0 January Secret Agent #34

TITLE: Sunchild
GENRE: YA Fantasy

“Yarrow, tell me about the sun.”

“Eh?” He looked up from his lap, the unwound strings of his fiddle sprawling like insect antennae into the air. “What for?”

“I want to hear about the way things used to be,” I said. “Before the Darkness.”

He returned to stringing the instrument, his grey brows furrowed. Across the cabin, beside the hearth, my best friend Linden paused in his mending to wave me on.

“ Once upon a time, there was something called the sun,” I prompted.

Yarrow raised one eyebrow. “You start at Gildenbrook in the morning. I think it’s probably time you went home to bed.”

Gildenbrook. My insides deflated. Black lace gowns and high-heeled boots for the rest of my life. A prison sentence.

“Why do I have to go?”

“Because you’re twelve, and that’s what happens when you turn twelve.”

“Linden’s fourteen and he doesn’t have to. I could be a gardener like him.”

Yarrow snorted. “I don’t expect your mother and father would be very pleased with a gardener for a daughter. They want you to become a proper young lady.” He pressed his lips together, as if trying to hide how much he doubted the likelihood of this possibility.

“Doesn’t it matter what I want?”

Once again he looked up from his fiddle, but something in his lined face now seemed a little sad. “No,” he said.

I tried again. “Tell me about the way things used to be, Yarrow.”