 
### Saskia's Skeleton

Copyright 2017 Lily Markova

Published by Lily Markova at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Chapter One. Bastilly's

Chapter Two. The Woods

Chapter Three. Saskia's Fairy Tale

Chapter Four. The Castle

Chapter Five. The Proper Invasion

Chapter Six. The Prison

Chapter Seven. Charlie

Chapter Eight. A Visitor

Chapter Nine. Good-bye

Chapter Ten. Ever After

P.S.

If it so happens that you are a child, it would be my pleasure to tell you this story about a one-eyed girl, her skeleton, and its bird; a kooky princess; a boy who could run very fast; and a cat, who turned human. But be brave! And beware:

This is not a fairy tale.

If you'd rather be ranked among adults, particularly proper ones, I assure you that, despite the conclusions you may have already jumped to, this story is not too silly and is in fact, ahem, a metaphor (which I trust you are well able to decipher without condescending explanations from someone like me). Oh, you're also going to need some sort of guarantee or insurance, of course, so here you go:

This story has a happy ending*.

Now, if you're uncertain of which party to join (children or grown-ups?); if you don't see why that is supposed to matter at all; if you can't help but be somewhat indignant at my suggesting you're proper; and if it's beyond you why a story about a cat and a skeleton can't be serious without having to be a metaphor—then, first, let us exchange hugs, or handshakes, or at least knowing smiles, and second, allow me to dedicate to you this story

with a fairly sad ending.

Chapter One. Bastilly's

It's not unjust to expect a glorious story to kick off in a glorious way—say, with a large, fluffy, propeller-tailed dog drooling all over a laughing face. Or with a cake so big and sweet as to fill five stomachs and uplift five moods. Or, at the very least, with someone waving wistfully at an old friend.

This, however, is a humble little story that doesn't sit around claiming gloriousness. As such, it is spared the trouble of living up to any glorious expectations—like the necessity to start with something beautiful, bright, kind, or even funny. This little story is thus free to begin with a _gloomy_ , _spine-chilling, sinister-looking_ (as well as long-winged and, when viewed from above, V-shaped—just so you won't mis-imagine it) fortress.

If instead of viewing it from above, you looked up at it, though, from a child's height, you could easily mistake the fortress for the stern dark bow of a giant icebreaker ship—except rather than plowing polar seas, cleaving glaciers, and stupefying penguins, it was towering formidably (albeit quite incongruously) amidst the otherwise flat, half-heartedly green scenery. The plainness of its surroundings only made the building appear eerier for the contrast.

The main entrance at the sharp front of the _gloomy, spine-chilling, sinister-looking, long-winged, and V-shaped_ fortress was opening. It was doing so slowly, slowly, sloooowly, and the terrible creaking noise the massive door was making echoed like a raven's cry in the stillness of the gray sky. From behind the door, peeped out: first, the toe of a little shoe; then, a bit higher, four cautious little fingers; then, a bit higher still, a little nose—and only then, the nose was followed by the rest of the little girl's face. Accompanying her face was shaggy black hair, the longest of its chaotic strands barely covering her ears. The girl's right eye was plastered with a violet pirate patch, while the left one, dark and intent, glistened among the long eyelashes like a glossy, many-legged spider. Still only half outside, the door concealing her other half like an oversize cast-iron shield, Saskia assessed just how much trouble she was in. " _This time_ ," added the girl, to herself.

What she saw ahead was to Saskia more sinister, more spine-chilling than all the eerie fortresses of the world put together: her _classmates_. Just as she had feared, every one of them was still here, waiting for her to come out. The children stood before the building in two rows facing each other, forming a sort of corridor—a corridor of humiliation, terror, and shame, which Saskia was going to have to wade through. As swiftly and synchronously as though someone behind Saskia had tugged on a bunch of unseen strings, the children's heads all turned in her direction. The girl swallowed audibly, and her fingers clenched more tightly around the door's edge.

Freak! Freak! Freak! Freak!

The children had _wonderful_ porcelain skin. With that wonderful skin of theirs, and lining the grassless path running across the lawn, they looked like some flawless, cream-colored Greek columns dressed in identical well-ironed blue suits. Saskia, meanwhile, was wearing a baggy, yellowed shirt that had a few jagged holes in the sleeves, a pair of weathered brown pants, and an equally weathered (and equally brown) vest—all wrinkled and stained, of course.

The other kids weren't much taller than Saskia—in fact, some of them weren't taller than Saskia at all—but at that instant, the girl felt almost microscopic next to them, and it was as though with each second that she hesitated to step forward, she were getting shorter and grimier, while the others grew only taller and more immaculate. This sort of thing happens when you are a child faced with the prospect of walking some fifteen yards under the intense, disapproving, mocking gazes of other children. _Proper_ children.

Saskia un-clung from the door at last, and it swung slowly closed, resounding throughout the muted midday with another long _crrrrawk,_ and then a gunshot-like _bang!_ The girl gave a jump, and in a moment, her back was magnetized to the door once more. If all eyes had been goggling at her before, now they seemed to have doubled in size and quantity. Saskia shut her own eye and shook her head. For some reason, that eyeful vision was not helping her brace up.

The air was fresh and greenish-blue, and smelled sweetly of a recent rain. Drawing in a lungful of it, Saskia took heart and transferred her foot from the stone front step down onto the loose, damp ground. As loose as it was, and despite Saskia's faint dark hopes, the ground refused to help the girl out by swallowing her up, so she had little choice but to take another step, and another one after that. The closer she was to the children, the wilder it became: the incessant rustling noise that had been hovering around since she'd opened the door—as if countless wings of shadow-like, flash-like birds swished through the air.

Freak! Freak! Freak! Freak!

Saskia faltered and froze, her gaze fixed on the tarnished silver buckle of her tired brown boot. As she had known it would, a great and blurry drop of red came, flashing, into view. Proceeding to fall away, the drop grew smaller and more well-defined until finally it hit the buckle and exploded all over it. Saskia licked her upper lip. There was a familiar rusty saltiness in her mouth now, as if she had a silver buckle under her tongue, too. _"Here it comes,"_ Saskia thought. How mortifying! You pretend as best you can that you are perfectly at ease and having the loveliest day, but your nosebleed gives you away. (Most people's bodies betray them by trembling or stumbling or sweating, but Saskia's had perhaps one of the most embarrassing ways of telegraphing uneasiness.)

And she did have her reasons to be feeling uneasy. Even on a _normal_ day, the proper children gave Saskia enough grief, but half an hour ago, the girl had had the impudence to break today's normality—with something as innocent as presenting her homework. From where Saskia stood, she'd performed rather great, so she didn't understand what had happened and why. Certainly, knowing her audience, she hadn't expected a delighted ovation; a good grade and a few impressed whistles would have done. She had bowed jokingly and smiled around at the class but had been met with nothing more than a lot of mute gaping. Once the teacher had left off clutching his heart and abandoned weird gulping noises in favor of something more intelligible, he'd excused all his pupils for the rest of the day. All the pupils except Saskia, that is, who had had to hang back and answer a quarter-hour's worth of odd questions regarding her homework. " _What are some effects of the carry-on potion?_ " " _How many mice are there in the tower?_ "

But— _of course!_ —instead of scampering home and liking Saskia a bit more for their early release, her classmates remained here to gloat.

"Imagine that you are a little wolf," Saskia told herself. _"I am a little wolf."_ That was what the Princess would do. The Princess often said that if you found yourself stuck in a situation you didn't enjoy being stuck in, you would do well to imagine you were someone who could shuffle out of such a situation with dignity.

More than anything now, Saskia wanted to unlearn the word "dignity" in practicing "skedaddling," but that would be unbecoming to a little wolf. A little wolf would never skedaddle like some cowardly hare. (Saskia honestly tried to picture _that_ , but all she came up with was an image of her own brain pouting, folding its arms, and shaking its own tiny head inside _her_ head.) No, no—a little wolf, surrounded by big scary hunters smelling of gunpowder and avidness, would growl and snarl and glower at them with all the dangerousness it could muster, while creeping steadily toward the woods. It was fortunate for Saskia, then, that the woods were exactly where she was headed, too. Beyond them, the warmth of her splendid, safe castle awaited, where she would be hugged by her beautiful Princess and glanced at impassively by her sullen cat, Franz.

Freak! Freak! Freak! Freak!

Another drop of blood slipped from Saskia's nostril, slid down her lips and chin, and gravitated on to her shoe. Repressing a howl rising in her chest, Saskia hooked her thumbs under the shoulder straps of her backpack and, head still lowered, she looked up—challengingly, the way she supposed a little wolf would. As it often happens in such dramatic moments, a gust of wind blasted out of nowhere, and the girl's tangled locks flew up and swirled around her face. Saskia could only hope this made her look slightly more menacing, not a lot more ridiculous.

She stepped into the corridor of shame and thread-needled on, her defiant glare darting from face to face, daring the children to attack. (Saskia kept her head down as well as turned slightly to the right so she could dare those in the right row effectively, too.) Oh, what wonderful porcelain skin they all had! When your own face is strewn with dozens of crisscrossing thin scars, everyone around you seems to have porcelain skin.

Saskia felt many eyes drilling into her, but each time she tried to catch any of the children staring, they looked away before she could. It was almost as if they weren't even chanting—nobody's lips appeared to be moving, not when Saskia's gaze fell upon them, anyway. But the whooshing _"Freak! Freak! Freak! Freak!"_ hadn't subsided in her ears. Could they be chanting mentally, could Saskia hear their thoughts because they were directed against her, so loud and so unanimous?

And the ceaseless whispering! _"Hear the nonsense she spoke today? Everyone knows the poor thing's not all there. Her whole family's like that. Even the cat, I tell you. It's got rats in the attic, mind. Threw a stick at it once, for fun, like, and I swear the dumb beast threw it back at me. Think I might've heard it cuss, too!"_

But _who_ was it, who was whispering? Saskia peered into the children's faces, but no one was so much as mouthing; all they did was avert their eyes and tug at one another's sleeves as she passed. _"It must be their eyes that are whispering,"_ decided Saskia. It was strange, but strange things rarely disturbed her as deeply as _proper_ ones did.

Was the corridor _ever_ going to end? Saskia's chin felt already all sticky, lips taut and itchy with blood. She raised her hand to her nose mechanically, and stared at her now-red fingers, which were flecked with scars like her face. Saskia always carried tissues for such an occasion but had already used today's box when the teacher had asked her to stay after class. The only thing unnerving Saskia more than nasty whispers from proper children were compassionate questions from proper adults, so it had taken her _a lot_ of tissues to get through that friendly interrogation.

Not knowing what else to do with the blood, Saskia wiped the hand on her pants. That was something she'd never dare do were she dressed properly, as she was supposed to be, in the blue uniform, but today was a special day for Saskia—or so it should have been—and hence, she was wearing a pirate costume, with which blood went quite naturally.

Sewn on the previous night by the Princess herself, this costume was for Saskia's presentation; she could have just as well performed in the uniform, yes, but it was so much more fun this way (or so it should have been). Besides, you didn't have a good excuse to dress up as a pirate every day. It was a shame, the Princess had said, that the other kids couldn't pretend to be pirates and such whenever they liked. It would be no trouble for her to make them all costumes so that nobody'd have to feel envious, only she was afraid the proper adults wouldn't allow it. Oh, the Princess knew their ways too well; sometimes, she tried her hardest to be like them, but she could never figure out how to be proper and happy at the same time.

Saskia felt as though she had been walking down the corridor for hours already. She was just approaching the exit and had to remind herself not to break into a run, when she noticed a girl in the left row (the one with a pair of thick white braids and the bluest eyes Saskia'd seen in her life), whose lips _were_ moving, after all. Saskia had never spoken to this girl, but she did know that her name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth wasn't chanting insults, however; it looked as though she wanted to say something—say something to _her_ , Saskia.

Heart fluttering thrice as fast as the second before, Saskia paused and lowered her gaze. She noted a silk scarf wrapped around the bluest-eyed girl's neck. Although the scarf was blue, too, it wasn't part of the school uniform. Saskia looked still lower, and there was a starched white handkerchief in Elizabeth's hand. Saskia cast her gaze to the ground and saw a pretty, lacquered shoe inch toward her battered boot.

Saskia held her breath, amazed at the ridiculous hope that this wonderful blue-eyed girl with such porcelain skin was about to come forward and offer her— _her_ , Saskia!—that handkerchief. It would then cease to matter whatsoever what the other children were whispering. For a moment, Saskia had even forgotten she was a little wolf, although she did pull herself together promptly and made her stare wary again. There was a brief second when the bluest eyes met Saskia's, and all the children's attention began to lumber from Saskia to Elizabeth. The blue-eyed girl dropped her head, crumpled the handkerchief in her fist, and put her foot back in place.

Saskia felt all eyes aim at her once more. The whispers picked up again. Somebody chuckled. Saskia realized she was still standing foolishly before Elizabeth, gawking at her. What a smart way to disprove you're a freak! Not that there was much point in trying, what with Saskia's silly, careless tricks that had got her in this position to begin with. The girl looked around her—the children's faces seemed now twisted with wicked laughter and sneers only to appear utterly unstirred moments later, with just the echo of their laughter lingering in the air.

As a thoroughly abashed Saskia turned to leave, the heavy door of the fortress _crawked_ one more time. It must be some of the grown-ups because one of the children shouted, with a hint of relief in his voice, "That girl is bleeding again, sir! She needs to see the doctor, doesn't she?"

Saskia gasped. Her eye became perfectly round with horror, and her hair stood on end. She knew one should shun doctors at all costs if one didn't want to wind up prescribed metal pellets for one's improperness, and Saskia was positive she wasn't going to find anything metal tasty. A friendly voice called her name, which boded another sympathetic talk. Just as the front door of the fortress shut with another _bang_ , Saskia devised a clever compromise that would cater to both her little girl's fear and her little wolf's dignity: After such a loud gunshot, no one would blame a little wolf for taking to its heels, which was what Saskia did without looking back.

Her breathing panicked, her backpack rattling, the girl hurtled down the remainder of the grassless path, through the arched gates in the fence surrounding the fortress grounds, along the bowed cobblestone bridge over a gurgling creek, and plunged into the woods. Perhaps, the Princess would be displeased that Saskia had chosen not to wait until she picked her up today, but the girl was far more afraid of proper talks and metal pills than walking through the woods alone. So she ran, panting loudly, away from this dreadful building that was called, as the plate at the entrance proclaimed,

Bastilly's School

for the Ungifted, Average, and Unchosen

Chapter Two. The Woods

Like the school grounds, the woods were bordered by a high wrought-iron fence. Apparently, proper people had at some point decided that everything ought to be bounded, walled in and off. _Proper_ ties, countries, even these woods. Were they worried, wondered the girl as she ran, that were it not for the fence, the trees would head for the hills?

Now Saskia came to think of it, there was something else that bemused her about these woods, namely the golden plaque at their gates that explained what they were. Somebody proper must have also decreed that everything should be tagged and defined, even the most obvious or the most obscure things. Perhaps they felt, speculated Saskia, that had they not concreted the nature of these woods by engraving it on metal, the place might one day grow tired of woodiness and evolve into water or rock. (Proper adults wouldn't appreciate having to redraw the boundaries then.)

So, as Saskia's feet pedaled on, her mind was occupied with pondering all that. Had it worked at least a little more properly, it would rather concern itself with a different side of the matter: What the plaque at the entrance explained was that these were—

SPOOKY WOODS

(today, _particularly_!)

The girl raced for another minute, keeping to the earthy trail that lay quite straight, splitting the wilderness into two neat halves. This was, Saskia guessed, why the sign said "the woodS": Indeed, they were neither dense, nor vast enough to call themselves "we," but there was one wood to the left of the trail, and another one to the right, and together, these were two woodS.

No one was following her, so at last she slowed down, gazing about her and gasping for breath. It was the first time the girl had been here alone. (Either the Princess or Jack walked her to school every morning, and after classes, Saskia waited around until one of them took her home.) As with any story about a girl and a skeleton, the woods _were_ by all means very spooky. They were filled with a hooting and howling and crisply snapping silence, and they were also filled with a whooshing and prowling and crawling immobility. Each time Saskia stumbled to a halt or shot a sudden glance over her shoulder, the woods became rooted to the spot and pretended to be a most average and ungifted assemblage of trees, but once she started to move again, so did the landscape. She could sense it—shadows coming alive behind her, owls awaking, orange bulbs of alert eyes lighting up among the dark trunks, branches weaving themselves into threatening figures. . . .

Saskia held the back of her hand to her nose. Although the woods did frighten her, the bleeding had stopped. From her zoology lessons, Saskia remembered that some beasts could scent blood from many miles away. What if the smell of _her_ blood had already attracted the interest of something truly vicious? Saskia turned around anxiously and weighed for a while whether it was best she go back to the school. Miserable though she often was there, and while it didn't make her feel protected from the world the way her castle did, the school _was_ well fortified, and closer than her home so far.

Then she reminded herself, with a shrinking stomach, of the way her classmates had stared at her—not just earlier on this afternoon, but any time she'd said or done something other than what had been expected of her. How sweet would it have been, sighed Saskia inwardly, if the blue-eyed Elizabeth had spoken to her just the same. If any _one_ of the children had noticed that her costume was not only flouting the dress code but also true-to-life and terrific, or that what she'd told today in class was as inventive as it was ridiculous. . . . No, Saskia wasn't going back to the school. Better she be torn apart by monsters than swallow metal pills or have the children taunt her again!

