Chantress Read Free Page A

away. I tugged at the lid till it popped off.
    Inside the box was a letter. Folded into a packet, badly spotted and water-stained, it bore a single line above its seal:
    For my daughter, Lucy, in case I do not return . . .
    For a moment, I was so bewildered I could neither move nor breathe. A letter for me? From my mother? After all this time?
    Norrie had always told me that nothing remained of my mother—that her possessions had been lost in the shipwreck. And yet here, tangled in Norrie’s plant, was this letter.
    Norrie must have known about it. Indeed, she must have hidden it herself. Which meant Norrie had lied to me.
    A flame of anger shot through me, and my hands tightened on the letter. How could Norrie have kept it from me?
    I scanned the line of handwriting again: . . . in case I do not return . . .
    But that made no sense. It wasn’t as if my mother had planned to leave me. My mother had drowned.
    Or had Norrie lied about that, too?
    Fingers trembling, I broke the seal and flattened out the letter. Entire pages were blotted out by water damage, and the remaining handwriting was so small and faded that it would have been difficult for me to read even in daylight. By candlelight, I could decipher only a few complete sentences at the very start of the letter:
    My dearest daughter, I sang you here for your safety.
    I stopped and read the phrase again: Sang you here? What did she mean?
    I will do everything in my power to return for you within a few days, at most a few weeks, but nothing is certain, and I know that if you are reading this, it is because I have failed. The very idea of this pains me almost beyond bearing. My only comfort is that Norrie will look after you, and that when you reach your fifteenth birthday, she will give you this letter . . . .
    But she did not, I thought. She did not. She hid it from me instead. And now the letter is almost unreadable. All I could make out on the rest of that page were a few words near the bottom: singing . . . careful . . . stone . . . Chantress . . . Allhallows . . . magic . . .
    Magic?
    On the next page, only a single phrase was legible, but it took my breath away: . . . when you sing, it will bring you home.
    Home. I thought with longing of England, of the small cottage by the sea where we had lived, and of the castle keep and the River Thames and the other places I remembered mostly in dreams. And then I wondered: Sing what?
    Frustrated, I leaned closer to the candle, trying to shape stains into words, until the edges of the parchment nearly caught fire. I pulled back sharply, but not before I saw a word after stone that looked like off .
    Take the stone off?
    I reached for the pendant swinging against my skin. Was this the stone my mother had meant?
    The winds outside the cottage were gathering strength, but I hardly heard them. I folded my mother’s letter, tucked it into my sleeve, and peered down at my stone. It looked just as it always did: a dense, brick-red disc about the size of a walnut. Heavy as granite, it was as bumpy and plain as could be. There was nothing magical about it whatsoever. But perhaps it only revealed its powers once it was off its chain.
    Never take that stone off , Norrie had told me. It’s meant to protect you.
    But then Norrie had lied about my mother. Who was to say she hadn’t lied about this?
    There was only one way to find out. Yet my hand slowed as I reached for the pendant. Almost as long as I could remember, I had been following Norrie’s rules. The thought of breaking them—deliberately, perhaps irrevocably—made my heart pound.
    The wind howled at the cracks in the window, making the candle dance. I thought I caught the whisper of a tune.
    This is it. This is your chance to go home. Be bold, and take it.
    I grasped the chain and pulled it over my head.
    The moment the stone was off, the songs came for me—hundreds of them, humming like bees, flickering like firelight, crossing like shadows. And the strongest one was the