Five
Jenny and Ben were used to seeing Otto and Pip pile off the bus after Eleanor, and Ben already had snacks laid out for them.
“Hey, kids!” he said as they ran into the kitchen, dumping their backpacks and snatching up the tray of cheese and crackers. “Bye, kids!”
“Thanks, Uncle Ben,” Eleanor said over her shoulder, and bolted after Pip and Otto. They paused only long enough to make sure the coast was clear before heading up the fireplace steps and into the secret room.
Wander and Jack were already inside. Jack had fetched some chairs from the house, along with a card table. He was seated with his reading glasses on, paging through a textbook called Introduction to Internet Basics. He was still working on getting up-to-date on modern life. Wander was standing at the rear of the room, where a round mirror looked out over an ever-shifting landscape. When the trio entered, she turned toward them with her usual dreamy smile.
“You’re back,” she said in delighted surprise, as if she’d had no idea they were coming. Jack stifled a sigh as he set his book down and tucked his glasses into his shirt pocket.
“Yeah, we’re back, and we’ve got problems,” Pip said. She set her tray of snacks down on the card table and flopped into the chair. Eleanor and Otto took seats as well, helping themselves to crackers.
“What sort of problems?” Wander asked, concern creasing her brow.
“Today on the way to school there was a road that wasn’t there yesterday, and at school there was a hallway that didn’t exist, and I think it might have tried to eat me,” Eleanor said.
“We think maybe that’s the third sibling’s plan,” Otto said. “Trap us on a road somehow.”
Wander tapped her finger against her lips, considering. “It’s also possible that a predatory pathway followed me. Some roads are hungrier than others. If anyone ever tells you they can show you the way to Ys, trust me, run the other way.”
“That’s not all,” Eleanor said. “It turns out there’s an eclipse on Saturday. A total eclipse.”
“I can’t believe I missed it,” Otto said, looking dejected.
“We’ve had a lot to keep track of,” Pip reassured him, slinging an arm around his shoulders. “And I’m still not convinced. It’s not a day, like the others. It’s more of an . . . an event. Didn’t Mr. Crouch say it only lasts a few minutes?”
“That could be a good thing,” Eleanor said. “Only a few minutes of danger.”
“Or a very bad thing. Only a few minutes to get out of danger,” Otto countered. He looked at the adults. “What do you think? Eclipse, or solstice?”
Wander pursed her lips. “Were I to pick the one more suited to the mistress of the Wending, I would say the eclipse. But it is impossible to be certain.”
“We’ll be wary, regardless,” Jack pledged.
“Yeah, don’t go down any weird roads,” Pip suggested. “And we should all meet up that morning. Make sure we’re all together in case something goes down.”
“I’ll have to ditch my lab partner first,” Otto said. “She sort of invited herself over to my house already.”
“I already told mine I was doing it with you guys,” Pip said with a shrug.
Eleanor thought of Katie and felt a pang of guilt. She really did wish she could be a better friend—but what was the point, anyway? She was probably going to get turned into a key, and she couldn’t exactly show up for movie night then. “We’ll meet up here,” she said firmly. “Whatever the People Who Look Away are trying to throw at us, we can handle it.”
“Indeed. To that end, I have prepared lists of supplies to have ready before the fateful day,” Jack intoned, holding out three pages of notebook paper covered in his scrawling handwriting.
Pip picked one up and snorted. “Sunscreen? You’re such a dad.” She rolled her eyes. Jack struggled to hide a pleased smile, and Eleanor pressed her lips together, stifling a laugh.
“This is a terrible list,” Pip went on, shaking her head. “Not nearly enough snacks. Or weaponry.” She pulled a pen out of her back pocket and began making changes.
Eleanor looked down the list. Jack had suggested books, potions, flashlights, rope, and, despite Pip’s objections, a startling array of sharp objects. He’d even put life jackets on the list. It was enough to fill the whole garage. “This is a lot,” she noted delicately.
Jack looked troubled. “We don’t know what to expect. I tried to prepare for every eventuality,” he said.
A strange feeling shimmered and shuddered through Eleanor. Words seemed to rise to her tongue without her thinking of them first, and when she spoke her voice didn’t sound quite like her own. “Then we undertake the task with nothing but our wits, our courage, and one another,” she said.
Otto and Pip stilled. Jack stared openly. “Isn’t that a line from Tales of the Gray?” Otto asked uncertainly.
“I . . . I don’t know,” Eleanor said, but she knew perfectly well it was.
They were the words the girl with backward hands spoke in the tale of Tatterskin. That Wander had spoken, Eleanor realized with a start.
As if Wander’s tale was seeping into her mind, bit by bit.
OUTSIDE HER ROOM that night, she paused to look at the grandfather clock that stood opposite her door. It was a tall clock, the case carved from dark oak and the face the color of pearl. The hands of the clock ran backward, counting from twelve to eleven to ten to nine. Thirteen keys were painted around the numbers, the last one faint as if almost rubbed away. Each of those keys represented a trio of children stolen from Eden Eld by the People Who Look Away. The last key was hers—hers, and Pip’s, and Otto’s.
