I spent most of that evening in the drawing room. That gave Conrad a chance to watch some shows while the ghosts and I played Connect Four. We put the game on a small end table after pulling it into the center of the magic circle. I had claimed a cushion to sit on.

Iset and Olivia were in the room with us. Olivia had lit a fire in the fireplace and wrapped up in a few blankets.

As I played, I tried to divide my attention between our spectators and the children. It didn’t help my playing.

“Here?”

“No,” Jacob said. He pointed, emphatically, at the space to the side of the one I had pointed to.

“You can’t want to go there,” I said. “That’d mean you won.”

“I’m next,” Anna said.

“I’m next!” Jan insisted. “You play me, Emerra.”

“Why don’t you play with Anna?” I asked.

“I want to win.”

“Maybe I’ll win.”

Jan laughed at the absurdity of the idea. That’s what I get for being a good sport and throwing a game or two.

Off to the side, Olivia asked, “Any luck on the language?”

“We’re not certain, but we think it might be Dutch,” the mummy murmured.

“Why can’t you be certain?”

“It’s difficult. No audio device can pick up their words, and I can’t seem to get the accent right when I repeat them.”

“Have you had Emerra ask them what they’re speaking?”

“They didn’t understand the question, but when I tried speaking to them in Dutch, they seemed to recognize a few words.”

“That doesn’t sound encouraging.”

“I know, but there would be a difference between the modern Dutch I’m learning and what they’re speaking.”

I finished setting up the board again. “All right, Jan. You start, but you have to play against Anna.”

He pointed to a red piece on the tabletop, then to the middle column.

Olivia said to Iset, “Why did you think it was Dutch?”

“Because there were Dutch settlers in this area back in the seventeenth century. Emerra pointed that out to me, and the more I listen to them, the more I think she’s right.”

Olivia looked at me. “You thought of it?”

I confirmed Anna’s next move, then looked up. “Middle school history. If they’re from around here and they aren’t speaking English, it was probably Dutch.”

Anna’s soft voice interrupted me: “Middle school?”

“Oh.” After ten days, you’d think I would be used to dealing with their endless questions, but sometimes it was hard to know how to frame the answers. “You know about school?”

“Dominie went to school. You didn’t go to school.”

“I did.”

“What’s she saying?” Iset asked.

“She’s saying I didn’t go to school.”

Olivia snorted. “Maybe she thinks a twenty-year-old losing to a five-year-old seems suspicious.”

“She says her dad went to school.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if girls weren’t allowed to go to school back then,” Iset said.

“Anna,” I said, “how did you learn to read and write?”

I knew she could; I had done it in my dreams, in that painful way where my mind feels like it’s receiving words but refuses to see them.

“Dominie taught me.”

“What did she say?” Iset asked.

“She’s homeschooled,” I related.

Iset shook her head. “That’s no good.”

For days we’d done something like this, hoping to get a clue as to who the children were and why they were stuck. At first it had been difficult getting them to stay in the circle with me since standing around talking was boring for all of us, but then Anna had found the strategy games laid out in Jacky’s study. She wanted to learn chess, but I thought that would be a little much for Jan, so I had Mrs. Park buy us Connect Four.

The children loved it, and we got hours more each day where we could try to draw out detail after detail, none of which seemed to get us any closer to the answers we needed.

“Emerra,” Olivia said, “why did you think the ghosts were from this area?”

I motioned to the children. “They’re here, aren’t they? Don’t they have to generally stay where they are?”

“That’s only if they’re haunting a place. Ghosts don’t have to be stationary. Some of them roam. Some of them haunt objects and move around with them.”

“But they are speaking Dutch, aren’t they?” I looked at Iset.

“Most likely,” she said.

Jan tried to nudge me. I shivered as his hand moved into my shoulder.

“Emerra!” He pointed to the board.

“Right.”

I was busy hunting down a red piece, so I couldn’t see Olivia, but I heard her let out a groan.

“Okay, so let’s say it’s Dutch,” she said. “That means they might be haunting the area—but if they are haunting this area, how come we haven’t seen them before?”

“You and I never would have seen them at all,” Iset reminded her.

“What about Jacky?”

“That is rather strange.”

With the ruthlessness of a child, Anna insisted I place her winning piece. Jan pouted over his loss until I reminded him that we didn’t have to play.

“I can beat her,” Jacob assured his brother.

A smile appeared on Anna’s face. There was, maybe, a hint of condescension in it.

Jan showed similar skepticism. “Anna was always good at these games.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

My heart skipped, but I tried not to show any excitement as I set up the next match. That was the first detail I’d ever heard from Jan.

“Did you and Anna play games like this?” I asked.

“Not this game,” Jan said.

“Was it a board game?”

