Looking Glass

by Christina Henry

  Alice knew they must cross these mountains to reach the valley of her dreams. Hatcher seemed to know the best way to go, moving with the same certainty that had guided them through the Old City after the hospital burned down.

  “We shouldn’t have to cross the peaks,” he said. “Though I think there are some tunnels we must use otherwise.”

  Alice wasn’t fond of tunnels. Tunnels sparked a series of vague and unfounded fears—that they might lead nowhere and she and Hatcher would be trapped wandering inside a mountain forever, or that there might be strange monsters inside waiting for foolish travelers. When she mentioned these things to Hatcher he didn’t laugh, for which she was grateful.

  “If you must worry about something, though, and sometimes I think you like to—”

  She hit his shoulder, not hard, and said, “I do not!”

  “Then the worst thing you have to worry about with caves, I think, is a cave-in.”

  “One of those great falls of rock?” Alice said.

  Hatcher nodded. “They do happen sometimes. Though you’re quite the Magician now, aren’t you? I’m sure you could shift a lot of rock with your magic.”

  “I might,” Alice said doubtfully. “But that won’t help us if the rock falls directly on our heads.”

  She imagined it, imagined great slabs of mountain crashing into them, breaking their bodies to pieces. She imagined choking on dust and lightless air.

  “Let’s avoid caves if we can,” she said firmly. “I’d rather climb a little higher if we must.”

  * * *

  They soon came upon another of those little villages that seemed to sprout out of the ground here and there, completely unconnected with any other part of civilization. Alice always wondered how these places came to be—how did so many people gather in one isolated spot? Who decided it was a very clever notion to build a village on the path up to a mountain? Why did their descendants decide to stay?

  Whatever the reasons, Alice was grateful. She needed an hour or two of rest sitting in a chair instead of the hard ground with nothing except a boulder to prop up against.

  The people of the village had a warily friendly look, as if their first inclination was to be kind, but they’d lived long enough to know that not every traveler deserved their kindness. Alice could tell immediately that this place was not the place she dreaded. That dark shadow, whatever it was, still loomed ahead.

  “Good morning,” Alice said to a woman sitting on the stoop of a cottage. The woman had the slightly faded prettiness that came when beauty met a life of hard work. She was watching two small children, a boy and a girl, run back and forth in the street as they played some game with sticks.

  “Morning to you,” the woman said, shielding her eyes from the sun as she stood to get a better look at Alice and Hatcher. “Travelers?”

  Alice knew she asked this question not because the woman didn’t know the answer, but because she wanted to know where they came from.

  “Yes,” Alice said. “We’ve come a very long way, actually. From the City.”

  The woman gave them a long, keen look. “That is a very long way. And where are you bound?”

  It was hard not to feel that these questions were intrusive, and none of the woman’s business at all, but Alice knew that information was the currency that would smooth their way in this isolated place.

  “We’re looking for a quiet place to settle down,” Alice said. “Somewhere on the other side of the mountains.”

  The woman’s eyes flashed when Alice said “the other side of the mountains,” but all she said in response was, “Hmm.”

  Hatcher had been watching the children run to and fro while this exchange occurred. He’d dropped the pack at his feet.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a public house or an inn in this town,” Alice said. “We’d be very glad to pay for a meal.”

  The woman snorted. “It’s very kind of you to call it a town. More like a bump in the road. But there isn’t any inn here. We don’t get very many travelers.”

  The two children had stopped their game, clearly bored. They poked their sticks in the dust, wondering what to do next.

  Hatcher quietly walked near the children—not too close, Alice noticed, not close enough to startle—and picked up a stick of his own. He turned the stick in the dust this way and that. After a few moments the children walked over to him, peering into the dust.

  “Wow!” the girl said. She was a little older than the boy. “You’re a really good drawer.”

  “That looks just like a bear that I saw once in the woods,” the boy said. “Not from up close, though. From far away.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Hatcher said. “What was he doing?”

  “Trying to get some honey out of a beehive,” the boy said. “He didn’t seem too happy.”

  Hatcher didn’t say anything, but he kept moving the stick in the dirt, and after another pause the boy said, “Yeah, it was just like that! He had the honeycomb on his hand, but there were bees all over it still and he even ate some of them.”

  “I didn’t get to see it,” the little girl said sadly. “I was with Mama, collecting herbs, and Calder and Papa were off checking snares.”

  “What’s your favorite animal?” Hatcher asked.

  “A wolf!” the little girl said excitedly. “I think they’re so pretty.”

  “Really,” Hatcher said, and Alice heard the smile in his voice.

  It was sometimes a hard thing to remember that Hatcher had been married a long time ago, and that he’d already had a daughter. That daughter had been taken away from him, and she became a monster, but before that she’d been his most precious child. Hatcher already knew how to be a father, but Alice didn’t know a thing about being a mother. What if she was terrible at it? What if all she did was make mistakes and make her child unhappy?

  The woman looked from Hatcher to Alice. “You’re expecting, aren’t you?”

