Greenglass House (8 page)

Some time later, the two of them sat back, looking with satisfaction at the pages that were now covered with notes in both Meddy's scrawl and Milo's meticulous handwriting.

“Not bad,” Meddy said. “In fact, this looks like a pretty cool character. What are you going to call him?”

“Call him?” Milo echoed. “Isn't he—isn't he sort of me?”

“Yes, but you should pick a name for the character too,” she told him. “After all, it's a
character.
It's a different version of you. In the game, it helps to think of being different from the you that lives in the real world.”

“But
our
game is
in
the real world.”

“Yes, but . . .” Meddy sighed, exasperated. She tapped the page. “Look at all this stuff we wrote down. Be honest. When you read it, does it seem like
you?
”

“Of course not,” Milo retorted. Hadn't that been the point?

“So give this person a name,” she said patiently. “
Milo
doesn't think he has these qualities. But
this
person”—she tapped the page again—“
this
person has them. This person
needs
them. My character is going to need to rely on this person. I can't have him not come through because Milo's confused. So what's his name?”

Milo dropped his head into his hands and stared at the notes. She was right. Nothing on this page was like him. This was a character from a fairy tale, not from life.

He found himself thinking of names from
The Raconteur's Commonplace Book.
“Reever,” he said, trying it out. “Or Negret.” Those were the names of the tattooed twins trapped at the inn in the book. “Negret,” he decided.

“Negret it is,” Meddy said, writing the new name in the margin. She set down her pencil and stretched. “Well, that was a good morning's work.” She tore the page out of her notebook along with several others and handed them to Milo. “I need you to do something for me. Make a floor plan of the house.” She held out her pencil.

“The whole house?”

“Yes. A plan for each floor. Start with this one. We're going to need them.”

She gathered the rest of the papers and the books into a neat pile, tucked them into the corner, clambered out from behind the tree, stretched again, and headed for the stairs.

Milo leaned out for a look at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was just before noon. He folded up his papers and stuck them in his pocket along with Meddy's pencil. “Negret,” he said quietly, trying the name out. “Negret.” It certainly sounded more like a blackjack than a twelve-year-old boy. Then he scrambled to his feet and rushed up the stairs in Meddy's wake. “Meddy?”

She popped out from behind the banister at the second-floor landing. “Yes?”

“What are we doing with this game, again?”

She gave him a disappointed look. “Trying to find out who lost that map, and what it's a map of. Obviously.”

“Oh. Right.” He scratched his head. All this talk about heroic, fantastic types, and he'd totally forgotten why they'd started the game to begin with.

“Milo.”

“What?”

“You still have it, right?”

“The chart?”

“Chart, map, yes—Milo, do you still have it?”

“Of course I do,” he retorted. Meddy held out her hand. “Well . . . I don't have it on me.”

“Why on earth not? You just
left
it somewhere?” Meddy swooped down the stairs faster than he'd ever seen a kid move and glowered in his face. “Where?”

Milo shoved past her and stomped up to the second floor. He continued stomping until he reached his bedroom, Meddy close on his heels.

Then he stopped and stared at the door.

“What is it?” she asked, standing on her tiptoes to peer over his shoulder. “Is it open or something?”

“No, it's closed,” Milo said slowly. “It's just like I left it.”

Except that wasn't quite true. The plaid silk ribbon that tied the jingle bell to his door wasn't the same. The bow he had neatened when he'd left that morning was crumpled. Someone had turned the doorknob, and since Milo didn't make a habit of locking his door, that meant someone had probably been in his room.

The leather wallet and
The Raconteur's Commonplace Book
were still there on his desk, right where he'd left them, but once again, something was wrong. Milo had placed the red book on top, carefully lining up the book's bottom edge with a row of stitches on the wallet beneath it. The book's bottom edge was still parallel to the wallet's, but it no longer sat directly atop the row of stitches.

He moved the book aside, picked up the wallet, and flipped it open. The folded paper in the left-hand pocket was old and green-tinged, but Milo knew right away that it wasn't the same. He could feel Meddy watching him as he carefully eased out the page with two fingers and unfolded it.

It was blank. No washes of blue, no green dots, nothing.

“Somebody
stole
it?” Milo said, confused. A panicky feeling was coming up in his throat, but it wasn't the familiar anxiety he usually felt when things didn't happen the way he expected them to. This wasn't just some random surprise; this was legitimately
bad.
This made things different somehow.

“Well, I don't know if we can really assume it was stolen,” Meddy said, reaching for the green page, which now dangled, forgotten, from his fingers. “If the person it belonged to took it, you'd sort of have to say they found the map and took it back.”

Milo shook his head. “Somebody broke into my room,” he said numbly. Because of course, that was what really mattered. In all his years of living at Greenglass House, in all the years of smugglers and what lots of people would call unsavory characters passing through, never had anyone invaded Milo's space. Never. Not once.

“Well, did you lock it?”

“It doesn't matter!”
He stood with his shaking hands clenched in his pockets, stock-still except for his eyes, which darted to each nook and corner of his room, looking for anything else that might be disturbed. “I shouldn't have
had
to lock it! It's
my room!
”

“Okay, okay,” Meddy said more gently.

Someone had been in his room.
Milo's parents might have come in for some reason, or Mrs. Caraway, but given how much they were scrambling to stay ahead of the needs of five unexpected guests, he doubted they had time to worry about him at all. And of course, they wouldn't have taken anything.

Someone who had no business in his room had been there. And if one of the oddball guests was a thief for real and was after the chart for some reason, then this game they were about to start playing was turning into something more serious.

Someone had been in his room. Someone had been in his room.
Milo forced himself to breathe evenly so he wouldn't have a panic attack.

