Alice Hunt paced the floor of her cheerless farmhouse, hoping the son who was overdue for dinner would remember to eat somewhere else. She understood why he was troubled; Ivy had told her the reason for the young couple's breakup.

This web of lies is unfair to everyone, Alice thought bitterly. Ivy has lost Lucius, and I seem to be losing him too.

If Edward had told Ivy the whole truth, I'd tell Lucius at this point. His learning it from someone other than Ivy might even make it possible for the two of them to reconcile.

But Edward is determined to keep Ivy believing that after all our years of hoaxing, the old legend of "creatures in the woods" was proven true when one of them attacked her. That she killed a "creature," and its kin killed Noah. I can't tell my son that! Admit I've been deceiving him all his life, beg his forgiveness, and then immediately lie to him again? Unthinkable!

She hadn't anticipated this dilemma when she agreed that the elders should continue keeping their secret. She wondered now, guiltily, to what extent her agreement had been influenced by romantic fantasies about the married Edward.

Is he as admirable a man as I've always believed?

Is this latest lie meant, as he claims, to protect his daughter--or to protect himself?
.
.
.
.
.
Ivy Walker sat alone in her room, ignoring the tray her mother had brought her when she declined to join the family at the table.

For the first few days after Ivy's trek through the forest, Lucius's life had hung in the balance. Then he'd had a long recuperation, made more difficult by a harsh winter. Ivy had been too distracted to dwell on the details of her own experience. But now that Lucius was well--and lost to her, perhaps forever--she had time to spare.

There are things that don't make sense.

It's tempting to think that even though the elders were staging hoaxes for decades, a creature's having attacked me proves they exist, so nothing has really changed. But is that true?

For all those years, the elders were play-acting, sometimes noisily, on the fringe of the forest. Noah, who lived near it, may have been wandering back and forth at will. More recently, Lucius ventured in as a test.

And the creatures never attempted contact--never did anything to give us a hint that they existed, let alone that they objected to our entering those woods!

So why, now, did they suddenly attack me? And then Noah, of all people--the one they'd probably tolerated many times?

Was this an aberration? Was one of them--no, there must have been at least two--as deranged as poor Noah?

Should we be trying to communicate with them, to reach the kind of understanding our lying elders told us had been reached long ago?

Oh, how I wish I could discuss all this with Lucius!

She knew Lucius believed the promise she'd tried to exact from him had been her own idea. But the truth was that she understood and respected his position. She herself had been bound by a promise made to her father.

Now she let her thoughts stray in a direction they hadn't gone before.

When Lucius was a boy, the color I sensed from him was blue. I admired it, because blue is said to symbolize loyalty. But as he matured into the man he is now, it changed to something else: violet. I believe that was an improvement, because his color was moving away from the "bad" one in the spectrum, and violet is the farthest from it of all.

Do I have a color? If so, there's no one who can tell me what it is...

Lucius refused to promise, in advance, to keep a secret I wanted to share with him. Was it the holy color that guided him to take that stand? To reject the old ideal of unquestioning loyalty to clan and loved ones, and insist, instead, on the supremacy of a person's own conscience?

Is it possible my color has always been blue...and now, it's starting to shift into violet?