The Night Country

by Melissa Albert

  I made myself look right at her when I spoke. “If you do one thing for me first.”

  “You think you’re in a position to bargain?”

  “I just have a question. If you’ll answer it. I just want to know…” I swallowed, trying to put my suspicion into words that wouldn’t enrage her. “What was Hansa like at the end?”

  “At the end?” She glared at me. “She was curious. Funny. Odd. Happy. She was a child.”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t think how to ask the question I really wanted the answer to: Would she have martyred herself? If so, for what?

  “Not at the end, though.” The man spoke for the first time. His voice was soft. The woman turned on him, and a little steel went into it. “You know it’s true.

  “At the end she was angry.” He looked at me. “She didn’t want to lie about who she was anymore. What she was. She didn’t understand why we had to.”

  I braced myself. “Is there any chance she might’ve … chosen this? That it might’ve been part of something bigger, even if she didn’t really understand it?”

  The woman’s body was taut as a tiger’s. I didn’t dare look at her. But the man seemed to be thinking, turning over my words. “Our daughter did not want to end,” he said carefully. “Never, never would she choose that. But. It’s possible whoever took her life tricked her. That final day, next to her body, we found a packed bag. All silly things, cookies and books and coins. I think she thought she’d be traveling. Perhaps she believed dying was the first step of the journey. Death isn’t the end, in the Hinterland. I wish we’d taught her better than that here.”

  He reached into his pocket, and I flinched. But what he brought out was a compass. He pressed it into my palm, then pulled his hand back fast like he wanted to be clear of it.

  “Take it,” he said. “If you’re really trying to find out who did this, use it. It steered Hansa right, till it didn’t. Perhaps it will help you.”

  24

  The door they’d come through clung for a moment to the air. Through it Finch could see the weary illumination of the last world, turned grayer by the contrast. Then it winked out like a firefly.

  He turned, and for a delirious moment thought they were back in the Hinterland. But this place had a shabbier, used kind of feel—less cozy medieval, more Dickensian. They stood at another crossroads, a six-cornered intersection of rubbly little streets lined with lit windows. The sky was an early evening color, and it was a relief after the dead world to breathe in cooking smells and breezes and even the murky contents of the standing puddles between cobblestones.

  Iolanthe, too, breathed like she’d set down a heavy load. “Glad to be out of there. You good?”

  Finch nodded wordlessly. He wasn’t sure he was. He wasn’t sure he was made for travel like this, barely leaving a footprint in one place before you were off to the next.

  Scooting them out of the way of traffic—a man on an oddly balanced three-wheeled cycle, who ignored them from beneath the brim of his hat—Iolanthe swept off her cloak. She folded it into a bundle so impossibly tight it made Finch remember she’d been a sailor, and tucked it into her bag. Over her black jeans, bleach-stained black T-shirt, the exposed black straps of her bra, she pulled on a high-necked black dress. It fell around her heavy hips with a swish.

  “Camouflage,” she said.

  Finch looked down at his patched-up Frankenjeans, the blue Hanes T-shirt he’d won from Lev in a particularly intense game of Egyptian Rat Screw. His shoes were more duct tape than canvas. And his skin was brown, which hadn’t signified much among the refugees of the Hinterland, but might mean something in a place that looked and smelled like a scene from Great Expectations.

  “You’re fine,” she told him. “This place is used to travelers—think of it like a port city. It’s just, they do have certain ideas about ladies here.”

  On ladies she dropped like a bob into a curtsy that would’ve been ironic, were it not so deep and perfectly done.

  Who the fuck are you? This time Finch said it in his head. He was biding his time.

  Now properly attired for who knew what, Iolanthe led them down the widest of the roads, still so narrow he doubted this was a world built for cars. There was more foot traffic the farther they went, and more shop windows open to the evening, selling food and clothes and tools and toys. Finch searched the faces of the people they passed, but they were a diverse, disinterested crowd, and after a while he paid more attention to the windows.

  “Don’t look too closely,” Iolanthe said sharply. “They’ll make you buy something.”

