The dark was vast and pendulous. It rippled from the edges of me. Everything was echo and pulse, float and stretch, sleep and wake and a distant hunger. Something waited in my hummingbird heart: potential. A distant rage. I nipped at it like sugar water. Then a whoosh and a wrenching in my core, and the velvet dark ripped open. There was cold and terror and chilling white light.
The first thing I saw was a face, red cheeks and watery blue eyes. Not my mother’s. I’d lived beneath her heartbeat, light and restless, for too long not to know this face didn’t belong to that heart. The blue eyes raked over me, registering fear and something else—satisfaction. Though I didn’t have the words for that yet. Two rough hands lifted and turned me.
The next face I saw matched the heartbeat I’d rested my cheek against for nine months, as I stretched and unfurled and grew myself from the inside out. A wide mouth, damp ropes of blonde hair. Eyes the hot brown of wet fur. She twisted her hands in bloody sheets. She looked at me and turned away. My mother.
But that word plucked at something else in my rapt, nascent baby brain. Mother. I saw someone else, a girl with unruly black hair and long fingers. She tangled them with mine and spoke into the angry pulse at my temple. Count to ten, Alice.
The tendrils of the story grew up and over me, like briars pulling a tower down. And I forgot.
It was so easy after that to let the story happen to me. I was a princess. I lived in a castle. I had eyes so black they drank the light. My siblings were scared of me; they ran like rabbits when they heard the bouncing of my silver ball. My father was a head of dark hair as he left the room, a booming voice that terrified the maids. My mother was a placid fairy queen at the far end of a table, plucking at the strings of a lute or the threads of some useless embroidery.
I grew up. I grew in jumps. The older brother who teased me one day, when I was only seven, got his the next, when I woke up taller than him. My bones stretched in the night. It was excruciating. It felt like stars had crawled into my joints and exploded.
But everything else felt so good, so free. I never knew how hard I’d worked to keep the darkness at bay—I remembered, distantly, that I’d done this before, under other circumstances. Lived, grown up. When I thought too hard about it, something silvery and webbed flickered over my sight. When I stopped thinking, my vision went clear.
There were other hints that there was something more to my life. Some secret that lay just beside it, ready to crack open like an egg. Sometimes at night I heard a shower of rocks at my window, like fingertips tapping. Sometimes I saw a face that was almost familiar, in a place where none should be—in the woods, or looking up at me from the frozen yard. If I peered too long the glittering sparks flared up and my head ached, so I stopped looking.
It felt good to be cruel. I let it wash over me like a warm black bath. My mother never punished me—she made her servants do it. Every stripe they laid on my back I paid out on my mother’s other children. She didn’t treat me like her own; she treated me like a cuckoo. I think she almost believed I wasn’t hers. She hated that we had the same silly hair.
I was fascinated by ice from the first time I tried it. Cream and honey and lavender syrup stirred into chipped ice, after a banquet dinner celebrating one of my father’s bloody victories. It slid into my stomach and lit a tiny fire. After that, in the cold months, I’d go outside and suck on icicles, eat snow. In the summer I’d hide in shadowy places, unmoving. My siblings felt safer then.
They weren’t safe in winter. I played tricks on them, put nasty things in their beds and ruined their chances at balls. After my little brother broke my hand mirror I led him deep into the woods on an icy night, promising him we were looking for erldeer. I left him alone in a clearing and trekked back alone. He returned home hours after me, led by a stranger who’d found him in the woods. He didn’t dare tell what I’d done.
When I came down to breakfast one morning in a woman’s body, as shaky on my new legs as a fawn, my father looked me in the eyes for the first time. He looked down my body and up again. He smiled in a way that made me afraid.
Soon after that, my mother announced it was time to marry me off. She didn’t do it to save me, but to deny him. She did it with the air of a woman withholding a toy from a hated child.
I didn’t care from which direction safety came. By then I knew the king wasn’t really my father—a contingent of men had spent a few weeks at the palace some months before I was born. They lived in the ice caves at the very edges of the Hinterland, and answered to a warrior queen. Rumors say she was briefly the king’s mistress. My mother got her revenge with the man who gave me my ice-chip eyes.
When my eligibility was announced, I knew I could be frivolous. A princess can set rules for her suitors, even a blackhearted girl like me. It was high summer when I told my father I’d marry the man who brought me a velvet purse full of ice from the distant caves. It wasn’t sentiment that drove me, it was curiosity.
