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that.
    “It’s not your fault, Daddy,” Imperia says. “I tried to talk to her. I’m just not charming like you are.”
    He looks up at her, his blue eyes suddenly as piercing as Grandfather’s. “A lot of people aren’t charming, Imp. They don’t go around breaking people’s noses. You have to make this right.”
    “What does that mean?” Imperia asks.
    He shrugs. She doesn’t want him to shrug, because that means he’s not going to tell her. Then he surprises her by adding, “You need to defuse this, Imp. You need to stop this whole thing from escalating any further.”
    “How do I do that?” Imperia asks.
    “I don’t know,” he says grimly. “But I trust you can figure it out.”

 
     
     
     
    SEVEN
     
     
    I trust you can figure that out . Imperia hates it when Daddy says that. She hates it when anybody says that. The last time she had to figure something out, she ended up punching someone in the nose.
    She bows her head and sighs as she heads back into the dining room. This thing with Skylar is harder to solve than all the math problems in her little book. She sits down, makes fists with both hands and props her chin on them. Her knuckles graze her cheeks. Her knuckles are sharp .
    The thing that’s bugging everybody about Skylar isn’t that Imperia defeated her. It’s that she has a broken nose, and she’ll be disfigured. The problem isn’t the punch so much as the horrible medical treatment.
    In the Kingdom, whenever Imperia injured something, she went to the palace wise woman, a healer who would then wave her magic wand over it or rub a potion on it or make some incantation.
    And then the bruise would be gone.
    Imperia leans back in her chair.
    Of course. The solution is that simple—and that hard.

 
     
     
     
    EIGHT
     
     
    Imperia knows how to get to the Kingdom, even though she’s not supposed to go without Daddy. She’s not supposed to go anywhere without telling him either. She’s going to break a lot of rules here, but she’s going to do it so that she can make things right.
    There are dozens, maybe hundreds of portals between the Greater World and the Kingdom. Imperia has traveled through some of them, always with Daddy, and always holding his hand. But she has done a lot of reading about them, and she knows that you don’t have to have your magic to use them.
    (This is how mortals—folks from the Greater World—end up in the Kingdoms. That’s how the evil Brothers Grimm discovered the Kingdoms in the first place.)
    There’s a portal not too far from the house. Imperia slips out the back door at seven a.m., before everyone else gets up. Ruthie doesn’t even show up on Saturday, which is too bad, because if she did, Imperia would ask her to drive to the better portal in Sherman Oaks. That portal is bigger, but Imperia doesn’t really need big on this day, because she’s not traveling with Grace or Daddy.
    It’s hot outside even though it’s early, and at most of the houses, the sprinklers have just ended their timed watering. Here, everything seems to run on technology, and everything has a time and a place. Even watering, because apparently, water is rationed, an idea that just plain scares her.
    A lot scares her about the Greater World. Kids at school say they’re not allowed to walk by themselves because they might be abducted. At first, Imperia thought they meant abducted by bad serial killer guys, like in the movies, but no, they actually mean by kidnappers, because their parents are so rich and so famous.
    Abductions don’t happen in the Kingdom, at least not for her or Grace, because if someone took them, that someone would be beheaded or worse. Grandfather has no problem with violence, and sometimes uses it to enforce his decrees. One unspoken decree is don’t mess with his family.
    Sometimes Imperia thinks that’s a much better way that Daddy’s insistence on talk, talk, talk.
    A couple of people are outside, working in their lawns, trimming flowers