Otherhalf

When Lola was five her mother taught her the secret of the painting on the mantelpiece. She lifted her daughter up onto the ledge, and Lola reached out, and her fingers slipped right into the picture. For a moment they shimmered, and took on the appearance of paint on canvas, and then they dissolved. Frightened, she yanked her hand back. Her fingers reappeared at once. Her mother laughed at her fright.
"There's another world through the painting," she said, hugging Lola tightly, protectively. "The Other world. And on the other side of the painting is an Other house a bit like ours, and in it lives an Other family a bit like us."
Lola didn't really understand what that meant, but she liked the thought of a secret world through a painting.
"Nobody knows about the Other place except us, though," her mother continued. "So you have to keep it a secret. If you promise to keep it a secret, I'll let you visit there all the time if you like. There's a little boy in the Other house who likes all the things you like."
"Even fairies?" she asked, wide-eyed. She'd thought it was a Fact that boys didn't like fairies.
"Even fairies," her mother promised, laughing. "Go on, go through and meet him. Tell his daddy that Margie says hello. You can stay until it's time for dinner, but then you have to come back."
Although she trusted her mother completely, seeing her fingers and hand and arm and elbow disappear into the painting made Lola cry. She believed that there was an Other world, of course she did, her mother had said it was there. But she was still afraid that something would go wrong, and when she put her face into the painting it would disappear forever. Her mother shushed her and gave her a gentle push.
"It's exciting, Lo," she said. "Mummy promises. Go on."
And Lola leaned forward, pushing her face against the canvas. For a second it resisted, but then she felt something give, something a bit like tearing cloth and a bit like parting water and when she opened her eyes she was crouching on a different mantelpiece, facing out into a room that was almost like the one she'd been in a moment ago.
A man and a boy stood a little way away, waiting. The man came over and lifted her down.
"I'm Morgan," he said, setting her on the floor. "You can call me Uncle Morgan, if you like, or just Morgan for now. This is my son Lucas. He's been looking forward to meeting you for a while now. Ever since your birthday."
"Our birthday," Lucas said, reaching out and shaking her hand solemnly. "It's on the same day, both of us."
"Okay," Lola replied. She still wasn't sure if this was fun or not.
The room looked mostly normal, with a few couches and a bookshelf and a fireplace that was clean but obviously well used. It had wood in it, though, which she wasn't used to - theirs ran on gas. The light coming in through the window was much brighter than the light in her living room had been, and she wondered how it could be raining there but not here. How far had she gone when she went through the painting?
"Want to see my toys?" Lucas offered. "I have lots of toys, they're pretty good."
"Lucas," she asked, shyly, "do you like fairies?"
He shrugged.
"Sure, if you can catch them. There's some in the garden. They always steal the seeds out of the bird feeder though."
Morgan laughed at the way her eyes widened at this.
"Go on," he prompted. "Go play."
He continued to smile as the children ran from the room, but when the room was silent once more he looked with plain longing at the painting for a long time.

HIT AND RUN

The intern entered the office cautiously, sidestepping the piles of paperwork that covered the floor. The director's head snapped up.
"I wasn't asleep," he mumbled, running a hand through his hair in a moment of forgetfulness. There wasn't much there, these days, but he never remembered until he touched it. It was disappointing every time.
"Of course," she replied.
He couldn't remember her name, though she'd worked there almost two years now. Alanna? Leanna? Something like that, he was sure. He watched her progress through the room. She carefully lifted aside the paperwork he'd been working on and laid a file folder in its place. The cardboard cover was fresh - not dusty, or faded, like the other folders in his office.
"A new prediction," she announced. He could hear excitement and curiosity in her voice. It had been months since the last - or longer, maybe. A year? It was hard to remember how time passed, here, marked by the ticking of the clock and the slow but inexorable decline in staff numbers. There was still one technician in the building, if the prediction had come through, but aside from that man and the girl in his office now, the director couldn't say for sure how many people still worked here.
"Thank you," he said.
She hesitated, torn between accepting his words as a dismissal and lingering in the hopes of finding out what the folder held. For a moment the director found himself impressed by her integrity. It was a long walk from the Receiving Room to his office, and the folder must really have called to her by the time she arrived.
The seconds passed too loudly in the still room. He relented.
"There's a seat somewhere..." he gestured vaguely in the direction he remembered a chair being, though the papers had really piled up and he couldn't see one for looking. She looked around, shrugged, smiled.
"I'll stand."
He smiled back. It felt strange, pulling up the corners of his mouth. Had it been so long? His memory felt dusty. He had sat in this office too long.

