“You’re a pretty girl,” she amended. “But you could do with a bath and a night’s sleep.”
“A year’s sleep, you mean.” Then I squashed my mouth shut, before all kinds of observations popped out. You look like you should be on a crystal healing retreat in Ithaca. Did you know your house smells like fire and blood?
“Where did you come from, and why? You can give us the short version.” Ingrid’s tone was clipped.
“No fair,” I said. “She didn’t drink any.”
“Chop more firewood for us, love?” Janet said. It was only half a question.
Ingrid stood, grudgingly. “First, tell me you haven’t any bad intentions here, or any plan to hurt either of us.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Saying what you want is a dodge. State your intentions.”
“I have no intention of hurting either of you. Or anyone else. Oh!” I grabbed at my stomach—something twisted there, as I thought about the Briar King. About the monsters who’d killed Finch and left me in the woods. “Maybe there’s somebody I’d hurt,” I amended, “but they’re not here.”
That seemed to satisfy Ingrid; she grabbed a waxy-looking coat from a peg and let herself out.
“She’s protective of you,” I said. “It must be nice.”
Janet lifted one shoulder, dropped it. “I made my way here alone for a long while. It took some time to find my place. It took more time to become somebody worth protecting.” She sat down in one of the squashy chairs before the fire, and I sat in the other.
“God, this thing smells like a wet dog,” I said, and bit my lip.
She smiled faintly. “Did you or did you not arrive here today?”
“I did.”
“And it’s your first time here?”
I hesitated. “I can’t remember ever being here.”
Her raised eyebrow told me she caught the dodge. “As you may have gathered, my home is a sort of way station for new arrivals. People come here from your world—my world, once—by various means, sometimes accidental but more often on purpose. I’ve made it my job to welcome them, warn them, and keep track of them. The numbers get a bit dodgy, of course, what with all the things you can fall into or get eaten by. I do my best. They come from other worlds, too, but that’s not my problem. There’s precious little mixing between refugee groups, less than you’d think for such a small place, but … you look like you have a question.”
“How big is it?” I blurted. “What is it? What’s beyond it? Did you come on purpose? Is there any way to go back? And how do people become ex-Story?”
She held up a hand to stop me. “It’s quite small. As small as it can be, considering its borders are shifting, unmappable, and nearly impossible to reach. It’s a kingdom of sorts, but it has many queens and many kings. As far as what’s beyond it, I couldn’t say. I did come here on purpose, God help me, and yes, there are ways back. People become ex-Story when their tales are no longer being told. Sometimes it kills them, sometimes it drives them mad, and sometimes they adjust to it nicely and assimilate into the general population. Them I don’t keep track of, though I do like to know when there’s intermarriage. Their children, when they have them, tend to find their way into trouble—or into stories, which I suppose is the same thing. Now, tell me your story, as short or as long as you like.”
I barely had time to open my mouth before I was talking. Whatever she’d had me drink made the words feel like water pouring from a faucet. While I talked, I kept a dim flicker of hope in the back of my mind: that maybe, if I had enough to say, I could keep from telling her the one thing I wanted to keep a secret. At least for now, until I knew how she’d take to having a Story sitting in front of her fire. Curling my white fingers in their gloves, I told Janet about Ella, about Harold and New York and coming home to find her gone. I backtracked and told her about Althea’s supposed death—referring to her as my mother’s mother, close enough to the truth for the truth serum to bear—before jumping forward again to tell her about Ellery Finch, my night in the woods, my hours or days in the Hazel Wood. It was such a relief to speak that it took me a while to notice her face had gone ashen under the warm color of her skin.
“And I met a man on the path,” I said, and faltered. Janet’s hands gripped the arms of the chair, and her eyes looked past me.
She shook her head, trying to smile, then gave it up. “You said you’re Althea’s granddaughter. Althea Proserpine.”
“You’ve heard of her? Have you read her book?”
