Chapter 1
By the time we reached the spice stalls, I had already decided that I hated the city.
Not in any dramatic, irreversible way. Not enough to run screaming through the streets or throw myself into the river like one of Liora's tragic heroines. I hated it in the quiet, daily way one hated a room with no windows after living in it too long.
I hated the same crooked streets, the same bell tower cutting the sky into familiar pieces, the same vendors calling out the same prices for the same bruised pears and over-polished apples. I hated the smell of horse sweat in the morning, fish by noon, and rain trapped in the stones by evening. I hated knowing which baker watered his dough, which flower seller lied about the freshness of her lilies, and which corner of the market would flood first when the autumn storms came.
Mostly, I hated that I knew all of it because I had never been anywhere else.
"Miss Evershade," Mrs. Wren said beside me, "you are walking too quickly again."
I slowed at once, not because I wished to, but because a woman walking quickly in public was apparently one step away from moral ruin.
Mrs. Wren was not a cruel chaperone. That made her worse in some ways. Cruelty could be resented cleanly. Kindness wrapped around a cage was far more difficult to hate.
"Forgive me," I said.
She gave me a look over the top of her spectacles. "There is nothing to forgive. Only something to correct."
That, I had learned, was the language of my world.
There was nothing to question. Only something to obey.
Behind us, one of the footmen shifted the basket on his arm. Another servant trailed a few paces back, carrying a folded list from our housekeeper. We made a small, respectable procession through the market: one unmarried young woman, one chaperone, two attendants, and absolutely no possibility of scandal.
No possibility of anything, really.
I stopped before a table stacked with dyed ribbons, glass buttons, and little paper packets of sewing needles. The merchant smiled too broadly when he recognized the crest embroidered on Mrs. Wren's glove.
"Fine morning, Miss Evershade," he said.
"It is a morning," I replied.
Mrs. Wren cleared her throat.
I selected two lengths of blue ribbon for Liora, though she had not asked for them, and a packet of dark thread for myself. Liora would like the ribbons. She liked anything that could be tied into her hair, pressed between pages, or imagined as a token from a doomed prince in one of her dreadful romances.
Jonas would have laughed if he had been there.
Then again, Jonas was almost never made to be there.
My brother could accompany Father on short journeys to neighboring towns. He could stand beside men at auctions and treaty dinners and pretend to understand wine, horses, and politics. He could ride beyond the southern road without three pairs of eyes measuring the distance between his body and the nearest disaster.
I, however, could not cross a market square without Mrs. Wren reminding me to slow my steps.
It was not that I disliked my brother for it. Jonas had not built the rules any more than I had built the walls of our house. Still, he moved through the world as if doors had been made for him, while I had been taught to wait beside them until someone suitable opened one.
Mother traveled often enough. She had seen the coast beyond Velmora, the white bridges of Orison, the winter estates in the north where the roofs shone blue beneath frost. She went because Father went, and respectable couples were expected to appear in pairs. A husband alone invited questions. A wife left behind invited pity. Together, they became proper.
That was the trick of it, I thought as I handed the ribbons to the footman. A woman could see the world, so long as she did so beside the man who owned the carriage.
"Anything else, miss?" the footman asked.
I glanced at the list. "Cloves. Ink, if Master Bell has any that has not turned to sludge. And pears, but not from Hamish's stall."
The younger footman blinked. "Not Hamish's, miss?"
"He polishes them with oil when they begin to soften."
Mrs. Wren's mouth twitched as if she were trying not to smile. "An accusation of grave importance."
"It is not an accusation if it is true."
We moved on.
The market thinned as the sun climbed higher, though the streets remained crowded enough to make every step a negotiation. A woman in a green shawl argued over the price of eggs. Two boys darted between carts with stolen plums in their fists.
Somewhere near the fountain, a musician sawed miserably at a violin while his dog slept beside an overturned hat.
It should have been charming. In a book, perhaps, it would have been.
