Read an Excerpt From Unraveller

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

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Frances Hardinge’s Unraveller, a dark YA fantasy out from Amulet Books on January 10th.

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…

Chapter 1
Blame

Five minutes into the conversation, Kellen was grinning so widely his face ached. He could see Nettle trying to catch his eye and very slightly shaking her head. She knew what his grin meant, even if this idiot merchant didn’t.

I’m going to lose my temper, Kellen thought. Any minute now. The inevitability of it was almost calming.

“I didn’t hire you to lecture me!” the merchant was saying. “I hired you to fix the problem!”

Kellen stood there in the stupid, overdecorated reception hall, letting the flood of words pour over him. The merchant had glossy, angry, frightened eyes. His hair was dyed, but that just made his pale, haggard face look older. Petty, weak, childish. The sort of man who needed chandeliers the size of dinner tables to feel powerful and who made you stand while he sat and ranted at you so that everyone knew who was in charge.

“Are you listening to me?” demanded the merchant.

Kellen’s head snapped up, his mind airy and bright with anger.

“The blood’s showing again,” Kellen pointed out, a little spitefully.

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Unraveller

The merchant immediately curled his hands into defensive fists. His gloves were so padded that they looked like clownish silken paws, but even this had not been enough. The blood always found its way through, mysteriously oozing from his palms and fingers until it could not be hidden.

Kellen wore gloves too, for a different reason. He was used to the weight of the iron bands hidden within the cloth. Right now, he was wondering whether that weight would break someone’s nose if he punched them in the face.

“They said you knew how to deal with curses!” snapped the merchant. “But you’ve done nothing, and it’s been two weeks!”

Kellen had taken the job against his better judgment. Or rather, he had allowed his rational judgment to outweigh his better instincts. For once there had been a reasonable prospect of a decent payment. Now, however, reasonableness was losing its appeal.

“That’s because I was trying to find out who cursed you, and there were too many suspects!” Kellen exploded. He could almost feel his leash snap, his temper bounding forward like a big black dog. The aghast silence all around him made him want to laugh.

Oh well. Boring job anyway.

“All the marsh-silk pickers, the carders and dyers, the folks in your felting mills… they work themselves to the bone for you, and you pay them spit!” Kellen’s voice echoed off the frescoes and ornamental arches. “And the lodgings you rent to them are stinking hellholes, crammed to the eaves with too many families! What did you think would happen? I’m surprised they haven’t all cursed you!”

“How dare you?” Powerful people never said anything original once you stopped showing them the deference they expected. In a state of outrage, they all used the same script.

“Anyway, I did work out who cursed you,” said Kellen, “and they’re already dead. So you don’t need to know who they were.”

No, the merchant didn’t need to know about the sad little note or the body in the river. The dead woman’s family didn’t need a ladleful of stigma added to their grief. Kellen would have felt differently about the curser if she’d been alive and still dangerous, but she wasn’t, so all he felt was pity.

“Dead?” The merchant looked alarmed. “Is that a problem? Can you still lift the curse?”

“Talking to the curser often helps, but all I need to know is the reason for the curse,” Kellen said grimly. “And there’s no mystery here, is there? You’re the reason! It doesn’t even matter which of your victims cursed you. Because in this case, the problem is you.

“You made somebody desperate enough to become a curser. You’ve got blood on your hands. And thanks to the curse, now everyone can see it.”

“You’re one of those rabble-rousers!” The merchant was recovering from his shock. “Who do you work for! Who paid you to come here and say all of this to me?”

“You did, you idiot!” exploded Kellen. “You hired me to get rid of your curse, and I’m telling you how to do it! What did you expect me to do, give you an ointment? You can’t cure a curse; you have to unravel it. You have to find the reasons that wove it and work out how to pull the threads loose. And the only way I can see for you to do that… is to be sorry.

“You need to understand what you’ve been doing all this time, and regret it, and change. So you need to spend a month gathering raw marsh silk in the Wilds, or washing the thorns and grit out of sticky fluff until your fingers bleed, so you understand other people’s lives. Then you need to find ways of mending the harm you’ve done and doing penance for anything that can’t be fixed. If you do this for long enough, then maybe—”

“Maybe?” The merchant gave an appalled huff of laughter. “You want me to do all this for a ‘maybe’? This is ridiculous!”

Kellen had let himself become earnest again. Yes, this whole conversation was ridiculous.

“Fine,” he said. “Do what you like. If you pay someone else enough, I’m sure they’ll tell you you’re blameless and sell you a curse-proof hat. It won’t work, but at least they won’t be rude.”

“Listen to me, you grubby little charlatan!” The merchant leaned forward. “I want my money back, right now!”

