Althea looked good. She looked real. She wore cigarette pants and a striped boatneck shirt and, oddly, short white gloves. Like the Hazel Wood, she resembled exactly my idea of her—the level blue eyes, the elegant bones. Through the window behind her I saw snowy grounds and a strange white sky, bathing the room in a lunar glow. It made the shadows deeper. A nightlight cast a valiant circle of orange against the wall.
“Do you want to hear a story?” Althea asked.
I froze. Before I could respond, a mulish voice from the bed beat me to it. “No.”
Ella lay in the shadows, arms flung over her head and one foot on the floor. She looked older again—fifteen, maybe sixteen. Too old for bedtime stories.
Althea exhaled a thin haze of blue smoke. “Oh, yes, you do.”
“I really, really don’t.” But Ella didn’t move, beyond propping her head up on her hands. She was old enough now that she looked like herself, dark and fierce and distracted. It took all my strength not to rush to her, but I knew whatever I was seeing wasn’t real. Wasn’t happening now.
Althea began. “Once upon a time there was a beautiful queen and a brave princess and a castle in the middle of a forest.”
“I know that one.”
“Then I’ll go back a little further. Once upon a time there was a beautiful queen who thought words were stronger than anything. She used them to win love and money and gifts. She used them to carry her across the world.” Althea laid out her words like a dealer lays out cards, with a distant, mesmeric precision. “And one day when she was very, very bored, she used them to convince a noblewoman to lead her into another kingdom, a place out of legend, and far beyond her own kingdom’s borders.”
“The Hinterland.” There was a sharp edge to Ella’s voice that saved it from being indifferent.
“Hush. This is my story, not yours. As I was saying, this new kingdom—the Other Kingdom—was strange and dangerous and far from home. The queen quickly grew homesick and set about trying to find a way back. It was said there were doors that could take her where she wanted to go, but they hid themselves from her. And do you know what you do when you can’t find a door?” She itsy-bitsy-spidered her fingers across the air. “You build a bridge.”
I stood rooted halfway between the door and the bed. Althea’s voice worked on me like a shot, loosening my limbs and sharpening my vision, leaving a hot ache in my chest.
“In the Other Kingdom there were many kings and queens, each equally powerful. But the queen set out to find the kingdom’s true ruler—not royalty, but someone far more important. A storyteller. A master of words. When the queen found her, she very convincingly shared her plight—she was a master of words, too—and soon the storyteller whispered the secret of escape into the queen’s ear.
“But the storyteller made a mistake in trusting the queen. When she escaped from the Other Kingdom, she took something with her—something that held the walls of the world in place and kept the stars from coming down. Something she brought back to her own kingdom and shared with all of her subjects: stories. All the stories of the Other Kingdom. She told them, and told them again, and they were told and retold all over the realm.”
Althea’s voice was losing its soporific thrum, like the nap rubbing off velvet. Her eyes gleamed in the weird white light.
“The queen felt rich, richer than she’d ever been, until she realized what she’d done: by carrying the Other Kingdom’s greatest treasure across her bridge, she’d drawn the two kingdoms tight, tight together—until they were like two hills rising side by side, then the sun and the moon in eclipse, then a hand in a glove stitched too snug.”
Sew the worlds up with thread. The words sang in my head and passed away.
My grandmother’s voice dropped to a whisper. “But nobody knew it except the queen. Nobody else noticed when terrible things started happening. When the queen threw festivals, demons arrived in dresses, and hid their red eyes behind masks. If she stayed in one castle too long, a darkness grew over everything and everyone around her, like briars. People from the Other Kingdom slipped through their hidden doors to mock her, for believing she’d escaped. For thinking she’d gotten away with her theft. Then one night, someone from the Other Kingdom snuck inside her castle and murdered her king.”
Her voice was raw now, her head bowed low. I blinked and the room seemed to stutter; Althea was standing, and the bed she’d been sitting on was cast in deeper shadow. The glow of moonlight on snow no longer came through the window.
Althea went on. “The queen realized it wasn’t the kingdoms that had changed—it was her. She didn’t need to find a door, she had become one. A bridge, too. A place where the demons could get in. So she and her daughter ran away to a castle in the woods. The Other Kingdom followed, and over time the woods around the castle became as twisted as an oak, torn between the two kingdoms.
“But still the queen’s daughter, the princess, grew up strong. She grew up fast and fleet, forever running between the Other Kingdom and that of her birth, because she couldn’t remember a life that was any other way.”
All the magic had gone from her telling. She spoke fast and flat. The room was changing, and Althea was, too. Her shoulders slumped; gray licked through her hair. Without warning, her gaze swiveled toward my face. Her teeth were stained, and her eyes spun like pinwheels.
Ella was gone. The room was the same, but different. The bed was humped and tarnished, and dust lay over everything like a veil.
“You’re here.” Althea’s whisper cracked in the middle. She was looking at me. “Is it you? Is it you, really?”
