by Kelly Link
Lily was sitting in the parlor when she got home. “Humphrey’s Aunt Rose called,” she said without preamble. “There’s been an accident.”
“What?” June said. Her chest heaved up and down. She thought she felt the tickle of feathers in her lungs. She thought she might throw up.
“His plane crashed. A flock of birds flew into the propeller. He died almost instantly.”
“He’s not dead,” June said.
Lily didn’t say anything. Her arms were folded against her body as if she were afraid they might extend, unwanted, towards her daughter. “He was a nice boy,” she said finally.
“I need to go up to my room,” June said. Of course he wasn’t dead: she’d read the book. He’d explained the whole thing to her. When you’re immortal, you don’t die. Half-immortal, she corrected herself. So maybe half-dead, she could live with that.
Lily said, “The woman in Room Five left this afternoon. I haven’t cleaned it yet, but I thought we might move the guests in your room. I’ll help you.”
“No!” June said. “I’ll do it.” She hesitated. “Thanks, Lily.”
“I’ll make up a pot of tea, then,” Lily said, and went into the kitchen. June took the ring of keys from the wall and went up to her room. She took the blue sweater out of the cupboard and put it on. She picked up the bottle of perfume, and then she paused. She bent and thumbed open the suitcase of the Strasbourg honeymooners, reaching down through the folded clothes until her hand closed around a wad of notes. She took them all without counting.
The last two things she took were the two books: D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and Arrows of Beauty.
She went out of her room without locking it, down the stairs to Room Five. The light didn’t come on when she lowered the switch and things brushed against her, soft and damp. She ran to the drapes and flung them back.
The window swung open and suddenly the room was full of whiteness. At first, blinking hard, she thought that it was snowing inside. Then she saw that the snowflakes were goosedown. Both pillows had been torn open and the duvet was rent down the middle. Feathers dusted the floor, sliding across June’s palm and her cheek. She choked on a feather, spat it out.
As she moved across the room, the feathers clung to her. She felt them attaching themselves to her back, growing into two great wings. “Stop it!” she cried.
She opened the D’Aulaire, flipping past Hera’s mad, triumphant face, to a picture of rosy-cheeked Venus. She pulled the stopper from the perfume bottle and tipped it over on the drawing. She poured out half the bottle on the book and behind her someone sneezed. She turned around.
It was Humphrey’s aunt, Rose Read. She looked almost dowdy – travel-stained and worn, as if she had come a long way. She didn’t look anything like the woman in the picture book. June said, “Where is he?”
Aunt Rose shrugged, brushing feathers off her wrinkled coat. “He’s gone to see his Aunt Prune, I suppose.”
“I want to go to him,” June said. “I know that’s possible.”
“I suppose you had Classics at your comprehensive,” said Aunt Rose, and sneezed delicately, like a cat. “Really, these feathers – “
“I want you to send me to him.”
“If I sent you there,” Rose said, “you might not come back. Or he might not want to come back. It isn’t my specialty either. If you’re so clever, you’ve figured that out, too.”
“I know you’ve sent people there before, so stop playing games with me!” June said.
“Your mother could tell you what to do when a lover leaves,” Rose Read said in a voice like cream. “So why are you asking my advice?”
“She didn’t go after him!” June shouted. “She had to stay here and look after me, didn’t she?”
Rose Read drew herself up very tall, smoothing her hands down her sides. She looked almost pleased. “Very well,” she said. “Fortunately Hell is a much cheaper trip, much nearer to hand than Australia. Are you ready? Good. So listen, because I’m only going to tell you this once.”
20. Going to hell. Instructions and advice.
“If you don’t let the sweater fall from your hands, if you follow the sleeve until it is only yarn, it will lead you to him. He won’t be as you remember him, he’s been eating his memories to keep warm. He is not asleep, but if you kiss him he’ll wake up. Just like the fairy tales. His lips will be cold at first.
“Say to him, Follow me, and unravel the right arm of the sweater. It will take you to a better place, little thief. If you do it right and don’t look back, then you can steal him out of the Bonehouse.”
June stared instead at the birdcage, gilt and forlorn upon its single hinged leg. Down was caught like smoke in a sieve in the grill of the cage. “What now?” she said. “Do you disappear in a puff of smoke, or wave a wand? Can I just leave?”
“Not through the door,” Rose said. “It’s time you had your flying lessons.” She stepped upon the windowsill, crouching in her coat like a great black wing beneath the weight of the moon. She held out her hand to June. “Come on. Are you afraid?”
June took her hand. “I won’t be afraid,” she said. She climbed up on the sill beside Rose, and pointed her shoes toward the moon, away from the scratch of quills against the walls and ceiling. She didn’t look back, but stepped off the edge of the known world.
