Excerpt: The Quidnunx (This Is How We Ediiiiiit) (Patreon)

What am I working on this month? Literally the thirteenth version of the first third of this damn middle grade novel, which you read an old first chapter of months ago. Figuring out how to start this thing has eaten me fully alive and I hate everything, but I think I have it now. I hope so anyway. So this is the new beginning, and fuck me but I don't even think the protagonist has the same name as when you guys last clapped eyes on it. But it's due so soon so this is gonna have to move on from where it's been stuck since I was pregnant I MAY BE HAVING A LOT OF SELF DOUBT ISSUES RIGHT NOW.

Anyway. Here's hoping! And here's a big fat chunk of boy-Persephone story for you to gnaw on.

***

First Things First

I am going to tell you a story. It’s a rather strange, wild, grand story. But I know you don’t mind any sort of thing being grand or strange or wild, so long as it is also exciting, since you are so grand and strange and wild yourself. That is why I have chosen this story specially for you, and why I have chosen you specially for this story. When I woke up this morning, I did not even take the time to pour my tea. I knew that you were out there, even if you didn’t know it, waiting for this exact story to find you at this exact moment. There is no time at all to waste, even for tea, when a story has found its person.

Let us settle in together now, in the soft, small dark of the Beginning. 

I am so glad we have found each other. It was a near thing, there being so many other books in the shop you or your uncle or your mother or Father Christmas might have chosen. The story was very worried you might miss each other, that it would end up in the hands of the wrong sort, who wouldn’t take good care of it the way you will.

No one else would understand it as well as you. 

No one else would be brave enough to listen to the scary bits without hiding behind the bed.

No one else would keep it secret.

And it must be kept secret. We have made a bargain, you and I. It started when you opened the front cover of this book and it will never end, not even when you have closed the back cover. No take-backs. We are conspirators, you and I. Once you’ve heard it all, from top to bottom, down to the last scrap of fur and copper scale, you will protect the secret at the heart of this story as I have. You must tell it only to others like you, who can be trusted.

I shall have to insist on a promise. If you do not promise, you must not turn the page. You must put this book away and never look at it again. I’m afraid I am quite serious. I can’t take the risk. 

Not on my account, of course. I’m in no danger. And you will most probably be all right. It’s them. 

Raise your hand and repeat after me. 

No, no, that won’t do. 

You must say it out loud, no matter how silly it makes you feel. I shall wait until I see your hand. I have nothing but time, you know. Grown-ups, too. No one is excused. If you don’t say the words, I must ask you to close this book at once and put it away at the bottom of your closet and go read something nice and breezy with no magic or secrets or monsters or dark, hungry woods in it.

Are you still here? Have the others gone? Very good. It’s just us.

Now say:

I, (say your name), do very sincerely and vigorously swear that I, being a friend to all things wild and fierce, shall never tell anyone what I know about the Quidnunx, unless I am one hundred percent completely and cross-my-heart certain that they are like me, the very best sort of person. The kind of person who will stand up with me when the winds come. Who always looks up at the moon at night and not only straight ahead of them. Who cannot help but let the dog in the back door when it is cold, even though they were specifically told not to several times. The rare and special type of person who can be trusted to keep the promise also. Yours very truly (say your name again).

There. It’s done. I knew I chose the right human being for this story, out of all the millions and billions. Now we will be linked forever, just like the village and the woods, for that is one of the things that secrets do best. I am so very glad we met.

Let’s begin.

Second Things Second

Let me warn you right now: this is a fairy tale. Now, now, no groaning. You are not too grown-up for fairy tales. Nobody is. The kind of people who think fairy tales are frilly or silly or simple are the ones most likely to be eaten by a witch before next weekend.

Now, the fairy tales you’ve read before probably all began with once upon a time, and then you were very quickly expected to care a great deal about a total stranger with a funny name and an interesting family situation. 

But this is a different kind of fairy tale. It hasn’t got any fairies in it, for one thing. And for another, this fairy tale thinks it’s rather rude of those other stories to assume you’d get all your feelings out for Snow White when all you really knew about her was that she had black hair and red lips. 

As if everybody hasn’t got more or less red lips. 

When you meet a person in the real world, somebody says Oh, how lovely to see you both! So-and-so, this is so-and-so, we know each other from work. I’ve been just dying to get you two together, do sit down!

