But he put himself in the way of the wrong kind of enchantment, and got himself killed.
Or so I thought. Instead he recovered, somewhere, somehow, and dragged me kicking and screaming—and scratching, if I remembered it right—from my tale. I’d barely had time to thank him. I’d barely had time to let the new shape of him impose itself over the old one in my head. The Finch I carried around with me was somewhere between the narrow, restless prep school kid I’d known, and the scarred, strong, steady-eyed man I only got a glimpse of.
That version of him had looked so grown. So complete. But I bet he was just wearing another kind of armor.
Here’s what I would write to him. If I knew how to deliver the letter.
I always knew magic was real. It might be cheating to say that now, but I really think I did. I just didn’t call it that. I didn’t think it could be benevolent, except in books. Magic was a bully that made my mom cry and followed us at night. In the daytime, too. It was the thing in me that made it hard to get calm again, once I got angry.
One time I counted it up, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen thirty-one states. Some places I’ve only seen their gas stations. Some places that’s all there is to see.
I wrote fanfiction, too. If you find me I’ll let you read it I’ll tell you what I wrote it about. If you find me I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.
20
Janet wanted to meet Iolanthe first. Ingrid didn’t want to go at all. She wasn’t like Janet—a transplant, a born wanderer. Her roots here went all the way down to the world’s bedrock, even if that bedrock was turning to smoke.
“We don’t know where the door in the tavern goes,” Finch said tightly. “But the fact that it smells like everything you want to get home to is a pretty big tip-off it’s dangerous, right?”
“Yes, thank you, I’ve read my share of fairy tales,” Janet snapped. “And while we’re on the subject of devil’s deals, who exactly is this person that popped in out of nowhere, ready to save our lives?”
“A traveler,” Finch said, though he knew that was oversimplifying things. “She wants money, and she thinks I can help her with that.”
“A traveler, listen to him. Do you know what you’re talking about? Do you think we’re playing a game?” Janet’s chill had frayed along with the Hinterland. For the first time Finch feared he wouldn’t be able to convince her, that she wouldn’t come at all.
“The door in the tavern feels wrong,” he half shouted. He hadn’t fully admitted it before, but it did. It had a furtive feeling, an oiliness. Even the round hobbity cuteness of it felt like a vicious joke.
“So our options are these,” he said, speaking low again, calmly. “We stay. Hope the Spinner fixes things. Or we take our chances tomorrow morning and go. Because none of us is walking through that door.”
* * *
Finch didn’t sleep much that night. None of them did. He heard the burr of Janet and Ingrid’s voices through the wall hours past dark. They would decide without him whether to stay or go, all he could do was wait and see. His tiny store of belongings was packed, and all the inscrutable treasures of the Hinterland. There wasn’t anything more he could do. Finally, restlessness sent him outside.
Night was tipping softly into day when the front door creaked open behind him. Janet was always after Ingrid to fix that creak. She settled beside him, already dressed in her jeans and open-necked shirt, her trim-cut coat, relics of the Earthly life she’d abandoned decades ago.
Traveling clothes. The fearful grip on his heart eased away. They sat together while the light went blue, then violet, then the powdered silver of pine needles. The Hinterland and its relentless beauty stopped for no one.
Just before sunrise the three of them walked together across the women’s land. Ingrid unlatched the gate on the goat pen and bent over to pick a teacup-shaped flower. She tucked it into Janet’s hair. Their path to the tavern was circuitous now, winding around great starry gaps in the land. Iolanthe was standing out front of it in her black on black, including a cloak with copper stitching at the neck, running a thumb over the empty face of her pocket watch.
First she made Finch show her all the things he’d taken from the broken tales.
“Good Christ,” Janet murmured as he did it. “That’s quite the arsenal.”
Iolanthe’s eyes were alight as she ran her hands over all the little treasures he’d plucked from the Hinterland’s wounds. It filled him with pride to see her lift one, then another, holding a walnut to her ear and shaking it, weighing the balance of a speckled yellow egg. Then she picked up the dagger.
“Hello,” she said. “You’re going to make this a whole lot easier.”
It was an age-stained thing of yellowing bone Finch had taken from a pretty three-story manor house in the town where Hansa had lived. Words ran over its hilt, carved in a language he couldn’t read. Iolanthe shrugged an arm free of her cloak, then paused.
“Almost forgot: I made you a promise.” From an inside pocket she brought out two small booklets. They were bound in the same shade of green leather as Tales from the Hinterland, the print across them embossed in the same gold. PASSPORT, their covers read, above the unmistakable shape of a Hinterland flower.
Alice, Finch thought. She’d had that flower tattooed on her arm. The memory was sharp as an embroidery needle.
Janet practically snatched the passports. Finch could see her hungry mind clicking away. “How do they work?”
“The door.” Iolanthe pointed toward the tavern. “Keep them against your skin as you walk through it, and you’ll get to where you’re going. I’d hold hands if I were you. Tightly.”
“And if you walk through the door without a passport?” Ingrid asked grimly. “What happens to you then?”
