She rolled up her sleeves—she had sleeves again, not armor—and opened her mouth.
“Why did you make me?” I asked her, before she could speak. I felt like a convict standing on a gallows with a noose around my neck, asking after the nature of God. “Why like this? Can I really end my story? Were you ever going to let me go?”
“Let you go?” Her voice was honey on razor blades. “Go to what? This is your purpose—the start of your story. This is what you were made to do.”
“So you lied. I can’t really change anything.”
She smiled at me, a tender smile that sent fear jackrabbiting through my blood. “You won’t want to, Alice. Can’t you see that yet? The Stories are perfect. The Stories are worlds. I made a whole world just for you, and in it you get to do what nobody gets to: you get to live, and live, and live. And everything will come out the way it’s meant to, no matter what. I made it that way.”
“But how is that living?” I whispered.
Something passed over her face, a look of soft indulgence. “You’ve lived more than most already. You burn so brightly, Alice-Three-Times. So much anger, so much ice. A story wouldn’t have waited like this for just anyone.”
“But I’ll be dying, too. That’s the end of my story, isn’t it?”
“That’s what you’re worried about? Dying’s not so hard, Alice-Three-Times. You’ve done it before.”
I went for the stairs. I wouldn’t get far—my legs felt like logs and my breath came out in white clouds. But I wanted my last act as a free person to be one Ella would be proud of. Ella, who bought my freedom with seventeen fugitive years, all so I could throw it away on a gamble.
I was right: I didn’t get far. I barely had time to turn before the Spinner yanked me back around. She touched my cheek and the ice rose to meet her, shivering through me and up to her fingers in waves.
It shouldn’t have hurt. If I was just the stuff of stories, the ice sealing my throat shut shouldn’t have burned like fire and the pain of going breathless shouldn’t have felt endless and the fear rising off my skin shouldn’t have smelled like a cornered animal. The pain was so massive it pressed out reason. I couldn’t even whimper.
The Spinner spoke into my ear. “When Alice was born, her eyes were black from end to end.”
I went blind. My body shuttered in like a telescope and I lost track of my limbs and where my head was and found myself suddenly bodiless, just an awful yawp of cold and dark, and a focused rage that should’ve eaten me up like a cinder.
I was imploding and I had nothing to scream with and my mind was melted plastic and my last clear thought was of the Spinner’s sociopathic blue eyes, etched into the cold glass of my fading consciousness. Then I was nothing in the dark.
29
The dark was vast and pendulous. It rippled from the edges of me. Everything was echo and pulse, float and stretch, sleep and wake and a distant hunger. Something waited in my hummingbird heart: potential. A distant rage. I nipped at it like sugar water. Then a whoosh and a wrenching in my core, and the velvet dark ripped open. There was cold and terror and chilling white light.
The first thing I saw was a face, red cheeks and watery blue eyes. Not my mother’s. I’d lived beneath her heartbeat, light and restless, for too long not to know this face didn’t belong to that heart. The blue eyes raked over me, registering fear and something else—satisfaction. Though I didn’t have the words for that yet. Two rough hands lifted and turned me.
The next face I saw matched the heartbeat I’d rested my cheek against for nine months, as I stretched and unfurled and grew myself from the inside out. A wide mouth, damp ropes of blonde hair. Eyes the hot brown of wet fur. She twisted her hands in bloody sheets. She looked at me and turned away. My mother.
But that word plucked at something else in my rapt, nascent baby brain. Mother. I saw someone else, a girl with unruly black hair and long fingers. She tangled them with mine and spoke into the angry pulse at my temple. Count to ten, Alice.
The tendrils of the story grew up and over me, like briars pulling a tower down. And I forgot.
It was so easy after that to let the story happen to me. I was a princess. I lived in a castle. I had eyes so black they drank the light. My siblings were scared of me; they ran like rabbits when they heard the bouncing of my silver ball. My father was a head of dark hair as he left the room, a booming voice that terrified the maids. My mother was a placid fairy queen at the far end of a table, plucking at the strings of a lute or the threads of some useless embroidery.
