Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Blue Vein Tavern
The Game of Maps
The Whalebone Spring
The Devil and the Scavenger
The Queen of Fog
The Roamer in the Nettles
The Hollow-Ware Man
The Coldway
The Tavern at Night
The Blue Stair
The Storm Bottle
The Ferryman
The Reckoning
The Particular
The Three Kings
The Gardener of Meteorites
The Summons of the Bone
The Crossroads
A Note About the Clarion Books Edition
Acknowledgments
Read More from the Greenglass House Series
Read More from Kate Milford
Can You Solve the Case?
About the Author
Connect with HMH on Social Media
Clarion Books
3 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10016
Copyright © 2021 by Kate Milford
Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Nicole Wong
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
hmhbooks.com
Cover art by Jaime Zollars
Cover design by Sharismar Rodriguez
Interior design by Sharismar Rodriguez
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-328-46690-7
eISBN 978-0-358-41122-2
v1.0121
To Lynne, who makes every story shine,
and to Tess, Griffin, and Nathan,
because every story is for you.
ONE
THE BLUE VEIN TAVERN
THE RAIN HAD NOT STOPPED for a week, and the roads that led to the inn were little better than rivers of muck. This, at least, is what Captain Frost said when he tramped indoors, coated in the yellow mud peculiar to that part of the city, before hollering for his breakfast. The rest of the guests sighed. Perhaps today, they had thought. Perhaps today, their unnatural captivity would end. But the bellowing man calling for eggs and burnt toast meant that, for another day at least, fifteen people would remain prisoners of the river Skidwrack, and the new rivers that had once been roads, and the rain.
They passed the day much as they had passed the day before, and the day before that. Eventually, Mr. Haypotten, the innkeeper, announced supper in half an hour; he apologized for the state of the meals and the flickering lights, but without real worry. The Haypottens might run out of provisions eventually, but they had not kept this inn and tavern on the Skidwrack for a quarter of a century and more without seeing a flood or two, and they were well prepared for the whims of the river and the rain. The electricity might flicker and the hot water heating system, bought by the previous owners off an itinerant salesman when Mr. Haypotten was still in short pants, had never worked properly, but since the inn’s fireplaces never went dark, its rooms never went particularly cold. Nobody would freeze, nobody would starve, and as for the rising water: “See that?” Mr. Haypotten would say, opening one of the windows in the lounge barroom against the cold and wet and pointing across the porch that wrapped halfway around the inn to indicate a blue step in the stairway leading down to the river. “That’s where the river came back in ’fifteen. She doesn’t dare come nearer than that. Water won’t rise past a blue stair. Isn’t that so, Captain?”
“That’s so, Marcus,” Captain Frost agreed today as he had every day, because Mr. Haypotten kept the captain in very good sherry. But when Mr. Haypotten left the lounge to go help his wife and the kitchen maid finish preparing supper, the captain sang a different tune. Captain Frost’s eyes were deep-lined, his face tanned to mahogany, and his hair and beard bleached to a yellowed bone color from his decades at sea. He felt himself, not inaccurately, to be somewhat an expert in weather lore, and when the innkeeper was out of earshot, he muttered that he’d never heard such doss before in his life o’ years at sea, and if painting a thing blue were all it took to put water in its place, then how was it every ship in the harbor wasn’t sky-colored? Then he finished his very good sherry, pulled on his coat, and stomped into the hall and back out to check the weather and the roads yet again, as he did at every turn of the cracked half-hour glass he tended as religiously as if he were still aboard ship. It was never far from his elbow when he was inside the house, though it meant rearranging the place settings a bit at meals.
He left four guests behind in the lounge. Jessamy Butcher got up from her chair by the window, where she could see how very close the water was actually coming to the much-discussed blue stair, went around the bar, and found the captain’s bottle of sherry. She poured herself a glass, then held the bottle up in one thin, gloved hand, offering it silently to the rest of the room. The tattooed young man named Negret declined and went back to the pages he had taken from the pockets of his tweed vest and was stacking together on the bar top: a mismatched collection of liquor labels, scraps of newsprint, wallpaper, remnants of the long, match-like twists of paper called spills that the maid kept in vases in each room for lighting the lamps and fires around the inn, and other scavenged oddments. When he had them where he wanted them, he took a sharp, round-handled awl from a roll of tools that lay open on the countertop before him and, pressing the pages flat with his palm, began to poke holes along one edge.
But his brother, Reever, nodded in response to Jessamy’s offer and murmured his thanks as she reached across the bar to pass him a glass. Jessamy tried once again to decide whether or not the pale, brick-haired Colophon brothers were identical under their facial decorations. It was impossible to say. The tattoos were very similar but not quite the same, plus Negret wore his hair long and floppy, while Reever kept his short-cropped and cowlicky. And one didn’t like to be rude by looking too long. Jessamy turned to the fourth person in the room. “Mr.