  Alice started. “How did you know?”

  The woman laughed. “You’ve got that look, the one that says you’re happy and confused at the same time. Come inside and get off your feet awhile. I’m sure I have enough stew left over for you and your man.”

  “Oh, but . . .” Alice said, worried that if she and Hatcher ate this woman’s food that there wouldn’t be enough left for her family.

  “It’s not as hard as it looks here,” the woman said, reading Alice’s expression correctly. “And besides, your man will pay me back if he can keep those little monsters occupied. It wears me out just to look at them, sometimes.”

  She said this with the gentle affection of a mother who loved her children but didn’t always like them. Alice supposed that was the way of it, really—that you could love your child more than anything in the world and still wish for five minutes of quiet, if you could get it.

  The woman, whose name was Thora, settled Alice at the table and spooned out stew from a pot hanging over the fire. She placed a hunk of bread next to the bowl and indicated that Alice should eat.

  The bread was a little stale, but the stew was delicious. Alice was already missing Olivia’s cooking, even though it had only been a few days.

  “You said you and your man were planning to pass through the mountains?” Thora asked.

  Alice’s mouth was full, so she only nodded. Thora looked troubled.

  “There’s a place up there,” she said. “A very odd sort of place, but I think you should avoid it if you can.”

  Alice felt the touch of dread slither over the nape of her neck.

  “What is this place? Do you know where it is?”

  Thora shook her head. “Not precisely, though I know it’s even more isolated than our own village. And no one seems to know for sure what goes on there. We have only heard rumours from those who have occasionally passed within reach of that place. There are always storm clouds a
bove the village, and it has a strange name.”

  “What is it called?” Alice asked.

  “The Village of the Pure.”

  * * *

  Alice and Hatcher stayed overnight in that village. Thora and her husband very kindly offered Alice and Hatcher the use of their small barn, and Alice found it very pleasant to bed down in the straw and listen to the night murmurings of the donkey and cow and three goats.

  She did not, however, find her dreams very pleasant. She dreamt of lightning, and terrible faces, and someone screaming.

  When Alice woke her nightmares lingered in a jumble at the back of her mind, disconnected images that wouldn’t form a cohesive whole. She’d been warned twice now about peril ahead, and she was certain that the peril came from this Village of the Pure, but knowing that didn’t make her feel any easier. She still had no concrete notion of what made the place so terrible, only that it should be avoided.

  If they’re only interested in purity they certainly won’t approve of Hatcher or me. Neither of us is anything like pure.

  Alice found she wasn’t as troubled by this as perhaps she ought to be. She used to care about being right and proper and good, but whoever that girl was had faded into the far distance.

  About midday they were walking on a narrow path that led between two faces of rock. Alice saw that the path widened only a short distance away, and was hurrying to get through this bit, for though the sky was still above her it felt too much like cave walls pressing in on her. Hatcher was being extra careful not to tease her about this, she could tell. The rock walls seemed like they were squeezing inward, like they were trying to squash her between them.

  But of course that’s ridiculous, Alice thought. Rocks don’t have feelings, or malice.

  She heard a creaking noise above, then a crashing. Alice looked up to see a part of the rock wall had sheared away and was tumbling directly at them.

  And it did seem like it was coming for them. Alice didn’t know why she thought this, only that she felt some rush of magic just ahead of the rock, something enchanted that brushed through her hair.

  “Run!” Hatcher shouted, tugging at her arm.

  Alice ran, though as she ran she thought that perhaps they wouldn’t be able to outrun it at all, that the rock would change direction and chase them no matter where they tried to flee.

  This didn’t happen, of course, but they did only just manage to clear the area before the rocks smashed into the place where they’d been standing. There wasn’t very much of it, certainly not enough to bury them alive, but Alice shuddered. If either of them had been hit they still could have been injured or killed.

  “Hatcher,” Alice said. “Did it seem to you that those rocks fell just because we were passing beneath them?”

  Hatcher gazed upward. “A trap, do you think? A magic one?”

  “Yes. That’s what it felt like to me.”

  “I didn’t feel it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true,” Hatcher said. “We should be very careful from now on.”

  “But who would want to set such a trap? To what purpose?”

  It surely can’t have anything to do with this Village of the Pure, Alice thought. Olivia told me that I shouldn’t use my magic around them. That doesn’t sound like the sort of place that would set a magic trigger on a mountainside.

  Hatcher shrugged, the way he often did when something troubled Alice but didn’t bother him in the same way. She could almost read his thoughts—We didn’t get hurt, there’s no obvious solution, so why trouble yourself about it?

  But Alice knew it would nag and worry at her, even if she never discovered the answer. It was hard for her to copy Hatcher’s equanimity.

  They stood for a moment, staring at the pile of rock. Then Hatcher said, “Why don’t you try to shift it with your magic?”

  Alice gave him a startled look. “I don’t think we ought to be standing here playing with the rocks. More of them could fall at any moment.”

  “I was only thinking that you ought to test what you can do, in the event that we do have to go into a cave.”