Liora would have found a way to love it. She would have seen the violinist and decided he was a disguised prince. She would have sworn the woman in the green shawl was a hedge-witch hiding from an ancient court. She would have pointed to the black archway between the apothecary and the candle shop and whispered that it looked exactly like the sort of place where a Verin gate might appear.
I could almost hear her voice.
Not all gates look like doors, Lyss. Sometimes they look like shadows. Sometimes they look like reflections. Sometimes they only open for someone who is not looking for them.
I had been half-asleep when she told me that. Or nearly half-asleep. Liora did most of her important talking at night, when the candle had burned low and I was trying to surrender myself to the mercy of unconsciousness. She read beneath her blanket until her eyes hurt, then emerged with some new horror or wonder she insisted I must know.
The Verin never say thank you.
A name given freely can be used as a chain.
In the oldest tongues, Verin meant true-born. Not truthful. Not honest. True. As if the rest of us were only imitations of something the world had forgotten how to make.
That last one had stayed with me, though I wished it had not.
"Miss Evershade?"
Mrs. Wren was watching me. "You seemed elsewhere."
"If only."
Her expression softened for half a breath. Then propriety returned and shut it away.
"The ink shop is this way."
We finished the errands before noon. I chose cloves sharp enough to scent the inside of my glove, ink in two stoppered bottles, a square of beeswax, and three pears from a farmer who did not insult either my intelligence or his fruit by pretending perfection. I told the servants what to carry and what to send ahead, and when Mrs. Wren declared the outing complete, I did not argue.
There was no use arguing with a completed thing.
The carriage waited at the edge of the square, lacquered black and trimmed with the muted silver of the Evershade crest. I stepped inside, gathered my skirts, and watched the market fold itself away behind the glass.
The streets narrowed as we left the square. Shops gave way to townhouses, townhouses to walled gardens, and walled gardens to the older road where the elms leaned inward as if sharing secrets. The wheels struck every familiar rut. I could have closed my eyes and known exactly when we turned toward home.
I did close them, for a moment.
When I opened them again, Evershade House was waiting at the end of the lane.
It stood three stories high, pale stone under a steep slate roof, with ivy climbing the eastern wall despite Mother's annual threats to have it torn down. The house had been renovated more times than I could count. New windows. Repaired chimneys. A widened front stair. Fresh paper in the dining room after Liora spilled blackberry cordial against the old one and tried to blame a ghost.
And still, somehow, it remained the same.
The same brass lion knocker on the front door. The same narrow windows on the third floor, where the nursery had once been. The same deep green railings inside, polished by years of hands, skirts, dust cloths, and one reckless girl who had once slid down them from the second landing and crashed into a vase large enough to hold a body.
Mother had called it unladylike.
Then dangerous.
Then expensive.
I had been seven years old and secretly proud of all three.
As the carriage stopped, the front door opened before the footman could knock. Mr. Wicks, our butler, stood waiting with his usual expression of calm disapproval, as if the world had once again failed to meet the minimum standard of order and he alone had chosen not to mention it.
"Miss Evershade," he said.
"Mr. Wicks."
"Mrs. Wren."
"Mr. Wicks," she replied.
The servants began unloading the parcels. I handed over my gloves and stepped into the entry hall.
Home smelled of lemon oil, old wood, and the faint smoke that clung to every hearth no matter how often the flues were cleaned. Sunlight fell across the black-and-white tiles. Somewhere upstairs, a door closed. Somewhere at the back of the house, Cook was scolding a kitchen maid with the emotional force of a battlefield commander.
For a moment, I felt the childish urge to run straight through the hall, fling open the garden doors, and escape into the grass.
I did not.
I was twenty-four years old. Far too old to run indoors. Far too unmarried to run outdoors.
"Has there been any word?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.
Mr. Wicks's face did not change. "No further letters, miss."
No further letters.