No, it was something else—instinct. I felt, not for the first time, the influence of some unseen force in my life, some hand that wasn’t my own. That feeling was what once made me throw my brother’s toy cart into the fire. The way he tugged it carefully along with its little wooden handle put me in mind too much of myself.
The suitors came. They presented me with ice, but not from the caves. I knew by sight, by touch and taste, the ice dug out of sawdust in a barn, the ice from a frozen creek, from the glacier atop a mountain. Summer became winter, and nobody had gotten it right.
The brothers who finally won me were both tall, with hair the color of a fox’s pelt, but the similarities ended there. The older brother was broad-chested, hard as flint, with a flat brown glare. He had a dirty face when he presented himself to my father. The younger one stood behind him, looking down. He was lean and favored one leg. He looked like someone I could break.
They came at the raw edge of spring. Where other men had gone down on one knee to present me with their gift, the older brother slung it into my lap. I knew before I opened the bag he was the man I would have to marry.
The ice was beautiful. It danced with the phantom green lights the skies over the caves were said to hold, and was cut into delicate cubes. I looked at the first brother’s heavy hands, then the narrow fingers of the second. He was the one who’d done the cutting. He kept his head down, like he was ashamed of himself. I couldn’t see his face.
The first brother spoke his intentions out loud—they meant to make me a servant, not a wife. I could see on my parents’ faces that they didn’t care, so long as I was won fairly. They couldn’t save me from this. Wouldn’t.
So I swallowed the ice.
It left a burning trail down my throat and hit my stomach like blue fire. It coiled there, and it sent its vines into my arms, my legs. It froze the last bit of life out of my deadened heart and slowed the workings of my mind. I had a quick mind, and there was just enough time to feel fear lance through me before my thoughts turned into cold honey.
I heard my mother’s distant scream, my father’s shout. I watched everything through a latticework of frozen tears: the brothers arguing, the eldest hefting me over his shoulder like I was a bag of grain. My littlest sister sank her teeth into my hand before I was carried away, and reeled backward, coughing.
The brothers tied me to the back of the horse that was my dowry. I saw nothing but the curtain of my own hair and the puffs of my breath freezing whitely on the air.
Someone followed us out of the castle yard. Down the muddy road, into the trees. Someone who made my head throb and sparks sizzle over my sight. I heard their tread like an echo to the brothers’. I was frozen, trussed, on my way to a life of servitude, but the follower—that was what filled me with fear.
When the brothers stopped to make camp, they left me on the horse—tied, upright, unmoving. As if from the bottom of a well, I heard the older brother’s laughter, the crackling of a fire. Much later, hands untied me from the horse, laid me flat beneath a tree.
When they were asleep, the ice that sat like frozen coals in my stomach shifted. The freeze came slowly undone. My lips and eyes thawed, my fingers pricked, and I started to shake. When I felt strong again, I slid free of my ropes and walked over to the older brother. He was even uglier in sleep, his face twisted by cruel dreams. I hung over his sleeping body and fitted my lips to his. I blew my ice into him, along with my hate. He went with a shocked flutter and a rotten-tasting sigh, his heart frozen before he could struggle.
I returned to the horse and listened for the follower. I listened even in the frozen half-sleep I couldn’t fight back, which came over me the moment I was still.
The hours passed, the light turned silver, and the younger brother’s shout broke the air when he found his brother dead.
His boots stomped over the thawing ground. Some deep, moving part of me braced itself for a kick that didn’t come.
Instead, the brother crouched and blew warm breath onto my eyes.
As fast as they thawed, they froze over again, but I managed to shift them in their sockets. For the first time since they’d taken me, I was looking at the man’s face. At his dirty red hair.
“Hello, Alice,” he whispered.
I stared and stared, recognition crashing into me. My words came out in a hiss, and my fingers moved feebly in the air over my chest.
“Try,” he whispered, so quiet it was almost a breath. “Remember.”
He was a man I’d seen twice before he’d come with his brother to present me with ice, but I couldn’t remember how or where. Not family, not servant, not soldier. Who was he? I saw the dusty blue side of a carriage, a hoop fallen on grass.
That wasn’t quite right.
