OUTSIDE, THE WINTER day was bitter and gray. Icy snow scraped on the windows, and the wind worried and whined in the chimney. All the color had been sapped out of the world. When Sorrow looked over the barren soil of Grandma’s garden, the snow-covered lawn and field, the naked brown apple trees, she worried that she might forget how to see green, that her eyes wouldn’t even know what they were looking at when the first shoots pushed through the dirt and the first leaves unfurled.
Outside, the orchard had become another world, one crueler and less welcoming. Even though it was only March, Sorrow very much believed winter had long outstayed its welcome.
Inside, the house was warm and bright, and everything was normal until Patience asked about school.
“It’s okay if I just go by and talk to the high school, isn’t it?” she said.
Sorrow froze with a spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth. They were sitting at the table, her and Patience, a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup before them. Grandma had finished her own soup and gone to her room for a nap. Mom was at the sink, washing dishes. Steam from the running water fogged the window.
“Just to get some information?” Patience added.
Mom was rigid as a tree trunk from head to toe, betrayed only by the faint tremble in her hands. Sorrow looked nervously between them. The soup churned unpleasantly in her stomach.
“I said we would talk about it,” Mom said.
Patience stood to lean against the counter with her arms crossed over her chest. She was as tall as Mom now, and they could have been two sides of a mirror, except that Patience was fully dressed and had combed her hair sleekly over her shoulders, whereas Mom was still wearing her flannel nightshirt, and her hair was a bird’s nest tangle of brown and gray.
“We are talking about it,” Patience said.
“Later,” Mom said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“How much later?” Patience demanded, and Sorrow flinched. “Dad said if I want to enroll by fall I have to catch up—”
Mom dropped a bowl into the sink with a clatter, tossed the towel onto the counter, and walked out of the kitchen without saying a word. There was the muffled thumping of her sock-clad feet on the stairs, the snap of a door closing.
Sorrow glanced at the clock. Mom hadn’t even been out of her room for a full hour.
Patience sighed and turned off the faucet. She picked up the towel Mom had discarded, set it down again. “I can’t believe her.”
“You shouldn’t have mentioned Dad,” Sorrow said.
“Oh, shut up,” Patience said. “You don’t even understand what’s going on.”
Sorrow’s face burned and anger buzzed in her ears. Patience was sixteen. People in town were always telling Sorrow how beautiful her sister was, how she was growing to be such a lovely young woman. Sorrow was eight, exactly half Patience’s age, and she knew she would always be exactly half of what Patience was: half as beautiful, half as beloved.
Maybe she was only half as smart too, but she wasn’t stupid. Mom and Patience were arguing because Patience wanted to go to school—to regular school, the high school in town, after being homeschooled by Mom for her entire life. She claimed Dad agreed it was a good idea, but his last visit had been in January, which meant Patience had waited almost three months to say anything. Three months of mulling it over, forming her arguments, making a plan, and today was the day she chose to bring it up, even though it was one of Mom’s bad days and she knew better.
“You could have helped, you know,” Patience said.
Sorrow looked up. “Helped what?”
“Don’t you want to go to school too? Meet new people? Make friends?”
Sorrow swirled her spoon angrily in her soup. “I don’t know.”
“I think you would like it,” Patience said. “You can help me talk to her later. We can convince her if we do it together.”
It didn’t sound all bad, having a chance to go to school in Abrams Valley and learn things Mom didn’t teach them, to talk to girls her own age and maybe even play with them. But Sorrow couldn’t think about what she might like about school without thinking about all the things she knew she would hate. She didn’t even like to go into town, where everybody knew about their family and made jokes about the weirdo Lovegood girls. Last week two boys about Sorrow’s age had followed her and Mom all the way from the grocery store to the post office and back, muttering about crazies and psychos when their backs were turned, bursting into fits of laughter when Sorrow glared at them. Mom had pretended not to hear anything, but when they got back to the car she had sat for a long time without turning the key, not looking at Sorrow, not doing anything except staring through the windshield and breathing.
