“But still the queen’s daughter, the princess, grew up strong. She grew up fast and fleet, forever running between the Other Kingdom and that of her birth, because she couldn’t remember a life that was any other way.”
All the magic had gone from her telling. She spoke fast and flat. The room was changing, and Althea was, too. Her shoulders slumped; gray licked through her hair. Without warning, her gaze swiveled toward my face. Her teeth were stained, and her eyes spun like pinwheels.
Ella was gone. The room was the same, but different. The bed was humped and tarnished, and dust lay over everything like a veil.
“You’re here.” Althea’s whisper cracked in the middle. She was looking at me. “Is it you? Is it you, really?”
She was a ghost. Or a mirage. She had to be. The hunger in her voice should’ve made me wary, but my own hunger rose up to meet it. “It’s me. It’s Alice. Your, your…” I couldn’t say it. Granddaughter.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky Althea,” she said, low, moving closer till I could smell the sweat on her skin, the bitter almond on her breath. I froze, my heart hammering like frozen rain, and she spoke the rest of her tale into my ear.
“The Other Kingdom didn’t hurt the queen’s beloved daughter, because she was too clever. Clever Princess Vanella.” She hissed the princess’s name—my mother’s name. “Until the day the princess found a baby in the Halfway Wood, left by her parents and their hunting party to sleep beneath a tree. Cherry blossoms had fallen into her bassinet. The baby squeezed them between her little fingers, staring up at the princess with her black, black eyes. The princess loved her right away. And she stole her out of her fairy tale.”
My heart knew before my head. It beat tiny throbs of adrenaline, like a poison drip telling me to run, run, before you hear something you can’t forget. I didn’t run. I let her tell me the rest of our story.
“Alice-Three-Times,” she spat. “You were plucked from your story like a cherry blossom by a girl who didn’t know what she did.”
My mind moved like a cold computer. “I’m here to find Ella,” I said stupidly. “My mother.”
“Your kidnapper. That girl is nobody’s mother.”
For a long white moment my mind wiped clean. I couldn’t even picture Ella’s face. I didn’t know my hand was raised till Althea stepped back, out of range.
“Look at you.” Her laugh was an ugly thing. “Still feral after all these years.”
I dropped my hand, wrapping my arms around myself as Ella came back to me in pieces. Bony hands and breath in the dark and the sharp line of her profile as she drove. She’d never looked like me. I’d never wondered why.
I used to picture a father somewhere, someone Ella had loved, at least for a little while. That was a lie, too.
“I don’t believe you,” I whispered. Another lie.
“You were her favorite story.” Althea’s voice grew gentler, a little. “She liked how angry you were. Like an avenging … well, not an angel.”
“I’m a girl,” I said fiercely. “I’m a person.”
“You’re both, and neither. You’re a story, but that doesn’t make you any less true.”
I felt like I was watching myself from the outside, a girl with blurred edges holding herself like a child. The image stamped itself onto my brain, one of those out-of-your-skin moments that turns into memory while it’s still happening. This is the day my dead grandmother told me my mother wasn’t mine. That I was a character in a story, plucked from another place.
“She ran away from you,” I told Althea, watching the words land like a slap. “We both did. I grew up in the world. I remember it—I remember skinning my knees and reading library books and eating crap food from the gas station. Sick days watching bad TV. I remember life happening in the right order, and, and bus rides, and being lonely. I remember all of it!”
“Do you?”
I stared at her, then down at my hands, rough and chapped and un-fairy-tale-ish. I thought of the way my life faded out behind me, faint scratches on the earth washed away like footprints on dirt.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “And you’re dead. And I’m here to take Ella back.”
“Take her back? From who?” She smiled at me coquettishly, a ghost of what she once looked like, back when hers was a face to look at. She’d become very old since she was a woman telling her daughter a story in the dark.
“From the Hinterland,” I said unsteadily. “They took her.”
Althea shook her head. “I assure you, they did not. You’re the one they wanted, Alice-Three-Times. She was just”—she flipped her hand—“a distraction.”
