It wasn’t. We both knew she’d never tell me the entirety of that tale.
“It wasn’t easy being Althea’s kid, even before we moved to the Hazel Wood. But one thing I’ll say for her, she could spin a hell of a bedtime story. Stick with you for months. Give you nightmares for years.
“Althea and the Spinner, they were … not friends. Old adversaries, at best. They used to meet for tea sometimes, at the edge of the Halfway Wood.” She smiled at the look on my face. “Didn’t expect that? Well, boredom makes strange bedfellows. This was after my stepdad died, long after people stopped coming to stay. Althea would get all dressed up for it, like she was Norma Desmond or something. Even when I was little it was hard to watch. And she’d come home and tell me all the things they’d talked about, like it was this normal social call. I guess for her it was. I guess it was the only kind of social she got. The Hinterland treated me like a mascot, like a little changeling kid—untouchable. Althea, though, they messed with. Or worse than that, ignored. My god, you cannot fathom the depth of her loneliness.
“Okay,” she said, putting down her cup. “Okay. So there was one day when Althea came home from one of her tea parties and told me a story. She told me lots of stories, enough to make you sick on, but this one I remember. Because she told me—and she said this like it was an honor that she knew it, because even if she resented the Spinner she drank her Kool-Aid, too—she said it was the very first tale the Spinner had ever told.
“This story is called ‘The Night Country.’ And it is not a fairy tale.”
28
There’s no shortage of spilled blood in fairy tales. But this is not a fairy tale.
It’s a love story.
In a real world where blood was red as apples, as bitten lips, and spilled just once, there was a girl.
Always. Of course. A girl.
This girl was not a victim or victor. Not a maiden or a princess or a mother or a witch. She was a girl with chapped knuckles and curious eyes that saw everything. She was not a good person, by which I mean she was not good at being a person, which was okay because she lived in a world where girls were not expected to be good at anything. She was uninterested in the limitations of her sex, so she ignored them. Her obsession was with uncovering the workings of her world: what lay beneath.
Though not a princess, she was the daughter of a powerful man, a magician, and a dead mother, so perhaps this is a fairy tale, just a bit.
With no mother to raise her, the magician supposed she could raise herself. He gave her freedom, and trust, and a library to roam in. Though not a whimsical child, she was drawn to his books of fairy tales. Such tales exist in all worlds. She loved them not for their enchantments but for their shapes, their ruthless black-and-white symmetry. She was often left alone, but she always had her books, and she was never lonely.
Her father was a very bad person, but very good at hiding it, and had become powerful by his importance to the rulers of their world. One after another, these rulers died, and always he was there, invaluable and discreet, to guide their successors, until at last none was left to rule but him, with his strange and lovely daughter.
Because she was very lovely. And wise enough to know it was dangerous to be so, in a world where she prized knowledge and the freedom to seek it above all. As her father, who was proud in his way of his brilliant daughter, and allowed her access to the tools of his arts, turned his mind to affairs of state, she was left to her own devices.
There was no wolf to mislead her in the woods, no stepmother or enchantress. There were only her books, her curiosity, and the iron of her will.
The first magic she learned was the art of wearing different faces. This was a world where small magic was common, and those who could used it to smooth their way. But transformation was not a small magic: once done, a magician could not return to the face of their birth. The girl peeled herself away from the face she’d been born with, trading it for a plain one that would allow her to do as she pleased without notice. Her eyes, only, she couldn’t change—silver-blue eyes, their color as unlikely as summer ice—and her father knew her by them when he saw her again. He said no words of damnation or praise, but pressed a hand to her unfamiliar cheek. He was not a tender man, and it was not a tender gesture, but acknowledgment of what she’d done: one magician honoring another.
From that day he left her to her work. He never spoke of marrying her off, but waited greedily for what knowledge her studies might uncover that he could profit by.
And he did. Her abilities became greater, deeper, more insidious. She was born the beautiful daughter of a commoner, and had become the plain daughter of a self-made king, and it seemed that nothing could stop their rise.
Until something derailed it. This girl was uncommon: intelligent, without sentiment, cold. But she was not entirely heartless. And love, unexpected and unlooked for, came her way.
It happened like this: on occasion her father would prevail upon her to give some demonstration of her magic, an impressive public display to shore up support and quiet the discontented. He took credit for this magic, which was as she wished it. She liked being nearly invisible, working in her library and her laboratory, learning to separate matter from reason, and to convince the physical world that it needn’t continue to do the things it had always done, just because it was habit.
On the third anniversary of her father’s rise to power, he requested that she put on a display in his hall. She made hypnotized spectators dance ten feet above the ground, twirling in elegant pairs. She coaxed static sparks from their clothing and rolled them into a lightning bolt that crackled across the ceiling and back, before unraveling and returning to the places from whence it came.
For her final act, she lifted all the jewels from the gathered attendees’ ears and wrists and throats and fingers, gathering them into a spangled cloud that clustered and hummed. She meant for the jewels to whirl up into the shape of her father’s sigil.