I saw a rusty blue Buick, the Hula-Hoop I’d been spinning doggedly over my hips when he pulled up beside me.
“Hi,” he’d said.
I’d ignored him, annoyed he made my hoop fall.
“I’m a friend of your grandmother’s,” he told me. “The writer, Althea Proserpine. She wants to meet you. Will you come with me to see her?”
My head snapped up. “Does she have horses?”
“Lots of them. And a swimming pool. She wants very much for you to visit, Alice.”
I’d let the hoop roll to a halt and climbed into his car. I clicked the heels of my white cowboy boots together like Dorothy, for luck, and we were off.
The memory crashed through the delicate webbing that kept my world together. I shivered and thawed on the grass, sending off meltwater and seized with visions. A woman in white denim overalls studded with cigarette burns. The sound of her quiet cursing, waking me to a sea of brake lights stretched out on the road ahead. Go back to sleep, Alice.
Her name. What was her name? The memories boiled up—Christmas lights on a whitewashed wall, slipping my legs out from beneath hers in early morning. The smell of coffee beans, cheap macaroni, burning sage. The sour crunch of my ankle when I jumped from a crabapple tree and she wasn’t quick enough to catch me. The feeling of her beside me in the world, the invisible searchlight that stretched between us.
“Ella,” I wheezed from my frozen throat.
The man didn’t hear me; he dipped his ear closer. “Do you remember me?”
“Blue Buick.”
He grinned. “We’re changing it already,” he whispered. “It’s almost broken. I needed you to come back here, so you could help me break it.”
“Why…”
“Because I’m not a page in a book,” he said, cradling my head.
Then he screamed, a high rabbit sound that boiled the last of the ice from my blood.
He fell onto me, pinning me to the ground. I was still weak, and it took longer than it should’ve to get free. It took an age. When I finally struggled out from under him, I saw the ax in his back. Behind him stood his brother, humped and frozen and watching me out of dead eyes. All around us the air thrilled with silver sparks, so bright I squeezed my eyes shut. I could still see them against the hot red of my eyelids: a glowing tapestry of threads. Tiny, even brighter flickers of light ran like spiders around the hole we’d snagged in it: a hole the shape of the redheaded brother who’d tried to change our story. I winched my eyes open and saw the raw threads being snipped and stitched back into place by invisible fingers.
A handful of tiny, spidery points of light jumped toward me. I shrieked and scrambled back, my movements dulled by cold. One of the lights reached my temple, burning through it like a fleck of ash thrown off by a bonfire. First I felt it on my skin, then under it, burrowing there and rearranging my brain.
“Ella,” I gasped, holding her in my mind’s eye. Her brown eyes, her long blonde hair … no! That wasn’t her, that was the other mother. The one who made my cruelty grow like a vine.
More of the sparkling things jumped at me, as the redheaded man moved limply on the ground. His brother fell back to earth, dead again once he’d done what the story needed him to do.
“Spinner,” I whispered. I remembered her now, how I’d followed her like a lost dog into the twisted heart of the Hinterland. Into the story I meant to break free of, long, long ago. Because this wasn’t a life I’d been living, it was a story.
When it was far too late, she’d told me there was no way out. But she hadn’t told me it was because the story fought back if you tried. The spider-sparks still worked in the air, moving the weaving back to rights. They pulled the ax from the younger brother’s back, they sizzled into my brain, they put him on his feet and closed up the rip in his flesh.
He couldn’t die, I realized. Until it was part of the story. It would be me who would kill him, as I had his brother. Because in this story, I was the monster.
But was that really me? Horror hardened my skin. It sent the cruel little sparks bouncing off it like fire off a forge. I held on to that tenacious spike of fear and rage. I couldn’t let my story end this way.
The redheaded man stood, but barely. His eyes were wild; he leaned over his knees and vomited up a thin yellow bile.
“We have to go,” he panted. “Before…”
Before it happened again. I moved between him and the corpse on the ground. If I was a monster, at least I could be a helpful one.
“Get on the horse,” I said. It came out slurred, like I was on Novocain.
I grabbed the ax from where it lay next to the dead man. The threads glittered to life, an angry matrix that flexed around my fingers on the handle, biting at my skin with a pain that started out irritating and turned to agony.
“Get on the horse,” I said, turning my face from the sizzle of my skin. “Now!”
