“Prologue. ‘Hetta stood at the garden gate, one hand on the latch, and wondered if this was the day she would finally slip through the ornamental fence, leave behind the manicured lawn, and escape into the rough country just visible beyond the borders of her mother’s house. Behind her, she could hear her sister calling her name, but though her sister came nearer with every step, somehow her voice seemed to grow fainter and farther away. The trees on the other side of the fence, however, appeared to move closer the longer Hetta watched. They squirmed and wriggled where they stood, shaking their long trailing branches at the young girl watching, inviting her over to partake of whatever mystery and excitement they had discovered on the other side of the gate. “Hetta!” her sister called again, but Hetta almost could not hear the voice, so faraway had it become. She lifted the latch and stepped outside the fence, and into another world …’ ”

He read for about an hour. When he stopped to fetch himself a glass of water, Kit took the book and read the next few chapters. Hetta had been her idol, back when she had first encountered this book. That had been during one dreary, interminable summer she had spent with Granmama, when her father had not come to visit her once for six endless weeks. Like Hetta, Kit had longed to escape the neat lawns, the formal houses, the regimented days. Of course, she had known that a completely different world existed, and she was determined to make her way back to Geldricht, not the mythical kingdom that Hetta eventually stumbled upon. And she would not make Hetta’s mistake, oh no. She would not, at the end of her own tale, forsake the bright kingdom in favor of the familiar green lawns of Inrhio.

Or would she? Chay had made it clear that her position here was precarious, certainly not permanent. She did not know how long she would be permitted to wander within the brilliant, dangerous boundaries of the alien kingdom. That was a bitter lesson Hetta had not been forced to learn, that sometimes you are not welcome where you most desire to be.

“I like this,” Nolan said, when Kit laid the book aside once she got tired of speaking. “But if all the girls of Inrhio read this when they’re children, why are they all so conservative and traditional once they grow up?”

Kit laughed. “And I suppose, after you read Corbin Heather, Trewillin Soldier, you joined the crew of a merchant ship and sailed off to fight in foreign wars? Because I read all the boys’ adventure books, too, and they’re just as full of intrigue and daring as the girls’ books. And yet I never did meet an indigo man who confessed to having been a pirate.”