In Stone's Clasp

"Are you sure it was this tree?" Jareth Vasalen called to his friend.

"Yes, I'm positive," Larr Ovaak called up.

Jareth sighed, blowing a stray strand of yellow hair out of blue eyes. Thirteen-year-old muscles quivering with the effort, he kept climbing.

Larr had spotted the blessing cloth — or, at least, what had certainly looked like a blessing cloth; no one had ever actually seen such a thing — dancing in the wind. It had led the two boys a merry chase, away from chores and family and other mundane things, and now Larr was convinced that it had gotten lodged in the topmost branches of this ancient oak tree. "Think about it, Jareth!" Larr had exclaimed. "I'll let you share it, since we both saw it. Everyone'll be jealous!"

But of course, it was Larr who would keep the cloth, and Jareth who was expected to make the tricky climb on branches bare and slick with ice. Jareth didn't really mind; he loved this old oak. Often he would sit for hours, cradled in its large branches, looking out over the farmland and watching it turn from green to gold to brown and finally, as now, swathed in winter's cold blanket of white. He ... read full excerpt from In Stone's Clasp ebook