  “I have exactly zero dollars,” Finch said, though it wasn’t true. He still had forty-seven U.S. dollars and thirty-eight cents in his wallet, which he was too superstitious to toss.

  She threw him a look. “They don’t want your money.”

  Iolanthe barreled down the street, looking to neither side. Afraid of losing her, or of invoking some binding buyers’ rule of the market, he followed, but things still caught his eye: a window full of small, densely focused paintings of mermaids, and another hung with gossamer-weight butterfly nets, handfuls of jeweled insects stuck into their webbing. The blue eyes of a man selling tins of tea; the man was leaning forward, smiling, when Finch ripped himself away. In an alcove between shops, a puppet show played out beneath a dusty curtain. Two jointed wooden puppets clacked over a painted backdrop of a familiar city skyline. The girl puppet had a cap of pale hair, the boy a cloud of dark. Between them they held a green book, its title written in tiny gold print.

  “Wait,” Finch said, slowing down, but Iolanthe grabbed his hand and tugged him into the thickening crowd.

  “If you stop, they’ll want you to buy something,” she called back.

  They walked deeper in, past increasingly urgent sellers and their wares—twitching piles of ballet slippers, bumpy fruits, a window full of telephones (candlestick, rotary, princess, tablet) that made Finch do a double take—before stopping in front of a shop he’d have missed on his own. Its window was frosted glass, firmly closed. Iolanthe rapped on the door beside it, winking conspiratorially at Finch. As if he were in on the joke. As if he had any idea where they were, and who they were about to see. He gripped his bag in front of him, packed in the Hinterland less than twenty-four hours and exactly two worlds ago.

  The woman who opened the door was Baba Yaga to the life, with eyes like milky jade, straight-up George Washington teeth, and the leathered skin of an aging French film star. She was built like a sparrow but moved like a battleship: slow and deliberate, with a hand to her back.

  “You,” she said crankily, eyes on Iolanthe. “Back from nobody knows where, dragging I don’t know who, selling gods know what. Nervy little bitch.”

  “Hello, Grandma June,” Iolanthe said comfortably. “I know I’ve been away too long and you thought I was dead and I’m a dreadful child for never bothering to write, but here I am anyway. Can you forgive me?”

  The woman flapped a dismissive hand. “Depends what you’ve got for me. Come in, before you stand still too long and the market thinks it’s caught two buyers.”

  “Is that really your grandma?” Finch muttered.

  “Hell, no. Watch your back around her, she’ll steal the gold from your teeth if she thinks she can get away with it.”

  The door shut behind them with a sinister snick, and Finch blinked in the abrupt gloom. Though it wasn’t really gloomy; it was the stained red of a forge, or the inside of a dragon’s belly. The place was a curiosity shop, or else a really, really esoteric thrift store. It was full of delicately balanced metal instruments, and pieces bristling with exposed circuitry, and the kinds of carved wooden objects that look like they’ve got a trick to them: a secret compartment, a hidden blade.

  “Well.” Grandma June bustled behind a countertop and turned on a lamp, casting a circle of clean white light over the three of them. “What have you got for me?”

  Iolanthe presented Finch with a flourish, like she was whipping
a drop cloth off a statue. “A scavenger, fresh from the Hinterland.”

  “Hinterland? Scavenger? You’re telling me that place is in a state to be scavenged?” The old woman rubbed her bristly chin. “Serves her right, doesn’t it? Well, don’t stand there blushing. Show us what you’ve got, this isn’t my first time.”

  Finch stuck a hand into his bag, pulling out the first thing he touched—the spyglass from Hansa’s cottage—and placing it on an open square of countertop.

  Grandma June’s brusque air dropped away. Her hand shot out to grab it, then stalled midway. Carefully she plucked and lifted it, like her palm was a grocery scale.

  “Well? Did I do good or what?” Iolanthe’s eyes crinkled.

  June ignored her. “I’ve seen the seed before the bloom. I’ve seen the babe before the bones. But I’ve never seen one of these.”

