by J. A. White
“Safi closed the door,” Taff said. “Just like she said she would. The twins can’t follow us now. That’s good, at least.”
“In a way,” Kara said, “but Safi forgot one thing. Now that she’s closed the door, how are we going to get out of here after we find Grace?”
“You’re right,” said Taff. “For all we know, that could have been our only way out. We’re trapped!”
“There’s always another way,” Kara said.
She held Taff close so he couldn’t read her frantic doubts.
Although they seemed to be walking on paper it was as sturdy as regular ground, and Kara quickly got over her initial fear that they would fall straight through it. The land, for the most part, was blank and featureless, punctuated only by a series of paper-thin walls that were ten times the height of the children but as easily pushed over as a page in a book. Taff took great delight in this. Everything was the same sandy hue, and Kara quickly found herself hungering for the colorful variety of the real world. The utter sameness of this place was dizzying.
They came to a small waterfall that emptied into a narrow river. Instead of water, however, light-brown pulp the consistency of quicksand fell over the cliff. Paper trees lined the shore, and there was a small patch of flowers carefully folded like origami.
“I bet this used to be beautiful back when it was Phadeen,” Kara said. “Before dark magic corrupted it.”
“Just like the Thickety,” Taff said.
Kara nodded. Beneath the ground she saw, in her own handwriting, Does magic ruin everything? The words slid into the pulp and vanished in its currents. She saw other words floating there. They had been written in dozens of different hands, the letters linked together like a line of toy rafts: How come she gets to be a Whisperer and I’m stuck here on the barge? Trina claims she’s been through a Burngate but I don’t believe her; her tail is almost complete—won’t be long now before she becomes one of them.
“What does it all mean?” Taff asked.
“It means we’re not alone,” said Kara. “The Well of Witches is gathering everyone’s thoughts.”
“Why?”
“Not sure. Maybe the thoughts are feeding it somehow?”
“It eats thoughts?”
“Imogen ate memories. It’s not much different.”
“But Imogen was a person. Well, sort of a person. This is a place. It’s not alive.” He threw his hands into the air. “Unless it is alive. I give up.”
“The important thing right now is to find Grace as quickly as possible. Any ideas?”
Taff shrugged his shoulders. In the distance, the lower half of the horizon darkened to a familiar rose color. “Look,” he said. “There’s another wall, just like the one we came out of. It’s so tall—I think it touches the sky, or at least what passes for the sky here.”
As Taff talked, his thoughts continued to flow in a steady stream about various other topics: How can we be walking on paper? Where are they going to take Safi? This place is nothing like a well. What did that glass globe in Sablethorn do? Kara’s hair is a mess. What happens if there’s a fire?
Kara knew her brother had been gifted with an unusual intelligence, but seeing it on display here made her smile.
“Let’s follow the river,” Kara said, straightening her hair as best she could. “Keep walking against the current. The thoughts floating there now must have entered at some point upstream and flowed in this direction.”
“So our plan is to search for the evil witches.”
“That’s where Grace will be.”
“Now that we’re actually here, the idea of seeing her again scares me.”
“Me too.”
“Even if she agrees to help us, we can’t trust her. Not even a little bit. The first chance she gets—”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” said Kara.
“This is completely different than Mary Kettle. I could tell there was good in her. Grace Stone never had a drop of goodness. Even before she became a witch.”
Kara nodded, and then watched with surprise as her mind leaked a thought she didn’t even know she had into the ground.
There is good in everyone.
It slipped into the sludge and flowed away.
There was no morning or night in the Well of Witches, no paper sun and moon. Just the rose wall, growing incrementally closer with each labored step. Kara and Taff did not feel the need to sleep. They were not hungry or thirsty. These changes made traveling easier on a practical level, but they still made Kara uneasy.
What will happen to us if we don’t escape this place soon?
They followed the river of words until—at long last—they saw other inhabitants.
