KAILASH LIFTED ONE WING ever so slightly and banked left, gliding silently toward Katherine’s island, to the topmost spire of the main house. It is difficult to ascribe a structure as unique as Ganderly’s as any particular sort of building. It was larger than a house, but not really a mansion. It had several towers, but it wasn’t a castle. It was beautiful, in some ways rather grand, but it was by no means a palace.
It was rambling yet intimate. It was handsome and sturdy, but also airy and graceful. It was certainly elaborate, but in a simple, uncluttered way. There were porches and balconies and decks and walkways and roofs; some were peaked and pitched and pointed. Others were rounded or flat.
But Ganderly’s most notable feature was the half dozen or so massive trees that twined and curved their way around and throughout the house itself. These were saplings of Big Root, and they had the same gnarled sycamore bark of their mother tree, as well as flowing clusters of thick, elegant limbs that curled outside the windows and balconies. These limbs served as willowy paths and stairways upon which one could walk up to other windows or floors or simply sit amid the treetops that arched over the house like giant leafy umbrellas.
This unusual feature gave Ganderly the appearance of being a sort of tree house estate, which had been Katherine’s plan from the beginning. As a child her favorite secret place had been the makeshift tree house she had made as a nest for Kailash in the topmost branches of Big Root. It was in that tree house that she began to write her many stories, where she first discovered that they had the power to help her make sense of the wonders and sorrows of the real world.
Ganderly had become her grown-up version of that hideaway, the place where, as Mother Goose, she lived and thought and dreamed and wrote. But tonight she would not write. Tonight Jack needed a story. A story to help him make sense of whatever it was that Ombric had told him. And hopefully, save them all.
But first he would need to wake up.
