“No!” she cried, jerking away from him and flinging herself at the door. “I want out! I want to go home!” She pounded on the iron with fists and forearms. She kicked the door and threw herself against it. The goblin watched all this with a fond forbearance, but when she tried to claw the door open, he intervened.
“Now, now,” he said gently, capturing her wrists and surveying her bruised hands. “Let’s not break off all those pretty nails, my dear. We’ll need at least three for the ceremony.” And arm around her waist, he led the sobbing, stumbling girl away.
Seventy years passed over the land, and they passed underneath it, too. Anguish and grief faded to a dull throb, and finally only the mysteries themselves remained, forgotten by all but a concerned few.
Part I
Starlight
Chapter 1
“It’s so nice to see new faces at Hallow Hill, isn’t it, Prim?”
Gracious and white haired, Celia Whitaker beamed across the dinner table at her great-nieces, and Kate and Emily Winslow smiled shyly back. The girls were grateful to find a smile at the end of their journey. It had been a hard two months. Their father had died suddenly. By scrupulously legal tradition, his house and lands near Coventry now belonged to his nephew, the next male relative, and this man had refused to become their guardian. The Hallow Hill estate belonged to Kate from her late mother, but she had never visited it. It had been rented to another branch of the family for generations. Now Kate and her younger sister were coming home to land and relatives they had never seen. Hugh Roberts, a bachelor cousin of their mother’s, had become their legal guardian, and the two great-aunts, Celia and Prim, had agreed to raise the sisters.