“Not a chance!” yelled Kellen. “I did what I was paid for! I’ve told you how to lift your curse! It’s not my fault if you’re too stupid to do it!”

The merchant tightened one hand into a fist. There was a tick-tick-tick noise as he did so, and the seam across the knuckles of the glove burst open, white eiderdown bulging out through the gap. As more blood seeped scarlet through the exposed feathers, the merchant gave a whimper of panic and clutched his hand to his chest.

“Fetch me more gloves! A cloth! Something!”

Kellen gave an involuntary snort of mirth, and apparently that was the final straw.

“Guards!” shouted the merchant. “Take this fraud into custody!”

Nettle managed to get arrested by the guards as well, by asking politely. She could probably have walked away in the confusion, but instead here she was in Kellen’s cell in the local jail, her unspoken opinions filling half the room. Apparently she didn’t even trust him to languish in captivity by himself.

Part of him wished that she would just grab him by the collar and yell, What’s wrong with you? Why couldn’t you just tell that rich idiot what he wanted to hear? Or maybe just shut up and let him yell at us?

“You think we should give him back his money, don’t you?” he said accusingly. “Well, I’m not doing that! We earned that money!”

“Actually,” said Nettle levelly, “we can’t. We don’t have enough money. They want you to pay for the glove. The one that split.”

“What?” Kellen stopped pacing to stare at her. “But… that was his fault! You saw him! He clenched his hand and stretched the seams…”

“And they’re saying one of the tapestries in that room is frayed around the edges,” continued Nettle carefully. “They want you to pay for that too.”

“I can’t believe they’re trying to blame that on me!” Kellen was aghast and furious. “That’s… criminal! That’s fraud!”

He looked to Nettle for agreement but didn’t get it. Instead, she looked impassive and raised her eyebrows slightly.

Nettle seemed meek and inoffensive if you didn’t know her. Her expression was usually rather blank, in an attentive, slightly worried sort of way. She appeared diluted, colorless, as if she were waiting for somebody else to give her an opinion to hold. After more than a year of traveling with her, however, Kellen had learned to read stillness and listen to silence. He had become very good at hearing the things Nettle didn’t say.

You lost control again, she wasn’t saying. I told you needed to rein yourself in. When you unravel, so does everything else.

Kellen’s ability to pull apart the threads of a curse came with a mild but annoying side effect. Woven cloth in his vicinity loosened over time and began to unravel. This phenomenon was particularly noticeable when Kellen lost control of his emotions.

“That wasn’t me!” he protested. “I didn’t unravel anything!”

“You were very angry,” Nettle said in a mild, careful tone that Kellen found infuriating. There was something about her “one-of-us-has-to-be-reasonable” air that made him want to be wildly unreasonable. “You’ve been in a bad mood all day.”

This was true enough. He’d had a night of broken sleep and uneasy, half-remembered dreams, and it had left him feeling sour and strung out.

“So what?” Kellen held up his hands in their iron-studded gloves. “I was wearing these!”

Iron damped his unravelling side effect, so there were strands of it in Kellen’s boots, hat, and coat lining. The iron-studded gloves muffling his clever, calloused weaver’s hands made the biggest difference.

The merchant had demanded to know the reason for these gloves, so Kellen had told him about the side effect. Now it sounded like the man was using this as an excuse to blame every loose thread and pulled seam on Kellen.

“And even if I hadn’t been wearing them, it wouldn’t happen that quickly, would it?” Kellen pointed out. “I can’t just make somebody’s clothes fall apart by being angry with them. More’s the pity.” The truth is, he had been thinking that it would serve the merchant right if his stupid gloves fell off his stupid bloody hands. Thoughts didn’t unpick cloth, however.

“Well, we’re going to have trouble proving that, aren’t we?” Nettle stared calmly at the opposite wall, refusing to meet Kellen’s angry gaze.

Nettle was like a belt that rubbed. Familiar, irritating, every little chafe adding to a thousand others. Comforting, necessary. Unavoidable, every twinge of irritation mixed with guilt and a sense of obligation. She might as well have been family.

Her strangeness was something you noticed only when you paid attention to her, and most people didn’t. She always held her face and body too still. All her motions were careful and deliberate, as if she were getting used to steering her body, which was in fact the case. Kellen knew that she was fifteen, but strangers found it difficult to guess her age. There was something young-old about her face, a weathered smoothness that spoke of storms survived. He wondered if she would always have that ageless oddness. A young woman with an old woman’s careful gravity, and then an old woman with a quiet, fey blaze like a winter sky.

She had Kellen to thank and blame for that. Nettle was his responsibility, and she never let him forget it.