Maybe it’s Mathew. He had a dalliance with a huldra and lived to tell the tale. Tell the tale, free the tail.
Stop it. Kira knuckles her eyes, but for each thought she blocks, more auld wives bustle in. The woman in the cabin, who seemed to know her. The sense that the forest does know her. The village in the clearing, living among such frightening, hostile instability, speaking the same language as she and—
Callum. Her racing thoughts become backseat drivers. Oh, no. What happened to Callum?
Kira heaves herself up to sitting too fast. ‘Oh, my—’ She screws up her face, riding out the pain. Her back is a wrenching protest, the bones in her wrist clicking and locked. Yesterday’s injuries sting, pulse, blending into the whole. ‘Ow.’
Slowly, she breathes. Slowly, she straightens. Her shoulder knocks something vertical, a rock, a wall, whatever. Bracing her hands on the stony ground, she squeezes her deadweight eyelids shut, grits her teeth, and eases back.
It takes her weight. Okay. She breathes, untensing her muscles against it. It’s okay; she’s okay. Her knee twinges. Her tailbone moans. Her jaw thumps hot. It’s probably cut. It feels like she’s been thrown off a cliff but found mercy on the rocks.
Ish.
A wobbly memory paddles to the surface: falling through the snow like the snow was water. The ghost appeared, and then she was here, waking up in the dark. A dark that still surrounds her. Massaging her aching neck, Kira frowns up at the light. It’s a pale, hazy glow and doesn’t help the dark. Is that where she came in?
Another light flares from off to the side. Kira starts and inhales. It’s close.
Another.
Another, in front of her.
Another, white and pointed, on her right. Uneasy, Kira’s stomach dips. The nausea. The dread. ‘Hello?’
Two more lights flare, brighter than the others. Kira shields her eyes. ‘Who—ah!’
Her arms clap roughly back to her sides. Alarmed, she looks down: her gloved hands are pinned by invisible weights. She curls her fingers. Nothing.
Dread pools into fear. ‘Hello?’ She squints around, her voice pitching. The lights could mean anything; they’re too bright to see past, and the dark all around is nothing but afterglow. She tugs on her arms: nothing. She wiggles her fingers: nothing. Inane, desperate questions balloon in her throat, but she clamps her mouth shut. They never help the captive.
She drags her knees slowly up to her chest. Captive. Is she a captive?
In a perfect circle of white, the lights flare and drop away. Kira shields her eyes too late. The afterglow is dizzying, hot, bright, red. The dark swarms around it. Slowly, her eyes adjust.
Quickly, she quails.
Dozens of women, still and straight, pale and blank and silent. The pool of fear freezes. It’s a sword, a mace, a battle-axe sucking her breath as she stares. Their outlines waver in the settling gloom, cupping the stubs of candles. The smouldering glow doesn’t reach their faces, but she’d bet her life, her afterlife, that the women are staring back.
Her mind backs into a corner, but her body knows what to do. Running is better than waiting to die.
Her hips crack. Her thighs groan. Her arms refuse to move. Pressing into the rocky wall, Kira scrapes herself up.
Until, after four whole seconds, the air slams her shoulders down. Unprepared, her knees give. The ground becomes a bullet in the buttocks. ‘Agh!’
‘No,’ a voice says softly. Kira screws up her face in pain. ‘No.’
The word rings and stretches. Kira’s legs turn as numb as her arms. Her neck is stilling, and strain as she might, she can’t slow it, can’t make it stop. Hysteria mounts in her chest, up her throat. Her head is rotated to face the front. Her shoulders jerk flat against the wall, and there, in a matter of seconds, she’s trapped.
On the whole. ‘What the hell?’ Kira cries, yanking at her limbs. Invisibly manoeuvred, invisibly bound, they’re dead and dull and limp. ‘Let go!’
She strains until her face hurts, until her breath flutters shallow and fast. The rows of women emerge from the dark. She doesn’t want to look, doesn’t want to see. Not their thin faces, their trailing hair, the dresses clinging to their brittle legs and swirling about their feet. Dying candles, bottomless eyes. Hello.
‘Let go!’ Kira yells. Manic tears scour her throat. The curving cavern mocks her. The rock-hewn walls echo her words, the skylight, its pale light dwindling. A hopeful star winks out. Swallowing hard, Kira shakes her head. ‘Let go,’ she croaks. ‘Please.’