“Hard to say,” Iolanthe said. “But I wouldn’t trust it, would you?”
“What about Ellery?” Janet put an arm around him. “Can you guarantee he’ll be safe?”
“No.” Iolanthe smiled to soften it. “But I can guarantee he’ll be interested. Good enough?”
Janet looked at her coolly, then turned to him. She touched a new cut under his eye and a healing one below his lip. Gently, she cupped his chin, looking at the scarred-over line on his throat.
“This is what you want.” She said it without inflection, not a question.
Finch had gotten used to not looking at what he wanted head-on. He’d learned the dreadful lesson of being careful what you wish for, and had taken pains since then not to wish for too much. Nothing more ambitious than to save one girl.
And to dismantle, as it turned out, one entire world.
“I want to see what’s next.” They felt like the safest words he could say. He felt Iolanthe’s eyes on him, and refused to be embarrassed. He brought his arm around Janet, then held the other one out to bring Ingrid in.
It was okay to leave the Hinterland if they weren’t in it. If another world waited for him and Alice was free and he’d drunk so deeply already of this place’s orderly and chaotic magic, he could go. He could let go.
And if he left, part of him whispered, the Spinner couldn’t follow. He’d be free at last of the fear that held him by the neck, the sense that her revenge, when it came, would take him out at the knees.
“Walk through the right doors,” Janet told him. “And perhaps a few wrong ones.”
She tilted her head and ran her thumb tips under his eyes. “When we see each other again, heaven knows where, you can tell me everything. And if this young woman is to be trusted, we can thank you both for our lives.”
Iolanthe’s forearm was already bared. She held the bone knife in her left hand, loose and easy. Tossed it a bit, to get a better grip. With a motion like she was mincing garlic, she made three cuts just above her elbow.
Janet breathed hard through her teeth and Ingrid stepped back, muttering. The cuts welled and spilled, running red over Iolanthe’s sun-browned skin. She stepped closer to the tavern wall and, using her finger as a br
ush, painted a line of blood in the space between two timbers.
“Stop staring,” she said after a minute. “It doesn’t help.”
The lines she drew were faint, the blood stretched as thin as it could go without breaking. It wasn’t till the line climbed over her head that Finch understood what she was doing.
She was drawing a door. The bone dagger, the blood. The door. Finch knew this story. He’d read it in Tales from the Hinterland.
If Iolanthe was weakened, the only sign of it was the way she caught herself, briefly, against the wall, before pulling a square of fabric from her bag.
“Tie this around my arm?”
Finch did, wincing as he drew the ends together tight.
“Now.” Iolanthe looked close at the dagger, at the words running over its handle, then read them aloud. Their syllables were bright and distant; they swooped and dove like seabirds, lingering on the air before drifting away.
The blood on the wall shifted like a shadow, becoming the seams of a real door. Through those seams, a gray light glowed.
Iolanthe drew her head up and shook out her cloak and looked, for a moment, very solemn. “Ready?”
21
After my first night’s sleep in Hell, I woke up too early with a stranger’s voice in my ear.
A girl’s. Stucco-rough but somehow sweet. I could still hear what she’d said, I could almost remember it …
Then I woke the rest of the way, and it was gone. I thought about swimming up yesterday from my blackout nap, the feeling I’d had that someone was talking to me then. And I wondered.
But not too hard, because I had bigger things to wonder about. First, I reread Finch’s last letter. I read it twice. Then I pushed it aside because I could lose a whole day to that mystery, and there just wasn’t time. I had to figure out who among the Hinterland had ice in their hands and a taste for dismemberment.
I could hear Sophia’s voice in my head. Look at you, Nancy Drew. She’d never say that; she’d never even heard of Nancy Drew. I guessed the voice I heard was really my own. I guessed I should call Sophia to talk about last night, and Ella to beg her forgiveness. I did neither.
I decided what I did have to do was learn what had happened with Hansa. She was the only one of the four I felt like I knew, at least a little, and if I was looking for a pattern here her death seemed the most likely to break it.
But the idea of sniffing around her grieving parents, once I tracked them down, made me feel sick. Even worse was the idea that they might think I’d been the one to kill her. Though Sophia had promised to unsmear my name, I didn’t know how long that would take. Who would and wouldn’t believe her. And whether she was still up for helping me after last night.
When all my thoughts started going into soft focus I put on a clean shirt and headed out for coffee and food. I walked till I found an open pizza place, then ate a big foldable slice of rubbery margherita while searching out caffeine. It was half past seven by then, commuters bleeding from every subway entrance. A thousand different faces to get caught on, but the one that hooked me was a little girl’s. She wore sunglasses and a hoodie and was sitting on the edge of a gutter punk’s blanket, just out of reach of his dog. I couldn’t tell whether they were together, but she was paying him no mind.
Something about her was so familiar. I stared a minute, trying to place whether and where I’d seen her. Then I had it: she’d been waiting at the bus stop across from the diner last night. And the night before that, she’d been in Central Park. Watching me from beside the path.