Only the one that had arrived yesterday morning, sealed in Father's hand and apologetic in Mother's.
They had meant to return two days ago. They had meant to be home in time for the solstice celebration. Mother had promised Liora she would help choose the flowers for the supper table. Father had promised Jonas he would bring back the maps he had requested from Veyrhal. Neither promise had survived contact with whatever business or invitation had detained them.
The letter had been brief. Regretful. Polished.
Delayed at least a week.
I had read it once, then again, then handed it to Jonas without surprise.
Our parents were always leaving and always sorry for it.
People liked to say that Evershade House had been full of children. What they meant was that it had been full of us. Jonas, Liora, and me, running through corridors, growing out of shoes, inventing kingdoms in the garden, learning the particular silence that settled over a house when its master and mistress were away.
We were not neglected. That would have been too simple.
We had tutors, servants, chaperones, music lessons, riding lessons, proper meals, winter coats, summer gloves, and every necessary correction. We had letters from cities we had never seen and gifts from roads we had never traveled.
What we had not always had was them.
I looked toward the staircase, toward the dark green banister gleaming in the noon light.
For one ridiculous moment, I wondered what would happen if I gathered my skirts, climbed to the second landing, and slid down it again.
Perhaps Mother would appear out of sheer outrage.
Perhaps Father would laugh before remembering he was meant to disapprove.
Perhaps Liora would clap, Jonas would call me an idiot, and the house would feel, just for a breath, like it had when the world was smaller and every locked door belonged to someone else.
"Miss?" Mr. Wicks prompted gently.
I turned away from the stairs.
"Have the cloves sent to Cook," I said. "The ribbons to Liora. And the ink to my father's study."
"Of course."
Then, because I could not help myself, I added, "If my parents write again, tell me first."
Mr. Wicks inclined his head. "Always, miss."
Always.
It was a comforting lie, and we both knew it.
By late afternoon, Evershade House had surrendered itself to the solstice.
Every window had been opened to invite in the warm, restless air. Servants moved through the halls with armfuls of linen, polished silver, and enough flowers to make the house look as if the garden had staged an invasion. The kitchen exhaled the smell of roasting herbs, honeyed carrots, and fresh bread. Somewhere beyond the back doors, a maid laughed too loudly and was immediately hushed by Cook.
The city would hold its own celebration by the river, of course. There would be musicians in the lower square, lanterns strung from the bridges, vendors selling sugared nuts and plum wine, and respectable families pretending not to notice how many young couples disappeared into the crowd at dusk.
We would not be among them.
Mother had always preferred our solstice supper at home. A beautiful dinner in the garden, she called it, followed by the sunset from the western lawn, where the sky opened wide beyond the old orchard wall. It was one of the few traditions she guarded with something like tenderness.
This year, she had guarded it from several towns away.
Liora had taken command of the table with the solemnity of a general before battle. She stood beneath the garden awning, directing two maids in the placement of candlesticks, ribbons, and flowers as if the fate of the realm depended on whether the white blossoms sat nearer the silverware or the wineglasses.
No one who saw us from a distance ever had trouble believing we were siblings.
We had the same chestnut-brown hair, though Liora's fell in softer waves and Jonas's never stayed neat for longer than an hour. We had the same light eyes, though his seemed sharper, hers brighter, mine perhaps less forgiving. Strangers liked to tell Mother that we looked like three attempts at the same portrait.
They were wrong, of course.
Jonas, at twenty-two, had the quick, impatient stillness of someone always waiting for the rest of the room to catch up with him. Everyone said he was the clever one, and he had the unbearable habit of proving them right.
Liora, two years younger than him and four younger than me, had somehow taken the same features and made them lovely. Not merely pretty. Lovely in the way that made people soften when she smiled and forgive her before she finished asking.
And I was the bossy one.
No one ever needed to say it twice.
"No, not there," Liora said, lifting a cluster of blue ribbon from one corner of the table. "It should look accidental."