‘No.’ One of the women steps forward. It’s the voice that said hello, the woman from the snow, a blurry glow ghosting her body. ‘This,’ she says softly, ‘is the Kyo.’ Her eyes are blank and black as she smiles. ‘Here, we all are dead.’
The words echo in a murmur of voices. Kira bites at her cheek. Her breath is light. Her head swoons black. Here, we all are dead. Is she dead? She fell through the snow, and then?
The black coalesces. It’s twilight, midnight, lurking on the edge of her senses. Dead?
‘Am I dead?’ she asks thickly, to keep herself awake. The speaker is watching her closely, her dress a flutter in a draught. ‘When I fell, did I—’
A draught. Struggling through the night, Kira blinks. Again. An exit?
‘Stand.’
The bond upon her arms is released. Her legs propel her up. ‘You’re alive.’ The woman smiles. Kira cries out. Fighting for balance, her arms become windmills. In addition to having fallen off a cliff, she’s now run a marathon. ‘Just. You wouldn’t be, had we not brought you here. We thought you far too interesting to die at the hands of fools.’ She turns like a leaf. ‘Come.’
A tug jolts behind Kira’s ribs. Her feet stumble to follow. ‘What?’ She tries to hold back, but it’s useless. ‘Stop it. How are you making me move?’
The woman says nothing. Gaunt and haunted, the other women part, spanning a spectral path. Kira shivers. The cavern has murmured back to silence, candles smouldering in ghostly hands. The flurrying cold grows colder.
There must be another way out. Step by step her head clears, and step by step she chills. An opening that isn’t a hole in the roof. There must at least be communication for the voice to be able to reach her. She wraps uneasy arms around her sick, unsteady torso. Both here and on the outside.
There is. An arch in the rock swims out of the gloom, and as the speaker drifts through it, Kira stops. Be careful what you wish for, she thinks morosely; the gap is dim and barely a fissure. It doesn’t look wide enough for Romy, even, let alone her own non-willowy frame. What if she squeezes in and can’t get back out?
The tug in her chest sharpens to pain. ‘Hey!’ Kira yelps, but it jerks her forward, hesitation be damned. Before it can ram her against the stone, she turns to the side, sucks in her stomach, and slides through into the dark.
On the other side, the tug slips away. Softly, almost caressingly released, Kira stops. The space around her is as black as ice, the draught flitting cold about her feet. Somewhere, the woman claps her hands.
The room imbues with light. With a gentle puh, Kira’s lips part: candle flames upon candle flames, gentle and wicking and filling the air with the scent of a sputtering match. Cradled by stone bowls brimming with water, lining the ribs and the feet of the walls. Lighting a path to a pool at the end, to the breeze floating off it and the woman on the edge.
The blank-faced woman beckons. ‘Closer.’
This time, Kira doesn’t hesitate. She’d rather not risk losing her body again; not now she’s back in control. Like a dreamer, she walks. This room is smaller than the first, and wilder; the walls rougher, the ceiling low, moisture glinting on the stone. Rocky stalactites jut down. It gives the cave an air of a jumbled, toothy mouth. Gems in amber dance with the flames. Amethyst sparkles in corners. She’d be thinking up a painting if she wasn’t so afraid.
Alice falling through the dark, into a world of tricks. Reaching the edge of the pool, Kira twists her hands in her sleeves. If
only the tricks could stop.
‘They’re not tricks.’ The woman motions for Kira to sit. Grimacing at her aching bones, at the stone-cold floor, Kira sits. These women read minds now, Callum would say. His sarcasm makes her breathe. ‘They are life. But you’ve never known life like it.’
Her dark eyes flick up to Kira’s. Kira fights to keep her face straight. If her eyes widen, she betrays her fear. If she grits her teeth, she betrays her fear.
She betrayed her fear in the other room. The colts have already bolted.
‘We can’t blame you,’ the woman says. Kira struggles to fix on her words. ‘Whiteland is more than outsiders can think of, let alone think can exist. Creatures and men, more creatures than men.’ She looks wistfully down at the pool. Three feet wide, it glitters with the ceiling, the breathing of the wind so tender on its skin. ‘We watch it all from here.’ She traces the water softly. ‘And what we don’t watch, we hear. I watched you on the outside, and I watched you in the forest, but I only heard you speak when you fell. Wondering about language, Anneliese.’ She retracts the finger. ‘Your friend.’