Bait. Finch was right. Ella, wherever she was, had been bait.
“So where is she, then? If not here, where?” My voice rose. “I don’t care if you’re a ghost or a memory or a, I don’t know, a hologram, but please. She’s your daughter. Please tell me how to get her back.”
“You think I’m a ghost? I haunt this old memory palace, and it haunts me, but I’m not dead.” She grabbed my hand, shoved it against the sloping bread-dough skin beneath the yellowing stripes of her shirt, right where her heart would be.
A dim beat fluttered against my fingers.
Alive.
“But … but the letter…”
“It reached you? I wasn’t sure it would. The death letter was to get her to bring you back.” She laughed, harsh and sad. “Even that wasn’t enough. So why now? What made you come back now?”
My heart crunched in on itself. After everything, I still wanted to think all of it had been her—that she’d sent cold fingers into the world to draw me here. Because she … what? Loved me? Wanted me? Stupid Alice. I liked to think I’d put my old dreams behind me, but here I was talking to one, and she made me feel five years old.
But Ella loved me. My mother. My kidnapper. The Thief, Hansa had called her.
She was still mine, maybe more now that I knew it had been a choice. My longing for her rearranged itself in my chest. It felt like a new-hatched thing, wet-feathered but fierce. I set my jaw and let it be the lifeline that would pull me from the quicksand of this hot, close room, the smell of dust and the night crawling over the windows.
“Ella was gone,” I said. “They took her somewhere—somewhere in New York, maybe, I don’t know. And the book—your book. It was haunting me. Twice-Killed Katherine. She … got me to come.” I found I couldn’t tell her about Finch. Seeing Althea like this would have broken his heart.
“Of course she found you. You are a walking, talking bridge to the Hinterland. Anywhere you go, the wall between the worlds grows thin. They get through. They do damage.”
“She tried to kill me. She tried to make me cut my own wrists in the woods. Why?”
“Ah.” Her eyes turned bright. “Clever Katherine. There’d be a grave cost to pay if they killed you themselves, but if you spilled your own blood in those woods? Alice-Three-Times? It would burn a door between worlds that would never fade. Their vicious holidays out there would never end.”
Alice-Three-Times. The name seared and burrowed into me.
She looked at me with something approaching respect. “So you made it through the woods without a guide. Life out there hasn’t rendered you completely helpless. You must be a bit like her—like Ella.”
“I am,” I said, biting off the words.
She sucked on the cigarette I’d forgotten she was holding. “Ella never could resist a lost lamb—especially not you in your basket, with those awful black eyes. I tried to return you myself, before they killed her getting you back.” Her eyes darkened. “But Ella hated me for it, and she took you away. Far from them, far from me. Like I was a boogeyman, too.”
“But they’re not black. My eyes. They’re brown.” I said it stupid and hopeful. Like it was a loophole I could use to slip back into my real life.
“That happened after you left the Hazel Wood. It was enough to make Ella believe she did the right thing. She wrote to me, back when letters still washed up her
e once in a while—she said it was the Hinterland draining out of you. Saving you, giving you a real life, became her purpose. Did it work? Did you get one?” Her voice swerved sharply from desolation to hope—stunted and sad, but hope nonetheless.
I remembered the rootlessness, the travel, the cursed incidents that followed us from place to place. I felt in my back the bars of every sofa bed we ever crashed on, the heavy gaze of our hosts when we’d outstayed our welcome, and the ache of sleeping in our car for days on end, pretending I didn’t know we were homeless.
I saw Ella. Gripping my arms and counting down with me from one hundred, bringing my anger back within its borders. The blanket forts she built for me in guest rooms, resigning herself to sleeping without a pillow so I could forget we were a burden for a night. The crow’s-feet starting at the corners of her eyes, so out of place on a woman who never really grew up. Who chose saving me, running with me, over having a real life of her own.
“Yes,” I said. “It worked. I’ve had a wonderful life. I have a wonderful life.”
Althea tilted her head back, looked at me through lowered lashes. “And did she—did Ella ever talk about me?”
