The children and their parents stayed in the house for more than two weeks, eating, resting, and getting used to the idea of being a family. At first, it was strange for Kate to no longer be the one responsible for her brother’s and sister’s safety and well-being; but she couldn’t deny that every day she felt lighter, as if she’d set aside a little more of the weight she’d carried for ten years. She sensed, however, that the day would come when she would miss the weight and wish it back.
Beyond that, those first days were trying for everyone. For as much as the children had yearned to be reunited with their parents, and as much as Richard and Clare had yearned for and missed Kate and Michael and Emma, no one could pretend that the years apart had never happened. They had to get to know each other, and that would take time.
It was easier at meals, which Kate partly attributed to Miss Sallow’s cooking, which was as mouthwateringly delicious and nourishing as always, so much so that Kate wondered if the woman wasn’t just a little bit of a witch. But they couldn’t always be at meals, and after all the years of looking forward to being together, it was hard when things weren’t immediately perfect.
“It’s okay,” Clare assured Kate. Not surprisingly, Kate and her mother found their footing first, and soon the two of them were taking walks in the woods around the house. “Your father and I understand. It’s going to take time.”
It was on one of their walks that Clare told Kate how this was not her and Richard’s first visit to Cambridge Falls. They had been there once before.
“It was just after your adventure here, though before any of you were born. Stanislaus had told us who you were destined to be, what you would do. Imagine not having any children, and then hearing that you’re going to have three, and they’re going to be at the heart of this ancient prophecy. We talked him into bringing us here. And we saw them, all the children you’d saved. We were so proud of you, and you hadn’t even been born yet. That day, Richard and I both knew that whatever life had in store for you, we had to trust that you would be strong, you would stand by each other, and you would survive. And you have.”
It was also during one of their walks that her mother pointed out the locket Kate was wearing, the one she’d given her the night they’d been separated.
“You held on to it all this time.”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad. I’ve always imagined you wearing it.”
“I’m going to keep wearing it,” Kate said, and her hand went to it, clutching it, as if her heart lived not in her chest, but in the small, golden chamber.
And if her mother sensed there was something Kate wasn’t telling her, she let it be.
Soon enough too, Michael and their father had begun to find their way toward each other. It started when Michael apologized about losing his Dwarf Omnibus, and his father had told him not to worry; in fact, he’d heard that G. G. Greenleaf had put out a new edition, and Robbie McLaur had promised to send him one, and he and Michael could read it together. From there, they seemed to be talking about dwarves whenever Kate saw them, and their comfort with each other, their sense of being two kindred souls, only increased. Though once, Kate heard Michael admonishing his father, telling him, “Well, the truth is that elves aren’t silly at all. It’s a common enough misconception, but you should try and get past it. It’s very small-minded.”
Then one day, in the middle of the second week, Kate saw Michael entering the house and his eyes were red and swollen.
She asked if something had happened.
“Oh,” he said, pulling out his handkerchief and blowing his nose with a loud honk, while making an offhand comment about summer allergies (though it was nearly autumn), “Wilamena was just here. She couldn’t stay. Her people are looking for a new home. Now that the Chronicle’s gone, their valley in Antarctica has frozen over, and with the portal to the world of the dead closed, there’s kind of no reason to be there. They’re thinking about moving to the magical quarter of Paris, but apparently, it’s really expensive.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And we decided, you know, after talking it over, that we would just be friends. I mean, I’m probably going to be really busy with school soon, and it turns out her dad’s retiring as king, something about the stress being bad for his hair, so she’ll have to take over…. It was a mutual decision, of course.”
“I guess it’s for the best,” Kate said. But she hugged him tightly, and he let her, while muttering something about wartime romances burning brightly but not long.
It was Emma who had the hardest time with their parents. Following that first morning after the battle, when Emma had seen her mother and hugged her and cried, she had pulled back. It was almost, Kate thought, as if Emma wasn’t convinced that her parents were there to stay, as if she thought that she and Kate and Michael might wake up one day and find their parents gone, and the three of them on their way to the next orphanage. She even avoided calling them Mom and Dad, referring to them instead, when she was alone with Kate and Michael, as Him and Her.
Her mother insisted that she and their father understood. “It’ll take time; that’s all. We’ve just got to prove to her we’re not going anywhere.”
They were more concerned about what else might be weighing on Emma, the ordeals and trials she had gone through, which she refused to discuss.
“We’re not saying she has to open up to us,” Richard said. “It could be to you or Michael. It would just help her to talk.”
But Kate, who knew her sister, insisted that no one pressure her. “She’s been through a lot. She lost her best friend. She’ll tell her story when she’s ready.”
The truth was, Kate herself was worried. Every day, she waited for Emma to come to her, to tell her all that had happened, and every night they went to bed, and Emma turned her back to Kate and curled away, as if closing herself around her grief.
Then, a few days after Wilamena’s visit, as they were all sitting down to dinner, their mother set aside her knife and fork, reached for their father’s hand, and said:
“It’s been wonderful being here. Abraham and Miss Sallow have been very kind—”
“Well,” Richard said, “Abraham has.”
