Stella Starflake Pearl rubbed frost from the turret window and scowled out at the snow. She ought to be in the most splendid mood – it was her birthday tomorrow, and the only thing Stella loved more than birthdays was unicorns. But it was hard to be cheerful when Felix was still refusing to take her on his expedition. Even though she’d begged, pleaded, cajoled, threatened and stormed – none of it had done any good at all. The thought of being packed off to stay with Aunt Agatha again made Stella feel positively sick. Aunt Agatha didn’t know much about children, and sometimes she got things completely wrong, like the time she gave Stella a cabbage for her packed school lunch. No chocolate dinosaurs, or marshmallow cake, or treats of any kind – just a single, solitary, useless cabbage. Plus, Aunt Agatha had nostril hair. It was almost impossible not to sometimes stare at it.

Stella had wanted to be an explorer ever since she was old enough to know what the word meant. More specifically, she wanted to be a navigator. She never got tired of looking at maps and globes, and as far as she was concerned, a compass was just about the most beautiful thing in the whole entire world. After unicorns, obviously.

And if she wasn’t meant to be an explorer, then why had the fairies given her a middle name? Everyone knew that only explorers had three names. Felix had given her his last name, Pearl, but then hadn’t known what to do about a first name, so he’d asked the fairies to name her instead. This was probably a good thing, because Felix was fond of peculiar names like Mildred and Wilhelmina and Barbaretta. But the fairies had given her not one name, but two: Stella and Starflake. And surely that meant that she was absolutely destined to be an explorer.

Stella scrambled onto the turret window seat and pulled her legs up to rest her chin on her knees. It was getting dark outside, and she knew Felix would be looking for her to give her her twilight present. It was a tradition they had – Stella was always allowed to open one present the night before her birthday. But right now she was too angry and disappointed for presents, so she’d come up to the turret to hide. And if she tucked herself into the window seat then she couldn’t be seen from the end of the corridor.

Unfortunately though, Gruff liked the turret too, and he had come lumbering over almost as soon as Stella had sat down, poking his nose into her pockets in search of biscuits. Mrs Sap, their housekeeper, hadn’t been very happy when Felix brought an orphaned polar bear cub home one day, but the bear would have died otherwise. Not only was he an orphan, he had a misshapen paw as well, and might not have been able to survive in the wild. Stella thought it was the best thing ever to have a polar bear in the house, even if he did almost flatten her sometimes when he wanted to cuddle. Polar bears were quite startlingly huge.

She reached into her pocket for a fish biscuit and held it out to Gruff, who took it from her with extreme gentleness and then crunched it up happily, covering her in crumbs and bear slobber. Stella was used to the bear slobber, so she didn’t mind, but the downside of Gruff coming to see her was that he gave her presence away when Felix came into the corridor a few minutes later.

‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, stopping by the window seat. ‘I’ve been looking high and low for you.’

Stella looked up into his face – her favourite face in the whole world, the first one she could ever remember seeing. Stella had been a snow orphan, just like Gruff. If Felix hadn’t found her when she was a toddler, she would probably have died out there, alone on the ice. Stella had never met anyone with hair as white as hers, or skin as pale, or eyes her particular shade of ice-chip blue. Most people at Stella’s school had pinkish skin, but Stella was white as a pearl from head to toe. It was something that had always bothered her – especially that she didn’t look more like her adopted father.

Felix was Stella’s father in every sense of the word, but she had fallen into the habit of calling him by his first name because that was what everyone else did. He wasn’t particularly handsome or distinguished, and he didn’t sport a moustache, whiskers or side-burns, as was the current fashion. This was in large part because those things required quite a significant time-commitment in terms of grooming and maintenance, and Felix said he had (so far) counted up a total of 134 more interesting ways that he would rather spend his time, including making numbered lists of interesting ways he would rather spend his time. His nose was bent at the top but Stella loved the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, and his golden-brown hair was usually just a little bit too long, curling around his collar – and his mouth always wanted to smile. Felix didn’t like frowning. He said it was a waste of good muscle use.

Stella had always thought of him as a special person, and the fact that he was a fairyologist proved it beyond doubt. There weren’t many humans that fairies would speak to, but they had always liked Felix. He could hardly leave the house in the summer months without one of them perching on the brim of his hat or landing on his shoulder to whisper into his ear. So if he forgot to brush his hair sometimes, or put on odd socks, or did the buttons of his shirt up wrong, none of that mattered one jot to Stella. Besides which, Felix knew how to ride a penny farthing, perform card tricks and make little flying birds out of paper – and if that wasn’t enough to make someone a favourite person, Stella didn’t know what was.

‘It’s twilight present time,’ he announced, holding up a white box wrapped with a wonky pink bow.

It took all Stella’s discipline to say, ‘I don’t want it.’ She turned her head to stare out the window.

‘I cannot believe you are serious,’ said Felix. He tried to nudge Gruff – who had laid down next to the window seat – out of the way, but nudging a polar bear is a bit like nudging a mountain, and really wasn’t any use at all, so Felix climbed over the bear instead, and sat on the seat opposite Stella.

‘I’d take you in a heartbeat,’ Felix said quietly. ‘If girls were allowed on expeditions then you know I would take you.’

‘It’s not fair that girls can’t be explorers!’ Stella said. ‘It’s stupid and it doesn’t make sense!’

The injustice of it made her whole body tremble. Stella had grown up listening to Felix’s stories whenever he returned home from an expedition, and had always loved them, but there comes a time when a girl gets tired of hearing about other people’s adventures, and wants to start having a few of her own.

Plenty of explorers took their sons with them on expeditions. Even Stella’s friend, Beanie, was going on this next one with his uncle, the renowned entomologist, Benedict Boscombe Smith. Beanie was the same age as Stella and he was part elf. He had a long list of dislikes that, so far, included small talk, sarcasm, handshakes, hugs and haircuts. Basically anything that involved physical contact was a definite no.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ Felix replied. ‘It is stupid, and it does not make sense. I’m sure it will be different one day. But the world doesn’t always change as quickly as we’d like it to.’

Stella continued to look out the window, preferring to stare at the snow than meet Felix’s eye. ‘I thought rules didn’t matter to you,’ she said, biting her lip.

Felix had always said that some rules were okay to break, and, in fact, some should be broken regularly for one’s health. When Aunt Agatha said that Stella needed a woman in the house to bring her up properly, Felix was always on her side about stuff like being allowed to gallop around the grounds on her unicorn, or build a fort out of books in the library, or learn how to make balloon animals rather than sew ugly embroidery.

‘There are some rules that absolutely cannot be broken,’ he’d say. ‘Like being kind and treating others as you’d like to be treated yourself. But whether or not people laugh at you, or think you peculiar, or different from them, doesn’t much matter in the grand scheme of things.’

‘It’s not like it would hurt anyone if I went on the expedition, is it?’ Stella asked, trying to use Felix’s own logic against him. ‘And if people think it’s strange for a girl to be an explorer then that’s their problem. Not mine.’

Felix sighed and put the present down on the seat between them. ‘My dear thing, I wish it were that simple. But I don’t make the rules at the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club.’ He nudged the present along the seat towards her. ‘Let’s not let it ruin your birthday. Why don’t you open your present?’

‘Take it away. I don’t want it,’ Stella said in her coldest voice. But she felt awful as soon as she spoke, and she hated herself for being cruel, and she hated being angry with Felix too. It felt so unnatural not to be friends – it made her stomach feel all twisted up and wrong.

‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted quickly. ‘That was mean.’

Felix picked up the present and pressed it into her hands. ‘Open it,’ he said again. ‘The poor...