He looked down at it, then up. I swore he smiled at me, his teeth small and gray, before folding his hands around my throat.
Can you really die in a story?
Maybe not.
But you can die in a whole world built for it, full of cruel queens and black-eyed princesses and men with hands meant for violence. At least for a little while. My vision opened and closed like a butterfly’s wings and my head fell forward. The corpse laughed again, till I arched up and fixed my lips on his.
I blew. Not ice this time. I blew out ice’s opposite: the heat and the rage of being away from Ella. Trapped here. Forced into the role of murderer by a distant storyteller with no horse in the race. I did it because a girl doing nothing in a fairy tale ends up dead or worse, but a girl who makes a decision usually gets rewarded.
My reward was this: the taste of metal and sweat on lips like two cold maggots. His hands slackening on my neck. Dropping to his sides. He made the horrible grinding sound of a motor failing and fell to the ground. I angled my head to the side and pulled the ax from his chest.
When I turned I felt like I was wearing twenty tons of iced-over armor. I moved, shivering, toward the horse. It shied away from me, from the insect onslaught of sparks surrounding me. The redheaded brother leaned down and covered its eye with one hand, whispering soft things into its ear.
The fabric of the world was fully visible now, a glittering weave that snagged around us both. I hefted the ax and swung it through the threads suspended between me and the horse, but nothing changed.
“Goddammit!” I screamed. I fell to my knees and started crawling. The horse, surrounded by the glittering, shivering source code of the world, did what I’d have liked to do: reared back in holy terror and ran.
The brother thumped hard to the earth, keening as the wind was knocked out of him. The sparks sizzled, faded away. It was just him again. Me. The dead man on the ground. I felt something begin in my stomach—the ice, gathering itself.
The air in front of us shuddered like bad TV, and—there was a horse. Empty air, then a horse to fill it. Same animal, but wearing blinders this time.
“No,” said the brother, brokenly. “It can’t be.”
It could. It was. Ella Ella Ellaellaellalalala. I said the name till it turned to an aching syllable soup in my head. What did it mean? When I stopped thinking too hard about it, the bright pain behind my eyes went away.
There’s no way out. Not from the inside.
The cold was spreading through me like kudzu. Its fingers crawled up my throat; soon they would reach my black eyes. The sparkling air had faded to gray. I couldn’t remember why the man beside me was crying.
I slumped to the ground, anticipating the bite of rope around my wrists.
And all at once, the air lit up like a Christmas tree. Two shapes were moving fast toward us, setting the grid of the world alight.
A young man and an older woman. On … bicycles. They were on bicycles, one red and one green.
“Get her feet!” the boy yelled. His voice was cracked and strange, like he spoke around burrs caught in his throat. He had dark skin, a cloud of dark hair, and eyes as bright and steady as an animal’s.
A hot thump of recognition cut through the curling cold.
He was the one who’d been following me. Not just today, but all my life. In the yard, in the woods. In my father’s hall, once, before he was dragged away. The somebody who always set my head to aching, woke the sparks waiting at the corners of my sight.
Then he was next to me, grabbing my wrists. His touch drew my senses to the surface. I fought against him instinctively, and against the woman he was with—gray hair, blue tunic—who tried to hold my feet.
“Alice. Goddammit, Alice.” The boy ducked out of the way as I pulled a hand free and swiped at his chin with my nails.
Then I knew him. I went stiff so suddenly they dropped me. “Finch.”
“Yep. No time to catch up, we’ve got to break you out of this thing.”
I had something to say to him. He was somebody I could almost remember—somebody important. I saw blood and trees and a ceiling full of stars.
“But … you were dead. Weren’t you?” When he dipped his head to hear me, I saw the blurred scar across his throat, a narrow brown rope.
“Not quite. If you can … can you stand up? That’ll be easier than dragging you. But I’ll drag you if I have to. If you forget who you are.”
“Finch, it won’t let me go.”
