THE NUMBER OF BOOKS IN Ganderly was beyond impressive. Within its many rooms, thousands of shelves pressed snugly upon one another with an ever-growing mass of volumes. Katherine’s Rhymes and Tales, the works we call Mother Goose stories, were but a tiny fraction of her collection. As dowager empress of stories, her library contained virtually every book devoted to children that had ever been. They spread throughout Ganderly in alphabetical order, and far beyond Ganderly as well: Katherine functioned under many guises and disguises to establish libraries and sections of libraries that were devoted to children’s books all over the world.
She was aided in this endless endeavor by the citizens of a tiny nation-state not far from Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) located on the Bosporus Strait. The name of this land was Raconteuristan, and its people were called Raconturks. For millennia, the rulers of Raconteuristan had been chosen not by birth or by lineage or by who was most cunning or adept at war, but by the beauty, wit, and power of the stories they told. Theirs was a nation of the imagination, with a history that mixed fact and fiction with joyful abandon. Entire eras and epochal events may or may not have happened. If the myth sounded good and was entertaining, then it was proclaimed true. The only rule the Raconturks insisted upon was that no fiction could be used to hurt any real person, and most important, anyone who was overtly cruel or mean would be banished. The Raconturks’ history had many villains, none of them actual, and an endless series of heroes who may or may not have existed. So when the Raconturks became aware of Katherine, or rather Mother Goose, they felt as if the most wonderful story of all had at last come true. They called her Lady Goose.
The Raconturks volunteered to be Katherine’s secret army and proved themselves to be invaluable as unofficial diplomats in the service of spreading the importance of stories. In every town, village, city, and hamlet, they posed as teachers, professors, and scholars, but most often librarians, devoting their lives to inspiring people, especially children, to not only read, but also to write. In time the notion of growing up and being a writer began to take hold as a genuine possibility for thousands of imaginative people. And this was the beginning of one of the most powerful and important forces of the Guardians: an actual protective field that encircled the entire Earth.
The Man in the Moon called it the Mythosphere, and from it coursed an invisible layer of enchantment that could inspire any man, woman, or child who needed or desired to tell a story. This had been Katherine’s inspiration. She had discovered during her childhood with Ombric that stories could save people. They had helped her save North when he nearly died of his wounds protecting the children of Santoff Claussen. And they had saved her, transforming her from a shy, lonely, seemingly powerless orphan into a being who, even as a child, could stand toe-to-toe with the most potent villain in the cosmos, Pitch himself.
Pitch was keenly aware of Katherine’s growing influence. He had always known that Katherine would develop into a formidable entity. That had been the primary reason why he had tried to convert her into becoming his Darkling Princess, why he had submerged her into that dark sleep when she had resisted, the sleep that Nightlight had woken her from with that single kiss. And now, even in his deep isolation, Pitch felt the shift in Katherine’s growing powers.
But this new component of the Guardians’ defenses, these ever-amassing stories, struck some deep and fearful alarm inside his dark heart. Spells, magic, jolliness, chocolate eggs, presents, elves, teeth—all the Guardians’ methods to fight his darkness were, to him, puny parlor tricks. But this power of story? He could not figure out how to fight a story.
“A cow jumps over the Moon. A boy named Huck saves his friend,” he would rant to himself. “Things that never actually happened! And yet they matter. They move people. Make them care. They give them escape. They give them hope. They make them less afraid!” He simmered with the rage of the ignorant. “How do I fight something that isn’t real?”
For more than a century he’d puzzled over this. As with most mysteries, when the solution came, it was simple. The clean, elegant cruelty of the scheme he was devising became vital to him. It delighted him. He lay in his prison, concocting his own story, a story of revenge. And this story had indeed saved him in a way. Changed him. Made him even craftier. This plan gave him new life and purpose. And for the first time he understood the power he was fighting. But his story would not be used to help or heal.
This story was everything the Raconturks fought against.
This story would cause hurt. It would destroy.