She was a ghost. Or a mirage. She had to be. The hunger in her voice should’ve made me wary, but my own hunger rose up to meet it. “It’s me. It’s Alice. Your, your…” I couldn’t say it. Granddaughter.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky Althea,” she said, low, moving closer till I could smell the sweat on her skin, the bitter almond on her breath. I froze, my heart hammering like frozen rain, and she spoke the rest of her tale into my ear.
“The Other Kingdom didn’t hurt the queen’s beloved daughter, because she was too clever. Clever Princess Vanella.” She hissed the princess’s name—my mother’s name. “Until the day the princess found a baby in the Halfway Wood, left by her parents and their hunting party to sleep beneath a tree. Cherry blossoms had fallen into her bassinet. The baby squeezed them between her little fingers, staring up at the princess with her black, black eyes. The princess loved her right away. And she stole her out of her fairy tale.”
My heart knew before my head. It beat tiny throbs of adrenaline, like a poison drip telling me to run, run, before you hear something you can’t forget. I didn’t run. I let her tell me the rest of our story.
“Alice-Three-Times,” she spat. “You were plucked from your story like a cherry blossom by a girl who didn’t know what she did.”
My mind moved like a cold computer. “I’m here to find Ella,” I said stupidly. “My mother.”
“Your kidnapper. That girl is nobody’s mother.”
For a long white moment my mind wiped clean. I couldn’t even picture Ella’s face. I didn’t know my hand was raised till Althea stepped back, out of range.
“Look at you.” Her laugh was an ugly thing. “Still feral after all these years.”
I dropped my hand, wrapping my arms around myself as Ella came back to me in pieces. Bony hands and breath in the dark and the sharp line of her profile as she drove. She’d never looked like me. I’d never wondered why.
I used to picture a father somewhere, someone Ella had loved, at least for a little while. That was a lie, too.
“I don’t believe you,” I whispered. Another lie.
“You were her favorite story.” Althea’s voice grew gentler, a little. “She liked how angry you were. Like an avenging … well, not an angel.”
“I’m a girl,” I said fiercely. “I’m a person.”
“You’re both, and neither. You’re a story, but that doesn’t make you any less true.”
I felt like I was watching myself from the outside, a girl with blurred edges holding herself like a child. The image stamped itself onto my brain, one of those out-of-your-skin moments that turns into memory while it’s still happening. This is the day my dead grandmother told me my mother wasn’t mine. That I was a character in a story, plucked from another place.
“She ran away from you,” I told Althea, watching the words land like a slap. “We both did. I grew up in the world. I remember it—I remember skinning my knees and reading library books and eating crap food from the gas station. Sick days watching bad TV. I remember life happening in the right order, and, and bus rides, and being lonely. I remember all of it!”
“Do you?”
I stared at her, then down at my hands, rough and chapped and un-fairy-tale-ish. I thought of the way my life faded out behind me, faint scratches on the earth washed away like footprints on dirt.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “And you’re dead. And I’m here to take Ella back.”
“Take her back? From who?” She smiled at me coquettishly, a ghost of what she once looked like, back when hers was a face to look at. She’d become very old since she was a woman telling her daughter a story in the dark.
“From the Hinterland,” I said unsteadily. “They took her.”
Althea shook her head. “I assure you, they did not. You’re the one they wanted, Alice-Three-Times. She was just”—she flipped her hand—“a distraction.”
Bait. Finch was right. Ella, wherever she was, had been bait.
“So where is she, then? If not here, where?” My voice rose. “I don’t care if you’re a ghost or a memory or a, I don’t know, a hologram, but please. She’s your daughter. Please tell me how to get her back.”
“You think I’m a ghost? I haunt this old memory palace, and it haunts me, but I’m not dead.” She grabbed my hand, shoved it against the sloping bread-dough skin beneath the yellowing stripes of her shirt, right where her heart would be.
A dim beat fluttered against my fingers.
Alive.
“But … but the letter…”
“It reached you? I wasn’t sure it would. The death letter was to get her to bring you back.” She laughed, harsh and sad. “Even that wasn’t enough. So why now? What made you come back now?”
My heart crunched in on itself. After everything, I still wanted to think all of it had been her—that she’d sent cold fingers into the world to draw me here. Because she … what? Loved me? Wanted me? Stupid Alice. I liked to think I’d put my old dreams behind me, but here I was talking to one, and she made me feel five years old.
But Ella loved me. My mother. My kidnapper. The Thief, Hansa had called her.
She was still mine, maybe more now that I knew it had been a choice. My longing for her rearranged itself in my chest. It felt like a new-hatched thing, wet-feathered but fierce. I set my jaw and let it be the lifeline that would pull me from the quicksand of this hot, close room, the smell of dust and the night crawling over the windows.
“Ella was gone,” I said. “They took her somewhere—somewhere in New York, maybe, I don’t know. And the book—your book. It was haunting me. Twice-Killed Katherine. She … got me to come.” I found I couldn’t tell her about Finch. Seeing Althea like this would have broken his heart.
“Of course she found you. You are a walking, talking bridge to the Hinterland. Anywhere you go, the wall between the worlds grows thin. They get through. They do damage.”