“We’ve had time to look into these things, and it will,” said the woman, her voice severe.
I gaped at her. “Janet?”
She smiled, slightly, and nodded toward the redheaded brother crouching speechless on the ground. “Friend or foe?”
“Friend. I think. Yes, friend.”
Janet helped him to his feet, and still he didn’t speak. The glittering veins of the world had receded; they weren’t close and hot and blinding, they smoldered at a polite distance.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I did some field research,” Janet said triumphantly. “Every ex-Story I spoke to says the stories broke one of two ways: they were wound down by the Spinner, or picked apart by an inciting incident. And that inciting incident always had to do with a refugee wandering in at the wrong time. From there we extrapolated—” She stopped short, looking at me and Finch. “Oh. But you weren’t asking me, were you?”
“Your eyes are black all over,” he said. His crooked, raspy voice was so changed I couldn’t tell how he meant it. He touched his fingers to my chin and hissed.
“God, you’re like … well, like ice. Obviously. But we don’t have time for this, get on the bike.”
He was different from how I remembered him, in the dim memory rising from my wrung-out brain. This boy was thick through the shoulders. His hair was shorter than it used to be, and his arms were flecked with scars—silvery nicks and burns and raised patches of rough tissue. His eyes were what I remembered best, but they looked so tired.
I hiked my skirts and straddled Janet’s bike seat while the brother took Finch’s. As they pedaled away with two Stories weighing down their wheels, I looked back over my shoulder. The horse that shouldn’t have been there went up in a shower of sparks.
We lit out toward the grid of sizzling light. I braced myself, ready for a galactic ripping or the blinding pain of riding a bike through a wall of fire.
But the wall receded as we moved. It stayed ahead of us and beyond our reach, its light just south of blinding. Janet huffed as she pedaled, her wheels slipping in spring mud. We wheeled past a stretch of trees, a run of scraggling bushes, a tree like a weeping willow in bud. We passed them again: trees, bushes, willow. And again, until I realized the woods were repeating themselves on a loop.
We were being given a chance to turn around. Every other minute, the same blue-breasted bird showed itself on the branches of the flowering willow, singing a chastising four-note song.
“Janet,” Finch called back, warningly.
“I see it.”
“Stop!” I cried.
Janet skidded to a halt.
I slipped from the bike, walked a few unsteady steps, and turned. “Don’t follow me.”
I left them behind to walk toward the sparking wall. It was endless, a net hung down from the cool Hinterland sun. It stayed in place, allowing me to meet it. I kept going till I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then stood there bathing in the light it cast.
What would Althea do? The woman who’d built a bridge between two worlds, then brought them together like a hand in a glove?
I thought of her in the dark with her daughter, years ago and a world away, telling a story. I thought of the words she wrote down tripping over tongues and across continents, slicing fissures in the walls of the world.
“Once upon a time,” I whispered, “there was a girl who got away.”
The light burned a little less brightly through my lids. Maybe.
“Onc
e upon a time there was a girl who changed her fate,” I said, louder. The words ran together like beads on a string. Like a story, or a bridge I could climb—up, up, up, like a nursery-rhyme spider.
“She grew up like a fugitive, because her life belonged to another place.” I held my fingertips out, feeling the ice of them meet the wall’s fine, hot fizzing. “She remembered her real mother, far away on an Earth made of particles and elements and, and, and reason. Not stories. And she ripped a hole in the world so she could find her way home.
“And she lived happily ever after in a place far, far from the Hinterland,” I said. I begged. “And the freeze left her skin. And she found her real mother in the world where she had left her.”
Slowly, slowly, I opened my eyes.
There was a hole snagged in the wall. The air around it glittered like the last wandering traces of a firework. It was just the right size for a girl. I put my hand out behind me and beckoned.
The spokes of two rusty bicycles clicked closer, but the wall stayed in place. I kept my hand extended until Finch’s fingers closed around mine, warm and sure. I led him, ducking, through the hole I’d made, Janet and the fairy-tale brother just behind.