It was then, as Saskia made her choice in favor of this questionable option, that she saw it. A little way ahead, by the trail she was following, there lay a fallen tree with enormous dry roots, which stuck out in all directions and looked like a giant dark mouth fixed in a wide roar of rage. On the trunk, as though on a bench, sat a tall human skeleton, its lower jaw propped up on its hand, and its elbow on its knee. It was tapping its fingertips on its cheekbone, which produced a curious hollow sound, as if someone insisted on dropping several dice to a wooden desktop, and the dice bounced off and thumped back down. The skeleton seemed to be contemplating something exceptionally dreary, like school.

This was a fine, handsome skeleton, too. It wore a dark purple tailcoat, and its sleeves were rolled up so Saskia could see that the skeleton's forearms were like two violin bows. Clearly, it didn't find a lower garment as necessary; Saskia could also make out that its legs were thin and long, and they reminded her of a grasshopper's. Why that was, Saskia didn't really know, for unlike a grasshopper's, the skeleton's knees did not bend backward.

Having finished surveying the monster's anatomical particulars, Saskia gave a deep sigh, hung her head, and shook it. A thing like this would _never_ happen to a proper child! To get to the castle, she needed to walk past the skeleton—right under the scary upside-down heart-shaped hole that was its nose!—or else veer off the trail and bypass it through the thicket. Any child in their right mind will tell you that the woods are acrawl with hungry beasts and evil spirits just waiting for you to step off the safe path, and—who knows?—other monsters may not be as sleekly clothed.

Saskia tried to imagine what she would do if the skeleton ate her. The prospect upset her, but there was no help for it.

As the girl edged closer and closer, thoughts bustled around her head like tiny hyperactive people, scurrying in circles, falling over one another, fumbling about for ways to convince the skeleton she wouldn't make the most nutritious of lunches. She even pulled a green apple out of her backpack to try and tempt the skeleton with that instead—the Princess had mentioned something about apples being good for bone-building. (Surely they were better than little girls?)

The monster still didn't react to Saskia's presence, although she'd drawn almost level with the fallen tree's roots. The girl summoned all the courage she could find in her (feigning some more), which evidently wasn't much: While she _had_ brought herself to sprint headlong past the tree, her eye in the process was squeezed shut so tightly it was a miracle it hadn't got crushed under the eyelid. It wasn't helping Saskia's heroic image, either, that she was shrieking as though falling off the tallest bridge.

Still shrieking, Saskia opened her eye a slit and looked back. To her surprise, relief, and to some extent, disappointment, the skeleton hadn't even moved a bone—hadn't even snapped its teeth at her for the sake of decorum. It was sitting there as it had before, slouching and drumming on its cheekbone. Nonplussed, Saskia stopped both running and screaming. She had come up with so many nice arguments that could change the skeleton's mind were it to charge at her that she felt a tad let down.

Forgetting how she had nearly fainted from panic the moment before, the girl wheeled around and marched back up the trail in front of the skeleton, this time making sure not to hasten, and not to take her eye off it.

No response came.

More annoyed by the minute, Saskia stomped beside the tree one more time, drawing her knees nearly up to her chin, like an overly diligent soldier.

Nothing.

She went jumping in the opposite direction, now on one leg, now on two, as if playing hopscotch, her neck narrowly unscrewing itself as she craned and twisted it to keep an eye on the jaded-looking monster at all times.

No use. The hard-headed skeleton refused to attempt to eat her.

When she had exhausted most of her physical strength, Saskia backed away a yard or two. She tarried there for a good two minutes, examining her unwilling opponent in a calculating, deciphering manner, her lips pursed and her eye narrowed. Then, another bright idea sprang into her little, disarrayed, black-haired head: What if she sent a pine cone the skeleton's way?

Never mind; Saskia recalled at once that proper children sometimes pelted Franz with all sorts of things, pine cones, sticks, and even stones, and that it offended Franz greatly. Her spirits, she realized, would rather plummet if it were the skeleton who decided to chuck things at _her_ , however kindly its intentions. At school, when the teachers couldn't see, the boys often bombarded her and other girls with erasers or crumpled pieces of paper, and those occasions, though not very damaging, did vex Saskia. The girl flushed, growing ashamed of her malevolent impulse and stingingly sorry for the skeleton. True: If it weren't for the wretched creature's Halloweenish looks, she never would have thought to assail it in any way.

The Princess had warned Saskia repeatedly not to talk to strangers, but she had not once given any precise instructions as to what not to do when it came to strangers' bones. At any rate, it was decidedly impossible for someone bad to wear a tailcoat, of that Saskia was sure. The only person she'd ever seen in one was anything but evil.

"Sorry I wanted to throw a cone at you," said Saskia in a small voice, slinking nearer. "That wasn't very thoughtful of me. Ah, this seat looks untaken—you don't mind, do you?" She indicated the part of the trunk that wasn't occupied by the skeleton, which was certainly rather roomy, as skeletons tend not to take up much space when they're seated.

The skeleton quit drumming and turned to look at her, slowly and in a strange way: First, he inclined his head to the opposite side, as if to get water out of the ear he did not have, and only then did he proceed to face the girl, with his skull still positioned horizontally. Inside his eye sockets, Saskia could discern green stalks and blue flowers, and for a moment she even thought their petals had twitched, as through the skeleton had blinked in surprise. Finally, just as unhurriedly, the skeleton raised his head back into an upright position and waved his arm, allowing Saskia to sit beside him. After that, he turned away and placed his hands stiffly on his knees. The skeleton must be feeling slightly awkward, Saskia understood—it couldn't be too often that somebody tried to strike up a conversation with him.

Saskia clambered onto the tree, feeling glad for yet another time today that she wasn't wearing her blue uniform, because her pirate pants became instantly black and slimily wet in the knees (the back of her pants was unlikely to be getting any cleaner either as Saskia fidgeted in attempts to make herself comfortable on the trunk's coarse and lumpy bark). She clapped and rubbed her hands together and then smeared the last of the sticky, honey-colored resin on her vest.

"Oh," said Saskia, suddenly aware that her hoodlum looks and manners might alarm a creature of such a refined taste in clothing. "Please don't mind my pirateness. I'm just dressed up as an acrobat who's dressed up as a pirate, so it's all right. It's for a school thing," she explained.

The skeleton continued to look straight ahead of him. For some time, they sat in silence, until Saskia blurted out cheerfully, "My name is Saskia, I live in the castle at the other end of the woods, that's where I'm going now."

With a lot of grinding, cracking, and popping noises, the skeleton turned to her again—this time with his entire torso, too—and blinked twice with his flower petals. He didn't introduce himself in response, didn't say anything at all, and Saskia figured that he might be inconvenienced by the lack of vocal cords.

"May I simply call you the Skeleton? You could simply call me the Girl, in return," suggested Saskia, but then she remembered the skeleton couldn't call anyone the Girl due to his lack of vocal cords, so she corrected herself. "I mean, you could call me that in your head."

Saskia's gaze lingered upon the skeleton's forehead, behind which there was probably nothing but a few blades of grass. She felt her ears ignite.

"Oh."

How insensitive! The Princess wouldn't be too happy about her social skills. And Franz, that one would downright snort if he heard her now. The skeleton's tailcoat, though, Franz would adore. The last time Franz had seen a tailcoat, he had rolled around on it, sheeting it with hairs in delight.

"I apologize," said Saskia sheepishly. "I didn't mean to insult you. I've never talked to a skeleton before."

She held out her hand, and the Skeleton stared at it with his dark eye sockets (for his flowers had shrunk back inside them); then he stared at his own hand resting on his kneecap, and then at the girl's again. At last he reached out and gave Saskia's hand a quick, tentative shake, barely touching it at all, after which he snatched back his bony fingers and pivoted away.

It looked as though he'd never talked to a girl before, either.

Saskia would love to stay and chat some more with him, but conversation pieces in the vicinity were scarce, and she couldn't think of anything to say that would be of any interest to a skeleton. She slid off the trunk and was just about to say her good-byes when, much to her amazement, the Skeleton _made a sound_. It wasn't like a human voice, but rather a chirrup, as if his stomach had given a small rumble—except he wasn't supposed to have a stomach! The girl couldn't tell for sure whether he did, because of the tailcoat. She felt the strongest urge to ask the Skeleton what and how he ate, but she was, after all, well brought up so she never asked people when they were going to have a baby, or how they managed to eat without internal organs.

Even without her asking questions, the Skeleton seemed discomfited. His head had drooped forward; Saskia thought it was so he could avoid looking her in the eye, but he didn't stop angling his head downward until his flowery gaze had arrived at his own chest. The Skeleton peered at it for a time, then unbuttoned his tailcoat and resumed the examination of whatever was demanding his attention so in there. Saskia, too, tried to peek in a couple of times, but the Skeleton kept a side of his tailcoat up so that she couldn't get a glimpse without her nose poking too obviously into the Skeleton's business.

When eventually the Skeleton's attention did return to Saskia, she pretended to be enthralled by an iridescent bluish-green beetle scrambling up the trunk. The Skeleton cast another glance at his chest, and another glance at Saskia, and finally, after some indecisive clacking of teeth, he made up his mind. Slowly, he drew the left front of his tailcoat aside so Saskia could have a look, and her mask of disinterest peeled off on the instant.

"Aaah," breathed Saskia, the unpatched half of her face becoming one giant glittering pupil. Inside the Skeleton's chest, there was a ruffled bird, whose peppercorn eyes were squinting against the intrusive daylight. Saskia didn't know what kind of bird this was, except that it was a very small, very red, and very sleepy-looking bird. Now Saskia saw where all the plants twining around the Skeleton's bones, and the flowers in his eye sockets, were coming from—they grew out of the nest that the bird had built inside his rib cage.

"Aaah," repeated Saskia.

With one last, expectant look at his chest (perhaps to check that the bird was settling itself down to sleep again), the Skeleton pulled the front of his tailcoat back closed and fastened the buttons.

Saskia got a feeling she had just been let in on something well-guarded and personal (not to mention incredible!), which was a thrilling feeling to get.

"Thank you for showing me your bird," she said, her voice a little too solemn because of a pleasant agitation that had also given her cheeks a pink tint. "I don't think anybody's shared a secret with me before. People aren't quick to trust you when you look a bit. . . _out of the way_ , you know what I mean?" she added in a whisper, blushing even harder.

The Skeleton stared himself up and down. Then he granted Saskia a prolonged oblique look, blinked, and spread his arms out to his sides, as if to say, "Well, I _am_ a skeleton."

"Oh, right." There was no room for further blushing on Saskia's face, so she could only bite her lip as her memory flashed back to her original impression of "the monster" and the concern that he was going to eat her.

The Skeleton wouldn't like it at Bastilly's at all, she thought. The children would probably scream and scatter at the sight of him, without caring to get a deeper understanding of the situation first, and the adults would call the police. . . . While the girl pictured the furor a skeleton's arrival could cause in a proper place like that, her eyebrows crawled up and toward each other, as though they had arranged a meeting at the center of her forehead. That made for a rather sorrowful look on her face, but thinking about school again _had_ replenished Saskia's sadness. The Skeleton, unlike her, didn't have to go to Bastilly's every day. _He_ didn't have to worry about having the scars the others didn't, or saying the wrong thing all the time.

"I wonder how much longer they're going to be mad at me," she sighed—not to herself but, unwittingly, quite aloud. "Everyone's mad at me now because of the fairy tale," the girl explained to the Skeleton (who hadn't really asked her anything), as she climbed back onto the tree.

_Now_ the Skeleton appeared interested, swiveling his creaky corpus around and batting the petals of his staring flowers like big, blue, coaxing eyelashes. And he looked it, of course: Some people have it manifested in their air that theirs is a mind that's tuned to fairy tales. If, say, a bird nests in a person's chest, and the person doesn't seem to mind, it is a sure sign they are a fairy tale enthusiast. The only exception Saskia knew to this observation was Franz. Impossibly fluffy, impossibly white; ears and nose pink like a rabbit; a pink lining around the mint-green, slit-pupiled eyes; Harem pants of fur around the hind legs that turned his gait into a kind of rolling waddle—everything about Franz screamed, to Saskia at least, that he must enjoy fairy tales. But for some reason he just couldn't stand them. Saskia suspected it was only an act, to maintain his reputation as a sophisticated longhair, but she hadn't any proof yet.

"We had to tell the class about our families today," said Saskia. "What they do for a living, how much they make a year, which I think you'll agree with me is all very boring, so I decided to tell them a fairy tale instead, about the Princess.

"Once upon a time. . . ."

Chapter Three. Saskia's Fairy Tale

"Once upon a time," Saskia began in tones of mysteriousness, her high childish voice ascending even higher with excitement, "there was a princess, and all about her was brilliant and alight: her heart, and her mind, and her face, and her hair."

The Skeleton lifted his chin slightly, in an inquiring way.

"Of course not!" said Saskia, offended by his assumption that she was talking about herself. " _I'm_ only a girl. Sometimes I can be a little wolf, or an acrobat in a pirate costume, but most of the time I'm merely a girl. By the way, the Princess had a girl, a very niminy-piminy cat, and Jack."

Once more, the Skeleton's chin rose in a silent question.

"No, Jack's not a prince, just Jack," said Saskia, getting impatient. She was flattered the skeleton had come to be so engaged with her fairy tale already that he wanted to analyze the details, but she wouldn't be able to sustain any semblance of a magical atmosphere if she had to stop and clarify things all the time. "So, the four of them had such fun times together. They went to the circus almost every weekend. Sometimes they would buy a cake as big as—"

Saskia hesitated for an impressive simile. "—as a _dinosaur_!" she exclaimed, and the Skeleton's mouth hung open. He threw back his head as if there were conveniently a stray dinosaur in front of them to help him envisage the size of that cake.

"Yes, as big as a dinosaur, and for no special reason at that. They also played children's games and laughed a lot."

The Skeleton quivered a little, teeth clattering against one another, and Saskia giggled too.

"The girl lived in her _own_ tower," she continued importantly to make up for this lapse in earnestness, "at the foot of which there was a _majestic_ rosebush. Oh—but don't think it was all laughter and buttercream at the castle—of course, the Princess and Jack argued at times, as adults do. Jack complained that the Princess was always having now a Fever, now the Common Cold and there was no use planning anything with her. The Princess accused Jack of liking to control everything too much, and anyway, she hadn't signed up for this, being a stay-at-the-castle Princess, she wanted _things to happen_ , she wanted to learn how to play the violin for goodness' sake (at which point Jack turned to hair-tearing and groaning about how last week it had been the guitar). For your information, Jack's hair was as black as—"

The Skeleton's sharp shoulders had sloped, but Saskia didn't notice that. She'd just remembered she had to be more descriptive so her scant audience could feel truly involved in the story.

"—as something _really_ black," she said, for nothing sufficiently vivid had offered itself.

With her enviable eloquence and narrative skills, Saskia told much of the rest of the story to the Skeleton in under a minute. It was as follows:

When the Princess was down with the Common Cold, she would stay for long days in her chamber. At such times, the green of her eyes faded to blue, and somehow they couldn't fix on the girl, or Jack, or even Franz anymore but seemed to look right through their faces and the chamber walls, seeing something _really_ blue far away.

When the Princess had a Fever, however, every day at the castle clamored and blazed like a carnival, which was almost worth the bizarre things the Fever often made her do: set off for some wet place called Venice without a single suitcase or warning, or teach herself how to breathe fire. The Princess could master whatever she set her heart on in the snap of a finger, but new activities lost their appeal to her just as quickly, and she dropped what she was doing the moment a more exciting plaything caught her eye.

Her sudden trips to Venice and fire breathing couldn't go unnoticed by proper people. Every so often, they turned up at the castle, urging the Princess to eat magic metal beans that would cure her of these undesirable peculiarities and help her get well and proper. That scared the Princess; she said both the Fever and Common Cold were who she was, and without them, she might turn into a completely different princess.

Underneath all his hair-tearing and grumbling, Jack loved the Princess as she was, so he didn't insist that she eat metal beans. If the proper well-wishers dared breathe a word of _Extra Painful, Ultra Dangerous, and Occasionally Effective Lightning Treatment_ , he went red and angry in the face and prodded them out of the castle with a poker. The Princess then apologized to the girl, and Jack apologized to the Princess, and the girl didn't get what there was to apologize for but apologized to Franz just in case. After that, everyone could finally go to the circus again (except for Franz, who was a cat and therefore neither allowed in, nor interested).

At the mention of such a happy resolution, the Skeleton's hunched shoulders and bowed head sprang back up, and he rattled his jaws against each other in a bony equivalent of laughter.

Encouraged by that, Saskia let the Skeleton know, with a fresh quavering fascination in her voice, that the girl from the fairy tale _loved_ the circus! There were mad-looking magicians, mischievous monkeys, and merry musicians who sang funny verses about a fantastic land named Côte d'Au Revoir. But the little girl's awestruck fondness was reserved for the acrobat who sauntered along a tightrope high above the arena floor, whistling and pretending to tap-dance or drunk-reel as he did. As soon as the ringmistress in a mini top hat and a spangled red suit rode out onto the stage on her unicycle, heralding the acrobat's _up_ -coming appearance, everything else ceased to exist for the girl. A tiger could have started eating her leg, she would have overlooked that. With sparkling, enamored eyes, she marveled at the way the acrobat made his feats seem at once so effortless and so impossible; to her, this art embodied the most alluring things of all: freedom, lightness, disobedience, adrenaline, and—not least—a great chance to show off. Granted, the girl was going to become an acrobat and nothing else when she grew up.

