Katalin’s smile is white and gloating, a perfect mirror of her wolf’s. “The Woodsmen only take the girls with magic. It’s a shame none of her mother’s skills are in her blood, or else we might be rid of her for good.”

The word mother burns worse than blue flame. “Keep your mouth shut.”

Katalin smiles. At least, her mouth does.

If I think hard about it, I can almost feel sorry for her. After all, her white cloak is given, not earned—and I know how ugly a seer’s duties can be. But I don’t care to show her the sort of pity she’s never shown me.

Boróka lays a hand on my arm. Her grip is reassuring— and restraining. I tense under the pressure of it, but I don’t lurch toward Katalin. Her eyes, pale as a river under ice, glint with assured victory. She turns to go, her cloak sweeping out behind her, and Írisz and Zsófia follow.

Hands shaking, I reach for the bow on my back.

The rest of the girls spend their days honing their magic and practicing swordplay. Some can perform three skills; some have mastered one exceptionally well, like Boróka, who’s as useless at fire-making or forging as I am, but can heal better than anyone in the village. Without even the feeblest glimmer of the gods’ magic, though, I’m relegated to hunting with the men, who always eye me with discomfort and suspicion. It’s not an easy peace, but it’s made me a mean shot.

It doesn’t come close to making up for being barren—the only girl in Keszi, our village, with no aptitude for any of the three skills. No blessings from Isten. Everyone has their own whispered theories about why the gods passed me over, why none of their magic pooled in my blood or grafted white onto my bones. I no longer care to hear any of them.

“Don’t,” Boróka pleads. “You’ll only make everything worse—”

I want to laugh. I want to ask her what could be worse— would they strike me? Scratch me? Burn me? They’ve done all that and more. Once I made the mistake of swiping one of Katalin’s sausages off the feast table, and she sent a curtain of flame billowing toward me without hesitation or remorse. I sulked around the village for a month afterward, speaking to no one, until my eyebrows grew back.

There’s still a tiny bald patch in my left brow, slick with scar tissue.

I notch the arrow and pull back the bow. Katalin is the perfect target—an impossible mound of snow in the gold-green haze of late summer, bright enough to make your eyes sting.

Boróka lets out another clipped sound of protest, and I let the arrow fly. It skims right past Katalin, ruffling the white fur of her wolf cloak, and vanishes into a black tangle of briars.

Katalin doesn’t scream, but I catch the look of sheer panic on her face before her fear turns to scandalized anger. Though it’s the only satisfaction I’ll get, it’s better than nothing.

And then Katalin starts toward me, flushed and furious under her wolf’s hood. I keep one hand steady on my bow, and the other goes to the pocket of my cloak, searching for the braid curled there. My mother’s hair is warm and feels like silk beneath my fingers, even though it’s been separated from her body for more than fifteen years.

Before she can reach me, Virág’s voice rings out through the woods, loud enough to startle the birds from their nests.

“Évike! Katalin! Come!”

Boróka thins her mouth at me. “You might have just earned a lashing.”

“Or worse,” I say, though my stomach swoops at the possibility, “she’ll scold me with another story.”

Perhaps both. Virág is particularly vicious on Woodsman days.

Katalin brushes past me with unnecessary force, our shoulders clacking painfully. I don’t rise to the slight, because Virág is watching both of us with her hawk’s wicked stare, and the vein on the old woman’s forehead is throbbing especially hard. Boróka takes my hand as we trudge out of the woods and toward Keszi in the distance, the wooden huts with their reed roofs smudged like black thumbprints against the sunset. Behind us, the forest of Ezer Szem makes its perfunctory noises: a sound like a loud exhale, and then a sound like someone gasping for breath after breaching the surface of the water. Ezer Szem bears little resemblance to the other forests in Régország. It’s larger than all the rest put together, and it hums with its own arboreal heartbeat. The trees have a tendency to uproot themselves when they sense danger, or even when someone ruffles their branches a little too hard. Once, a girl accidentally set fire to a sapling, and a whole copse of elms walked off in protest, leaving the village exposed to both wind and Woodsmen.

Still, we love our finicky forest, not least because of the protections it affords us. If any more than a dozen men at once tried to hack their way through, the trees would do worse than just walk off. We only take precautions against
our most cowardly oaks, our most sheepish poplars.

As we get closer, I can see that Keszi is full of light and noise, the way it always is around sundown. There’s a different tenor to it now, though: something frenetic. A group of boys have gathered our scrawny horses, brushing their coats until they shine, and braiding their manes so they match the Woodsmen’s steeds. Our horses don’t have the pedigree of the king’s, but they clean up nicely. The boys glance down at the ground as I pass by, and even the horses eye me with prickling animal suspicion. My throat tightens.

Some girls and women polish their blades, humming softly. Other women run after their children, checking to make sure there are no stains on their tunics or holes in their leather shoes. We can’t afford to look hungry or weak or frightened. The smell of gulyás wafts toward me from someone’s pot, making my stomach cry out with longing. We won’t eat until after the Woodsmen have gone.

When there is one less mouth to feed.

On the left, my mother’s old hut stands like a hulking grave marker, silent and cold. Another woman lives there now with her two children, huddling around the same hearth where my mother once huddled with me. Listening to the rain drum against the reed roof as summer storms snarled through the tree branches, counting the beats between rumbles of thunder. I remember the particular curve of my mother’s cheek, illuminated in the moments when lightning fissured across the sky.

It’s the oldest hurt, but raw as a still-gasping wound. I touch my mother’s braid again, running my fingers over its contours, high and low again, like the hills and valleys of Szarvasvár. Boróka’s grip on my other hand tightens as she
pulls me along.

When we reach Virág’s hut, Boróka leans forward to embrace me. I hug her back, the fur of her wolf cloak bristling under my palms.

“I’ll see you afterward,” she says. “For the feast.”

Her voice is strained, low. I don’t have to fear being taken, but that doesn’t mean seeing the Woodsmen is easy. We’ve all done our own silent calculations—how many girls, and what are the chances that a Woodsman’s eye might land on your mother or sister or daughter or friend? Perhaps I’m lucky to have very little worth losing.

Monday

First-day-back assemblies are the most pointless practice ever.

And that’s saying a lot, seeing as Niveus Academy is a school that runs on pointlessness.

We’re seated in Lion Hall—named after one of those donors who give money to private schools that don’t need it—waiting for the principal to arrive and deliver his speech in the usual order:

1. Welcome back for another year—glad you didn’t die this summer

2. Here are your Senior Prefects and Head Prefect

3. School values

4. Fin

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for structure. Ask any of my friends. Correction—friend. I’m pretty sure that, even though I’ve been here for almost four years, no one else knows I exist. Just Jack, who generally acts like there’s something seriously wrong with me. Still, I call him a friend, because we’ve known each other forever and the thought of being alone is much, much worse.

But back to the thing about structure. I’m a fan. Jack knows about the many rituals I go through before I sit down at the piano. Without them, I don’t play as well. That’s the difference between my rituals and these assemblies. Without these, life at Niveus would still be an endless drudge of gossip, money, and lies.

The microphone screeches loudly, forcing my head up. Twenty minutes of my life about to be wasted on an assembly that could have been an email.

