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The clerk listens attentively, then rises from his seat—I can hear his bones creak—and walks to a bookshelf along the wall, lined with huge, aged ledgers in various states of decrepitude. He floats his finger around them, using no logic that I can follow, and finally pulls one off the top shelf. He places it on a desk with a heavy thud, and I cough on the ensuing cloud of dust.
As he opens the book, I draw closer to read over his shoulder. Each large, yellowed page is filled with rows of names and numbers. The name of the child and his or her birthday, if known; the day and state in which they entered the orphanage; the name of their adopter, if there was one. The last column was only a third as full as the first two. But then I reach a section where all the information is scattered. There are numbers instead of names, and many blanks.
The man sees the confusion on my face. “The woman who ran this orphanage before my husband and I was terrible at record keeping,” he explains. “Then a few decades ago, there were some nasty cases, people who would adopt children just to steal their time. The Queen hanged them all and dismissed the orphanage workers who had let it happen. To keep order, you know.” He laughs, but there is no humor in it. “To be safe, our records have gotten quite good over the years. But still—” He frowns, looking closer. “This was the year of those tremors.”
“The tremors?” I echo. “In the earth?” We hadn’t felt them in Crofton, but the stories kept me awake—in one town near the palace, the ground ripped in two, swallowing buildings and people whole.
The attendant raises his eyebrows. “No—tremors in time.” Dimly, I call up a memory of my father dismissing stories about time shattering. “The winter you asked about, we saw all sorts of disturbances. Frozen moments, days that seemed too long. Once, we all lost an hour together. People were frantic. There was panic up and down the coast, looting, and then there was the whole business with Briarsmoor.” The man chews on his cheek, staring at some point over my shoulder.
I’m beginning to feel like Papa didn’t tell me anything about the world. “What’s Briarsmoor?”
“Nothing like education these days.” The attendant’s voice is mildly chiding, though not aimed at me. “It’s a town, Briarsmoor, some miles north of here. It’s twelve hours behind the rest of us—if you and I were sitting there now, it’d be the dark of night. Time froze in that town for half a day that winter. And people started saying that all the children who came from there were cursed.”
He leans his chin on his hand and tilts his head at me, waiting for a reaction, but my mind is still grappling with what he’s said. It’s not unusual for time to trip over itself in places, to slow down or speed up or pause entirely for a moment, the wind and sun hold still while we move about our lives, oblivious that we’re out of time’s current. But everything always irons itself out. It’s unbelievable that anywhere time could drag to half a day behind—and even more so that the lag could last so long.
“The Queen ordered everyone to evacuate,” he continues, “but the damage was done.”
A half hour later, I’ve paged through the ledger three times, front to back and back to front to back again. But I’ve seen no sign of baby Ina, or of me. And indeed, one entire week is absent from the ledger. Is it possible that we were abandoned in the week out of time?
Briarsmoor. The name sparks something like recognition in me—although how could it, if Papa had never mentioned it?
“Jules?” Ina’s voice calls from outside, making me start. I thank the man for his help, and return the useless ledger to its shelf. Then I hurry out to find the Queen’s daughter.
It’s started to snow outside, just a faint dust of white crowning Ina’s hood. She sees me and her face falls. “Nothing? No record?”
“No names,” I say. “But—”
Before I can tell her about Briarsmoor, Ina’s huffed a sigh and turned away from me. “These places and their shoddy record keeping,” she says, muffled. The bluster is visible in her frame. Though I don’t know her well enough to say for sure, I’d swear she’s on the verge of tears. “I’ve scoured practically every orphanage in the kingdom.”
I want to say something to comfort her, but she’s already off, walking fast toward the orphanage’s half-tipped-over stables. The crowd of wide-eyed children admiring our horses scatter when we come in, disappearing out a back exit before either of us can say a word.
As we saddle up, an idea forms in my head. “The clerk did mention something . . .” I start, making Ina look up sharply. “He said there’s a town north of here—”
“I know,” Ina interrupts. “Briarsmoor.” Her mouth twists like she’s just eaten a rotten fruit.
“You’ve been?”
“No, but I know it,” Ina says with finality. “And there’s nothing there. It’s a ruin.”
My heart sinks, but— “There couldn’t have been nothing,” I press. “Maybe no people, but what about books? Papers?”
“I cannot go to Briarsmoor. The Queen forbids it.” Her voice is hard as stone, and I wonder if there isn’t an old conflict buried there, one still too raw to reveal to me. “She says it’s cursed.”
“Maybe . . .” I start, but Ina has already made it into her saddle. She glances toward me and then up the road to the north, stiffening. But then something goes out of her. Her shoulders slump, making her look less like a princess, more like any sad girl I might have known in Crofton.
“And what would we do there, even if the Queen didn’t discover us?” she says, an uncharacteristic note of roughness in her voice. “No. I’m tired of dead ends and strange towns.”
A protest rises in my throat, but I push it back down and clamber onto my horse. It’s not my place to contest her.
We ride back to Everless in silence—Ina’s in a dark mood, whereas I’m still too consumed by what the clerk told me. Briarsmoor. How can it be—and how could Papa not have mentioned the name or the curious town that dropped out of time?
But there’s no end to what my father kept secret from me. Even his death is a mystery.
Another thought hits me with brute force: maybe I am a mystery—a secret—that needs unraveling, too.
The idea takes hold of me, somewhere deep down, and I know that as soon as I can, I will have to find my own way to the town out of time.
With a sack of Gerling hours on my belt, I think.
If there is some truth to the superstition he mentioned—that Briarsmoor babies are cursed—I’m sure that Ina, the kingdom’s most blessed child, couldn’t have been born there.
But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t.