But something was working against her magic. It bent the will of the jeweled cloud. Instead of forming her father’s sigil, it picked itself out into the shape of an abelia: a bell-like flower. Then it shivered out like blown pollen, each piece returning to its master.
The audience thundered their approval, not understanding the error. The girl’s cheeks reddened as her father looked at her, ferocious and brief, before turning a benevolent face to the crowd.
But her heart was a shivering cloud, too: only another magician could’ve disordered her display, one even greater than she. And by doing so, they’d both shamed and honored her: the flower was her namesake. Like her dead mother’s, her name was Abelia.
The second time it happened she was alone.
She could not, to her frustration, change the paths of celestial bodies. That was a magic even her father’s grimmest grimoires could not condone. But she was learning to alter the appearance of the skies. On a moonless night she stood by the edge of the lake behind her father’s palace, her sleeves rolled up and her hair tied back. Borrowing the light of the stars, she made a counterfeit moon and ran it through its phases.
But as it waxed it deepened in color, from champagne to wine. Her arms ached and her eyes streamed, and still she could not make it pale. In its fullest form, it sprung five arms, and a star spun out of orbit to serve as its pistil.
“Abelia,” said a voice from behind her, as deep in color as the altered moon.
She turned, and her life was changed.
* * *
What drew the girl to the mage was his magic. What drew the mage to the girl was her ambition. To him, ambition smelled like a drug, like opium and amber, and hers was bottomless. He, too, wore an altered face, but while hers was built to go unnoticed, his was made to please, because it costs less for a man to be pleasing.
From that day, they worked together. Her ambition ran into his like a tributary into a river. He reminded her of her earliest wish: to peel up the corners of the world and see the workings that lay below.
Anyone who seeks to bend the world to their wishes, with words or science or magic or sheer will, must operate by a code. The girl was not good, but she had a code: she did not undo what she could not put back together. But rules can be rewritten, letter by letter, by a man with a velvet voice, who touched her mouth with his thumb tips and said her name like it was dipped in honey.
When he asked her the first time, he said it lightly.
Hands, he told her. There’s so much magic in hands. If we needed them—if you needed them—could you get a pair of hands?
Yes, she said. Of course. The city has no shortage of corpses.
Not like that, he said, choosing his words as delicately as grains of rice. There’s a power in ending a life. In the dead giving of their body to make something new. An ending births a beginning, becoming that much more powerful.
The girl understood, then, what he was asking for.
She took one hand from her seamstress. Clever hands, neat and quick. She took another from her cook, blurred with scars but strong. And her lover was right: the women were alive, then dead, choking on poison on Abelia’s sitting room floor. That was their end. But when Abelia took their hands, it became a beginning, too. She could feel in the hands’ heaviness all the knowledge that pooled there, all the ability. She wrapped them in yards of heavy satin and had a rider carry them to her love. The rest of the bodies she disposed of.
All of it was easy after that.
One foot came from a housemaid who’d always moved lightly through the castle, with the darting joy of a bird. The other from a messenger boy who spent his days running between the castle and the city.
When her lover asked for a tongue she solved two problems at once, cutting it from the mouth of her father’s silver-tongued right hand. He’d grown too powerful of late, too sure of his place. She didn’t tell her father it was she who’d solved his problem.
For the pair of eyes the mage requested, she ventured into the city, her anonymous face her disguise. A man in a tavern there was bragging of all he’d seen in his travels, how far he’d come from and where he’d been along the way.
She gave herself a lovely face and form just long enough to lure him into an upper room, where she took his life and his eyes that had seen so many wonders.
Now, her lover said when she’d given him all these things. He could not hide the thrill in his voice. Now we need only a heart.
This was harder for the girl to obtain. She did not lack nerve, or even appetite. But she could not decide on the heart. A good one—but who could tell what secrets might lie inside it? A hard one, then—but what rotten softness might hide within?
She considered the riddle so long her lover grew impatient. If you don’t have the stomach to do this, he warned her, I’ll find one that will.
The girl did not like to be threatened. She didn’t answer his threat, because she hungered to know what great magic he was building, whose purpose he still hid from her. She only bit her tongue and noted, with a scholar’s fascination, how a slice of the love she bore for him shriveled and fell away.
The arrogant magician hadn’t noticed it when her magic exceeded his own. He did not understand that by teaching her ruthlessness, he’d made her more powerful. And he didn’t recognize that her ambition had grown greater than her love.
Finally, impatient with her, he chose a heart himself. The finest heart he could think of: the heart of a king.
When she learned he’d killed her father, the mage imagined she would cry, as women do. Be angry with him. He imagined she would rage, strike out with attacks he could easily defend against, and require many kisses to return her to herself.
But his imagination was limited.
When he showed the girl her father’s heart, she did not need his words to recognize it. It was shaped like her own, just barely scarred with love. The scars belonged to her, and those on her own heart, faint as they were, belonged to him, her father, not to this man she’d briefly thought worthy.
