Read An Excerpt From ‘Unraveller’ by Frances Hardinge

A dark YA fantasy about learning to use your power and finding peace, from award-winning author Frances Hardinge.

Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Unraveller by Frances Hardinge.

In a world where anyone can create a life-destroying curse, only one person has the power to unravel them.

Kellen does not fully understand his talent, but helps those transformed maliciously—including Nettle. Recovered from entrapment in bird form, she is now his constant companion and closest ally.

But Kellen has also been cursed, and unless he and Nettle can remove his curse, Kellen is in danger of unravelling everything—and everyone—around him . . .

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Chapter 2
GALL

NETTLE HUNCHED ON THE SILL OF THE LITTLE WINDOW AND watched the sky. She tried to make her mind just as cool, blue, and untouchable, but it wasn’t easy with Kellen pacing up and down right behind her.

“That merchant’ll have to get the magistrate to release us, once he’s calmed down,” he was telling the walls and world for the ninth time. “He still needs me!”

Nettle took a breath and let it cool in her lungs for a second before answering.

“He won’t,” she said with determined calm. “You humiliated him.

He’ll convince himself you’re a fraud.”

“Well . . . he shouldn’t!” Kellen glared at Nettle, as if making her back down would somehow change the situation. “All I did was tell him the truth!” He was always like this, raging at the world for not being as it should. His furious innocence was exhausting. Kellen started pacing again, and she knew he was hating her for being right. The sky was wide and flawless. When Nettle was little, it had just been the roof of her world, a place to store the sun and stars. Since then, she had come to understand the texture of that wild, blue air. She knew its chill strength, its living tremors, the sweet and treacherous way it bore one’s weight. Nettle watched the birds and felt her soul reach out, like an amputee wanting to stretch a lost but remembered limb.

I hate being heavy. I hate being here. I hate being right.

As usual, she was right. The merchant didn’t arrange their release. It was somebody else who came to rescue Kellen and Nettle just a few hours later.

The visitor was six foot tall but, as he ducked through the doorway and straightened, he seemed taller. His dark gray riding coat looked well-made. He could not have been more than thirty, but his complexion was grayish too. There was something quietly forbidding about him, as if a stone lion had found a way to look human.

Nettle felt a tingle in her teeth. This man had a touch of the Wilds, she could sense it—a familiar pang, like the worst kind of homecoming. Then he glanced her way, and she saw that his left eye was covered by an eye-patch of dark red leather. It looked expensive and showy, which only ever meant one thing.

Marsh horseman.

He stood and watched them in silence for a little while. He seemed to be waiting, as if they had asked to see him, not the other way around. “What?” demanded Kellen at last, getting impatient. Fortunately, the visitor showed no sign of being offended.

“Do you want to get out of here?” he asked. His accent was a lot less refined than his clothes. Mizzleport dockyards, Nettle reckoned.

Kellen opened his mouth, and Nettle cut in quickly before he could say anything sarcastic.

“Yes,” she said. “We do.”

“Good,” said the stranger. There was another pause. Either he was trying to make them nervous, or he didn’t consider talking a particularly valuable skill.

“The merchant’s had a change of heart then, has he?” asked Kellen, casting a triumphant glance at Nettle.

“Not yet,” said the stranger. “But he’ll listen if money talks. My name is Gall, and I’ve been sent to make you an offer.”

“Sent by who?” demanded Kellen. Nettle was pretty curious herself. Anybody who could hire a marsh horseman was probably very rich.

Marsh horses were creatures of the Deep Wilds. They could not be bred, trapped, or tamed by humans. It was said that they could be acquired only by trading with the people from the White Boats, at one of the Moonlit Markets held where the Wilds met the sea. The price for such a horse was usually a single, living human eye, of clear vision and beautiful color, willingly given by its owner. Since rich people didn’t like giving up their own eye, they would generally pay a fortune to someone poor or desperate enough to surrender one of theirs.

Such an arrangement had consequences, however. The rich buyer might fancy that they owned the marsh horse, but the horse itself always knew whose eye had bought its loyalty. Most marsh-horse owners were philosophical about this unbreakable bond and hired the one-eyed unfortunate to control the horse. Such coachmen or coachwomen were generally treated with respect by anyone who knew what was good for them.

“There are questions I won’t answer,” said the stranger simply. “That’s one of them. If that’s a problem, I can save us all some time and leave now.”

“You can’t expect us to—” “Kellen!” hissed Nettle.

Kellen sighed angrily, then shrugged. After a pause, Gall continued. “You have a rare talent, boy. Unique, probably. There are plenty of people claiming they can undo curses for money, but they’re all liars.

You really can. So you should be rich by now. But you’re not. You’re running from one town to the next on hope and an empty belly.”

Nettle exchanged glances with Kellen. The stranger was evidently well-informed. Raddith had no end of con men preying on the desperate by claiming they could cure curses. It had always been hard for a scruffy fifteen-year-old like Kellen to convince people that he wasn’t just another charlatan. His attitude also made him a lot of enemies. Word of Kellen’s successes were starting to spread at last, but there were also plenty who would swear violently at the mention of his name.

“You need protection,” the stranger continued, “and somebody to vouch for you. Someone who can get you rich clients and make people think twice about locking you up.”

“A patron, then?” Kellen was clearly annoyed, but he was too honest to deny the truth of the stranger’s words. “A mysterious, anonymous patron?”

