Dramatis Personae
Ista Flit: Trainee chef at the Fabulous Fletwin restaurant.
Tide-blessing: Face-changer.
Nat shah: School student, with ambitions to become a journalist.
Tide-blessing: None.
Ruby Mallard: School student, part-time pickle seller at Mallard’s Pickles, and would-be acrobat.
Tide-blessing: Always lands on her feet.
Pa Flit: Musician. Currently missing.
Tide-blessing: Ability to perfectly mimic any animal noise.
Padley Mattheson: Co-owner of the Fabulous Fletwin restaurant.
Tide-blessing: Moves small metal objects, often by accident.
Giddon Mattheson: Co-owner of the Fabulous Fletwin restaurant.
Tide-blessing: Sometimes sees the future in his dreams.
saf Mallard: Ruby’s younger sister. Recently returned after being snatched by the grilks.
Tide-blessing: Superhuman strength.
Ravi Shah: Nat’s younger brother. Recently returned after being snatched by the grilks.
Tide-blessing: Unknown.
Priya shah: Nat and Ravi’s mum. Journalist at the Daily Conch newspaper.
Tide-blessing: Has hunches about where to find a good story.
Tamlin: Musician – and Alexo Rokis’s sometime helper and spy.
Tide-blessing: Unknown.
Betrika Hettle: Nefarious ex-governor of Shelwich. Currently a statue.
Tide-blessing: Eyes that change colour.
Jarmak Hettle: Betrika’s son.
Tide-blessing: Wings.
Alexo Rokis: Owner of the Shrieking Eel Inn. Collector of Curiosities. Keeper of many secrets.
Tide-blessing: Strictly speaking, only humans have Tideblessings . . .
Magic: Scope unknown.
Ithe Door
sta Flit stood with her left foot in the city she had just begun to think of as home and her right foot in a patch of shadow belonging to . . . somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that smelt of wet soil and witch hazel and pine. A forest, overlooked by a gauzy pre-dawn sky.
Impossible, part of her insisted. Well, it was almost dawn. The kitchen door, however – a door she had used without incident every day since Pa’s disappearance had brought her to Shelwich almost three-and-a-half moons ago – should have opened on to the narrow street that ran behind the Fabulous Fletwin restaurant. She should have been looking at the woodstore and the mailbox and the moss-covered
stone trough where Padley and Giddon had planted bulbs that they said would sprout into crocuses when the weather grew warmer.
But now . . . no street, no trace of the snow that had been dusting the city since yesterday evening. Behind her, the Fletwin’s kitchen was as solid and cosy as ever, but through the doorway in front of her, unquestionably, was a forest. Rain-freckled creepers hung like garlands between white-barked silver birches, sturdy oaks and elegant pines. A carpet of fallen leaves was spread in invitation, drawing her attention to a glade a little way ahead.
Fortunately, impossible was exactly what Ista had expected.
Impossible was going to help her find Pa. Finally.
And yet she hesitated, leaning into the magic that whispered around her. At not quite two hours past Low Tide, most people wouldn’t have been able to hear it. When it came to magic, though, Ista was not most people. She could read the Tide’s ebbs and flows as easily as she could sniff out the ingredients of a soup or sauce, which was to say, with almost unfailing accuracy.
Over the past few days, she’d accidentally sniffed out rather a lot of trouble in her search for Pa too. Now, she felt the tell-tale prickle of wrongness in her stomach and down the backs of her legs.
A breeze stirred, ruffling her short brown hair. Not an
ordinary breeze but one that reached out in tendrils, tugging at her limbs as if imploring her to get a move on. Ista glanced down at the key winking up at her from the Fletwin’s doormat. It was a small silver key, with nothing remarkable about it except for it being engraved with symbols that almost resembled musical notes.
Well, and the fact that her using it had made a forest appear on the doorstep.
Any door with a keyhole will do, Pa’s message had said – the message he’d hidden in his clarinet case, along with the key, where no one but Ista would discover them.
