Page 1

CHAPTER 1

CLARA

The ferry carrying me into Mountmend is held together with mismatched planks and stubbornness, and the man steering it hasn't spoken in two hours.

I'm not offended. Nine years of teaching eight-year-olds has taught me the difference between a person who dislikes you and a person who hasn't decided what you are yet.

The village arrives out of the mist all at once. Houses on stilts, dark-legged, standing over water the color of strong tea. Bridges run between them in no pattern I can follow, planks lashed and lashed again, some sagging toward the surface, some arched high enough for a boat to slide beneath. Unlit lanterns swing from the railings as we pass.

“Marlow place is the far one,” the ferryman says. “East walk. Green door.”

So he does talk. “Thank you.”

“Nobody's been through it.”

“That's why I'm here.”

He turns and studies me properly for the first time since Rell Crossing. Whatever he's measuring me against, I don't think I match it. He puts out a hand streaked with boat tar anyway.

“Joren,” he says. “Pike.”

“Clara.”

“I know.”

Everyone here is going to know. I've been on this planet four hours and I already understand that much.

Uncle Garrick's house sits at the far end of the eastern walk, the last thing standing before Mountmend stops pretending to be a town and goes back to being a swamp. The door is green the way anything stays green after forty years of weather arguing with it. The key the estate office sent me doesn't turn. The door opens regardless when I put my shoulder against the frame.

I have emptied a classroom at the end of every school year since I was twenty-two. I thought that qualified me for this.

It does not.

Surveying tripods lean in the corner like stacked firewood. Coils of waxed rope hang from pegs. There are jars of marsh water on every shelf, each labeled with a date, each a slightly different shade of brown, all of them arranged in an order I can't crack. A drafting table sits under the window, buried. Charts have been pinned over charts pinned over charts until the wall has grown a second wall out of paper.

And journals. Dozens of them, shelved and stacked and wedged into gaps, spines split, pages swollen with damp.

I open one at random. It's filled edge to edge with my uncle's handwriting, and not one line of it is words.

Someone knocks at four, which I only know because the light has gone the flat gray of a marsh afternoon.

“You'll be Garrick's girl.”

The woman on the boardwalk has gray braids and sleeves rolled past her elbows, and she carries a covered dish the way other people carry a summons.

“Clara.”

“Edda Hollowfen. Move, I'm not standing out here.”

She crosses the front room like she keeps an old map of it somewhere behind her eyes, sets the dish on the one clear corner of the table, and considers the paper wall.

“He never let anybody in this room,” she says.

“That's comforting.”

“It isn't meant to be.” She turns. “How long are you staying?”

“Three weeks. I sell it, I go home, school starts.”