“If you want to put it that way,” said Gall. “We’d tell you which curses to unravel, and we’d see that you were well paid for it. You’d be fed and given somewhere to sleep each night. And trust me, nobody will ignore or underestimate you if you turn up in a carriage with a marsh horse between the shafts.”

“You’d be coming with us, then,” Nettle said sharply. A tame marsh horse never went anywhere without its horseman, and vice versa.

“You’d accept my protection and guidance,” Gall said blandly. “Guidance?” Kellen made it sound like a dirty word, and Nettle didn’t blame him. “You mean orders.” “Advice,” said Gall. “And supervision.”

“We don’t need to be put on a leash!” snapped Kellen.

“Not everyone would agree,” said Gall, and let the silence stretch.

Nettle knew how silences were used, and she had no trouble filling this one. You make people jumpy, with your strange talent, and the way you pick apart the knots of everyone’s secrets. You can’t and won’t rein in your temper. You cause trouble.

“Why bother with us at all, then?” asked Nettle. Gall looked at her, and the experience was a little like facing into a damp wind. His one eye was dark gray, like his coat, and almost as lightless.

“My employer needs someone who can unravel curses,” he said. “And there’s a matter that needs investigating. I think you’ll want to hear about it, actually.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Kellen.

“You two have put a dozen cursers behind bars, haven’t you?” said Gall.

“Sixteen,” Kellen corrected him. Unravelling curses nearly always meant identifying the cursers, who were then handed over to the authorities for arrest.

“Do you know what happens to them after that?” asked Gall. “They get sent to the Red Hospital.” Kellen fidgeted uneasily. “And after that?” pressed Gall. “Do you ever keep track of them? Do you ever visit them in the Hospital?”

“No!” Kellen said sharply, looking unhappy. “I’m the last person they want to see!”

Nettle couldn’t blame Kellen for wanting to avoid angry cursers who hated him, but it was also typical of him. He always wanted to put upsetting things behind him so that he could forget about them.

Gall nodded quietly to himself, seeming unsurprised, then reached into his pocket. He drew out a creased and grimy slip of paper and passed it to Kellen. Nettle leaned across to read it over Kellen’s shoulder.

A good choice. She has every reason to want revenge against the young unraveller of curses. After all, he’s the one who put her behind bars.

There was no signature.

“Where did this come from?” demanded Kellen. “Who wrote it?

Who’s this ‘she’ they’re talking about?”

“We don’t know,” said Gall. “The note was found among the belongings of a dead criminal, and we haven’t identified the handwriting. But we believe the ‘unraveller’ they mention is you.”

Of course it is, thought Nettle, her blood running cold. “Unravelling” was the way Kellen always talked about his curse-lifting. It was the way he saw things, as a tangle of threads to be pulled apart.

“So what does this mean?” she asked. “Are you saying some criminals are trying to get a curser to take revenge on Kellen? How can she do that if she’s a prisoner in the Red Hospital?”

“A good question.” The thing that happened to Gall’s face was probably a smile. “As far as we can tell, the prisoners there are all secure. They shouldn’t have any means of affecting the outside world or harming anyone. But my employer thinks we’re missing something. You two have an instinct for cursers, and a knack for prying out secrets. She wants you to take a look round the Red Hospital, to see if everything’s as secure as it should be.”

“What if we don’t take up your offer?” asked Kellen. “What if we say no?”

“I leave,” Gall said immediately.

No threats. No dwelling on the desperation of their position. Kellen glanced at Nettle again.

“Let me talk about it with my friend,” he said.

After Gall had left the room, Kellen dropped to a crouch with his back to the wall, frowning.

“For all we know, he might have written that note himself,” he muttered, clearly rattled. “What do you make of him?”

Cold and weird, thought Nettle, but there was no point in stating the obvious. Pacting with a marsh horse changed you, and never by making you more pink and cheery.

“He doesn’t care whether we agree,” she said instead. “If we say no, he won’t haggle. He’ll just go.”

“Well, that’s obvious,” said Kellen. “But maybe we should say no anyway.”

Nettle said nothing.

“Oh, and you disagree?” asked Kellen.

“I’m not telling you what I think!” said Nettle. “You’ll just do the opposite!”

“Then what’s the point of even talking to you?” Kellen frowned down at his fists and sighed. “So he’s offering us a way out, and we need one. I know that, all right? Is that what you want me to say?”

“No,” said Nettle, very quietly. “What?”

“I don’t like him. I don’t like this. Any of it.”

“But you’re the one who wanted to listen to him!” exclaimed Kellen. Nettle hesitated, trying to find words for her unease. It smacks of the fen-weed, her mother would have said. And it was like a scent, like the lush, creeping fragrance of salt and sweet rot that told you that you’d taken the wrong turn, that the hungry, unseen bog was just one unwary step away . . .

“It’s . . .” She tried again. “The deal looks too tempting. The price looks too low. Which means it must be too high—we just don’t know it yet.”

“So how else do we get out of here? And what about that note?”

Just as Nettle had predicted, Kellen was pivoting to disagree with her. She could see him doing it, even if he couldn’t. He was unbelievable.

“If we’ve got a secret enemy, I want to know,” Kellen declared, as if that had always been his argument. “Don’t you? And if something crooked is going on at the Red Hospital, shouldn’t we find out? If we make a deal with Gall and it goes sour, we can always run away later, can’t we?”

Nettle turned away from him, pulling back her temper like a snail withdrawing its horns. She returned her gaze to the sky and tried to let its calm blue pour into her head.

“Do what you like,” she told him coolly. So of course he did.