Jack gave a high-pitched, nervous chuckle each time the girl declared that. Each time he did, the Princess told Jack to stop laughing and go and stretch a tightrope from the girl's tower to an old apple tree in the front garden, and place a trampoline below. Jack, whose disapproval of the tightrope-walking's perils had grown to be so strong he made quite a show of storming out of the circus before every single one of the acrobat's performances, thought that a terrible idea. He puffed and grunted, but eventually and as always, he gave in to the Princess's wish—except that afterward he vanished: went to work in the morning and never returned by dusk.

That evening the Princess came down with the frostiest Common Cold she'd ever had, came down right where she was standing, to the kitchen floor. There she drank from a bottle of potion brewed and supplied to her by their neighbor—a stump-toothed, bad-mannered witch—and there she cried, and there she fell asleep, at the bottom of the kitchen that was turning into a deep, deep well. The Princess kept crying even as she slept, and the floor came spinning downward, the well fuller and fuller of her tears. The last of the potion spilled out of the bottle in a shining red ribbon, which spiraled around the Princess's figure until it had dissolved in the water. . . .

Meanwhile, the little girl was so bored in her tower she'd almost yawned herself to a lockjaw. She had already read aloud a short story she knew word by word, scratched Franz behind the ear, and even done her Numbing Numbers homework. (The last one was something the girl resorted to only in the most extreme cases of nothing-to-do, and she had balanced the dull thing out by doing it while standing on her head. Quite apart from feeling funny, the trick caused the blood to rush to her brain, rendering it quicker, for a change, than her feet.)

The girl was halfway through another yawn and squashing her face against the dark windowpane to try and distinguish anything interesting in the still garden below, when the moon rolled out from behind its cloudy screen. Bluish-white with dark blue seas, the orb was so big it took up half the sky. The unfinished yawn turned around in her mouth and came out as an admiring "Aaah!" It wasn't the moon's magnificence that had the girl's attention—who cared about the moon itself, when it illuminated the rope Jack had stretched above the garden, making it twinkle like a string of blue fairy lights in the black air?

The girl flung open the window and climbed onto the sill. Everything smelled like roses and warbled like nocturnal insects—it was a most magical night. . . . All of a sudden, the girl understood it was ridiculously easy to walk a tightrope. She stepped bravely into the boundless night and was pleased to find that every muscle in her legs seemed to know what to do. So inspired she felt, she forgot herself; she forgot Jack, and the Princess, and even Franz, who was meowing his protests on the windowsill now far behind her. The girl rose on tiptoe, her arms over her head like a ballerina, and began humming a tune her favorite acrobat in the circus often whistled. If only Jack could see her dancing through the air now, he'd believe she could do it, he'd never laugh at her dream again!

But where was he? The girl's arms dropped to her sides, as she remembered Jack hadn't come home yet—he had never been so late before. She looked down, hoping to catch sight of him somewhere in the woods ahead. Instead, she noticed something else, something that made her calves turn numb and heavy. If a moment ago she'd felt lighter than a breeze, now she was as good as an unwieldy stone statue. Jack hadn't set up a trampoline yet!

The magic was sucked out of the night, as was the air and confidence out of the girl's chest. On stiff legs, she started to edge back toward the tower, but she was too scared now and couldn't stop casting glances at the dark yard so far beneath her tingling feet, couldn't stop imagining how horrible things would be if she lost her balance. The Princess and Jack would be _so_ angry she'd started practicing without supervision. They would take down the tightrope and ground her for this—oh, but would they even be able to ground whatever was left of her if she crashed?

She only had time to hold out her arms to the madly yowling cat and scream, "Franz!" The springy rosebush softened her fall, but the prickles scratched and cut her skin and wounded her eye. Everything happened so quickly—"Franz!", and a cloud of white petals shot up into the air. (Here, the Skeleton patted Saskia clumsily on the arm, and his ribcage gave another quiet _cheep_.)

When the little girl stumbled into the kitchen, threads of red beads trickling down her face, the Princess, who had gotten ten years older in one night, started to weep again. Then she got up from the floor, gave the girl a tight, reassuring hug, and brought a few medicine flasks and bandages from the bathroom. The most furious Fever she'd ever had followed, which the girl only welcomed, because the Fever always meant plenty of dancing, singing, laughing, trips to the circus, games, and cakes.

The Skeleton shivered. Saskia stopped mid-story, unsure of whether he was laughing again or upset.

"But are you tired, Skeleton?" she asked. "It's a _good_ fairy tale, I promise. I haven't yet gotten to the part where there are candles, and funny mice, and a cat who woke up human one day. I think that's the part they were angriest with, at school," she added pensively, swinging her legs. "That Franz became human and stopped chasing mice. Or was it the candles? Or that the Princess drank potion and learned how to play the violin? Proper people are strange. They said my story needed rewriting because all fairy tales must have a happy ending."

"I know!" agreed Saskia hotly, for the Skeleton's chest had let out an unmistakable _Jeepers!_ "That's what I told them too: 'Why, this fairy tale already does have a happy ending!' But they said it must be a _proper_ happy ending, you see."

Saskia felt a warm splash on her hand—another drop of blood had escaped her little nose. The Skeleton hastened to extract a handkerchief from his tailcoat breast pocket and hand it to the girl.

"Jack from the fairy tale had a tailcoat, too," Saskia said, distractedly, as she threw back her head and pressed the handkerchief to her nose. "This is so very nice of you, thank you!"

The bird in the Skeleton's chest chimed in again, and Saskia, who had come to be rather good at interpreting its remarks, could clearly hear " _Do you miss him?_ " hidden in the gentle interrogative chirp.

Saskia gave that some consideration, and then shrugged, carefree, and said, "No?"

And again the Skeleton's shoulders fell, but this time it didn't escape Saskia's notice.

"I must have worn you out with my babbling! Would you like to see our castle, maybe? I'll introduce you to the Princess, and to Franz, unless he's having a bad-hair day. It would be wonderful—it's been such a long time since we had a guest. And the Princess will like your flowers!" Saskia chattered away. "After Jack was gone, people would try to give her bouquets sometimes, but she says you should only bring her cut flowers if you mean to give her an opportunity to watch something beautiful wither, and potted flowers if you'd like to burden her with having to look after something. But she'll love _your_ flowers, because they're both live and taken care of!"

Saskia jumped off the trunk and helped the Skeleton down, since he moved with stiff difficulty. It looked as if he hadn't flexed his bones in a while.

"How long have you been sitting here?"

The Skeleton began ticking off on his fingers, folding the digits inward, but quickly lost count and waved his hand. They set off, and the woods grew animated behind their backs once more, but Saskia was no longer frightened. After a few minutes, the Skeleton stepped on a crunchy twig, and with a piercing cry, a great black bird soared into the sky from the shuddering crown of the nearest tree, making the Skeleton leap up and land with his bones rattling. Saskia took his hand and smiled.

"The Princess and I, we walk through these woods almost every day," she said. "If there _is_ something dangerous here, it had many chances to hurt us, but it didn't."

A wide gumless grin spread downward on the Skeleton's grayish face, but he was soon distracted by a passing green butterfly, which took interest in his eye flowers, so the Skeleton snapped at it for the rest of their walk to the castle. Once or twice, he managed to swallow it, but the butterfly found its way back outside easily through the gaps in his bones.

Chapter Four. The Castle

Once Saskia and the Skeleton had reached the edge of the woods and exited through another set of labeled gates in the spiked fence, a delightsome-looking castle of golden-brown rose into view, the scarlet conical roofs over its towers resembling strawberry frosting caps on biscuit cupcakes. On their arrival, the sun drew the creamy clouds apart and poked out its beaming face, making the tips of the spires blaze like the flames of birthday candles. Here and there, long plants were twining around the castle walls as though someone had piped green buttercream all over them in thin loopy patterns. And of course, the garden! The garden rounded up the deliciousness, flower patches and fruit-spangled tree crowns scattered around like shreds of hurriedly ripped, motley gift paper, with a luxuriant white rosebush for a wrapping bow.

Saskia watched the Skeleton's reaction, furtively, with bated breath, struggling not to burst out with enthusiastic comments about what was what and how everything worked. She felt funnily proud to be showing the castle to somebody, as if she herself were the mind solely responsible for all its splendidness. The Skeleton proved to be a pleasant guest, for he was eyeing the castle with his mouth agape, and even the flowers in his eye sockets had blossomed more brightly and exuberantly, he was so charmed.

When the double front door flew open, the Skeleton's flowers popped out of their sockets altogether. Flustered, he fumbled to stuff them back inside. The Princess herself had come out to greet them, and the castle rayed still more radiantly around her.

The Princess was a tall woman with large eyes, which were currently green and amused, a rippling cascade of chestnut hair, and the most porcelain skin possible—except, far from being cold and matte like the proper children's, her face was glowing with an evasive understanding smile, which filled Saskia's heart with a warm sense of safety at once. Meanwhile, the Skeleton's chest had broken into a spoony song.

The Princess's sweeping, fancily embroidered ball gown rustled against the grass as she lowered herself to meet Saskia, who ran up to her and flung her arms around the Princess's neck.

"My sweet girl," said the Princess, her tone half relieved, half still worried. "Why are you so early? _Why_ didn't you wait for me?" She drew back and examined Saskia shrewdly from head to toe. "Did something happen? Oh, dear, you were bleeding again. The kids pester you?"

A grin broke across the girl's face, and she shook her head; the Princess kissed the messy top of it and got up to withdraw into the castle, but Saskia dashed back to the middle of the garden path, seized the Skeleton's hand (he had hidden himself behind one of the bushes), and hauled him over to the Princess, who was frowning in confusion, halfway through the doorway.

"I brought a friend. I hope it's all right."

The Princess's mystified eyes dwelled on Saskia's hand that was firmly clutching the Skeleton's, and traveled up from there to the visitor's face.

"Oh, my!" she exclaimed, staring at the Skeleton with a horrified expression. "Pardon me, but your friend is terribly thin! Please, come on in, join us for dinner!"

The Princess stepped aside and waved a gracious arm, and Saskia hopped into the entrance hall, the Skeleton trailing behind her, his sharp shoulders pulled sheepishly up to where his ears should have been.

The castle was not a jot less wonderful on the inside. There were paintings everywhere on the walls, but they weren't arranged in a strict and precious way of a respectable, no-nonsense art gallery; here, opposing genres rubbed along, frames of all shapes and materials hung askew and overlapping, and nobody seemed to care that some of the pictures were probably the wrong way up. Numerous armchairs and sofas were heaped with all sorts of musical instruments, most of which lacked some of their keys and strings or were entirely dismantled. There were so many instruments that it looked as though an entire dysfunctional orchestra had vanished from under them just the moment before Saskia and the Skeleton had entered.

The Skeleton's head revolved around and around, and he almost knocked over a valuable-looking china vase as he gazed about the hall, now and then tripping over old-fashioned footrests and nearly bumping his skull on unlit floor lamps' shades. He managed to put on an apologetic expression, no small accomplishment for someone missing facial muscles, and tilted the vase back to its due position on the mantelpiece. Just in time to witness that, an extremely pale man of unidentifiable age between fifteen and fifty-one, wrapped in a woolly white bathrobe, trudged down the fine helical stairs.

"Franz!" Saskia cried out, lunging across the hall to hang from his neck and ruffle his ashen-blonde head. Franz gave a long, noisy nasal sigh. He hated public displays of affection, he hated private displays of affection, he hated to be nestled, squeezed, snuggled, and touched in general. Even more, he hated being human.

The morning after Jack's disappearance and Saskia's accident, cat Franz had had his portion of bad luck too—the largest of them all, or so Franz was secretly convinced. He had woken to find that a highly unpleasant fate had befallen him—in his sleep, he had been misshaped into a human being, an event that the Princess would later shrug off as being beyond anyone's control and therefore unworthy of fretting about, designating it "Franz's metamorphosis." Naturally, on that first morning, the Princess had been perhaps as annoyed as the cat himself to discover that a strange person was sprawled on her bedroom windowsill— _her cat's favorite windowsill_ , at that. She soon puzzled out, however, whom she was dealing with, from the stranger's sour mien and tragic complaints. It's not that the Princess was so gullible as to take his crazy word for it, but the man had for a passport a mop of wonderful white hair on his head (of which he left rich tufts wherever he went, and even somehow where he didn't). Together with the atrociously hairy legs, pink ears, and redness around his pale green, apathetic eyes, that left no doubt of the poor thing's identity. It hardly need be pointed out that as a human, Franz was considerably less charming than as a feline. His personality seemed to have drastically deteriorated, although the truth was, Franz's attitude had always had room for improvement, but what looks good on a cat might get a man kicked out of the house.

"We have a guest!" Saskia told him. Franz glanced the Skeleton's way, screwed up his face, and let out a snort that still bore a faint aftersound of the hissing he had once been known to welcome guests with.

"Please, Franz, be nice!" asked Saskia.

Reluctantly, Franz lifted a corner of his mouth in a painful imitation of a fanged smile.

Satisfied with that much, and heeding the Princess's second reminder coming from the adjoining room, Saskia scuttled off to wash her hands. The half-smile slid down and off Franz's face immediately after the girl was out of the hall, while his pupils hurried in the opposite direction as he rolled his eyes. Pretending rather pointedly that the Skeleton wasn't there, he leaned against the mantelpiece and preoccupied himself with prodding faience figurines and dishes with his finger, stopping just when they were on the verge of collapsing and maddening the Princess. In his turn, the Skeleton crossed his violin bow-like arms over his chest, suspicious flowers shifting in his eye sockets, following Franz's every sluggish movement.

A clatter of plates coupled with abstracted humming were issuing from the dining room, where the Princess bustled over the long table—a wave of an arm, and a rich-green spread descended onto the tabletop, flattening itself there neatly. Another wave, and on the spread appeared three blackened candelabra of dark blue tapers, which crackled and sparked to life, sprouting slender white flames, on a third wave of the Princess's arm. (Because you can't forgo candles once you've invited a skeleton to dinner.)

After four silver domed platters and as many crystal goblets took their places on the green spread, too, everyone gathered around the table at the Princess's call and seated themselves: the Skeleton next to Saskia, and the Princess and Franz across them. The Princess filled her goblet from a dusty red-glass bottle—she was quite fond of the witch's Carry-on potion these days. (It _had_ been troubling Saskia at first, but she had long since come to accept that, just like everybody else, the Princess was a person with her own weaknesses and whims, and it wouldn't be fair to ask her to be perfect when no one ever was. Saskia had figured that, if the Princess were anyone but herself, she wouldn't be as saddened by her love of the witch's potion, so the girl had learned to treat the Princess as leniently as if she were a stranger.)

Next, the Princess poured Franz some milk, and the girl and the Skeleton cherry juice from a large crystal jug. All lifted the domelike lids off their platters. Each dish contained half a pomegranate, a handful of olives, a few chili peppers, a small pool of honey, a bulb of garlic, blue-molded cheese, and three different-colored scoops of ice cream seasoned with basil.

The Skeleton stared at the unlikely assortment, while Saskia got to casually dipping her slice of cheese in the honey.

The Princess leaned over the table. "I'm sorry, I didn't know what you friend liked," she explained to Saskia in a whisper, "so I decided to serve the usual."

Franz shook his sulky head, creating a little snowfall as he did so by shedding clumps of white hair on everyone's platter, and began to slurp his milk. Every ten seconds, he paused to mop his chin and, while he was at it, forehead, with a napkin.

The Princess threw a concerned glance at the Skeleton's untouched plate, put aside her fork, and nibbled on her thumbnail before saying, "Well, why won't our guest _eat_ anything? Does he not like the food?"

Saskia regarded the Skeleton for a moment, taking in the gaping slits beneath his collarbones.

"I think he's afraid of ruining the carpet," she said, in a low voice and with a meaningful look at the Princess, hoping that she was sounding more tactful that way.

The Princess said, "Oh," and then, "Hmm," and she picked up her fork again.

At this, Franz thrust out an arm to the middle of the table to grab the salt cellar, but instead he upset it. (It is quite possible, however, that that had been his intention to begin with.) Franz's lunge made the Skeleton, who was sitting squarely opposite him, rock back on his chair and clap both hands over his chest.

"Oh no, don't worry!" the girl told him quietly so that no one else could hear. "Franz doesn't hunt birds anymore. Not even mice, look!"

Laughing, Saskia pointed toward the floor. A fat gray mouse had just toddled up from under the table, and showing no sign of shyness, scurried up the Skeleton's leg. Once it was sniffing around the dishes with the air of someone owning the place, the Skeleton looked up at Franz, bones aquiver, but the other just watched the mouse grimly while it was towing the largest piece of cheese off his own platter.

"Well, of course!" Franz grunted in response to the Skeleton's stunned chirrup. "Though we cats do use the terms interchangeably, I became human, not an idiot. I am well able to adapt to change, and albeit I find my new condition deeply unfortunate, I still have enough common sense to realize that chasing after every filthy mouse under the current circumstances would be inappropriate and reeking of cheap, classless comedy."

"What is it?" said the Princess, looking from Franz to Saskia.

"There is a bird in the Skeleton's chest," said Saskia with an encouraging glance at him.