“No, thankfully. Not a single copy can be found within the Hinterland’s borders. I imagine you’d be thrown to the Night Women if you tried to bring one in. But I did know her—back there. On Earth. Althea was … hmm.” Janet fumbled with something at her wrist, a narrow string of blue beads. Her fingers moved fretfully, making them flash in the firelight. “We came here together,” she said finally.
“Wait, what?” She looked older than Ella but not nearly as old as Althea. Yet she’d been in the Hinterland for … “Fifty years ago you came here? With Althea?”
“Fifty, you said? Fifty years have passed out there?” She laughed a little frantically. “I always imagined I’d—well, maybe I knew I never would, but—I suppose it’s a near certainty my parents are dead, isn’t it? Fifty years, that’s well into the new century, yes?”
I had a brief, dizzying desire to wow her with news of the internet but decided it mattered not at all. “Tell me about Althea,” I said instead.
“Oh, how can I make it quick? How about this: she made a dark deal, and it ripped holes in the curtain that keeps the worlds apart.”
“That sounds a little dramatic,” said my truth-drunk tongue.
“It was pretty goddamned dramatic,” she snapped. “She didn’t even offer to take me back with her, the selfish bitch.”
“Oh,” I said softly. “She was your … you were together?”
“Well, don’t weep for me,” Janet said dismissively. “She was a day-tripper. She mainly liked me for what I could do for her. We had fun, but it never would’ve lasted longer than the summer.”
“The summer Althea found her way into the Hinterland.”
“Of course. We met at a bar in Budapest—she was a pretty American tourist who’d run away from her friends. I was an idiot who never could resist a tough girl. I told her about my fieldwork, and she decided over the course of a cheap bottle that she had to come with me.” Her eyes went unfocused; she plucked the string of her bracelet like a zither.
“Your fieldwork?”
“Doors. Doors between worlds. I started out doing coursework in fairy tales—my parents were professors, my mother at a time when it was rare for a woman to make it as far as she did—but the theoretical became quite real when I found a door in a book.”
“Not metaphorically speaking, I’m guessing.”
“Not at all. Most books’ power is in the abstract, but occasionally you’ll find one with very physical abilities. It was your average fairyland door, quite disappointing if you grew up imagining fairies as air sprites or woodland types—I was stuck underground most of the time. Once I got out again, months later in real time, I was hooked. I dropped the idea of getting a degree and went very hands-on.” Janet had the same strange Hinterland accent Ingrid did, but the more she talked about her past, the more the British in her came out.
“And you told Althea about the Hinterland door,” I prompted.
“I did. That kind of knowledge was around if you could pay the right price, which I could—knowledge buys knowledge, and a pretty girl of twenty-six has other currency, too.” She pursed her lips and looked prudish for a minute, daring me to judge her. When she saw I wouldn’t, she continued.
“I was celebrating a very promising lead when I met Althea, and between the liquor and her loveliness, I had loose lips. God, I’m glad I sent Tam out, she’d hate to hear this.” She shot a nervous glance toward the door.
“Anyway, I told her—too much. By
the next morning, I already had regrets, but I couldn’t put her off. But she had a … she seemed to have the right spirit for it. Pilgrim soul and all. It was a whirlwind, the weeks we spent planning. Buying supplies, sourcing objects we thought we’d need—cloud powders, books, waterproof boots, a very expensive magical compass that, it turned out, worked in neither this world nor the last. We fell in love, or so I thought, and she never seemed to have a doubt about the Hinterland. I should’ve been suspicious, I know. I’d had years to get used to the idea of leaving the world behind. I’d cut my ties rather harshly. But she did it spontaneously. Thoughtlessly. That came clear when we got here. Painfully so.”
The door creaked open, letting in cold air and the spicy smell of the Hinterland woods. Janet went quiet and watched Ingrid come in, something complicated in her eyes.
Ingrid dropped a heavy armful of split logs in front of the fireplace. “Your refugee is staying the night, then?” she asked, feeding one into the flames.
“Of course she is,” Janet said sharply. “Ingrid, you’re such a snob. I was a refugee myself once, you ever think of that?”
