The Fragile Tower - Book 1 of the No.1 magical fantasy series

The Fragile Tower Chapter 1 - The Midwinter Fair

Grace had forgotten all about the phone by the time she stepped out of the lobby and into a cold, dark-blue night. She was too relieved to be on her way home, to warmth and comfort and family. She found Benjamin, Dad and Maggie all throwing snowballs at each other outside the elementary gym, and chased them out onto the road.

Watching Benjamin walk along doing impressions of their Aunt Frances, she laughed almost as hard as Maggie did. It was a classic routine of Benjamin's, but made funnier tonight by the cold. When he put his fingers to his lips and puffed, it looked like he was actually smoking some of the foul little cigarettes that Aunt Frances constantly dragged on.

The twins were goofing around so much that other school-kids ended up overtaking them. Ma would have hurried them, but Dad was enjoying the spectacle as much as anyone else.

Grace kept on moving at her own pace, gradually separating from the other three as she thought about the readings she would do tonight with her cards. So she was the first one to see the fair, glimmering away in the darkness on the open grass of St. Matthew's Park.

She caught sight of it through the iron railings and faltered, her feet choosing to stop before her head had made a decision. The lights strung between the stalls and tents were yellow-orange, with reds and greens and whites scattered among them, warm and gorgeous against the ice blue and black of the snow. When she took a breath in, it was a breath made up of caramel and cinnamon and wood-smoke.

She took two crunching steps and pressed her face up against the railings, her eyes full of jugglers, coconut-shies, carousels and waffle stalls. The bars started to make thin, icy imprints down her cheeks but she still stood there, breathing in flavours and watching the groups and couples who made their laughing way between stalls.

It might have been designed just for her, that fair; the perfect place for Grace the dreamer, the one who loved to watch a spectacle without having to join in, and who was always looking for strangeness in ordinary things. It held her, caught against the park railings, unable to look away while her cheeks grew numb and then painful.

Maggie's shrieking laughter from back down the street made her look around in the end, and a little of her skin stuck to the metal and pulled sharply as she tugged her head away. She rubbed at it with a wool-mittened hand as she watched Benjamin trying to be The President. Dad was chatting to another parent, she saw, one of the elementary-school Moms who was flirting with him a little like they all did.

Grace looked back at the fair, her hands reaching for the railings again. It was everything her mother hated most, right there. A snowy night, an exotic and unknown fair full of strangers and probably swindlers, and a full moon shining brilliantly down out of the clear sky overhead.

But Ma wasn't here, and none of her fears seemed reasonable this evening. It was just a fair: a prettier than usual, warm and fun and living fair. And if she didn't ask to go...

She slid a sidelong glance at Benjamin, who was nearly past the end of the old Dawson Bank building and in sight of the park. Benjamin would want to go, and Maggie would want to do whatever her twin brother was doing.

The little trio cleared the building, and it was actually Maggie who saw the fair first, gasping for breath between shrieks. Grace watched her face change straight from hysterical amusement into longing in the instantaneous way Maggie seemed to have, and she flew across in front of Benjamin to clutch at the railings, already saying, "Please, oh, please, Daddy," as she went.

Benjamin watched her, his nose puckered, as he considered pretending he hated the sight of it just to avoid looking like he was copying her. But an expanding circle of lights and some jaunty piped gypsy-music announced that a small Ferris-wheel had begun working, and he was next to his sister in a moment.