"Oh, that's nice, sweetie," was the Princess's only reply, as she returned to stabbing her olives with a toothpick and sending them into her mouth.

"No one bites here," Saskia prompted, and the Skeleton succumbed and began to unbutton his tailcoat—even though Franz had gone out of his way to contradict the girl's statement by sinking his teeth into a chili pepper and making his eyes menacingly round. A second later, however, his eyes proceeded to morph into long vertical ovals, his eyelids grew pinker than usual, and he spit out the pepper and seemed to be trying to sputter out his tongue in its wake.

Luckily for Franz, neither the Princess nor Saskia had noticed his failed attempt to intimidate their guest. Saskia couldn't tear her gleaming eye off the Skeleton, who pinched seeds off his pomegranate, juggled them, and caught them with his mouth—inside his ribcage, the bird did just the same with its beak. While the girl enjoyed the show and cheered, and Franz was still trying to hack and wheeze the throat-tickling, tongue-burning taste of pepper out of his system, the Princess rose from the table and went to the back of the dining room.

There, against the wall, stood what looked like a decades-old sideboard with peeling golden tracery and a scuffed hutch dresser on top of it—that is, so it had looked until the Princess pulled open the two stained-glass doors. Rather than dishware and quaint souvenirs, the hutch displayed a jumble of wooden gears, metal strings, glass pendulums, piano keys, sewing and knitting needles, bronze horns riddled with lots of tiny holes, and long levers. The Princess sat on the short three-legged stool before it, slipped off her shoes, and planted her feet on the pedals sticking out from under the sideboard. She rolled her head around her shoulders and tugged at one of the strings, which set one of the wooden gears in motion, which tugged on some more strings, which set some more gears in motion. The Princess's fingers began to flounce across the black keys, soon leaving them for white ones on the shelf above, soon skipping to the right to pull some faceted glass spheres and tubes hanging by elastic threads.

"Ah, listen!"

Saskia shushed Franz, even though he was silent already, and tapped the Skeleton on the hand to attract his attention to the Princess, even though he had wheeled around at the first sounds of music. Saskia wanted to ask him how he could hear anything without any ears, but remembered she was too well brought up to do so, and then she forgot that, together with what she had meant to ask the Skeleton, for this was what the Princess's music did: It made people forget every thought they'd been having, except for the one about how unearthly and pure the music was. An enchanting sight it was, too—the Princess's bare feet dancing across the countless pedals, her hands gliding lovingly over the whimsical elements of the instrument, striking and plucking them swiftly and accurately, and her whole body swaying as she reached for yet another lever or pendulum.

Saskia rocked from side to side as well and went on to jump in her seat once the music whirled faster and more brightly, until her little fidgety legs carried her to the center of the room and, presently joined by the Skeleton, she spun there around and around, singing a song in a nonexistent language. The Skeleton's bird twittered a tune that was different from Saskia's but complemented it amiably.

When the Princess stopped playing, Franz woke up from his sweet slumber to discover that the mouse was snoozing among the cheese crumbs on his platter, with its bulging belly up. Its fur looked stiff and sticky, as though it had rolled in honey, and now and then, it let out a contented hiccup.

"I couldn't possibly fall lower," said Franz morosely.

The Princess closed the doors of the hutch dresser, turned to face the quiet room, and smiled. The Skeleton pointed at her, pressed his palms to his chest, against an imaginary heart, and shook his head so that his chin traced a figure eight in the air. As everyone went back to the table, Saskia told the Skeleton that the musical instrument was called the Polyfun and that the Princess had designed it herself, after she'd had enough of getting bored with individual instruments and decided the only logical solution was to have them all in one. The girl also added that the Princess had started learning how to play the Polyfun just a few months ago, to which the Skeleton reacted appropriately by dropping his lower jaw. Embarrassed, he slid under the table, picked up the jaw, dusted it off, and fitted it back where it belonged.

Helping herself to more potion, the Princess said, "Oh, it's nothing!"—either to soothe the Skeleton's awe or to stop Saskia exaggerating her talents. "There's a secret to my music, you know. When I play, I imagine that I'm the best musician alive and it's the most natural thing for me to do. I mean, if you want to amount to anything extraordinary, you'd better have something to keep you going, like sheer madness."

"Stay delusional," muttered Franz. Music had a positive but sadly short-lived effect on him.

"That is my motto, indeed—thank you, Franz," said the Princess, without a hint in her tone or expression to suggest that she might be joking. "I think, once you're down at your instrument, your best chance to extract true music from it is to delude yourself into believing you already _are_ everything you aspire to be. You're incapable of making mistakes, you're infallible! I say—" The Princess lifted her glass in a toast to nobody in particular. "I say, stay delusional as long as you're playing."

"Of course," she added, taking a sip of her Carry-on potion and inclining her head to one side, "it's rather important to forget the illusion of omnipotence the minute you're finished. For if you think you are the greatest all the time, how can you grow and learn what else there is to learn? But for the time being, while you're playing, let go of your reality—don't let it hold you back, not even for a second, don't hesitate, do not look down, or else you will—"

"—fall," said Saskia, casting her dimmed eye to the floor and nodding. If only she hadn't looked down the moonful night of Jack's disappearance. . . . How light her midair step had been until she'd seen she had no safety net to count on! It all had come to her at once: how painful her collapse would be, how inevitable; how young and inexperienced she was, and how she'd never once before had done a thing as difficult and scary.

"How can I ever become a real acrobat now that everyone can see my fall forever written on my face?" the girl blurted out, and she hid her scarred face in her hands.

The Skeleton made to stroke Saskia's lowered head, but the Princess got up, swept around the table, and squatted before the girl. "Come!" she said, drawing Saskia's hands off her face and clutching them tightly in hers. "It is true that you fell. It is real that it hurt. And the scars _will_ stay with you. But, my wonderful child, it's for you to decide whether you're going to keep wearing these scars like a shield to fend people off so they can't see your shame—like proof of your failure, a reminder of your slip. You can _choose_ what you'll let them see—the scars, or the one behind them."

"But the proper children—" began Saskia, sniffling.

The Princess pulled away and threw up her hands. "How many times do I need to ask you not to call them that? You're setting yourself against them!"

"But we're not like them, they will always sense that! This morning. . ." And Saskia told the Princess about the girl in a blue scarf, who she thought had wanted to speak to her but had changed her mind after taking a good look at Saskia's face.

"Oh, my poor little thing, you're unlike other kids, all right," said the Princess, with that special understanding smile of hers. "But surely you know it's not your scars that make it so? No, child, what makes you different is here, beneath the scars, beneath your skin—it's the way you see the world, the way you change it by just being here, being you."

Saskia gave an unconvinced laugh and looked away, wiping her eye on the sleeve of her pirate shirt.

"Okay, you know what I think?" said the Princess in a cheerful, confidential tone. "I think that girl you speak of is hiding something underneath that scarf. What if she's also different, but, just like you, she is afraid the others will condemn her? You know what else I think?" the Princess pressed on, when Saskia turned to her, frowning uncertainly at the idea. "I think they _all_ wanted to say something to you, something nice. I think they all have something to hide under their uniform, under their flawless skin—something different, something wonderful. And I am absolutely sure that if one of them, just one, stepped forward and supported you, the others wouldn't sneer. They'd be relieved somebody else did it before them, and they would know it's safe for them to step forward, too."

"But no one did," said Saskia, and although she was still frowning, it was clear from the look on her face that she wanted to believe the Princess very much.

"Oh, give them time," said the Princess, standing up and waving a hand. "Or be the first to stop hiding and speak to them."

That unexpected suggestion left Saskia wide-eyed and wondering for a while. Franz, meanwhile, was telling the Skeleton all about the hardships of human life—then again, it was _Franz_ , so he could just be recounting his misfortunes aloud to _himself_.

"Humans can't even jump onto a fridge," he was grumbling, "and I was six times as short as I'm now when I could do that. It's pathetic!"

The Skeleton's eye flowers had a droop and a slightly withered look to them.

"Stop it, Franz, you're depressing him!" said Saskia, discarding her own troubles and putting her energy into entertaining the Skeleton.

Franz watched her from under knitted white eyebrows while she tickled the fat mouse's stomach with her little finger until it snored itself awake. The girl hid her hands under the table, and the confused mouse fell asleep almost immediately only to be woken again in a moment.

"You try it, Skeleton, this mouse's so funny!" a giggling Saskia kept repeating.

Franz leaned closer to the Princess, who had resumed her seat beside him and was watching the girl too, only with a more indulgent expression. "Are you even planning on telling her at all that there is no skeleton?" he whispered so that Saskia couldn't hear him.

"Dear Franz," said the Princess in an undertone, so that Saskia couldn't hear her either, "you make a _very_ _proper_ human."

"Thank you," Franz replied stiffly, "but I was doing fine without your compliments. What's that to do with the child's having an imaginary friend and your playing along?"

" _Imaginary_! Look how happy she is!" The Princess refilled her goblet and sighed. "Maybe your problem is you don't have any—imagination, I mean. Maybe that's why you're so unhappy."

"I'd rather be unhappy that delusional." Franz's reproving stare followed the goblet as it rose to the Princess's lips. "Or completely crackpot, like some," he added still more quietly.

"Well, honestly, I'm surprised you believe in _yourself._ How did you manage to become human in the first place, with a mind so narrow?" Though the Princess's tone was scolding, her eyes twinkled cunningly, reflecting the candlelight.

A huff of indignation came out of Franz's flaring nostrils. "Is that _my_ fault now? I'd still be a cat if it weren't for you and the girl. I am what I am because _you_ believe it is so. _You_ read this personality into me. _Oh, Franz is moody, Franz is sulking, Franz enjoys classical music, isn't that adorable?_ Franz this, Franz that! I just wanted to eat, sleep, and look out of the window. Lifelong meditation. Observation. Enjoyment. That's what the whole thing's about. The human condition, if you ask me, and even if you don't ask me, is a deviation, an illness! Imagination is a horrible mutation. Creativity? Intoxication! Fever! You should _all_ be taking those metal pills!"

Leaping out of his chair (and almost out of his skin, too) with resentment, Franz pointed to the chained and padlocked medicine cabinet on the nearest wall, where, behind the glass, there were two shelves crammed full of labeled orange bottles.

"I love you, Franz," said the Princess with another sigh. "But you are so moody!"

Chapter Five. The Proper Invasion

"I can see already that the school were right to sound the alarm."

The grave, distant voice was coming from the outside, drifting in through a slightly open window in the next room. Saskia and Franz exchanged apprehensive looks. The Princess dropped her fork, and they all froze, listening.

"Goodness, this place looks _miserable_!" said a second voice.

"A dump if I ever saw one," agreed the other, sounding closer.

At such a scandalous description of her spectacular castle, the Princess nearly choked on an olive and an unuttered fuming retort. She hitched her shoulders back and her chin up, motioned for everyone else to stay put, and stalked off to the entrance hall. Just in time, too—there was an impatient rapping of two sets of knuckles on the front door. The lock clicked, and the unfamiliar voices grew louder as the visitors greeted the Princess, but she must have hushed them, because the talk became instantly muffled. Saskia couldn't understand what they were saying anymore, but the Princess sounded both unusually angry and unnerved and was frequently interrupted by the other two, who were speaking in clipped tones.

There was a thud, and a clank, and the beginning of a bad word quickly cut short. Franz jumped onto his chair. His abundant hair spiked up and his pupils were now as great and madly shining as if he could see what was happening through the wall and it were a horrific sight.

"What is it, Franz, what is it?" whispered Saskia urgently. She was much too afraid to move.

"What a— _mess_!" said a male voice finally, and it was the unmistakable tone of someone who had just stubbed their toe on a stray footrest.

Soon two strangers entered the dining room—a woman and a man, both with looks of deep dissatisfaction and concentration shadowing their faces. It was obvious at a glance that these were extremely proper people: Not only were they wearing the most proper of facial expressions, but their clothes were also gray and identical, with large letterings on the sleeves and a good deal of emblems on the fronts. Besides, they were each holding out a rectangular plastic card, also covered with letterings, holograms, and their own photographs to further establish their properness. They never put down their documents the whole time their eyes were sweeping the dining room, and Saskia thought their gazes looked so sharp they could detect every dust speck in every tiny crack.

Behind them, the Princess was pacing and wringing her hands. "But I don't— _please_ ," she mumbled, "Misunderstanding. . . Mistake. . ."

The woman said, "Miss, we must ask you not to interfere with our inspection," and the man said, "We have a signed and sealed permission to examine the _dwelling_ and assess its properness." And they both pulled more documents from their vast pockets and waved them in the Princess's bloodless face.

"We're here because of the fairy tale," the man said importantly.

"We're entitled to take measures if necessary," said the woman.

The Princess's complexion became more ashen than Franz's hair. "W-what m-measures? _What measures_?"

But instead of replying, the proper people rolled up their sleeves. The woman cleared her throat, as if she were preparing to sing or to shout—as far as Saskia was concerned, she seemed like the type who was more likely to do the latter. The man drew a pen and a notebook from another of his wide pockets. He remained standing by the door, while his companion moved around the dining room, narrowing and widening her eyes, shaking her head, and exclaiming things like, "Impermissible! Impossible! Unallowable! Forbidden!"

She pointed at the Princess's elegant candelabra with an accusing finger. "Candles? _Suspicious_!" The woman rushed to the wall and flipped a switch. Nothing happened. "Aha!"

"No electricity," the man said slowly, syllable by syllable, as he was writing that down. "Looks like _someone_ doesn't bother to pay their bills."

"A _mouse_?" squealed the woman, giving a leap on her way back to the table.

The mouse on Franz's platter squeaked, too, patted itself on the belly, and returned to sleep.

"Insanitary conditions," translated the man, scribbling in his notebook.

"And look at that!" The woman indicated the bottle of red potion and the Princess's half-empty goblet.

The man clucked his tongue. "Drinking in front of the child in the middle of the day."

Throwing disgusted glances at the mouse, his female associate tiptoed over to the table and took a closer look at the platters.

"This is no way to feed a kid!"

"Poor nutrition," dictated the man to himself.

"Is this one for the _cat_?" The woman reached for Franz's plate, and he slapped her hand, unable to resist old habits. She squealed again and jerked her hand away, shaking it in front of her face. "It _scratched_ me!"

The man's pen was at the ready. "Pets at the dinner table. Inadequate mealtime hygiene."

"And who's this one for?" the woman asked shrilly, careful not to jab her fingers anywhere near the table this time.

Though sounding timid, Saskia found the courage to speak up. "It's for my friend, the Skeleton, madam. He is sitting right here!"

In response to a dark, heavy look from his partner, the man made another note, saying, "Encouraging dangerous fantasies."

The woman rounded on the Princess. "Wasn't the child's _terrible_ accident the result of indulgence on your part?"

The Princess seemed to have trouble breathing and couldn't say anything at this point.

"That appears like a _lot_ of prescriptions," the woman observed, with a nod to the chained-up medicine cabinet. "Are you, by any chance, forgetting to take your metal meds?"

When the Princess failed to defend herself, the woman's eyes finally paused on Saskia and scanned her pirate costume, which, of course, had been quite dirty even before the girl had climbed fallen trees, because, as any idiot would know, there is no such thing as a clean pirate.

Saskia cowered, expecting to be reprimanded, but what happened next was much scarier: The proper woman teared up.

"Oh, poor child, don't you have water to wash your clothes or take a bath?"

"We do have water but—" Saskia began to explain.

"Then this is pure negligence!"

"I've seen enough," said the man. He snapped his notebook closed and shoved it back into his pocket along with the pen. "Don't you worry, kid," he said, smiling pleasantly at Saskia. "Your fairy tale will have its happy ending."

Saskia gulped.

"We'll make sure of it," agreed the woman, as both strangers advanced toward the girl, and their gray figures seemed to darken and expand the closer their outstretched arms were. A burning sensation was starting to throb at the bridge of Saskia's nose.

The Princess attempted to stop them, but they waved more stamped papers in her face and threatened to add a line or two about her resistance to the man's notebook.

Their arms lifted Saskia off her chair and carried her toward the exit. The Princess ran after them, begging and promising the girl everything was going to be all right, and even Franz was thrashing about the entrance hall and yowling, "No! No! No!" He went so far as to throw himself under the inspectors' feet, almost tripping them over.

The Skeleton followed them, too, and the bird in his chest was crying in distress. The proper people took Saskia outside; as they were walking away from the front door, she was writhing in their arms, facing the castle, and could see everyone else pour out into the garden. Terrified out of her mind, Saskia thought for a moment that the Princess was suddenly looking much older and that her beautiful dress had turned into a sloppy old dressing gown, and that her once-gorgeous hair was dull and uncombed. Saskia closed her eye, shook her head, and opened it again, hoping for the horrible vision to have gone away—and cried out, for Franz was no longer human but a white ball of fur meowing and winding around the Princess's ankles.

Her castle was crumbling, shedding its charm from roof to foot, to reveal a decrepit wooden house, all overgrown with weeds and hop tendrils. Untended, the trees in her garden blackened and shriveled up even as she watched; apples were rotting rapidly on the ground, and holes were blossoming in the leaves and petals of her dying roses where slugworms had eaten them. Wave after wave of panic came over Saskia, confusing her thoughts so much she wasn't even trying to free herself anymore. The Skeleton was still tailing along, but his bones were growing transparent and blurred—he would disappear like Jack, melt into the air in front of her eye! Saskia reached out and grasped the Skeleton's hand—and the castle assembled itself back to magnificence, from the flower-covered ground to the flaming spires. Frantic as she seemed, the Princess was still beautiful again, and Franz had got to his two feet, brushing himself off.