Ista hadn’t questioned his instructions. And she’d had no doubt that the key would work. Less than two days previously she’d watched a boy called Tamlin use an almost identical key to open a doorway very like the one in which she now stood.
Very like, but not the same – and this was the root of her hesitation. The doorway through which Tamlin had vanished had led to a garden, not a forest. A garden promised a house, and people – people who might know where Pa was. The forest in front of Ista made her think of stories about travellers who took wrong turns and lost themselves among the trees . . .
She shook off the unsettling thought. Pa wouldn’t steer her wrong. He simply wouldn’t.
Then again, Pa hadn’t come back. That fact had scuttled
after her like a spider all night as she’d planned and packed. Pa’s message had claimed that he would return in good time, that the key was just in case she needed him sooner. Yet almost a complete season had passed since he’d disappeared, and there had been no trace of him.
The impossible breeze seemed displeased that she was dithering. It twined round her ankles, nuzzling like a cat. Adjusting her grip on her bag of supplies, Ista cast a look over her shoulder to the kitchen counter and the three envelopes waiting upon it.
One for Giddon and Padley, proprietors of the Fabulous Fletwin and as close to family as she had in Shelwich.
One for quick-thinking Ruby Mallard, who always landed on her feet – quite literally, when the Tide was high.
One for Nat Shah, who was as bossy as a beagle but who never gave up on anything, especially the people he cared about.
She pictured a swarm of jewel-green beetles click-clacking across the rooftops – the glass-bugs, hurrying to deliver the fourth envelope to Alexo Rokis on Nimble Lane.
Four envelopes, and four identical letters, explaining in Ista’s scratchy handwriting what she was doing and that she’d left them the key as Pa had left it for her, although in plain sight rather than hidden away.
If I’m not back in two days, please send help, she’d written, knowing that her friends would only try to delay her if she
were to ask their advice on how to proceed. Ruby would be sceptical that the doorway was a trap. Padley would say it was too dangerous to even consider. Giddon would want to go in her place. Alexo would insist on devising one of his clockwork plans. As for Nat . . . Ista thought of his searchlight stare, of the notebook that barely left his hands. He would have a thousand questions, and she wouldn’t have answers to any of them.
But Nat and Ruby had both had their missing loved ones returned to them. Pa was still missing – and no matter how confident his message had sounded, some piece of his plan had clearly crumbled. Which meant that Ista couldn’t afford to waste time. He might be waiting for her, counting on her, precious minutes falling through his fingers like grains of sand through a timer.
She felt a pinch of doubt about leaving the key. Perhaps that had been Pa’s mistake. What if the doorway sealed itself up after her and couldn’t be opened again?
The impossible breeze whirled impatiently, as if it really didn’t want her thinking about that. It gave Ista a nudge, knocking her off-balance, and she stumbled forward, her left foot landing beside her right one.
That was that. She had crossed the threshold.
Ista spun back. The doorway remained, framing a neat rectangle of the Fletwin’s kitchen like a painting, the key still winking on the doormat.
Everything else was forest. Then, with stomach-sinking inevitability, a curl of wind looped round and swung the door shut. For a second, the shape held, as though all Ista had to do was turn the handle and the Fletwin and Shelwich would welcome her home. She reached out, but it was too late. The door became ghostly, its outline wavering, then disintegrated into dusty fragments that a final lick of wind swirled away into nothingness.
the Path of footPrints
Its work done, the impossible breeze stilled. Quiet settled like a blanket, disturbed only by the murmur of magic.
I can’t have gone so very far, Ista told herself. The Tide –and the cold – both felt the same as they had only moments ago in Shelwich, and it was the same time of day.
But there was an oddness to this place. An absence. No insects, no birds.
Ista refused to panic. Just breathe, Pa would have said, and though it was because of him that she was in this mess, the advice still stood. She closed her eyes and counted to five, taking in the richness of rain-drenched earth, the lemony smell of the witch hazel, the sharp green cleanness of the pines.