I lean back against my chair as a tall, pale guy with dull black eyes, oily black hair slicked back with what I’m sure was an entire jar of hair gel, and a long dark coat that almost sweeps the floor stands at the podium, staring down at us all like we’re vermin and he’s a cat.

“My name is Mr. Ward, but you must all address me as Headmaster Ward,” the cat says, voice liquid and slithery. I squint at him. What the hell happened to Headmaster Collins?

The room is filled with confused whispers and unimpressed faces.

“As I’m sure some of you are aware, Headmaster Collins resigned just before summer break, and I’m here to lead you all through your final year at Niveus Academy,” the cat finishes, his lips pursed.

“So, the rumors were true,” someone whispers nearby.

“Seems like it … I hear rehab is super classy these days, though…”

I hadn’t even heard anything was wrong with Headmaster Collins; he seemed fine before summer. Sometimes I feel like I’m so lost in my own world, I don’t notice the things that seem obvious to everyone else.

“And so,” Headmaster Ward’s voice booms over everyone else’s, “we keep within the Niveus tradition, starting today’s assembly with the Senior Prefects and Head Prefect announcements.”

He swivels expectantly as one stiffly suited teacher rushes forward and hands him a cream-colored envelope. Silently, Headmaster Ward opens it, the paper’s crinkle amplified to a blaring shriek through the speakers. He removes a small card and places the envelope on the podium in front of him. I start to zone out.

“Our four Senior Prefects are…” He pauses, his pupils flicking back and forth like black flies trapped in a jar. “Miss Cecelia Wright, Mr. Maxwell Jacobson, Miss Ruby Ainsworth, and Mr. Devon Richards.”

At first, I think he’s made a mistake. My name never gets called out at formal assemblies. Mostly because these assemblies are usually dedicated to the people the student body knows and cares about, and if Niveus was the setting for a movie, I’d probably be a nameless background character.

Jack elbows me, pulling me from my shocked state, and I push myself out of the chair. The creaking of wooden seats fills the hall as faces turn to glare at my attempt to shuffle through the rows. I mumble a “sorry” after stepping on some guy’s designer shoes—probably worth more than my ma’s rent—before making my way to the front, where the senior teachers are lined up, my sneakers squeaking against the almost-black wood beneath. My heart pounds, and the light applause comes to an awkward stop.

I recognize the other three standing up there, though I’ve never spoken to them. Max, Ruby, and Cecelia are these giant, pale, light-haired clones of each other, and next to them, my short frame and dark skin stick out like a sore thumb. They are main characters.

I stand next to Headmaster Ward, who is even more terrifying up close. For one thing, he’s unnaturally tall, and his legs literally end at the top of my chest. His pupils move toward me, staring, despite his head facing the front.

I look away from him, pretending that the BFG hasn’t got a scary emo brother called Ward.

“I’ve already heard great things about our Head Prefect this year.” Ward’s voice drags, making what I’m sure was meant to be a positive, somewhat lively sentence as lifeless as a eulogy. “And so, there should be no surprise that the Head Prefect is none other than Chiamaka Adebayo.”

Loud cheers fill the dark oak-walled hall as Chiamaka walks forward. I notice her army of clones seated at the front, clapping in scary unison, all as pretty and doll-like as their leader. There’s a smug expression on her face as she joins us. I almost roll my eyes, but she’s the most popular girl at school, and I don’t have a death wish.

I shift awkwardly, feeling even more out of place now. If Max, Ruby, and Cecelia are all main characters, Chiamaka is the protagonist. It makes sense seeing them up here. But me? I feel like any moment now, guys with cameras are gonna run out and tell me I’m being pranked. That would make more sense than any of this.

I know things like Senior Prefects are a popularity contest. Teachers vote for their favorites each year, and it’s always the same kind of person. Someone popular, and I am not popular. Maybe my music teacher put in a good word for me? I don’t know.

“As all of you know, the roles of Senior Prefect and Head Prefect should not be taken lightly. With a lot of power comes great responsibility. It is not just about attending council meetings with me, or organizing the big events, or impressing a choice college. It is also being a model student all year round, which I am sure the five of these students have been during their time at Niveus and will, hopefully, continue to be long after they leave Niveus behind.” Headmaster Ward forces a tight smile.

“Please give another round of applause to our prefect council this year,” Ward says, triggering louder claps from the sea of pale in front of us. I feel a few eyes on me, and I avoid them, trying to find something interesting in the floor beneath my feet, rather than dwelling on the fact that there are rows and rows of people watching me.

I hate the feeling of being watched.

“Now for the school values.”

We all turn to face the giant screen behind us, like we always do, ready to watch the school values scroll down like credits at the end of a movie, while the national anthem plays in the background. In normal assemblies, we usually just pledge allegiance to the flag, but seeing as this is the first assembly of the year, Niveus does what it does best: amps up the drama.

The screen is enormous and black and covers most of the large, double-glazed window behind the stage. Niveus is a school made up of fancy, dark wooden walls; marble floors; and huge glass windows. The exterior is old and haunted-looking, and the interior is new and modern, reeking of excessive wealth. It’s like it’s tempting the outside world to peer in.

There’s a loud click, and a large picture fills the screen: a rectangular playing card with As in each corner and a huge spade symbol at the center.

That’s new.

I turn to find Jack in the audience, wanting to give him our What the hell? look, but he’s staring at the screen as if the whole thing doesn’t faze him. Everyone else in the audience looks just as unbothered by this as Jack. It’s weird.

“Ah, there seems to be some kind of technical malfunction…,” Mrs. Blackburn, my old French teacher, announces from the back. A few more clicks, and all goes back to normal. The national anthem blares from the speakers and we sing along, with our palms placed on our chests as we watch the school values fly past: Generosity, Grace, Determination, Integrity, Idealism, Nobility, Excellence, Respectfulness, and Eloquence.

Nine values most people at this school lack. Myself included.

“Now for a speech from our Head Prefect, Chiamaka.” The student body goes wild at the mention of her name, clapping even louder than before and cheering like she’s a god—which by Niveus standards, she basically is.

“Thank you, Headmaster Ward,” Chiamaka says as she steps up to the podium. “Firstly, I would like to thank the teachers for selecting me as Head Prefect—it’s something I never imagined would happen.”

Chiamaka’s been Head Prefect three years in a row now; she was the Junior Head Prefect as well as the Sophomore Head Prefect—there’s nothing remotely shocking about her selection. Mine, on the other hand …

She looks back at the teachers with her hand still placed over her heart, from when we sang the national anthem, feigning surprise like she does every year.

My eyes really, really want to roll at her.

“As your Senior Head Prefect, I will work hard to ensure that our final year at Niveus is the best one yet, starting with the Senior Snowflake Charity Ball at the end of the month. This year’s prefect council will make sure it is a night everyone will talk about for many years to come.”

People start to clap but Chiamaka doesn’t back down. Instead, she drags the microphone forward, not yet done with her soliloquy.

“Above all else, I promise to make sure that the majority of the funding we get goes to the right departments. I’d hate to see all the generosity shown by our donors go to waste. As Senior Head Prefect, I will make sure the right people—the students winning the Mathalons, competing at the science fairs, the ones actually contributing something to the school—are prioritized. Thank you.”

Chiamaka finishes, flashing a wicked grin as the hall erupts in applause once again.