  “But I don’t want to go into them,” Alice said stubbornly. “So it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “Alice,” Hatcher said. “We might have to.”

  She knew she was being silly and childish about it, and that her fears were very likely unfounded or at least exaggerated, and that Hatcher was quite right that she ought to practice using her magic. But she didn’t feel like being sensible at the moment, and the rockfall had given her such a fright that all she wanted was to get away from this narrow space.

  “No,” she said, and hurried away, knowing that he would follow.

  He didn’t chide her for her decision, but she felt him staring at the back of her head. Clearly he was more troubled by the fact that she wouldn’t go into caves than about the rockfall that had nearly killed them. Alice thought he needed to get his priorities in order.

  The path opened up into something less anxiety-inducing and they continued on without discussing the rockfall again. Alice felt some of the tension inside her ease away.

  They had to stay that night in the cradle of the mountain. They found a small clearing where they could spread out their blankets and sleep under the wheeling sky.

  Alice didn’t think she would be able to rest at all, worrying about falling rocks and caved-in tunnels and worst of all—not being strong enough to fix it if such a thing did happen.

  She was a better Magician than she had been months before, that was true. But she wasn’t, as Olivia had so gently reminded her, at the smiting stage yet. Alice didn’t know if she could blast apart a cave-in if they encountered one.

  Perhaps the only way to know is to try. If you continue to fear your power you’ll never discover the extent of it.

  They were sitting quietly by the fire, each of them lost in their own thoughts, when Hatcher suddenly stood. His axe was in his hand, though Alice hadn’t seen him grab it. His nostrils flared wide and he stared into the darkness of the path ahead of them.

  The path to the Village of the Pure, Alice thought, and she stood too, because she felt it was better to stand up and face whatever might be coming for them.

  A man loomed out of the darkness, a man with a bloodless face and rolling eyes, a man who barely seemed aware of their presence at all. He staggered to a halt a few feet from the fire, breathing heavily.

  The man’s clothes were torn, his face covered in scratches. Alice at first thought the scratches might be from thorns or tree branches, but as she peered more closely it seemed that the marks—long and deep—came from human nails. The tears on his clothes, too, seemed to be the result of grabbing hands—something about the way the cloth had torn.

  Perhaps it was just that he had the look of a man being chased by a mob. Or perhaps it was only that Alice’s magic was allowing her to see things she wouldn’t otherwise see.

  Hatcher didn’t move toward the man, or threaten him, but Alice sensed Hatcher’s tension. If the stranger made any attempt to attack, to hurt them, then Hatcher would dispatch him. Alice didn’t think the man was a threat—he appeared terrified—but she knew a terrified person could become dangerous.

  “Sir?” she said, taking a step toward him.

  “Don’t get any closer to him, Alice,” Hatcher said in an undertone.

  Alice tried again. “Sir? Can we aid you in some way?”

  The man’s thoughts were someplace far away, someplace that made his eyes dart back and forth, searching the shadows for monsters.

  “Nobody would help me,” he said, his voice trembling. “Nobody would help me.”

  “But we will help you,” Alice said soothingly.

  “I thought they were my friends,” he said. “I thought I was one of them.”

  “Would you like to sit down here by the fire?” Alice asked. �
�We have food and water.”

  “The lightning,” the stranger said, his voice rising. “The lightning. The mercy seat.”

  Alice and Hatcher exchanged a confused look.

  “Sir, I think if you’ll sit with us awhile, and be calm, and tell us what happened . . .”

  The man suddenly turned on her, seemed to see her clearly for the first time. “The LIGHTNING!” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth. “The LIGHTNING! I was one of them, but they were going to put me in the mercy seat!”

  He took off then as suddenly as he’d arrived, darting around the fire and into the night, back down the path that would take him out of the mountains.

  As he ran they heard him calling, his voice a mad and broken thing, “The LIGHTNING! The LIGHTNING!”

  It seemed they heard him calling for a long time, his voice echoing back to them long after it should have faded.

  That night Alice had another dream, though this one was not as vague as the one she’d had the night before. There was a chair, a strange wooden chair on a dais, and a crowd of chanting people all around. High above there were storm clouds swirling. Alice looked down and saw that she was chained to the chair, and that the chanting people were smiling.

  “No!” she called to them. “Help me! My baby! Please don’t hurt my baby!”

  There was a crack of thunder, and a flash of white, and Alice woke covered in sweat, her hands cradled protectively over her stomach.

  “What is it?” Hatcher asked.

  “The mercy seat,” Alice said.

  * * *

  The next day the path seemed to widen. Strange trees dotted the landscape, trees that clung to the rocky cliffs and set their roots twining into the cracks and crevices. Pretty little wildflowers set white and purple faces toward the sun, and Alice saw several white goats far above them, serenely balancing on rock shelves no larger than their tiny hooves.

  They stopped to eat a cold lunch from the provisions Thora had kindly given them. Alice looked at the dried meat and fruit and sighed.