Then you decide for yourself whether or not they seem a good sort or a rotten old walnut of a person. You explore whether you love the same things they love and hate the same things they hate and whether you have one lonely threadbare feeling in the back of your heart to spare for what happens to them. 

Although it’s not completely unheard of, people don’t often make friends on the basis of hair color these days.

Because that’s just what the hero of a story is. A new friend. Someone kind and good and a little bit wise. Or if not wise, at least clever. Or if not wise or clever, at least a bit of fun. Someone you’d like to go on adventures with. Someone with a trick or two up their sleeve. Someone who can hold up their end of the conversation and never make you feel silly or stupid or small. Someone who thinks you’re rather wonderful yourself. And even if they do talk about themselves a little too much and forget to ask you about your day, well, you forgive them, because they are so nice otherwise and everyone has flaws. You’ve got to spend quite a bit of time together, after all.

Well, this fairy tale likes you very much, and wants you to like it back. It is a bit shy, and a bit introverted, and it does so desperately hope you will get your feelings out for the boy at the center of it. It has, therefore, asked me to introduce you properly.

Oh, how lovely to see you both! Everyone, this is Osmo Unknown. We know each other from work. I’ve been just dying to get you two together. Do sit down.

Osmo is thirteen years old and left-handed. He lives in a village called Littlebridge, on the edge of a wild and tangled forest. He has bright hazel eyes, the color of old pages and old leaves. He is tall and thin for his age, with long clever fingers. The boys in school think him strange and the girls don’t think about him at all. The things he loves best in the world were hot baked apples, books, his mother, his sister Oona, his old patchwork coat, anything colored black or grey or both, his pocketknife, the stars at night, knowing just a little bit more than other people about something, games of every sort, but particularly chess, and the wild tangled forest on the edge of town. He hates most of the things his father says, being told what to do, people who take more than their fair share, stories with no magic in them, onions, black sausage, anything stupid with fists, which included most of the boys at his school, and, if he’s being honest, more or less all of the village called Littlebridge.

But Osmo loves a lot more things than he hates.

Osmo Unknown keeps little hopes, because he knows big hopes might get so big they could crush him. He hopes to have enough to eat. He hopes to see the world outside Littlebridge. And he hopes, eventually, with a lot of hard work, to find one real friend.

The story admits that Osmo Unknown is a funny name. It’s not really terribly different from Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or Prince Charming. And you’re absolutely right, he does live on the edge of a mysterious, dangerous forest. Jsut the same as Hansel and Gretel and Vasilisa the Brave and Little Red Riding Hood. And yes, we did just look down our nose a bit at all of those nice people. The trouble is, we are already breaking the rules of fairy tales fresh out of the gate, and no one story is allowed to break all of them at once. Besides, he has a good enough reason to be called such an odd thing. And anyway, odd things are the best kinds of things there are.

If it helps at all, he does have black hair. And red lips.

Chapter One: The Wild and the Mild

Osmo Unknown had always lived in Littlebridge, and nothing interesting had ever happened to him there. 

He was born, neither rich nor poor, in a little white four-room cottage on the north side of the Fourpenny River, almost at the furthest edge of town. He thought he would most likely die an old man with a white beard, neither rich nor poor, in a little four-room cottage on the north side of the Fourpenny River. 

He was quite, quite wrong about that.

Littlebridge was just precisely the kind of place you think of when someone says the word village. The bell tower in the center of town. The painted houses with straw and clover roofs and criss-crossed windows. The schoolhouse and the green-and-brown river full of trout and eels and the tavern with golden, welcoming light in the windows even at eight in the morning. The bits of roof-gargoyle and marble rose-leaves from an age when folk took a bit more care with architecture. Yes, the stone shops and mills and churches were a bit old and crumbling, but they crumbled in a way that made them look interesting, somehow more beautiful than if they’d been smart and new. The streets wound narrowly up the heights and down the dells, full of little nooks and hiding places. All nestled in a pretty valley with good, steady rain and strong, reliable sun, sandwiched between the steep blue mountains on one side and a deep, thorny forest on the other. 

And of course, there was no shortage of mysterious legends no one believed in anymore and stern rules everyone broke when they were young and insisted on when they got old. 