"Please, dear Skeleton," implored Saskia, clutching his newly opaque, solid hand more tightly, knowing that if she lost him, he would vanish forever along with her fairy tale. "Don't leave me."

Her home fell away behind the Skeleton's back. The hot stinging sensation at the bridge of Saskia's nose had reached its peak, and she was leaving a trail of blood drops glistening in her wake along the path. The proper people carried her in silence, deeper into the woods. Sometimes, the Skeleton stumbled—their hands slipped apart, and Saskia then fancied that the shadows flashing past were only squirrels, and the woods themselves were merely the safe, well-kept town park, which the plaque on the exit gates confirmed. (It read, "The Safe, Well-Kept Town Park.")

By the time they walked out onto the cobblestone bridge, the Skeleton seemed deader than skeletons usually do with exhaustion, losing touch with Saskia and falling behind more and more often. The girl's school, which they passed, looked abnormally normal—not in the least sinister and not a thing like a fortress. The sign at the entrance was now different, too: It said, insipidly, "Still Bays Elementary School."

"Oh, no, Skeleton, please don't let go," cried Saskia once more, and she seized his hands again and made sure never to release her grip as, along darkening, foreign landscapes, she was taken farther and farther—away from everything she cherished, toward a cavernous unknown.

Chapter Six. The Prison

The dusk was already thickening unevenly into swarms of shadows when the kidnappers had brought Saskia to the foot of a building that reminded the girl awfully of Bastilly's. This fortress didn't resemble an icebreaker's bow—rather, a colossal crown carved crudely out of stone and encrusted, in place of gems, with rhombic orange-lit windows. But like her school, the building was dark-walled and ominous-looking, and like the school, it made Saskia think of screeching bats fluttering overhead, their sharp wings grazing her hair, and of hook-shaped, warty noses silhouetted against a monster-size yellow moon, even though she could see none of those horrors around.

Saskia was still dangling helplessly in the air between the two strangers, who were holding her under the arms; both her hands were still clamped around the smooth and cool, somewhat ceramic to the touch, wrists of the Skeleton. Amidst the deepening murk, his bones looked so white he seemed almost phosphorescently luminous.

The proper people hadn't harmed her (if Saskia didn't count the time they'd taken her away from home), but she could sense something dangerous about them, as if their uniform and papers enabling them to steal little girls from their castles were only the beginning of their evil powers. Saskia had the feeling they could, and were intending to, deprive her of so much more, of some fragile magic that, even this far away from her Princess, was still with her, protecting her, feeding her courage and strength.

In addition to a five-foot-high concrete fence, the building was surrounded with a moat, where muddy, moss-colored water was frothing, hissing, and bubbling. Saskia shuddered to imagine what could happen to someone who fell there—they would probably be boiled in a second.

There seemed to be no way to escape from this place; even the patch of sky above the front yard was striped all over with electric wires and clotheslines, like a barred window in the ceiling of a jail cell. The abductors carried Saskia across the drawbridge over the ditch, and the bridge began to rise creakingly behind them, nearly crushing the Skeleton's foot.

He leaped away from the folding crack between the drawbridge and the land, and proceeded to jump up and down on his good foot, rubbing the other with his hands. Saskia lunged to reach him, but at that moment, the proper people's insistent arms pulled the girl back and finally put her down, in front of a metal door that bore a faded sign reading,

Children's Home

Somewhere Around Still Bays

Beneath that, there was a little rhyme, and Saskia's eye became wetter and bluer with each line she read.

"Oh, no."

Saskia tried to wriggle around and get to the Skeleton again, which was complicated by the fact that the proper people had cupped both her shoulders in their heavy hands, while their free fists were banging on the door. Luckily, the Skeleton noticed the girl's struggling at last, hurried over, and squeezed her hand.

Slightly relieved, Saskia shut her eye and opened it in a moment, expecting the sign on the door to be different now that the Skeleton was by her side—and it was. Saskia shrank back. The new sign said,

" _The Prison for Children Who Did Something Wrong."_

And it added,

" _Where No One Will Ever Find You."_

And then:

" _With Dungeons, Rats, and Ghosts!"_

But worst of all was the rhyme below, which hadn't changed at all, and which went like this:

We'll keep you safe. Your head's askew?

Say "bye" to the bizarre!

We only want best things for you—

We'll tell you what they are.

"A little wolf," whispered Saskia to stop herself from crying.

The door swung inward. Saskia could make out only the looming, boulder-like shape of the one who had let them in. The narrow corridor that had unfurled itself far into the depths of the house was windowless, and the roof of it seemed to be at least ten times Saskia's height away, so what few dim light bulbs hung from the ceiling didn't do much good.

Here, Saskia's guards parted: the man with the notebook stayed to talk to the boulder-like figure, and the woman led the girl farther down the corridor, through one of the many doors on the right and down another corridor, then through another of the many doors on the left, then up a flight of stairs—another corridor, another door, another flight of stairs. . . . Saskia tried to memorize the route, but, of course, it was pointless. The corridors and doors and stairs were all too unmemorable, nondescript, impossible to tell apart from their countless copies. Except for Saskia's and her escort's footfalls, the building was suffused with a soft, enveloping silence—the kind of silence that makes one feel as if they were floating in a vacuum, isolated from any living thing.

Eventually, the woman steered Saskia to yet another door that had no sign or number to distinguish it from the one to its right or the one to its left but did have a bolt and a tiny peep-slot at an adult's eye level. The woman pushed the door open and urged Saskia to go inside, prodding her in the back. Hardly had the Skeleton slipped in after the girl when she heard the lock slide closed and the woman's footsteps grow distant and die away.

The room wasn't big, but with only a child's bed and a nightstand in a corner to occupy it, it felt like a lot of empty, chilly, sterile space. A single diamond-shaped window overlooking the yard was too high for the girl to reach. Saskia glanced up at the Skeleton for some comfort, and he placed an awkward hand on her shoulder, attempting a grin, but since the only way the Skeleton could smile is by drawing his lower jaw down, the grin turned out to imitate a soundless scream.

Soon, the woman returned, carrying a stack of folded clothes and a glass of water. She put the glass on the nightstand and waited outside the door until Saskia had changed. Then she collected the girl's pirate costume, gesturing to Saskia that she could keep the eyepatch.

"It's just for tonight. It's late now—we'll place you with the others tomorrow. I'll leave the lights in the corridor on." With that, she was gone.

The girl heard the door bolt slide closed once more and, shortly after, a muffled click of a switch. The room went dark but for the thin slants of light seeping in through the peep-slot and the window.

Saskia sat on the bed, which sagged and complained in a tinny voice. The Skeleton sat alongside her, and the middle of the bed curved down nearly to the floor, emitting what sounded like a sad but resigned sigh.

"These pajamas are like a ghost's dress," said Saskia, examining her overlong, bleach-white sleeves with frayed cuffs in the sheet of moonlight. The Skeleton, too, stretched his arms in front of him and considered his pale bones, clenching and unclenching his fingers so his knuckles sprang now in, now out of the light. Suddenly, his index finger snapped upright, as if he'd arrived at an idea. The Skeleton pulled off his tailcoat and wrapped it around Saskia's shoulders, his skull splitting into another vertical grin. A black, pea-like eye peeked through a gap in his ribs. The bird's red feathers bristled as it stared unblinkingly at the window. Saskia returned the Skeleton a feeble smile of gratitude and looked up at the window, too. There, great black birds with crooked beaks strutted back and forth along the electric lines, their slick plumage reflecting the moonlight.

What with her longing thoughts about the Princess and Franz, who must be beside themselves with worry, and this being the first night she'd ever had to spend away from home, Saskia braced herself for the restless hours to come. Without crawling under the covers, she lowered her head to the flat, lumpy pillow. The Skeleton's bird began to whistle a soothing lullaby, which rose and fell like the waves of a calm sea, and Saskia's mind sank into a weary dreamlessness.

It took her mind much longer than usual to grope its way out of this heavy slumber and resurface, and when Saskia finally managed to get her eye to stay open, she discovered that she and the Skeleton were dragging themselves again along the endless many-doored corridor, flanked by two proper people. Saskia recalled, blurredly, how the Skeleton had snatched the tailcoat off her the moment before the door to their room had opened, and how someone had tried to make her drink and eat and wash her face, and how she'd been forever yawning and falling asleep on her feet.

Slowly, it all came back to Saskia. She'd been torn out of her home. She was in a foreign, hostile place fortified with moats and high walls. Where were they being taken now? What was going to happen to her? Saskia clung to the Skeleton's flimsy arm.

It soon became apparent that what they were being taken to was another door, which was different from the rest of them in that there was a sign on it.

Main Villain's Lair

O.L. Horridan

Saskia heard a chattering of teeth and gave the Skeleton's hand a squeeze. It was her turn to reassure him.

"It doesn't look _too_ bad," she whispered.

One of their guards knocked.

"Just a moment!"

" _Must be hiding away the evidence of some unthinkable crime or assuming a human form_ ," thought Saskia, but she decided not to share her guess with anyone, for the sound of rattling bones on her right was loud enough as it was.

"Come in!"

Four hasty hands shoved Saskia inside, the Skeleton at her heels. The uniformed people explained something briefly to the woman at the desk, but Saskia barely heard them because she was focused on eye-searching the interior of the room for anything suspicious. It was a cramped office with a plenitude of potted plants and stuffed toys on the desk and the windowsill. Identical, floor-to-ceiling file cabinets dominating the walls were bursting with signed and stamped papers. Saskia had never seen a villain's lair quite as underwhelming.

"Hello, Saskia," said the woman behind the desk, shifting papers in front of her, when the other two adults had left. "Have a seat."

Face a nauseous green, hair colorless and dry-looking, cheeks so flabby they seemed to be dribbling down like a dough mask—she looked as though she hadn't slept all night, which was sketchy. From what Saskia had gathered, this was—

"You're a wicked hag!" the girl voiced her conclusion.

The woman arched an eyebrow. "Now, now! I'd rather you addressed me as 'Madam Horridan.' Sit, please." She nodded to a wooden chair across the desk from her and consulted her papers.

The Skeleton wasn't offered a seat, so Saskia didn't oblige, either. Instead, she imagined that she was someone much bolder and blurted out, " _Iwannagohome_!"

Madam Horridan seemed not taken aback or annoyed by that in the slightest, as if she was accustomed to children being disobedient and wanting to go home. She simply nodded, her lips compressed together so hard they sort of disappeared into her mouth.

"Make no mistake: We want that for you, too. However, even more, we want you to be _safe_. Things at your house—" Madam Horridan ran a finger down the topmost paper on her desk, shaking her head. "Things at your house have to change."

The only time Saskia had seen things change at her house was when she had been flying backward away from it on the proper people's arms. She had been so scared then that she'd almost believed them. She'd almost let them convince her that her castle was an eyesore, her Princess was crazy, her friends weren't real—that she had nothing at all.

"But I _love_ the way things are at my house!" Saskia said hotly. _"I want to go home!"_

Madam Horridan's expression remained unperturbed, which was starting to irk the girl, but the look on the woman's face was not even remotely as infuriating as her tone when she spoke again: She talked down to Saskia, sympathetically, as the teachers at Bastilly's did, as though Saskia were terminally stupid.

"Saskia, your mother—let's say, she needs some rest. She can't take proper care of you now."

Upon hearing the word "proper," Saskia opened her mouth to protest. Madam Horridan motioned for her not to interrupt, which Saskia was determined to ignore until—

"We _will_ send you back home," Madam Horridan said, raising her voice a little.

Saskia had not expected the wicked hag to concede so easily, so she closed her mouth. She didn't understand. What was the point of kidnapping children and then just sending them back home? Proper people were so confusing. The Skeleton, too, scraped his skull.

"As soon as your mother gets well," added Madam Horridan.

"But—"

"Until then, I'm afraid, you will have to stay here. It will be a nightmare, of course: We'll give you a warm bed, good food to make your stronger, clean clothes—I hear you're not much used to those."

Because Saskia _wasn't_ terminally stupid, she understood what the wicked hag was implying—that the Princess's treatment of her had been lax.

"We were _happy_ that way," said Saskia quietly. "We were happy before you came. The Princess took the _greatest_ care of me."

"Oh, your mom loves you, all right," agreed Madam Horridan, puzzling Saskia once more. "I'm sure she'll do whatever it takes to have you back. _Although_ —"

Saskia's heart sank. The wicked hag wasn't going to let her go home. She'd only said that to appease her.

"—there's something _you_ could do to help the process."

Saskia's heart soared back up, shoving around inside her chest as it settled itself in its usual station. "Anything!"

Madam Horridan smiled. "See? We _can_ cooperate. The thing is, Saskia, I am worried. I am worried that, with your being around your mother in her condition, you could pick up some dangerous ideas. I was informed you'd brought along a friend. Is that so?"

Saskia didn't like where this was going at all, but she decided to be patient with Madam Horridan so that she would let her leave the Prison.

"I did, Madam. He's right in front of you."

"Saskia," called Madam Horridan, and there was a mild reproach in her smile now. "At _this_ house, we will not tolerate any behavior that might. . . _corrupt_ other children. It is very important that you be earnest with me. No tricks, no lies, no fooling around. Now tell me, do you really think there is someone else in this room, other than me and you, or are you just being naughty?"

Saskia glanced at the Skeleton. His free arm was pressed over his chest, protecting his bird, and he refused to look Madam Horridan's way.

"Maybe he doesn't want you to see him," said Saskia, trying not to sound rude. "Maybe he only shows himself to the people he likes. The Princess could see him," she added hastily, so that Madam Horridan would understand she wasn't making him up. "So could Franz!"

"Franz," repeated Madam Horridan, checking her papers again. "Franz, I believe, is your cat?"

"Yes, only he's not a cat anymore, Madam, he—"

"I see," said Madam Horridan, and she stopped smiling. "A very treacherous thing it is, Saskia, to take refuge in your fantasies. Look what it did to you. Imaginary friends won't help you out if you're in trouble. I have an idea—why don't you try and make some friends _here_? Some _proper_ friends."

The Skeleton's bird gave a stifled chirrup, and Saskia knew at that moment that the Prison _was_ going to be a nightmare.

Chapter Seven. Charlie

The playroom where Madam Horridan took Saskia was buzzing with voices, but there wasn't nearly as much noise as one would expect from about two dozen kids locked up in the same room. As Madam Horridan had explained to Saskia on their way here, toddlers were kept separately in the nursery, as were teenagers, who had to spend more time in the study room than Saskia's peers. That Saskia found slightly heartening; she'd never seen a toddler up close and was afraid of accidentally breaking one. As for teenagers—well, suffice it to say that if Saskia saw one sitting on the fallen tree in her woods, she wouldn't think twice about veering off the trail into monsters' grabby paws.

All the children were dressed in ghost's clothes, the same shapeless, unadorned pajamas as Saskia's. They didn't seem to her like proper children at all—not like the ones that went to Bastilly's, anyway. Most of them played alone, humming to themselves, keeping as far away from one another as the playroom allowed. When Saskia had walked in, hardly anyone had looked up from their toys or books.

"Good morning, children!" said Madam Horridan. Few voices replied, and those without enthusiasm. "This is Saskia. She'll be staying with us for a while. Like all of you, she misses home and could use a friend. Be nice to her, please, even though she. . . may not look like the rest of you."

Only now that Madam Horridan had brought this up, Saskia remembered she had scars and an eyepatch. With everything going on, she had completely forgotten to worry about them. And only now, she became aware that, as withdrawn and plainly dressed as these children were, their faces were perfectly scar-free.

Madam Horridan whispered something about arrangements to a woman in the gray uniform, who was sitting by the door and watching over the children. Both women left the playroom, and the door clicked closed behind them.

The moment the grown-ups were out of sight, the playroom livened up, buzzing louder, closing in, crawling toward Saskia from every side. She and the Skeleton began to back away, holding hands and shivering. Wherever Saskia glanced, eyes were leering at her, but unlike those at Bastilly's, these eyes weren't hiding, weren't turning away. Saskia looked around at the closed door, wishing, to her bewilderment, that the wicked hag hadn't left.

But she and the Skeleton were on their own now. Saskia held her breath, counted to three, imagined herself a little wolf once more, and faced the playroom, meeting the unpleasant stares with a threatening glare of her own.

_Freak_!

A drop of blood splashed onto Saskia's sock. She lowered her eye. And then, another sock, with a hole in the toe, came shuffling into view.

"Here," said a clear voice.

Saskia's gaze flew up. Standing before her, holding out a handkerchief, was a boy a couple of years younger than she, and his must be the most porcelain skin in the world—more porcelain than Elizabeth's, or even the Princess's.

"Well, go on," said the boy. "You have blood on your face. We don't want monsters to smell it."

Saskia gaped at him. Not only did the boy have such wonderful skin, but his rye-colored hair, while ear-length like Saskia's, was cut and combed more neatly than hers had ever been.

Apparently tired of brandishing the handkerchief at Saskia to no effect, the boy thrust it into her hand. With his other hand, he was hugging a battered stuffed dog to his chest.

"You don't—you don't think I'm a freak?" said Saskia, wiping the blood from under her nose.

The boy frowned. "Nobody thinks you're a freak."