His hands shook a little as he reached out to the folder, and the paper inside was so white, blindingly white beside the yellowing pages he had grown accustomed to staring at. The words on the page were starkly black by comparison. There was a spot of ink on the side of the page that marred the blank margin and for a second it was all he could notice. It seemed - irreverant, that spot, given the gravity of the moment.
He skimmed over most of the information - time and location of testing, biographical information on the subject, details of the machine's last service - of course it needed maintenance, they all did, but who had the time? What he wanted to read was at the bottom of the page, under the heading of 'prediction'. He read it aloud, for his own benefit as much as hers.
"Hit and run."
From the corner of his eye he saw her face fall. It wasn't exciting at all, of course. It wasn't exotic. It didn't make up for the last year. He regretted the last two years, for her sake. She was a bright, capable girl. She did her job well. She could have gone places, if she hadn't come here.
"Shall I file this?" she offered. Before he could reply she closed the folder and lifted it, nestled it against her side. "I have a key to the Stacks. I'm sure I can manage that much on my own, sir. Just as I'm sure you have better things to do?"
Suddenly he was very tired. Yes, he had things to do. Decades-old paperwork that would never be reviewed but that, nonetheless, must be completed. That was his job, after all. Why else was he here?
"Yes, file that."
He watched her go, then rested his elbow on the empty space on his desk, and leaned his head against his hand.

Her footsteps echoed as she walked across floors that, she suspected, had not been walked on for a long, long time. Looking behind, she could see her footprints in the dust. To each side were the filing cabinets that stretched to the high ceiling, and every now and then a little stepladder that could be carried about as required. A few of the fluroescents flickered overhead, and more than a few of them had failed and never been replaced, but there was enough light to see by. She wasn't bothered by the semi-dark, because she knew there was nothing down here but old files, page after page of predictions that had been dutifully recorded and filed away against some unspecified future need.
She had heard it whispered that the facility had been set up as a safeguard against machine failure. They had a perfect success record, but the whisperers suggested that this was too accurate to be possible, that there must have been a helping hand along the way. And perhaps, in the beginning, there had been agents of some kind who had monitored the predictions, just in case. That certainly did not happen now. The machines had been proven. Even when they malfunctioned, or wore down, or stopped working entirely - if the machine managed a prediction, that prediction was true. There was no need to safeguard against the inevitable.
As she walked, she read the file. It was a long way to the 'T' wing, and by the time she reached the 'Th' room she knew that Mark Thomas lived in an apartment only a few doors down from the street-side death machine he had tested at. He lived alone, had no close relatives, had a degree in 'The Arts'. He was a few years older than her. He had broken his arm when he was seven, and his knee when he was nineteen. According to his biography, Mark had tested on his birthday.
She ran her finger down the fronts of the drawers as she read them, and when she finally found his place she was kneeling. There were a number of Mark Thomases in the drawer, so she placed this one at the front - then hesitated. She pulled out the next file and flipped it open on her lap. A quick glance was enough to show her that it belonged to the same person, from a year earlier. And the other Mark Thomases were the same Mark Thomas too, a file for each year, always on his birthday. There were twenty-seven of them. The first had been facilitated by the doctor at his birth, the next dozen by his parents. He had carried on with the testing on his own, after their deaths (in a house-fire, as they had known from their own predictions that they would die). She wondered if he did it for them.