He'd had panic attacks before. When he did, his mother usually told him to try to take his mind off it, to think of something else.

Like, for instance, a game.

“What's your name?” he asked Meddy.

“What?”

“In the campaign.”

“Oh. Well, let's call me . . . let's call me Sirin.”

“And who are you? You haven't told me anything about you yet.”

Meddy scratched her head. “Well, there is a kind of character I've always wanted to play. It's called a scholiast. They're these winged creatures who follow angels around like familiars, and they're not supposed to act in ways that change the course of events. But they love adventures, and they never get to have any, so when you come across one—they're usually non-player characters, meaning you run into them and get information or clues or tools or something—you can almost always convince it to help. But I don't see why a player couldn't be one. I love the idea of a scholiast who's decided to have an adventure, even though she isn't supposed to. Do you mind if I try playing one?”

He shrugged, curious. “Why would I mind?”

“Well, for starters, Sirin would have to be invisible to all the non-player characters—meaning everyone but you.”

Milo grinned. “I have to pretend you're invisible?”

“Milo,” Meddy said sternly, “Sirin's an otherworldly creature who's not supposed to interact, just observe—unless ordered to do something by her angel. She'd have to be invisible to everyone but Negret. And that would make Negret the captain of our campaign. Sirin wouldn't be comfortable being in command. She'd just be excited to be able to join the adventure. But she might be very useful in terms of seeing things Negret can't. And she'd have unearthly powers that might come in handy.”

“Powers like what?”

“Dunno. I guess we'll find out.”

Meddy looked anxious, as if she was worried Milo might say no. He shrugged again. “Fine by me. Sirin it is. Sirin you are, I mean. Welcome to the campaign.” He held out his hand, and they solemnly shook on their new identities. “Anything else I need to know before I start?”

Meddy blew out a mouthful of air. “Let's see . . . Always check for traps, left is always right unless there's a middle, always put your healer in the best armor and wear your magic rings on your toes instead of your fingers . . . What else? . . . Always have rope . . .” She counted these off on her fingers as Milo listened, wondering if any of it ought to be making sense to him.

“Never mind,” Meddy said when at last she noticed his bewildered expression. “You'll figure things out as you go.”

“All right.” Milo-Negret leaned against the wall by the window and chewed on his thumbnail, relieved to discover that thinking about the game was helping the waves of anxiety subside. “Well,” he said, “I don't think it was the map's owner who took it. If it was, he or she would just have taken the wallet and everything. There would've been no reason to make it look like it hadn't been disturbed, or to replace it with something similar. That only makes sense if the thief wanted to keep someone from realizing the chart had been taken for as long as possible.” What they didn't know, he realized, was whether the thief was trying to fool the real owner of the chart or Milo himself.

He took the imposter map back from Meddy, or rather,
Sirin,
turned on his desk lamp, and held the paper up to the light, revealing the same twisted iron gate he'd seen on the original.

“It's the same paper,” he told Sirin. “There's a watermark.”

“So the thief somehow had another piece of that same old paper? That's weird. What are the chances of that?”

“I don't see how something like that could be coincidence. So the paper is important, maybe just as much as what was on it.”

“That gives us three questions to answer,” Sirin said, scratching her head. “What is it, whose is it, and who took it? Maybe the paper can help us with the
what
part.”

There was another thing too, he realized. It had already seemed implausible that all these strangers would show up at the same place at such an unlikely time. And now it was clear that this map, if nothing else, connected at least two of them. “What if the guests are all here for the same reason, and the map is part of it? That would mean the map has something to do with . . . with Greenglass House, wouldn't it?”

Sirin looked at him with a strange expression—something like triumph—on her face. “Negret. What if there's some kind of—I don't know, treasure or something, a secret—hidden in the house? What if we had the map to it in our hands, just last night?”

Treasure? In Greenglass House? Milo wanted to scoff. Bizarre guests or no, this was still the same rambly-shambly house he'd lived in his whole life, and the idea that it concealed any secret at all seemed inconceivable. But to Negret, hidden treasure in Greenglass House was possible—just barely—and Milo felt a strange, brief flush of happiness. He was learning to think like his character.

“Well, someone else has the map now,” he said. “I wonder if whoever stole it knows how to read it, though. Maybe we still have time to figure this all out first.”

“Hey, and what about all that stuff Clem was saying downstairs? She said she was a cat burglar, remember?”

“I thought it was a joke,” Milo said. “But then she said something about Georgie Moselle, like maybe she was suggesting that Georgie was a thief too.” He shook his head. “A real cat burglar wouldn't have made any mistakes.” He pointed at the desk, where
The Raconteur's Commonplace Book
sat. “A real cat burglar would've noticed the way I'd left everything on the desk, and would've made sure to leave it exactly the same. And the bow on the door. Anybody would have seen the bell and made sure to keep it from ringing when he or she went in, but a professional would've left the bow just like I did.”

As he spoke, Milo realized he was feeling a bit disdainful about the thief, whoever it was. “The thief thought he or she was being clever because of the decoy paper, but missed all the stuff that tipped me off even before we opened the wallet.” He gave in to the game and his character completely and rolled his eyes. “Amateur.”

“Well, to be fair,” Sirin said with a little smile, “he probably didn't realize he was breaking into the room of the noted escaladeur Negret.”

“No,” Negret said, “I bet he didn't.”

They set the paper on his desk and smoothed out the folds. Negret traced a finger over the iron gate, feeling the subtle difference the watermark made in the paper's surface. “Does it mean anything to you?” Sirin asked.

“There's no gate like this here. Not on the grounds of Greenglass House, not as far as I know.” But even as he said the words, something made him pause. “Not on the grounds of Greenglass . . . Oh, wait, I
have
seen something like this before!”