This time, I roll my eyes without a care, and I’m pretty sure the girl in the front row with the red bows in her hair looks at me with disdain for doing so.

The prefects all stay behind to get their badges while everyone else marches out of the assembly to their first-period classes. I watch them with their shiny, new fitted uniforms, their purses made from alligator skin and faces made from plastic. Looking down at my battered sneakers and blazer with loose threads, I feel a sting inside.

There are many things I hate about Niveus, like how no one (besides Jack) is from my side of town and how everyone lives in huge houses with white-picket fences, cooks who make them breakfast, drivers who take them to school, and credit cards with no limit tucked away in their designer backpacks. Sometimes, being around all of that makes me feel like my insides are collapsing, cracking and breaking. I know no good comes from comparing what I have to what they have, but seeing all that money and privilege, and having none, hurts. I try to convince myself that being a scholarship kid doesn’t matter, that I shouldn’t care.

Sometimes it works.

The badges are all different colors. Mine is red and shiny, with Devon engraved under Senior Prefect. The prefects teachers choose in senior year always have high GPAs and, as a result, are immediately drafted as the top candidates for the valedictorian selection, and while Chiamaka will probably get it, I’m still happy to even be considered. Who knows, if I can get Senior Prefect, what’s stopping the universe from granting one more wish and making me valedictorian?

I don’t usually allow myself to dream that much—disappointment is painful, and I like to control the things that seem more possible than not. But I’ve never been on the teachers’ radars before, or anyone else’s for that matter. I excel at being unknown, never being invited to parties and whatnot. Now that I’m here, and something like this is actually happening to me, I can’t help but feel it is a sign that this year is gonna go well … or at least better than the last three. A sign that maybe I’m gonna get into college—make my ma proud.

Ward finally dismisses us and I rush out of the hall, weaving through a small crowd of students still hanging about, and into one of the emptier marble hallways with rows of dusky gray lockers. I only slow when a teacher turns the corner. She gives me a pointed look, her sleek bob giving her face the same scary, judgmental appearance of Edna Mode from The Incredibles. Then she passes and I can breathe normally again.

The sound of a locker door slamming hard grabs my attention, and my head whips around to find the source. A dark-haired guy with sharp, heavy makeup around his eyes and an expression that says Fuck off stares back at me. Josh? Jared…? I can’t remember his name, but I know his face.

He’s the guy who came out last year at Junior Prom, walking in holding his date’s hand. His guy-date’s hand. And it wasn’t that big a deal. People were happy for him. But all I remember was looking at him and his date, hand in hand, and feeling this overwhelming sense of jealousy.

Prom is one of Niveus’s many compulsory and meaningless events, and so, like a masochist, I watched them all night, from the benches at the side of the hall. I watched them slow-dance, arms wrapped around each other like they were naturally safe there. Like nothing bad would happen to them. Like none of their friends outside of school would hurt or mock them. Like their parents wouldn’t stop loving them—or leave them. Like they’d be okay.

My chest had squeezed as I’d held on to that thought. My vision blurred, the lights in the room becoming vibrant circles. I had blinked back the tears, quickly wiping them off my cheeks with the sleeve of the black tuxedo I’d rented, still watching them dance—like a class A creep—looking away only when it got too painful.

“What?” A deep voice cuts into the memory like a blade. I blink to find the guy at the locker is staring at me, looking even more pissed off than before.

I turn quickly, walking the opposite way now, not daring to look back. Because, one, Jared? Jim?—that guy—scares the shit out of me, and two … My mind flashes back to prom, their intertwined fingers, their smiles. I screw my eyes shut, forcing myself to think of something else. Like music class.

I climb the steps to the first floor, where my music classroom is, burning the depressing memory and tossing its ashes out of my skull.

My body tingles when I see the dark oak door with a plate engraved Music Room, and the sadness melts away. This is my favorite classroom, the only place in school that’s ever felt like home. There are other music rooms, mostly for recording or solo practice, but I like this one the most. It’s more open, less lonely.

“Devon, welcome back and congrats on becoming a prefect!” Mr. Taylor says as I step in. Mr. Taylor is my favorite teacher; he’s taught me music since freshman year and is the only teacher I ever really speak to outside of class. His face is always lit up, a smile permanently fixed to it. “You can get started on your senior project, along with the rest of the class.”

My classmates are lost in the world of their own music, some on keyboards and others with pencils firmly gripped in their hands as they write down melodies on crisp white music sheets. We were supposed to start planning our senior projects over the summer, ready to showcase when we got back. But I spent most of my summer occupied with my audition piece for college, as well as other not-so-academic things.

I spot my station at the back by one of the windows, with a keyboard on top of the desk and my initials, DR, engraved in gold into the wood. Not many people take music, so we all have our own stations. I’ve always loved this classroom because it reminds me of those music halls from the classical concerts online: oval-shaped, with brown-paneled walls. Being in this room makes me feel like I’m more than a scholarship kid. Like I belong here, in this life, around these people.

Even though I know that isn’t true.

“Thanks,” I say, before stepping toward the keyboard I’ve dreamed of all summer. I don’t have a keyboard at home, because there’s no space and they are a lot more expensive than they look. I’m sure my ma would get me one if I asked, but she already does so much for me, and I feel like I burden her more than I should. Instead, when I’m not in school, I improvise; humming tunes, writing down notes, and listening to and watching whatever I can. I’m more into the composition and songwriting aspect of music anyway, but it still feels good to have an actual instrument in front of me again.

I plug the keyboard into the wall and it comes alive, the small square monitor in the corner flashing. I put my headphones on, running my fingers over the black-and-white plastic keys, pressing a few, letting a messy melody slip out, before I sit back, close my eyes, and picture the ocean. Bluish green with fish swimming and bright sea plants. I jump in, and I’m immersed in the water.

The familiar sense of peace rises inside, and my hands stretch toward the piano.

And then I play.

A few days earlier, Mariana was at home, in London.

She was on her knees, on the floor, surrounded by boxes. She was making yet another halfhearted attempt to sort through Sebastian’s belongings.

It wasn’t going well. A year on from his death, the majority of his things remained spread around the house in various piles and half-empty boxes. She seemed unable to complete the task.

Mariana was still in love with him—that was the problem. Even though she knew she’d never see Sebastian again—even though he was gone for good—she was still in love and didn’t know what to do with all this love of hers. There was so much of it, and it was so messy: leaking, spilling, tumbling out of her, like stuffing falling out of an old rag doll that was coming apart at the seams.

If only she could box up her love, as she was attempting to do with his possessions. What a pitiful sight it was—a man’s life reduced to a collection of unwanted items for a jumble sale.

Mariana reached into the nearest box. She pulled out a pair of shoes.

She considered them—the old green trainers he had for running on the beach. They still had a slightly sodden feel about them, with grains of sand embedded in the soles.

Get rid of them, she said to herself. Throw them in the bin. Do it.

Even as she thought this, she knew it was an impossibility. They weren’t him; they weren’t Sebastian—they weren’t the man she loved and would love forever—they were just a pair of old shoes. Even so, parting with them would be an act of self-harm, like pressing a knife to her arm and slicing off a sliver of skin.