Ingrid shook her head without responding.
“That’s the real problem with the Hinterland,” Janet said, ostensibly to me. “Nobody here has a goddamned sense of humor. Or a god, for that matter. Maybe you need one to have the other. The sense of being at someone’s mercy, so you can laugh about it.” She laughed like she was giving a demonstration.
“You’re tired,” Ingrid said without turning around.
“Too much truth for her,” Janet informed me.
I felt like I did the night I’d watched Ella get drunk on sherry and rip into Harold. It was two weeks after the wedding, and her wifey mask was starting to slip.
“You said Althea made a, um, dark deal to get out of here,” I said, trying to get the conversation back on track. “What was it?”
Ingrid turned around on her knees, eyebrows up. “What are you doing talking about that one? Where’s she come into it?”
“Alice is Althea’s granddaughter,” Janet replied regally. “And she’s the one who brought her up, not me.”
“A large coincidence, that is. I’m sure you hate having the excuse to talk about her.” But Ingrid said it without rancor, moving to stand behind Janet and rest her hands on her shoulders.
“What was the deal?” I repeated.
“What, so you can make the same one?”
“No, so I can…” I winced, grabbing my stomach. When I tried to lie, the stuff I’d swallowed twisted around in there like a snake made of acid.
“Oh, just tell her,” Ingrid said. “The damage is done, and she’ll hear a twisted version of it if she has to ask elsewhere. Everyone hears about the Spinner, sooner or later.”
“I’d rather it be later,” Janet muttered. She turned her cheek into Ingrid’s hand and sighed. “Things were bad here for Althea. There wasn’t someone like me yet, to tell us what to do, and there were very few refugees then. We had to find our way, painfully and slowly. She ran out of whiskey first, then cigarettes, then books to read, and the poor thing ran on all three. Think of a bored child on holiday, but imagine that holiday is forever. Until boredom made her do something very stupid.”
“What was that?”
“She started following the Stories. I don’t know how she managed to do it without being killed, but she did. She talked to the characters in the margins for the bits she couldn’t witness—the nursemaids, the middle sisters. She communed with dead kings and murdered wives; all those poor shades haunting the edges of things, desperate to talk. Then she’d come home and tell them to me. ‘I’m a journalist,’ she’d say. ‘This is what I do.’” Janet scoffed. “Like she’d been doing war reporting, instead of writing about what to wear to hunt a husband.”
Something broken in me ached at her words—a world ago, Finch had described Althea as writing like a war reporter. I wished I could tell him he’d been right.
“Eventually, of course, she followed the stories to their source,” Janet continued. “The Story Spinner.”
I heard the reverent space she put around the words, the capital S’s. She said they didn’t have a god here, but maybe this was something close. “Who’s the Story Spinner?”
“It’s in the name, isn’t it? In this place, it might as well be World Builder. She’s as good as. Story is the fabric of the Hinterland. Althea convinced the Spinner to make her a story she could use like a bridge. And then she just”—Janet tiptoed her fingers up the air—“climbed it right out of here.”
“She climbed—what? Words? That doesn’t make any sense.”
Ingrid eyed me oddly, but Janet cracked a smile. “Sense,” she said. “The last bastion of the struggling refugee.”
“So she made her way back. Fine. But how did that—what did you say? Rip holes in the world?”
Surprisingly, it was Ingrid who replied. “It started just before I met Janet. People from that world slipping in, those from this one slipping out. At first we thought it was new stories getting started. It happens from time to time—girls get abducted by kings, mothers murder their sons. Then we wondered whether there were doors opening onto other worlds, or hells.” Her Hinterland accent was clipped and compelling. It made me think of the dark shapes of icebergs, the light of a cold white sun.
“But rumor came of a place in the woods, a thin place where you could walk right out and back in again. It was discovered by a prince, a fourth son out of seven—his parents and his youngest brother were Stories, but he wasn’t. He put it under guard for a while, until he and his men were killed by the Briar King. Then things got much worse.”
“Worse how?”