Clare gave their father a look, then went on. “But we’ve been talking, and maybe it’s time we thought about going home.”
“Home,” Emma said. “Home, like where?”
“Home,” their father said. “Our home. Your home.”
Kate wondered what reaction their parents had expected. Probably not total, stunned silence. But the fact was neither Emma nor even Michael—they’d both been too young—had ever really thought of themselves as having a home. Their only memories of the places they’d lived had been years of being bounced from one orphanage to another. And the news that they did have a home waiting for them, and they would be returning to it soon, was almost too large and strange a concept to process.
“Okay,” Kate said, answering for all of them.
“Yeah,” Michael said.
Emma said nothing. But the next morning, she woke Kate up and said she wanted to go back to Gabriel’s cabin, just the three of them, to say goodbye.
When asked, Abraham said he knew the way and could draw them a map, which was fortunate, as none of the children had paid much attention when walking with King Robbie. Abraham also said that if they left after breakfast, they could be back before dark, and Miss Sallow agreed to pack them lunch, though she said that on such short notice there was no way she could prepare foie gras pastries or truffle galettes, so their Highnesses might as well chop off her head now, shoot fireworks at it, and be done.
“Whatever you make will be fine,” Kate told her.
“You’re sure this is okay? I mean, it’s safe?” their mother asked when Kate explained their plans. But she immediately corrected herself. “What am I saying? Everything you all have been through—you can take a walk in the woods alone. Just, now that we have you back, I guess I’m feeling protective.”
<
br /> “We’ll be fine,” Kate said.
So the following day, after a breakfast of poached eggs, lemon curd pancakes, bacon as thick as sausage, and crispy, buttery potatoes, and after Michael rechecked his map several times with Abraham and double- and triple-checked his equipment (which was more suited to a three-week journey than a daylong hike), they set off.
As soon as they began walking—it was a cool, early-fall morning, the air was clean, the pine needles and earth slightly damp from a drizzle the night before—Kate knew that this was a good thing they were doing, that it was important and necessary, to be out and alone, the three of them, in the place where it all began. And more than that, it was just good to be tramping through the forest; magic or not, Kate could feel something working on her, on all of them.
The children walked in silence, and there was no sound but the calls and whistles of birds, the skittering of squirrels along branches, and the muffled thuds of their own feet. Michael diligently made corrections to the map that Abraham had drawn so that he could show the caretaker his mistakes when they returned. “He’ll appreciate it,” he assured his sisters. After walking for an hour, they stopped on a ledge that looked out over the mountains. They’d gotten hot and stuffed their sweaters into their packs, and they sat there in the sun, drinking water and eating apples.
And it was then that Emma began telling her story.
She began simply, with no preamble or warning, describing what it had been like to arrive in the world of the dead—the hours, or what had felt like hours, of hiking through the mist, her coming upon the walkers. She told them how she’d met Dr. Pym but he hadn’t remembered her, how they’d traveled across a sea and then through the burning, wasted landscape; she told about the carriadin and how they’d guarded the book for thousands of years, and how the first time she’d touched it she’d been overwhelmed by the voices of the dead. She told about being a prisoner and discovering how the Dire Magnus had been consuming the souls of the dead, about encountering the Countess, her body twisted and mangled, and how the witch had helped her; she told how the necromatus had pinned her hand onto the book with Michael’s knife, bonding her spirit to the magic—
(Kate and Michael both noticed her unconsciously rubbing the scar on her palm as she said this.)
—and she told them about Gabriel appearing and how it had saved her, how she’d given the dead back their memories with the question she’d posed and how that question would judge the dead from now till the end of time. She told them how she and Gabriel and Dr. Pym had gone to the last portal, and how both of them had chosen to stay in that world rather than let Michael bring them back, and how she’d said goodbye to Gabriel, standing there on the cliff, and how he’d promised that he would never forget her.
“Anyway,” she said, after she had been silent for a moment, “that’s what happened. And now he’s gone.”
When Kate reached for her sister’s hand, Emma didn’t pull away.
Then Michael said, “So the dead will remember us? Dr. Pym and Wallace and Gabriel, they’ll remember us?”
“Yes,” Emma said.
Kate felt her heart tighten in her chest, and her hand went to her locket. She saw Emma looking up at her.
“I’m okay.” Then she said, “We all are, aren’t we?”
And Emma, squeezing her sister’s hand, said, “Yes, we are.”
Then they lifted their packs and continued on.
The sun was not quite at the top of the sky when they came around a bend in the path, and there, tucked into the shoulder of the mountain, was Gabriel’s cabin. They ate on the small bench beside the front door, and though Miss Sallow’s lunch was no doubt exquisite, afterward none of them could quite remember what it had been. Then they walked over to the two markers, and already the ground had been tamped down and trodden on by animals and looked little different from the rest of the mountainside, which was as it should be, the children felt.
Kate and Michael left Emma alone to say goodbye to Gabriel, while they went and loaded their packs. Emma came back several minutes later, wiping her eyes, and, knowing it was her turn, Kate walked over to the graves. She stared down at the patch of earth that held Rafe’s body while her fingers worried the golden locket. She tried to think of what to say, but none of it sounded right. Finally, she knelt, placed her hand on the still-damp ground, whispered, “I love you,” and walked away.