“I don’t know,” Sorrow said again.
Patience rolled her eyes. “Fine, whatever. I don’t need your help.”
She stomped out of the kitchen. More footsteps on the stairs, another door slamming shut, and Sorrow was alone.
She poked at her soup, but it was cold and filmy and she wasn’t hungry anymore. She had been hoping to convince Patience to play a game or go for a walk. She was tired of being stuck inside through the gray days and cold nights. She was tired of cold, tired of snow, tired of mud, tired of wind and ice. Their farmhouse felt small and isolated in this gray tail end of winter in Vermont. The orchard was only a few miles from town, but nobody came to visit, not unless there was trouble.
She didn’t need Patience. She would be fine on her own. She bundled up against the cold and went outside.
Sorrow followed the path around the barren garden, past the chicken coop, down to the old dirt road. Her boots crunched through the crusty top layer of snow to the hard ice below. The pickup at the edge of a fallow field was a soft white lump.
She knew winter couldn’t last forever, however much it felt like it would. Spring was coming. She could feel it in her bones, in the light flutter beneath her lungs, even if she couldn’t yet smell it in the air.
And when spring came to the orchard, the favors would return.
Last spring she had found the very first favor of the year by the pond in the northwest corner of the property, in the branches of a crooked old beech tree leaning over the water. She wanted to look there again, just in case there was a sign of spring waiting to be found. She followed the dirt road around the hill and stomped down the slope, slipping and sliding in the deep snow, toward the boundary with the Abrams land. When she reached the meadow, cold wind whipped around her, stinging her face and making her eyes water. The stone well at one end of the meadow was a fat hump beneath a snowdrift, the wire fence a sketched black line. At the other end of the meadow was the cider house.
The cider house door was open.
Sorrow’s heart thumped in surprise. The weathered two-by-six that normally barred the door was lying on the ground, and all along the front of the building the snow was trampled. A line of footprints led to the fence and through the field on the Abrams side.
The Abramses weren’t allowed on Lovegood land, no more than the Lovegoods were allowed on Abrams land. The sheriff had made both families promise to keep to their own property after the last time Mr. Abrams had called the police and said Mom was cutting down trees on his side of the fence, and Mom had called the police when Mr. Abrams and his brother were hunting in the orchard.
Sorrow crept forward to approach the door from the side. Her mouth was dry and her heart was racing so fast she could feel it in her throat. She had to say something. She wasn’t a baby. She was eight years old, and she was a Lovegood. She wasn’t going to let an Abrams scare her away.
She leaned into the open doorway. “Hello?”
Her voice echoed dully. It was so dark inside it took her eyes several seconds to adjust.
“Hello! Who’s in there?”
All she could hear was the wind and the rattle of icy snow on naked branches. She eased one boot forward, stretching over the slick of ice to step inside. The floor creaked and she held her breath, trying to make herself as light as possible. There were piles of apple crates in the corners, stacks of orchard ladders against the wall, barrels and buckets and all kinds of junk, but no person that Sorrow could see. Long ago the old cider press had smashed through the rotten floorboards to the muddy cellar below, leaving a gaping hole in the floor.
Sorrow leaned forward to peer into the cellar. It was so dark it could have been a bottomless pit. There was no ladder; if somebody fell through the floor, they wouldn’t have any way to get out.
“Are you down there?” Her voice, now, little more than a whisper. “Hello?”
“I didn’t even know you could talk.”
Sorrow spun around, her heart jumping.
Cassie Abrams stood in the doorway. She cocked her head to one side, considering Sorrow with an unimpressed expression. “I thought you were mute like your grandma.”
Cassie’s blond hair curled in pigtails beneath her red knit hat, and her round cheeks were pink with cold. Her coat was red too, a deep crimson velvet with shiny silver buttons marching down the front, and her puffy snow boots were bright pink.
“Or can you only talk to empty rooms, not people?” Cassie said.
“I can talk,” Sorrow said, bewildered. She blushed when Cassie laughed.
