Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [0]
Anne Ursu
Drawings by Erin McGuire
Dedication
For Jordan Brown
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part I
Chapter One - Snowfall
Chapter Two - Fairy Tales
Chapter Three - Spaces
Chapter Four - Pieces
Chapter Five - The Mirror
Chapter Six - Castoffs
Chapter Seven - The Witch
Chapter Eight - Reasons
Chapter Nine - Sleigh Ride
Chapter Ten - Slush
Chapter Eleven - Magical Thinking
Chapter Twelve - Passages
Chapter Thirteen - Splinters
Part II
Chapter Fourteen - Into the Woods
Chapter Fifteen - Skins
Chapter Sixteen - The Birdkeeper
Chapter Seventeen - The Marketplace
Chapter Eighteen - Temptations
Chapter Nineteen - Rose
Chapter Twenty - Matchlight
Chapter Twenty-one - Jack, Prince of Eternity
Chapter Twenty-two - The Snow Queen
Chapter Twenty-three - Puzzles
Chapter Twenty-four - Object Memory
Chapter Twenty-five - Hazel and the Woods
About the Author
Also by Anne Ursu
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
Snowfall
It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems. It was the sort of snow that transforms the world around it into a different kind of place. You know what it’s like—when you wake up to find everything white and soft and quiet, when you run outside and your breath suddenly appears before you in a smoky poof, when you wonder for a moment if the world in which you woke up is not the same one that you went to bed in the night before. Things like that happen, at least in the stories you read. It was the sort of snowfall that, if there were any magic to be had in the world, would make it come out.
And magic did come out.
But not the kind you were expecting.
That morning, Hazel Anderson ran out of her small house in her white socks and green thermal pajamas. She leapt over the threshold of the house onto the front stoop where she stood, ignoring the snow biting at her ankles, to take in the white street. Everything was pristine. No cars had yet left their tracks to sully the road. The small squares of lawn that lay in front of each of the houses like perfectly aligned placemats seemed to stretch beyond the boundaries of their chain-link fences and join together as one great field of white. A thick blanket of snow covered each roof as if to warm and protect the house underneath.
All was quiet. The sun was just beginning to peek out over the horizon. The air smelled crisp and expectant. Snowflakes danced in the awakening sky, touching down softly on Hazel’s long black hair.
Hazel sucked in her breath involuntarily, bringing in a blast of cold.
Something stirred inside her, some urge to plunge into the new white world and see what it had to offer. It was like she’d walked out of a dusty old wardrobe and found Narnia.
Hazel stuck her index finger out into the sky. A snowflake accepted her invitation, and she felt a momentary pinprick of cold on the pad of her bare finger. She gazed at the snowflake, considering its delicate structure. Inside it was another universe, and maybe if she figured out the right way to ask, someone would let her in.
Hazel jumped as her mother’s voice came from behind her. “Come inside,” she said, “you’ll freeze!”
“Look at the snow!” Hazel said, turning to show her glimmering prize.
Her mom nodded from the doorway. “It’s amazing when you can see the patterns like that. Look at it. See the six sides? It’s called hexagonal symmetry. A snowflake is made—”
People were always doing this sort of thing to Hazel. Nobody could accept that she did not want to hear about gaseous balls and layers of atmosphere and refracted light and tiny building blocks of life. The truth of things was always much more mundane than what she could imagine, and she did not understand why people always wanted to replace the marvelous things in her head with this miserable heap of you’re-a-fifth-grader-now facts.
And then Hazel’s mother said something brisk about getting her inside and something funny about someone calling child