My first instinct was to hurt her. But I looked at the taut white knobs of her knuckles, the drawn-tight pouch of her mouth around the cigarette, and couldn’t. “All the time.”
“Liar,” she said softly, smoke sifting through her lips. “I won’t make excuses for my life, but I can tell you it wasn’t my choice to lose her. She thought—I don’t know what she thought. That I was the Hinterland’s dogcatcher, maybe.”
“Aren’t you? The letter—wasn’t that a trap?”
“Hmm.” She stubbed her cigarette against the bedframe, dropped the butt on the floor. “Not a very effective one.”
“She thought it was over. When you died—when the letter told us you’d died. She thought we were safe.”
Althea looked at me, eyes bleak. “She knew I was a bridge. She didn’t know you were one, too.”
It hit me like delayed pain. It had always been me. My black energy leaking into the air like blood, and the Hinterland like sharks on its trail. All the years we’d spent running, we were running from me.
“So they’ll always find me?” I whispered. “No matter where I go?”
“They are you. You’re all made of the same stuff.” Her voice was almost sympathetic. “It’s hard, isn’t it, to find you’re not at all the thing you thought you were?” She pointed at herself, her words poison-tipped. “Intrepid adventurer.” Then at me. “Real live girl.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t believe in a world outside of that room. “So what happens to a girl like me?” I asked dully. “If the letter had worked, if she’d brought me back. What would you have done with me?”
“But it did work after all, didn’t it? It just worked slow. It made you stand still, long enough for those monsters to corral you into the Halfway Wood. But—you survived it. And you came here, to me, of your own free will. Did you not?”
The sharpened look in her eyes made me wary. “I … don’t know. I wanted to come here. But I didn’t want it like this.”
“We never do, do we? When we get what we want?” Then she peeled off her gloves and seized my hands. Her grip burned worse than Katherine’s, and I gasped, trying to wrench myself free.
“This is what happens to girls like you.” Her words were half curse, half plea. “She’s tried so long to get you back, Alice-Three-Times. And as long as you’re on the wrong side of the woods, she won’t let me die.”
“Who?” I could barely hear my own voice over the pain. “Who won’t let you die?”
She ignored me, looking up like the ceiling was the sky, and a vengeful god was watching her. “I’m giving her back to you!” she cried. “Now will you let me go?”
The heat spread up over my arms and down my chest, squeezing me in its fist till my vision burst open and swung with stars. I felt the tremor in Althea’s fingers, saw the wide yellows of her eyes, and her mouth shaping itself around some final words I couldn’t hear. A plea, an apology. A promise, a lie.
Then I was falling end over end like Carroll’s Alice, through space or water or clouds or atoms. The pain passed, and I felt alive, breath in my chest and blood in my muscles and nothing hurting. The room was gone, Althea was gone, and I was rushing through bracing air. When I landed with a numbing jolt, I was in the Hinterland.
24
I was back in the forest. But this was a forest that made the Halfway Wood feel like a Polaroid. It made the woods on Earth seem like the pencil sketches of a blind man who’d read about trees but never seen them.
In the Halfway Wood I wondered whether the trees could hear me, whether they could speak. Here they seemed practically to breathe. I’d landed with my back against a trunk as wide as a car, front to back, its bark covered in knots that suggested an implacable face. It dropped a rain of seeds into my lap. They were crescent-shaped and pinkie nail–sized, burnished the color of a harvest moon.
I looked up at the sky like I might see Althea’s face there, watching me through a rip in the blue. Then I stood up and started walking. What else was there to do? I was numb. Three degrees removed from the world I’d grown up in—a world that wasn’t even mine.
Finch is here. I remembered it with a feeling like jerking back from the brink of sleep. The Halfway Wood had tried to make me forget. Althea’s junk drawer of a house and the woman herself, going mad in a yellow room. But Finch was here. He’d lived, and he’d bled out in an in-between forest, and now his corpse was cooling in a world he’d wished for.