  “What is it?” Finch asked, itching now to snatch it back. He wasn’t sure, suddenly, that he wanted to sell.

  The woman handed it over. “Look through it.”

  Finch already had, in the Hinterland, but now he tried again. “Nothing.” He executed a slow turn. “It’s not even magnified.”

  She took it back and touched an invisible catch, and the thing snapped open, revealing a second section. “Now look.”

  Finch peered through it dutifully, and gasped. He felt like he had the first time he’d ducked his head underwater while snorkeling with his parents in the Seychelles: from the mundane surface to a riotous world of colored fins and scattered light. Just like that.

  “How am I seeing this?” he said. “What am I seeing?”

  “That’s the past,” she said, her voice disembodied, floating. “You might be looking at yesterday, or a year ago, or ten.”

  “Longer,” Finch said. He was watching a girl with milk- glass eyes, tracking her path through a transformed shop—brighter, tidier, full of different unnameable things. She was fourteenish, light as a dragonfly, her skin the color of buckwheat honey. She perched on a cluttered tabletop, then turned. Impossibly, she fixed Finch with her pale green gaze. It sparked like an ice cube down his back, and he dropped the spyglass to his side.

  “Well?” June said hungrily. “What’d you see?”

  “A girl. Really, really pretty, with eyes like yours. I think she might’ve seen me.”

  “That was me!” she crowed. “I thought you looked familiar. I was pretty, wasn’t I? Too pretty for anyone’s good, least of all my own.

  “One more thing,” she said, taking the spyglass back and opening it to reveal a third section.

  “The future.” She narrowed her eyes. “Look if you’d like, but keep your findings to yourself. I’m old enough to have a fair guess as to what’s next for me.”

  Finch made to take it, then shook his head. “I believe you.”

  “Clever boy. The spyglass alone is worth plenty on its own, but let’s see what else you’ve got.”

  The next few hours were full of wonders. Iolanthe sat cross-legged on the floor, grinning, as the old shopkeeper showed Finch what his treasures could do.

  She showed him how to prick his finger on the frail golden needle he’d taken from a crumbling tower, then laughed at his panic as the thing spun around him, weaving a shirt right onto his back. The child’s boot was a charm, for the health of the child who wore it. If you polished the mirror it would show you what your true love was looking at right that second; Finch’s heart flip-flopped, and he pushed it back without peeking. When Iolanthe put out a hand to look into it herself, Grandma June snatched it away.

  “Not you. Not here.”

  Iolanthe’s lips thinned before she made herself laugh. Finch noted the odd exchange, filed it away.

  The walnut the old woman shook her head at.

  “Unpredictable. There could be a dress of stars inside it, or a cloak of ashes. Or a white cat. Or just a walnut.”

  She picked up the silver pen carefully, tapping its point with the ball of her thumb. When she wrote with it, the words disappeared into the paper, each swallowed up as she wrote the next. She clapped her hands.

  “Oh, this is good. It’s a general’s pen.”

  “A what?”

  She knew he didn’t know anything, she just liked making him ask. “Generals use them to write reports back to their king or queen without fear of interception. You can write a letter to anyone, on anything, and one way or another, the letter will find them—and never fall into the wrong hands. It doesn’t leave a mark on your end, either. Of course they’re used more commonly for trysts, or separated lovers.” She smirked at the look on his face. “Well, well! If I didn’t know better, I’d say I just convinced the boy to keep it for himself.”

  He shrugged, like, what can you do? and put it into his pocket. “You never know when you might get a chance at a tryst.”

  “Wise words,” she said. “Now look: these scales are used by sailors in storms. Often lead to drownings among the lovestruck, but summoning a mermaid is the most reliable way to change an unfriendly tide…”

  * * *

  Finch was paid for his treasures in bound stacks of leaf-green paper, tissue-thin.

  “What is this?”

  “We call them fairy gold,” said Grandma June. “It’s a joke that stuck. Whatever world they’re in, they become that world’s currency. And they keep their form till they’ve passed through seven times seven pairs of hands.”