The clock had warned them before, its ticking following them wherever they went. She could hear the steady tick-tock-tick as she stood here in the hall, but downstairs there had been no hint of it. Not yet, she thought. They were safe for now.
That night, Eleanor dreamed again of Rag-a-bone and Shatterblack, their lolling pink tongues and snapping white teeth. But this time, as their hot breath panted on the back of her legs, she was suddenly lifted out of the dream by a soft voice.
“Eleanor.”
She startled awake as Wander’s fingertips brushed her brow. The woman bent over her, glass shards drifting like dust caught in a beam of sunlight. Eleanor sat up, sitting back against the headboard. “I was dreaming about the hounds,” she said.
“I know.” Wander sat on the end of the bed. “They can’t harm you in your dreams, but they can keep you from sleep. Here.” She twisted her fingers, and a loop of shining silver thread appeared, braided into a bracelet. She settled it around Eleanor’s wrist. “That will keep your dreams protected.”
Eleanor ran her fingers along the bumps of the braided thread, and the bracelet made a sound like a sigh, settling snugly against her skin.
“Eleanor. I think you and I need to talk,” Wander said quietly.
Eleanor’s lip began to quiver. She bunched her hands into fists and took a sharp breath through her nose. “Otto and I—we’re becoming Stories, aren’t we?” she asked.
“It is not a certain thing for you, yet. Not as it was with Pip. Do not despair.”
“Otto’s Story is the hedgewitch, right?” Eleanor asked. “The hedgewitch is all about knowledge and naming things and learning, and that’s totally Otto. So that leaves the world-walker. But why would it want me? I’m nothing special.”
“You are the daughter of two Stories. That is a very rare thing. One that makes you more suited to slipping between worlds.”
Eleanor looked over at Thirteen Tales of the Gray, which sat in its customary place on her bedside. “In the book, it says that the girl with backward hands was the daughter of a princess who was taken by Mr. January,” she said. “It’s implied that—I mean, it seems like Mr. January is—I mean . . .” She trailed off, not sure how to ask such an awkward question.
“The tale implies that the girl with backward hands is the daughter of Mr. January and the stolen princess,” Wander said with a wry twist of her lips. “I promise you, I am not Mr. January’s child. Bartimaeus Ashford took significant liberties when he recorded those stories.”
Eleanor nodded. The stories had hints of truth in them, but rarely stated things outright.
Wander picked up Thirteen Tales, paging through it with her spidery hands. Her fingernail ran down the title page, rasping softly against the paper, and then she flipped ahead. She held the book out for Eleanor to see. “This is my story. Or what little I remembered of it, embellished by Bartimaeus’s imagination.”
“The Glass-Heart Girl?” Eleanor asked, seeing what story it was open to. Wander nodded, and Eleanor read aloud the familiar words.
Once upon a time in a kingdom of magic, a princess was born with a heart of glass. Her glass heart beat normally, but each time she tightened her fists and wailed, tiny cracks appeared on its surface. The king and queen warned their daughter as she grew: Do not be moved to anger. Do not weep with sorrow. Do not quail with fear. Most of all, do not love: for however strong your love, sooner or later, your heart will break. And while any other broken heart might mend, a glass heart could only shatter.
The princess obeyed her parents. She knew neither joy nor sorrow, neither rage nor relief, and above all she resisted the lure of love. Until one day a knight came to the kingdom, fair of hair and blue of eye. From the moment she saw him, her glass heart was filled with love.
Eleanor paused in her reading, her fingers trailing under the words. “How much of it is true?” she asked.
“I don’t remember anymore,” Wander said. Her fingers traced the illustration on the opposite page: a princess extending her hand to a dashing knight, clad in armor. He had pale hair and sharp good looks, and his eyes gazed upon the princess with adoration. “Perhaps the true story still exists in the Library of Endersea—it is said its shelves contain every story from every world. But it is lost to me forever.”
“In the book, she falls in love, but the knight dies,” Eleanor said. “Her heart breaks into a thousand pieces. She dies, too.” It was the saddest story in the book.
“I didn’t die,” Wander said quietly. “But it hurt so much I wished I had. That’s the only part I remember. The pain of it. You need to guard your heart, as I did not. Promise me that.”
She touched her fingertips to Eleanor’s chin, tilting it up. Her eyes glinted with reflected moonlight—and so did the shards of glass that danced and swayed around her. Her heart, Eleanor thought. It was with her still.
“I promise,” she whispered, and Wander nodded, satisfied.
“Sleep well,” she said. “The hounds won’t trouble you.”
Eleanor lay back down as Wander left, closing the door behind her. But even knowing the hounds would not plague her dreams, she couldn’t sleep. She stared at the ceiling instead, and thought of Jenny and Ben and baby Naomi, and of her parents, and crushes, and all of the things that felt even a little like love.
Wander was right. She couldn’t worry about those things right now. She needed to be strong. Strong, but cold and clear as glass.