Was he buried? Was he burned? What did a place like this do with its dead? Thoughts of him made my fingers curl and ache. I shoved them into my pockets and walked through a world where everything—everything—seemed alive.
The sun was vast and low and not so bright that I couldn’t make out something happening in the fire of its surface, the tracings of a story so distant I’d never read it. Flowers furled into pellets or went lurid as I passed, sending out vapor trails of scent—cardamom, iced tea, Ella’s shampoo. This new world was too strange, too lucid; it made my mind explode in a dandelion puff. Everything had a revelatory crispness, like a new day seen through the lens of a coffee-fueled all-nighter. I started reciting stuff in my head to keep my thoughts within safe borders: The track lists of my favorite albums. The names of all the Harry Potter books in order. The places we’d lived, one by one. Chicago. Madison. Memphis. Nacogdoches. Taos.
It kept my mind wrapped around a thin blue wire of sanity and denial. But it was slipping. Ella, I knew now, was in the place I’d left behind. And I was in an alien world, surrounded by trees whose sentient interest in my passing ranged from distant friendliness to a ruffled annoyance that made me picture a dog smelling someone else’s pet on your clothes. I had Earth all over me. But underneath it, if Althea was to be believed, I was Hinterland.
I believed her. If for no other reason than how good my body felt moving through this wood. The air was crisp, almost autumnal, but everything in sight was lavishly green or flowering. The light was an ambient, suffused gold, and it did something funny to the shadows: they looked like black stamps. My own shadow gave the distinct impression of keeping up with me just to see what I’d do next; if I proved to be boring, I suspected it would ditch me.
After spending an hour pushing through low-hanging branches that either courteously shrank from my touch or pushed back, I stumbled by luck onto a path.
It was almost too picturesque, lined with berry brambles and flowers that wept fat, furry petals onto the packed dirt. They were duckling yellow and smelled like buttered toast.
I took two steps and stopped.
Birds had been singing. Three- and four-note trills I didn’t recognize. A breeze had moved through all that curious green, branches had cracked, leaves had rustled, unseen animals had made their quiet way. But here the noises stopped, replaced by a focused, annihilating calm. There was a bend to th
e air here, an almost invisible heat that made my fingers curl and my nose itch.
It made me hungry. I was hungry, and my hands were so cold I felt them burning through the fabric of my pockets, chilling my thighs.
I didn’t see the girl till she was almost close enough to touch. She’d stopped a few paces off the path and didn’t notice me. Her profile could’ve been drawn in one long, economical stroke by a master, and her hair was as thick and dark as my shadow. She stood perfectly still, both hands pressed against the bark of a tree. Her mouth moved furious and silent, as if she were reading a very disturbing letter.
The air around her shivered and prismed like the heat over blacktop. She was what I was looking for, the hot moving point at the center of this island of charged quiet. I watched her with a feeling I couldn’t name—fear or awe or recognition.
The tree trunk cracked in two between her palms. I sucked in a breath as its bark became doors, opening inward. From where I stood, just above her, I could see the top step of a silver staircase going down, and hear the sound of a party happening far away. As the girl lifted her foot and placed it on the first stair, I took a step forward.
A hand landed heavy on my shoulder, and a voice spoke in my ear. “Wouldn’t do that if I were you. You don’t want to come between a Story and their story.”
I jerked away from the man standing next to me. He was in his early thirties, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, jeans faded almost to white, and a shabby brown bomber jacket.
And he was eating a Hershey’s bar. He saw me staring at it and stepped backward, blocking it with his hand. “Dude, no. This is practically my last one. It’s not like I can go buy more.” His accent was American, mostly, but touched with something else. It gave a crisp edge to all his consonants.
I pushed my hands deeper into my pockets, breathing in the cool, untainted air he carried with him. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re from Earth.”
He stared at me a moment, then sighed. “Oh, hell, no. You just got here? Nope, I’m not equipped to do an orientation. Wait, you didn’t bring any food with you, did you? Like … packaged stuff?” He scanned me—sweatshirt, jeans, no bag. “Okay, that’s a no.”
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