Gallant

by V.E. Schwab

To those who go looking for doors, are brave enough to open the ones they find, and sometimes bold enough to make their own.

Home is a choice. Those four words sit alone on a page in her mother’s book, surrounded by so much white space they feel like a riddle. In truth, everything her mother wrote feels like a riddle, waiting to be solved.

How to exist in a world that does not want you. How to be a ghost in someone else’s home.

even a grim tombstone of a place is better than the street.

bottle of brandy sloshes in the top drawer, and beneath that, Olivia finds a tin of cookies, iced with sugar, and a paper bag of clementines, bright as tiny sunsets. She

That is the trick with the ghouls. They want you to look, but they can’t stand being seen.

Her mother spoke of it, the way he seemed to wane as her belly waxed, some wasting sickness that stole him weeks before Olivia was born. And when he died, her mother fell. She broke. Her lovely words went jagged, the writing came apart.

My heart is ash and did you know ash holds its shape until you touch it

It is a narrow room. The walls are lined with books, which would be welcoming if they were stories of magic or pirates or thieves. Instead, thick spines bear titles like The Lady’s Book of Etiquette and Pilgrim’s Progress, and a full shelf of encyclopedias that as far as she knows have only been used to enforce good posture.

peels the skin from the words.

I am so happy. I am so scared. The two, it turns out, can walk together, hand in hand.

Free—a small word for such a magnificent thing.

She has never had a family, and now she has a tree.

The joy she’d felt at those first ringing notes. The thrill of commanding such sound. The thunder of the low keys, the kettle whistle of the high. Each and every one its own mood, its own message, a language played out in C and G and E.

“A house like this has too much history, and history always brings its share of ghosts.

The kind that reach through the folds of sleep and into your bed. The kind that can caress your cheek or drag you down into the dark.

There is no rest in sleep. These dreams will be the death of me.

But you can’t dream words onto paper. So here. Last night, I went beyond the wall. And I met Death.

But what is the difference between a shadow and a shade? Is it a riddle or a code?

Perhaps you are haunting me. What a comforting thought. Maybe it’s you in the darkness. I swear I’ve seen it move.

Home is a choice.

I feel like a pane of glass, shot through with cracks and every night the wind is buffeting. The splinters spread, the glass groans under the weight. It will break. I will break.

It is like watching clouds, trying to spot the shapes as they drift past, each one something and nothing at the same time, a promise of a picture more than the picture itself,

Overhead, the dusk has somehow dropped away, the sky an inky black. There is no moon. No stars. And yet, it is not empty. No, it is like a lake, a vast expanse of dark water. The kind of dark that tricks the eye. Makes you see things where there are none. Or miss things when they are there. The dark that lives in the spaces you know you should not look, lest you catch sight of other eyes, staring back.

Just . . . bored.

When people see tears, they stop listening to your hands or your words or anything else you have to say. And it doesn’t matter if the tears are angry or sad, frightened or frustrated. All they see is a girl crying.

Tired can be a kind of sick, Edgar said, if it lasts long enough.

But traps are like locks. They can be picked. They can be opened. A trap is only a trap if you get caught.

She doesn’t draw the blade, isn’t sure what good it will do against the monster in the dark, but it is enough to know that it is there.

“They say there is love in letting go,”

puppets cannot live without their strings.