Greenglass House Read Online Free PDF

having it when he’d led the three new guests up to their rooms, or when he’d come back down to get Mrs. Hereward’s luggage. Which meant it had to be outside. Probably in the pavilion.
    Milo flung himself back down the stairs and into the foyer, where he grabbed his boots and ducked outside before anyone could ask him where he was going. He skidded across the porch, passing his father, who was busy stacking firewood under a tarp, and sprinted down the path and into the woods.
    The fairy lights were still on along the roof and down the railing of the long staircase, but now they glowed under a half-inch glaze of snow. Milo found the paperback right away, wedged between the
Whilforber Whirlwind
and the edge of the wooden floor. He must have dropped it when the tower of luggage had come tumbling down.
    He tugged the book free and tucked it in his back pocket, and he was just about to head back inside when he spotted something else on the steel tracks.
    It looked like a blue leather wallet, only bigger. Milo climbed down onto the rails behind the car and picked it up.
    And that’s how he found the first map.
    It was tucked into the left-hand pocket of the leather wallet, folded into quarters. The paper was old and green-tinged, the way the copper pots in the inn’s kitchen were tinted green from verdigris—only Milo had never seen paper turn green like that. He unfolded it carefully with cold fingers. It was brittle and delicate and didn’t look as if it could stand much more folding and unfolding, but he could tell it had once been thick and expensive. Milo held it up so that the light from the closest lamppost shone through, and he could just make out a watermark: it looked like a wrought-iron gate, but slightly warped and wrenched out of its original shape.
    It was then, with the page lit up from behind, that Milo realized what he was looking at. He turned and hopped across the rails to the shed that housed the big winch, turned on the overhead light, and held the paper up again to get a better look.
    It’s a funny thing about maps: you don’t have to know what they’re supposed to represent to know you’re looking at one. A map is pretty much unmistakable. Draw one on a napkin, sketch one into the mud with the toe of your shoe, line up the flakes of your cereal with your spoon to make one in your breakfast bowl; maps come in all kinds, but they all still manage to look like maps. And the brittle, watermarked paper Milo was holding was definitely a map, even if it didn’t look like any map he’d ever seen. At least, not at first.
    There were no lines for streets, no boxes for houses, nothing to mark the features of a city or a town or even a lonely road winding through the countryside. Instead, there were shapeless washes of blue layered one on top of the other, so that in some places the paper was merely blue-tinged and in others the color deepened by degrees to china blue and ultramarine and royal and navy. Here and there, centered in the bands of shading, were groups of green ink dots, small clusters of two and three where the blue was lightest and larger clusters of nine or ten or more where it was darkest. In one corner was a group of nearly white curls, like slightly twisted triangles gathered together. In another corner was the shape of a bird with an arrow pointing away from one outstretched wing.
    Milo knew a thing or two about maps. This, of course, came from twelve years of growing up around smugglers and sailors. And as he stared at the paper in his hands, he realized it reminded him of a very specific sort of map, one that he saw fairly often. It looked like a nautical chart, the kind that ships’ navigators use.
    Yes, a nautical chart. That was exactly what it was, with the shadings of blue and the green dots meant to represent the different depths of the waterway. The bird shape must be the compass rose, which would mean the wing with the arrow was