Kara pulled Taff behind a nearby Page—as they had started calling the easily moved walls that populated the landscape—and the two children peeked their heads out for a closer look. Dozens of girls and women worked in a forest of paper trees standing as tall as the Fenroots they resembled. The witches all wore the same attire: blood-red cloaks that would make them incredibly easy to see from a distance, especially against such a uniform backdrop. Encircling the tree closest to the children were three witches holding hands, their faces hidden beneath their hoods. At first Kara had no idea what they were doing, but then she saw the words gliding along the ground toward the trunk of the tree: Cut, chop, saw; cut, chop, saw; cut, chop, saw. Two witches sent their thoughts at blurring speed, but the third witch, her hands withered and covered with purple veins, was slower. Finally, however, Kara saw physical gouges appear in the bottom of the tree, as though an invisible woodcutter were taking an ax to it.
A few minutes after this the tree crashed to the ground.
The Cutters did not take a moment to celebrate; they simply moved to their next assignment. Meanwhile, another set of women dragged the tree away to an unknown destination. Other groups were partnered in the same fashion.
“Look at that,” Taff whispered, pointing to the ground between the trees and the river. Some of the words were slipping away from the sludge and gliding toward the trees, where they vanished into the ground. “I think the words are helping the trees grow. Like water.”
This idea made no sense, of course, but it did not make it wrong.
All of a sudden, an argument erupted among the three witches. Kara wasn’t close enough to hear the words, but the gist of it was clear enough: The young witches were unhappy that the older woman was taking so long to send her thoughts, thus slowing down the pace of their work. The argument escalated. The old witch pleaded that she would try to do better, but the younger women, arms crossed, were having none of it. The rest of the workers gathered in a loose circle to see what would happen next.
Taff covered his mouth, stifling a scream, and squeezed Kara’s arm.
A figure made entirely of paper was approaching the witches. It had the general shape of a human, with parchment skin and gangly arms and legs like thinly rolled scrolls. From its neck protruded an additional seven arms, each as tiny as those of a child.
These arms had no fingers or hands. Instead, they ended in masks.
While the rest of the thing’s body was the same flat color as the ground, its masks were each a different shade. Kara was reminded of the papier-mâché masks she had seen during the Shadow Festival, flour-hardened ghouls and goblins painted garish colors. These masks, however, were far more horrible, because they were literally the monster’s face. The one it currently wore was rust-orange with bulbous white eyes and a long snout. As soon as the creature reached the witches, however, and saw the older woman kneeling on the ground with her hands in the air, its neck arms swiveled and provided a new mask, this one a staid expression, with two slits for eyes and a noncommittal half smile.
If the first mask was for watching, this one was for making judgments.
The monster peeled a strip of paper from its own torso and the old woman, knowing what was coming, turned obediently. Attached to the back of her cloak was a large ring fit
ted with hundreds of similar strips. With stiff fingers, the creature threaded one more through the ring and tied it tight. Kara noticed that all the witches had these rings, though none with as many paper strips as the old woman. As she walked away they dragged along the ground like chains.
The monster switched back to its rust-orange mask and glared at the other witches until they went back to work.
Finally, it left.
“What was that?” asked Taff.
“I think it’s a guard,” said Kara. “Something that the Well created to keep the witches in line.”
“If you don’t work hard enough, they attach paper strips to your back?” Taff asked. “That’s a strange punishment.”
“I don’t think it’s normal paper,” Kara said. “It doesn’t look like it rips. Just like the ground and the sky.”
“But why?”
Kara was about to answer when someone stepped behind them.
“Fools!” a woman said. “You hide but make no attempt to conceal your thoughts. I’ve been watching them water the trees below, like footprints leading back here. I will be well rewarded when I report you to the Faceless. They might even remove one of my strips.”
“Please don’t,” Kara said. “We’ll leave right now.”
She turned around. Before her stood a red-cloaked woman with a pudgy face and pretty blue eyes.
I know her.
The woman shuddered.
