It wasn’t a root at all but a white bone, and not an animal’s… “Don’t scream,” said a voice above her.

Hoping it was a root she could climb up, she bounded toward it and reached to grasp it. After the fifth time she’d tumbled from the side of the pit, she spied something white gleaming from the sheer side of the dirt wall. But the earth was soft and crumbled away in her fingers. She tried digging her hands into the dirt that rose on every side of her and climbing up it the way she might shinny up a tree. The sides were smooth and rose several feet above the reach of her arms. She was lying at the bottom of a cir cular hole that had been dug into the earth. She tumbled head over heels and hit a layer of hard-packed dirt. It felt like Alice’s fall into Wonderland, though it was much shorter than that. One caught at her nightdress and ripped a long tear in the fabric. But the forest only grew darker, the thorns more tangled. She gave a little sob and began to run in what she thought was the right direction. She amused herself at first by making chains of flowers and hanging them from branches. Her slippered feet barely disturbed the moss as she slid in between the trees. She flitted toward it like a small ghost. The edge of the forest, just past the stables where their horses were kept, seemed to glow. It was a summer night and she was warm in her nightdress. She slipped out of bed and climbed through the window, dropping lightly to the flower bed underneath. It was pouring into her room like milk, laying white bars of light over her bed and across the polished wood floor. Late one night the brightness of the moon woke Lucie. James came from the ancient and noble line of Herondale, but that didn’t mean he was above pulling his little sister’s plaits if the need arose. Lucie stepped on his foot, which meant that Papa swept her up and carried her back to the house before a fight could erupt. James, of course, told her that faeries didn’t have pillows, they slept underground and they stole away naughty little girls in their sleep. The carpeting of moss underfoot was so green and soft that her father told her it was a pillow for faeries at night, and that the white stars of the flowers that grew only in the hidden country of Idris made bracelets and rings for their delicate hands. The forest surrounded Herondale Manor on all sides, its trees bent together at the tops like cautious whisperers: dark green in the summer, burnished gold in the fall. Growing up in London, Lucie had never imagined a place like Brocelind. Lucie Herondale was ten years old when she first met the boy in the forest.

Chain of Gold by Cassandra Clare