Kira looks up sharply. ‘Callum? Do you know where he is?’ Her nails dig into the pool’s narrow ledge. ‘Do you know if he’s all right?’
The woman smiles. ‘He was last on the list. Language, Anneliese, your friend.’ She closes her eyes, and Kira’s fingers spring loose. Startled, she folds them into her coat. ‘It will all be dealt with. I am Enny.’
Nice to meet you isn’t right. I’m Kira is pointless. Kira fiddles with the fluff inside her gloves and says nothing. Taking a breath, Enny straightens her spine. Her eyes smudge and darken. Kira flickers with disquiet. She’s seen that change before.
‘Languages are all the same.’ Enny waves a long hand musically, with grace. ‘Or, they are nothing. It’s sometimes hard to say. They could be so different that they circle around and finally become the same. Loathing is close to love, is it not?’ A shudder ripples through her. She blinks. Her eyelids are translucent. ‘Is it not? I’m speaking to you now, and you shouldn’t understand. You think that you’re speaking your language, but you’re not. Nobody here will speak your language, and you will not speak theirs; yet you speak. Yet we speak.’
She curls her hand, a royal motion, as if proving a philosophical point. Cautiously, Kira nods. What else can she do? Her heart has lodged itself in her sternum, but there’s no way out. There’s no way out.
And this ghostly, ghastly woman is mad.
‘It must be, then,’ Enny continues, mildly pleased, ‘that there is no language. Not here. How can it exist if we communicate with fluency, yet never give it a thought? I am not conscious of speaking any language. I may have been when I was alive, but I no longer remember. Are you conscious of your language?’
She blinks her black eyes at Kira but doesn’t give her time to speak. ‘Maybe,’ she muses. ‘Or maybe not. Maybe the outside is different; maybe not. In the Kyo, in Whiteland, and in Urnäsch, I believe, language is irrelevant. There’s just communication.’ She tilts her head. ‘Do you understand?’
No. No, she doesn’t. Kira’s insides crawl, full of spiders. Does she nod again? Make up a response? Is silence better than the wrong response and losing her body—or worse, her mind?
Enny trails her finger through the water. Kira’s breath stutters. Any speech slips away. The water isn’t moving.
We all are dead.
‘Now’—Enny watches the water—‘Anneliese.’ Her voice lilts toward the absent-minded, light and sighing. ‘She—no.’ Stopping her tracing, she frowns. ‘You’re right. Your friend must come sooner. He will.’ She snaps her chin in a fitful nod. ‘I’ve seen him; I’ve seen them all. Your sister, your parents, the woman who follows.’ She regards Kira inquisitively. ‘This is quite the expedition.’
Kira’s pulse thuds in her ears. Her body tenses, straining, stiff. On balance, she might have fared better with the mob; providing they didn’t burn her first, she could have explained her way to release. Here, though… ‘You’ve seen my family?’ She balls her fists on her thighs. Here, she’s a star on the edge of dark matter. ‘And Callum? Are they okay?’
Dipping her whole hand into the pool, Enny merely sighs. The water ripples, colours sparking, washing up on the surface. As bright and irritated as a suncream reaction, Kira’s eyeballs start to sting.
She blinks. Nothing happens. Butterflyquick, she blinks again. The pool shifts in swirls. She rubs her eyes, but the sting keeps building. Kira grits her teeth. Tiny, dotted pinpricks, her eyeballs burn, and as they draw a throttled gasp from her throat, the water-bound image comes clear.
Kira stills. It’s a woman. A woman in a boat of reeds, sailing an endless blue. A woman, pink-faced with heat, wearing the white, black-treed vest she originally bought for Romy. Her mother.
Tears swell up, but Kira rams them down. Anna’s here. On the ocean that isn’t an ocean, her mother is alive.
Pain wires through her eyes. At her blink, the image reforms: Romy, struggling through the forest, her arm around Mathew to drag him along. Kira inhales, and it sticks. She can’t breathe out. Mathew’s face is semiconscious, haggard, a dark-shadowed white. It’s so far away from the father she knows: the father of playful dream contests, poking fun at reality shows, trying to be a tower of strength. It’s not the father from her eighteenth birthday, surprising her with a grove of art supplies while he and Anna beamed. It’s not the father who hugged, who teased, who looked sad when Romy started shying away. It’s a shadow. A tragedy. A ghost.
