JASPER WOKE EARLY. HE USUALLY did. And on this morning his brain instantly snapped to fully awake. He had haunted things to think about.
The Chevalier home was a very old farmhouse. Most of it creaked whenever stepped on or leaned against. Jasper knew which floorboards had the loudest voices, but he still couldn’t avoid creaking noises entirely while he moved around upstairs. Not that he was trying to be sneaky. Both parents would be up already. He just liked to move without making much noise.
As in most old farmhouses, the bathrooms were tiny and the staircase too narrow for anyone wider than three sheets of paper. Broad-shouldered Dad had to turn himself sideways to go up or down the stairs, but Jasper still fit. In the bathroom he used very pale Band-Aids to stick pennies to each shoulder. In the stairwell he skipped several steps on his way down. He also skipped breakfast until after he had checked in on the stable.
He brought his staff with him. The coin at the tip made a clink, clink, clink noise against the driveway and the stable’s cement floor.
Jerónimo was still missing. Twelve stalls on the right stood full, but only eleven on the left.
The four grooms who worked for the family went about their business, performing their morning rituals with brush and sponge, checking the bandages over yesterday’s cuts and scrapes. And the horses themselves seemed fine, unhaunted by memories of a haunted tree. Horses spook easily, but they also calm down quickly.
Jasper mucked out Jerónimo’s stable and put down fresh bedding, even though he didn’t need to, even though the horse hadn’t come home last night. Jasper still needed to do this. He did it every morning. It meant that the day would unfold as it should.
He went back inside the house. His staff clinked against the driveway as he walked.
The Chevalier kitchen, like the Renaissance Festival itself, was a gleefully anachronistic place. Their shiny chrome fridge sat beside a stone hearth large enough to stand up in. Sometimes they boiled stew in a massive cauldron over an open fire, but not very often. It set off the smoke alarm. And good stew takes forever to make properly.
A long wooden table took up most of the kitchen. It had benches rather than chairs, and seemed suitable for feasting bands of merry warriors.
Mom and Dad—Emily and Morris Chevalier—sat sipping ye olde cappuccinos with the other two directors of the Ingot Renaissance Festival: Timothy Rathaus, who used to joust with Dad at the very beginning but had since retired from the lists to run the Tacky Tavern, and Nell MacMinnigan the smith, who was still the smith. Mr. Rathaus sported a trim goatee on his chin. Nell had short red hair, a torn T-shirt, and an armband that swirled around her smithy-widened bicep. She rarely laughed. Right now she looked very far away from laughing.
Jasper got himself a bowl of cereal, joined the adults at the table, and listened to them talk over and around him.
The four directors met to decide the fate and future of the Ingot Renaissance Festival, large portions of which had been flattened by a tree yesterday. And they seemed to remember that tree stampede, which was a huge relief to Jasper. They didn’t pretend that it had not happened. But they also didn’t seem concerned that it had happened.
“We can reopen tomorrow,” Mr. Rathaus insisted. “We can rebuild by then.”
“Seems doable,” said Mom, cautiously optimistic. “But I might have to cut down on royal processions.” She stretched out her leg. Jasper scooted aside to give her sprained and bandaged ankle more room on the bench.
“We really can’t afford to close for longer than that,” Rathaus went on. “Not so early in the season.”
“We also owe it to the out-of-town performers,” Dad agreed. “I doubt they’ve even recouped travel expenses yet.”
Nell hunched her shoulders and stared at her mug as though scrying their future in the dregs of cappuccino foam. (Jasper knew and liked her well enough to think of her as Nell rather than Ms. MacMinnigan.)
“A few out-of-towners have skipped already,” she said. “They know what can happen to historical reenactments in haunted places. Echoes of actual history crop up to argue with performers.”
“Ingot isn’t haunted,” said Mom, Dad, and Rathaus in unison.
Nell looked up. “Trees don’t decide to flip over and run downhill all by themselves.”
Rathaus shook his head. “That’s just the exception that proves the rule.”
“Nope, nope, nope,” Nell insisted. “The rule is that this never happens. Ever. Not here. But it happened anyway. So that exception very definitely disproves the rule.”
She couldn’t convince them. Rathaus only pretended to listen. Mom had her mind firmly set to optimistic problem-solving. Dad was tired, a little sad, and clearly worried about the horses. But he couldn’t imagine shutting down the festival. He couldn’t see it as necessary, or even possible. And a haunted Ingot was an alien idea to them, one that they couldn’t even look at directly.
Jasper had felt much the same way before Rosa made him a rough bracelet out of copper wire.
“We have safety volunteers patrolling up and down the tree line,” Rathaus said.
Nell was not mollified. “I saw some of that. Local boys itching to take some kind of action. They formed their own ghost hunting militia. Now they’re all marching around in costume with pointy, poorly balanced pole arms they bought or borrowed from Smoot. Young Humphrey, the mayor’s own kid, is carting around a homemade flamethrower with brass gears glued on to make it look sort of Victorian. I feel very, very safe now that those brave lads stand ready to protect their homes and kill some ghosts. But you can’t kill something that’s already skipped through dying and come out the other side. We aren’t used to hauntings here. We don’t know how to respond. I’m pretty sure that this isn’t how we should.”