I grew up. I grew in jumps. The older brother who teased me one day, when I was only seven, got his the next, when I woke up taller than him. My bones stretched in the night. It was excruciating. It felt like stars had crawled into my joints and exploded.
But everything else felt so good, so free. I never knew how hard I’d worked to keep the darkness at bay—I remembered, distantly, that I’d done this before, under other circumstances. Lived, grown up. When I thought too hard about it, something silvery and webbed flickered over my sight. When I stopped thinking, my vision went clear.
There were other hints that there was something more to my life. Some secret that lay just beside it, ready to crack open like an egg. Sometimes at night I heard a shower of rocks at my window, like fingertips tapping. Sometimes I saw a face that was almost familiar, in a place where none should be—in the woods, or looking up at me from the frozen yard. If I peered too long the glittering sparks flared up and my head ached, so I stopped looking.
It felt good to be cruel. I let it wash over me like a warm black bath. My mother never punished me—she made her servants do it. Every stripe they laid on my back I paid out on my mother’s other children. She didn’t treat me like her own; she treated me like a cuckoo. I think she almost believed I wasn’t hers. She hated that we had the same silly hair.
I was fascinated by ice from the first time I tried it. Cream and honey and lavender syrup stirred into chipped ice, after a banquet dinner celebrating one of my father’s bloody victories. It slid into my stomach and lit a tiny fire. After that, in the cold months, I’d go outside and suck on icicles, eat snow. In the summer I’d hide in shadowy places, unmoving. My siblings felt safer then.
They weren’t safe in winter. I played tricks on them, put nasty things in their beds and ruined their chances at balls. After my little brother broke my hand mirror I led him deep into the woods on an icy night, promising him we were looking for erldeer. I left him alone in a clearing and trekked back alone. He returned home hours after me, led by a stranger who’d found him in the woods. He didn’t dare tell what I’d done.
When I came down to breakfast one morning in a woman’s body, as shaky on my new legs as a fawn, my father looked me in the eyes for the first time. He looked down my body and up again. He smiled in a way that made me afraid.
Soon after that, my mother announced it was time to marry me off. She didn’t do it to save me, but to deny him. She did it with the air of a woman withholding a toy from a hated child.
I didn’t care from which direction safety came. By then I knew the king wasn’t really my father—a contingent of men had spent a few weeks at the palace some months before I was born. They lived in the ice caves at the very edges of the Hinterland, and answered to a warrior queen. Rumors say she was briefly the king’s mistress. My mother got her revenge with the man who gave me my ice-chip eyes.
When my eligibility was announced, I knew I could be frivolous. A princess can set rules for her suitors, even a blackhearted girl like me. It was high summer when I told my father I’d marry the man who brought me a velvet purse full of ice from the distant caves. It wasn’t sentiment that drove me, it was curiosity.
No, it was something else—instinct. I felt, not for the first time, the influence of some unseen force in my life, some hand that wasn’t my own. That feeling was what once made me throw my brother’s toy cart into the fire. The way he tugged it carefully along with its little wooden handle p
ut me in mind too much of myself.
The suitors came. They presented me with ice, but not from the caves. I knew by sight, by touch and taste, the ice dug out of sawdust in a barn, the ice from a frozen creek, from the glacier atop a mountain. Summer became winter, and nobody had gotten it right.
The brothers who finally won me were both tall, with hair the color of a fox’s pelt, but the similarities ended there. The older brother was broad-chested, hard as flint, with a flat brown glare. He had a dirty face when he presented himself to my father. The younger one stood behind him, looking down. He was lean and favored one leg. He looked like someone I could break.
They came at the raw edge of spring. Where other men had gone down on one knee to present me with their gift, the older brother slung it into my lap. I knew before I opened the bag he was the man I would have to marry.