Instead, Mariana brought the shoes close to her chest. She cradled them tight, as she might a child. And she wept.

* * *

How had she ended up like this?

In the space of just a year, which once would have slipped by almost imperceptibly—and now stretched out behind her like a desolate landscape flattened by a hurricane—the life she had known had been obliterated, leaving Mariana here: thirty-six years old, alone and drunk on a Sunday night; clutching a dead man’s shoes as if they were holy relics—which, in a way, they were.

Something beautiful, something holy, had died. All that remained were the books he read, the clothes he wore, the things he touched. She could still smell him on them, still taste him on the tip of her tongue.

That’s why she couldn’t throw away his possessions—by holding on to them, she could keep Sebastian alive, somehow, just a little bit—if she let go, she’d lose him entirely.

Recently, out of morbid curiosity, and in an attempt to understand what she was wrestling with, Mariana had reread all of Freud’s writings about grief and loss. And he argued that, following the death of a loved one, the loss had to be psychologically accepted and that person relinquished, or else you ran the risk of succumbing to pathological mourning, which he called melancholia—and we call depression.

Mariana understood this. She knew she should relinquish Sebastian, but she couldn’t—because she was still in love with him. She was in love even though he was gone forever, gone behind the veil—“behind the veil, behind the veil”—where was that from? Tennyson, probably.

Behind the veil.

That’s how it felt. Since Sebastian died, Mariana no longer saw the world in color. Life was muted and gray and far away, behind a veil—behind a mist of sadness.

She wanted to hide from the world, all its noise and pain, and cocoon herself here, in her work, and in her little yellow house.

And that’s where she would have stayed, if Zoe hadn’t phoned her from Cambridge, that night in October.

Zoe’s phone call, after the Monday-evening group—that was how it started.

That was how the nightmare began.

The Monday-evening group met in Mariana’s front room.

It was a good-sized room. It had been given over to the use of therapy soon after Mariana and Sebastian moved into the yellow house.

They were very fond of that house. It was at the foot of Primrose Hill in Northwest London, and painted the same bright yellow as the primroses that grew on the hill in the summer. Honeysuckle climbed up one of the outside walls, covering it with white, sweet-smelling flowers, and in the summer months their scent crept into the house through the open windows, climbing up the stairs and lingering in the passages and rooms, filling them with sweetness.

It was unseasonably warm that Monday evening. Even though it was early October, the Indian summer prevailed, like an obstinate party guest, refusing to heed the hints from the dying leaves on the trees that it might be time to go. The late-afternoon sun flooded into the front room, drenching it with a golden light, tinged with red. Before the session, Mariana drew the blinds, but left the sash windows open a few inches to let in some air.

Next, she readjusted the chairs into a circle.

Nine chairs. A chair for each member of the group, and one for Mariana. In theory, the chairs were meant to be identical—but life didn’t work like that. Despite her best intentions, she had accumulated an assortment of upright chairs over the years, in different materials and in various shapes and sizes. Her relaxed attitude to the chairs was perhaps typical of how she conducted her groups. Mariana was informal, even unconventional, in her approach.

Therapy, particularly group therapy, was an ironic choice of profession for Mariana. She had always been ambivalent about groups—even suspicious of them—ever since she was a child.

She’d grown up in Greece, on the outskirts of Athens. They’d lived in a large ramshackle old house, on top of a hill that was covered with a black-and-green shroud of olive trees. As a young girl, Mariana would sit on the rusty swing in the garden and ponder the ancient city beneath her, sprawling all the way to the columns of the Parthenon on top of another hill in the distance. It seemed so vast, endless; she felt so small and insignificant, and she viewed it with a superstitious foreboding.

Accompanying the housekeeper on shopping trips to the crowded and frenetic market in the center of Athens always made Mariana nervous. And she was relieved, and a little surprised, to return home unscathed. Large groups continued to intimidate her as she grew older. At school, she found herself on the sidelines, feeling as if she didn’t fit in with her classmates. And this feeling of not fitting in was hard to shake. Years later, in therapy, she came to understand that the schoolyard was simply a macrocosm of the family unit: meaning her uneasiness was less about the here and now—less about the schoolyard itself, or the market in Athens, or any other group in which she might find herself—and more to do with the family in which she grew up, and the lonely house she grew up in.

Their house was always cold, even in sunny Greece. And there was an emptiness to it—a lack of warmth, physical and emotional. This was due in large part to Mariana’s father, who, although a remarkable man in many ways—good-looking, powerful, razor sharp—was also highly complicated. Mariana suspected he had been damaged beyond repair by his childhood. She never met her father’s parents, and he rarely mentioned them. His father was a sailor, and the less said about his mother, the better. She worked at the docks, he said, with such a look of shame, Mariana thought she must have been a prostitute.

Her father grew up in the slums of Athens and around the port of Piraeus—he started working on the ships as a boy, quickly becoming involved with trade and the import of coffee and wheat and—Mariana imagined—less savory items. By the time he was twenty-five, he had bought his own boat, and built his shipping business from there. Through a combination of ruthlessness, blood, and sweat, he created a small empire for himself.

He was a bit like a king, Mariana thought—or a dictator. She was later to discover he was an extremely wealthy man—not that you would have guessed it from the austere, Spartan way they lived. Perhaps her mother—her gentle, delicate English mother—might have softened him, had she lived. But she died tragically young, soon after Mariana was born.

Mariana grew up with a keen awareness of this loss. As a therapist, she knew a baby’s first sense of self comes through its parents’ gaze. We are born being watched—our parents’ expressions, what we see reflected in the mirror of their eyes, determines how we see ourselves. Mariana had lost her mother’s gaze—and her father, well, he found it hard to look at her directly. He’d usually glance just over her shoulder when addressing her. Mariana would continually adjust and readjust her position, shuffling, edging her way into his sight line, hoping to be seen—but somehow always remaining peripheral.

On the rare occasions she did catch a glimpse into his eyes, there was such disdain there, such burning disappointment. His eyes told her the truth: she wasn’t good enough. No matter how hard she tried, Mariana always sensed she fell short, managing to do or say the wrong thing—just by existing, she seemed to irritate him. He disagreed with her endlessly, no matter what, performing Petruchio to her Kate—if she said it was cold, he said it was hot; if she said it was sunny, he insisted it was raining. But despite his criticism and contrariness, Mariana loved him. He was all she had, and she longed to be worthy of his love.

There was precious little love in her childhood. She had an elder sister, but they weren’t close. Elisa was seven years her senior, with no interest in her shy younger sibling. And so Mariana would spend the long summer months alone, playing by herself in the garden under the stern eye of the housekeeper. No wonder, then, she grew up a little isolated, and uneasy around other people.

The irony that Mariana ended up becoming a group therapist was not lost on her. But paradoxically, this ambivalence about others served her well. In group therapy, the group, not the individual, is the focus of treatment: to be a successful group therapist is—to some extent—to be invisible.

Mariana was good at this.

In her sessions, she always kept out of the group’s way as much as possible. She only intervened when communication broke down, or when it might be helpful to make an interpretation, or when something went wrong.

On this particular Monday, a bone of contention arose almost immediately, requiring a rare intervention. The problem—as usual—was Henry.

