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remaining cars.
    Gert and Gideon managed to fold themselves into their vehicle without ever disengaging from Daphne, who hung from them like an oversize pendant. Her dress, Ralph noted as the ruffled seams disappeared within, was all pink crinoline: a Valentine’s cookie.
    “Love your sister’s funeral outfit,” Ralph said as he slid into the passenger seat. Cecil was already inside, and the reggae had started pounding its rump poetry again. Beatrice took the back, her chin cradled on her palm as she stared out the window. Her torso was fully in the seat, but her face was pressed against the door, as though she were split by equally strong urges to exist fully in the car and to dash herself on the road. In her mind, she was writing rhyming verse full of gray adjectives and deep feeling, in which every crow is called a raven.
    “That princess costume?” Cecil asked. “She bought it from British Home Stores. At first Mother refused to allow it in the house, but Daphne wants to be a princess, and, well, that means Daphne gets to be a princess. She’s got a chip on her shoulder because a lot of her friends actually
are
princesses. It was all Mother and Father could do to rip her scepter away for the funeral.”
    The tides of conversation would have called for Beatrice to speak next. But when Ralph glanced back, he caught her staring at the dingy shopping centers outside the window, her plain face impassive, her marble eyes shiningand impenetrable under the sheaves of hair that almost covered her face. Perhaps she was trying to think of a word to rhyme with “anguish.”
    “So she wears pink frilly stuff all the time?” Ralph asked distractedly.
    “Sleeps in it, too, except when Mother puts her foot down.”
    “Well, that’s good,” Ralph said.
    Beatrice snorted, her first social interaction for the day.
    “Dad had a special room constructed for Beatrice in her wing,” Cecil continued mutedly, after swerving around a loping tractor. “It’s got all her books. She’s big into trilogies with yellowed pages. She’s a total dork. Aren’t you, Ugs?” Cecil glanced at her and turned up the music. “I think she really wants to
be
the characters she reads about.”
    “Well, I guess that’s the point of it all,” Ralph said, out of dork solidarity.
    Beatrice nodded, glared at her brother, and snorted a second time.
    “Yeah, I guess so,” Cecil said, moving quickly from wounded sniff to impassioned rant as the little car chugged up a rise. “But I’m like, there are bigger issues out there, you know? Sure, yeah, she’s just seven” — Ralph surmised they were back to Daphne now — “but should we really be encouraging her to be all fake? There are real people suffering out there, who aren’t princesses worrying about snagging princes but working mums trying to buy formula for their sickly infants, and because we have money we can afford not to think about these things. It makes me so mad. She’s in a
princess costume,
and there are kids in, like, Bangladesh who don’t have any costumes! Don’t have any clothes at all, for that matter! I’m just trying to say that — oh, this is our vale, by the way.”
    Their vale. The car finally crested the top of a sunny hill and began to putter across a bumpy bridge, which crossed a river into a radiant bowl of trees. Cecil sped up and zipped along the lane as it threaded between thetrunks. The uneven road threw the car’s occupants against the doors and, on especially big bumps, the roof.
    “I take it ‘our vale’ is home?” Ralph asked.
    “Yeah. It’s an island of sorts.” Cecil turned off the radio.
    The lane bent to follow a shelf of rock, and from this new vantage point Ralph could see a skyscraper of a tree at the center, throwing its great leafy umbrella over the glade. To one side of its circumference, a castle had been offhandedly placed. The castle would have been monumental in any other context; next to the tree it was a mere cake