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CHAPTER 1

NOTHING BUT A DOG AND A SHEET OF PAPER

Moonlight fell on Elinor’s bathrobe, her nightdress, her bare feet, and the dog lying in front of the Oh, the way he looked at her with his eternally sad eyes! As if asking hi s in her library in theinto space

"Why?" said Elinor in the silence "Because I can’t sleep, you stupid animal" But she patted his head all the saht as she hauled herself out of her ar You don’t even like dogs, least of all this one, with his heavy breathing that always re master!

Still, she had kept the dog in spite of the painful ht back She’d kept the chair, too, even though the Magpie had sat in it Mortolahow often Elinor thought she heard the old woman’s voice when she went into the quiet library, how often she see the bookshelves, or Meggie sitting by the ith a book on her lap, face hidden behind her sht hair

Meible than the pictures conjured up by books But ould be left if she lost those ain forever with the silence and the e

Her feet looked so old in the paleher toes in it In ical powers All lies Her whole head was full of printed lies She couldn’t even look at the moon with eyes unclouded by veils of letters Couldn’t she wipe all those words out of her head and heart, and see the world through her own eyes again, at least once?

Heavens, Elinor, what a fabulous lass case where she kept everything that Orpheus had left behind, apart fro rolling over in every puddle

The sheet of paper that lay behind the glass looked like nothing special, just an ordinary piece of lined paper densely written in pale blue ink Not to be conificently illuh the tracing of every letter showed how very impressed Orpheus ith himself I hope the fire-elves have burned that self-satisfied slass case I hope the men-at-arms have skewered him — or, even better, I hope he’s starved to death in the Wayless Wood, miserably and very, very slowly It wasn’t the first time she had pictured to herself Orpheus’s wretched end in the Jnkworld These i

The sheet of paper was already yellowing To add insult to injury, it was cheap stuff And the words on it really didn’t look as though they could have spirited their writer away to another world right before Elinor’s eyes Three photographs lay beside the sheet of paper — one of Meggie and two of Resa a photo of her as a child and another taken only a fewso happily! Hardly a night went by when Elinor didn’t look at those photographs By now, at least, the tears had stopped running down her cheeks when she did so, but hey were still there in her heart Bitter tears Her heart was full to the bri

Lost

Meggie

Resa

Mortimer

Almost three ie had even been gone a few days longer than her parents

The dog stretched and ca drowsily over to her He pushed his nose into her bathrobe pocket, knowing there were always a few dog biscuits in it for him

"Yes, all right, all right," she s into his broad muzzle "Where’s your master, then?" She held the sheet of paper in front of his nose, and the stupid creature sniffed it as if he really could catch Orpheus’s scent behind the words on the page