“I bet my friend Madison I could make you talk,” Cassie said. “Now she has to kiss Jemma’s brother Hunter on the playground tomorrow. Maybe she won’t believe me but I’m going to make her anyway. You can talk like a normal person, can’t you? Say something else.”
Sorrow didn’t know Madison or Jemma or Hunter. She barely even knew Cassie. She and Patience weren’t allowed to talk to the Abramses or make friends with their daughters. Mom said that making friends with an Abrams would only lead to heartache.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Cassie kicked a clump of icy snow; it slid past Sorrow’s boots and dropped into the cellar. “Nothing. I was bored.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I thought this building would be cooler on the inside, but it’s just a bunch of junk. My playhouse is way better.” Cassie pointed across the snow-covered field toward her house. “It’s in the barn. I get to have the whole hayloft just for myself, and it’s not gross and dirty like this.”
Sorrow bristled, even though Cassie was right. “If you think it’s gross, maybe you should leave.”
“Maybe I don’t want to,” Cassie said.
“You have to. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Says who?”
“Says my mom, and your mom, and your dad,” Sorrow said. “The sheriff said we have to stay on our side of the fence so everybody stops bothering him.” Those had been his exact words, in fact, and Mom hadn’t been at all pleased to hear it.
Cassie snorted. “I don’t care what the dumb old sheriff says. Let’s do something fun. Can we climb that big tree on the hill? I’ve always wanted to climb it.”
Sorrow stared. It was a trick. It had to be a trick. No Abrams would invite her to play for no reason.
Even so, a part of her wanted to say yes. This lonely gray day would be more interesting if she could stomp through the orchard and climb the black oak with Cassie, breaking the rules their parents had set.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t risk Mom finding out, not when she was having a bad day. Patience had already pushed Mom too far by asking about school. Getting caught playing with Cassie Abrams would be so much worse.
“I don’t want to play with you,” Sorrow said. “I want you to leave.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“You have to,” Sorrow said, her worry turning into a desperate kind of fear. “You have to. You have to go before somebody sees you.”
Cassie’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll just tell them you made me come over here. I’ll tell them it’s all your fault.”
Something hot and angry was building in Sorrow’s chest, a bright painful ember pushing out into the cold. “That’s not true.”
“So? They’ll believe me more than you. Everybody knows you’re just as crazy as your mom.”
Sorrow lunged forward and shoved Cassie backward through the door. “Shut up!” she shouted. “You shut up about my mom!”
Cassie stumbled in the deep snow and fell. She struggled to her feet, and her cheeks were even pinker now. There was snow stuck all over her mittens and red coat. “I knew you were crazy. Your whole family is crazy.”
“Shut up!” Sorrow stepped toward Cassie again, but her boot slipped on the ice just inside the door. She grabbed for the doorframe to catch herself.
Cassie slammed into her before she was steady on her feet, and Sorrow’s feet skidded out from under her. She fell, hard, right onto her back. The jolt knocked the breath out of her, made her vision blur, and everything went dark with a thunderous thump. There was another thump—the walls shook—and a noisy clatter.
Cassie had shut the door.
“Hey!” Sorrow yelled. “Hey, what are you doing!”
She climbed to her feet and tumbled against the door, but it didn’t budge. Cassie had barred it from the outside.
“Let me out!” Sorrow hit the door hard enough to make the whole wall shake. “What are you doing? Let me out!”
“No,” Cassie said. Her voice was muffled through the door. “No way. No way. You’re crazy. You’ll kill me or something. Your whole family is insane.”
Her footsteps crunched through the snow.
“Cassie! Wait! Come back! Please come back!”
The footsteps paused.
“Please come back,” Sorrow said, more quietly. “Let me out. Please?”
Cassie started moving again, but now she was running. Her footsteps faded, and faded, and there was silence.
