Read Liesl & Po for Free Online Page A

Will, who was trying very hard to keep his teeth from bouncing together, having stuffed a corner of his coat sleeve in his mouth, and then stepped back inside the small stone guard hut. He began cranking a lever; slowly, the iron gates groaned open.
    “Go on, then,” the guard called out to them, and the alchemist and his apprentice passed into the mistenshrouded courtyard.

Chapter Six

    THE GUARD’S NAME WAS MO, SHORT FOR MOLASSES, as in slow as molasses or thick as molasses . The nickname had been his since he was so young he no longer remembered what his real name was. And it was true that from his earliest infancy, although his heart was as big and as warm and as generous as an open hand, his brain had seemed just a tiny bit small.
    Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE . The other guards had made fun of him for preferring hot chocolate to coffee, and called him a wimp and a child, and so this was his solution: He had become a secret sipper.
    There was a slapping sound, and then a low mewling in the corner. Lefty, Mo’s black-and-white-striped tabby cat, had just come swinging through the large cat door Mo had fitted carefully into the back wall of the guard hut, so the cat could go directly out into an alley where she could play and sniff and roam at will.
    “Hiya, Lefty,” Mo cooed. Two fluorescent green eyes blinked back at him. He removed a sardine from his sandwich and held it out to her. Lefty materialized from the shadows and took the sardine from Mo’s hand, afterward licking each of Mo’s fingers with a rough pink tongue. “Thatta girl,” Mo said fondly.
    Lefty mewled again, then turned and shot once more out the cat door, which banged and shuddered in the cat’s wake.
    When Mo was finished with his sandwich and had taken a last, satisfied slurp of his hot chocolate, he settled his hat more firmly over his ears, slumped down a bit in his chair, and promptly fell asleep. He dreamed of many strange things—at one point he was standing at the fishmonger, but the fishmonger was a sardine, and refusing to wait on him—and then, as so often happened, he dreamed of his sister.
    In his dream she was wearing her pink-and-blue-striped pajamas, as she had been the last time he had seen her. She had her favorite stuffed animal in her lap: a ratty lamb with one eye missing and stuffing coming out of its socket.
    She was cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, except the bedroom was not the bedroom of his childhood but his bedroom now, with its bare stone floor (he had had to take up the carpet, after the fleas) and its plain whitewashed walls and its single mattress, as hard as a chair.
    “Hi,” she said to Mo quite casually, as though she had not been missing for nearly twenty years, and as always in his dreams, Mo was at first too overwhelmed to speak. His gigantic heart seemed to be having some sort of convulsion. He was flooded with emotions, all tugging at him from different sides, like wrestlers grappling somewhere deep inside his chest. Relief that she was alive; joy at finding her again; anger that she had stayed away so long; despair that he was so much older now, and she was still so young, and they had missed so much time together.
    “Where have you been all this time?” he managed finally. “We searched everywhere for you.”
    “Under the bed,” his sister said. She had a nickname just like he did, except that hers, Bella, meant beautiful , and she had earned it by being the most beautiful child in a three-mile radius, and possibly everywhere.
    “Under the bed?” Mo felt tremendously confused. A small corner of his brain said, That’s impossible and You must be dreaming , but he swatted that part away like a fly. He did not want Bella to be a dream. He wanted her to be real. “All this time? How did