She opened her eyes again, turning towards the glade she’d spotted earlier. That was where the doorway had pointed her, so that must be where Pa meant for her to go. Something stood at the centre of it. An archway, perhaps double the height of the doorway through which she’d come and made of some kind of pale stone.
Be careful, little thief . . .
Alexo’s voice tolled a warning bell in Ista’s mind. People said Alexo Rokis was many things – a trickster, a ghost, an angel, a monster. Most people didn’t know the half of it. He had taught Ista everything she knew about getting out of scrapes. She’d imagined him – fox-faced, wolf-eyed –scrutinizing her as she’d packed her supplies, which meant that she’d come very well prepared indeed.
She took out a small ball of red wool and some foldable scissors and cut a long strand, which she tied round the trunk of the tree nearest to where the doorway had been. That precaution taken, she crept towards the glade.
The air chilled, the damp replaced by frost that pinched her nose and hardened the ground. At the edge of the clearing, she stopped. The archway wasn’t made of stone, after all, but from the trunk of a willow tree, stripped of its branches and bowed over, with veinlike ribbons of ice tracing the bark.
She couldn’t pinpoint when she noticed the music. One instant it wasn’t there, the next she could have sworn she’d
been listening to it for at least a minute – a bittersweet, yearning, twisting refrain that kept rising then dropping away.
Half of a duet, or a harmony line, Ista thought. Pa would have known. He was the musician. She had a topsy-turvy feeling that the missing piece of the music would be familiar to her, that she’d heard it somewhere before.
The sound was coming from the archway. Not from the other side of it, where she could see more glade and forest rolling out into the shadows, but through it, as if from down a long hallway. There were drums too. The beat pulsed in her toes, making her itch to move.
She felt it then. A silent summons woven into the music, as persistent as an undertow.
All magic, even Alexo’s, was subject to the ebb and flow of the Tide. Ista could tell that at High Tide the call of this magic would have been hard to resist. She planted her feet, grateful that High Tide was hours away – then looked down and found she’d walked almost two-thirds of the distance to the archway without realizing. The ground here was so well trodden that a path of sorts had formed, with dead leaves flattened into the earth, and footprints layered over footprints, all leading to the archway.
When they reached it, the footprints simply vanished, some of them cut in two as if a blade had swung across.
Were Pa’s footprints part of this pattern? Several prints
looked fresh, but others were much fainter. Ista huddled deeper into her baggy black coat, which had been Pa’s coat once and hung past her knees. The key to a door of our own. That’s what he’d said he was going to bring back. That was why he’d come to Shelwich without Ista in the first place –to find work and save up for a proper home where the two of them could live together without having to rely on her aunt.
Pa was beyond the archway. He had to be. Nat and Ruby would say she was jumping to conclusions, that she couldn’t know with any measure of certainty. One thing was certain, though. A lot of people had walked this way, and none of them had walked back. The footprints only led in one direction.
She suddenly worried she’d made a terrible mistake in coming here on her own.
Two days, Ista told herself. If she didn’t return in two days’ time, some or all of her friends would come for her. If she hadn’t found Pa by then, they’d find him together. In the meantime, she was Ista Flit. She was dangerous. And she needed to figure out how anyone or anything could possibly have made Pa feel safe enough that he’d invited her to join him here.
She peered into the archway, feeling the power thrumming from it. The music crooked its finger at her, then retreated, delicate as spun sugar, sly as a half-hidden smile.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said a voice behind her.
I3
the stranger
sta’s skin prickled from crown to toe as she reeled round to see who had spoken. The stranger had propped himself against the broad trunk of an oak, his arms folded and one ankle hooked over the other as if he’d been observing her for some time.
‘Who are you?’
The words flew from her mouth before she could stop them. She was usually too alert to be taken by surprise. Knowing that he had crept up on her made her jittery. Not being able to see him properly made her more so, and his face was infuriatingly cloaked in shadows.