With the director in his office and the technician somewhere underground - where vast halls of machinery sat mostly silent, gathering dust, waiting patiently for something to happen - she could go where she liked. Today she cleared a desk in a room that had once seated a dozen secretaries and set the Mark Thomas folders in a neat pile. She took her time to read each of them, examining the details as if they would tell her why he still tested. When it came time to go home she was on her third read-through, filling in the gaps in a mental map of how his life had gone. She looked around to be sure she was alone before she slid the folders into the desk's single drawer. Then she picked up a few of the boxes and papers she'd pushed onto the floor and covered the desk with them again. She wasn't meant to be reading these files, after all. Nobody needed to know that she had done that.

The next day she brought a notebook and pen, writing down what seemed to be the key events in his life, drawing lines around and between them, writing questions in the margin. Soon she had filled a dozen pages with notes. Still, she didn't know why he did it. There were plenty of possibilities, of course. She had guessed a whole bunch of them. It could have been because his parents had got him tested every year, and this seemed the most likely at first glance. But she also remembered hearing about people who obsessed over their predictions and got themselves constantly re-tested in the hopes of changing the fate they could not accept. And there was such a thing as addiction, too, where people physically could not stop themselves from taking the test, no matter how they felt about its moral implications or the results it offered. Or he could be some kind of test subject, paid to take the test annually by... some group... for some reason...

On the third day she let herself into the suite of offices that had once belonged to the organisation's managers and stakeholders. They were just as dusty, but here the floors were carpeted and instead of footprints she left little puffs of dust that slowly settled down again behind her. The chair creaked as she sat in it, and she could feel the cracks in the leather against her legs and back. The computer was much older than those she was used to using, and it took her almost a full minute to find the button to power it up. The monitor crackled as the system booted. A cloud of dust was blown out of the computer's casing as the fan started up. She had to wipe at the screen with the end of her sleeve just to read the words as they came up. The company intranet ran slowly but that was alright - she had all day after all. By home-time she knew everything about Mark Thomas that his file could tell her. But that wasn't much, in the end, and that wasn't nearly enough.

That night she dreamed about Mark Thomas. He didn't have a face but he had hands, and his left hand - it had to be his left hand, because he was right-handed and sometimes the death machine needle-prick reacted with people's fingers and made them swell up so that it was difficult to write, or so dream-logic told her at the time - was covered with little red needle-marks. His fingers were all swollen, too. He was standing in front of one of the machines, a dingy little kiosk on a street corner with a white, dotted line-up-here line thoughtfully painted onto the sidewalk. It was a good thing that there was nobody lining up behind him, though, because he was taking a long time with the machine. He would put his finger into the slot - his dreadful, already swollen finger - and, when the prediction slip was ejected, would read it, nod knowingly, and place it in his pocket. His pocket was already bulging. He repeated the process without stopping, and she couldn't look away. After a while the slips he put into his pocket just fell out again and fluttered to the ground. HIT AND RUN, they all said. HIT AND RUN. HIT AND RUN. She woke up feeling ill and sweaty.

His apartment building looked just as she had imagined it would, faded red-bricks and grimy iron-barred windows. There was a stunted tree growing to one side of the front steps and a pair of rose bushes flowered half-heartedly beside that. There was more rubbish in the dirt than garden, though. She considered ringing the bell, but what would she say? Better to stay outside, safely across the street, comfortable enough on the rough slats of a wooden bench to wait until she caught a glimpse of him. There was not much traffic on the road which was good, because there would be nothing to obscure her view when he walked past. She knew he would walk by sooner or later. He worked and shopped nearby; from his record she knew he received regular payments from a local bookstore (that was doing remarkably well despite the print media decline that had forced even the governments to abandon state-run libraries for more tech-friendly Computernet facilities) and spent regular sums at a local grocery mart. She could even see both of these locations from where she sat, on opposite ends of the street. It was so convenient. She smiled. She waited.
She did not see him that day.

