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There was once a princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys.

Her name was Irene. She was eight years old when this story begins, though she got older very fast. She lived in a large house on the side of a mountain — half castle, half farmhouse — about halfway between its base and its peak. Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two pieces of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.

She had rarely seen the real sky at night. This was because of what lived under the mountain. The mountains in that country were full of hollow places — great caverns and winding passages that the miners had opened up over generations. And in the hollow places lived goblins. Not monsters exactly. Creatures that had once been ordinary, who had gone underground when a king treated them badly, and had changed in the dark into something resentful and clever and bent.

This is why they kept the little princess inside at night. She did not know this. She only knew that the nursery ceiling was painted blue with stars, and sometimes she lay on her back and looked at it and thought about the real sky she couldn't quite remember having seen.

---

One very wet day, when the mountain was covered with mist that gathered itself into raindrops and poured off all the eaves of the great old house, the princess could not go out.

She got tired. Not ordinarily tired — the kind that toys cannot help, the kind that comes from being inside your own skin too long on a rainy day. Her nurse went out of the room for a moment. And the princess, who was brave enough for her age and curious the way only certain people are — not cautiously, but in the way of someone who genuinely needs to know what is on the other side of things — went to a door she hadn't tried before.

It opened onto a narrow staircase of old worm-eaten oak. She had been up six steps before, on another day, and six steps had been enough reason to come back. On this day she kept going.

Up and up — through one flight and then another and then another, until she came out at the top of the third flight onto a landing that opened into long passages full of doors. She ran. The same doors. The same silence. She was lost.

She sat down on the floor and cried. Really cried — the way you cry when you're alone and there's no one to be brave for. She didn't cry long. She was braver than that, even at eight.

She got up, brushed the dust from her frock — it was very old dust — and decided to do the thing that fear most wants you not to do: keep walking, keep looking, keep trying each new turn.

In a corner, through a half-open door, she found a staircase. It went the wrong way. It went up. She went up anyway.

---

At the top was a small square landing with three doors. She heard something — low, sweet, humming — more like a very happy bee in a flower full of honey than anything else she could name. She put her ear to the first door. Not there. The second. Not there. The third.

She opened the third door.

Inside was a very old lady, sitting spinning.

You might wonder how she could tell the lady was old, since her skin was smooth and white and her face unlined. But her hair was white — white almost as snow — and her eyes were the eyes of someone who has seen a great many things and understood most of them. Not the sharp eyes of cleverness. The deep eyes of time.

While the princess stood in the doorway, the old lady lifted her head and said, in a sweet voice that was old and a little shaky and mingled pleasantly with the sound of the wheel:

"Come in, my dear. Come in. I am glad to see you."

The princess did what she was told. She walked in, shut the door behind her, and stood beside the old lady and looked up at her face.

"Why, what have you been doing with your eyes, child?"
"Crying," said the princess.
"Why?"
"Because I couldn't find my way down again."
"But you could find your way up."

The princess thought about this. "Not at first. Not for a long time."

The old lady rose and washed the princess's face with a little silver basin and a soft white towel. Her hands were smooth and warm and not what old hands were expected to feel like.

"Do you know my name, child?"
"No," said the princess.
"My name is Irene."
"That's my name!"
"I know. I let you have mine. A name is one of those things you can give away and keep at the same time."

"Who are you?" asked the princess.

"I am your great-great-grandmother," said the old lady. "Your father's mother's father's mother. I came here to take care of you."

"But I've never seen you before."

"No. But you shall see me again."

"Does nursie know you're here?"

"No. Nobody knows."

The princess thought about this for a moment. Then she said — and this is the part that tells you what kind of person she was:

"I should like very much to bring nursie to see you. She won't believe I found you, and I can't bear not being believed when I'm telling the truth."

The old lady smiled. "You may try," she said. "But I cannot promise she will see me."

She took the princess back to the top of the stair and watched her go down. Then she turned and walked back to her room — very fast, for such a very great-grandmother — and sat down at her wheel again with a smile that was difficult to interpret.

---

The nurse did not believe her.

The princess told her everything, precisely and honestly. The nurse said she had dreamed it, or invented it. Every denial drove the princess a little closer to tears — not of sadness but of a particular frustration: the frustration of knowing something true that you cannot prove.

The princess wiped her eyes. She understood something that night that most children take longer to learn — that you cannot make a person believe what they are not ready to believe, and that this is not the same as the thing not being true.

She forgave her nurse and went to sleep.

But she had not changed her mind about what she had found.

Time passed. Irene went back to the tower whenever she could, and the old lady was always there, always spinning, always glad to see her.

She showed Irene her bedroom one afternoon. It was full of extraordinary light — from a large globe that hung from the ceiling, catching and holding light in a way that normal materials don't. The crown was there in a box by the wall, and the princess was allowed to look at it but not to touch, which is the correct relationship to have with certain things when you are eight years old.

The old lady showed her something else. She held out her hand. On her finger was a ring, and from the ring ran a thread so fine it was nearly invisible — the kind of thing you think you might be imagining.

"This is what I have been spinning."

"It's so thin," said the princess. "I can barely see it."

"Yes. But it is very strong. Stronger than anything you can see."

She put the ring on Irene's finger. It fit as though made for her — because, in a sense that was not magical but was nevertheless true, it had been waiting to fit her.

"If you are ever in trouble, or in darkness, or in a place where you cannot find your way — put your finger where the thread is and follow it. Do not pull it. Do not try to see it. Only follow."

"Where will it lead?"

"Where you need to go. I cannot tell you more than that. I will not always be visible to you. But the thread will always be there."