Still gasping, the younger brother heaved himself onto my dowry. On the ground, his brother jerked, then rose, lurching, his movements close enough to human to make the differences horrifying.
I wrapped my burning hands tight around the ax handle. The corpse watched me through eyes like frozen forget-me-nots, and lunged.
I smelled sweat and ice and something rank and unplaceable, before swinging wildly. The ax thudded into his shoulder with the sick sound of a boot on mud.
He looked down at it, then up. I swore he smiled at me, his teeth small and gray, before folding his hands around my throat.
Can you really die in a story?
Maybe not.
But you can die in a whole world built for it, full of cruel queens and black-eyed princesses and men with hands meant for violence. At least for a little while. My vision opened and closed like a butterfly’s wings and my head fell forward. The corpse laughed again, till I arched up and fixed my lips on his.
I blew. Not ice this time. I blew out ice’s opposite: the heat and the rage of being away from Ella. Trapped here. Forced into the role of murderer by a distant storyteller with no horse in the race. I did it because a girl doing nothing in a fairy tale ends up dead or worse, but a girl who makes a decision usually gets rewarded.
My reward was this: the taste of metal and sweat on lips like two cold maggots. His hands slackening on my neck. Dropping to his sides. He made the horrible grinding sound of a motor failing and fell to the ground. I angled my head to the side and pulled the ax from his chest.
When I turned I felt like I was wearing twenty tons of iced-over armor. I moved, shivering, toward the horse. It shied away from me, from the insect onslaught of sparks surrounding me. The redheaded brother leaned down and covered its eye with one hand, whispering soft things into its ear.
The fabric of the world was fully visible now, a glittering weave that snagged around us both. I hefted the ax and swung it through the threads suspended between me and the horse, but nothing changed.
“Goddammit!” I screamed. I fell to my knees and started crawling. The horse, surrounded by the glittering, shivering source code of the world, did what I’d have liked to do: reared back in holy terror and ran.
The brother thumped hard to the earth, keening as the wind was knocked out of him. The sparks sizzled, faded away. It was just him again. Me. The dead man on the ground. I felt something begin in my stomach—the ice, gathering itself.
The air in front of us shuddered like bad TV, and—there was a horse. Empty air, then a horse to fill it. Same animal, but wearing blinders this time.
“No,” said the brother, brokenly. “It can’t be.”
It could. It was. Ella Ella Ellaellaellalalala. I said the name till it turned to an aching syllable soup in my head. What did it mean? When I stopped thinking too hard about it, the bright pain behind my eyes went away.
There’s no way out. Not from the inside.
The cold was spreading through me like kudzu. Its fingers crawled up my throat; soon they would reach my black eyes. The sparkling air had faded to gray. I couldn’t remember why the man beside me was crying.
I slumped to the ground, anticipating the bite of rope around my wrists.
And all at once, the air lit up like a Christmas tree. Two shapes were moving fast toward us, setting the grid of the world alight.
A young man and an older woman. On … bicycles. They were on bicycles, one red and one green.
“Get her feet!” the boy yelled. His voice was cracked and strange, like he spoke around burrs caught in his throat. He had dark skin, a cloud of dark hair, and eyes as bright and steady as an animal’s.
A hot thump of recognition cut through the curling cold.
He was the one who’d been following me. Not just today, but all my life. In the yard, in the woods. In my father’s hall, once, before he was dragged away. The somebody who always set my head to aching, woke the sparks waiting at the corners of my sight.
Then he was next to me, grabbing my wrists. His touch drew my senses to the surface. I fought against him instinctively, and against the woman he was with—gray hair, blue tunic—who tried to hold my feet.
“Alice. Goddammit, Alice.” The boy ducked out of the way as I pulled a hand free and swiped at his chin with my nails.
Then I knew him. I went stiff so suddenly they dropped me. “Finch.”
“Yep. No time to catch up, we’ve got to break you out of this thing.”
I had something to say to him. He was somebody I could almost remember—somebody important. I saw blood and trees and a ceiling full of stars.
“But … you were dead. Weren’t you?” When he dipped his head to hear me, I saw the blurred scar across his throat, a narrow brown rope.
“Not quite. If you can … can you stand up? That’ll be easier than dragging you. But I’ll drag you if I have to. If you forget who you are.”
