He passed book and bag to his brother, who cradled them in his palms with all the solemnity of a priest holding a wafer. Then Negret crouched before the girl and her castle. “But speaking of stories yet to be told, we haven’t heard a tale from you yet, Maisie.” He took from his pocket the little book he’d bound the day before from scraps and Tesserian’s spare aces. “What would you write, if you had a special book full of empty pages, a book meant to contain miracles?” He held it out, an offering.
Maisie looked at the little volume, then at the castle she and Tesserian had constructed. “I don’t know.”
Petra got up from the sofa and came over to sit on the hearth beside her. “Start one. See where it goes.”
Hesitantly, Maisie took the handmade book and riffled the pages. “All right.”
FIFTEEN
THE THREE KINGS
The Dancer’s Tale
ONCE UPON A TIME, there were three kings. They were the King of Finding Things, the King of Opening Things, and the King of Tying Things. And they all lived together in a castle, watching over a kingdom made up of a thousand small islands in a huge green sea.
The three kings spent part of every year out on a journey, visiting the islands of their country, which were spread too far across the green sea for telegraph cables, visiting their people and the neighboring lands, and sometimes finding new islands and new people and introducing themselves and setting up alliances and trade treaties and embassies and that sort of thing.
At first they had thought it would be a bad idea to all go out voyaging at the same time, but they discovered they had to, because if the King of Finding Things didn’t go, they couldn’t find any of the places they wanted to get to, and if the King of Tying Things didn’t go, they couldn’t tie up their boat when they reached a destination, and the King of Opening Things refused to be the one to stay home all the time because he said it wasn’t fair. So they left a trusted person named Carol in charge when they left, and it worked all right.
One day, they were out sailing, and the King of Finding Things, who was up in the crow’s-nest, spotted land through her spyglass. (She was a girl.) “Land ho!” she said. They sailed to the harbor, and although there was a nice pier with a sorbet stand on it (the shaved-ice sort of sorbet, not the other kind), there was no one in sight and nothing at all to see on the land anywhere, except for a big stretch of bushes that had been cut into a long, tall, very high wall.
The King of Tying Things tied up the boat with a very good knot that looked like a heart, and they all went ashore.
“This is strange,” said the King of Opening Things.
“Very strange,” said the King of Tying Things. And both of them looked to the King of Finding Things.
She strapped on her sword, which she didn’t wear at sea because sometimes the sea was rough and that made sailing feel a bit like running with scissors. Then she nodded once and said, “If there’s anyone or anything to be found on this island, I’ll find it.”
And together (but with the King of Finding Things in the lead) they marched up to the big hedge and started walking beside it. Before long, the King of Finding Things stopped. “Aha!” she said, and although neither of the other kings could see anything, she began to chop at the hedge with her sword until the branches fell away and there was a big wooden door with a big iron lock.
“Allow me,” said the King of Opening Things, and he stepped forward. (He was very glad to have a way to be useful, because sometimes on these trips all he got to do was loosen stuck pickle-jar lids.) The door was locked, but of course that was no trouble. He had a set of picks to open locks without keys, and that’s what he did.
Inside the door, they found a mess of a garden. It was almost more like a woods than a garden, actually. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to walk, it was so overgrown.
But the King of Finding Things could see where the paths had been, and she could see where hedges and rosebushes that used to be separate had grown together. “It’s not just a garden,” she said as she found more and more clues. “It’s a garden maze. It’s just gone wild!”
The three of them worked together to find their way through. First the King of Finding Things would find the next correct part of the route, chopping a bit at the greenery when she had to. Then the King of Opening Things would make a path, and the King of Tying Things would tie the reaching and tangling plants to the side so they could all get through. And in that way, they got to the center of the maze, where they discovered a small castle with a single tower.
The three kings looked at one another.
“Is it possible?” asked the King of Finding Things.
“It would be a huge coincidence,” said the King of Tying Things.
“There’s only one way to find out,” said the King of Opening Things. And he looked up at the tower and called, “Hey! Is someone in there?”
They waited, and then the window was pushed up and a girl leaned out. “Is that you?” she called, very surprised. And the three kings down on the ground looked at one another.
“I can’t believe it,” the King of Tying Things said.
“I can,” said the King of Finding Things, who was used to huge coincidences with some of her finds. And this was a pretty big one. The person