We spend most of our lives afraid of our own Shadow. He told me that. He said a Shadow lives deep inside every one of us. So deep we don’t even know it’s there. Sometimes, with a quick sideways glance, we catch a glimpse of it. But it frightens us, and we quickly look away. This is what fuels the Shadow—our inability to look. Our inability to examine this thing that is in fact our raw selves. This is what gives the Shadow its power. It makes us lie. About what we want, about who we are. It fires our passions, our darkest desires. And the more powerful it gets, the greater we fear it, and the deeper we struggle to hide this Beast that is us . . .

I don’t know why He tells me these things. Maybe it’s a way of obliquely bringing out and addressing his own Shadow. But I do think our Shadows are bad—his and mine. Big and dark and very dangerous. I don’t think our Shadows should ever be allowed out.

—From the diary of Leena Rai

2:04 a.m. Saturday, November 15, 1997. Leena Rai stumbles onto the old trestle bridge near the log sorting yard. The night is crystalline. Cold. Eerily quiet. She can hear the wind high in the tips of nearby conifers, the soft lapping of water against rocks under the bridge, the distant, omniscient thundering of the twin waterfalls that plunge down the granite cliffs of Chief Mountain from over a thousand feet up.

She shivers and draws her scarf higher around her neck. The move­ment makes her sway. She catches hold of the railing and laughs. Her emotion stems from a toxic mix of anxiety and a thrilling, daring sort of anticipation. Mostly she’s comfortingly, numbingly, deliciously drunk on vodka from the almost-empty Smirnoff bottle in the pocket of the oversize military surplus jacket she is wearing. It isn’t her jacket. It’s his. Smells like him. Woodsy. Some pine resin. A residual scent of after­shave. And just the particular aroma that is him. All blended with a loamy whiff of moss and dirt from the forest floor where she was pressed on her back a short while ago. Leena shakes that unwanted memory, the pain. She waits for the heavens, the full moon, the Milky Way, the tops of the trees to stop their spinning, and when the motion slows, she sucks in a deep, steadying breath. The air tastes like autumn.

She continues her way across Devil’s Bridge. She can see the black water of the sound in the distance, and a few lights from the pulp mill twinkling across the water. Her breath comes out in ghostly puffs. As she nears the south end of the bridge, nerves bite harder. She stops, reaches into her pocket, unscrews the cap on the vodka bottle, tilts back her head, and swigs. She wobbles and the drink spills out the side of her mouth and dribbles down her chin. She laughs again, wipes her mouth, and slides the bottle back into the big pocket. As she does, she sees something. A shadow. A noise. She squints into the darkness as she studies the shadows on the bridge ahead. A car approaches. She blinks into the sudden flare of headlights, then it’s gone. A truck barrels past, throwing a blast of hot, exhaust-laden fumes her way. She feels turned around all of a sudden. Which way is the right way?

Focus.

She can’t screw this up, this special invitation to meet beneath the bridge at the south end, a place where teens often gather to smoke, drink, make out. She wobbles onward. Another car passes, blinding her. Leena stumbles off the sidewalk into the road. The car swerves. A horn blares. Her heart beats faster.

She squints into the darkness, her gaze fixed on the end of the bridge.

Don’t screw this up. This is what you’ve been waiting for . . .

Leena pulls the jacket tighter around her body as though it will offer her fortitude. It’s too large for even her frame. Which is why she likes it. It makes her feel petite, and that’s a gift. And warm. Like a hug. Leena doesn’t get hugs often. She can’t actually recall when someone last hugged her. Her little brother gets hugs. Lots. He’s cute. It’s easy to love Ganesh. She, on the other hand, gets scowls. Warnings. People say she is stupid. Or never good enough, or right enough—just an ungainly, oversize, lum­bering, inept spare part. A nuisance inside her own home. At school. She wishes sometimes she could get out of her own body. And she sure as hell can’t wait to get out of Twin Falls.

But right now she’s trapped. In this stupid town. Inside this physi­cal body that people can’t see past. They can’t see who Leena is inside. How deeply she feels things. How she loves to write—poetry, prose. He knows, though. He says her words are beautiful. He sees her. When she’s with him, she sometimes believes her whole world might change if she can just hold on and push through for another year or two. And then she will get out of this place. She will go far away. Overseas. Africa maybe. She’ll work in exotic places doing things where people need her. She will write about those adventures. For a newspaper perhaps. She’ll become someone different. When she’s away from him too long, those dreams blur, fade. Everything goes black again. And Leena sort of just wants to do everyone a favor and die. But then she goes to him, and he says something nice about her poetry, and she feels a fluttering of her heart, a shuddering of primal wings beating through the hot darkness in her soul. El duende. That’s what he says Federico García Lorca called it. It’s the spirit of creativity, and he says Leena has it buried deep inside. She reaches the end of the bridge and starts down the steep gravel trail that twists around and leads beneath the Devil’s Bridge overpass.

A car rumbles above. Headlights silhouette trees. Then all is black. Dead quiet. Leena feels disoriented. Fear whispers. She moves carefully, feeling her way with her feet down the dark trail. A distant part of her brain sends a warning. It’s too quiet. Too dark. Something is off.

But the vodka keeps her moving down the trail. To the rocks. To the water. A dot of orange suddenly flares bright in the blackness under the bridge. She sees a partial silhouette, then it fades. She smells the cigarette smoke.

“Hello?” she calls into the darkness.

“Leena—over here.”

The voice sounds behind her. She turns.

The blow comes fast. It smacks her on the side of the face. She staggers sideways, stumbles, and falls hard onto her hands and knees. Gravel bites into her palms. The world spins. She’s confused. She tastes blood. She tries to take a breath, but the next blow strikes her in the back of her neck. She flails face-first into the ground. Stones cut into her cheek. Dirt goes into her mouth. Another hard wallop, as if from a mallet, smacks between her shoulder blades.

Leena can’t breathe. Panic swirls. She raises her hand to make it stop. But the next kick is to her head.

My first memory is of the three of us, still inside, impatient to be born. We were waiting, like at the top of those water slides you see at amusement parks on TV, slippery wet and sliding all over one another to see who got to go first, shivering, hysterical, mostly with laughing but a little with fear. The winner—me!—streamed away from the other two, excited to slide and smug because I got to be first but also a little scared to leave them and a little left out because of the time they’d get to spend alone together until it was their turn too. Not that I’ve ever been on a water slide.

School doesn’t start until tomorrow, and already I’m behind. Mrs. Shriver emailed us the prompt a month ago. “History and memory are unreliable narrators, especially in Bourne. Therefore, please write a 2-to-3-page essay on your earliest memory and its relation to what’s true.” You think I couldn’t possibly remember being born—that its “relation to what’s true” is something like third cousin twice removed—but maybe the reason most people don’t remember is because they were alone in there. We weren’t alone. We never were. Before we were our mother’s or ourselves, we were one another’s.

Mama was waiting outside, of course, so she can’t say for sure either. Most mothers of triplets don’t even try to give birth naturally. Most aren’t even allowed to try. But our mother is not like most mothers.

She remembers hours of screaming and pushing and pain, and she was alone then, after him, but before us. While she waited, she made a plan to give us all M names with escalating syllables so she would be able to keep us straight. She named me Mab—queen of the fairies, deliverer of dreams—baby number one.