“Stories started using the door, when they could sneak away. They like to cause trouble in your world.”
“How was that Althea’s fault?”
“Tales from the Hinterland,” Janet said bitterly. “She took the stuff that makes this world run and put it into a book, a book that got printed and shipped all over her world. The stories were read, they stuck in people’s brains, they got told and retold and dreamed about. New bridges were built—fragile, uncontrollable things between the worlds. Most of them were one-ways, rifts where people who loved the stories found their way through. I never understood what made the Briar King’s door so stable, but now I see—it’s on the other side of Althea’s Hazel Wood.”
“She was trying to contain it,” I said, unsure why I was trying to defend her. “She thought if she stayed in one place, and shut herself off, it would be better than leading them around the world.”
“If she was really so considerate, she would’ve killed herself,” Janet said bluntly. “We’ve had refugees as young as ten, little girls obsessed with fairy tales, and now they’re stuck living at the fringes of them.”
“Couldn’t the Story Spinner do something? Send them home?”
“You think she’d take that risk again? She’s been too busy trying to reverse what’s been done. The only people she sends through now are working for her, trying to clean up Althea’s mess. A few of the lost find their way back home on that errand—they track down copies of the book and destroy them. But, intentionally or not, Althea has made herself into a lesser Spinner. My guess is she doesn’t know how to control it. Every copy of her foolish book could be ash, and she would still serve as a bridge.”
“I think she wanted to,” I said, low. “Kill herself, I mean. That’s why she wanted me back—as long as I was out there, she couldn’t…” Then I stopped short, remembering what they didn’t know about me. The words sat on my tongue, burned my stomach when I swallowed them down.
“Wanted you back? What do you mean, she wanted you back?” Janet eyed me, sharp as a terrier.
“She…” I clutched my stomach. “It’s none of your business!”
“Yes, it is. Answer me, and the pain will stop: who are you?”
My stomach stopped burning the instant I pulled off the gloves, laying them flat across
my knees. They looked like the hands of a corpse, but flexing, eerie, alive. Ingrid gasped so hard it was funny and moved in front of Janet. Janet just looked at me like I was Christmas and the Fourth of July wrapped up in one.
“My god. You’re not anybody’s granddaughter, you’re the prodigal returned. No wonder she pushed you back through!”
“You know who I am?”
“Everyone knows who you are. You’re almost as bad as Althea—you’re like a seam ripper moving around out there, letting the beasties through. Not that they manage out there long. None of the Stories can, but you.” Her eyes were alert; I could practically see her brain ticking. Suddenly I could see her at twenty-six, beautiful and quick and squeezing people for information on the doors between the worlds. “Alice-Three-Times. How did you do it?”
“I didn’t do anything. My … Ella. Althea’s daughter. She took me when I was a baby, from the Halfway Wood. Then she just ran with me. We moved a lot—bad things happened when we stood still. What do you mean, I’m a seam ripper?”
“Ella Proserpine. I remember hearing about her, even before she took you. Poor thing grew up wild in the Halfway Wood, in and out between worlds. She’s probably half mad by now.” Her eyes widened as she took in my expression. “Oh. What an idiot I am. All these years later—she must be like a mother to you.”
“She is my mother.” It was painful to think of Ella now—the narrow shape of her, always too skinny, the delicate face and ant-black hair inherited from a dead man. Her life in three sharp pieces, two of them nearly unknowable: The broken puzzle of the Hazel Wood. The perilous fringes of the Hinterland. And an escape that was its own kind of trap—a fugitive’s life on the road.
“Yes. Of course. She would’ve had to be, to do this for you. To take you away and keep you away—how curious.” Janet’s eyes were distant. “Do you know your story? ‘Alice-Three-Times’?”
“Part of it.”
“The leaps. In your age. Did they happen out there?”
Ella kept a stack of Polaroids in a fireproof metal box in our car’s glove compartment. Me stone-faced at age two, solemn at eight, glowering at fourteen. Me in the ocean, me on a bike, me with my fingers dipped in sugar water, reaching for a butterfly.
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