Lucas is right. The book is useless.

Kara resisted an urge to toss it across her room. She could barely keep her eyes open, and yet here she was again, flipping through the pages in the middle of the night, searching for . . . she didn’t even know what. A clue?

The pages remained as blank as ever.

When Kara had first opened her mother’s book the night before, she had been thunderstruck by disappointment. She wasn’t sure what she had expected to find, but anything would have been better than this: white page after white page after white page. She had risked her life by entering the Thickety . . . for nothing.

The worst part was that she had believed. Holding the book in her hands, Kara had felt the strange sensation of hope flood over her. This is my mother’s journal—it has to be! Finally she was going to get the answers she longed for all these years.

She felt like such a fool.

Maybe there’s some sort of trick to reading it, she thought, flipping through the pages. The book had been moved from its place beneath the floorboards of their barn—a perfectly adequate hiding spot—and hidden in the Thickety itself. Whatever secrets it held had to be amazingly important, otherwise Mother would have never taken such a huge risk.

More determined than ever, Kara tried everything she could think of to unlock the book’s meaning. She examined the tome page by page, running a finger across every inch of white space, searching for some kind of telltale bump or groove. Each page was perfectly smooth. She knew that some of her classmates passed messages with what they called “vanishing ink,” a simple mixture that remained invisible on the page but was easily revealed by the glow of candlelight. Kara tried it. Nothing. Since the blank pages invited her to write, Kara put quill to ink and wrote her name. Here, at least, the results were curious: The ink ran down the page like tears before dripping onto the floor.

The book was blank—and determined to stay that way.

Despite this, Kara could not get it out of her mind. Her thoughts had been wandering to the book all day, distracting her from Master Blackwood’s lessons and making her forget her duties around the house. And now, despite her exhaustion, she remained awake, unable to stop flipping through the pages.

I need rest. A clear mind.

Sliding the book beneath her pallet, Kara blew out the bedside candle and forced herself to close her eyes. It was no use. Scattered thoughts about the book immediately bombarded her. Perhaps pages once held writing but Thickety soil dissolved ink flesh from bones no Mother would know that so wouldn’t hide it there could be something hidden inside cover cut it open whole book could be a hiding place . . .

Kara flipped over on her side and tried to think of something else. Her thoughts wandered to Lucas. She couldn’t believe how cruel she had been to him today. Lucas had done nothing wrong. He was just curious about the book.

I’ll apologize tomorrow, she thought. I’ll let him look at the useless thing all he wants, and then I’ll get rid of it forever.

Feeling a little better, Kara closed her eyes. At some point in the night, her hand fell off the bed and slipped beneath the pallet, touching the book with a single finger.

Her dreams were dark.

 

After school the next day, Kara walked to the Fringe.

The infectious flora in this area had been carefully removed from the ground, but not all of it had been burned yet. As Kara walked between the towering piles of unearthed plants, she passed two Clearers using long pitchforks to poke at a mound of bulbous pods, draining any fluid at a distance before they risked transporting the weeds to the Burning Place. Both Clearers were large, bald men who wore heavy gloves and bandannas over their mouths and noses. They did their job without speaking. Kara, who did not have a bandanna, kept her mouth clamped shut. The air here was acrid enough to burn your tongue.

She continued toward the thick plumes of smoke that rose in the distance. Several Clearers were heading in that direction, pushing wheelbarrows overflowing with weeds. A stout woman nodded, and Kara returned the greeting with a small wave. She wasn’t sure if she could call these people her friends, but they certainly afforded her more respect than anyone else on the island. In some ways, she was one of them. Her mother, being an orphan from a foreign land, had begun her life in De’Noran as a Clearer. She would have remained a Clearer had Father not insisted on her hand. As one of the most respected men in the village—some had even predicted he would be the next fen’de—his decision to marry so far below his class was openly questioned. But Father would have none of it. He loved her; it was as simple as that. Later most would claim he was bewitched. But Kara had witnessed her parents’ love on a daily basis, and though she would agree that there was magic involved, it wasn’t the kind they meant.

She was close to the Burning Place now, the greenish smoke hanging in the air like a pestilent fog. Kara tried not to gag on the smell, and though she kept her eyes slitted she would see the world with a greenish haze for hours afterward. Luckily she found Lucas before she had to get any closer. He was in his usual spot, shoveling up the less dangerous Fringe weeds with the rest of the younger Clearers.

“Kara?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

Kara started to reply, but Lucas shook his head and handed her a bandanna. She covered her mouth.

“Can we talk?” she asked.

“Not now. There was a huge growth spurt last night—the usual weeds and some kind of yellowish plant we haven’t seen before. Not deadly, but one touch is enough to make you really sick.”

“I wanted to explain about yesterday.”

Lucas ran the back of one gloved hand across his forehead, damp with perspiration. He nodded toward a short woman already heading in their direction, an exasperated look on her face.

“Can you come back in a few hours, after my duty ends? Framer’s in charge today. You know how she is about breaks.”