She knew, too, that her heart would not be scarred again. Her father was dead, her heart impermeable, and the man before her already gone to dust in her mind.
She lifted a hand as if to touch his cheek. He smiled, that it should be so easy, that she should already be tender with him. He was not ready for the knife in her other hand. With strength born of fury and a hand driven by magic, she divided him from himself. Her face was set and steady. She did not seem to hear his screams.
She knew enough of magic to guess at what must be done with the pieces she’d gathered: the eyes, the tongue, the hands, the feet. She laid them out in the semblance of a body, and in the center of them she placed her father’s heart. Her hands were still red with her lover’s blood, and it touched the pieces like a covenant.
It was not long before the pieces shivered and shook, and the air among them thickened with gristle, with tendon and blood and bone. When they stood up together, they formed a figure, that did the thing it was made for: it pierced the wall of the world. It made in that wall a door to what lay beyond, a great nothingness waiting to take form. The figure breathed in the life of the world behind it, and blew it into the gap.
Then it moved aside for the girl to step through.
Before her, stretched out like a sleeping beast, lay the thing her lover had used her to kill for. A new world, waiting to be given form: a night country, fresh-made, created through magic and blood. As she stepped onto its giving ground, she felt it opening its arms to her. She became its master, and its servant. It laid its cuts on her unreachable heart.
She looked around at the soft black canvas of her world, and submitted to its pull. She knew only order, and magic, and the books of enchantments she’d raised herself on. Love had burned out of her at the root.
Grieving and angry but never uncertain, she made an ordered world. A world that ticked and turned like a clock. She filled it with fairy tales.
29
The bartender sliced his finger halfway through my mother’s telling, shouted once, and disappeared into the back. The drunk in the corner groaned as the jukebox clicked to life, playing an old Flamingos song. The Spinner was gone, but her stories weren’t; they could still leak poison into the air.
“So you think that the Spinner—and now you think someone’s trying to…”
“I don’t know what I think.”
The bleak landscapes of the tale pulsed in my mind in shades of red and gray. The Trio said it first: what if the dead weren’t victims but martyrs? What if their deaths meant more, and their desecration had some vast, impossible purpose?
“A night country. What did Althea think of that? Did she tell you?”
“My mother.” She said the words like a curse. “It’s just good she heard it when she did. Any earlier and she might’ve tried to make one herself. We always lived in Althealand anyway, she would’ve loved to make it literal.”
Two hands, two feet, a tongue. Two eyes, a heart, and blood to cover them. This was it. The piece I’d been looking for. But I had to get my mother clear of it.
“Or maybe,” I said, my voice rusty, “it’s just a story.”
Ella fixed me with a stare that could wither an acorn. “So says the literal Story.”
She never referenced my origin like that. It stopped me short.
“I’m not saying someone didn’t hear it and believe it,” I said. “That they’re not trying, even, to do what she did. But the Spinner told a lot of tales.”
“And all of them true.”
And all of them true.
We looked at each other, but I wasn’t seeing her. I was trying to picture it, to imagine its outlines: a night country. A world built on carnage and sacrifice, made to order—but by who?
Ella swallowed the last of her whiskey. “I know you’re not at the Best Western.”
My eyes refocused on her tired face.
“I called the front desk, asking for you. Didn’t want to tell me one way or the other, but I figured it out.”
I caught a drop of condensation as it ran down the side of my cup. “Why didn’t you believe me?”
“I just had this feeling you were lying to me.”
“Why didn’t you say anything till now?”
“I wanted to see your face, I think.” She studied it. “I wanted to see if you’d try to keep lying.”
“Why—”
“Enough with the questions. It’s time for you to come home.”
“When this is done. When this is done, I’ll come home.”
She cursed softly, looking at the ceiling for strength. I wondered who she was looking for up there. Certainly not Althea.
“What does done look like to you?” she began quietly. “Is done when you’re dead? What will you do if you figure out who’s doing this—turn them in? Stop them? You think they’d put up with that, any of them? It’s time to stop playing at whatever it is you’re playing at. It’s time for us to go. You don’t owe anyone here shit. Anyone but me.”
“You just said they might be trying to make a whole new world,” I said incredulously, my act cracking. “You think I can just walk away?”
“You might be a Story,” she said, ignoring me, “but I know Stories. Sophia and the rest of them are not like you. They’re as different from you as an eagle from a canary. They’re not built to survive here, and honestly? Good riddance.”
“Mom, just stop!” I grabbed her wrist hard. And though it was her bones in my fist, it was my wrist that ached, where Sophia had grabbed me at the diner. As fast as I reached for her, I let go. I could taste acid in the back of my throat.
Blank-eyed, she rubbed her wrist. Rolled it.
“You know what,” she said. “No.
“I’ve always excused your temper. It was easy to blame it on what you were. But now this is you. Just you. The Hinterland is gone, and neither of us can blame the Spinner anymore for how she made you. We are done with that.” Her eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them. “If you touch me in anger again, I will fucking touch you back.”
The Night Country Page 17