The ice was beautiful. It danced with the phantom green lights the skies over the caves were said to hold, and was cut into delicate cubes. I looked at the first brother’s heavy hands, then the narrow fingers of the second. He was the one who’d done the cutting. He kept his head down, like he was ashamed of himself. I couldn’t see his face.
The first brother spoke his intentions out loud—they meant to make me a servant, not a wife. I could see on my parents’ faces that they didn’t care, so long as I was won fairly. They couldn’t save me from this. Wouldn’t.
So I swallowed the ice.
It left a burning trail down my throat and hit my stomach like blue fire. It coiled there, and it sent its vines into my arms, my legs. It froze the last bit of life out of my deadened heart and slowed the workings of my mind. I had a quick mind, and there was just enough time to feel fear lance through me before my thoughts turned into cold honey.
I heard my mother’s distant scream, my father’s shout. I watched everything through a latticework of frozen tears: the brothers arguing, the eldest hefting me over his shoulder like I was a bag of grain. My littlest sister sank her teeth into my hand before I was carried away, and reeled backward, coughing.
The brothers tied me to the back of the horse that was my dowry. I saw nothing but the curtain of my own hair and the puffs of my breath freezing whitely on the air.
Someone followed us out of the castle yard. Down the muddy road, into the trees. Someone who made my head throb and sparks sizzle over my sight. I heard their tread like an echo to the brothers’. I was frozen, trussed, on my way to a life of servitude, but the follower—that was what filled me with fear.
When the brothers stopped to make camp, they left me on the horse—tied, upright, unmoving. As if from the bottom of a well, I heard the older brother’s laughter, the crackling of a fire. Much later, hands untied me from the horse, laid me flat beneath a tree.
When they were asleep, the ice that sat like frozen coals in my stomach shifted. The freeze came slowly undone. My lips and eyes thawed, my fingers pricked, and I started to shake. When I felt strong again, I slid free of my ropes and walked over to the older brother. He was even uglier in sleep, his face twisted by cruel dreams. I hung over his sleeping body and fitted my lips to his. I blew my ice into him, along with my hate. He went with a shocked flutter and a rotten-tasting sigh, his heart frozen before he could struggle.
I returned to the horse and listened for the follower. I listened even in the frozen half-sleep I couldn’t fight back, which came over me the moment I was still.
The hours passed, the light turned silver, and the younger brother’s shout broke the air when he found his brother dead.
His boots stomped over the thawing ground. Some deep, moving part of me braced itself for a kick that didn’t come.
Instead, the brother crouched and blew warm breath onto my eyes.
As fast as they thawed, they froze over again, but I managed to shift them in their sockets. For the first time since they’d taken me, I was looking at the man’s face. At his dirty red hair.
“Hello, Alice,” he whispered.
I stared and stared, recognition crashing into me. My words came out in a hiss, and my fingers moved feebly in the air over my chest.
“Try,” he whispered, so quiet it was almost a breath. “Remember.”
He was a man I’d seen twice before he’d come with his brother to present me with ice, but I couldn’t remember how or where. Not family, not servant, not soldier. Who was he? I saw the dusty blue side of a carriage, a hoop fallen on grass.
That wasn’t quite right.
I saw a rusty blue Buick, the Hula-Hoop I’d been spinning doggedly over my hips when he pulled up beside me.
“Hi,” he’d said.
I’d ignored him, annoyed he made my hoop fall.
“I’m a friend of your grandmother’s,” he told me. “The writer, Althea Proserpine. She wants to meet you. Will you come with me to see her?”
My head snapped up. “Does she have horses?”
“Lots of them. And a swimming pool. She wants very much for you to visit, Alice.”
I’d let the hoop roll to a halt and climbed into his car. I clicked the heels of my white cowboy boots together like Dorothy, for luck, and we were off.
The memory crashed through the delicate webbing that kept my world together. I shivered and thawed on the grass, sending off meltwater and seized with visions. A woman in white denim overalls studded with cigarette burns. The sound of her quiet cursing, waking me to a sea of brake lights stretched out on the road ahead. Go back to sleep, Alice.