The next day, when she should have been taking lunch in the tiny break room that only had a hot-water tap and in which all chairs wobbled, she stood in front of the death machine on Mark Thomas's street instead. Its paint was so faded, its front panel so covered by splatters of mud, that the little unloved kiosk almost blended into the walls around it without being noticed. Words that had once shouted at passers-by - LEARN YOUR FATE HERE! CHEAT DESTINY! - now only whispered. She had to lean in close to read the instructions. Someone had scrawled over half of them with a marker. Death to death machines, the graffiti said. We were never meant to know.
She wondered who had written it there, and when, and if anybody had ever noticed or cared. She remembered the protests, and how people had died when some of those turned into riots. She remembered wondering if any of the protesters had been tested, and if they had suspected that they would be SHOT or TRAMPLED or CRUSHED IN A FLEEING MOB at a rally to ban the machines. And if they had suspected it, had they come along anyway, because they cared so much about the cause?
When she was little she had been tested, when the machines were new and exciting and nobody realised that they were anything more than a gimmick. They had been installed in malls and supermarkets and hospitals. School nurses had been provided with them. Travelling salesmen had taken portable units door to door and visited nursing homes and showed up at fresh-produce markets to market their oracular ware. She had been tested at school, in the assembly hall, seventy-third in a line of three hundred and fifteen boys and girls who were half excited and half fearful that it would hurt. None of them even really understood what was happening, except that their parents had signed a consent form, and that they would have to have a needle stuck into their fingers. Nine children had fainted at the sight of the needle. And a lot of them had not come into school the next day, or the day after that... One of her friends hadn't come back to school ever again. Nobody had ever told her why. Thinking back, though, she remembered her friend confiding to her that her parents had refused to sign the form, and that she had forged their signatures on it. She thought she remembered that, anyway. Maybe she had just dreamed it.
The machine in front of her now didn't look much like the one she remembered. That had been such an ungainly thing, with funny stubby legs and a gaping mouth with its single, sharp tooth. It had gleamed. This machine was hidden behind its once-sleek panels, broken in three places - a coin slot, a ticket return chute, and of course the needle-hole - and it did not look anything like an animal. But still, as she watched her finger slowly enter that hole, she felt that it was going to bite her.
The needle sting felt like a bite.
When she withdrew her finger, a drop of blood welled up from the place where the needle had bitten her. The machine clunked and whirred and made sounds as if it was going to fall apart. When it printed out her prediction, it ejected the slip with something like a dying wheeze. She put it in her pocket without looking at what it said.

The next day it rained, and after sitting on the bench a while she was soaked despite her coat and umbrella. Water seeped under her collar and ran down her back. Her feet made squishing sounds when she moved them. Nothing interesting happened, and she did not see him. She went home with the beginnings of a cold and told herself that she would do the sensible, adult thing by going in to work the next day.

The next day she sat on the bench again. Work could wait. Mark Thomas had to leave his apartment eventually, and she intended to be there when he did. She tested at the machine three times as the hours passed, mostly to have something to do. The predictions joined the first in her pocket, unread. The paper was almost weightless and it seemed strange that they should be so light when they contained her fate. In the early evening a figure emerged from the apartment building where he lived and walked to the store. It was hard to see his features in the dim light, but she suspected it was him. It had to be him. He returned with a bag bulging with groceries that split and spilled onto the pavement. She wrestled with herself - this must be the perfect opportunity to talk to him. She would be a helpful stranger who politely enquired about his health. She would deftly steer conversation to the death machines - carefully staying neutral, allowing him to give his opinion without revealing hers.
But she stayed seated, and he picked up his things and left, and a little sigh escaped her as she stood to go home.

When she saw him a second time it was raining again, and when he entered the store she followed him. She shadowed him from the adjacent aisle and when he reached for a box of cereal their eyes met for a moment through the shelving. She blushed and left, and for the rest of the day she fantasised about the conversation they could have had if she had spoken to him instead.