  “You’re telling me that after … forty-nine people have touched them, they turn back into little pieces of green paper?”

  “Right. Long after they could possibly be traced to you.”

  “Yeah, but what about the forty-ninth guy?”

  “Save your tears for the fiftieth. Would you rather I pay you in stock?”

  Iolanthe elbowed him hard. He took the fairy gold.

  Before they left, Grandma June caught up Iolanthe’s blank-faced watch in her knobby fingers. “How about this? Looking to sell?”

  Iolanthe snatched it back and shoved it down the front of her dress. “Not today, grandmother,” she said in a voice like iron.

  After that, Finch decided he’d keep an eye on that pocket watch, too.

  When they walked out, his treasure bag was empty, the unsold walnut in his jacket and the general’s pen in the front pocket of the new shirt the needle had sewn for him. It was nice. A little piratey, but soft. A first day of school feeling was coming over him, that imminent sense of being left behind. This, he figured, was where he and Iolanthe parted ways, once they’d split up the money. He wondered whether one of those books in the gray library told a tale that would drop him back on Earth, and whether he was ready, finally, to read it.

  But Iolanthe said nothing as they made their way up the street. It was nighttime now, the sky scattered with strange stars, and half the shops were closed. The windows still lit held darker promises than they had before the stars came out.

  Finch didn’t stop to stare. He was too distracted. He felt the metal of the general’s pen, warm through the weave of his shirt. He felt the weight of it, heavy as words unspoken.

  In his mind, he was already writing a letter.

  25

  Come home.

  Ella’s last text to me before I’d turned off my phone. And I wanted to, so badly. I wanted to kick the bottom of our front door to unstick it when I came in, and fit my fingers into the grooves of the fugly hand-thrown pottery mugs we ate our yogurt from. I wanted to see the crown of Ella’s hair under the living room lamp, the sides of the couch too high to know what she was reading till I came in close. I wanted her to flip back to the pages with folded corners, to read aloud the lines she’d liked and had saved for me. I wanted to slip back into our domestic routine like it was warm wax.

  Instead I walked on shaky legs to the parking garage’s elevator, my body feeling like it had been run through a laundry wringer. I texted Sophia as I went.

  If you’re working on clearing my name work faster. Hansa’s parents just threatened to ki
ll me with a wrench.

  Then, because it looked a little more dire typed out than I thought it would: I’m sorry btw. Does it suck that your best friend’s such an asshole?

  Seriously though I’m sorry

  She still hadn’t gotten back to me when I walked into the hotel lobby. Felix was gone from behind the desk, replaced by a pink-haired woman I’d never met. Even her brows and lashes were the color of bubblegum. She looked like something in a bakery window, a cake that bit you back. When she spotted me her face went from bored to pin-sharp. She had a phone in her hand, and I was pretty sure she used it to take my photo. I threw her a dirty look as the elevator doors closed.

  The air inside it pushed against my ears. As the elevator rose the pressure climbed, climbed, then cracked like an egg when the doors opened. I was left rubbing away the memory of pain, and the sense that I’d been about to hear something when the pressure let up. That if I’d just listened closer, words would’ve broken through.

  The hallway was empty as ever, and I wondered who slept behind these doors. Who read or stared or waited for some unfathomable thing. Were they fearful? Were they angry? Were they trying to figure this out, too?

  In my room I checked under the bed and inside the closet before stepping into the shower, because I’d been on the receiving end of vigilante justice once today already, and that was enough. The shower I took was so cold it made me gasp, but when I stepped out, the mirror was fogged all the way over. I stopped, one foot out and one foot in, because words were written in the fog in slashed uppercase letters, like a scattering of toothpicks.

  YOU’RE NOT LISTENING.

  I stared a few seconds, my skin prickling over in goose bumps so sudden they hurt. Then I banged my elbow yanking my towel down and around me, and slipped out of the bathroom sideways. I pulled clothes on over damp skin, the grossest feeling in the world, and hightailed it to the lobby.