One of the maids blinked. "Accidental, miss?"
"Beautifully accidental."
Jonas, who had been leaning against the stone balustrade with his arms crossed for the better part of ten minutes, made a low sound that might have been a laugh or the first symptom of death by boredom.
Liora turned on him. "You are not helping."
"I was not aware I had claimed otherwise."
"You could at least pretend to care."
"I do care. Deeply. About supper."
I should have scolded him. Instead, I pressed my fingers to the bridge of my nose and tried not to smile.
The garden was too bright, too loud, too full of movement. Servants crossed the lawn with trays and folded blankets. Mr. Wicks appeared and vanished like a judgmental ghost, correcting the angle of chairs no one had touched. Mrs. Wren stood near the French doors, speaking with the housekeeper and occasionally looking toward me as if I were a candle that might tip over if left unattended.
I could feel the whole day tightening around my ribs.
The market. The letter. The absent place where Mother should have stood, fussing over flowers. The absent place where Father should have been, pretending not to fuss and failing. Liora's cheerfulness, Jonas's restlessness, the servants' careful silence whenever our parents' delay came too near the conversation.
All of it pressed too close.
"I am going for a walk," I said.
Jonas lifted a brow. "Should I alert the city guard?"
"Only if I make it as far as the roses."
Liora barely glanced up from the table. "Do not crush the west beds. I need the pale ivy later."
"I shall do my best not to ruin the solstice by stepping on a leaf."
Mrs. Wren heard me, of course. Chaperones had the hearing of hunting owls when inconvenience was involved. She looked as if she might object, then seemed to remember that we were inside our own walls, surrounded by our own servants, beneath the gaze of our own windows.
Even propriety had limits.
Or so I had always hoped.
I left them to their ribbons and candlesticks and crossed the lawn toward the older part of the garden, where the grass grew less obedient and the trees gathered thickly near the northern wall.
After all, the only place I was allowed to wander alone was the safety of our own garden.
The thought should have comforted me.
Instead, it made me quicken my pace.
The noise of the preparations softened behind me. Voices blurred into birdsong. The scent of roasting herbs faded beneath damp earth, crushed grass, and the faint green bitterness of ivy climbing over stone. Here, the garden had never fully accepted being a garden. It had always seemed one season away from becoming woodland again.
As children, we had loved it for that.
Jonas had built forts from fallen branches. Liora had crowned herself queen of the moss and demanded tribute in the form of stolen biscuits. I had hidden between tree trunks, beneath hedges, behind the old standing stones near the wall, holding my breath while Jonas counted too quickly and Liora accused us all of cheating.
I had not thought of those stones in years.
A flicker of movement caught my eye.
I stopped.
Something pale shifted between the trees ahead, low to the ground and quick enough to vanish before I could properly see it.
A rabbit, I thought.
We had dozens of them in spring and summer, bold little thieves that ate Cook's herbs and escaped every trap laid for them. One had gotten into the house when I was twelve and sent three maids shrieking onto chairs while Liora tried to name it and Jonas tried to catch it with a laundry basket.
The memory tugged a reluctant smile from me.
Then the movement came again.
Not pale this time.
Dark.
I stepped off the path.
The grass brushed damp against the hem of my skirt as I moved between the trees. A branch snagged lightly at my sleeve, then let go. I should have turned back. Supper would not arrange itself, and Liora would eventually remember some urgent detail only I could solve. Mrs. Wren would notice my absence. Jonas would make a joke about me being devoured by decorative shrubbery.
But there it was again: a shiver at the edge of sight.
Not a rabbit.
A shadow.
The three stones stood in the small clearing just beyond the oldest yew.
I had forgotten how tall they were.
The smallest rose a little higher than my shoulder. The second stood well above my head. The third towered over both, narrow and dark, its surface furred with lichen and age. They were arranged in a slight curve, close enough to seem intentional but not close enough to form a wall. No one in the house had ever known who placed them there. Father called them decorative ruins. Mother called them an eyesore.