“Finch, it won’t let me go.”
“We’ve had time to look into these things, and it will,” said the woman, her voice severe.
I gaped at her. “Janet?”
She smiled, slightly, and nodded toward the redheaded brother crouching speechless on the ground. “Friend or foe?”
“Friend. I think. Yes, friend.”
Janet helped him to his feet, and still he didn’t speak. The glittering veins of the world had receded; they weren’t close and hot and blinding, they smoldered at a polite distance.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I did some field research,” Janet said triumphantly. “Every ex-Story I spoke to says the stories broke one of two ways: they were wound down by the Spinner, or picked apart by an inciting incident. And that inciting incident always had to do with a refugee wandering in at the wrong time. From there we extrapolated—” She stopped short, looking at me and Finch. “Oh. But you weren’t asking me, were you?”
“Your eyes are black all over,” he said. His crooked, raspy voice was so changed I couldn’t tell how he meant it. He touched his fingers to my chin and hissed.
“God, you’re like … well, like ice. Obviously. But we don’t have time for this, get on the bike.”
He was different from how I remembered him, in the dim memory rising from my wrung-out brain. This boy was thick through the shoulders. His hair was shorter than it used to be, and his arms were flecked with scars—silvery nicks and burns and raised patches of rough tissue. His eyes were what I remembered best, but they looked so tired.
I hiked my skirts and straddled Janet’s bike seat while the brother took Finch’s. As they pedaled away with two Stories weighing down their wheels, I looked back over my shoulder. The horse that shouldn’t have been there went up in a shower of sparks.
We lit out toward the grid of sizzling light. I braced myself, ready for a galactic ripping or the blinding pain of riding a bike through a wall of fire.
But the wall receded as we moved. It stayed ahead of us and beyond our reach, its light just south of blinding. Janet huffed as she pedaled, her wheels slipping in spring mud. We wheeled past a stretch of trees, a run of scraggling bushes, a tree like a weeping willow in bud. We passed them again: trees, bushes, willow. And again, until I realized the woods were repeating themselves on a loop.
We were being given a chance to turn around. Every other minute, the same blue-breasted bird showed itself on the branches of the flowering willow, singing a chastising four-note song.
“Janet,” Finch called back, warningly.
“I see it.”
“Stop!” I cried.
Janet skidded to a halt.
I slipped from the bike, walked a few unsteady steps, and turned. “Don’t follow me.”
I left them behind to walk toward the sparking wall. It was endless, a net hung down from the cool Hinterland sun. It stayed in place, allowing me to meet it. I kept going till I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then stood there bathing in the light it cast.
What would Althea do? The woman who’d built a bridge between two worlds, then brought them together like a hand in a glove?
I thought of her in the dark with her daughter, years ago and a world away, telling a story. I thought of the words she wrote down tripping over tongues and across continents, slicing fissures in the walls of the world.
“Once upon a time,” I whispered, “there was a girl who got away.”
The light burned a little less brightly through my lids. Maybe.
“Once upon a time there was a girl who changed her fate,” I said, louder. The words ran together like beads on a string. Like a story, or a bridge I could climb—up, up, up, like a nursery-rhyme spider.
“She grew up like a fugitive, because her life belonged to another place.” I held my fingertips out, feeling the ice of them meet the wall’s fine, hot fizzing. “She remembered her real mother, far away on an Earth made of particles and elements and, and, and reason. Not stories. And she ripped a hole in the world so she could find her way home.
“And she lived happily ever after in a place far, far from the Hinterland,” I said. I begged. “And the freeze left her skin. And she found her real mother in the world where she had left her.”
Slowly, slowly, I opened my eyes.
There was a hole snagged in the wall. The air around it glittered like the last wandering traces of a firework. It was just the right size for a girl. I put my hand out behind me and beckoned.
The spokes of two rusty bicycles clicked closer, but the wall stayed in place. I kept my hand extended until Finch’s fingers closed around mine, warm and sure. I led him, ducking, through the hole I’d made, Janet and the fairy-tale brother just behind.
When I stepped beyond the borders of the story, I felt it in my teeth and my belly button and the roots of my hair. Behind me the brother groaned, stumbling heavily against Janet. Finch put an arm around me, and his heat neutralized my cold.
We stood at the edge of a shallow valley filled to the knee with fog.