The princess wanted to ask more questions. But the grandmother was already turning back to her wheel, with the look of someone who has said everything that can usefully be said on a subject.

Irene went back downstairs with a ring on her finger and a thread she could barely feel.

---

She did not know, yet, about Curdie.

He was a miner's son, twelve years old, with a face a little pale from time spent underground, and eyes that were sharp and honest. He worked in his father's mine, deep in the mountain, and had grown up knowing the underground the way some children grow up knowing the forest — not as something frightening but as something familiar, with its own rules and personality.

He also knew about the goblins, which the grown people preferred not to think about.

The goblins had been growing bolder. Their king had a plan — the miners whispered about it without knowing what it was, the way you whisper about something you feel but cannot see clearly. Curdie had been listening at walls when he should have been asleep. He understood more of it than most.

The plan involved the mines flooding. The mountain was full of underground rivers, rushing through passages in the dark, and the goblins had found a way to redirect one of them. If they opened the right passage at the right time, the water would pour through and down into the valley below.

Curdie overheard this by accident — or something very like accident — lying still in the dark after his torch had gone out, pressed against a cold stone wall while the goblins walked past and talked. He was very good at being still and quiet.

When they had gone, he made his way out carefully. He sat for a while on the mountainside in the open air and thought about what he had heard.

He was twelve years old, and he had grown up in a mining family, and he understood what it meant for a mine to flood. He understood it in his body, the way practical knowledge lives — not just in the mind.

He went home and told his father. His father told the other miners. The miners told the people who ran the house above. And the house above, in its slow and uncertain way, began to take the threat seriously.

But Curdie already knew it was not enough to simply know where the threat was coming from. You had to know where it was going.

He went back underground to find out.

The night came when the goblins moved.

Irene was asleep in her nursery with the blue ceiling when she woke — not to a noise exactly, but to something. A feeling. The kind that wakes you before the sound arrives, before there is anything your senses can name. She lay still for a moment in the dark, her heart beating in a way that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite excitement.

Then she put her finger where the thread was.

She could feel it. Faintly — barely — the way you feel a breath of air from under a door, not quite sure if you're imagining it. But it was there. And it was pointing. The way a compass needle doesn't pull you north but simply shows you which way north is, and leaves the walking to you.

She got up. She went through door after door and passage after passage, and the thread led her on, and she followed. She had no light. The house was dark and everyone was asleep. She went down stairs she didn't know she knew, and she was not quite afraid because the thread was steady, and there is something about a steady thing to hold that changes the quality of dark places.

---

Below, Curdie was in trouble.

He had gone too deep, following the goblins to their gathering place, and a stone had fallen — not from carelessness, just from the mountain shifting slightly the way mountains sometimes do — and the goblins had heard it. He had run, but running in the dark in unknown passages is not the same as running in the light, and he had taken a wrong turn, and now he was in a cavern he didn't recognize, and the goblins were somewhere behind him, moving with the patient confidence of creatures who know every inch of the dark they live in.

He was a brave boy. He did not panic. He put his back against the wall and thought. But he had no way out that he could see.

---

The thread led Irene down.

She had not known there were stairs going this way. The air changed as she went — cooler and different, the underground air, the kind that has never been near a window. She should have been more frightened than she was. Perhaps the thread made the difference. Perhaps she had already learned, in her months of finding the grandmother's room and losing it and finding it again, that the right response to not being able to see where you're going is to trust what you're following rather than stop because you can't see.

She came out into a cavern.

And there was Curdie, with his back against the wall.

He stared at her. She stared at him. Neither said anything for a moment.

"Who are you?" he whispered, because whispering seemed correct.

"I'm Irene," she whispered back. "I followed the thread."

"What thread?"

"This one." She held out her finger. He looked. He could see nothing there. But he had learned, underground, that not seeing something is not the same as it not being there.

"Can you follow it out?"
"I think so," she said. "Come with me."

He came.

They went through the dark together — the princess following something invisible, and the miner's son trusting her, which was its own kind of courage. Perhaps harder, even, than hers. The goblins fell behind, confused by the path the thread took, which was not a path anyone would have thought to go. And eventually they came out through a low opening in the rock onto the mountainside in the cold open air.

Above them was the sky. It was full of stars.

Irene looked up. They were exactly as she had imagined from the nursery ceiling, and also not at all like it — in the way that real things are never quite like their representations, but are better.

"You followed something you couldn't see," Curdie said, after a while.

"Yes," said Irene.

"How did you know to trust it?"

She thought about it. "My grandmother gave it to me. And she is very old, and has been there a very long time, and I believe her."

---

The goblins' plan did not succeed. Between Curdie's knowledge of where the flood would go and Irene's knowledge of the thread, the two of them together found what neither could have found alone. Curdie could read the underground. Irene could follow the thread. Different kinds of knowing, pointed at the same problem.

Irene went back to the grandmother's room one last time before her father took her to the palace. She wanted to say goodbye, and to ask the question she'd been carrying since the cavern.

"I followed the thread," she said. "It worked."

"Yes," said the grandmother, spinning.

"Will it always work?"

"It will always lead you where you need to go. That is not always the same place as where you want to go."

"And if I can't feel it?"

"It is still there. The thread does not break. You only lose touch with it sometimes. The way to find it again is not to look harder — it is to be still, and wait, and put your finger where it was last, and trust."

"What is it made of?" asked Irene. "You never told me."

The grandmother looked at her wheel. She looked at the thread on her finger. She looked at Irene.

"You," she said. "Mostly you."