"They do." Saskia lowered her voice. " _I can hear them whispering. I can feel them staring._ "

"Nobody's whispering," said the boy, looking around at the other kids. "You probably expect them to whisper, and that's why you think they are. As for staring—well, have you seen your face?"

Nobody had ever pointed out her scars to her this openly before, and Saskia, who had just begun to cheer up, felt as though the boy had spat at her in front of everyone.

But he didn't seem to notice Saskia's humiliated expression and continued, in a matter-of-fact tone, "You have this angry look about you, like you're a wolf or something. You're scaring them—of course they will stare. They sense that you dislike them, so they want to dislike you first."

There was something familiar in the way he had said it, and Saskia couldn't help smiling. "You speak just like the Princess."

The boy jerked his head and dropped his eyes to the floor, as though she had caught him pretending. "It's what my mom used to tell me when I scowled at my classmates," he admitted.

"Oh, did they take you away from your princess, too?"

"No, she—"

Something clattered in a corner, and the boy broke off.

"The weirdo got himself a weirdo friend," muttered a girl from that corner. She was twice as tall as Saskia and four times the width of the Skeleton, which in itself wasn't too big a deal but together with her shaven head made the word "skedaddle" swim across Saskia's mind as if printed on the banner towed along by a rattling red airplane. The girl was glowering at the wooden blocks scattered around her, which must have been the source of the clattering noise, and which apparently had been a carefully constructed castle just a few moments ago.

At about the same time that the shaven-headed girl's castle had tumbled down, there had also been the sound of a pencil tip snapping off, coming from the opposite corner. There, a boy who might be her identical twin, save for the slightly longer stubble covering the top of his head, was peering at the torn page in his coloring book. With an unsettling simultaneousness, they squinted up at Saskia and the boy beside her, as though both the castle and pencil accidents had been their fault.

Everyone else seemed to have completely lost interest in their solitary games, too. Throats were cleared, conspiring looks exchanged, and somehow, the kids appeared to have huddled tighter together while Saskia had been looking the other way.

"Do we really have to beat somebody up again?" drawled a sturdy boy, who alone looked as if he wasn't eager to abandon his toy train, but he got up and waddled over to the others just the same.

"Hey, new girl!" shouted the girl with shaved-off hair from the ruins of her wooden castle. "Have you seen his leg?"

The rest of the children joined in. "Yes, have you seen his leg, new girl?"

"Show her your leg, Charlie, go on!"

The Skeleton dodged behind Saskia and the boy who was clutching his stuffed dog, because pencils and plastic building blocks came pelting at the three of them.

"All right, all right!" Charlie raised an open hand in a "stop" gesture, and when the fire subsided, he sighed and rolled up the right leg of his pajamas.

Saskia, who had just started to feel intrigued, was disappointed. She'd expected to behold something exciting, or at least horrible, but this was a perfectly ordinary, boring leg. She wondered why the kids had wanted her to see it. Proper children were so strange—she would never get their ways.

"Uh, that's a nice leg," she said cautiously, trying to be polite. No one would like to hear that their legs were boring.

"It's _wooden_! Are you blind?" yelled an indignant voice out of the throng.

"Of course she's blind, are _you_ blind?" yelled another voice, sounding even more offended by the first yeller's stupidity.

"Shut up!"

While the proper kids were busy elbowing and shushing one another and calling one another idiots, Saskia leaned closer to examine Charlie's leg.

"Oh, it _is_ wooden," she said, mildly surprised that she had missed that on the first take. "If they hadn't told me, I never would've noticed."

"Neither would I," sighed Charlie, pulling the leg of his trousers down. "Uh-oh, we should run."

Charlie ducked; the toy train went choe-choeing over his head, narrowly missed the Skeleton crouched behind him, and smashed into the wall.

"They never remember to lock it," Charlie shouted to Saskia, reaching for the handle and poking his head around the door. "There's nobody there, let's go!"

Something whirring caught Saskia on the back. With a moment's hesitation, she and the Skeleton looked at each other, shrugged, and dashed after Charlie, bombarded with clockwork cars and ragdolls.

Whooping, the rest of the children followed them into the corridor. Running on the smooth wooden floorboards with only socks on her feet was tricky; Saskia found herself now pattering, now skidding, struggling not to slip or lose sight of Charlie, who was zigzagging ahead like a hare. She could barely keep up with him. Even if she hadn't had a skeleton to drag along and slow her down, she would have probably still been lagging compared to Charlie—which was incredible, because Saskia had always thought herself to be pretty quick.

Charlie certainly seemed to be no stranger to running away from the other kids, and they certainly seemed no strangers to chasing after him. It was a mystery to Saskia how Charlie chose which faceless door to go through next, but he clearly knew where each of them led to, for he never faltered or darted the wrong way, and the spaces behind those doors turned out to be corridors, and not, say, bathrooms or offices, without fail.

Gradually, most of the proper children fell behind; some were scooped up by people in the gray uniform, who kept jumping out of the rooms at all the noise. Finally, the shaven-headed girl, the last of their chasers, stumbled to a halt, bending double and shaking her fist at their backs. Charlie turned a corner, wrenched open another door, and beckoned Saskia inside. He closed the door quietly behind them.

"This is my bedroom," he said, panting. "It'll be a while before Madam Horridan thinks to look for me here."

Charlie sat on one of the five beds and put his stuffed dog on the nearest of the five nightstands. Saskia flopped down on another bed, clutching a stitch in her side and wiping the sweat off her forehead. The Skeleton simply slid down the wall, his eye-flowers crossed.

"How— _how_ come you can run so fast?" Saskia said, still breathing heavily.

Charlie shrugged with one shoulder. "I keep forgetting I have a wooden leg."

Saskia pondered that, while her insides cooled off. She didn't see how she could apply the secret of Charlie's speed to her own running ability, so she sounded a little aggrieved when she spoke again. "I thought you said they were just scared, but the kids here are really mean."

"I know," sighed Charlie. He sighed a lot, Saskia noticed—perhaps even more than Franz, who was hard to compete with when it came to the amount of sighing. "I said that because I thought that's what would have made Mom proud of me. _She_ would say they _are_ scared, and they attack anyone whose shortcomings are easier to spot, so no one would suspect their own."

Saskia smiled again. "The Princess would say so, too." Then she remembered how Charlie had almost been run over by a flying train, and stopped smiling. "To be fair, _I_ think they're just jerks."

The Skeleton's bird whistled like a sports referee, and the Skeleton himself clapped his hands to the earless sides of his skull. Saskia blushed.

"Oh, _sorry_! Franz taught me that word."

But Charlie didn't seem to mind. " _Cowardly_ jerks," he added. The bird gave a whistle again, a longer and angrier one this time.

"Oh, the Princess would never say something like this," said Saskia, feeling both giggly and guilty. "She'd say _proper children are not evil_ "—Saskia imitated the Princess's patient tone—" _it's just that their proper parents haven't taught them to be curious about, and not frightened of, that which is different_ , _and the proper parents aren't to blame, either, it's just that_ their _parents_ —Only she'd drop the word 'proper.' She only uses it when she thinks I can't hear."

"Well, she must be older and wiser," said Charlie, "but we are children. We don't have to understand that just yet."

"You never told me what had happened to _your_ princess?" Saskia reminded him.

Charlie sighed.

"She's gone to some foreign land called Côte d'Au Revoir, or so I've been told. _Where everyone can enter_ —"

"— _but not many can come back_ ," said Saskia. It was part of a verse she'd heard the circus musicians sing. "The Princess says that's where our Jack went, too."

After that, neither of them said another word for a few minutes.

Then Saskia remembered something. "Oh, my manners! I forgot to introduce you to my friend!" She nodded at the Skeleton and, feeling a little nervous, asked Charlie, "You _can_ see him, can't you?"

Charlie looked in the direction she had indicated, visibly straining his eyes. "Could you tell me what your friend looks like, just so I'm sure I'm seeing correctly?"

Saskia had to strain her eye too in order not to miss any niceties as she described the Skeleton's appearance to Charlie: his blue eye-flowers, violin bows for arms, red bird for a heart, green grassy veins, purple tailcoat, and legs like a grasshopper only bending the right way.

"Now I _can_ see him!" said Charlie, to Saskia's great relief. "Hang on."

Charlie took a notebook and a pack of colored pencils from his nightstand and, a few minutes later, showed Saskia a portrait of the Skeleton that looked exactly like the real Skeleton, only smaller. Charlie jumped off his bed, went over to the Skeleton, and showed him the portrait, too. The Skeleton's eye flowers started out the better to see, then rolled over in their sockets, and Saskia could tell he was swooning over the result.

Charlie returned to his bed and picked up the old stuffed dog from his nightstand.

"And I only have this," he sighed. "Archie gave it to me. Must have found him in some junkyard."

Charlie spoke in an offhand tone, but Saskia didn't doubt for a moment that he had a lot of affection for this toy. Charlie petted the dog on the head the way Saskia had petted Franz when he had been a cat.

"Wonder where he is now, Archie," Charlie said distractedly.

"You miss him?" said Saskia.

Charlie gave one short nod and hugged the dog closer.

"I had Jack," said Saskia. "He's gone, too. Only I don't miss him all that much."

Chapter Eight. A Visitor

Days in the Prison for Children Who Did Something Wrong were as unremarkable, endless, and unvaried as its corridors. Nights were empty of dreams and seemed to last no longer than a tired blink of Saskia's eye. Each new "today" blended so seamlessly into another "tomorrow" that soon Saskia wasn't able to tell where one day expired and the next one began. It wasn't long (or maybe it was—Saskia couldn't be certain anymore) before she started to feel as though her castle were nothing more than a distant nice fantasy that had never truly happened, and that she had always been here, living the same routine over and over, without a break.

For her second and all the following nights in the Prison, Saskia had been moved to a different bedroom, which she shared with four other girls. Since the Gray Fiends (so Saskia had decided to call the gray-uniformed grown-ups) hadn't managed to find Saskia a vacant bed in a dormitory with her peers, she had been given a place in a teenagers'. Despite the sense of foreboding that had swept over Saskia upon her receiving the news, her roommates had taken little interest in Saskia's arrival and didn't bully her; they only warned her not to come near their nightstands.

Indeed, it was hard to believe that her life had ever been anything else. Already a thousand times she must have been shaken half-awake by the Gray Fiends' hurried hands. A thousand times she, still half asleep, had taken a quick, scant trickle of a shower, and a thousand times she had been to the spoon-clanging canteen for breakfast (sticky porridge and a glass of warm milk—Saskia hated both substances dearly). From the canteen she had gone, what felt like a thousand times, to the study room, where for hours she languished over her Numbing Numbers (Saskia wasn't allowed to stand on her head while she did them, or, for that matter, at all). Then, back to the canteen for a thousand lunchtimes (soup and a viscous fruit drink, either of which Saskia loathed only a little bit less than the breakfast).

After lunch, the schedule drove Saskia outside for an hour, during which time, under the close watch of a Fiend or two, the kids wandered around the front yard. Saskia made the most of those opportunities to furtively investigate the surroundings, but there wasn't a gap or a crack in the fence, and the moat was as seething and the drawbridge as hefty as ever. One day, she noticed something that made her situation seem still more hopeless: The Prison's exterior walls had _eyes_. Numerous, black, protruding, they turned back and forth as they spied on the children, zooming in on anyone who dared stray too close to the locked gate.

Once they returned to the fortress, Saskia's age group had free time, which didn't feel all that free, since they weren't allowed to while it away anywhere but in the playroom. During these hours, some of the kids were one by one summoned to Madam Horridan's lair.

If Saskia wasn't summoned, she and Charlie sat in a far corner, chatting in hushed tones, until the Fiends supervising them had to leave the playroom—they had to leave the playroom a lot and, in their haste, often forgot to lock the door. (Saskia had overhead from snatches of their frustrated conversations that there weren't enough Fiends in the Prison, and those who dealt with toddlers and teenagers could always use an extra dozen pairs of hands.) As soon as the Fiends were out of sight, the proper kids turned on Charlie and Saskia, so the two of them were forced to run for it and hide (the proper children never attacked the Skeleton, but he kept Saskia and Charlie company just the same).

Sometimes they found shelter in the laundry room, which the washing machines filled with helicopter-like droning and chopping noises. Other times, they took cover in the milk-smelling kitchen, or in one of the deserted bedrooms. Until the Fiends located them, Saskia and Charlie could finally have some fun. Saskia borrowed crayons from Charlie and painted the Skeleton's face white, copying her favorite acrobat's stage makeup. Then they played charades—the Skeleton was a natural for miming.

On the days when their hideout was so lucky they still had some time left after charades, the Skeleton fluttered his eye-flowers, wheedling a fairy tale out of Saskia. Happy to oblige, she acted out little stories, which Charlie then turned into comic strips: about the Princess, the Skeleton, Saskia, Jack, and Franz. Once or twice, Saskia asked Charlie to draw something about his own princess and Archie, too, but he shook his head and became sad, so she didn't insist.

Perhaps because Saskia was new, or maybe because she was suspected of greater misdoings, the wicked hag called for her more often than any of the other kids—every couple of days. Usually, the conversation began with Madam Horridan rebuking Saskia for running away from the playroom.

"You need to stop acting as though we're your enemies, Saskia," the wicked hag kept saying. "The staff have got enough on their plates without having to turn the house upside down in order to find you!"

Saskia tried to explain to Madam Horridan that she and Charlie hid only because they didn't fancy receiving a beating from the proper kids.

"You're making things up again," replied Madam Horridan. "I saw you all play very peacefully. If truth be told, I'm so proud of you children—such unfortunate backgrounds, but your hearts haven't hardened."

Madam Horridan had made it clear during their previous meetings that Saskia's return to the castle depended greatly on her behaving properly, which meant never inventing any stories. Saskia didn't want the wicked hag to think she was lying, so she refrained from further attempts to help Madam Horridan see things Saskia's way (which was that the other kids' hearts hadn't hardened only because they had none).

"How is it going with your friend, um, the Skeleton?" the wicked hag would then ask, with an innocent smile.

Saskia was fooled by neither the smile, nor Madam Horridan's casual tone, so she didn't say anything to that, but she never let go of the Skeleton's hand.

Madam Horridan's smile disappeared, and she said things like, "It's time to grow out of this," and "Look the truth in the eye," and "You have to be careful, or you'll get sick like your mother." Saskia didn't get what half of that meant—the Skeleton didn't hurt anyone, after all, so why did the wicked hag claim he was dangerous?

At the end of these meetings, Madam Horridan mentioned that the Princess had been taking her metal pills very responsibly, and that her Fever was almost over, and now she only had to battle a severe Common Cold.

Saskia pictured her Princess lying somewhere in a Prison for Grown-ups Who Did Something Wrong, with her green eyes blue and staring through the ceiling, and eventually, these thoughts caused Saskia to catch a slight Cold herself.

She was allowed not to study or go to the playroom until her Cold was over, and Saskia spent most of the time in her bedroom. The teenagers returned to the dormitory only after dinner, so for much of the day, she and the Skeleton had the whole room to themselves. Saskia rarely got out of bed. The Skeleton combed her hair with his fingers so often it now looked almost as smooth as Charlie's. His bird sang her songs that, at least for a while, made Saskia's eye grow a little less blue. Sometimes, Charlie managed to sneak out of the playroom, too, and he brought Saskia new comics, in which the Princess got well and took Saskia back to the castle.

Then, one night, something extraordinary finally happened. Saskia awoke because someone was tapping her cheek. At first she decided it must be Franz—he often did this, both as a cat and a human, when he was bored and wanted somebody's unobtrusive but wakeful presence. As her mind caught up with what her eye perceived—the dark shapes of the four occupied beds around hers—Saskia remembered she wasn't in her tower.

The one tapping her on the cheek turned out to be the Skeleton. Saskia couldn't discern whether he was silently screaming or smiling, but his mouth was wide—no, long—open, and he was jabbing his finger toward one of the windows.

Carefully, so as not to wake the teenagers, Saskia made her way between their beds to the window, and climbed onto one of the girls' nightstand, casting apprehensive glances down at the motionless silhouette it belonged to. Then she looked up and saw—

" _Franz_!"

As quietly as possible, Saskia rose on tiptoe and opened the window—she could only just reach the latch.

Franz scrambled in onto the narrow, angular windowsill. Moonlight pierced through his nearly transparent whiskers, eyebrows, and ear hair, so it seemed as though he himself were giving off a soft glow. He was a cat now, which could mean only one thing: The Princess didn't have the strength to think about him much anymore.

"Franz!" breathed Saskia, making to stroke his paw. Franz jerked it away instantly, so Saskia had to content herself with "looking-but-not-touching."

"How did you—?" she whispered. "There are moats and fences everywhere, and the walls have eyes! How did you get here?"

Either Franz still retained the power of speech, or Saskia could somehow speak Cat now, or maybe she just knew Franz so well—whatever the reason was, when Franz opened his mouth, she understood what he said.

And what he said was: "Like a bird."

"You can FLY?"

Saskia forgot to keep her voice down and almost toppled off the nightstand, she was so impressed. The girl in the nearest bed, who had recently reminded Saskia not to come near her nightstand, and on top of whose nightstand there were currently Saskia's feet, stirred. Franz, Saskia, and the Skeleton, who was looming behind her, froze. The teenage girl rolled over onto her other side and stopped moving, too. After a few more moments of outward stillness and mental skedaddling, Saskia felt it was safe to start breathing again.