When I stepped beyond the borders of the story, I felt it in my teeth and my belly button and the roots of my hair. Behind me the brother groaned, stumbling heavily against Janet. Finch put an arm around me, and his heat neutralized my cold.
We stood at the edge of a shallow valley filled to the knee with fog.
I sucked in air that tasted like rain and barbecue. Not too far away, a little girl moved through mist that reached almost to her neck. Beside her, a man in a white T-shirt laughed, lifting her onto his shoulders. She wore beat-up Rollerblades.
My whole body was cramped and half-asleep. The sun was hot; I was hungry. My nose itched like I was allergic to something, and I stank. Finch did, too. His smell and mine were rank and human in a way that made me weak with longing. The brother staggered forward, his eyes round. He kept looking back toward the trees we’d left behind, then at his hands.
I sank down to the grass and cried. As I did, I swore I could feel the shiny black washing out of my eyes.
“You saved me,” I said when I could speak again.
“I tried,” Finch said. “But I think maybe you finished the job.”
I shook my head, thinking of the horse blinking into view from empty air. “No. It was too … I lived for years in that thing. In that story.” The whole stretch of it spun before my eyes like a carousel. The cold queen, the absent king, my own dark appetites. “For how long?”
“I don’t know how long we’ve been here,” Finch said softly. “Time doesn’t work right, so nobody bothers keeping track.”
“How are you alive?”
“The guy who cut my throat—he was on his way back to his own story—he dropped me pretty close to a refugee village. Left me to die. It was close, but they patched me up. Healing took some time.”
“And Janet?”
“We learned quickly we had a mutual acquaintance,” she said. “We found out what happened to you, and we decided—well, we thought we might help you along a bit. It was his idea.” She looked at Finch, and the motherly pride in her eyes made my heart bob like a buoy.
“You were there,” I said. “Through all of it. You were—always on the edges, trying to get me to notice you.”
Finch laughed. “Dang, Alice. I knew you’d see me eventually.” His laugh had changed—it was a man’s laugh, rumbling under the rubble of his throat. It made me shy.
“Hey!”
The man in the white T-shirt had noticed us; he was waving from the sea of mist. He carried his daughter into one of the cottages squatting on the rising side of the valley, then jogged toward us. But not too close.
“Good travels to you,” he said cautiously.
“Do you have water?” Janet asked. “Food? They could use it.” She gestured at me and the redheaded brother.
The man’s face cleared, and he smiled. “I’m ex-Story, too,” he said.
“How’d you—” I began.
“The clothes. And the smell. Like burnt hair and, you know—” He plucked at the air with his fingertips. “That magic smell.” He was handsome. Twenty years ago he might’ve been somebody’s prince. Or somebody’s poisoner. The Hinterland didn’t tell nice tales.
He brought us a bucket of water, and I sucked down cups of it till my stomach ballooned. The redheaded brother didn’t speak until he’d done the same. He kept smacking his lips, letting the water run over his chin.
“I can taste it,” he said. “It’s sweet and it’s … dusty. Like stone. Can you taste it?”
I knew what he meant. Everything I’d ever eaten or drunk in the story paled next to the electric flavor of this river water. “Yeah. I can taste it.”
He looked at his hands again, trailing his fingers through the air like he was on something. “Look at this. It’s all me, doing this. It’s mine.” He looked up at me sharply, suddenly fearful. “It’s over now, isn’t it? No more story? No more dying?”
I could see Janet hovering over my shoulder, aching to dart in and start asking questions. I ignored her, ignored Finch. I looked at the man who had followed me to another world, to coax me home with gifts that carried me through the Halfway Wood.
His eyes were hazel, and broad freckles dusted his cheeks. It was the details that could drive you crazy—did the Spinner really create him just so? Did she decide on that wedge of darker brown in his left eye? Did she engineer my love of honey?