The children all stared at me like I was crazy.

I heard Iset slide off the couch. She came and crouched close to us. “Don’t use that phrase,” she said. “I don’t think they have an equivalent concept.”

I knew Iset was a lot smarter than I was, so I didn’t bother asking what that meant.

I tried another question: “What did you play that was like this?”

Anna answered, but it sounded completely unintelligible to me.

Olivia laughed when she saw the look on my face. “And now you don’t have the equivalent concept.”

Iset reached out and put her bandaged hand on the table. The children had long ago gotten used to her strange appearance, if only because her voice was so mild.

“Anna, will you teach me how to play?”

I translated.

Anna nodded to Iset, then turned to me. “Paper?”

“What is it?” Olivia asked.

“We need paper,” I said.

“And small dark and light stones,” Anna added.

Olivia was already standing up, shedding her blankets.

“Can you bring some go pieces too?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Thank you!”

Olivia returned with a piece of paper large enough to cover the small tabletop. I thought that was kind of her, considering it was from the stash normally reserved for drawing out spells. She handed me a pencil, set the go pieces beside us, then went back to her blankets while I tried to follow Anna’s instructions on how to draw the board.

A small square, a medium square, and a big square, all nested inside each other. I had barely started drawing the biggest square when Iset laughed.

Anna smiled when she heard it.

“This is Nine Men’s Morris,” Iset said.

“You know this game?” I asked.

“Of course.” Iset took the pencil from me and finished drawing the board. “I hope you’re good, Anna,” she said while I translated, “because I used to be wonderful at it.”

She handed me Anna’s set of stones and took the black ones for herself.

We played—well, they played. I put the stones down where Anna pointed while trying to puzzle out what they were doing.

“Can we learn anything from the fact they know the game?” Olivia asked.

Iset placed a stone, then picked up one of Anna’s. “It does seem unusual that Anna knows it, but if her father was educated, it’s possible he picked it up from his time at school.”

“So it can’t tell us who her father was?”

“I’m afraid not. It was universal.”

Olivia sighed.

The fidgeting at my side told me I was losing Jan and Jacob. They would have been glad to play Connect Four, but I wasn’t there to move the pieces for them. This was usually when they ran off to try to find Kappa.

A few days ago, I had hauled Kappa into the drawing room to meet them. He’d stared at them in wonder and gotten upset when he couldn’t touch them. I took that to mean he didn’t mind them, in theory, but he didn’t like the cold, so he tended to shy away from them if they got too close. This led to some interesting games of chase. Kappa had already called on me to save him that day, so I knew he was at his limit.

I tried to distract them. “What about you, Jacob? Jan? Have you played this with Anna?”

Jan shook his head, but Jacob said, “A few times.”

“I played Jacob,” Jan said. “He cheated.”

“I did not.”

I doubted either of them could remember, but they always seemed ready to argue on principle.

“What else did you play?” I asked.

They looked at each other. Whenever their memories were hazy, they would look at each other, as if trying to find support in their uncertainty.

“Tag,” Jan said.

“And hide-and-seek,” Jacob added.

I got out another stone, but Anna explained to me we weren’t placing them anymore, now we were sliding them.

Okay. Whatever. I slid her stone where she told me to, then I looked back up at the boys.

“That was in the forest, right?”

Most of their memories seemed to come from after they had died. The years and the seasons all slid together in an always-changing, never-changing collection of days, and each day took place in the forest. It was all they knew.

“What about in town,” I said, “when you lived with Anna?”

They stared at me.

“Back when she lived with Dominie. Do you remember?”

It was clear they didn’t.

“Have you dreamed about us?” Jacob asked.

I tapped the edge of a spare go piece and watched the stone wobble as I tried to decide what to say.

“A few times,” I muttered.

“What was it—”

“Tell us!” they said over each other.

I told them what I could. I told them about the yard game I’d seen—nine-pin, they informed me—and about how Jan thought the goal was to knock them down before the other person could finish putting them back up.

Jacob grinned. “We had to put them all around the grass so he’d bowl them one at a time.”

“Did I win?” Jan asked.

“Sometimes.”

I told them about the day when fresh supplies had arrived in the village. Two men had busted the bands off an old barrel and given the hoops to the children.

Jan clapped and bounced on his ghostly feet. “I remember.” He laughed. “I remember we didn’t do any chores. Nobody cared. We played all day.”

Anna and Iset had both stopped to listen.

I smiled at their enthusiasm. Jan and Jacob were young enough, they probably didn’t see the sorrow hiding in it. “Yeah. Then it got dark, and when you went home, Dominie had to put them up in the rafters so you’d go to sleep.”

Jacob and Jan were both delighted by this. For a while they chatted with each other, talking about whose fault it was that the hoops had to be put away and describing fragments of the scene as they came back to them.