What sorts of rules? Oh, just the usual kind. Nothing out of the ordinary. 

Don’t go out alone after sundown and never eat anything that talks and stay out of the woods no matter what, this means you. 

If you wanted to lay a trap for catching the sort of quiet people who not only didn’t want to rock the boat, but who had never met a boat already rocking that they didn’t want to haul in and chop up for firewood to last the winter, Littlebridge would have done the job perfectly.

In fact, there was only one unusual thing in the whole town. Only one thing you wouldn’t find in any other town of the same size and age and climate: where the crossroads met in the center of town rose a great red granite pillar. On the very tip-top of the pillar, a silver skull had looked down on everyone for a number of centuries now. The skull was huge. The skull was not human. The skull was almost like an elephant’s head, and something like a tyrannosaurus’s. But it was not not an elephant, either. And it was most certainly not a tyrannosaurus rex.

No one paid it any more attention than they gave to the belltower or the shoe shop.

Osmo Unknown knew every street and side-road of his home. Every wishing well, every stony building and sturdy roof. Good old Dapplegrim Square with Soothfaste Church on one side and the Cruste and Cheddar Tavern on the other. Old St. Whylom’s School and the Afyngred Agricultural Hall and Bonefire Park, the Katja Kvass Memorial Fountain bubbling away pleasantly on the long grass, clear water weeping from a pretty young woman’s pale stone eyes and spilling from the wound in her marble heart into a great wide pool. The little Kalevala Opera House that had never put on an opera in all its life as a house and all the fine shops with real glass windows lining Yclept Closeway and the big wide half-burnt steps of Bodeworde’s Armory, which had gone up in a blaze a hundred and fifty years before. They’d kept the stairs as a reminder never to get careless with gunpowder again.

Osmo knew them all.

He knew exactly what color every leaf on every tree would turn in the autumn. He knew which birds would stay for the winter and which would flee the snow. He knew the exact day that snow falling on the broad forehead of the old silver skull would turn to spring rain. He knew far more local secrets and gossip than a boy of thirteen should, for he had a tremendous talent for listening. (You might not think listening is a talent, but try it instead of talking for a whole day and you will see it is harder than juggling and checkers put together.) 

The boy with the hazel eyes had never gotten lost, not once, not in his whole life. He couldn’t get lost in Littlebridge any more than you can get lost in your own body. 

Osmo Unknown had a very little inheritance when he first arrived in this world: the little white four-room cottage, a small slice of land that obediently produced onions in the spring, oats in the summer and olives in the fall, two brindled goats, seven black chickens, a calico mousing cat called Nono, four apple trees and a peach one, his mother’s gun, his father’s cart, a massive tangled patch of unkillable wild mint and green garlic in the garden, and a famous name. He was eleven months old when his first sister turned up and put a claim on the cat, the mint, one goat, and the peach tree. They kept coming pretty regularly after that. Girl after girl, neither pretty nor plain, but all clever as crows. 

By the time he was thirteen, and the story of his life finally decided to get up and milk the cow in the morning, Osmo was down to only the gun and the name.

The famous name didn’t do him much good at all. The first person to settle down in the cozy valley that became Littlebridge centuries ago did it because he owed a baron back home quite a lot of money and the prospect of working off his debt bored him half to tears. He’d set off, called himself Mr. Unknown, and the history books didn’t ask questions. By the time Osmo was born, no one remembered much about him at all except the bit about the baron. Not that it mattered. It seemed the original Mr. Unknown hadn’t known a thing about compound interest except to avoid paying any. There wasn’t much advantage to being distantly related to a founding father when that father hadn’t founded much more than a good place to hide. Anyway, after so many centuries of being a village, Littlebridge was just shy of becoming a proper town, and nearly everyone had an interesting grandfather or two. 

That left the gun.

Osmo felt very shy of his mother’s gun. He always had. It was big and heavy and he knew very well its purpose was death. Osmo’s mother was a hunter. A very good one. Possibly the best there ever had been in the history of Littlebridge. She could see in the dark better than Nono the cat and she never put that rifle against her shoulder without something far off in the shadows quietly falling to the earth with barely a cry. The gun was long and lovely, with a huge bell-shaped barrel on one end and a polished red wood stock on the other. In between, Tilly Unknown had braided, strung, burnt, and carved all manner of charms and totems to keep her safe in the wood and her family safe at home, despite there being no such thing as magic, not really, not the way there was such a thing as fresh eggs or school exams or mint that always comes back no matter how much you rip out of the ground. 