A laugh like a chorus of bells rippled over her. The
stranger moved into the light, dawn painting him in shades of purple and grey. He was a slender-bodied, long-limbed, fine-faced man, dressed in rough-spun clothes that looked right for the forest but somehow wrong for him, as if he was in disguise. His gleaming brown hair and immaculate nails told of a pampered indoor life – a life in which he didn’t see much sun at all, judging from his pearl-pale skin.
Ista sensed that he wanted her to find him impressive. To her irritation, she did. He didn’t simply walk; he flowed, like water. He stopped a few paces away from her, his mouth slanting with amusement and a silent question hovering in his storm-cloud grey eyes.
‘Ah,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘A citysider.’
His pupils were oddly small, as though the daybreak dimness was too bright for him, and his full smile, which he showed her now, was even sharper than Alexo’s.
Instinctively, Ista stepped back.
Magic sighed up her spine, reminding her of the archway just behind her – and of the music, which had burrowed under her skin with such stealth that she’d stopped noticing its undertow pull. She leapt away like a salmon, right off the path of footprints, landing in unexpectedly soggy ground.
‘Interesting.’ The stranger looked her up and down, as if he’d thought he’d solved her but now she’d become a puzzle again. ‘How did you travel here? You don’t have a key . . . Oh, but you had one, didn’t you?’
His voice was rich and low and had a magic of its own. Ista could feel it trying to chase her worries away, urging her to lean in and spill her secrets. Every cell in her body jangled with a warning that this person would take any crumb of truth she offered and use it against her.
‘A key?’ She frowned. ‘No, I . . . I don’t know how I got here.’
Not a complete lie – she didn’t know, after all, exactly how the key had brought her here – but a deliberate sidestep from the truth. The stranger seemed to sense that she was concealing something. A lightning flash of fury sparked behind his eyes, then dissolved, replaced by another sharp smile.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘And yet here you are. You’ve come all this way, and now you don’t want to go any further?’
He inclined his head towards the archway. The music rose, reaching out like a velvet-gloved hand inviting Ista to dance. She could hear the main strand of the melody peeking through, as tender as the first springtime shoots after a thaw. If she answered its call, it would lead her to Pa. She was sure of it. She could go to him right now . . .
The Ista of a week ago would probably have done just that, but that Ista hadn’t met Nat Shah and Ruby Mallard yet. The Ista in front of the archway knew what her friends would say if they were standing beside her – that there was strange magic here and she shouldn’t face it alone.
‘Well?’ the stranger prompted.
His tone was casual, but something artful and greedy snuck across his waxen features. He wanted, very badly, for her to walk through the archway.
‘I haven’t quite decided.’ Ista rummaged for the sort of slippery answer Alexo would have pulled from his pocket. ‘Is it . . . is it like people say it is?’
‘Ah, the only way to know is to see for yourself.’ The stranger’s smile seemed sharper than ever. Five more flowing paces brought him level with her. Another three took him to the archway. He stopped in front of it, turning to regard her. ‘If you don’t like it, you can always come back.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Ista said.
The music rose in a crescendo, a web of harmonies stretching and spreading around the elusive central strand of melody, each one calling to her. She knew that tune –she was sure she did.
But she didn’t move.
For the second time, anger boiled behind the stranger’s eyes, and for the second time he squashed it. It was like watching someone bottle a storm and set it aside for later.
‘Well,’ he said, as if she was more of a puzzle to him than ever. ‘I expect we’ll have the pleasure of your company soon enough.’ He gave Ista a shrewd look that made the chilly air even chillier.
Then he stepped backwards through the archway.
For three fierce kicks of her heart, Ista glimpsed what was on the other side. A thick ribbon of mossy green carpet between two walls of mirrors, the frame of each thin glass panel glazed with sparkling frost.
Impossible, she thought again. An impossible hallway in an impossible forest beyond an impossible door. The music swelled, making one last grab for her. There was a scent too – a cool, clean, watery scent that reminded her of limecress on a millstream.