Liora, naturally, had once declared them the bones of an ancient doorway.
At the time, Jonas and I had laughed until she threw a handful of moss at us.
Now, standing before them, I did not feel much like laughing.
The sun had not yet set. It hung low, yes, but not low enough to throw shadows that deep. The clearing should have been gold and green, full of late light.
Instead, the ground beneath the stones looked black.
Not shaded.
Black.
The darkness pooled at their bases like spilled ink, then stretched toward me in three long, uneven ribbons. I stared at them, waiting for my eyes to correct themselves.
The shadows moved.
Only slightly.
Only enough that I could tell myself they had not.
A sensible woman would have gone back to the house.
I had been raised to be sensible. Corrected into it. Laced into it. Praised for it when I managed not to want too much.
And still, some part of me leaned forward.
The air around the stones felt cooler than it should have. The sounds of the garden dulled until I could barely hear the birds. I took one step, then another, though I did not remember deciding to move.
A strange pressure gathered behind my ribs.
Not pain.
Recognition.
Which was absurd. I had never seen anything like this before. I had hidden behind those stones a hundred times with dirt on my knees and leaves in my hair. I had pressed my back to the tallest one while Jonas shouted numbers from the fountain and Liora whispered that if I was very quiet, perhaps the old things beneath the garden would think I was one of them.
The old things beneath the garden.
My skin prickled.
Liora had said something else once. At night. Half-whispered from the bed beside mine while I was trying desperately to sleep.
The oldest gates wake—
Wake when?
I could not remember.
I took another step.
The toe of my boot touched the nearest shadow.
The world dropped away.
There was no opening door. No flash of light. No sound of stone grinding against stone. One moment I stood in the forgotten corner of my family's garden, and the next my stomach rose into my throat as if I had stepped from a cliff.
I gasped, but the breath went nowhere.
Everything turned.
Not around me.
Through me.
The trees stretched into long black lines. The stones bent like reflections disturbed in water. The ground vanished beneath my feet, and for one impossible heartbeat I was falling through cold, empty air.
Then my knees struck earth.
Pain shot up my legs. My palms hit the ground hard enough to scrape skin from one hand, and the world rushed back in a violent blur of grass, stone, and my own ragged breathing.
For several seconds, I could do nothing but kneel there with my head bowed, swallowing against the sour twist in my stomach.
"Idiot," I whispered to myself.
My voice sounded too thin.
I had fainted. That was all. I had walked too far without eating enough, or stood too quickly, or frightened myself with shadows like a child listening to one of Liora's stories. I had fainted in the garden, fallen on my hands, and would now have to endure Jonas's amusement for the rest of the evening.
Slowly, I pushed myself upright.
The clearing looked the same.
The three stones stood before me. The yew tree leaned at the edge of the clearing. The grass was crushed where I had fallen. Nothing had opened. Nothing had swallowed me. Nothing had changed.
Except—
I turned toward the sky.
The sun had shifted.
Only a little. Lower than it had been. Nearer the hour when Liora would begin panicking over candle flames and wine service and whether the sunset had the decency to be beautiful enough for her table.
"How long was I down?" I murmured.
My head still spun, but less violently now. My knees ached. One palm stung. I brushed dirt from my skirt, though the motion made my fingers tremble.
Enough.
I would go back to the house. I would wash my hand, invent a reasonable explanation for the grass on my hem, and avoid looking at the stones for the remainder of my life.
I turned and followed the same path back through the trees.
Or I thought I did.
The branches seemed closer than before. The air smelled different, sharp and sweet, like crushed mint and approaching rain. I told myself it was dizziness. I told myself the garden was always strange in this corner. I told myself many things in the short distance between the clearing and the lawn.
Then I stepped out from between the trees.
And stopped.
Evershade House was gone.
