Chapter 1

People say love changes a person. They have no idea.

Frank Dearing was the first man I ever met. He made me whole. He provided me with purpose and identity. And he gave me a name. “Greenwood” might not be the most original moniker for a dryad, but it was mine.

Nidhi Shah gave me strength and a larger purpose. Through her, my life grew from a single farmhouse to a larger world of people, plants, and magic.

Then there was Isaac Vainio. I thought his greatest gift to me would be a sense of freedom, however limited. But through him, through his curiosity and his often deranged need to poke the universe and ask “What does this button do?” I found something more.

I spent fifty years confined by my nature. Isaac helped me to discover hope.

As a Libriomancer and a researcher, this was one of the moments I lived for. I loved that this brilliant, untrained fourteen-year-old girl had just shattered an entire body of magical theory.

I hated the fact that I couldn’t figure out how she had done it.

Jeneta Aboderin slouched in a white plastic lawn chair on the old deck behind my house. Plastic sunglasses with pink-slashed zebra stripe frames hid her eyes as she read from an electronic tablet. “You’re not concentrating, Isaac,” she said without looking up.

Her words blended the faint Nigerian and British accents she had acquired from her mother and father, with a generous helping of teenaged annoyance at me, the thickheaded librarian who couldn’t pull magic from a simple poem.

“Am, too.” Not my most brilliant comeback, but I was off my game today. I was concentrating so hard my forehead would be permanently creased. I just wasn’t feeling the words. I glanced down at my own brand-new e-reader, a thin rectangle the size of a trade paperback, with a gleaming glass screen and a case of rounded black plastic. The buttons were recessed into the edges, and the whole thing looked like it had come straight off the set of Star Trek.

I was afraid I was going to drop the damn thing.

“Try again,” Jeneta said.

I scrolled up through Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, back to the beginning of a poem I had read fourteen times so far this afternoon. I had memorized it the second time, but reading the words helped me to touch the book’s magic. At least in theory. “Maybe if I started with something simpler, like creating moonlight?”

She snorted. “ ‘Look down, Fair moon’ isn’t about moonlight.”

“Are you sure? It’s right here in the title.” I tilted the screen toward her and pointed. “maybe I’ve got a defective reader.”

I imagined her eyes rolling behind her glasses. She yanked the reader out of my hands, and her fingers tapped a staccato beat on the screen. “Check out this one. ‘Dream Deferred,’ by Langston Hughes.” Slender brown fingers sank into the poem, emerging moments later with a raisin held between them. “You think Hughes was going on about raisins? It’s a metaphor.”

She left the “duh” at the end unstated. Shaking her head, she popped the metaphor into her mouth and said, “He packs every syllable with hope and fear and desperation, until the words are ready to explode. How can you not feel that?”

Her exasperation at my obvious thickheadedness didn’t bother me. I was more interested in how easily she had produced that raisin from an electronic device. Johannes Gutenberg himself, the man who invented libriomancy, had said it couldn’t be done.

Gutenberg had built his printing press more than five hundred years ago based on his theories about magical resonance. He had believed that physically identical books would hold the collective belief and imagination of the readers, and that a man with sufficient magical gifts could tap into that belief, using it as a focus for his own power.

Growing up, Gutenberg had been a third-rate practitioner at best. He had mastered only the most basic of spells, and even then needed help to cast them properly. libriomancy had transformed him overnight into one of the most powerful men in history.

Electronic books lacked the physical resonance of print. The words were nothing but a collection of zeroes and ones translated into a transient image on whatever screen you used to read them. We had always assumed that e-readers would be useless for libriomancy, that the variety of reading devices and the impermanence of the files would prevent anyone from tapping into that collective belief. Porter researchers wrote dire predictions about the dilution of our magic as more readers moved from print to electronic, whittling away at our pool of belief.

And then Jeneta Aboderin had accidentally loosed a three-foot, long-nosed vine snake from her smartphone in the middle of algebra class. That event had left a hundred Porter researchers fighting for time with Jeneta and the chance to try to figure out exactly how the hell she had done it.

After all, part of the mission of die Zwelf Portenære, the secret organization Gutenberg had overseen for all these centuries, was to learn as much as we could about magic’s potential. more importantly, if I could master this trick, I wouldn’t have to lug thirty pounds of books with me every time I went into the field.

The Porters, as they were known to those not comfortable with middle High German, also worked to hide the existence of magic from the world, and to combat an ever-changing list of potential magical threats.

The other Porter researchers were probably cursing my name and trying to understand how Jeneta had ended up working with me in copper river, Michigan. I was the newest member of our research branch, having been promoted a mere two months earlier, and none of my work had anything to do with electronics or e-books.

Jeneta plucked another raisin from the e-reader and handed it to the large spider soaking up the sunlight on the deck railing. Smudge and Jeneta had taken to each other at once. Smudge lazily extended his forelegs to take the raisin from her fingers. A droplet of red fire appeared between his legs, and he stuffed the burning snack into his mouth.

“I had another dream last night,” Jeneta said quietly, not looking away from the fire-spider.

I reached over and took my reader back. “No more raisins. You know the rules. You’re on a twenty-four hour magic ban after the nightmares.” I did my best to keep my tone comforting, but to my ears, I came off more like a cross between a school counselor and a babysitter trying too hard to be cool. This was why the Porters had trained therapists on staff. “What were you doing yesterday?”

“I dunno. I just ...after campfire, I needed a break. There’s been a lot going on, you know? Three weeks ago I was in summer school, trying to make sense of geometric proofs. Now I’m doing magic.”

Her mouth softened into the first unguarded smile I had seen from her all afternoon. “I went down to the docks to think. I got to watching the minnows swimming around. After a while, I tried reading to them.”

“You read to the minnows?”

“Shut up. It was amazing. At first I was just sitting there, going through a...