Almost as quickly as it had appeared, the hallway vanished, taking the stranger with it. The millstream smell lingered, although the music faded as if muffled by a curtain. In its place, the Tide’s familiar murmur crackled up Ista’s spine, half urging her to run away, half nagging her to stay and investigate.
The ghost of the stranger’s smile lingered too. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still watching her from wherever he now stood.
4
the facechanger
Ista would have given almost anything to have Nat and Ruby with her to argue about what to do next.
Ruby would have wanted to run – not because Ruby was easily scared, though she might have been scared in this case, but because she was practical. She would have pointed out that it wasn’t safe to loiter near the archway. Nat would have disagreed. He’d have insisted they look for clues. We pull on any loose threads until we find one that leads to the answers, he’d said the night he and Ista had first met.
She let herself pretend for a moment, picturing Ruby jabbing a finger urgently towards the trees, and Nat holding
his ground, his owlish eyebrows drawing together in concentration as his pencil raced over a page of his notebook.
But Ista could feel the magic lapping in, skittering over her knuckles and humming at the backs of her knees. She’d shaken off the archway’s pull so far, but even though the Tide was less than halfway to its peak, she couldn’t be sure she’d be able to keep doing so. Imagining Ruby giving her an approving nod, Ista began retracing her steps.
As for loose threads, she listed them in her head: Pa’s disappearance, the key, the archway, the footprints, the stranger, Tamlin . . .
The past few days had taught her it was impossible to know which particular thread might lead somewhere crucial, but Tamlin – boy musician and Alexo’s helper and occasional spy who had trailed Ista all over Shelwich at Alexo’s bidding – was as good a starting point as any.
His key hadn’t brought him to the forest, though. She pictured the waterlogged garden she’d witnessed him conjure in the cupboard doorway at the Sunken Chandelier the night they’d finally come face to face.
It had been a garden – hadn’t it? Suddenly Ista wasn’t so sure. Memories could be as slippery as eels. And had the markings on Tamlin’s key been exactly the same as the ones on Pa’s? The stranger had implied the keys usually brought people to the archway, although he’d seemed free to come and go as he pleased.
I expect we’ll have the pleasure of your company soon enough. We. Ista shuddered. He’d been unnerving enough on his own. A citysider, he’d called her. He must have meant Shelwich – unless she’d travelled further than she’d believed. The oddness of the forest pressed in on her more tightly. How was the ground so thickly frosted and so squelchy? Why were there no insects or animals here?
All her questions, big and small, would be answered, she felt certain, on the other side of the archway. But she was equally certain that going through it would be more foolish than coming here in the first place had been.
What about her friends? Worry flicked like a fishtail in her gut as she reached the spot where her loop of wool was tied. The peaks and troughs of the Tide shifted forward every day. If someone arrived here in two days’ time – and surely this was where the key would bring them if they used it – the Tide would be higher than it was now. Would they be able to resist the pull of the archway?
All of them apart from Nat had Tide-blessings, of course – special talents that grew stronger as the magic rose with the Tide. However, Ruby’s ability to land safely after jumping from any height would be of no more help than Padley’s gift of accidentally making small metal objects move around. Perhaps Giddon would dream of the danger that lurked here, and none of them would come after all. No, they would come, and then . . .
Alexo was the only one who Ista could imagine going up to the archway and being able to walk away from it. His magic was a rare, wild thing, too complicated to be called a Tide-blessing. The rest of them wouldn’t stand a chance. Neither would Ista if she lingered much longer. Magic scraped over her skin – softly, but not nearly as soft as it had been when she’d arrived. She needed to leave a warning for her friends, stop them going even a step nearer to the archway than necessary – and then she needed to be gone from here.
Which way to go, though? The forest stretched in all directions. She had to think of this as an errand, like the twenty errands she had carried out for Alexo in Shelwich. Only this time she would be in charge, and instead of another Curiosity for Alexo’s collection, her goal had to be information. And, just like Alexo, she had to be ruthlessly practical.