I sucked in air that tasted like rain and barbecue. Not too far away, a little girl moved through mist that reached almost to her neck. Beside her, a man in a white T-shirt laughed, lifting her onto his shoulders. She wore beat-up Rollerblades.
My whole body was cramped and half-asleep. The sun was hot; I was hungry. My nose itched like I was allergic to something, and I stank. Finch did, too. His smell and mine were rank and human in a way that made me weak with longing. The brother staggered forward, his eyes round. He kept looking back toward the trees we’d left behind, then at his hands.
I sank down to the grass and cried. As I did, I swore I could feel the shiny black washing out of my eyes.
“You saved me,” I said when I could speak again.
“I tried,” Finch said. “But I think maybe you finished the job.”
I shook my head, thinking of the horse blinking into view from empty air. “No. It was too … I lived for years in that thing. In that story.” The whole stretch of it spun before my eyes like a carousel. The cold queen, the absent king, my own dark appetites. “For how long?”
“I don’t know how long we’ve been here,” Finch said softly. “Time doesn’t work right, so nobody bothers keeping track.”
“How are you alive?”
“The guy who cut my throat—he was on his way back to his own story—he dropped me pretty close to a refugee village. Left me to die. It was close, but they patched me up. Healing took some time.”
“And Janet?”
“We learned quickly we had a mutual acquaintance,” she said. “We found out what happened to you, and we decided—well, we thought we might help you along a bit. It was his idea.” She looked at Finch, and the motherly pride in her eyes made my heart bob like a buoy.
“You were there,” I said. “Through all of it. You were—always on the edges, trying to get me to notice you.”
Finch laughed. “Dang, Alice. I knew you’d see me eventually.” His laugh had changed—it was a man’s laugh, rumbling under the rubble of his throat. It made me shy.
“Hey!”
The man in the white T-shirt had noticed us; he was waving from the sea of mist. He carried his daughter into one of the cottages squatting on the rising side of the valley, then jogged toward us. But not too close.
“Good travels to you,” he said cautiously.
“Do you have water?” Janet asked. “Food? They could use it.” She gestured at me and the redheaded brother.
The man’s face cleared, and he smiled. “I’m ex-Story, too,” he said.
“How’d you—” I began.
“The clothes. And the smell. Like burnt hair and, you know—” He plucked at the air with his fingertips. “That magic smell.” He was handsome. Twenty years ago he might’ve been somebody’s prince. Or somebody’s poisoner. The Hinterland didn’t tell nice tales.
He brought us a bucket of water, and I sucked down cups of it till my stomach ballooned. The redheaded brother didn’t speak until he’d done the same. He kept smacking his lips, letting the water run over his chin.
“I can taste it,” he said. “It’s sweet and it’s … dusty. Like stone. Can you taste it?”
I knew what he meant. Everything I’d ever eaten or drunk in the story paled next to the electric flavor of this river water. “Yeah. I can taste it.”
He looked at his hands again, trailing his fingers through the air like he was on something. “Look at this. It’s all me, doing this. It’s mine.” He looked up at me sharply, suddenly fearful. “It’s over now, isn’t it? No more story? No more dying?”
I could see Janet hovering over my shoulder, aching to dart in and start asking questions. I ignored her, ignored Finch. I looked at the man who had followed me to another world, to coax me home with gifts that carried me through the Halfway Wood.
His eyes were hazel, and broad freckles dusted his cheeks. It was the details that could drive you crazy—did the Spinner really create him just so? Did she decide on that wedge of darker brown in his left eye? Did she engineer my love of honey?
“Why did you take me?” I asked. I tried to say it gently.
He smiled faintly, his gaze going inward. “I did it for her. For the thief.”
“The thief? You mean … Ella?”
He poured a cupful of water over his hair, tilting his face toward the pale sun. “Before she stole you, she wanted to steal me.”
Oh. Fourteen years my mother spent alone with Althea in the Hazel Wood. But not all alone, not with the Halfway Wood so close.
“But if you … if you loved her. Why did you want to take me away from her?”
“I wanted to help her. And you. And, yes, myself. You were never going to be free, not until we broke it. I’m right, aren’t I? You were never really free?”