"Listen to me, Saskia, I think the Princess might be in serious danger!" whispered, or maybe hissed, Franz. "I don't know the details, but I came to visit her in the hospital, and I saw her sign so many papers! Something terrible is happening, Saskia. . . ."

Saskia opened her eye and let out a particularly despairing morning groan. Was it time to get up already? The Gray Fiend who had been shaking her moved away to wake the other girls. It wasn't immediately that Saskia remembered she had seen Franz at night, and when she did remember, Saskia realized she had just had her first dream in the Prison. It would have been nice to let herself fantasize for a little while that Franz had really come here, but, most uncharacteristically, Saskia didn't feel like pretending. She just missed Franz and worried about the Princess, and a silly false hope that she'd heard from them wouldn't make the dream any truer. Besides, the very idea was simply ridiculous: If Franz could _fly_ , Saskia would have known that.

As dispiriting as the unreality of Franz's visit was, it had succeeded in bringing Saskia's mind out of its Cold. She pined for neither Numbing Numbers nor the spiteful playroom but wouldn't mind spending more time with Charlie (the Gray Fiends had finally cottoned on to the fact that, lately, every time Charlie had escaped from the playroom, he'd headed straight to Saskia's dormitory. It didn't take the Fiends long to find him anymore, so Saskia and Charlie didn't see much of each other these days).

After breakfast, Saskia asked a Gray Fiend to take her to Madam Horridan, whom the girl then informed that she was "feeling all better."

"I'm very glad to hear this, Saskia. _I've_ got good news for you, too!" said the wicked hag, with an expression of feigned excitement. "Unfortunately, the metal pills no longer improve your mother's condition, so yesterday, she agreed to _Extra Painful, Ultra Dangerous, and Occasionally Effective Lightning Treatment_ she had been refusing to undergo before. But now, to help speed her recovery, she has signed the consent form—I'm sure she'll be allowed to take you back home very soon."

Saskia swayed, and would have fallen if the Skeleton hadn't supported her. So it was true! Franz really had flown over to see her last night, this was what he had been trying to warn her about. . . .

"You know, I think I'm still sick," said Saskia dully, and she felt the bridge of her nose, which was beginning to sting.

"Of course, my dear, of course," said Madam Horridan, wrinkling her sympathetic brow, and Saskia was sent back to her bedroom.

There, Saskia sat on her bed and cried with fear for the Princess. She didn't know exactly what that _Lightning Treatment_ was like, but in her imagination it was torturous. Saskia could almost see the Princess chained between two tall trees, as trident after white-hot trident of lightning struck and jolted through her shuddering body. Saskia could almost hear the Princess scream and a horde of proper people around her laugh. . . .

The bedroom was empty except for the girl. The teenagers were always in the study room at this time of day, and even the Skeleton wasn't around. Where had he got to?

Saskia stopped crying for the Princess and started worrying about the Skeleton instead. She hopped off the bed and checked underneath it, but the Skeleton wasn't there, either. Saskia stared around the dormitory, starting to panic. Had she been so distracted she hadn't noticed him disappear completely?

The Skeleton soon returned, however. His bones hadn't begun to fade, as Saskia was afraid they would if she and the Skeleton didn't stay close together. Better still, he didn't come back alone—he brought Charlie. Both of them were grinning (although Saskia could never be sure with the Skeleton).

"Saskia, the Skeleton broke a window in a dorm upstairs and our Fiends ran out of the playroom to see what's going on—it was _wicked_!" said Charlie, laughing and high-fiving the Skeleton, who took a few moments to figure out what he was supposed to do with Charlie's waiting hand.

"Skeleton! Charlie!"

Saskia dashed across the room and gave them each a hug so mighty that the Skeleton's ribs creaked and his bird had to issue a warning chirrup.

"Dear Charlie, you have to help us escape, I need to rescue my Princess!"

Charlie's grin waned, but he pulled from under his arm his notebook, which, like his stuffed dog, he rarely parted with, and which was full of wonderful comics. He and Saskia sat on her bed, and some ten minutes later, Charlie handed her the notebook. He had drawn her a detailed plan of all the corridors and stairs, and outlined the places Saskia needed to avoid outside so that the eyes on the walls wouldn't detect her.

"Thank you, Charlie!"

Charlie nodded wordlessly and clutched his stuffed dog tighter to his chest. Saskia noticed that his eyes had gone bluer.

"Come with us," she suggested. "Our castle's so big, the Princess won't mind at all."

The Skeleton nodded vigorously, but Charlie shook his head. "I can't. I'm waiting for Archie. What if he won't know how to find me if I run away?"

"I will look for Archie when I get out of here," promised Saskia. "I will find him and tell him where you are."

"Here." Charlie extended his arm sideways and dropped the stuffed dog onto the open notebook in Saskia's lap, looking anywhere but at the toy.

"No, Charlie, I can't take—"

"It's so that Archie believes you."

"I will come visit you," said Saskia, wishing desperately she knew what to say to cheer Charlie up. "I will come visit very often. I can fly over on Franz."

They hugged again and said their good-byes and good-lucks—just in time, because two Gray Fiends burst into the room, scolded Charlie, and led him away to the playroom.

Chapter Nine. Good-Bye

Saskia couldn't bring herself to touch her dinner that night, even though dinner was the nicest mealtime in the Prison. (The rice pilaf was only borderline edible, but there were also a cup of tea, one of the only things Saskia liked proper, and a green apple, which reminded the girl of the Princess's packed lunches and which she usually shared with the Skeleton's bird.)

By now, her brain was used to falling asleep immediately after Gray Fiends checked that all the children were in their beds and turned off the lights. Struggling to stay awake, Saskia counted the minutes until the teenage girls would stop whispering to one another about their stupid teenage problems, which mostly revolved around other teenagers and math.

At last they stopped talking and tossing. Saskia lay still for a while longer, feeling less drowsy now that their sleep-inducing discussion was over and the images of a suffering Princess took advantage of the silence and flooded Saskia's mind again.

Finally, unable to bear another second of this internal turmoil unsupported by physical action, Saskia ventured out of bed and over to the door. She looked back at the teenage girls, her heart beating Feverishly, but not one of them moved or said anything. Saskia tightened her grip on Charlie's notebook and stuffed dog, exchanged bracing looks with the Skeleton, and slipped into the corridor. Following Charlie's drawing, the two of them made it, rather faster than Saskia had expected, to the first floor, without running into any Gray Fiends on their way.

But right before the front door, they encountered an obstacle in the person of a sleeping guard, an elephantine Fiend, who in the dimmed corridor appeared like a snoring boulder. The boulder, whether snoring or not, wasn't on the map; Charlie must have never wandered around the Prison at night.

The Skeleton didn't seem to fancy the idea of sneaking past the guard. He started to rattle, and Saskia had to steer him back around a corner, mouthing at him to stop being nervous, please, or at least stop being nervous so loudly. After the Skeleton pulled his bones together, Saskia poked her head around the corner, weighing their chances of not getting caught. The door was locked with a bolt, which looked rusty and heavy and would positively make a good deal of noise when disturbed. Even if that didn't wake the guard, outside the door she and the Skeleton would be faced with another challenge: the drawbridge. Saskia remembered, from her outdoor-time explorations, where the lever to lower it was, but the drawbridge was so creaky it would probably rouse not only the guard but also Madam Horridan in her lair. (Provided, of course, that the hag slept at all, and not circled above the Prison grounds on a broom or a vacuum cleaner.)

There wasn't much else to be done. Saskia returned to her bedroom, ready to burst into tears again. The Princess might be preparing to receive _Lightning Treatment_ right at this moment, and Saskia could do nothing to save her.

The Skeleton patted her on the back, more and more insistently, and soon Saskia understood that he wasn't trying to console her—he was trying to get her to look at the windows. Just like on the night she had spent in a single bedroom, bird-shaped silhouettes were strolling there along the wires and clotheslines.

" _Like a bird_!" half-whispered, half-shouted Saskia, leaping to her feet. "Franz didn't fly—he came here _like a bird_!"

The Skeleton bobbed his grinning skull. Apparently, he had worked it out before she had.

Once more, Saskia slunk over to the nightstand of one of the older girls. The Skeleton climbed up first, his feet _clunk_ , _clunk_ -ing on the polished top of the wooden nightstand. He then gave Saskia a leg-up, and she pulled herself onto the windowsill. Making sure the teenager in the bed below was still asleep, Saskia lifted the latch and pushed open the window.

As a cool night breeze tickled her neck, ruffled her hair, and sent shivers down her arms, Saskia felt a thrill of excitement tainted with trepidation. She was itching to look down but, clinging to the Princess's words at their last dinner together, resisted the urge. Instead, she screwed up her imagination and made herself forget where and who she was. She pictured herself in the circus, high above the arena floor; she was not the little wide-eyed Saskia, she was the virtuoso Acrobat, who had done this so many times she could dance along the thinnest of tightropes with her eye closed. It didn't matter whether there was a trampoline or a bubbling acid moat below, because she wasn't going to fall.

Saskia the Acrobat stepped forward onto one of the clotheslines and heard the Skeleton scramble onto the windowsill behind her. She turned back. While the Skeleton kept his head up, his flowers slid almost completely out of their sockets and stared at the ground, growing larger. The right one had even developed a tic. The Skeleton's mouth extended in what (Saskia was pretty certain this time) wasn't a grin.

Out of the corner of her eye, Saskia could see that some of the diamond-shaped windows were still lit and the front yard was illuminated by the street lamps, almost like the circus stage. She smiled at the Skeleton, gave him her hand, and together with the hook-beaked birds they walked: Saskia along the clothesline; the Skeleton, an electric wire beside her. In that manner, they reached the very fence surrounding the grounds, unnoticed by the walls, whose protruding eyes were scanning the yard below.

The Skeleton thudded onto the ground on the other side of the fence in a tangle of spindly limbs. One of his arms reached out from the middle of the heap, groping around the grass for his lower jaw. He inserted the jaw back in his skull, adjusted it with a _snap_ , and assembled the rest of his bones into their usual configuration. He made sure the bird in his ribcage was cheeping in anger at him and not in pain, then, as Saskia jumped down, too, he caught her, so they weren't stalled by having to search for _her_ jaw. They took each other's hands again, and ran.

On the rare occasions that they heard an approaching car rumble on the gravel, the pair of them hid, trembling, in the roadside bushes, but for the most part, the dark road was deserted and quiet but for their own crunching footfalls. It didn't take long for Saskia's shoeless feet to start hurting, so they had to slow down to a walk.

Saskia had never traveled such a long way on foot before. The distance they had already covered must be three times as great as the length of Saskia's trips from the castle to Bastilly's, but the school was still nowhere in sight. They needed to hurry. If they didn't reach home by morning, the Gray Fiends would notice Saskia's absence and seize them before they could get to Franz, who alone knew where the Princess was held.

But neither of them could move any faster. The Skeleton dragged his feet, too, and Saskia's heels were smarting, while her toes were growing numb with the cold. The tedious walk, worrying about the Princess, and staying vigilant for any Gray Fiends that might pursue them had depleted Saskia's energy, and her stomach ached, demanding some fuel. Now she felt inexcusably shortsighted for having skipped dinner. A juicy green apple would come in so handy now, and even the rice pilaf didn't seem as liable to taste like rubber anymore.

Eventually, they had to admit that a short stop for some rest was unavoidable if they wanted to make it to the castle in full consciousness. They sat down by the side of the road. Saskia rubbed her shoulders and tried to pull the legs of her ghost's pajamas down over her feet. Noticing that, the Skeleton clapped himself on the forehead. He disentangled himself from his tailcoat, wrapped it around the girl, and hugged her. His bird, which the journey had rocked to sleep, ruffled its feathers without waking up; it appeared to have grown a lot since the Skeleton had first shown it to Saskia in the Spooky Woods. That seemed like such a long time ago. . . .

Saskia could see the Skeleton's eye flowers recede deeper and deeper into their sockets, and, without quite registering it, she fell asleep herself.

When she opened her eye, the night had already passed. The sky above her was dirty-white, one smooth, vast cloud, without a single blue splotch or a glint of sunlight to enliven it. Saskia blinked and looked harder. This unnaturally even sky was not the sky at all; it was a ceiling.

She had fallen asleep last night, she had dreamed their escape! Saskia sat up and spun around but saw neither her roommates nor any nightstands. She was once again in a single bedroom, the Skeleton at the foot of her bed with his spine slumped against the wall. He had reclaimed his tailcoat, which was covered in grass blades and bush leaves, but his eye flowers were still dormant deep inside their sockets.

Before Saskia could think of a story that would explain how they had ended up back in the Prison, the bedroom door opened, and Madam Horridan stepped inside. Her face seemed saggier than usual, as though its grim expression were weighing it down.

"You're up," she said flatly. "I brought you some food."

She bent down and put a plate of sticky porridge and a glass of milk on the floor next to Saskia's bed.

"We had to remove your nightstand, you see, to prevent any more _flights_." Madam Horridan's eyes flicked up to the window, and Saskia looked back at it instinctively, too. Without the nightstand to add to her height, there was no way she could get onto the windowsill, not even with the Skeleton's help.

"Although I can't for the life of me imagine," added the wicked hag, "how you managed to pull that off without breaking your neck."

She waited, but Saskia wasn't going to tell her how. Madam Horridan sat beside Saskia onto her bed, right where the Skeleton's hand was. He leaped to his feet, jerked his hand from under Madam Horridan, and backed into a corner, massaging his eye sockets and pulling the flowers' heads closer to their rims.

Not in the least bit concerned about having nearly broken someone's fingers, the wicked hag spoke again. "We want what's best for you, Saskia, we really do. But considering what an _unruly_ , _ungrateful_ child you've been, we think that right now, it's best for you to spend some time alone and think about your behavior."

Madam Horridan gave Saskia a stern look but, apparently (and rightly), didn't find the girl's expression to be apologetic enough, because she decided to press the point.

"Just consider what a _disruptive_ influence you've been on the other children."

As Madam Horridan reached into her bag and pulled out Charlie's notebook and stuffed dog, Saskia's insides went cold. Now she had landed Charlie in trouble, too.

"These were on you when we found you by the road. Do you even realize how lucky you are that a draught from the window you'd left open woke one of your roommates and she noticed that you were missing? We had to rouse _everyone_ to find you! What were you _thinking_? You could have frozen to death! Alone, at night, in the middle of nowhere, _God knows what else could have happened_!"

Madam Horridan had almost screamed the last words, and had to pause to steady her breath.

"Will you give those back to Charlie?" said Saskia timidly. She wanted to ask Madam Horridan not to punish him, tell her that she had drawn the map herself, but was afraid her plea might achieve the opposite effect and make things worse for Charlie.

"Of course I will," said Madam Horridan, her tone calmer now. "We had to tell the other children that something dreadful had happened to you after you'd run away so that nobody else would be tempted to follow in your footsteps."

It took Saskia a few moments to realize what that meant for her.

"You're going to keep me here alone until I'm old?"

Madam Horridan raised her eyebrows and shook her head. This strange amused look suited her better; somehow, she seemed suddenly younger, less worn out and haggish.

"It's amazing how evil you think we are. _Of course_ we won't keep you here that long," she explained, meeting Saskia's wary gaze. "Yesterday, your mother received her first _Lightning_ _Treatment._ It seems to be working for her, she's doing better already."

"She is?" asked Saskia, and, though she didn't understand exactly why, she felt like crying again, for a long, long time.

"We're also willing to offer her a job when she recovers completely. Lord knows we need all the help we can get with you troublemakers. The job's hard and not pretty, but at least you won't have to do your homework by candlelight. You'll go home very soon," said Madam Horridan, smiling at the disbelieving expression on Saskia's crumpled face. "You just need to make an effort, too."

"An effort?"

Madam Horridan reached into her bag again.

"We took this from your house, with your mother's permission. Could you please tell me who this is?"

Hesitantly, Saskia accepted the photograph from Madam Horridan. It was frameless and frayed, as though someone had held it, wrung and twisted it in their hands many, many times. Saskia looked away, returning the picture to Madam Horridan.

"Saskia, before I can let your mother take you home, I need to know your mind is in a good place. Make an effort, remember? Talk to me. Now, please, tell me who this is."

"It's me, the Princess, Franz"—Saskia's voice cracked—"and Jack."

"Very good. Where is Jack now?"

"He went to Côte d'Au Revoir," said Saskia, louder than she had intended, and she looked at Madam Horridan defiantly in case she was going to argue with that.

It looked as though Madam Horridan was indeed dissatisfied with Saskia's answer, but argue she didn't. Her expression became gentler still.

"You must miss him very much."

"Not at all," said Saskia, scowling.

"All right. Could you describe to me, please, what Jack looks like in the photograph? Why is he dressed so peculiarly?"

Saskia felt the heat rising in her cheeks. Yet again, something lurked behind Madam Horridan's words, some insinuation—Jack wasn't a weirdo!

"Jack's not _peculiar_ , the photo's from _Halloween_!"

Madam Horridan nodded, riffled through Charlie's notebook, and opened it to the page with the Skeleton's portrait.

"This is your friend, the one you brought here with you, isn't it?"

At first, Saskia decided it was safer not to reply, but then she thought about the Princess, about how much she must have suffered through in her attempts to get Saskia back. The least Saskia could do was be honest with Madam Horridan and hope she would appreciate it rather than get angry.

