The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

know the Parris family.’
    After a moment Faith realized why the name Parris was familiar. The man she had met in the woods and run from had been called Tom Parris, according to Mrs Vellet. The wounded boy was the right
age to be his son. Perhaps the whole family liked cockling.
    As the doctor’s outdoor clothes were brought, he looked around and frowned, seeming slightly offended. Faith wondered whether he had been expecting her father to emerge and greet him.
    ‘Thank you
so
much for coming out at such an hour!’ Myrtle gave him a charming, vulnerable smile and extended a hand for him to take. Dr Jacklers’s disgruntlement
evaporated like dew in the morning sun.
    Much later, after the household had retired for the night, Faith quietly rose from her bed and donned her dressing gown. She slipped downstairs and peered through the keyhole
of the library door. It showed her little except a bookcase and a patch of floor, but they were both still lamplit. Pressing her ear to the keyhole she could make out the furtive scratch of nib on
paper, occasional mutters and tiny noises that might be made by the shifting of a chair.
    Relief washed over Faith. She had imagined her father sprawled and unmoving, or struggling for breath. Now these images melted away, and instead her mind’s eye saw him still seated at his
desk – alive, conscious and busily writing.
    She curled her hand around the knob, but hesitated, the metal chilling her palm. She could not forget her father’s eerily shifting eyes, the whispering sickness of the room, and the venom
with which he had ordered her out. Instead she crept back upstairs and slipped back into her cooling bed.
    When at last she slept, her mind remained unsettled. She dreamed of scrambling through a cold garden full of frost-furred trees. At its heart she came across her father’s enormous stone
head, jutting above the ground as if he had been buried to the neck. His eyes were yellow-stained glass, and behind them dark shapes shifted, blotting and muting their light. His face was stifled
with moss, but when she tried to claw it off, the stonework came away too.

CHAPTER 7:
A CREEPING FROST
    Faith’s mind was watchful, even while sleeping. The first early-morning movements in the house nudged her from her dreams into a half-wakened state. She could hear a
distant door banging, the slosh of water, the tumble of logs from a woodpile.
    Her outdoor coat wrapped around her nightshirt, Faith slipped downstairs, just in time to see Jeanne walking up to the library with a tea tray.
    ‘It is quite all right, Jeanne,’ said Faith, trying to imitate her mother’s air of confidence. ‘I will take in the tray.’
    Jeanne looked at Faith in surprise, then glanced at the door. Faith could see the older girl’s curiosity unsheathing itself like a cat’s claw.
    ‘Yes, miss.’
    After Jeanne had departed, Faith took up the tray and slipped into the library, which was almost pitch dark. The same cold smell hung in the room, but now with an added sour staleness, like
rotten oranges. Faith set down the tray and hurried over to open the window and shutters, so as to let in the light and clear the air. If the smell was the scent of an opiate, she did not want
anybody else to notice it.
    As daylight seeped into the room, Faith could see that the Reverend was still sitting in his chair, wearing the same clothes as the night before. His body lolled forward on to his desk, and
Faith felt a frisson of panic, until she realized that she could hear him breathing.
    The desk was heaped with open books and scrawled papers. The Reverend’s writing box and travel chest were open, their carefully guarded contents scattered over chairs and even the floor.
On the edge of the bookcase a candle had been left to burn down, so that there was a blackened scar in the shelf above and waxen stalactites trailing below.
    It felt blasphemous seeing him asleep. Even in rest his face had the sedate severity of churchyard