Children's Book

Wren found the door on the morning of the last day of summer, which was also the day before the first day of school, which was also the day she had decided she was too old to go looking for things in the meadow behind the house. It was therefore fortunate that she happened to be in the meadow anyway, for reasons entirely unrelated to looking for things.

The door was no taller than her knee. It was set into the roots of the old oak tree at the edge of the stream, and it had a round brass handle worn smooth in the middle, as though many small hands had turned it many times before hers. There was no lock. There was no keyhole. There was just the door, and the handle, and the sound of something on the other side that was not wind and not water and not any animal she could name.

She sat down in the grass and studied it for a long time, the way her father had taught her to study problems she did not immediately understand. Then she reached out, turned the handle, and pushed.

On the other side of the door was a corridor made of light — not a beam of light, but light that had been folded and stacked the way her mother folded tablecloths, into neat repeating layers. Wren walked along it carefully, keeping her arms close, because the walls looked delicate in the way that bubbles looked delicate, and she did not want to find out what happened if she put her finger through.

At the end of the corridor was a room the size of a small library. The walls were covered in maps — not maps of places she recognised, but maps of places that looked as though they wanted to be recognised, with mountains in familiar shapes and coastlines that almost matched something she had seen in an atlas. In the centre of the room was a table, and on the table was a map that was blank in one corner. The blank corner had a label: HERE.

Beneath the table was a small box, and in the box was a pen, and beside the pen was a note in careful handwriting: This map belongs to whoever completes it. The places you haven't been yet are waiting to be discovered. You'll need the pen.

The Lantern Keeper was shorter than Wren had expected for someone who kept the lights of an entire world. She was also considerably older, with the kind of wrinkles that suggested she had spent a great deal of time squinting at things in bright light and a great deal of time smiling. She was sitting beside a workbench covered in lanterns of every size and colour, and she did not look up when Wren came in.

"Sit," she said. "Don't touch anything that's lit. The ones that aren't lit are fine." She held a small lantern up to what appeared to be nothing at all and peered through its glass. "You've been completing the map," she added. It wasn't a question.

"A bit," Wren admitted. She had added three coves and a forest she had found by accident while looking for the corridor home. "Is that allowed?" The Lantern Keeper put the lantern down and looked at Wren with the considering look of someone reassessing a situation. "Allowed is the wrong word entirely. You couldn't have opened the door if you were only a visitor." She gestured at the maps on the wall. "You're a Keeper. Or you will be. The question is whether you want to be."