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The door was opened by Ferl, but as Olive and Styg stepped into the musty foyer, she barely even noticed him. Instead, it was his companion that seized her attention -- a black shape, suggestive of a large-dog and so dark she couldn't tell, even as sharp sunlight cut into the house, where the creature stopped and its shadow began.

Ugh, the Grayling mansion. Other families Olive simply ignored, but this old viney estate -- she could feel a growl come over her every time she passed. The Grayling grounds stretched from one end of the Winding Woods to the other, curved around the longer shore of Sunken Lake, and once a year -- around August, usually -- a Cyclorn's nest would inevitably hatch in the clouds directly above.

In other words, it touched three different realms of Creatures. Four, if Styg's hunch about the Pit were correct; and if you could even consider the Pit a realm.

So when Olive overheard the Grayling's Proxy, a stumpy little Rock-Gnome named Ferl, first mention a summer job at the estate to the headmaster of her school, she felt instinctively that it was a bad idea. And when Styg's mom started talking it over with to hers, after one of Ferl's visits to the medicine wagon for Heart Wash, Olive's feeling of dread only grew. And grew. And grew until finally it became a certainty as she stood before the gates of the estate in late June, her family days gone on the Medicine Circuit and nowhere for her and Styg to go but in.

"You'd better be right about the pit being here," she said.

"I can't wait to find out!" Styg replied, grinning hugely at the mansion as he struggled with Olive's bookbag on one shoulder and his own on the other.

"Do YOU want to be there?" asked Styg.

"I don't want to be anywhere," Olive said into the lapels of her coat, staring at the sharp lump in the lining.

"Well, then, why don't you give yourself a nice summer by --"

"Look." Olive lifted her eyes to his. "I don't care. I don't care what I do this summer. I don't care what you do. I don't care if you drag me to the garden. And I don't care if YOU care. So stop it, stop caring."

"I'll try," said Styg. He looked confused. "Or ... I think I'll try. Maybe I won't. Whatever. I don't care?" He paused, then leaned forward and whispered, "but I really really want you to come."

"No," said Olive. And she thought it over and over again in her head, each one washing away the last like endless colorless coats of paint.