Her name. What was her name? The memories boiled up—Christmas lights on a whitewashed wall, slipping my legs out from beneath hers in early morning. The smell of coffee beans, cheap macaroni, burning sage. The sour crunch of my ankle when I jumped from a crabapple tree and she wasn’t quick enough to catch me. The feeling of her beside me in the world, the invisible searchlight that stretched between us.
“Ella,” I wheezed from my frozen throat.
The man didn’t hear me; he dipped his ear closer. “Do you remember me?”
“Blue Buick.”
He grinned. “We’re changing it already,” he whispered. “It’s almost broken. I needed you to come back here, so you could help me break it.”
“Why…”
“Because I’m not a page in a book,” he said, cradling my head.
Then he screamed, a high rabbit sound that boiled the last of the ice from my blood.
He fell onto me, pinning me to the ground. I was still weak, and it took longer than it should’ve to get free. It took an age. When I finally struggled out from under him, I saw the ax in his back. Behind him stood his brother, humped and frozen and watching me out of dead eyes. All around us the air thrilled with silver sparks, so bright I squeezed my eyes shut. I could still see them against the hot red of my eyelids: a glowing tapestry of threads. Tiny, even brighter flickers of light ran like spiders around the hole we’d snagged in it: a hole the shape of the redheaded brother who’d tried to change our story. I winched my eyes open and saw the raw threads being snipped and stitched back into place by invisible fingers.
A handful of tiny, spidery points of light jumped toward me. I shrieked and scrambled back, my movements dulled by cold. One of the lights reached my temple, burning through it like a fleck of ash thrown off by a bonfire. First I felt it on my skin, then under it, burrowing there and rearranging my brain.
“Ella,” I gasped, holding her in my mind’s eye. Her brown eyes, her long blonde hair … no! That wasn’t her, that was the other mother. The one who made my cruelty grow like a vine.
More of the sparkling things jumped at me, as the redheaded man moved limply on the ground. His brother fell back to earth, dead again once he’d done what the story needed him to do.
“Spinner,” I whispered. I remembered her now, how I’d followed her like a lost dog into the twisted heart of the Hinterland. Into the story I meant to break free of, long, long ago. Because this wasn’t a life I’d been living, it was a story.
When it was far too late, she’d tol
d me there was no way out. But she hadn’t told me it was because the story fought back if you tried. The spider-sparks still worked in the air, moving the weaving back to rights. They pulled the ax from the younger brother’s back, they sizzled into my brain, they put him on his feet and closed up the rip in his flesh.
He couldn’t die, I realized. Until it was part of the story. It would be me who would kill him, as I had his brother. Because in this story, I was the monster.
But was that really me? Horror hardened my skin. It sent the cruel little sparks bouncing off it like fire off a forge. I held on to that tenacious spike of fear and rage. I couldn’t let my story end this way.
The redheaded man stood, but barely. His eyes were wild; he leaned over his knees and vomited up a thin yellow bile.
“We have to go,” he panted. “Before…”
Before it happened again. I moved between him and the corpse on the ground. If I was a monster, at least I could be a helpful one.
“Get on the horse,” I said. It came out slurred, like I was on Novocain.
I grabbed the ax from where it lay next to the dead man. The threads glittered to life, an angry matrix that flexed around my fingers on the handle, biting at my skin with a pain that started out irritating and turned to agony.
“Get on the horse,” I said, turning my face from the sizzle of my skin. “Now!”
Still gasping, the younger brother heaved himself onto my dowry. On the ground, his brother jerked, then rose, lurching, his movements close enough to human to make the differences horrifying.
I wrapped my burning hands tight around the ax handle. The corpse watched me through eyes like frozen forget-me-nots, and lunged.
I smelled sweat and ice and something rank and unplaceable, before swinging wildly. The ax thudded into his shoulder with the sick sound of a boot on mud.
The Hazel Wood Page 24