Two came kicking and screaming a quarter hour later and needed two syllables. Mama must have been tired because she’d lost track of what day it was—evening had turned to night had turned to morning by then—and when they told her it was early Monday already, she named the baby that.

And then three came too slowly, no matter how our mother pushed. Typical, though none of us knew that at the time. Eventually, they had to go in and get her, but she got the good name, the normal one. Mirabel. It sounds like miracle.

It turned out we didn’t need such an elaborate system, though. No one has to count syllables to tell us apart.

When we were very little, Mirabel called us with her fingers. One for me, two for Monday, three taps on her armrest or right above her heart when she was talking about herself. Monday and I used these nicknames too after a while, since she and Mirabel can’t go by something shorter without invalidating the entire point, so that’s our triplet shorthand. One for me, Two for one, Three for the other.

Mrs. Shriver won’t believe the other part, though, that I remember being in utero. She’ll say, “I asked for an essay, Mab, not a short story.” But if memory’s so unreliable, who is she to say? If memory’s so unreliable, what’s the point of even asking the question?

Except I know the answer to that one. It’s important for us to exercise our memories in Bourne, to stretch and strengthen them—like brain yoga or mind aerobics—because one of the sad things that happens when almost everyone dies is there aren’t enough people left who remember why.

The wind came into the house from the Sound, and it blew Daisy and me around her East Egg mansion like puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam, like a pair of young women in white dresses who had no cares to weigh them down.

It was only June, but summer already lay heavy on the ground, threatening to press us softly and heavily towards the parquet floors. We could not stand to go down to the water where the salt air was heavier still, and a long drive into the city felt like an offensive impossibility.

Instead, Daisy cracked open a small charm that she purchased on a whim in Cannes a few short years ago. The charm was made of baked clay in the shape of a woman, and when Daisy broke it to crumbling bits in her fingers, it released the basement smell of fresh kaolin clay mixed with something dark green and herbal. There was a gust of wind of a different kind, and then we were airborne, moving with languid grace along the high ceilings of her house and exclaiming at the strangeness and the secrets we found there. A single flick of our hands or feet sent us skimming through the air, at first adrift and then with surges of speed as we pushed away from the mantels and the columns.

We discovered a rather shocking miniature tableau of Leda and the swan above the bookshelves in the library, and we were so quiet over the heads of a pair of maids that we could flick back their starched white caps before they saw us and shrieked. In the nursery, while Pammy slept, we floated above her like slightly rumpled guardian angels. Daisy reached down to touch her daughter’s face with a gentle finger, but when the little girl stirred, Daisy fled, dragging me out of the room with her.

The summer rendered the manor mute that day, and we haunted its silence, moving from place to place before finding ourselves in one of the guest rooms close to the one I was using. The pale green damask wallpaper gave the room a forested look, absorbing everything but the pleasure of being so weightless. I floated on my back, running my fingers along the peak of the window casement and gazing at the bay beyond the glass. It was impossible to imagine how cold the water might be, but I tried, half-napping with my legs dangling down at the knee and one hand resting lightly on my chest. I was half asleep when Daisy spoke up.

“Oh look, Jordan. Do you think it’s my color?”

She plucked an enamel pot the size of a Liberty half-dollar from the top of the wardrobe. Lazily curious, I floated closer.

“Who did that belong to?” I wondered out loud.

“What does it matter?” she responded gaily, and she was right, because she and Tom had bought the whole of the manor—from the sprawling grounds down to the beach, the stables, the ghosts, and the history—all for their own.

She opened the enameled pot to reveal a mixture of wax and pigment, a dusty dark no-color until she warmed it with a few hard rubs of her thumb. She spread some of it neatly on first her lower lip and then her upper, and then she hovered upside down over the vanity’s mirror to examine her reflection. When I drifted nearer to see the deep rose on her lips, she drew me close and did mine as well.

“Look, we match,” she said, tugging me down to gaze at my own face in the mirror, but of course we didn’t. She had been a Louisville Fay, with a lineage as close to royalty as the United States would allow, and it showed in her dark blue eyes, her sleek black hair, and the generous width of her smiling mouth. For my part, I was nominally a Louisville Baker, a name with its own distinguished history, but it had always hung oddly on me, adopted from distant Tonkin and with a face that people variously guessed was Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Venezuelan, or even Persian.

The lipstick looked old-fashioned on her, giving her an antique air, but it brought out the red in my skin, roses instead of tomato, more lively than not. Daisy murmured with pleasure over the difference, and she stuffed the little pot into my pocket, saying of course it was meant to be mine.

She paused with her hand on my hip, both of us hanging upside down in front of the mirror. It was one of Daisy’s moments of intense stillness, rare when she was a girl and growing rarer. It gave her pretty face a slackness and an odd hollowness that suggested that anything might have come in to nest behind her eyes.

“I am glad you came when I called you,” she said with a slight hiccup. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t.”

“Been prostrate with grief and pined for me, I imagine,” I said lightly, and she smiled with relief.

We both looked up when we heard the distant slam of the front door, and then, louder and more insistent, the boom of Tom’s voice. There was a briefly startled look on Daisy’s face, as if she had forgotten any world where we did not merely drift along the ceiling of her enormous house, and then she took my arm.

“Of course, that’s right,” she said, pulling me towards the door. “We’ve arranged to have my cousin to dinner tonight. Come along, my darling, I promise you will find him utterly delightful.”

“Well, if you say so, I’m sure he is.”

It was Daisy’s avocation, setting up her friends and making connections between the members of the right set. She was somewhat famous for it, leaving plenty of variously happy couples and namesake babies in her wake. I had always been a bit of a failure for her, something that I decided was more amusing than anything else. I did well enough for myself, after all, back in Louisville and now in the years since I had come to New York.

We came back in the tall sun porch where we had started, settling on the enormous couch at the center of the room. We tamed our ruffled hair and smoothed down our dresses just moments before Tom appeared in the doorway. He was followed, with a touch of reluctance, by a rangy young man in shirtsleeves, his jacket thrown over his arm and his quick dark eyes taking in everything around him with interest.

He entered with an easy smile and a certain dislike for Tom, which made me like him right away. He gave me a second look, but didn’t stare, and he came to kneel next to Daisy’s end of the couch, paying her the court she liked best. They spoke of the time they’d passed in Chicago while I was allowed to do what I liked best, which was to watch from a cool distance before I had to chance an engagement. Tom hovered close by, finally trampling their conversation with a question of Daisy’s cousin’s occupation and by coincidence giving me his name: Nick Carraway of the St. Paul Carraways, only son, war hero, and apparently at loose ends after coming back from overseas.

I remembered vaguely that I had heard of some kind of trouble between him and a girl from St. Paul, a Morgan or a Tulley, something dishonorable, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he sat as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He looked like a polite man, though of course you can never tell.

I wondered that Tom couldn’t seem to recognize the barbs in Nick’s words to him, barbs that made Daisy’s eyes glint a little. Acid under the good manners, and I liked that quite well. More interesting by far than the war hero was someone with some bite to him, and I thought that rather a lot of people might not know that about Nick.

When he scored another point off Tom, making Daisy’s husband snort and declaim, I sat up with a laugh.