Although, Osmo had to admit, despite the charms and her skill, there had been less meat on the table in recent years than there used to be. No wild boar sandwiches or roast pheasant or beaver stew for years. No bear meatloaf or songbird pies. Tilly Unknown hadn’t even shot a deer since Osmo’s tenth birthday. It was only rabbits and minks now, and those few and far between. He’d asked his mother about it once, but she just stayed quiet for a long time until he changed the subject out of sheer awkwardness.

The hunters knew something, Osmo was sure of it. But you couldn’t make a hunter tell you the color of their own eyes unless they already wanted you to know it.

Everyone assumed Osmo would follow his mother into the family business, make a good marriage, and keep the little house of Unknown industry chugging along neatly. Tilly hunted deer and rabbits. The older girls, Milja and Minna, made cheese and sweets from the goats’ milk. The younger girls, Klara and Lizbel and Sanna, made blood sausages from the deer and scallion cakes from the spring onions. Osmo and Oona, only eleven months apart, spun an excellent thread from the goats hair and brewed black beer from the oats. Everyone said Unknown’s Goodest Stout was the best thing for a hard day’s work. Osmo wouldn’t have known. He and Oona weren’t allowed to have any themselves yet, not even to test the batch. And then Mads Unknown would take his cart to Dapplegrim Square every day to sell the pelts and the sausages and the cheese and the milk sweets and the scallion cakes and the beer and the thread and the apples and the peaches to anyone with good coin or a good trade. 

The family moved through the years this way as smoothly as a sled through the snow.

So there it was. His whole life. Laid very tidily in his lap, tied in a bow with goat-thread and wild stubborn, stupid mint and miles and miles of expectations. 

Osmo hated it.

He hated knowing every street and side-road. He hated knowing that the sugar maples in front of Mittu Grumm’s Toy and Shoe Shop would always go bright scarlet by the third of October. He hated being absolutely certain that the birches behind Hanna Gudgeon’s Laundry-for-Everyone wouldn’t turn pale gold until the first of November. He hated the ravens that stayed and the sparrows that had somewhere better to be, somewhere he could never go. He hated how easy it was to know anything about anyone because all they ever did was wait around for their chance to talk about themselves. He hated his dumb ancestor who couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a good fake name for the family. He hated onions and he hated blood sausage and he hated the smell of goat hair and the way it always left tiny little cuts in your fingertips when you spun it no matter how soft it might seem. On days when he felt particularly angry at the shape of everything, he even hated the Whaleskin Mountains for keeping him penned in with their useless, dopey sheer glittering jagged cliffs.

Osmo hated being the oldest because he always had to be good and set an example and he hated being the only boy because it meant he always stuck out. If Milja snuck off to play with turtles in the river shallows, no one cared. If Oona felt like slipping through the broken door in the back of the Forgaf Belltower and climbing up to the top to read alone, no one noticed. Not with five other brown-haired girls running in the house and yelling over each other about various delights and injustices. But if Osmo wanted to leave off his chores early to go down to Bonefire Park and play chess with old Mrs. Brownbread? Everyone knew it before he got past the mint patch in the garden. 

And he hated, deep down in his bones, that he’d never been lost, not one minute in his life, that he never would be lost, not in Littlebridge, not in his little white four-room cottage, not anywhere. Of course there were stories of a much more interesting Littlebridge, long ago when magic and monsters and princesses and curses were as common as tea in the afternoon. But they seemed to have run right out of that sort of thing. Everything in Osmo’s world was already mapped out to the very edges of the page. The village ran like a perfect brass watch. 

All he wanted was to wake up one day and find the hands snapped off and the bell ringing out twenty-five o’clock. 

But most of all, Osmo Unknown absolutely, thoroughly loathed the entire idea of becoming a hunter when he grew up. It took years of study, for one thing. There were rules upon rules upon ancient and unbreakable rules about what you could and couldn’t do in the forest. A hunter had to memorize each and every one of them. Monks and doctors had to study less than hunters. 