Ista’s gaze drifted back to the centre of the glade and the invisible line where the path of footprints stopped.
‘Tide’s teeth!’ Understanding swept over her so suddenly that she spoke aloud.
The footprints weren’t merely one loose thread; they were two. They raised the obvious question of where all the people had gone, but there was also the question of where those people had come from. Most of the footprints began at the same spot where Ista had stumbled into the forest. She
supposed they had been made by people with keys. But a few other footprint trails approached like a narrow stream from between the trees.
If she traced them to their source, perhaps she’d find answers there.
Ista rolled back her shoulders. Practical. Ruthlessly practical. One mistake she’d made so far had been not using her own Tide-blessing the instant she’d sensed trouble. She had let the stranger see her. The real her. Alexo would definitely have had something to say about that. There was no need for Ista to show her true self to anyone.
Little face-changer . That was how Tamlin had once described her.
She drew the magic to her, wrapping it around her like a cloak . . . It was a woman’s face that she held in her mind as the power whispered along her bones. Not a face she knew well; she had only glimpsed the woman for a split second, climbing into a fancy-looking carriage outside a patisserie on Saltwillow Avenue.
But with Ista’s Tide-blessing, a glimpse was all she needed. As it always did, the transformation started with a prickle at the nape of her neck and ended with a twitch of her toes. A moment of concentration, and it was done. She loosened the drawstring of her waistband a fraction. No further adjustment was required. Ista was reasonably tall for her age, and the woman was short and slight – and wealthy, judging
by the carriage. The sort of woman who would probably have been horrified to learn that her face was being used for mischief.
It always gave Ista confidence, borrowing someone like that. If Alexo had been in charge of this ‘errand’, she felt sure he would have approved of her choice.
She took a pen and a scrap of paper from her supplies and leant on the nearest tree to write.
danger!
i.F. you’re reading this,
Follow the Footprints backwards.
There was no knowing when the stranger or someone else might pass this way. The few words of the message were as much as Ista dared risk. No names, just her own initials underlined. She rolled up the paper and used another piece of red wool to secure it to the length she’d previously tied round the tree trunk. That would have to do.
Nat Shah might not have had a Tide-blessing, but she had never known him to miss a clue – especially one that was dangling in plain sight.
Nmeanwhile
at Shah was having a nightmare. It was the same nightmare he’d had every night since Ravi, his little brother, had been snatched by the monsters known as the grilks. In the dream, Ravi was trapped at the centre of a maze and Nat had to rescue him. But the walls squeezed tighter and tighter, and the awful mist – with its limestone and leaf-mould smell – crept in, thickening until Nat could hardly see. And when he finally reached the centre of the maze, instead of Ravi being there, one of the grilks was waiting. It reared up, its wings flaring wide, its huge mouth opening.
As always, that was when Nat lurched awake.
‘Nat?’
Ravi was peering at him across the narrow gap between their beds. Real Ravi, home and safe, tousle-haired and wearing elephant-patterned pyjamas. His eyes were wide and wild in the lamplight, as if he had just awoken from a nightmare too.
Nat sat up. ‘Are you all right?’
A shrug. ‘I’m cold.’
‘Want to get in with me?’
Ravi hesitated. He was seven but small for his age, and he looked impossibly tiny now.
‘It’s OK. I don’t mind.’ Nat pulled the covers back. ‘It’ll be time to get up soon, anyway.’
Ravi scooted in beside him, performing an impressive double whammy of stealing most of the blanket and elbowing Nat in the ribs.
‘Warmer now?’ Nat asked. Ravi gave an affirmative hum. ‘It’s normal to still feel a bit scared, you know – even though it’s all over. But you’re safe now.’
The whole city was safe. And we played a big part in that, Nat thought with a little swell of pride. Me and Ista and Ruby.
As for the grilks, they hadn’t even been real. They’d been puppets, made not of flesh and blood but of cloth and strings and fear.
‘All right?’ he said to Ravi, wanting to make sure his earlier words had sunk in.