“Absolutely!” I said in agreement, giving Nick permission to look at me fully. I smiled at him, levering myself off of the couch and letting him see a little more. I was in my low gray suede heels, giving me a soldier’s jaunty carriage; when I rolled my shoulders back to ease the cramp that was forming there, I saw him lower his eyes briefly with a slight smile.

The butler entered with four tall glasses filled with something delicious, and at a murmured word from Daisy, he added two garnet red drops to each tumbler from a rock crystal vial.

“I’m in training,” I said with a regretful sigh, but I took my glass anyway, sipping appreciatively. The cocktail was a good one—the Buchanans hadn’t ever been ones to stint where it truly counted, and it was no different when it came to the demoniac. The ban on demon’s blood had come down just four months before the one on alcohol, and now two years later the good vintages were disappearing from even the better clubs in Manhattan.

Daisy licked her lips like a pleased cat, and even Tom sipped his drink with a kind of somber respect for its quality. Nick drank more cautiously, and I remembered that the Middle West had crashed into Prohibition faster and more readily than the rest of us had. The demoniac was older and richer than what even Aunt Justine kept carefully locked away in the Park Avenue apartment we shared. It stung my lips and warmed my throat until I imagined myself breathing out flickers of candle flame. Legend said it could make tyrants from good men, but it only made me a little mean.

“Drink up,” I told Nick. “This isn’t St. Paul. You’re in New York now, even if you do live in West Egg.”

He blinked at me slowly, that slight smile still on his face.

“I do, though I hardly know anyone there.”

“I do,” I said. “And you must. You must know Gatsby.”

“Gatsby? What Gatsby?” asked Daisy, blinking at me. Her eyes were dilated almost black and she had bitten some of the lipstick off of her lower lip. I was about to tease her for being no better with demon’s blood than Nick was when dinner was announced.

Daisy came to take my arm, cutting me off from Nick and Tom as neatly as a sheepdog would, and when she leaned against me, I could smell the bitter almond and candied lemon scent of the demoniac on her breath.

“I need to talk to Nick. Alone, do you understand?” she said, her words hurried and slurred, and I stared at her. She sounded nearly drunk, slightly unsteady on her feet. She never drank to drunkenness that I knew of, save once. The darkness in her eyes and the slight unsteadiness in her step was for something else, and I hastily agreed.

Daisy was a fluttering nervy thing at dinner, snuffing out the candles distractedly as we ate only for the servants to relight them when she wasn’t looking. Tom ignored her, but I could see Nick growing more uneasy, his eyes darting between Daisy and me as if thinking there was surely an explanation. There wasn’t, any more than there was for anything else, and it was almost a relief when Nick made an innocent comment about civilization that sent Tom barking after one of his particular hobby horses. He shook his head hard, blowing air through his nostrils like one of his own prize polo ponies.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” he told us all angrily. “Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? It’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out, the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy solemnly. “He reads deep books with long words in them.”

Nick looked back and forth between them as if he wasn’t sure what to make of this, but he relaxed when I winked at him across the table, on the side Tom couldn’t see.

“This fellow has worked out the whole thing,” Tom said, stabbing a finger into the white tablecloth. “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

“You’ve got to beat us down, of course,” I said dryly, and Nick covered a laugh with his napkin.

Tom arched his neck, glaring at me suspiciously as if unsure what I might mean, and next to me Daisy giggled, just a little hysterical, though this was hardly anything new to us.

“The thing is, Jordan, we Nordics, we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. That’s what the Manchester Act wants to protect. Do you see?”

There were a dozen things I could have said to that, ranging in order from least cutting to downright murderous, but then the phone rang and the butler came to fetch Tom from the table. Tom went with a kind of confused irritation, and Daisy’s mouth opened, and closed again.

Then she dammed up the coming disaster by turning the full force of her Fay blue eyes on Nick. I was used to them after years of acquaintance, but he certainly wasn’t. He got a slightly dazed look as she leaned in closer to him. Her voice spiraled higher than it usually went, just a hair shy of shrill, shyer yet of sensible.

“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” Daisy turned to me with a flourishing hand gesture, a magician pulling a rose out of a soldier. “An absolute rose?”

He looked nothing like a rose, but I nodded anyway, watching Daisy warily. Her small hand was clenched into a fist next to her half-eaten fish, and I could see the little bruise on the knuckle, the one Tom had given her by grabbing her hand too hard just a day ago.

“Daisy…” I said, but she threw her napkin on the table and stalked after Tom without a single excuse, leaving Nick and me alone.

“So you mentioned my neighbor Gatsby,” Nick started, but I held up my hand.

“Shush.”

My spine and shoulders felt as stiff as wood, my ear strained like piano wire as I listened for something from the next room where the telephone was kept.

“What in the world is happening?” Nick asked, apparently bewildered. Perhaps things were not done like this in St. Paul, or perhaps he was better at playing the innocent than any debutante I had ever met. I didn’t much care.

November 28, 1905

Princeton, New Jersey

The Old North bell tolls the hour, and I realize that I’ll be late. I long to break into a sprint, my voluminous skirts lifted, my legs flying along the Princeton University pathways. But just as I gather the heavy material, I hear Mama’s voice: Belle, be a lady at all times. I sigh; a lady would never run.

I release the fabric and slow down as I weave through Princeton’s leafy Gothic landscape, designed to look like Cambridge and Oxford. I know I must do nothing to draw any kind of extra attention. By the time I pass Blair Arch, my stride is quick but acceptable for a lady.

It’s been five years since I left our New York City apartment for this sleepy New Jersey college town, and the quiet is still unnerving. On the weekends, I wish I could return to the energy of New York, but the sixty cents for a train ticket is outside our family’s budget. So, I send money home instead.

As I duck under a crenellated tower, I moderate my pace so I won’t be breathless when I arrive. You are at Princeton University. You must take extra care working at that all-male institution. Be cautious, never do anything to stand out. Even though she’s nearly sixty miles away, Mama insinuates herself into my thoughts.

Pushing the heavy oak door slowly to minimize its loud creak, I pad as quietly as my calfskin boots allow, across the marble foyer before I sidle into the office I share with two other librarians. The room is empty, and I exhale in relief. If sweet-natured Miss McKenna saw me arrive late, it would have been of no import, but with hood-eyed, nosy Miss Adams, I could never be certain she wouldn’t mention my offense at some future time to our superior.

I remove my coat and hat, careful to smooth my rebellious curly hair back into place. Tucking my somber navy skirt beneath me, I slide onto my chair. Within minutes, the office door flies open, slamming against the wood-paneled wall, and I jump. It is my only dear friend, fellow librarian, and housemate, Gertrude Hyde. As the niece of the esteemed head of purchasing for the library, Charlotte Martins, she can breach the quiet of the library’s hallowed halls without fear of repercussions. An ebullient twenty-three-year-old with ginger hair and bright eyes, no one makes me laugh as she does.

“Sorry to make you jump, dear Belle. I guess I owe you two apologies now, instead of the single one I’d intended. First, we abandoned you this morning, which undoubtedly led to your lateness,” she says with a mischievous smile and a glance at the wall clock, “and now, I’ve given you a fright.”

“Don’t be silly. The fault is mine. I should have put aside that letter to my mother and walked to campus with you and Charlotte. Miss Martins, I mean,” I correct myself.