Sorrow turned in a slow circle, trying to breathe normally. All she could see was the faint gray light around the edges of the door. Everything else was darkness. Tears stung her eyes and scalded her cheeks. She scrubbed at her face; her mittens were cold and rough and dirty. She was trapped. She didn’t know what to do. Her breath was shallow, her heart racing so fast she felt it in her ears. She couldn’t get enough air. She couldn’t see. She was between the door and the hole in the floor, but she couldn’t see it, and what if she was closer to the hole than she thought? If she moved the wrong way she would tumble into the cellar and break her arms or legs or even her neck.
“Help!” Sorrow shouted, her voice choked with tears. “Help me! Can anybody hear me?”
She could scream all day and all night and nobody would hear. She was too far from the house. It might be dinnertime, or even bedtime, before Patience or Mom or Grandma noticed she wasn’t in the house. They might not find her until morning, and by then she would be frozen solid.
“Cassie!” She slammed her hands into the door, rattling it against the bar. “Cassie, please, let me out!”
It was no use. Cassie wasn’t there. Nobody was there.
Sorrow let out a choked sob, swallowed it back quickly. She wasn’t going to panic. Panicking was what Mom did, and Sorrow and Patience were the ones who soothed her. They calmed her down and they worked around whatever problem she had, even if it seemed to them more imaginary than real. That was what they did. Mom said they were good at it. They were her rock, she said, for when everything else was unsteady.
This wasn’t an imaginary problem. Maybe Sorrow was alone, without her older sister to help her, but she could still be the person who fixed things, who made something scary into something manageable. She could do that. She put her mittened hand over her mouth to keep the cries inside, pushed down deep until they didn’t matter anymore, and she made herself think.
The door was blocked from the outside. She had to find a way to unblock it. She had to do it in the dark. She had to do it without falling into the cellar, which she couldn’t even see, which could be right next to her, it could be that shadow right there, and she was all confused again, confused about which way to turn, terrified of taking the wrong step, making a wrong move, and the cold was so sharp it felt like a living thing clawing its way into her skin—
Cold with teeth. That was what Patience called it, and she would bare her teeth and raise her hands like claws and pretend to be a winter monster chasing Sorrow all over the house. She used to, anyway, but it felt like a long time since Patience had played with her. Now when Sorrow suggested a game Patience would roll her eyes and say she was busy. She didn’t want to play Pioneers anymore, or Explorers, or even Traitors and Spies, which used to be her favorite. Patience had always made Sorrow be the nasty old preacher Clement Abrams so she could be their ancestor Rejoice Lovegood, who had been locked up after the townspeople accused her of being a witch. But she had broken out of their makeshift jail, not using magic as the men later claimed, but only a whalebone stay she tore from her corset.
Sorrow didn’t have whalebone stays beneath her dress. She had to find something else. It was too dark. She couldn’t see anything. She needed to see.
She lowered herself to the floor. She took off her mittens and began to search the space around her. When her fingers curled over the end of a broken board, she snatched her hand back.
That was the hole in the floor. She could feel the cellar breathing. In her mind the broken floorboards took on the shape of a great mouth rimmed with jagged wooden fangs.
Sorrow squeezed her eyes shut. She had to stay calm. She was good at that. Mrs. Roche from down the road said she was eerily calm. Sorrow hadn’t known what that meant, so she’d asked Patience, and Patience had said Mrs. Roche was only admiring how Sorrow didn’t throw tantrums or make a fuss like other kids her age.
She wasn’t making a fuss. There were sobs trapped in her throat and her breath was rasping and fast, but she was okay. She was okay. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. She wasn’t. She wasn’t. She just needed to see. She searched the area around her, and when she didn’t find anything she crawled a few feet and kept searching. Her fingers brushed over a curve of metal—the iron ring on the bottom of a barrel. Sorrow tugged at it, but she couldn’t break it free. She moved on, still searching. The metal head of a shovel. A couple of bottles that rolled and clinked when she touched them. More barrels. A scattering of short metal nails. A crusty chunk of something that Sorrow hoped was mud but knew was probably the dried-up remains of some unfortunate mouse or bird.