“Why did you take me?” I asked. I tried to say it gently.
He smiled faintly, his gaze going inward. “I did it for her. For the thief.”
“The thief? You mean … Ella?”
He poured a cupful of water over his hair, tilting his face toward the pale sun. “Before she stole you, she wanted to steal me.”
Oh. Fourteen years my mother spent alone with Althea in the Hazel Wood. But not all alone, not with the Halfway Wood so close.
“But if you … if you loved her. Why did you want to take me away from her?”
“I wanted to help her. And you. And, yes, myself. You were never going to be free, not until we broke it. I’m right, aren’t I? You were never really free?”
I shook my head. I felt stunned and hollow, looking at this stranger my mother might have loved. I would never reach the bottom of what Ella gave up for me. I would never know all the secrets of the life she left behind to run with me. “So what now?” I asked hoarsely. “Are you going back through the woods? To find her?”
He smiled at me, the kind of smile that cost something. He looked young enough to be a college student. My stupid, yearning heart dipped as I remembered dreaming, long ago, that he was my father.
“I’ve lived too many lives since I loved her,” he said. “I’ve died too many deaths. It doesn’t just … it leaves an echo.”
It leaves an echo. Would it be the same for me? There’d been moments even before the story, wild, piercing moments, when the Hinterland sang high in my blood and I wondered—should I stay here? If, a world away, Ella might already be gone? Maybe I belonged in this place, where my bones grew in the night and my eyes were black ponds and my cells were made of the same strange stuff that made up the trees and the water and the earth.
But now I was feeling an itch under my skin. Somewhere far away, on some other clock, the days were counting down on my mother’s life. Whether seven years had passed or seventy, I had to get to wherever she was. She deserved to see me this way—as an ex-Story, not just a stolen one.
I turned away from the red-haired brother. “Which way to the border?”
The handsome man had backed up politely while we spoke, pretending not to hear us. Now his face closed like a fist, and he pointed in a general way toward the land stretching beyond the valley.
“I don’t know what could be waiting there for you,” he said. “But good travels to you all the same.”
I turned to Finch. “It’s time. Let’s go home.”
His face was soft and sorry. Janet touched the redheaded brother’s sleeve; she led him gently away.
“Alice,” said Finch.
It dawned on me, what I already should have known. “You’re not coming, are you?”
He sighed and took my arm, walking with me into the fog. It swirled around our knees, our hips, higher. It had a gentle, flexible give, like wet petals against my skin.
No matter how much time had passed in this world or the other, Finch had changed. He’d grown up. At the fringes of my story, in a brutal make-believe world. But that wouldn’t have been his whole life. He must’ve been living with more of the displaced all this time. I pictured him at the refugee bar, falling in love with some Earth girl. In my mind she had a smile without shadows in it, and perfect jeans.
I was feeling more human all the time.
“I’m not going back,” he said, answering my question minutes after I’d asked it.
“Why not?”
“Because this was always what I wanted. Not quite the way I got it, of course. It shouldn’t have been like that. Alice, it shouldn’t have been blood money.” He sounded suddenly, comfortingly unsure.
“I know. You’ve made up for that, don’t you think?”
“I hope so,” he said seriously. “But that wasn’t what this was about. I wanted to see something through to the very end. And I’ve been living here all this time, in this world. It isn’t all bad. It’s beautiful. And strange. And bigger than you’d think. Alice, there’s a whole ocean. And ice caves—oh, you know that. I heard there are pools in the mountains that are a thousand feet deep, and clear as glass.”
“Fairy-tale shit.”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “Fairy-tale shit.”
“And there’s a girl?”
He smiled. It was so kind I almost died of embarrassment. “There might be. But believe me when I say I wouldn’t leave the whole world behind just for a girl.”
“Yeah. You would.” I meant it, too. He’d grown into the sort of man who would do more than that for someone he loved.
He’d done a whole hell of a lot for me.
The Hazel Wood Page 25