The Kingdoms

You're my family! You were family before any of them. I've missed you even when I didn't remember you. Everything I've done since losing you has been about getting back to you. And I know I've left you behind before for other families, but not this time. I can't do it again.

Come home, if you remember.

I think you're the same thing in three different lights.

Joe smiled his charming smile, which was less broad than his real one. Kite was so immune that Joe had forgotten how well it worked on everyone else. He wondered if anybody had ever been brave enough to flirt with Kite, and which ditch they’d ended up in.

His entire soul cramped. His heart locked and he couldn't breathe, never mind move, and everything in him was shrieking as if he'd thrust his hand into a fire. The second he stopped trying to leave, it eased.

He'd been stitching a fragile cloak of half-imagined hopes, barely with the substance of thule but there all the same. It dissolved and left him with a nasty residue of shame.

Home. It was coming up through the deck.

Fred gasped as if he'd hurt himself, but in fact it was a new burst of enthusiasm. "I know a goose joke! What do French geese say?" "Fred!" Joe hissed. Fred was busy writing on Kite's logbook. When he held it up, it said, HONQUE. Joe choked, because he hadn't expected to laugh.

When he was unhappy, Jem turned even better-spoken than usual, until there was so much cut glass in his voice that speaking to him was more like trying to talk to a chandelier than a person.

You won't sit down, you will wander around being nice to people, and then you will collapse and die. Look at the state of you.

whether you liked it or not, five minutes with someone kind and clever was cleansing, like green tea, or confession.

There were a few advantages in having a resting expression that looked like you were about to kick someone.

Middle-class people, Alice explained, hadn’t been in the world enough to know anything, and it was best to smile and nod and ignore them.

I like it," the little boy protested. Then, brightly, "Are you Captain Kite? Did you really sail into battle with fifty dead people hanging off the yards?" "I - what? No," said Kite. "Who said that?" "Everyone," the boy said happily.

But hoping for the best is not a strategy.

Joe went to fetch his tools, full of the fizzy joy that came from seeing something he couldn’t explain.

Kite believed strongly that, whether you liked it or not, five minutes with someone kind and clever was cleansing, like green tea, or confession.