TRAVELS WITH THE SNOW QUEEN
Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you. You enter the walls of the city early in the evening, when the cobblestones are a mottled pink with reflected light, and cold beneath the slap of your bare, bloody feet. You ask the man who is guarding the gate to recommend a place to stay the night, and even as you are falling into the bed at the inn, the bed, which is piled high with quilts and scented with lavender, perhaps alone, perhaps with another traveler, perhaps with the guardsman who had such brown eyes, and a mustache that curled up on either side of his nose like two waxed black laces, even as this guardsman, whose name you didn’t ask calls out a name in his sleep that is not your name, you are dreaming about the road again. When you sleep, you dream about the long white distances that still lie before you. When you wake up, the guardsman is back at his post, and the place between your legs aches pleasantly, your legs sore as if you had continued walking all night in your sleep. While you were sleeping, your feet have healed again. You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn’t really count, does it.
Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are breadcrumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you.
There is a map of fine white scars on the soles of your feet that tells you where you have been. When you are pulling the shards of the Snow Queen’s looking-glass out of your feet, you remind yourself, you tell yourself to imagine how it felt when Kay’s eyes, Kay’s heart were pierced by shards of the same mirror. Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.
Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren’t easy on the feet?
So this is the story so far. You grew up, you fell in love with the boy next door, Kay, the one with blue eyes who brought you bird feathers and roses, the one who was so good at puzzles. You thought he loved you – maybe he thought he did, too. His mouth tasted so sweet, it tasted like love, and his fingers were so kind, they pricked like love on your skin, but three years and exactly two days after you moved in with him, you were having drinks out
on the patio. You weren’t exactly fighting, and you can’t remember what he had done that had made you so angry, but you threw your glass at him. There was a noise like the sky shattering.
The cuff of his trousers got splashed. There were little fragments of glass everywhere. “Don’t move,” you said. You weren’t wearing shoes.
He raised his hand up to his face. “I think there’s something in my eye,” he said.
His eye was fine, of course, there wasn’t a thing in it, but later that night when he was undressing for bed, there were little bits of glass like grains of sugar, dusting his clothes. When you brushed your hand against his chest, something pricked your finger and left a smear of blood against his heart.
The next day it was snowing and he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. You sat on the patio drinking something warm and alcoholic, with nutmeg in it, and the snow fell on your shoulders. You were wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt; you were pretending that you weren’t cold, and that your lover would be back soon. You put your finger on the ground and then stuck it in your mouth. The snow looked like sugar, but it tasted like nothing at all.
The man at the corner store said that he saw your lover get into a long white sleigh. There was a beautiful woman in it, and it was pulled by thirty white geese. “Oh, her,” you said, as if you weren’t surprised. You went home and looked in the wardrobe for that cloak that belonged to your great-grandmother. You were thinking about going after him. You remembered that the cloak was woolen and warm, and a beautiful red – a traveler’s cloak. But when you pulled it out, it smelled like wet dog and the lining was ragged, as if something had chewed on it. It smelled like bad luck: it made you sneeze, and so you put it back. You waited for a while longer.
Two months went by, and Kay didn’t come back, and finally you left and locked the door of your house behind you. You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It’s hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren’t quite ready to give him up yet. You told yourself that the woman in the sleigh must have put a spell on him, and he was probably already missing you. Besides, there are some questions you want to ask him, some true things you want to tell him. This is what you told yourself.
The snow was soft and cool on your feet, and then you found the trail of glass, the map.
After three weeks of hard traveling, you came to the city.
No, really, think about it. Think about the little mermaid, who traded in her tail for love, got two legs and two feet, and every step was like walking on knives. And where did it get her? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Then there’s the girl who put on the beautiful red dancing shoes. The woodsman had to chop her feet off with an axe.
There are Cinderella’s two stepsisters, who cut off their own toes, and Snow White’s stepmother, who danced to death in red-hot iron slippers. The Goose Girl’s maid got rolled down a hill in a barrel studded with nails. Travel is hard on the single woman. There was this one woman who walked east of the sun and then west of the moon, looking for her lover, who had left her because she spilled tallow on his nightshirt. She wore out at least one pair of perfectly good iron shoes before she found him. Take our word for it, he wasn’t worth it. What do you think happened when she forgot to put the fabric softener in the dryer? Laundry is hard, travel is harder. You deserve a vacation, but of course you’re a little wary. You’ve read the fairy tales. We’ve been there, we know.
That’s why we here at Snow Queen Tours have put together a luxurious but affordable package for you, guaranteed to be easy on the feet and on the budget. See the world by goosedrawn sleigh, experience the archetypal forest, the winter wonderland; chat with real live talking animals (please don’t feed them). Our accommodations are three-star: sleep on comfortable, guaranteed pea-free box-spring mattresses; eat meals prepared by world-class chefs. Our tour guides are friendly, knowledgeable, well-traveled, trained by the Snow Queen herself. They know first aid, how to live off the land; they speak three languages fluently.
Special discount for older sisters, stepsisters, stepmothers, wicked witches, crones, hags, princesses who have kissed frogs without realizing what they were getting into, etc.