Kara shook her head. “Don’t worry about that.” She opened her satchel, revealing the three pouches of ointment she had made that morning. Although it would not heal the more serious wounds, the medicine would soothe the everyday burns that came from working with the Fringe weeds. It was worth its weight in gold to any Clearer.

Lucas whistled beneath his bandanna.

“That’ll buy me some time, for sure. But I still don’t feel right leaving my friends to do all the work. Maybe I can just—”

“The book belonged to my mother.”

Lucas put down his shovel.

“Come with me,” he said.

 

He brought her to an empty section of the Fringe that had been completely cleared that morning. Already Kara could see weeds sprouting from the ground, however. Within a day or two, it would need to be cleared again.

“Can I see the book now?” Lucas asked, smiling with mock caution. “Or are you going to yell at me again?”

“Sorry,” Kara said, trying to return his smile but failing. Slowly she withdrew the book from her satchel but did not yet hand it to Lucas. It felt so right in her hands.

“Or I could just stare at it from here,” Lucas said. He gazed at her strangely. “Kara?”

What are you doing? This is Lucas. You can trust him.

“Here,” Kara said. She held the book forward, but she could not bring herself to put it in his hands. “Please take it.”

He did. Kara resisted the urge to snatch it right back.

What’s wrong with me?

“Don’t tell anyone about this,” she said.

“Why would I? It’s just a blank book.”

“People are sensitive when it comes to my mother. They might think it’s a spellbook or something.”

Kara saw Lucas tense.

“It’s not,” she said. “A spellbook.”

“I know,” he replied, too quickly. “If it was a spellbook, there would be spells inside. Because that’s what’s in a spellbook. Which this is not.”

Lucas flipped nervously through the pages. He did not blame witchcraft for every misfortune, as did many of the villagers, but you couldn’t grow up in De’Noran without some fear of magic.

“I was thinking,” Kara said, “that there might be some kind of hidden message inside. Maybe something my mother wanted me to know.”

“Have you tried the trick with the lemon juice?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no writing. Anywhere.”

“I know that.”

“The paper feels like . . . paper.”

“Wow,” said Kara. “I feel like we’re really sorting out this mystery now.”

Without looking up Lucas playfully nudged her shoulder.

“Good paper,” he added. “That might be important.”

“Why?”

Lucas closed the book and ran his fingers over the binding.

“This leather is so weird,” he said. “It feels wet. It should be wet.”

“But it’s not,” Kara said.

“I don’t like touching it,” he said, handing the book back to her. Kara held it tight.

“I wonder what type of animal it comes from,” he said. “Maybe we should ask the tanner.”

“No!” Kara exclaimed. “No one else can know about this.”

“But that part could be important. Depending on the animal, the book could be worth a lot.”

“Why? It’s just a book. It doesn’t do anything.”

“True—if you sold it in the general store, I doubt you’d get more than a couple of whites. But that’s here in De’Noran. I have a friend who’s apprenticed to a Trader. He makes the ferry run every month, across the water to the shore of the World.” He shook his head in disgust. “They don’t even get off the boat, you know—not allowed. How do you make that trip and not even get off the boat?”

“Lucas? Point.”

“Some traders from the World meet them there, and my friend, he says those people have strange notions of what’s valuable and what’s not. They may have no interest in a perfectly good fishing rod, but show them a shiny rock they’ve never seen before and they get really excited. It’s not so much what something does but how rare it is.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Kara.

“But maybe that was your mother’s plan,” Lucas said, thinking out loud. “Maybe she knew she might not . . . always be here and that things could get hard for you later on. Maybe she left the book for you to sell, so you’d have enough money to start a new life.”

“You mean in the World? Don’t be ridiculous!”

Lucas’s gaze drifted toward the ocean. “Is it so strange,” he asked, “to want to see it, at least?”

In school they had been taught that the World was a cesspool of greed and violence, populated by fools who chose to ignore the dangers of magic. These people had forgotten how the witches nearly destroyed everything almost two thousand years ago, how Timoth Clen saved them all. “The people of the World live only within their own years,” Master Blackwood had told them. “They have never seen magic, and so many of them assume it doesn’t exist.” What they were good at, Kara learned, was war. Realm against realm, town against town, never ceasing. That’s why Children were not allowed to leave the ship; strangers were killed instantly.

Stories of the World were enough to keep anyone from wanting to leave De’Noran.

Except Lucas.

“How can anything be worse than how we’re treated here?” he asked, looking down at his green-tinged fingertips. “Both of us. Maybe your mother wanted you to leave.”

“Maybe,” Kara said. “But she didn’t want me to sell this book. It can’t be that simple.”

“Why not?”

Because she buried it in the Thickety. Because it sends me strange dreams in which coiled snakes spring from my fingertips and fearsome beasts kneel before me.

The book was magic. She knew it. She just didn’t know how.

Kara was trying to decide how much of this to tell Lucas when the trees of the Thickety parted and a creature of pure nightmare ran straight at them.