I shook my head. I felt stunned and hollow, looking at this stranger my mother might have loved. I would never reach the bottom of what Ella gave up for me. I would never know all the secrets of the life she left behind to run with me. “So what now?” I asked hoarsely. “Are you going back through the woods? To find her?”
He smiled at me, the kind of smile that cost something. He looked young enough to be a college student. My stupid, yearning heart dipped as I remembered dreaming, long ago, that he was my father.
“I’ve lived too many lives since I loved her,” he said. “I’ve died too many deaths. It doesn’t just … it leaves an echo.”
It leaves an echo. Would it be the same for me? There’d been moments even before the story, wild, piercing moments, when the Hinterland sang high in my blood and I wondered—should I stay here? If, a world away, Ella might already be gone? Maybe I belonged in this place, where my bones grew in the night and my eyes were black ponds and my cells were made of the same strange stuff that made up the trees and the water and the earth.
But now I was feeling an itch under my skin. Somewhere far away, on some other clock, the days were counting down on my mother’s life. Whether seven years had passed or seventy, I had to get to wherever she was. She deserved to see me this way—as an ex-Story, not just a stolen one.
I turned away from the red-haired brother. “Which way to the border?”
The handsome man had backed up politely while we spoke, pretending not to hear us. Now his face closed like a fist, and he pointed in a general way toward the land stretching beyond the valley.
“I don’t know what could be waiting there for you,” he said. “But good travels to you all the same.”
I turned to Finch. “It’s time. Let’s go home.”
His face was soft and sorry. Janet touched the redheaded brother’s sleeve; she led him gently away.
“Alice,” said Finch.
It dawned on me, what I already should have known. “You’re not coming, are you?”
He sighed and took my arm, walking with me into the fog. It swirled around our knees, our hips, higher. It had a gentle, flexible give, like wet petals against my skin.
No matter how much time had passed in this world or the other, Finch had changed. He’d grown up. At the fringes of my story, in a brutal make-believe world. But that wouldn’t have been his whole life. He must’ve been living with more of the displaced all this time. I pictured him at the refugee bar, falling in love with some Earth girl. In my mind she had a smile without shadows in it, and perfect jeans.
I was feeling more human all the time.
“I’m not going back,” he said, answering my question minutes after I’d asked it.
“Why not?”
“Because this was always what I wanted. Not quite the way I got it, of course. It shouldn’t have been like that. Alice, it shouldn’t have been blood money.” He sounded suddenly, comfortingly unsure.
“I know. You’ve made up for that, don’t you think?”
“I hope so,” he said seriously. “But that wasn’t what this was about. I wanted to see something through to the very end. And I’ve been living here all this time, in this world. It isn’t all bad. It’s beautiful. And strange. And bigger than you’d think. Alice, there’s a whole ocean. And ice caves—oh, you know that. I heard there are pools in the mountains that are a thousand feet deep, and clear as glass.”
“Fairy-tale shit.”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “Fairy-tale shit.”
“And there’s a girl?”
He smiled. It was so kind I almost died of embarrassment. “There might be. But believe me when I say I wouldn’t leave the whole world behind just for a girl.”
“Yeah. You would.” I meant it, too. He’d grown into the sort of man who would do more than that for someone he loved.
He’d done a whole hell of a lot for me.
“So what do I do now?”
“Now you find the Spinner. It shouldn’t be hard—she’ll be on the move since the story broke. Cleaning up messes, looking for you.”
I’m just one big fucking mess, aren’t I. That’s what I wanted to say. But didn’t. Finch deserved better than my self-pity. It felt like he’d become too old for it.
Janet was grilling the redheaded brother on his first escape and my abduction when we returned. “You taught yourself to drive a car and it didn’t kill you,” she said comfortingly. “You’ll do fine without a story. Who needs a story?”
He kept nodding, jittery with cold feet. I got it—life was a big thing to live without a map.
Janet turned her flinty eyes on us. “You off to find your own country?”
“Come with me?” I said impulsively, knowing she’d turn me down.
It still hurt a little when she did, however gently. This was a journey I’d have to take alone.
I hugged Janet, and I shook the brother’s hand. Then I stood in front of Finch. He wrapped his arms around me, and the last burning ember of ice in me melted to nothing.
I was hungry, and so tired the ground moved like waves beneath my feet. But I didn’t trust myself to stop now, to rest. I climbed onto Janet’s red bicycle and set out for the edge of the world.