Finally, on her third sighting, she spoke to him, a simple greeting as they joined the line at the grocery store. He said that she looked familiar, but that he couldn't say why and supposed he had seen her around at some point. She said that it was unlikely he had seen her before, as she did not frequent the area.
"I suppose I have that kind of face," she said, and he smiled.
"I think it's your eyes," he replied.
She told him he should be careful of such cliches and they both laughed. When he had paid for his groceries he stepped aside, then hesitated, and asked if she would like to get coffee with him. Her heart beat a little faster. She told herself it was because she would be able to bring up the predictions in conversation, but a voice in her head whispered that she cared about more than just the predictions. Her fingers were curled around the predictions in her pocket when she agreed.

It seemed like a good sign that the sun was shining when they stepped outside. They chatted a little as they walked to a cafe, mostly about the weather. She felt as though there were embers beneath her feet that were glowing brighter with every step. Even if she had wanted to, she knew she could not untangle her feelings any more. Her curiosity had grown into some kind of lust that, she suspected, the truth alone would not satisfy.
The coffee was gone too quickly, though, and when their cups were empty she found that she had not been able to ask him about the predictions. As they stepped outside he told her that he should really be heading home, but that he had enjoyed talking to her. They waited by the road for the lights to change and she knew her time was up.

"How do you feel about the machines?" she asked. The words spilled out of her like ink onto a page. "The death machines. The predictions, I mean. I've been tested but I can never bring myself to look, you see, and I know it's a controversial subject but I always wonder what others think of them. So I just thought I would ask. What you think."
The voice in her head was laughing and her cheeks blazed. Traffic slowed, then stopped, and the light changed. She resisted the urge to look at his face. They crossed the road without speaking.

Only they didn't both make it across the road, and it was not until she reached the other side and turned that she saw the car that didn't stop. He was knocked aside and blood spread in the puddles around his head. For a moment she could not breathe.
She fell to her knees beside him and grabbed his shoulders.
"Mark?" she said.
His eyes were closed. Somewhere behind her a woman was screaming.
"Mark? I need you to tell me about the predictions, okay?"
There was blood on her hands now, too.
"I need to know why you do it," she insisted. She hauled him into a sitting position and held him against her chest. "Mark, can you hear me?"
His smile, when it came, was slow and ghastly. There were gaps in his teeth, and blood.
"Hey," he croaked. "I think I've seen you around."
She held him with one arm and touched his cheek with her other hand.
"I don't live around here," she told him. She had to blink away tears to see him clearly. "You must be thinking of someone else."
"I think-" he stopped to cough and sprayed her with blood. "I think it's your eyes."
"Mark. Why do you use those machines every year?"
His eyes closed, fluttered, slowly opened again.
"I think I fell," he said.
"It's alright," she said. "I'm looking after you. But, look, Mark, I need you to tell me why you do it."
"Why I...?" he coughed again. She wiped his mouth with her sleeve.
"Testing. The death machines. The machines that tell you how you will die."
"Yes, those machines." His eyes struggled to focus on hers.
The screaming woman was further away now. A small crowd had gathered around them, but nobody dared come too close. She wished they would all go away completely. He was so far gone already, and she needed him to answer.
She needed to know.

"Mark." He met her gaze. "Tell me why, every year on your birthday, you get your death prediction."
"Why? What does it matter?"
His eyes were suddenly sharp. He understood everything. He could read her soul.
"I need to know. I need to understand. The predictions are always right and they never change. Why do you keep doing it? Is it a ritual? A compulsion? A tribute?"
His hand reached out and she took it. He squeezed her fingers.
"I wish I got to know you," he said.
"I know."
He sighed. His face was too pale. He felt lighter in her arms.
"I never even read them," he said, finally. "I always did it and I never even read what they said. Isn't that silly. I was always afraid. Ever since I was little. Always afraid to know."
His eyes closed again, and this time they did not open. She kissed him with tears running down her cheeks. He tasted like the sea.