It’s not the Romy she knows, either. Emotion threatens to swell and break. Where Mathew’s face is gaunt, hers is almost withered, as if the thing that took her mind is too much for her bones. Kira bites at her lip, hard enough to feel her bottom teeth through the flesh. Oh, Romy. Writhing in the hospital, lying on the couch, lolling in Callum’s arms. What’s happened?
The Romy in the water glances up. A gash of a smile stretches her mouth as if she sees, as if she knows. Kira flinches back, rushing hot. Her sister’s eyes are hematite, mischievous on her own. They should be blue. She always envied them, more frosted and glittering than her midwinter shade. They should be many things. Romy should be many things. Kira wants to choke. Her sister should be alive.
Before the horror can consume her, the image flits away. This time the pain is searing, a stab spreading out to her temples. Kira grinds her teeth against it. It’s flicked to a woman against a tree, angular and slumped. She’s fringed by snow, hidden in the centre of a thorny thicket, ringed by bullying, towering pines. Kira stops breathing again. Lena.
The image flicks before she has time to think. Her mind leaps, her vision spasms. Ignoring her throbbing head, she narrows her burning eyes: Callum. Callum, Callum, Callum, faint and silhouetted, crouched in a hole dug from snow. A chill prickles her chest. How long has she been gone? A web of branches weaves a door, and he crouches, peering through the cracks. Is he watching for her? Waiting?
If she can’t get back, will Whiteland release him? He shifts his weight from right leg to left, leaning as close as he can to the web. Kira bites her lip through to blood. Callum.
Seeping together, the images melt. Kira’s eyes are left wet and pulsing, staring at the pool as it ripples and stills. Everyone’s alive. As much as they can be, they’re okay.
For now.
Enny’s dress rustles against the floor. Kira startles. She’d forgotten the woman was here, probably watching for how she reacts, waiting for the slideshow’s end. Kira brushes the lingering water from her eyes. The woman is watching, but something has changed.
All her fear stampedes back. The change is visceral, calculated, chiming with the air: clearer, more metallic, like the taste of blood isn’t just from her lip. An aura…and the eyes.
Kira’s breath stutters. In the time of her distraction, Enny’s eyes have grown, rounder and darker and lacking in life. ‘You see?’ she asks. A smile thins her lips, cut by a boning knife. She’s all too sharply simila
r to the water-bound Romy. ‘All will be dealt with, as I said. You have no reason to worry.’
Maybe not about anyone else. Kira forces her aching teeth to stop grinding, dragging her eyes to the woman’s. ‘Why am I here?’ she asks. Her voice wavers. Dammit, no. She can’t collapse if she wants to leave, and there’s no way in hell she’ll stay. ‘You said I was interesting.’ She shifts her legs, enough to spring up and run in a beat. Enny doesn’t seem to notice. ‘What does that mean?’
Looking up in a jerk, Enny laughs. ‘I said that?’ Amusement bubbles like boiling water. Merrily, it echoes, a clockwork toy on a haunted night. ‘I don’t know what it means.’ She pulls her eyebrows together. ‘We’re not interested in you. We’re interested in your mother and your sister. You?’ She tilts her head. ‘You’re merely entertaining.’
Threads of anger start to hiss. Enny is trailing her fingers through the pool, regarding her like she’s a pet. Kira clutches the anger with two clenched fists. Pointed at, laughed at, put on display; she will not be a circus animal.
She’ll show this goddamn world her worth.
‘Why?’ she asks. Sparks flicker through her eyes. She bites back an exclamation. ‘Why am I entertaining?’
With a pointed deliberation, Enny lifts her fingers. The pain in her eyes retreats, leaving them stripped, watery, raw, but Kira doesn’t relax.
‘Why are you entertaining?’ The woman cocks an innocent eyebrow. ‘First’—she dips a fingertip, causing a piercing flicker—‘you don’t know who you are. Second, you’re so easily scared.’
She meets Kira’s eyes for a blink. A flutter of images flit between them: Kira, afraid, in the car park; Kira, afraid in the mirrored clearing; Kira, afraid in the present, bruised and hollow-eyed. Kira shakes her head sharply, jarred and chilled. She’s an older shadow of Romy.
Enny smiles, that glass-thin Chelsea grin. ‘Third,’ she says after a pause she seems to savour, tasting the dread upon the air, ‘you’re unaware of your danger. Fourth, although you don’t know where you are, you still try to play the hero. And fifth…’
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