“We do have a new appeasement specialist in town,” Jasper told them.
Rathaus gave a dismissive chuckle. “But this is Ingot,” he said. “We’ve never needed one of those before.”
The three directors wouldn’t budge. They still remembered what happened, but those events had ceased to be viscerally real or cause for concern. Something had sanded away the rough edges of their memories.
Nell gave up, swallowed the dregs of her cappuccino, and went outside to smoke.
Jasper slurped down his cereal milk and followed. He found her on the porch, stuffing tobacco into a long wooden pipe with the tip of her pinky finger. Then she looked for a light.
He gave her the Zippo.
“What’s this?” she asked, suspicious and muttering around her pipe stem. “Are you taking up bad habits? Smoking is all kinds of bad. I’ve inhaled so many fumes from melting down metal that I figure my lungs are wrecked already, but yours aren’t. Not yet. Stand back. Even second-hand stuff is bad.”
“No bad habits,” Jasper said. “Rosa needed fire yesterday. The appeasement specialist. So we picked this up.”
“That the girl I saw you racing around with?”
Jasper nodded.
“Interesting.” Nell lit her pipe, puffed the smoke, and looked out across the fields like a sailor watching the sea. “We’ve got ourselves a tiny specialist.”
“Two of them,” Jasper said. “One is less tiny. But she’s in rough shape after she took down the tree.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Nell said. She gave him back the Zippo. He stuck it in his pocket. “Still. Took down the tree. Good to hear. Your father didn’t have much luck jousting against it. Which came as no surprise.”
Jasper considered her spiraling piece of jewelry. “Maybe his lance wasn’t made of the right metal. Is that copper on your arm?”
“Mostly,” Nell said. “Almost entirely. It’s bronze, and bronze is just copper with a little bit of tin tossed in for strength and flavor. Is there something I should know about copper?”
He showed her the thin wire bracelet on his own wrist. “The ghost didn’t like touching this stuff.”
“Is that right,” she said. “I’ve got a bit of a Bronze Age collection back at the shop. Not much. Collectors usually go for more renaissancy replicas, but I do have a bit . . .” She stopped. “Forget it. Forget I said anything. And don’t go telling anyone else about this copper business. The very last thing I need is to have every would-be ghost hunter come begging for my Bronze Age collection. It wouldn’t protect them, or anyone else. It would just put danger in their hands—the sort of danger that might lash out at anybody. Know what adrenaline does?”
“Yes,” he said in a way that would, hopefully, forestall a lecture about adrenaline. Sir Dad loved to give lengthy explanations of things that Jasper already knew, so he had to endure this pretty often. “It makes you faster. And stronger.”
“It also makes your hands shake.” Nell took the pipe out of her mouth and pointed the stem at him. “No matter how brave you are, or level-headed, or filled with knightly virtue, your hands will still shake from the force of adrenaline and you will be simply unable to do anything precise with anything pointy. Unless you practice for years. And keep practicing. Every day. Our new, volunteer militia of ghost hunters aren’t so skilled. Maybe they’re trying to be usefully brave, but I figure they’ll be clumsily dangerous instead. And I won’t add to that disaster. I won’t give weapons to boys who want to feel more in control than they really are. Won’t make any difference against an undead, irate tree anyway. You just stand clear of dead trees. Can’t kill ghosts with a Bronze Age spear.”
“Can’t kill ghosts at all,” Jasper said, by which he meant, I’m with you. We’re on the same page. Stop reading me that page aloud.
Nell crossed her blacksmithing arms. The left one bulged inside its armlet. “Nice staff,” she said, nodding at the spot where it leaned beside the door.
“Thanks.”
She peeked at the old coin hammered onto the end. “Zhou Dynasty, looks like. Probably a replica. Can’t read the characters. One of my tattoos is in Chinese. Got it when I was young and dumb. It was supposed to be a list of the five elements. Turns out it reads, ‘This is a tattoo.’ ”
“At least that’s accurate,” Jasper said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Could be worse. I wonder what your coins say. I wonder how much it matters. But I’m glad you’ve got that staff. Proper kind of defensive weapon. You can use it to keep your distance from dangerous things without becoming a flailing, reckless, stabby sort of dangerous thing yourself. I’ll worry less about you if you walk softly with that. But don’t go around thinking that a stick makes you invincible. It’s not a talisman. It’s not a symbol of your mightiness. It’s just a stick.”
Jasper took it by the leather-wrapped grip in the center. He didn’t swing it around or do anything flashy, even though he really wanted to.
“Just a stick,” he promised.
Nell went to the railing and knocked ashes from her pipe onto the lawn. “Thank your parents for the coffee. I should make my rounds and check all the horseshoes.” As a real, actual blacksmith Nell was also the town farrier and horseshoe expert.
“The grooms checked already,” Jasper pointed out.
“Yeah, but I don’t trust them to do it right. And then I need to go back to the fairgrounds, clean up my smithy, hide my wares from amateur ghost hunters, and get ready to reopen. Which is, for the record, a terrible idea.”
“Bye Nell.”
She waved and headed for the stables with her pipe in her teeth.