“Not you!” she exclaimed. “It can’t be!” She pressed her hands to Kara’s cheeks and gazed into her eyes with unsettling intensity. “You would never be so foolish as to cast your Last Spell. Never!”
The woman’s mouth fell open as she saw the locket hanging around Kara’s neck. She grabbed it in two trembling hands and ran a thumb across the seashell embossed in the wood.
“Helena,” she said. “It’s really you.”
Kara jumped at the sound of her mother’s name, but it allowed her to make the final connection her memory needed.
“Hello, Aunt Abby,” she said.
Before the conversation could progress any further, Aunt Abby insisted on leading them to a spot farther downstream. Kara and Taff followed her at a distance in order to conceal their rampaging thoughts.
“Do you remember who she is?” Kara asked.
Taff nodded, his cold stare piercing the woman’s back.
“You told me all about her,” he said. “She killed people. Mother tried to stop her but couldn’t in time, so Aunt Abby ended up here and Mother got blamed for what she did. If it wasn’t for her, Mother would still be alive and everything would be different.”
Kara understood why he was angry; in many ways, Mother’s death was this woman’s fault. What Taff wasn’t old enough to remember, however, was the other side of Aunt Abby: the tireless player of hide-and-seek, the baker of treats, the teller of jokes that went over little Kara’s head but made Mother and Constance blush and then burst into laughter.
“She’s not a bad person,” Kara said. “The grimoire sunk its teeth into her and bit deep. She’s as much a victim as Mother.” Taff seemed about to contradict this point but Kara took his hand and squeezed it. “You never felt the grimoire’s pull. It’s hard for you to understand. Blaming Abby for her actions would be like blaming Father for trying to kill us on De’Noran.”
“I guess,” Taff said. His voice was quiet, but the point had hit home. “It doesn’t mean I have to like her, though.”
“Fair enough.”
Aunt Abby led them to three tall Pages that had fallen against one another, forming a pyramid that would protect them from prying eyes.
“I can only stay for a few minutes, Helena,” Aunt Abby said once they had entered. “If they find out I’m gone . . .”
Her hand reached back and shook the ring attached to her cloak. There were no more than a dozen paper strips there, and Aunt Abby clearly wanted to keep it that way.
“First we have to get something straight,” said Kara. “Helena was my mother. I’m her daughter, Kara.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Aunt Abby shook her head.
“That’s right! Poor Kara. You’ve left her all alone. Darling little thing.”
“Will you look at me, please? I’m thirteen. How could I be Helena?”
“Time works differently in the Well of Witches,” Aunt Abby said.
Kara couldn’t argue with this; though it had been seven years since she last saw Aunt Abby, the woman had not aged a day. Of course, there was no reason why Helena should appear younger than she had been in the real world, but Kara did not think logic had much place in this woman’s world anymore.
Aunt Abby placed her hand on Kara’s stomach. “What happened to the baby?”
Kara pointed to Taff.
“Right there.”
“No,” said Aunt Abby, her eyes scanning Taff. “No, no, no. That’s not a baby. Besides, you said the baby was going to be a boy.”
Taff crossed his arms.
“I am a boy!”
Abby shook her head. “There are no boys in the Well of Witches. Everyone knows that. The Faceless wouldn’t allow it. You’re just an ugly girl. That’s the only explanation.”
“Hey!”
“Would you rather she call you pretty?” Kara asked.
Aunt Abby examined Taff closely, her words coming in short, breathless chunks.
“This little girl . . . looks so much like your husband, Helena. How is that? Shouldn’t be possible. Unless . . . Could you be telling . . . Could I have been in this wicked place for that long? No. No.”
Aunt Abby bit down hard on her thumb to control her hand’s sudden shaking. She stared straight ahead, her eyes no longer seeing Kara and Taff but sliding toward a place from which she might never return. . . .
Kara grabbed Aunt Abby by the shoulders and shook her until the woman’s eyes regained focus.
She’s not ready to believe the truth yet, and I need her help.