Requirements

Maude was nine when she realised that all the main characters in the really good stories were orphans. She wasn't entirely sure why this was. Did have your parents die make you into a more heroic (or villainous!) person? Was it a requirement? Were there people keeping an eye on who was dying, ready to assign adventures to the unfortunate children as a kind of consolation prize?
Over breakfast one morning she informed her parents that she was ready to be orphaned.
"I can't start having adventures until you both die, you know," she told them, with her best 'you are breathing pretty selfishly right now' frown. For a moment they were silent, and the only sound was Baby Laurence mashing his cereal into their father's hair.
Her mother laughed - unconvincingly, Maude thought - and made a joke to her father about monitoring what their daughter read. Her father suggested they enrol her in an after-school class in something that wouldn't give her Any Ideas. Something like pottery, he said, spooning cereal from his hair back into Laurie's bowl. Laurie threw his spoon onto the floor.

Maude realised then that of course they would never understand the necessity of their impending deaths. She resolved not to speak to them about it again.

Empires

The three empresses met in a field high in the mountains. Each was accompanied by a single handmaiden who bore a covered basket and stared intently at the ground. The Empress of Flowers was the first to move forward, because she had always been the most impulsive. She climbed the three half-height steps into the gazebo and washed her hands in the basin that waited at its centre. The Empress of Oceans came next, limping a little as she stepped up, and washed her hands also. The Empress of Stones moved last and slowest, and when her hands were cleansed they hung at her side and dripped onto the floor. For a long time the three regarded each other from behind their veils, then each reached up and removed it.

The handmaidens knew better than to peek, but if there had been an observer at this moment he would have been astonished to see that the faces of the three women were more than a little similar. The same pale grey eyes lay below the same thick lashes over flushed cheeks with the lightest spray of freckles. The same half-smile curled lips that were all but mirrors each of the other. There were differences, of course - the Empress of Oceans' skin was ruddy and wind-bitten, her hair sea-bleached and tied in an intricate knot on her head. The Empress of Flowers' hair was long and sun-polished and hung in gentle curls, but there were traces of dirt beneath her fingernails. The Empress of Stones' hands were cracked and calloused with labour and there were dark circles beneath her eyes.

The sisters grasped hands, heads bowed, silent. There would be time to discuss the state of the Empires soon enough, and time to share the treats that each had brought, and time to be regaled by the singing and music and dancing of the handmaidens. For now it was enough to be together, for a moment, after so long. They dared not meet more than once in ten years, and though the years were far kinder to them than to most, still the weight of time was heavy upon them.
The Empress of Stones broke the circle first, gathering her skirts and sitting on one of the three benches.

"There will be war," she announced. There was no clue in her tone as to how she felt about this, and for that moment her sisters wondered how much had changed in the past decade. "It cannot be helped. Men are ever thirsty for blood and cannot be sated until it is shed."
"I feared it would be so," agreed the Empress of Oceans. She too sat, and after a while the third sister joined them.
"There is always a way to avoid it," she said.
But of course there was no way.

The Empire of the seas, where great city-ships rode the waters as a scent rides the wind and salt encrusted mountainous sails, had felt the change of the tides. Afraid and angered they were already assembling their strength, calling the city-ships to the Navel, the mountain-island that was the only land they ever set foot upon. They believed that the unrest in the waters was caused by some sorcery from the other Empires - they knew the sins of the landbound and would not be persuaded otherwise.

The Empire of the mountains and caverns had felt the tremors in the earth and seen ancient cairns topple into the great canyon. They had come, on foot and on horseback, in wagon and litter, to the Deephall to petition their Empress. As the earth trembled around them they cried out in rage, and nothing could dissuade them from their belief of the conspiracy between the sea- and plains-dwellers.

In the Empire of the plains, fields and plateaus and gentle hills and valleys writhed. Lush grasses yellowed and ancient trees toppled. In anguish they flocked to the Tree and beneath its time-wrinkled boughs they petitioned for an end to the treachery of their neighbours. Reports from all provinces agreed - sea- and stone-spies had poisoned their lands.

