Wren padded across the hall to take down her coat from the rack by the front door, and did not spare a glance or a thought for the prints on the walls or the precious bits of ancient food processors and telephones in the glass-fronted display case. She had grown up with all this stuff, and it bored her. This past year, the whole house had begun to feel too small, as if she had outgrown it. The familiar smells of dust and wood polish and Dad’s books were comforting, but somehow stifling too. She was fifteen years old, and her life pinched her like an ill-fitting shoe.

She closed the door behind her as quietly as she could and hurried along Dog Star Court. Mist hung like smoke over the Dead Hills, and Wren’s breath came out as mist too. It was only early September, but she could already smell winter in the night air.

The moon was low but the stars were bright, and overhead the Aurora was shimmering. At the heart of the city, the rusty spires of the Winter Palace towered black against the glowing sky, shaggy with ivy. The Winter Palace had been home to Anchorage’s rulers once, but the only person who lived there now was Miss Freya, who had been the city’s last margravine and was now its schoolteacher. On every winter weekday since her fifth birthday, Wren had gone to the schoolroom on the ground floor of the palace to listen to Miss Freya explaining about geography and logarithms and Municipal Darwinism and a lot of other things that would probably never be any use to her at all. It had bored her at the time, but now that she was fifteen and too old for school, she missed it horribly. She would never sit in the dear old schoolroom again, unless she did as Miss Freya had asked and went back to help teach the younger children.

Miss Freya had made that offer weeks ago, and she would need an answer soon, for once the harvests were in, the children of Anchorage would be going back to their lessons. But Wren didn’t know if she wanted to be Miss Freya’s assistant or not. She didn’t even want to think about it. Not tonight.