“Anything else?” Jacob asked me.

“There were these…rocks? Big white beads?” I pointed to the back of my hand where I’d seen the strange objects sitting in my dream.

The boys seemed puzzled.

I mimicked the game as I explained. “You toss one up in the air, and you pick up the ones on the ground.”

“They were bones,” Iset said.

I turned to her. “Bones?”

“Those things you thought were rocks—those were knucklebones. They were a precursor to jacks.”

“Are you serious?” I looked at the boys. “You played with bones? That’s so gross.”

They laughed again at my astonishment.

Beside me, I heard Anna murmur, “Bones.”

Whoops.

“Come on, Anna,” I said. “Whose turn is it?”

Anna lost, but Iset was full of compliments for her playing.

“I think you and I are both a bit rusty,” the mummy said, “but you did amazingly well.”

I translated. Anna glowed with pride.

“Your father must have been a very good player if you learned so quickly,” Iset added.

When Anna heard my translation, she corrected me: “Dominie was no good at it. Not like the mayor.”

“Did the mayor teach you to play?” I asked.

Iset suddenly raised her head. “What did she say?”

“She said Dominie was no good at it. Apparently, the mayor was the one to beat.”

“She didn’t say ‘mayor.’”

Olivia sat up.

Iset moved the table aside and knelt in front of Anna. “Emerra, see if you can get her to repeat herself. Word for word, if possible.”

I explained the request to Anna—“So I said, ‘Your father must have been a good player if you learned so quickly,’ and you said…”

Anna’s face was crinkled up in confusion, but she obediently repeated, “Dominie was no good at it.”

I prompted her: “Not like…”

“Not like the mayor.”

Iset’s bandaged hand reached up, as if she wanted to take Anna’s shoulder or touch her face, but she let it fall back to her lap.

“Emerra,” she said, “I have to do some research, but I think I might have a lead as to who these children are.”

When I heard that, my heart took a running leap that forced a laugh out of my mouth. Even Olivia smiled.

Iset stood up. “And there’s no time like the present.” She took two steps toward the door but then stopped with a jerk. “Oh! That reminds me.”

She went to the side table and picked up a tin. As she pulled off the lid, she said, “You two are the last.”

“The last what?” Olivia asked.

“The last to draw your names. These are who you’ll be giving your gifts to.” She held the tin out to Olivia. “If you get your own name, let me know, and I can trade with you.”

“Is it supposed to be a secret?” I asked.

Olivia rolled her eyes. “The gifts are supposed to be a secret. Not the names.”

“She’s right,” Iset said. “This was only a way to randomize it.”

Olivia opened her slip of paper. A thoughtful frown appeared on her face.

Iset walked over to me. “Emerra, could you help Kappa get his present? I’m not sure he quite understands what’s going on.”

“I’d love to.”

Iset held out the tin. There was one scrap of paper left. I pulled it out, read the name, and laughed.

It was late, and I was probably giddy, so the laugh did come out kind of…well, maniacal. You know—the solid laugh you’d hear from a well-established villain.

“Oh, god,” Olivia said. “Did she draw my name?”

“Come on, kids!” When I stood up, my feet tingled with pins and needles from sitting with my legs crossed for too long. “We have to go buy a present and go to bed.”

“You already know what you’re buying?” Olivia said.

I winked at her.

It took less than ten minutes on the internet to find and purchase the gifts. I grinned the whole time I was ordering them, and, sure, some people might have described my grin as diabolical.

Christmas presents are a lot more fun when you’re being sinister about them.

As I led the kids up to my bedroom, Jacob said, “Are you going to dream tonight?”

“Probably.”

“Will it be about us?” Jan asked.

“I don’t know. I usually dream Anna’s dreams—Anna?” I stopped and looked around. “Anna?”

She was at the bottom of the stairs. When I went back for her, she was staring at the front door.

I called her name again. She slowly turned away from the door and started climbing.

When we reached the boys, Jan fell in step beside me. “Emerra, will you dream one of my dreams tonight? Please?”

“I don’t think I get to pick.”

“But if you do dream, you’ll tell us, right?” Jacob said.

“We’ll see,” I said.

Ten days as a parent-type, and I was already whipping out the phrases I swore I’d never use. But I understood now; it was a useful phrase. It was easy to see why using it could become a habit. It satisfied the boys but didn’t stick me with a bunch of promises I couldn’t keep.

No matter how enthusiastic they were, I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell them about their dreams.

They had smiled and laughed when I had talked about the few memories I could offer them. The delightful sound had been so bittersweet, remembering it hurt.

How could they sound so happy when, in the dreams, all I could feel was an all-consuming grief, tainting everything?