Part I
IN WHICH THERE IS A DEATH
One
The moon dreamed. Far below it, a ship sailed toward Cape Fen, magic and moonlight illuminating a path across the ocean.
The midnight storm laying siege to Cape Fen’s shores seemed determined to ruin Eliza Serling’s little sister’s birthday. Earlier that day the Cape’s weather forecaster had watched birds flying inland, racing away from rain clouds that shadowed the ocean. She passed around word that everyone living along the coast should travel to the mainland to wait out the storm. But of course, that was nothing but a cruel joke. No one born on the Cape could leave.
The only fluorescent lamp left on in the Serling home darkened by the force of the storm’s winds. The yellow-speckled stars on the stained-glass lampshade dimmed as electricity stuttered inside the Fen Jester Restaurant. It was the only thing of Ma’s that had survived Pa’s purge after she’d left four years before. Eliza scowled at it now and vowed to use only plain oil lamps in the future. They, at least, didn’t stop working when stiff winds blew through their drafty living space in the back of the restaurant.
Eliza climbed out of the makeshift fort she’d built for Winnie and clicked off the lamp, leaving the potbelly stove in their kitchen with its licks of blue and gold flame as their only source of light. Returning to their cotton castle, she sat crisscross behind Winnie and took up the knot she was trying to free from her eight-year-old sister’s cloudy hair.
“Have you figured it out yet?” Eliza asked.
“Ostrich?” Win asked.
“No.”
“Owl. Octopus. Osprey.”
“No. No and no.”
Eliza tugged hard at the tight cluster of strands. “I give up. I don’t know any other O animals.”
Eliza grinned. “Opossum.”
“Liar! Possum starts with a P.”
“No, it only sounds like it does. It starts with an O.”
“You tricked me.”
“Does that mean you’d like me to go again, this time without a trick?”
“No, it’s my turn.” Winnie closed her eyes and felt around on the floor, grabbing up the wooden owl Pa had carved for her birthday. They’d celebrated earlier that night with butter cookies and presents—a Wright brothers tin airplane toy from Eliza and the wooden owl from Pa. She lifted the palm-sized bird in the air and flew it above her head. In the dim glow of the fire, light glimmered against fine details: tiny feathers ran down outstretched wings, massive eyes peered out from a heart-shaped face, and elongated claws clenched over an unseen branch.
Eliza picked at the tricky knot while she waited, guilt slithering through her. When was the last time she’d brushed Win’s hair? The tangled mess was Eliza’s fault, really. Sometimes, she didn’t know what it meant to be an older sister without a mother. For Winnie, she tried to be both, though it made her feel as if she were neither. “I’m thinking of an animal, and it starts with—”
“I’m thinking of an animal,” Winnie glared up at her, “and it starts with an S.”
“Salmon,” she guessed. “Starfish. Skunk. Sna—”
Light flared outside their fort, and a half second later, a boom sent tremors through the walls of the restaurant. Winnie folded into Eliza, burying the owl against her neck, breathing fast with fear as rain lashed the windows and the roof.
“Snake. Sloth.” Eliza rubbed the back of Winnie’s head. “Snowy owl. Sea lion. Seal. Sparrow. Spider. Squirrel. Stork. Swan?”
“No, no, no.”
“I’m running out of S animals here, Win.”
“It’s something little.” Winnie’s voice was muffled from where she hid her face against Eliza’s knees.
“Little like a mouse?”
“Littler.”
“I already said spider. A…stick insect?”
“No.”
“I give up. Tell me.”
“A centipede!”
Eliza dropped her head into her hands. “Centipede starts with a C.”
“And possum starts with a P.”
Eliza laughed. Her sister was too clever for her own good.
Winnie turned back over and eyed the fort’s ceiling, as if trying to peer through to the rain outside. “Do you think it’s a First Frost storm?”
Old fury ran through Eliza, and she pulled too hard on Winnie’s hair, making her sister wince. First Frost arrived at the very start of winter, bringing with it Baron Dire, who was more devil than man, and with him came his strange Wolf. This was why no one in Fen could leave; they supplied the baron with a steady source of magic. In the last century of the Cape’s imprisonment, only two people had managed to bargain in the right way to gain freedom from the Cape, one of them being Eliza’s mother.
It was Baron Dire who’d made it possible for her to leave, and Eliza hated him for it.
“It doesn’t matter if it is First Frost,” Eliza said, forcing her hands to loosen their hold on Winnie’s hair. “First Frost can come and go. We’re safe. We’ve never bargained. Without one of his bargains in place, Baron Dire and his Wolf can’t hurt us. Besides, it sounds like plain old rain outside, no frost or snow included… This snarl is refusing to unknot.”
“You could cut it out.”
“No!” Eliza wouldn’t give up as easily as that. “You’d have a bald spot at the back of your head. I’ll try using soap to loosen it tomorrow.”
Another bolt of lightning sheared through the storm, lighting up the Jester with white heat. Eliza lifted the sheet of their fort just as a second bolt lit the earth, illuminating the edges of the window where the shutters didn’t quite reach. Thunder cracked close behind.
She dropped the sheet. “Try to sleep. You need to rest for school tomorrow.”
“Do not. I’m noctractal.”
“Nocturnal,” Eliza corrected. “And no, you aren’t. Sleep.”
“You’re being bossy.”
“If I’m not bossy, you won’t sleep, and then you’ll be grumpy tomorrow.”
“Grumpy is better than bossy.” Winnie reached for the moon-patterned quilt that covered her feet, drawing it under her chin. “You should sleep and dream too, Liza.”
Words stuck inside Eliza, gumming up against her anger at Baron Dire. It had been their Ma’s dreams that had taken her from Cape Fen, too, right alongside Dire’s magic. She tucked the owl beneath the covers with Winnie and pressed her palm against her sister’s forehead. Winnie’s fine white hair and pale skin framed her black eyes, the only part of her that resembled Eliza. Neither of them looked much like Pa, and neither of them remembered Ma well enough to know. They had two photographs of her. The first was from when she and Pa had gotten hitched, and the muted black-and-white colors smudged the features of their faces. In the second, Pa stood behind the three Serling girls. Ma sat in the middle, a wide-brimmed hat trimmed in lace positioned carefully atop her head. Eliza stood to her left and Winnie to her right. Everyone smiled.