“Hey,” I said, almost to myself. I started toward her, but didn’t make it too far. As soon as I got moving, she vaulted herself off the blanket and flew down the street.
“Hey! Wait!” I took a few running steps, then stopped. She was already a block away, moving fast as a whippet through the crowd.
My heart pounded and my thoughts went sharp. She could run, but I knew who she must be. And I knew where to find her.
Not many kids came through from the Hinterland. Hansa had been one of them. Creepy Jenny was another, with her baby-doll face and those keen little in-turned eyeteeth. And then there was the Trio.
In the Hinterland they’d had other names: the Acolytes of the Silver Dagger. The Red, the White, and the Black. But here, everyone just called them the Trio. They weren’t little girls, exactly, that was just the form they took. It was odd to see one of them alone, but these were odd times.
I only knew about them what Sophia had told me: that in the Hinterland they’d answered to their own kind of deity. Here, they’d found their way to the Christian God, though I doubted it was a mutual thing. They hung out at a church in Midtown, and tended to show up when they had a message for you—the garbled, prophetic kind. The kind you’d damn well better heed. I waited a little longer, but the girl didn’t come back. When nothing worse showed, either, I headed to where I knew I could find her.
* * *
Times Square in the morning looked oddly clean. Massive video billboards cycled silently overhead, and tourists clustered on the corner of Forty-Fourth and Broadway. The place I was looking for was weathered stone with a big rose window, its imposing face half lost behind construction scaffolding. A church, lovely and unlikely, tucked among the anonymous hotels and overpriced diners above the square. The schedule by the entrance said I’d missed matins, but when I tried the doors they opened.
Ella never took me to church, and there’d been a time when I was fascinated by them. I couldn’t believe they were free, that anyone was allowed to walk inside a place that looked so much like a museum or a castle.
This one’s entrance was cool and hazy with incense. Beyond it was the great glittering mouth of the church itself, yawning wide to reveal its treasures: rows of polished pews and the Virgin in her nook, mosaicked arches and filigreed screens and wooden carvings of figures who must’ve been holy men, but could just as easily have been depictions of the Green Man, the Erlking, the King of May. Saints glared out through solemn eyes, and stained-glass windows cast dim jewels over the ground, and I was starting to see how an ex-Story could find solace here, in a building so replete with ancient tales.
There were a few tourists here and there, lighting candles or taking sneaky photos, dwarfed by the gold-and-marble altarpiece. Nobody who could be the Trio, I thought. Slowly I walked to the front of the room, a faint tock tock tock taking up slow residence in my head.
It was the sound, I realized, of heels on wood. Looking over the pews I saw that they weren’t quite empty: three heads just peeked over the top of a bench on the left side. The heads were hooded, from left to right, in red, white, and black. One of them must’ve been kicking her feet against the pew like … well, like a bored kid in church. I was a few rows away when the kicking stopped and the heads clicked on their necks like something out of Camazotz, turning in unison to look at me.
“Hello,” said the child in red.
“Alice-Three-Times,” said the child in black.
The child in white said nothing, but you could tell she was thinking plenty. She showed her milk teeth in a smile that made me colder than consecrated stone.
I scanned them, trying to figure out which had been following me. The one in red, I thought. She’d changed her hoodie.
“Hi,” I said, a little breathless. “I think you have a message for me.”
Red and Black leaned forward to look at each other. White kept staring.
“Well? What is it?”
“You can ask us anything you’d like.” Red.
“Perhaps we’ll answer. Perhaps not.” Black.
White said nothing, but the other two tilted their heads into her silence, and laughed.
“Is that the message?” I slid into the pew in front of theirs and turned around, facing them over its back. They had eerie little oatmeal box faces, like an illustrator’s idea of how a wholesome child might look. If the illustrator were terrified of wholesome children.
Red studied my face. “You�
�re afraid of something.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
She smiled, a little meanly. “You have more to be afraid of than they do.”
“Okay. Does it have something to do with the murders?”
“With the deaths, you mean,” said Red.
Black bowed her head. “We honor their sacrifice.”
“What sacrifice?” I said. “I’m talking about murder. The four Hinterlanders who were killed.”
“Great change requires great sacrifice.”
“And tales change their shape, depending on who’s doing the telling.”
I tasted metal. “Don’t talk about this in riddles, all right?”
All three held up their left palm, oath-giving style, as Red and Black talked between them.
“No riddles. You say it’s murder.”
“But we say they chose to die, and knew what they were dying for.”
“They go on to a great reward, in a better world.”
I seized on Red’s words. “A better world? What world is that?”
“The world of the kingdom of Heaven,” she said primly.
Black spoke next. “If they can make it. We do pray for all of you, not just our self.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “So you’ve thrown the Spinner over for God?”
“The Spinner never spoke to us. God does.”
“Oh, yeah? What does God tell you?”
Black shrugged. “He moves beneath the green and the gold. The blue and the brown. The red, the white, and the black.”
“He sacrificed a piece of his very self, just like Genevieve. Just like Hansa.”
The Night Country Page 12