Most days, Charlotte, Gertrude, and I walk together from their large family home on University Drive, where I have a room and share meals with Charlotte, Gertrude, and the rest of their family who live in the house as well. From the first, Charlotte and Gertrude have welcomed me into their home and social circles with warmth and generosity and have provided me with abundant guidance at work. I cannot imagine what my time in Princeton would have been like without them.

“Belle, why are you fussing about what to call Aunt Charlotte? There’s nobody in here but you and me,” Gertrude mock scolds me.

I don’t say what I’m thinking. That Gertrude doesn’t need to assess every single moment of every single day against societal standards to ensure her behavior passes muster. She has no need to analyze her words, her walk, her manner, but I do. Even with Gertrude, I must act with care, particularly given the heightened scrutiny in this university town, which operates as if it lies in the segregated South rather than in the supposedly more progressive North.

The distinctive clip of Miss Adams’s shoes sounds in the hallway outside my office door, and Gertrude’s skirt rustles as she moves to leave. She has as much fondness for my office mate as I do, and she’ll skedaddle before she can get locked into a conversation.

Before she exits the office altogether, she turns back to me, whispering, “Are you still free for the philosophy lecture tonight?”

Since Woodrow Wilson assumed the presidency of Princeton University three years ago and instituted all sorts of scholastic reform, the number of lectures open to staff and members of the community has increased. While Gertrude and I revel in being included in the academic life of the campus, I loathe certain of Wilson’s other decisions, such as maintaining Princeton as a whites-only university when all the other Ivy League schools have admitted colored folks. But I would never voice aloud these views.

Instead, I say, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

***

The quiet of the stacks wraps around me like a soft blanket. I relax into the subdued hush of patrons turning pages and the scent of leather bindings. My long days spent in the company of medieval manuscripts and early printed books calm and delight me. Imagining the labors of the first printing press users as they memorialized the English language and broadly disseminated its literature through the meticulous work of placing the type letter by letter, transforming empty pages into beautiful text to inspire worshippers and readers, transports me beyond the limitations of this time and place, just as Papa always believed. To him, the written word could act as an invitation to free thought and the broader world, and nowhere was that more true than in the dawn of the printed word, where—for the first time—that invitation could be made to the masses instead of a select few.

“Miss Greene.” I hear a soft voice from beyond the stacks.

Two simple words, but my visitor’s modulated tone and distinctive accent give him away, and anyway, I’ve been waiting for him.

“Good day, Mr. Morgan,” I reply, turning in his direction.

Even though I’m talking softly, Miss Scott glances up from the circulation desk with a disapproving scowl. It isn’t so much the volume of my speech as the pleasantness of my relationship with the fellow librarian and collection benefactor that vexes her.

While Mr. Junius Morgan is ostensibly a banker, he has generously donated dozens of ancient and medieval manuscripts to the university, which is why he also holds the titular position of associate head librarian. I’m convinced that Miss Scott thinks any sort of relationship between us—even the cordial, professional one we share—is beneath him.

A slight man, with wispy brown hair and a kindly expression behind his circular glasses, materializes. “How are you today, Miss Greene?”

“Well, sir. And yourself?” My tone is professional and reserved. He’s twenty minutes later than the time we’d mentioned, and I’d begun to think he’d forgotten about our appointment. But I would never dare mention his tardiness.

“I was going to take a gander at the Virgils, as we discussed yesterday. I wonder if you’d still care to accompany me. Assuming your duties and your interest permit, of course.”

Mr. Morgan, whom I think of as Junius in the privacy of my thoughts, knows that my zeal for the library’s most valuable collection is nearly as intense as his own and that none of my other tasks will stand in the way of the private viewing he has promised.

We share a passion for the ancient Roman poet Virgil. The library houses fifty-two volumes of his poetry. My discussions with Junius about the dark voyages in The Aeneid and The Odyssey are some of the brightest moments in my days. While Junius admires Odysseus, I identify always with Aeneas, the Trojan refugee who desperately tries to fulfill his destiny in a world that holds no place for him. Aeneas was driven by duty, sacrificing for the good of others.

“I have cleared my schedule, sir.” I smile.

“Wonderful. If you’ll follow me.”

My skirts swish the oak floor as I follow Junius to the small, elegant room where the Virgils are housed. I have to inhale and restrain my foot from tapping as I wait for him to fish out a heavy key ring from his pocket.

Finally, he pushes the door open to reveal the glass cases holding the precious collection of rare books. There are only about one hundred and fifty printed books of Virgil’s poetry in existence. These volumes were all printed in the fifteenth century. Most of them have been donated by Junius.

I’ve seen these books only a few times before, while in the company of the restoration team. This is a holy moment.

Mr. Morgan’s voice worms its way into the sanctity of my thoughts. “Would you care to hold my favorite?”

Junius is carrying the Sweynheym and Pannartz copy of Virgil, the rarest of all the books. German clerics Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz were two of the first users of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and the book he’s proffering is one of their press’s very first editions.

“May I?” I ask, incredulous at this opportunity.

“Of course.” His eyes are bright behind his spectacles. I suspect it’s a thrill for him to share his prize with one who cares equally about it.

I slide the proffered white gloves onto my hands. The book is heavier than I expected. I sit before its open pages. How Papa would have relished this moment. I think of my father, who introduced me to the rarefied world of art and manuscripts when I was only a girl.

One day, the beauty of your mind and the beauty of art will be as one, Papa had said once.

The memory of Papa’s words makes me smile as I turn the yellowed pages. I examine the hand-detailed letter T that marks the beginning of a page, marveling at the luster of its gold leaf. I am oblivious to Junius’s presence near me until he begins talking.

“I saw my uncle last evening.”

Junius doesn’t need to identify who his uncle is. Everyone at the library knows he is the nephew of the infamous financier J. P. Morgan, which is exactly why I never mention him. I want Junius to understand that I appreciate him for his erudition alone.

“Ah?” I answer politely, never moving my eyes from the page.

“Yes, at the Grolier Club.”

I know the club he speaks of, by reputation anyway. Founded about twenty years ago, in 1884, the private club consists of moneyed bibliophiles whose main aim is to promote the scholarship and collection of books. I would adore a peek behind the closed doors of its Romanesque townhouse on East Thirty-Second Street. But as a woman, I’d never be admitted, and to those men, my gender would not be my only sin.

“Were you attending an interesting lecture?” I attempt to continue making small talk.

“Actually, Miss Greene, it wasn’t the lecture that was interesting.” Junius’s tone contains a quality unusual for him, bordering on playful.

Curious, I turn away from the Virgil. Junius’s placid face, always pleasant but always serious, has cracked open wide with a smile. It is a bit disconcerting, and as I lean away a little, I wonder what on earth is going on.

“No?” I ask. “The lecture wasn’t good?”

“The lecture was fine, but the most fascinating discussion of the evening was with my uncle about his personal art and manuscript collection. I advise him about it from time to time, as well as the new library he’s constructing for it right next door to his home in New York City.”

“Oh, yes,” I say with a small nod. “Is he considering an intriguing new acquisition?”

Junius pauses for a moment before he answers. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose he is in search of a new acquisition,” he says with a knowing chuckle. “I have recommended that he interview you for his newly created post of personal librarian.”