“You’re right,” Kara said. “It’s me, Helena. I’m sorry I told you otherwise . . .” She started to say “Aunt” and caught herself just in time. “. . . Abby. I just got here, and I was confused.”
Aunt Abby sighed with relief and took Kara’s hands.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it the whole time. I’m so sorry for what I did.” Tears ran down her cheeks. “Peter. Constance. I never meant to hurt anyone.”
“All of that is in the past. Right now I need your help.”
Abby straightened.
“Anything,” she said, her voice resolute. “I can never atone for what happened, but I’ll do what little I can.” She pointed at Taff. “But tell me first—who’s this little girl?”
“Really?” Taff asked.
“I found her wandering all alone. She’s looking for her friend. I’m trying to help her.”
“That sounds like the Helena I know,” Abby said. “But how did you come to be this far from the Spellfire? You’re not Cutters, like me, otherwise I would have seen you before.” Noticing Kara’s look of complete incomprehension, Abby added, “Surely the Faceless assigned you a job, right? That happens the moment you get here.”
“We entered a different way,” said Kara. “Nobody knows we’re here except you.”
Abby backed away slowly, a look of horror on her face.
“If that’s true,” Abby said, “and they find you—they’ll take you to the Changing Place and turn you into one of the Faceless on the spot.” Her eyes grew wild. “I need to go. Right now. If we don’t hurry back they’ll know I’m gone!”
Kara grabbed her arm.
“Can you help us find the girl? Yes or no?”
“I don’t know. This place is a lot bigger than it looks, and the Faceless are always watching. Chances are I’ve never even seen her.”
“You’d remember, if you did. Her name is Grace. She’s thirteen and she has long white hair and bright blue eyes.”
Aunt Abby froze in place. Kara saw a single thought—written in sharp, De’No
ran cursive—form beneath her feet: The one with the bad leg.
“Yes!” exclaimed Kara. “That’s Grace! Can you take us to her?”
“Did you just read my thoughts?” Abby asked. Her mouth was wide with shock.
“Is that bad?”
“It’s the rudest thing there is,” Abby said. “We expect the Faceless to do it, but another witch . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Kara said, her face flushed. “I didn’t know the etiquette.”
“All right. Just don’t do it again.” She leveled a finger at Taff. “You too, girl.”
Taff looked as though he were about to object, then just shrugged his shoulders and nodded.
“So you’ve seen her, then?” Kara asked. “Grace?”
Abby nodded.
“I helped pull her into the Well myself.”
“I remember.”
“Are you sure you really want to find her?”
“It’s very important,” said Kara. “Why?”
“Because she’s a Whisperer,” Abby said. “The youngest one there’s ever been.”
“What does that mean?” asked Taff.
“I’ll show you, and then you’ll understand.” Abby chuckled nervously. “A Whisperer. Even us witches find them a little scary.”
Kara and Taff, now wearing red cloaks that Abby had found them, tried to blend in with the other Cutters as they shuffled their way out of the forest. Two Faceless corralled the group. One of them rode a long beast that looked like a giant caterpillar with great leathery ears. Its feet rustled gently against the paper ground, and its long mouth, stretching from one ear to the other, seemed made for smiling. It wasn’t smiling now, however—paper strips that looked as strong as rope had been knotted around its midsection. As the creature walked it emitted a pained moaning sound, and Kara felt her face flush with anger.
This poor creature has more legs than just the twelve, but the others are bound to its body. Perhaps that’s how they keep it from escaping.
They walked away from the forest until they reached a second river, this one flowing toward the rose wall instead of away from it. Docked at the shore were three large barges, little more than flat decks with towering paper sails. Two of the barges had already been loaded with the day’s quota of trees. The Cutters crossed a short plank onto the third barge, passing right by one of the Faceless. Kara kept her head bowed and tried to stay with the crowd. Although Abby had promised Kara that they had nothing to worry about, she felt her heart racing beneath the itchy cloak.