“How much farther?” I asked.

I had become increasingly aware that our parents counted on me to keep watch over Duncan. Ever since he’d gotten trapped in a tunnel the year before, we’d all become more conscious of Duncan’s reckless curiosity.

“I don’t know,” he said. “If I did, it wouldn’t be much of an adventure. But there’s something out there, something we need to find.”

His expression was mischievous, yes, but also, somehow, otherworldly. (Otherworldly? I was nine. There was nothing “otherworldly” about me. I liked to belch at the dinner table. I liked to blow bubbles and play with metal soldiers and read books about pirates and talking bears.)

“But there’s all that bramble,” I said. “It will take ages to clear it.”

“No,” he said, with a sudden sternness I found endearing, and a little ridiculous, coming from such a gangly frame. “No. We need to go out exploring. No more paths. We don’t need paths.”

“Well…,” I said, about to give Duncan my next objection.

But he was already off, tramping through the bramble like some miniature version of the Kalif, determined to claim everything he saw for the Empire. He had always been fast, the kind to set out obstinately for whatever goal beckoned, whatever bright and shiny thing caught his eye. Usually, I had control over him. Usually, he wanted to stay on my good side. But when it came to the forest, our relationship always changed, and he led the way.

So off he dashed into the forest, and I followed, of course. What choice did I have? Not that I hated following him. Sometimes, because of Duncan, I was able to do things I wouldn’t have done otherwise. And, such a relief, when I followed him, the weight of being the eldest lifted from me—that was a rare thing, even BDD.

The forest in that place had a concentrated darkness to it because of the thick underbrush and the way the leaves and needles of the trees diluted the sun’s impact. To find a patch of light in the gloom was like finding gold, but those patches only accentuated the surrounding darkness. The smell of rot caused by shadow was a healthy smell—I didn’t mind it; it meant that all of the forest still worked to fulfill its cycle, even down to the smallest insect tunneling through dead wood. It did not mean what it would come to mean in Ambergris.

Duncan and I fought our way through stickery vines and close-clumped bushes. We felt our way over fallen trees, stopping in places to investigate nests of flame-colored salamanders and stipplings of rust-red mushrooms. The forest fit us snugly; we were neither claustrophobic nor free of its influence. The calls of birds grew strange, shrill, and then died away altogether. (As if we had gone through a door to a different place, a different time, Janice. I could not believe, sometimes, while in the forest, that it existed in the same world as our house.)