Free Deadweather and Sunrise by Geoff Rodkey Page A

trying to separate what’s actually true from all the wild legends about magic trinkets that don’t exist.”
    “Since when don’t you think it exists?” asked Millicent, scrunching up her nose.
    “Since my thinking’s matured, sweetheart. It’s good fun, but it’s nonsense. A tale for schoolchildren.” He smiled at me again, with a kind look. “I had the impression your father was keen on the subject as well. Now I see it was just a coincidence.”
    “Why don’t we serve dessert?” suggested Mrs. Pembroke.
    “Yes, let’s!” Millicent leaned across the table. “Close your eyes, Egg—you’ll love this.”
    “Precious, he doesn’t need to close his eyes—”
    “Of course he does, Daddy! It’s a birthday surprise! Don’t be stupid.”
    “Millicent,” said her mother, in a tone that gave that one word a whole sentence of meaning:
don’t-call-your-father-stupid-or-there’s-going-to-be-trouble.
    “Mo-ther,” replied Millicent, meaning
I’ll-say-what-I-want-just-try-and-stop-me.
    In my house, there would have been a smacking for that. But Mr. Pembroke just smiled at his daughter like he was amused, while Mrs. Pembroke bunched her eyebrows together but said nothing.
    “Come on, Egg! Be a sport.”
    I squeezed my eyes shut. In a moment, I heard the kitchen door open. Then came footsteps, along with the unmistakable smell of jelly bread. A tray clanked onto the table.
    “All right, then—open them!”
    A steaming loaf of fresh jelly bread lay before me. The words “Happy Birthday, Egg!” were written in white frosting across the top.
    As I stared at it, stunned, the Pembrokes—along with the three servants who were in the room—all cried out, “Happy Birthday!”
    I started to cry.
    It was horribly embarrassing, and from the looks on the Pembrokes’ faces, it was more than a little awkward for them, but I just couldn’t help it. No one had ever been nice to me like that before. And I’d long since learned never to cry over pain orcruelty, but I didn’t know what to do with kindness. I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to cry about it, but the tears just started leaking out and I didn’t know how to stop them.
    Mrs. Pembroke must have gotten the wrong idea, because she got up and came over to kneel beside my chair, her soft hand on my arm.
    “Don’t you worry about a thing,” she said. “Mr. Pembroke is a very resourceful man, and he’s going to do everything in his power to make sure your family comes back safely to you. All right, darling?”
    I nodded. Just the mention of my family did a decent job of stopping the tears.
    “Thank you,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Can we eat this now?”
    I’ll say this for jelly bread: it was worth the thirteen years I’d waited to taste it. And when she saw how much I liked it, Mrs. Pembroke made sure we ate it every night, for the entire time I stayed at Cloud Manor.
    IN THE END, I was there three full weeks—the happiest, most carefree weeks of my life, so different from everything that came before and after that when I look back, they almost seem to have belonged to someone else. I spent the days tagging along after Millicent like a puppy, going from lessons with her tutor to croquet games to horseback rides in the hills below Mount Majestic to long, lazy hours reading in the library.
    The library was my favorite—it was enormous, lined with bookshelves so tall you needed a ladder to reach the upper rows. Early on, I found the Native books Millicent had mentioned—there were a dozen of them, up on a high shelf, and although theywere written mostly in Cartager, there were a few titles in Rovian, like
Savage Tribes and Customs
and
Across the Maw: Cartager Conquests in the New Lands.
I tried to look at them because I thought it might impress Mr. Pembroke if I could discuss one of his interests with him, but the ladder to reach the shelf had gone missing, and no matter how often I asked, the servants never could seem to find it.
    I’m not