"Yes, it's him," Saskia said finally, with a guilty glance at the corner where the Skeleton appeared to be trying to blend in with the walls.

"Don't you find it a little bit strange that the Skeleton's clothing looks very much like Jack's Halloween costume?"

What did Madam Horridan mean by that? Saskia knew by now that grown-ups often asked one thing when what they really wanted was an answer to an entirely different question. Was Madam Horridan trying to suggest that the Skeleton had done something to Jack and taken this tailcoat from him? But her Skeleton would _never_ hurt anyone, even if he might not look it to some.

"Saskia, it's okay if you miss Jack," Madam Horridan went on, sounding as though she had abandoned all pretense and was saying what she meant this time. "You're too young, you shouldn't have to be going through all these terrible things. People much, much older than you turn to illusions to fence themselves off against emotions that scare them. But you need to be braver now, for your mother. You need to look at the truth and choose to see it the way it is, without dressing it in convenient fairy tales. We're _not_ your enemies, Saskia! We're not demons, not witches, not child kidnappers. We're trying to help you. This isn't a prison. As much as you love your mother, she isn't a princess. You might think of Franz as your friend, but that doesn't make him as complex as a human."

Saskia couldn't bear any more of it. Why did Madam Horridan have to say all that, why did she want to steal everything away from her? Saskia pressed her hands over her ears, shut her eye, and tossed her head from side to side. "No, no, no, you're _lying_!"

Madam Horridan sighed. She put the photograph and Charlie's things back into her bag and cast a sad glance at the cold food on the floor.

"If you want to go home, you have to say good-bye to your skeletons," she said before leaving, but Saskia kept her ears covered and didn't hear her.

Once the door closed behind Madam Horridan with a muffled scrape of the bolt, the Skeleton edged across to Saskia and touched her hand with one fingertip. Saskia opened her eye, uncovered her ears, and threw herself into the Skeleton's arms, sniffling and shuddering.

Time in the single bedroom ticked away even more slowly than anywhere else within the Prison's walls, but at least, she and the Skeleton had been left alone. Gray Fiends only came by to bring Saskia food three times a day, and occasionally, they brought her some toys and books, too, but neither games nor reading did the trick of distracting her thoughts. Saskia couldn't stop brooding over what Madam Horridan had said, and try as she might not to let them, the words had slithered their way underneath her skin, crawling there and hissing the lies over and over. She knew Madam Horridan's cruel suggestions weren't true, but why did they fill Saskia with so much terror and sadness every time she replayed them in her mind?

The sun sank below the windowsill and reemerged somewhere on the other side of the fortress, unseen but casting a pale light on the birds that marched along the clotheslines, making their feathers gleam. After the sun sank and rose again fourteen times, Saskia was finally sent for.

It was early morning, and the other children were still in their beds, so Saskia didn't get to catch a glimpse of Charlie as she and the Skeleton were led down one quiet corridor after another. Saskia was burning to yell out, to let Charlie know that she was still in the Prison, too, and that Madam Horridan was lying about her getting herself into trouble. It was only for fear that the Fiends would change their minds and lock her in the single bedroom again that Saskia kept her mouth closed. She longed for some news about the Princess so tried not to do anything that the pair of Fiends escorting her might deem improper.

Before entering Madam Horridan's lair, Saskia let go of the Skeleton's hand. She heard his bird warble in a hurt voice and his teeth chatter, but she didn't turn to meet his gaze. Saskia wished she could reassure him, explain to him that she just didn't want to give the wicked hag a reason to be annoyed, but didn't dare say anything or even wink at him in front of the Fiends.

As she stepped into Madam Horridan's office, green eyes were the first thing Saskia saw, and they were the only thing she thought she was going to look at since.

"Mommy!"

In a second, Saskia's face was buried in the Princess's trench coat, her arms clamped tightly around the Princess's waist. The Princess wiped a tear out of her eye and kissed the top of Saskia's head, as she had so often done before.

"Just a little longer," said the Princess softly. "This will be over soon."

Madam Horridan, who was sitting at her desk and watching the reunion with a patronizing smile, cleared her throat and interrupted.

"Well, the papers are in order," she said in a festive tone, "the results of the latest home inspection satisfactory. . . . Saskia, you're going home—today."

Saskia looked up at the Princess, afraid to believe that. " _Really_?"

The Princess smiled and nodded. Saskia hid her face in the Princess's coat again, hugging her even more tightly.

"There is just one tiny thing left," said Madam Horridan, and Saskia peered at her warily from under the Princess's arm. "Saskia, this is a very important moment. You need to show me now that when we release you into the outside world, you will be able to deal with it in a mature, sensible way. Let's do away with fairy tales once and for all. Say good-bye to your skeleton, and you and your mother will be free to go."

Saskia looked up at the Princess again, searching for some solution, some other way in her green eyes, but the Princess's eyes were unreadable, her smile gone and replaced by a foreign tightness around her mouth.

"No," said Saskia, shaking her head. "No."

A strange feeling, both sore and hollow, settled in her chest as she heard her own voice. There was no resoluteness to her "no." She sounded as though something bad, irreversible had happened already and all she could do was say something, anything to buy herself time before she would have to face it.

"Please, Saskia," the Princess said barely audibly. "Then we can finally go home, you and me. . . . Franz is waiting, he misses you. We can eat the biggest cake in the world today. . . ."

Saskia fought back tears and turned to the Skeleton. He was standing alone in the middle of the room, pressing his hands over his chest and looking at Saskia with large, blue, blue flowers. Saskia couldn't bear to see him so lost and scared, and she turned to the Princess again, her eye pleading for help.

"Please, Saskia, do as they ask," said the Princess, still quietly, and her eyes were begging Saskia, too.

At that moment, the battle inside Saskia's mind was over, and she was the one defeated. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be with her Princess.

Saskia let go of the Princess's coat and walked up to the Skeleton. Her face was crumpled, and she felt as though she might burst out crying at any second now, but the hollowness in her chest wouldn't let her.

"I asked you not to leave me," she said, taking the Skeleton's hand and staring at it to avoid his gaze. "And you didn't. They told me you weren't real, that an imaginary friend wouldn't help me if I were in danger, but you were always here for me, and now—now, _I'm_ the one who's leaving you."

The Skeleton hung his skull, and his arms fell to his sides as Saskia's hand released his.

"You were my first and greatest friend, Skeleton, and you will always have been real to me."

Saskia stepped back, afraid that if she didn't, she would hold the Skeleton and never, ever, let him go.

"Good-bye, Skeleton."

The Skeleton dropped to his knees. The red bird broke out of his chest, leaving a dark hole in his ribs and his tailcoat, and fluttered out of the window. The Skeleton crumbled to the floor and lay without movement, his eye flowers staring and dewy. Saskia's mother hurried over and hugged the girl to her chest.

Madam Horridan clapped her hands together and laughed. "Wonderful, Saskia, I am so proud of you!"

When Saskia had the courage to look at the motionless Skeleton again, he wasn't there.

"I'm so sorry, baby." Saskia's mother took her by the hand, and they left Madam Horridan's office, and they left the Children's Home, and neither of them paused to look back, not one time. Saskia's mother kept saying she was sorry, and Saskia didn't understand what she was apologizing for, but replied every time that she was very sorry, too.

Chapter Ten. Ever After

"Was it _too_ bad at the Children's Home?" asked Saskia's mom over dinner that evening.

Saskia shook her head. "Was it _too_ bad in the hospital?"

Her mom shook her head, too. She looked older, a lot like the day two uniformed people had taken Saskia away, only her clothes were clean and her hair was drawn back into a tight, neat knot at the nape of her neck. She was beautiful anyway, because Saskia loved her.

They didn't speak much after that. Saskia wanted to talk to her mom, about anything, but the words got lost on their way through the hollowness that still dwelled in her chest. Saskia's mom opened her mouth a few times as if to ask something else, but seemed not to know what to say so pretended she'd only meant to take a sip of her tea.

Franz was curled up on Saskia's lap, purring and kneading her leg with his paws, his vertical pupils fixed on the window. He had fully transformed into a cat while Saskia and her mom had been away, and although Saskia couldn't be sure what really was on his mind, he appeared quite contented.

The mice must be less happy about Franz's recovery from the human condition, because there wasn't one around. The candelabra were gone, too; Saskia and her mom ate their macaroni and cheese by bright electric light, so the walls bore no shivering shadows and Saskia's glass of juice didn't have that fascinating flickering gleam to its rim that candles had once given it.

Saskia was glad to be back, but the new quietness of the house made her feel as if she still weren't at home, as if this were someone else's dining room, even though it looked almost the same as theirs.

"Could you play something, Mommy?" she asked when they had finished their food.

Her mother walked over to the hatch dresser and sat before it, but no matter how hard she tried, the music just didn't sound right. She closed the doors of the Polyfun.

"I think I forgot how to play it. Maybe some other time," she said sadly.

That night Saskia found that she had grown a lot since she had last slept in her bed in her tidy small room in the attic. Her size hadn't changed all that much, but somehow, Saskia just felt too old for a child's bed now.

On the next day, Saskia had to wake up earlier than usual, because her mom needed to get to work on time after she walked Saskia to school. Saskia wasn't as nervous as she had thought she would be before her first day back at Still Bays Elementary, but she did pause before the door to her class. She shut her eye for a moment, and instead of imagining she was a little wolf, simply reminded herself, "I am Saskia." Strangely, she felt much braver and calmer after that.

When she entered, the teacher smiled at her and nodded wordlessly at her seat in the back of the classroom. Saskia thought it was nice of him not to make a big deal out of her return. As she walked down the row of tables, no one was whispering or staring, or maybe she just didn't take notice anymore.

During lunch break, Saskia took her old place at an empty table in the far corner of the cafeteria, and peered into her backpack, searching for the apple her mom had given her this morning. She heard a chair scrape against the floor and looked up.

"Is it all right if I sit here?"

Saskia nodded slowly, afraid that if she spoke, her voice might quiver. This was the first time one of her classmates had expressed a desire to sit with her at the cafeteria.

The girl in a blue scarf sat down opposite Saskia, twiddling a brown lunch bag in her hands.

"It's so good to see you back," she said, looking from her bag to Saskia and then to her bag again, so Saskia wondered for a moment which of them the girl was talking to. "We were all very worried. We even wrote you a letter together, but I don't know if Mr. Goodwill managed to deliver it to you. . . . Oh, I'm Elizabeth."

Saskia swallowed down a lump in her throat together with the words "I know" that had almost burst out of her. She didn't want Elizabeth to think she was some weird stalker who knew all her classmates' names. "Hi, I'm Saskia," she said instead.

"I know." Elizabeth exhaled, as though she was relieved, and an uncertain smile lit her porcelain face. "Your costume that day, it was so _terrific_. I was a little bit jealous. You know, I wanted to tell you that right away, but you looked kind of cross—I was scared you'd be mean to me. Now I see I was wrong."

"I. . .like your scarf," said Saskia. A mixture of awkwardness and euphoria swirled in her chest, edging the hollow feeling away. "If you want, I can ask Mom to make a costume for you, too. She's very busy these days, but I think she'd be glad to."

Elizabeth's smile grew wider. "Yeah, I'd like that! Do you want an orange? Dad always packs me two of those, _every_ day, I just can't stand the sight of them anymore. . . ."

"Okay, and you can have my apple, then."

Saskia didn't think it was too early to say that this was the best day she had ever had at school.

After classes, Saskia had to loiter in the grounds for half an hour until her mom had a lunch break, too, and could walk her back home through the town park. As they passed the fallen tree, Saskia kept her eye on it furtively, but the trunk was empty, and it was empty on the following day, and the day after that, but Saskia kept hoping.

"I have a surprise for you," her mom said one day, when she came to pick Saskia up. She was wearing her gray uniform, but there was an old cunning twinkle to her green eyes, which made Saskia even keener to know what this was about.

"Is that a costume for Elizabeth?"

"No, but you can invite her over sometime, and then we can decide together what kind of costumes you would like, and you two can help me make them."

"That sounds good," said Saskia. "Maybe it's a trampoline, so that I can walk the tightrope above the garden?"

Her mom shook her head, and the intriguing glint in her eyes faded a little.

"Good," said Saskia firmly. "You know, I think I don't want to be an acrobat anymore."

"What do you want to be, then?"

Saskia hesitated. "I don't know. Maybe I'll be like you, work at the Children's Home to make sure nobody chases or beats anyone."

"Well, you don't have to figure that out right now," said her mom softly.

Saskia hazarded more guesses, a cake, a trip to the circus, a new Polyfun song, and a lot of other exciting things, but the surprise turned out to be much better than anything she had imagined.

Just as they reached the end of the park and saw their house across the road ahead, a black car pulled over nearby. Two people in the Children's Home uniform stepped out, waving at Saskia's mom. One of them opened a rear passenger door and let out a grinning boy.

"Charlie!" screamed Saskia, dropping her backpack and dashing toward him.

"Saskia! They told me something horrible had happened to you!"

They hugged and told each other all about their days apart, while Saskia's mom signed some papers and talked to the adults.

"Now, the five of us had better be able to fit in this poor tiny house," Saskia's mother said, shaking her head with mock concern, when the car had driven away.

"Charlie can _stay_? For good?" Saskia laughed and gave her mother a hug, too. "Wait!" She drew back. "Why five? You, me, Charlie, Franz, who else?"

"And that's another surprise!" said her mom, who had clearly waited for this question.

She motioned for them to follow her to the front door, and then unlocked it. For a second, Saskia hoped that behind the door would be the Skeleton, but it was someone else. That someone was nice, too.

"Archie!" yelled Charlie, dropping his notebook and the stuffed dog and running forward, faster than Saskia had ever seen him run before.

Scrabbling and howling in its eagerness to get outside, a large, fluffy, propeller-tailed dog shot out of the house and bounded at Charlie, knocking him off his feet. Charlie didn't complain. He lay on his back, laughing and wriggling, while Archie licked Charlie's face with his great slobbery tongue, his giant overexcited head shaking and barking.

"I found him waiting for you at your old house, Charlie," said Saskia's mom. "He could do with some feeding up. So could you two! There's a big cake getting cold in the dining room, let's go eat it—only, of course, first the soup."

And they went into the old wooden house, whose walls had been stripped of hop tendrils and were gleaming with fresh golden paint. The rosebush under Saskia's window had been supported with stakes and was on its way to getting well.

Many things were on their way to getting well. Saskia's nosebleeds had stopped, as had Charlie's abundant sighs. Elizabeth became a frequent guest at their house. Charlie's comics had more and more characters in them, and he found some friends at Still Bays Elementary, too. Archie and Franz, however, never came to see eye to eye, but their dislike of each other was only a source of entertainment for the children. Sometimes Saskia fancied that Franz had cursed, but it always turned out that she had misheard him, and when she asked Franz to repeat what he'd said, he remained unperturbed and proper.

Saskia's mother always meant to learn how to play the Polyfun again, but she never had time anymore, and eventually they took the instrument out into the backyard.

And the five of them lived, not ever after, and not always happily, but they were together and took the _greatest_ care of one another.

P.S.

Somewhere in most average and ungifted woods, on a fallen tree, sat a tall human skeleton. His broken ribs had knitted well—you could see that through the hole in his tailcoat. People often walked past the fallen tree, but no one ever stopped to say hi, and the skeleton sat and waited, snapping his teeth at the occasional butterfly or feeding a small, newborn bird in his chest with earthworms.

Sometimes, he got to see a girl with short black hair. She was dressed in a blue, well-ironed uniform (only her eyepatch was violet) and was invariably escorted by a woman in gray clothes, who had large green eyes, and a boy, who was also wearing blue and carried a mangy stuffed dog.

The skeleton knew the girl had a name, but it kept slipping his skull. He remembered only that it was the Girl, who had once noticed him and helped others notice him, too—a boy who could run very fast, and a princess who could play the Polyfun. The Girl always looked his way when she walked by, and he waved at her, but she never waved back. Maybe she pretended not to see him, maybe it was temporary, or maybe she would never notice him again. The boy who was with her looked at the fallen tree, too, but he never showed a sign that he could see the skeleton, either.

The skeleton also remembered that he came from a foreign land called Côte d'Au Revoir, the entrance to which was at the back of the circus tent. Sometimes people stumbled in, and it was such a pleasant place that they never wanted to leave it. There were a lot of creatures other than humans in Côte d'Au Revoir, and they could walk freely between their pleasant place and this strange proper world. Sometimes the creatures performed on the circus arena, where everyone could see them, because those who came to the circus _wanted_ to see something magical, while believing there had to be a safe explanation. But outside the tent, nobody really noticed the creatures, so they felt lonely in this proper world and didn't stay long.

In his pleasant land, the skeleton had met many people, and among them a man who used to be a circus acrobat, and who gave the skeleton his tailcoat, asking him to find the Girl and her princess and invite them to Côte d'Au Revoir. There was a fairyland waiting for the Girl, but she had been convinced there wasn't.

The skeleton didn't blame her for that. He knew how easily proper people could convince you that you were wrong and a little bit crazy. They offered sensible arguments and quoted philosophers, and led you to believe you were confused about things. They would be persuasive and sympathetic, and they would make you see the world out of their eyes until you forgot what it had looked like out of yours.

But the Skeleton wasn't going to return to Côte d'Au Revoir alone. He would wait for the Girl to grow up, and maybe then she would be brave enough again to remember him.

* This story has a _proper_ happy ending.

