The Color of Darkness Read Online Free PDF

these mountains, where bears and tigers live, and the mountains go so high that no one ever bothers to come over them. Then on the other side there’s the sea, which is full of whales and sharks and giant squid and stuff, but the sharks know me so they don’t kill me if I go in there, but they’d kill anyone else who tried. Sometimes I go and find all the animals and fish and stuff, and sometimes I build things in the forest, and sometimes I just go around the fields and lie in the grass and look at the clouds. And nobody else ever comes there, unless I want them to. And when I want them to go, they have to go.”
    She’d never said that to anyone at home. It was the stupid sort of dream that little kids had, until they grew out of it. But neither Barshin nor Zadoc commented on her words. Zadoc just began to move, gathering his great legs into a smooth leap, and then they were bucketing over the plain, so fast that the horizon ahead was shaken up into the waves of a choppy green sea.
    Cath closed her eyes and missed, for a long while, what they were galloping over, because it was so good just to listen to the strength of her own powerful blood, beating warmth and courage through her veins. She’d never felt so strong. She knew that if anything came leaping across the plain toward them—armies, monsters, wolves, even Dad—she’d grow claws from her fingers and fangs from her teeth and a sword from each hand, and defeat them all, without fear.
    When Zadoc slowed, she opened her eyes again. The plain had gone. They were on a beach, wide and white, with the sea to their left and some sand dunes crouching to their right. Beyond the dunes, at a little distance, the forest-covered slopes of mountains rose steeply into the pale sky, and seabirds screamed overhead.
    Zadoc pointed his nose inland, and Cath saw a roof and chimney peering over the top of the dunes, with a narrow path leading toward them.
    â€œIs it there?” she dared to ask.
    â€œOf course,” said Zadoc. “Or here. It’s always either there or here. Shall we go up?”
    Cath heard the distant call of a wolf. Her nose picked up traces of pine in the air.
    â€œYeah. Let’s go.”
    They turned up the sandy path. Beyond the dunes crouched a low house with whitewashed walls and a thick thatched roof, and in front of it a garden bright with thousands of small flowers. The house was as much a part of the land as the trees and garden that surrounded it: the walls seemed to have grown out of fallen rocks, the roof from the tough sea grasses that fringed the dunes, and the window frames from sapling trees, planted in the corners of each window. It was almost breathing.
    It was her house.
    Zadoc was right! She’d made it up! She’d made everything—the land, the sky, this house, the animals, the freedom—these were her wildest dreams. And she’d thought they were unthinkable .
    Cath’s heart soared for a moment, out into the blue sky, swooping alongside the seabirds in their clean, free flight. Their feathers brushed against it, and it stretched toward them, purring with pleasure.
    â€œPut me down,” she said, trying to swing her leg over Zadoc’s back. “I’m stopping here.”
    â€œNo!” said Barshin. “You can’t! This is Chromos, the land of colors! It’s full of everything that could ever happen—all the things that never will, and all that might, and all the things that no one has even thought about yet. If you fall into Chromos, it’ll swallow you down into a hole full of all the people you might have been and might one day be, and the person you are now will get lost among them. You must stay on Zadoc’s back!”
    â€œSays who?” said Cath, letting herself start to slide down toward the white path.
    But Zadoc swung his huge head around and knocked at her roughly with his nose, barring her way.
    â€œThe hare is right,” he