The girl, at least, seemed to believe him. Her eyes grew wide. “Don’t your parents miss you?”
Now it was Will’s turn to squirm. “I don’t—er—I don’t have any parents. I’m an orphan.”
“I’m sorry,” the girl said. She was quiet for a moment. “I’m an orphan too. Both of my parents are dead.”
“Oh,” Will said. “I’m sorry.”
“My father is on the Other Side now,” the girl said. “That’s why we’re heading west. So we can bring his ashes back to the willow tree, and he can rest, and go Beyond.” She gestured to the box in her lap.
“I see,” Will said, even though he didn’t, exactly. The girl was weirder than he’d imagined she would be. But he wasn’t sure he minded.
“Perhaps your parents are on the Other Side too.”
“Perhaps,” Will said doubtfully. He had never given it much thought. They had died when he was only a newborn, during an influenza outbreak, and he had no memories of them.
Suddenly the girl began to laugh. “Two homeless orphans,” she said, “and two ghosts. We make a funny team, don’t we?”
Will said, “I guess so.”
Po grumbled, “Some team.”
Bundle went, Mwark.
The girl put out her small, pale hand. “I’m Liesl,” she said.
Will’s heart gave another jump. Liesl. All this time he had desperately wanted to know her name, and there it was, and as soon as he knew it, he saw it fitted her exactly. “I’m William,” he said. “But you can call me Will.”
He took her hand, and they smiled at each other across the dark, as the cart carrying coffins and four stowaways rattled west.
Part III
Reversals & Reunions
Chapter Nineteen
IT HAD BEEN A VERY DIFFICULT YEAR FOR MRS. Snout, owner of Snout’s Inn and Restaurant, which stood on Crooked Street in Gainsville. Gainsville was the last populated town for forty-seven miles: After Gainsville, the road wound up through the ruddy hills, and then down again, and all around there was nothing but fields and fields and the occasional farmhouse.
For this reason, Snout’s Inn and Restaurant had never been particularly successful. There simply weren’t enough travelers on the road: only the occasional trapper headed north, or vagrant farmhands looking for work. Still, if a traveler did come to Gainsville, he or she was bound to stop at Snout’s Inn, as there was simply nowhere else to go. And so Mrs. Snout had watered down her stews, and rarely changed the linens, and hired for an assistant a small, rather dull boy who had lost an eye in a mining accident, and wildly underpaid him, and fed her guests scraps of feet and brain instead of nice cuts of meat without their knowledge, and so she had always squeaked by.
But this year had been hard—very, very hard.
That was why she had consented to take on the black-haired man who had shown up on her doorstep earlier in the day, growling that he needed a room and a meal, even though she could tell that he was as crooked as the street the inn was standing on—a robber, no question, and perhaps a murderer, too. But he had offered her two solid silver pieces—very dirty pieces of silver, and no doubt stolen, but money was money—and she had been unable to refuse.
Now she watched him greedily slurping up his third bowl of potato soup, whitish liquid dribbling appallingly down his long and filthy beard, and sighed to herself. There had been a time—long ago, it seemed, when the sun had still shone—when the farms had flourished, and she had hosted at her table good, honest workers, plowmen and reapers and apple pickers and cattle ranchers, and they had drunk her weak wine, and overpaid for it gladly, and laughed long and loud and stayed up to sing songs and tell stories around the fire.
When she heard a soft but insistent knocking at her front door, for a moment she had a wild fantasy that she would open her door to find a whole group of red-faced, smiling men, who would greet her with a great “Hullo, there!” and fill the house with noise and laughter.
She was therefore highly disappointed when she opened the door and saw only a small, shivering girl and a very thin boy with extremely large, and very pink, ears. It had started to rain. Both of the children were soaking wet.
“Excuse me,” the boy said, and Mrs. Snout saw at once he was trying to act brave for the girl’s sake. “We were hoping we might have a room for the night.”
“We’ve come a long way,” the girl said. Her voice was soft and gentle. “And we’re very tired.” And Mrs. Snout saw that she was. The girl’s eyelids kept fluttering as though desperate to close.
“Rooms are a dollar and twenty pence a night,” Mrs. Snout said.
The children exchanged a glance. “We—we have no money,” the boy said, his voice faltering.
“Then I have no rooms,” Mrs. Snout replied, and began to shut the door.