She brushed her hand on her coat, and she reached out again, walking her fingers along a gap between the floorboards until they touched something hard and cold.
It felt like metal, but not the gritty iron of old farm tools and cider press parts. She tugged, rocking the object back and forth until it came free. She turned it over in her hands. It was a rectangle about the size of a matchbox, mostly smooth, with a small bump on one side—a hinge, she realized, and her heart jumped in excitement. She flipped it open and ran her fingers over the inside, feeling for the small, ridged wheel. She knew what it was.
It was a lighter, an old-fashioned one like Mr. Roche used for his pipe. One evening last summer he and Mrs. Roche had come over to drop off some mail that had gone to the wrong house, and Mom had been in a rare good mood, bright and bubbly and cheerful, so she had invited them to stay awhile and drink cider on the back porch. Sorrow had been fascinated by how Mr. Roche had packed the tobacco into his pipe, the careful way he held the flame to the bowl and puffed and puffed. He had caught her staring and handed her the lighter, showed her how to use it, and he had chuckled when Mrs. Roche scolded him for teaching a child to play with fire. Mom had laughed too and told Mrs. Roche not to worry.
Sorrow struck the lighter once, twice. Nothing happened. A third try, and nothing. The cold felt even deeper, the darkness more complete, than it had a moment ago. She shook the lighter near her ear, but she couldn’t tell if there was any fuel inside.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, please, come on.”
Finally: a spark.
Sorrow was so surprised she nearly dropped the lighter. When she clicked it again, she got a small flame. It wasn’t very bright, but it was enough to push the darkness back, if only a bit. Finally she could see.
She scrambled to her feet and went to the door. She studied the small gap between the door and the frame. It wasn’t wide, barely big enough for her to stick her little finger in. She held the light out and looked around, searching through the junk and piles of discarded tools, until the flame burned her thumb and she had to let it go out. She stuck her thumb in her mouth to cool it before trying again. It took a few strikes to get the flame back.
The first thing she found, a long metal nail, was too fat. The second, a drill bit, was skinny enough to fit in the gap but not long enough to reach the two-by-six on the other side. She let the flame go out again, shook her hand and the lighter to cool them. The next time the flame caught on the first try.
She finally found what she was looking for in a long sliver of wood she peeled from the cracked leg of an orchard ladder. One end was thick, but the other tapered to a point, and that point was narrow enough to jam into the gap between the door and the frame. She had to let the lighter go dark and slip it into her coat pocket to get a good grip on her wooden wedge, but she didn’t need to see now. She worked the wedge upward, wood scraping on wood, until it bumped into the two-by-six on the other side. She held it tight with both hands and pushed it up and up and up. The bar on the other side moved a little. It was heavier than she expected, and holding the wood hurt her hands, but inch by inch the bar rose. When she was sure she had lifted it high enough to clear the bracket, she leaned on the door.
One end of the bar fell to the ground, and the door swung open. Sorrow tumbled out of the cider house.
It was colder now, the light grimmer, the wind more bitter. She ran back to the house as fast as she could, slipping and sliding through the snow. She couldn’t wait to tell Patience and Mom how she had escaped the pitch-black cider house using Rejoice Lovegood’s trick, and she had done it with the help of the first favor of the year. She had desperately wished for a light, and the orchard had given her one, and that meant the land was waking from its long winter hibernation.
Her excitement lasted right up until she burst through the door to find the kitchen empty. The soup pot was still on the stove, the bowls still in the sink. The only sound Sorrow could hear was the gentle chug-chug of Grandma’s sewing machine in the living room.
She shut the door. The sewing machine fell quiet, and Grandma appeared in the doorway. She tilted her head to the side in question.
“I was only taking a walk,” Sorrow said.
Grandma looked at her for a long moment, then nodded and went back to her sewing.
Sorrow was left alone in the kitchen. The lighter was a hard lump in her pocket.
Nobody had even noticed she was gone. She had been trapped in the cider house and she might have been trapped there forever, but nobody had noticed.