HORSES RUN WHEN THEY PANIC. Sudden, thunderous, directionless freakouts have always helped them avoid predators. The festival horses indulged in this instinct just as soon as they saw an otherworldly combination of predatory animal and upside-down tree—all of them but Fiore, Sir Dad’s own steed, and probably because Dad sang to Fiore.
The haunted tree did not seem interested in chasing horses. It lurched away from the fairgrounds. But the horses did not notice this. They ran, and ran smack into things like food stalls and fences.
Jasper spotted Jerónimo in the mess and chaos. The young Belgian horse was already prone to unpredictable footwork and sudden lunges, even when he wasn’t spooked by a moving tree. Now he tried to outrun his own uprooted hitching post. The post trailed behind him and whacked into his legs, which spurred Jerónimo to further frenzy. He screamed as he ran.
Jerónimo was Jasper’s own horse. Sort of. He was Jasper’s responsibility, the one he groomed daily. And now he was screaming.
Jasper ran. He tried to catch up with his horse. But Englebert the stable boy got there first.
Oh no, Jasper thought. Not him. The older boy had worked at the farm and festival for two summers, just to pay for riding lessons, but he remained willfully inept. Now he had Jerónimo cornered behind Mousetrap Stage.
Englebert tried to calm the horse by yelling at him to be calm. It didn’t work. Obviously. Jerónimo jumped sideways and back again, ears flat and tail clamped. He rolled his eyes as though sarcastically panicked.
Jasper slowed down and approached from the side.
Englebert took off his tunic. He clearly intended to lunge at the horse’s face and use the cloth as a blindfold. It didn’t work. Obviously. Jerónimo shied and reared back as though frightened by a snake underfoot. Then he lunged. The hitching post whipped around like a mace on a chain.
Jasper caught the post before it whacked into him. He only noticed this after he had already caught it. Once he did notice, he pulled. Jerónimo veered away sideways instead of trampling Englebert, and Jasper felt triumphant for one tiny moment before he got pulled off his feet.
The worn tether broke away from the hitching post. Jerónimo galloped off, finally free of the thing that had harried and tormented him. He disappeared into the forest.
Jasper stood up. He knew that he needed to follow his lost horse into the trees. Now. Right now. But he also knew that he wouldn’t.
Englebert seemed similarly unwilling to keep up the chase. They picked their way slowly back to the wreckage of the pavilion. Jasper noticed that he still held the hitching post, and dropped it.
He spotted his parents, upright and in charge of things. Then he looked for Rosa, and couldn’t find her—but he did find a broken knife and a circle carved in the dirt.
Branches and scattered leaves made a trail away from that spot and through a wrecked hole in the festival wall.
Rosa followed the tree through the festival parking lot. It climbed over cars and crushed them underneath its bulk. Square fragments of windshield glass crunched under Rosa’s sneakers as she ran after it.
The tree moved with difficulty. Branches broke away with every step. It made moaning creaks and the sharp snaps of bending, breaking, living wood that wouldn’t be alive for very much longer. But it still took long strides. It moved faster than Rosa.
The patron medallion of Catalina de Erauso grew painfully cold. Rosa pulled it out and clutched it in one hand. She tried to remember what she would need to do when she finally caught up to the tree.
Establish a circle around each harmful thing, de Erauso wrote four hundred years ago in Dialogues of the Skill, her great book of appeasement. Nothing is stronger than a circle, nothing more whole in itself, nothing freer in its motion, for the scholars say that motion is most perfect when it rotates around a central point. Draw flawless geometry around the point of danger. Draw flawless geometry around yourself. Understand this boundary between danger and yourself Understand yourself as dangerous.
Catalina de Erauso had dressed as a boy and fought as a mercenary in Spain and South America before she became a traveling librarian. She had also dueled and killed at least a dozen people—including her brother, though she didn’t know who he was at the time. He haunted her. She taught herself appeasement.
The circle is not a cage. It is not a trap. It is an expression of respect. It is the orbiting danger of each powerful thing within the boundary of its reach.
Rosa wondered what she could use to make a circle. She still didn’t have chalk, and her pockets were all out of salt.
She stumbled over a fallen branch, but caught herself before she fell. Then she ran faster. Her legs hurt.
Speak to danger in its language, or offer it your own. The spirits of the living and the spirits of the dead will strive to speak their histories. A librarian must listen.
The tree wouldn’t talk to me! Rosa argued back. Already tried. I’ll have to try harder. But first I need it to hold still.
The trail of broken branches led to the front steps of the Ingot Public Library.
Rosa came to a stumbling, stuttering stop. Her breath seemed to keep going without her. She tried to catch it.
Mom stood at the top of the steps, eye to eye with the head of a lion.
Athena Díaz, the appeasement specialist, threw down two handfuls of shredded paper cut from old encyclopedias—out of date, and out of print, but still soaked with the knowledge of ten thousand things.
The paper scattered like confetti at a wedding. It formed perfect circles when it fell across the library steps; one around the upside-down tree and its skirt of leaves, one around Rosa’s mother—which touched the first and formed a figure eight—and one huge, third circle encompassing them both. The final shape looked like an eye with two pupils.
“Hello,” Mom said. “I didn’t expect this. Thought I’d have more of a break than a single day.”
The beast screamed with the lion’s mouth. Reddish light glowed brighter inside it.
“Speak,” Mom said, resigned. “Find your voice. If you have none left then you may borrow mine.” She held out her hand through the place where two circles touched, and took hold of a twisting, muddy root.
“I am no dog you can command to bark,” the thing said with her borrowed voice, but so distorted by the mountain lion’s mouth that it didn’t sound like her.
“Clearly,” Mom answered. “You’re a cat stuck to a plant. Say what you came here to say. Tell me how you came to be the only haunting in Ingot.”
“I am not the only one,” the lion’s mouth growled. “Give him to me.”
Who? Rosa thought.
“Who?” Mom said.
The tree cracked and tore as it leaned forward. “Give him to me. He is already mine, and I know where he hides. I will find him. I will bring remembrance.”
“I’m also a servant of memory,” Mom said, her voice unshaken when she used it herself.
One of the tree’s branching legs caught fire and burned in lurid, shimmering green. “Everyone and every thing within this town and valley will burn in memoriam.”
“That sounds less appealing,” Mom said.
The green flame spread from the tree to the geometry of paper scraps that surrounded them both. “It will burn.”
“No.” Mom’s voice was not flammable.
“You will not prevent this.”
“No,” she said again.
“The boundary is breaking. He cannot maintain it. I have come home to claim him.”
“No.”
“You live in my house!” the thing raged. “You crawl through my cellar!”
This is getting ugly, Rosa thought. She tried to rush into the circle, but the fire grew and kept her out.
“I live here now,” Mom said.
“You are unwelcome,” said the thing. “This house is mine, as he is mine, as your voice is now mine. I will take the voice and keep it.”
Mom tried to pull her hand away, but the tree root wrapped itself tight around her arm.
Rosa shouted something. She wasn’t sure what.
Her mother reached out with her free hand, grabbed the lion’s head by its teeth, and tore it away.
The head made a thick, wet sound when it hit the sidewalk. The tree collapsed, still burning. A howling noise faded away southward.
Rosa couldn’t see her mother through the wreckage and flame.