Twelve-year-old Carmen has a secret: she can talk to her cat Grim. But the powerful Brotherhood has banned pets, and the penalty is death.
Ward is the most wanted boy in the world. The only thing standing between him and the hangman's noose is maste...
He ignored her at first, sweeping sawdust off the workbench onto the floor using a banister brush. When it was clean he tapped the brush on the edge of the bench. Motes of dust swirled off into the lamplight. Finally, he looked up at her.
"There's an old belief – nobody's sure where it came from – about a strange wild land away across the sea. The River of Forgetfulness flows through it. It was said that we drink from this river in our dreams. That people like your Grandmere are drowning in its waters."
"Do you believe that?"
He put the banister brush down and laid his palms against the edge of the workbench and looked sideways at her. "No."
He reached up and opened a tiny trapdoor in the ceiling, then pushed the toy into the dark space beyond and closed the trapdoor up again. He retrieved a lamp fitting from a nearby shelf and screwed it into a brass thread embedded in the trapdoor. When the fitting was tightened it completely concealed the trapdoor. Finally, he struck a match and lit the lamp. Carmen had seen this process before, and thought little of it.
"Will she get better?" she said.
"I don't think so. Do you visit her?"
"Sometimes," Carmen said, trying to be as truthful as possible. The fact was that Grandmere Anna scared her, and she didn't like to visit her alone. "Slops visits her a lot," she said, as if that made up for it somehow.
Her pere returned to his armchair and refilled his baccus. Carmen watched him from across the room. His hands were bony and immensely strong, but she knew that they could also be gentle. There was a time not long ago when she would have crawled onto his lap and clasped her arms around his neck and laid her head upon his chest, but these days she felt too grown up for such things. Sometimes he gave her a sad little smile, as if she was a bird flying away for the winter.
Grim appeared. He twined himself in figure eights about the legs of the seated man, purring, then leapt lightly up onto the workbench. Carmen remembered why she had come up to the attic in the first place, and she felt a burning sensation in her throat.
Before she could speak, her pere did. "Now Carmen."
"It's not fair."
"Few things are."
Grim poured himself onto the man's lap and weaved under a hand, which began to stroke his head. He closed his eyes.
"There are people who waste their whole lives protesting," her pere said. He was not often stern with her, and she didn't answer back immediately, as she would have with her mere.
He watched his own fingers move through Grim's lustrous fur. "He's a very fine fel," he said distantly, and Carmen wondered, not for the first time, whether he could communicate with animals like she could. She had never thought to ask him. It was a deeply personal question somehow.
"So what do you expect me to do?" she said. "Just let everyone walk over me?"
"I don't expect you to do anything," he said, as if to Grim.
"What would you do?"
Her pere put the stem of his baccus between his teeth, squinting as the blue smoke rose past his eyes. He spoke around the pipe stem. "I would do something constructive. I would... make toys."
Carmen started to protest, but then went silent. Because an idea had come suddenly to her.
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