"So war it must be," the Empress of Stones repeated when each had relayed the situation in her lands. "Our beloved peoples cannot see beyond their fear of the neighbours they do not know. And so they will kill each other, or die trying."
The Empress of Flowers wept quietly. She knew well the dying of each thing in its season, and the cycle of new life nourished by each death. There was no beauty in war, though, and in her mind she saw the plains-grasses stained red with the blood of her people.
"But what is the true cause?" the Empress of Oceans asked. Her voice was as soft as the tide, and as moving. Her sister's tears dried at once and the Empress of Stones' frown deepened. "The changing tides, the quaking earth, the dying fields... I suspect a great darkness, sisters, that has gone unnoticed within one of our own borders."

Nightrun

For almost a week Eleanor did everything she could to forget about Tobias Gorse and his impertinent kiss. Each night, though, she dreamed of him and in spite of herself woke each morning remembering the feeling of his lips against hers. Finally, on a night that was wild and windy and threatening rain, she could resist no longer. She tiptoed on stockinged feet to the side door and opened it with held breath - if it should creak her father or one of the staff would be wakened. Eleanor couldn't begin to think of an excuse plausible enough as to explain why she was sneaking outside on such a stormy night.
But the door was silent, and once outside Eleanor shoved her feet into her boots and began to run. She had never ventured closer to the Gorse manor than the water barrel where she had last seen Tobias, but in her dreams she'd been there a dozen times, and she moved through the darkness without fear of losing herself in the woods. A distant dog barked and small creatures made rustling sounds in the undergrowth. The moon peeked through the shredded clouds then was hidden again; the wind pulled her hair free of its nighttime braid and twisted the skirt of her nightgown until she almost tripped. There was no time for decorum, though, and so Eleanor lifted her skirts up to her knees, at once aware of how horrified her father would be if he found out and exhilerated by her own reckless defiance. She felt a sense of urgency as she ran that only seemed to increase the further she got, and she wasn't quite sure if the anxiety lay in what she would find at Gorse Manor or with her growing certainty that she was being watched.
When she passed the water barrel, the water within glinting in a sudden burst of moonlight, she paused, panting, to catch her breath. She could see the outline of the great house and a square of light that was a downstairs window. Quietly, Eleanor moved toward the window, mesmerised by the scene within.

Tobias sat in a deep and threadbare easy chair, a hugely thick book open on his lap. Much of his hair had fallen from its ponytail and hung down around his face, hiding his expression. Before Eleanor knew what she was doing her face was pressed up against the glass. Moths tapped the window around her head but she ignored them, too intent on Tobias to care. She couldn't work out what was so magnetic about him - perhaps it was only his boldness, or the strange claims he made, or that the way he had spoken to her had made it sound as if there was something special about her. All her life Eleanor had been certain of how ordinary she was. Until now.
Later she could not say which happened first, but she let out a tiny gasp and Tobias looked up. For a moment she was frozen with her nose flattened against the window pane and then, as he half-stood, she realised the ridiculousness of her situation. Hitching her skirt up again she turned and ran, hoping to disappear into the trees but knowing her pale skin and white nightgown would all but glow in the moonlight shadows.
She almost made it as far as the barrel before he caught her and as his hand closed around her arm Eleanor wondered how he could have moved so quickly.

"What are you doing out here?" he hissed. "At this hour? In the middle of the night?"
Frustrated tears threatened to spill onto her cheeks and she wished she'd a least worn a shawl. She was shamefully underdressed and when he father found out... Eleanor had never been in such serious trouble before and had never expected to be.
"Let me go," she replied. He did not.
"No," he said, looking around with something very close to fear, "no, I will not send you alone through these woods again tonight. Come inside and we'll discuss this properly."
Eleanor shook her head but she wasn't strong enough to pull free and so she allowed herself to be drawn inside his house and into the parlour.
"Wait here a moment," he ordered, "and don't think I won't notice if you try to leave before I come back."
From the look in his eyes she knew he meant what he said. She sat, folding her arms sulkily across her chest.