KATHERINE LUNDY HAD BEEN missing for eight days. Long enough that the police were starting to speak in hushed tones of calling off the search: they only had so many resources, after all, and while everyone agreed the girl was too young to have run off on her own, there was a point at which things would need to be turned over to the feds. They had the manpower and the training to pursue a kidnapping across state lines. They could find what the local authorities could not.
At home, her mother wept, her big brother stared sleeplessly out his bedroom window, and her younger sister cried herself fitfully to sleep, unable to quite understand why everyone was so upset, knowing only that her sister—one of the few constants in her life—was gone.
Only her father stayed dry-eyed and steady, standing at the back door, waiting. Even as the police said that they were sorry, they were running out of leads, and would he like to speak to someone higher up, he remained calm. He stood at the door, and he kept his eyes on the horizon, and he thought about a long hallway carved from a single piece of living wood. He thought about rules. They were always so careful with their rules in the Goblin Market. They never kept the children on their first visit. It wouldn’t have been fair. They wouldn’t have been sure.
He thought about a golden hind with daisies and pomegranate blossoms in her hair, dancing under a midsummer moon. He thought about the way her kisses had burned when she tucked them into the corners of his mouth, telling him to store them up for the rest of his life, to only use them when he absolutely needed to. They had been barely sixteen on that moon-soaked night, and she had already known he was leaving, even though he himself had still believed that he might stay.
He thought about choices—both the one he’d made and the one he knew his daughter was even now making, the choice that would define everything that came after. He had done his best by her, tried to raise her to live in books and quiet, safe rooms, rather than running wild through fields of gorse and heather. He had always assumed that, after Daniel had passed through his elementary school years without stumbling through any impossible doors, the chain had been broken. That it was over.
He had been so wrong. And so he waited, until one evening, as the moon was rising, a bedraggled little figure came walking up the street toward their house.
Katherine’s school bag was missing, as were both her socks, and the ribbons from her hair. She had a sharp knife of polished glass belted at her waist, its curved bone handle easy to her hand. She had feathers braided in her hair (and if her father’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of them, she wasn’t to know why; she didn’t yet understand). She had a smudge of fruit juice, dark and sticky as jam, drying on one cheek.
Her father was out the door and down the front steps before her mother even noticed that he was moving, and in less time than it takes to say “home again, home again, she was finally home again,” he was on his knees on the sidewalk, holding her close, holding her tight, holding her like the world depended on his never letting go.
Lundy sniffled. Lundy buried her face against the crook of his neck, inhaling that wool and paper and smoke scent that said “father” to her. And Lundy, brave Lundy, who had ridden alongside her friends Moon and Mockery to fight the wicked Wasp Queen for the safety of the pomegranate groves, who had seen that sometimes fair value wasn’t enough to prevent blood on the ground and a little girl with silver feathers in her hair lying broken in the leaves, never to mock or tease or mercilessly barter again, burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” she wailed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I won’t go back, I won’t.”
She was lying, of course. But she wouldn’t understand that for two more years.