During the entire trip they amused themselves by pretending to consider the most gory of revenges, all the while assuring him that he needn’t worry: his fate was already settled with a punishment most fitted to his crime. Josef pretended not to hear a word.

What did they really have in store for him? Josef closed his eyes and tried not to think about it. Did they know about him and Bianka? he wondered desperately. The suspense made him dizzier than the sled’s motion, which unaccountably had now begun to bother him.

Finally the trip was over. Shouting triumphantly, they dragged him off the sled, up the steps, and into the kitchen where Bianka and her mother and the two smaller boys stood—pointing, giggling, in a great mood. They whisked him through, pushed him upstairs, and threw him in his room. Jonathan shoved him over to the bed.

“We’ve decided what to do with you, famous artist,” Jonathan said. His round head bobbed. He wet his lips. His gray eyes sparkled. He put his hands on his stocky hips. “Haven’t we, everybody?”

“Yes,” came the shouts from outside the door where the rest of the family gathered, peeking in, from the top of the stairs.

“We are putting you in jail. It’s too much trouble to take you to town and swear warrants. Good farmers like us can’t take all that time. So this room is your jail—”

Nods and shouts all around. Josef squirmed underneath the ropes, and glowered.

“You’re going to do us a painting, as you promised. And you don’t get fed unless you do. Every day one of us will come up with some food, and if you aren’t working on a painting that takes our fancy, well then you’ll just get lighter and lighter and thinner and thinner.”

Bianka poked her mother and laughed.

Elgren stepped to the front. “It’s only fair. A bargain is a bargain. You don’t leave this room, no matter how long it takes, until we get a decent painting. My wife, here, wants a painting of the farmhouse, just like it was. She had her heart set on it, and that’s what she’s going to get.”

“I can’t just copy one painting over,” Josef yelled. “You can never get one painting just like another—”

“You better learn how, then,” Avona said, coming forward, shaking her apron in his face. “Thought you got away with it, didn’t you? You never had any intention of finishing that painting, and if poor Bianka hadn’t felt ill last night and couldn’t sleep, she never would have been up so late and looked out to see your tracks reaching out there in the snow—”

Bianka lowered her eyes. Josef could have killed her.