But it wasn’t that, really. Osmo liked books. Books were friends. Books never judged you or called you names or bossed you around. No matter how bad things got, there was always a book about how to fix it. Somewhere, somehow, if you could find it. And that book would never let you down like a person might. Osmo loved books. He loved knowing things. He preferred to know the most about things, if he could manage it. The studying part would’ve been all right if not for the rest of it.

Osmo just didn’t want to kill anything. He didn’t want to be good at using that beautiful gun. He didn’t want to know how to cut up pelts and gut a deer and portion out the meat so that it could be made into pies and kebabs and stews and roasts. He didn’t want to know how much blood was in a moose. He didn’t want animals to run from him the moment they heard his footsteps. He didn’t want to be the terror that little rabbits feared. 

He didn’t want his job to be hurting things. 

But he couldn’t tell anyone how he felt, and Osmo hated that, too. Hunting was a noble profession. Any family would be proud to have one at the holiday table. He knew he was supposed to be strong and brave. But he didn’t see what was so strong and brave about it. Osmo wasn’t a fool, he knew everyone had to eat to live, and killing a single deer could mean safety and health for a whole winter. But he just didn’t see why it had to be him. 

Come on now, be a man, his father always said. In their house, Be a Man was a complete argument. Once Mads said it, the conversation was over, no matter how Osmo boiled with the unfairness of it, and the obvious point that the only hunter in the house his mother, so what did being a man have to do with anything? 

The only solitary good thing about hunters was that they were allowed to go into the Talking Woods. That had always been the name of the vast, gnarled forest on the eastern border of the valley, even though trees don’t talk and neither do deer or rabbits. But whales never lived in the Whaleskin Mountains either, so Osmo figured that the ancient people who put names to everything were just a bit insane, as a group.

Everyone else was forbidden to cross the treeline. Even hunters were only allowed so far. When he was little, Osmo’s mother let him wait for her every day, just inside the first clusters of maples and junipers. He used to stare into the shadows and his soul filled up with the rich, new smell of sap. A forest was like an ocean. It had a beach-head, on top of the sheer blue cliffs where the meadow started to turn into stones and larches. It had tidepools, little clusters of elms and oaks and wild roses in the long grass a ways out from the huge, dark pine wall. It had shallows, when you first left the world for the woods, and the sunlight was still quite bright, the firs and spruces spaced far enough apart that yellow and purple wildflowers could grow underneath. And humans of any profession were only allowed in the shallows. The big, deep, rolling waves of forest that flowed on darkly into the mountains were off limits. 

To everyone. Forever.

And it was all because of them. Everyone knew what would happen if you went too far into the woods. Something lived in the deep trees. Something with a funny name, like Osmo’s. Something no one had seen in living memory, but everyone dreamed of on their worst nights, tossing and turning in their beds as though it was possible to escape. Something with terrible teeth that lived in the dark.

The Quidnunx.

Because a forest was like an ocean. 

And every ocean has sharks.

Each to their own was best for all, agreed the old folk from the mansions to the marshes. The woods were very wild and the town was very mild. The wild and the mild of this world do not get along so well, and nobody in Littlebridge was the sort of person to go testing the rules.

Except one boy with very bright, very wide hazel eyes and long shaggy dark hair and no friends to speak of.

Every inch of the forest the law let him explore was as precious as a whole emerald to his heart. He loved the woods like he loved his mother. And he feared it a little, as he feared his father. He didn’t love it just because it was forbidden. Well, not just because it was forbidden. He didn’t love it because it was full of food and things that were challenging and interesting to kill. He didn’t love it because it was dangerous, and therefore exciting. He loved it because it was secret and quiet. He loved it because no one could find him there if he didn’t want them to. He loved it because it was lonely, like him. He loved it because it was never the same twice. You couldn’t know a forest like you could know a village. As soon as you thought you did, it would change on you. The trees that went orange before the harvest last year hung onto their green almost till Christmas this year, and the sound you heard might be a hedgehog or a squirrel, but it might just as easily be something…else.

Osmo Unknown lived and breathed and thirsted for the else.

But until he turned thirteen, all he ever found in the shadows were hedgehogs and squirrels and the occasional bright red October leaf, swirling down from a grey, cold sky.