Michael and Emma had already shouldered their packs, and Michael glanced at her, questioning, and she nodded, not yet trusting herself to speak.
“We’d better get going,” Emma said. “Mom and Dad will worry if we’re not back by dark.”
Kate and her brother both stopped what they were doing and looked at her. Emma smiled awkwardly.
“I know. Feels weird calling them that. And weird knowing that there’re people out there who worry about you. But I guess it’s good.” She was silent then, and Kate and Michael waited, knowing she wasn’t done.
Finally, she said, “I thought giving the dead back their memories would make everything better. But really, it doesn’t change anything. At least not while you’re alive. The people you love are still going to die. You’re still going to lose them.”
Kate watched Emma closely, seeing shades of the sister she’d known, brave, reckless, thoughtless, and this new person who’d grown up in her place, who was working through what she was feeling, piece by piece.
“Then I realized, maybe that’s okay, maybe it’s even okay loving someone knowing it’s going to end, that either you’re going to die or they’re going to die, or you’ll move away and never see them again, because that’s what it means to be alive. That’s the whole point of life. To love someone.” And she looked up at her brother and sister, her eyes wide and shining with tears. “Don’t you think?”
And Kate took her hand and said, “Yes. I do.”
The End
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Books of Beginning would not have been written without the support, generosity, and intelligence of literally hordes of people. In particular, I would like to thank:
The friends who listened to me talk about the books over the years, read drafts, gave feedback, and did not strangle me, specifically, Kimberly Cutter, Bob DeLaurentis, Nate DiMeo, Leila Gerstein, J. J. Philbin, and Derek Simonds.
Everyone at Random House who has gotten behind this series to such an amazing degree that I frequently think they must have me confused with some other writer and are simply too polite to correct the mistake: Markus Dohle, for his boundless enthusiasm; Chip Gibson, who is everything a writer hopes for in a publisher, but funnier; Barbara Marcus, who had the impossible job of taking over from Chip and then did the impossible; John Adamo, Rachel Feld, and Sonia Nash, for their inspired marketing of the books; Joan DeMayo and her team, who barnstormed the country on the novels’ behalf; Felicia Frazier, who helped carry The Black Reckoning into the world; Isabel Warren-Lynch and the art department, for putting so much effort and creativity into making such beautiful books; Grady McFerrin and Nicolas Delort, for their intricate, exquisite drawings; Jon Foster, for his gorgeous and evocative covers; in the publicity department, Dominique Cimina, Noreen Herits, and especially Casey Lloyd, the books’ indefatigable champion, who came with me on tour and listened to me give the same spiel again and again and always laughed at my jokes; Adrienne Waintraub and Tracy Lerner, who did the essential job of putting the books in the hands of teachers and librarians; Kelly Delaney, for reading these books countless times and always with fresh eyes; Tim Terhune, in production; and finally, Artie Bennett, Janet Renard, Nancy Elgin, Amy Schroeder, and Karen Taschek, for their diligent copyediting, which taught me how much I still have to learn about the English language and whose work made the books better than they had any right to be.
At Writers House: Cecilia de la Campa and Angharad Kowal, for their help with the foreign sales of the books; and Katie Zanecchia and Joe Volpe, for their good cheer and hard work over the years.
; Kassie Evashevski, Julien Thuan, and Matt Rice at UTA, for their great enthusiasm and—still ongoing—support.
Karl Austen, who keeps me out of trouble.
Philip Pullman. Honestly, never met the man, but I wouldn’t have written these books if it hadn’t been for him. So, wherever you are, Mr. Pullman, thank you.
The many foreign publishers who believed in these books and carried them away to far-off lands to readers I could never have imagined I would reach. Indeed, I wish it were possible for me to name and thank everyone at all the different publishing houses who got behind these books with such passion. Whatever trust I gave them, they repaid—both collectively and as individuals—many times over.
And, lastly, my greatest debts.
Nancy Hinkel and Judith Haut. As much as anything, I’m grateful for the people these books have brought into my life, and Nancy and Judith, completely separate from their tireless support during the writing of this trilogy, long ago crossed the line from being publishers to being friends. They’re stuck with me now. Ha.
My agent, Simon Lipskar. There are a handful of people who I can absolutely say have changed my life, and he is one. Whatever notice the books received was due to his early championing. He put himself on the line, and I owe him more than I can say.
My editor, Michelle Frey. There is no amount of praise or thanks I could heap upon her head that would do justice to all she’s done. Over the past four years, she has never once flagged in her efforts to make these books as good as they could be or ceased to impress me with her insights into story and character, her patience, and her faith. She made me into a better writer, and these books are what they are because of her.
Finally, my family: my sisters, who taught me how siblings can squabble twenty-three hours a day and still love each other; my parents, for their endless encouragement and stubborn refusal to tell a child that being a writer was an unsound life plan; my sons, Dashiell and Turner, who have made my world a bigger place; and Arianne, my wife, first reader, and best friend, for everything, thank you.
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