“Not for this visitor. I want you hidden away in the lofts until she is gone.”

The news hit Neverfell like a physical blow. In the drab and pungent calendar of her life, a visitor was more than a holiday—it was a blessed intrusion of light, life, air, color, and news. For days before such a visit her excitement would be almost painful, her mind a hornet’s nest of anticipation. For days afterward her lungs filled more easily, and her mind had new memories and thoughts to turn over and play with, like a child with freshly unwrapped gifts.

To find herself denied contact with any guest at the last moment was agony, but to be denied a chance to meet this particular visitor was beyond bearing.

“I . . . I swept all the floors . . .” It came out as a pathetic, broken little mewl. Neverfell had spent the last two days taking special care to fulfill all her duties, and find yet more to complete so that Master Grandible would have no reason to lock her out of sight before the visitor arrived.

She felt her throat tighten, and had to blink back the blur of tears. Master Grandible stared at her and nothing changed in his face. No light moved in his eyes. Perhaps he was going to strike her. Or for all she knew perhaps he was just thinking of Cheddar.

“Go and put your mask on, then,” he growled, and scowled away down the corridor. “And no gabbling when she arrives.”

Neverfell did not waste an instant wondering at his change of heart, but scampered away to extricate her black mask from the heap of tools, ragged catalogues, and disemboweled clocks under her hammock. The pile of the velvet was now rough and flattened by years of greasy handling.

It was a full-face mask with silver brows and a silver mouth closed in a polite smile. It had painted eyes, each with a little hole in the center for her to peer through. She pushed her pigtails back, and tied the mask in place with its frayed black ribbon.

Once, many years before, she had dared to ask why she had to wear a mask when visitors came. Grandible’s response had been blunt and searing.

For the same reason that a sore wears a scab.

In that moment she had realized that she must be hideous. She had never asked again. From then on she had lived in dread of her own blurry reflection in the copper pots, flinched from the pale and wobbly visage that greeted her indistinctly in the whey pails. She was a horror. She must be. She was too horrible to be allowed out of Grandible’s tunnels.