from nightlight to hallway light to proper overhead light. This, she could read by.
No sooner had the thought formed than the first of the frames appeared on the wall. It contained a cross-stitch, neatly done, with an embroidered marigold in one corner. Katherine stopped.
“‘Rule one,’” she read. “‘Ask for nothing.’ How funny that is! Although maybe that means I’m not allowed to ask for the way out? I’ve never heard of a rule like that before.”
She resumed walking, and shortly came upon a second frame. Again, she stopped.
“‘Rule two,’” she read. “‘Names have power.’ What does that even mean ?”
The walls did not reply. Katherine walked on, faster now, hurrying to find the next sign.
Rule three was “always give fair value.” Rule four was “take what is offered and be grateful.” And rule five, most puzzling of all, was, “remember the curfew.”
“None of this makes any sense,” she complained, and heard a soft click, as of a door latch coming open. She turned. There, on the hallway wall, which she was sure had been smooth and featureless only a moment before, was a door. It was standing ajar, tempting her to come and see what might be waiting on the other side. She bit her lip, lightly, staring at it.
If the door was open, surely that was an invitation to go through it, wasn’t it? And she was already trespassing. It wasn’t like going through an open, unlocked door would mean she was trespassing more.
Carefully, Katherine approached the door. It didn’t disappear, which had never been a concern before, but was now an all-consuming one. She nudged it with her toe. It swung a little farther open, and something new appeared: a beam of light too buttery and bright to be artificial. Sunlight. She had found the exit. She wasn’t going to get in trouble after all. Beaming, Katherine shoved the door open and stepped through, emerging, not into the fields along the path or even into the well-maintained yard of some stranger’s house, but into a dream. She stopped, trying to stare in every direction at once, until it felt like her eyes were going to cross in her head with the effort of taking it all in.
If a carnival and a farmer’s market and a craft fair all decided to happen at the same time, in the same field, the result might have been something like what was in front of her. Everywhere she looked there were tents, and painted wagons, and little stalls with fabric walls and decorated awnings. Pens filled with animals—goats and chickens and pigs—stood side by side with rickety cases packed tight with leather-bound books whose spines glittered with gold leaf and what she thought might be real rubies. Figures moved by with sacks slung over their shoulders and yokes across their necks, the ends weighted down with buckets filled with mushrooms, or potatoes, or water that rippled from the motion of impossible fish.
Figures, not people: she wasn’t sure the word “people” was big enough to encompass everything she was seeing. Some of them were no bigger than her hand, soaring along on green moth’s wings, their hair like candle flames that flickered in the sunlight. Others were so big she could have mistaken them for boulders, with skin as gray as granite and hands almost as large as her body. It was like there was some sort of spectrum, and she was right smack in the middle, neither big nor small, neither fair nor foul.
A few of the figures moving by without giving her so much as a glance looked like they might have been human, and somehow they were the worst of all, because if they were human, this was really happening, and if this was really happening, then the rules she had known for her whole life were wrong. None of these things were covered. If nothing here was real, she was safe, but if any of it really existed . . .
“First time, huh?”
Katherine whirled and found herself eye to eye with a girl of her own height, with pale, dirty skin and small brown feathers tied in her long brown hair. The feathers only held Katherine’s attention for a moment before it switched, inevitably, to the girl’s eyes. They had no whites. The girl’s pupils were too big, surrounded by a dark orange iris that extended from corner to corner, lid to lid. Katherine did what was, under the circumstances, the only reasonable thing to do. She screamed.
A few