“She tried to kill me. She tried to make me cut my own wrists in the woods. Why?”
“Ah.” Her eyes turned bright. “Clever Katherine. There’d be a grave cost to pay if they killed you themselves, but if you spilled your own blood in those woods? Alice-Three-Times? It would burn a door between worlds that would never fade. Their vicious holidays out there would never end.”
Alice-Three-Times. The name seared and burrowed into me.
She looked at me with something approaching respect. “So you made it through the woods without a guide. Life out there hasn’t rendered you completely helpless. You must be a bit like her—like Ella.”
“I am,” I said, biting off the words.
She sucked on the cigarette I’d forgotten she was holding. “Ella never could resist a lost lamb—especially not you in your basket, with those awful black eyes. I tried to return you myself, before they killed her getting you back.” Her eyes darkened. “But Ella hated me for it, and she took you away. Far from them, far from me. Like I was a boogeyman, too.”
“But they’re not black. My eyes. They’re brown.” I said it stupid and hopeful. Like it was a loophole I could use to slip back into my real life.
“That happened after you left the Hazel Wood. It was enough to make Ella believe she did the right thing. She wrote to me, back when letters still washed up here once in a while—she said it was the Hinterland draining out of you. Saving you, giving you a real life, became her purpose. Did it work? Did you get one?” Her voice swerved sharply from desolation to hope—stunted and sad, but hope nonetheless.
I remembered the rootlessness, the travel, the cursed incidents that followed us from place to place. I felt in my back the bars of every sofa bed we ever crashed on, the heavy gaze of our hosts when we’d outstayed our welcome, and the ache of sleeping in our car for days on end, pretending I didn’t know we were homeless.
I saw Ella. Gripping my arms and counting down with me from one hundred, bringing my anger back within its borders. The blanket forts she built for me in guest rooms, resigning herself to sleeping without a pillow so I could forget we were a burden for a night. The crow’s-feet starting at the corners of her eyes, so out of place on a woman who never really grew up. Who chose saving me, running with me, over having a real life of her own.
“Yes,” I said. “It worked. I’ve had a wonderful life. I have a wonderful life.”
Althea tilted her head back, looked at me through lowered lashes. “And did she—did Ella ever talk about me?”
My first instinct was to hurt her. But I looked at the taut white knobs of her knuckles, the drawn-tight pouch of her mouth around the cigarette, and couldn’t. “All the time.”
“Liar,” she said softly, smoke sifting through her lips. “I won’t make excuses for my life, but I can tell you it wasn’t my choice to lose her. She thought—I don’t know what she thought. That I was the Hinterland’s dogcatcher, maybe.”
“Aren’t you? The letter—wasn’t that a trap?”
“Hmm.” She stubbed her cigarette against the bedframe, dropped the butt on the floor. “Not a very effective one.”
“She thought it was over. When you died—when the letter told us you’d died. She thought we were safe.”
Althea looked at me, eyes bleak. “She knew I was a bridge. She didn’t know you were one, too.”
It hit me like delayed pain. It had always been me. My black energy leaking into the air like blood, and the Hinterland like sharks on its trail. All the years we’d spent running, we were running from me.
“So they’ll always find me?” I whispered. “No matter where I go?”
“They are you. You’re all made of the same stuff.” Her voice was almost sympathetic. “It’s hard, isn’t it, to find you’re not at all the thing you thought you were?” She pointed at herself, her words poison-tipped. “Intrepid adventurer.” Then at me. “Real live girl.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t believe in a world outside of that room. “So what happens to a girl like me?” I asked dully. “If the letter had worked, if she’d brought me back. What would you have done with me?”
“But it did work after all, didn’t it? It just worked slow. It made you stand still, long enough for those monsters to corral you into the Halfway Wood. But—you survived it. And you came here, to me, of your own free will. Did you not?”
The sharpened look in her eyes made me wary. “I … don’t know. I wanted to come here. But I didn’t want it like this.”
“We never do, do we? When we get what we want?” Then she peeled off her gloves and seized my hands. Her grip burned worse than Katherine’s, and I gasped, trying to wrench myself free.
“This is what happens to girls like you.” Her words were half curse, half plea. “She’s tried so long to get you back, Alice-Three-Times. And as long as you’re on the wrong side of the woods, she won’t let me die.”
“Who?” I could barely hear my own voice over the pain. “Who won’t let you die?”
She ignored me, looking up like the ceiling was the sky, and a vengeful god was watching her. “I’m giving her back to you!” she cried. “Now will you let me go?”
The heat spread up over my arms and down my chest, squeezing me in its fist till my vision burst open and swung with stars. I felt the tremor in Althea’s fingers, saw the wide yellows of her eyes, and her mouth shaping itself around some final words I couldn’t hear. A plea, an apology. A promise, a lie.
Then I was falling end over end like Carroll’s Alice, through space or water or clouds or atoms. The pain passed, and I felt alive, breath in my chest and blood in my muscles and nothing hurting. The room was gone, Althea was gone, and I was rushing through bracing air. When I landed with a numbing jolt, I was in the Hinterland.