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you think. My feelings won’t be hurt if you decide you aren’t into it.” She smiled again. “But maybe you wound up with it for a reason.”
    â€œLike what?”
    She shrugged. “Don’t know. Read it, then you tell me. I think you’ll at least like the way it starts.”
    Milo looked down at the story Georgie had picked out and skimmed the first line.
There was a city that could not be mapped, and inside it a house that could not be
drawn.
    Before he realized it, he’d read the whole page. He looked up to find Georgie Moselle grinning at him. “Good stuff, right?”
    â€œMaybe.” He set the book aside just long enough to go into the kitchen and refill his cup of hot chocolate. Then he hunkered down in one of his favorite places to go when there were guests in the house: a high-backed loveseat facing one of the huge bow windows that overlooked the grounds beyond the front porch. When he sat there, the back of the seat made a sort of wall that separated him from whatever was going on in the rooms behind him and provided just a little bit of privacy. Curled into one corner, he started reading, this time from the beginning of the book.
    The rain had not stopped for a week, and the roads that led to the inn were little better than rivers of muck. This, at least, is what Captain Frost said when he tramped indoors, coated in the yellow mud peculiar to that part of the city and hollering for his breakfast. The rest of the guests sighed. Perhaps today, they had thought. Perhaps today, their unnatural captivity would end. But the bellowing man calling for eggs and burnt toast meant that, for another day at least, fifteen people would remain prisoners of the river Skidwrack, and the new rivers that had once been roads, and the rain.
    No wonder Georgie had thought he might like it. Substitute
snow
for
rain
and subtract a few people and the author might’ve been writing about Greenglass House. In the book, however, one of the guests, a man named Phin, suggested that they pass the time by telling stories.
    â€œIn more civilized places, when travelers find themselves sharing a fire and a bottle of wine, they sometimes choose to share something of themselves, too,” Phin told them. “And then, wonder of wonders—no strangers remain. Only companions, sharing a hearth and a bottle.”
    The wind and rain rattled the windowpanes as the folks gathered in the parlor looked from one to the next: the young girl in her embroidered silk stole; the twin gentlemen with the tattooed faces; the gaunt woman with her nervous gloved hands constantly moving; the other woman, gaunter still and hidden beneath two layers of voluminous shawls, whose red-brown skin showed in small flashes when her wraps did not quite move along with her.
    â€œIf you will listen,” Phin said, swirling his glass, “I will tell the first tale. Then perhaps, if you find it worth the trade, you will give me one of yours. Listen.”
    The guests in the book agreed, of course, and in the next chapter Phin told the story of the Game of Maps.
There was a city that could not be mapped, and inside it a house that could not be
drawn.
    Three stories later, the door flew open and a snow-covered Mrs. Pine tramped in, followed by more snow-people: Mrs. Caraway and her daughter Lizzie. Milo hunkered deeper into the loveseat and pretended to be so absorbed in his reading that he didn’t notice them as they piled brown paper bags full of groceries on the dining room table and started peeling off coats and boots. He glanced at a little clock on the side table next to the loveseat: it was nearly midnight. The couch where Georgie Moselle had been sitting was empty. Sometime in the past hour and a half, while Milo had been reading about the Unmappable House and the Maker of Reliquaries, she had disappeared. Milo had been so absorbed in the stories he hadn’t heard her going up to bed or his mother coming in