You leave the city and you walk all day beside a stream that is as soft and silky as blue fur. You wish that your map was water, and not broken glass. At midday you stop and bathe your feet in a shallow place and the ribbons of red blood curl into the blue water.
Eventually you come to a wall of briars, so wide and high that you can’t see any way around it. You reach out to touch a rose, and prick your finger. You suppose that you could walk around, but your feet tell you that the map leads directly through the briar wall, and you can’t stray from the path that has been laid out for you. Remember what happened to the little girl, your great-grandmother, in her red woolen cape. Maps protect their travelers, but only if the travelers obey the dictates of their maps. This is what you have been told.
Perched in the briars above your head is a raven, black and sleek as the curlicued moustache of the guardsman. The raven looks at you and you look back at it. “I’m looking for someone,” you say. “A boy named Kay.”
The raven opens its big beak and says, “He doesn’t love you, you know.”
You shrug. You’ve never liked talking animals. Once your lover gave you a talking cat, but it ran away and secretly you were glad. “I have a few things I want to say to him, that’s all.” You have, in fact, been keeping a list of all the things you are going to say to him. “Besides, I wanted to see the world, be a tourist for a while.”
“That’s fine for some,” the raven says. Then he relents. “If you’d like to come in, then come in. The princess just married the boy with the boots that squeaked on the marble floor.”
“That’s fine for some,” you say. Kay’s boots squeak; you wonder how he met the princess, if he is the one that she just married, how the raven knows that he doesn’t love you, what this princess has that you don’t have, besides a white sleigh pulled by thirty geese, an impenetrable wall of briars, and maybe a castle. She’s probably just some bimbo.
“The Princess Briar Rose is a very wise princess,” the raven says, “but she’s the laziest girl in the world. Once she went to sleep for a hundred days and no one could wake her up, although they put one hundred peas under her mattress, one each morning.”
This, of course, is the proper and respectful way of waking up princesses. Sometimes Kay used to wake you up by dribbling cold water on your feet. Sometimes he woke you up by whistling.
“On the one hundredth day,” the raven says, “she woke up all by herself and told her council of twelve fairy godmothers that she supposed it was time she got married. So they stuck up posters, and princes and youngest sons came from all over the kingdom.”
When the cat ran away, Kay put up flyers around the neighborhood. You wonder if you should have put up flyers for Kay. “Briar Rose wanted a clever husband, but it tired her dreadfully to sit and listen to the young men give speeches and talk about how rich and sexy and smart they were. She fell asleep and stayed asleep until the young man with the squeaky boots came in. It was his boots that woke her up.
“It was love at first sight. Instead of trying to impress her with everything he knew and everything he had seen, he declared that he had come all this way to hear Briar Rose talk about her dreams. He’d been studying in Vienna with a famous Doctor, and was deeply interested in dreams.”
Kay used to tell you his dreams every morning. They were long and complicated and if he thought you weren’t listening to him, he’d sulk. You never remember your dreams. “Other peoples’ dreams are never very interesting,” you tell the raven.
The raven cocks its head. It flies down and lands on the grass at your feet. “Wanna bet?” it says. Behind the raven you notice a little green door recessed in the briar wall. You could have sworn that it wasn’t
there a minute ago.
The raven leads you through the green door, and across a long green lawn towards a two-story castle that is the same pink as the briar roses. You think this is kind of tacky, but exactly what you would expect from someone named after a flower. “I had this dream once,” the raven says, “that my teeth were falling out. They just crumbled into pieces in my mouth. And then I woke up, and realized that ravens don’t have teeth.”
You follow the raven inside the palace, and up a long, twisty staircase. The stairs are stone, worn and smoothed away, like old thick silk. Slivers of glass glister on the pink stone, catching the light of the candles on the wall. As you go up, you see that you are part of a great gray rushing crowd. Fantastic creatures, flat and thin as smoke, race up the stairs, men and women and snakey things with bright eyes. They nod to you as they slip past. “Who are they?” you ask the raven.
“Dreams,” the raven says, hopping awkwardly from step to step. “The Princess’s dreams, come to pay their respects to her new husband. Of course they’re too fine to speak to the likes of us.”
But you think that some of them look familiar. They have a familiar smell, like a pillow that your lover’s head has rested upon.
At the top of the staircase is a wooden door with a silver keyhole. The dreams pour steadily through the keyhole, and under the bottom of the door, and when you open it, the sweet stink and cloud of dreams are so thick in the Princess’s bedroom that you can barely breathe. Some people might mistake the scent of the Princess’s dreams for the scent of sex; then again, some people mistake sex for love.
You see a bed big enough for a giant, with four tall oak trees for bedposts. You climb up the ladder that rests against the side of the bed to see the Princess’s sleeping husband. As you lean over, a goose feather flies up and tickles your nose. You brush it away, and dislodge several seedy-looking dreams. Briar Rose rolls over and laughs in her sleep, but the man beside her wakes up. “Who is it?” he says. “What do you want?”