I was back in the forest. But this was a forest that made the Halfway Wood feel like a Polaroid. It made the woods on Earth seem like the pencil sketches of a blind man who’d read about trees but never seen them.
In the Halfway Wood I wondered whether the trees could hear me, whether they could speak. Here they seemed practically to breathe. I’d landed with my back against a trunk as wide as a car, front to back, its bark covered in knots that suggested an implacable face. It dropped a rain of seeds into my lap. They were crescent-shaped and pinkie nail–sized, burnished the color of a harvest moon.
I looked up at the sky like I might see Althea’s face there, watching me through a rip in the blue. Then I stood up and started walking. What else was there to do? I was numb. Three degrees removed from the world I’d grown up in—a world that wasn’t even mine.
Finch is here. I remembered it with a feeling like jerking back from the brink of sleep. The Halfway Wood had tried to make me forget. Althea’s junk drawer of a house and the woman herself, going mad in a yellow room. But Finch was here. He’d lived, and he’d bled out in an in-between forest, and now his corpse was cooling in a world he’d wished for.
Was he buried? Was he burned? What did a place like this do with its dead? Thoughts of him made my fingers curl and ache. I shoved them into my pockets and walked through a world where everything—everything—seemed alive.
The sun was vast and low and not so bright that I couldn’t make out something happening in the fire of its surface, the tracings of a story so distant I’d never read it. Flowers furled into pellets or went lurid as I passed, sending out vapor trails of scent—cardamom, iced tea, Ella’s shampoo. This new world was too strange, too lucid; it made my mind explode in a dandelion puff. Everything had a revelatory crispness, like a new day seen through the lens of a coffee-fueled all-nighter. I started reciting stuff in my head to keep my thoughts within safe borders: The track lists of my favorite albums. The names of all the Harry Potter books in order. The places we’d lived, one by one. Chicago. Madison. Memphis. Nacogdoches. Taos.
It kept my mind wrapped around a thin blue wire of sanity and denial. But it was slipping. Ella, I knew now, was in the place I’d left behind. And I was in an alien world, surrounded by trees whose sentient interest in my passing ranged from distant friendliness to a ruffled annoyance that made me picture a dog smelling someone else’s pet on your clothes. I had Earth all over me. But underneath it, if Althea was to be believed, I was Hinterland.
I believed her. If for no other reason than how good my body felt moving through this wood. The air was crisp, almost autumnal, but everything in sight was lavishly green or flowering. The light was an ambient, suffused gold, and it did something funny to the shadows: they looked like black stamps. My own shadow gave the distinct impression of keeping up with me just to see what I’d do next; if I proved to be boring, I suspected it would ditch me.
After spending an hour pushing through low-hanging branches that either courteously shrank from my touch or pushed back, I stumbled by luck onto a path.
It was almost too picturesque, lined with berry brambles and flowers that wept fat, furry petals onto the packed dirt. They were duckling yellow and smelled like buttered toast.
I took two steps and stopped.
Birds had been singing. Three- and four-note trills I didn’t recognize. A breeze had moved through all that curious green, branches had cracked, leaves had rustled, unseen animals had made their quiet way. But here the noises stopped, replaced by a focused, annihilating calm. There was a bend to the air here, an almost invisible heat that made my fingers curl and my nose itch.
It made me hungry. I was hungry, and my hands were so cold I felt them burning through the fabric of my pockets, chilling my thighs.
I didn’t see the girl till she was almost close enough to touch. She’d stopped a few paces off the path and didn’t notice me. Her profile could’ve been drawn in one long, economical stroke by a master, and her hair was as thick and dark as my shadow. She stood perfectly still, both hands pressed against the bark of a tree. Her mouth moved furious and silent, as if she were reading a very disturbing letter.
The air around her shivered and prismed like the heat over blacktop. She was what I was looking for, the hot moving point at the center of this island of charged quiet. I watched her with a feeling I couldn’t name—fear or awe or recognition.
The tree trunk cracked in two between her palms. I sucked in a breath as its bark became doors, opening inward. From where I stood, just above her, I could see the top step of a silver staircase going down, and hear the sound of a party happening far away. As the girl lifted her foot and placed it on the first stair, I took a step forward.
A hand landed heavy on my shoulder, and a voice spoke in my ear. “Wouldn’t do that if I were you. You don’t want to come between a Story and their story.”
I jerked away from the man standing next to me. He was in his early thirties, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, jeans faded almost to white, and a shabby brown bomber jacket.
And he was eating a Hershey’s bar. He saw me staring at it and stepped backward, blocking it with his hand. “Dude, no. This is practically my last one. It’s not like I can go buy more.” His accent was American, mostly, but touched with something else. It gave a crisp edge to all his consonants.
I pushed my hands deeper into my pockets, breathing in the cool, untainted air he carried with him. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re from Earth.”
He stared at me a moment, then sighed. “Oh, hell, no. You just got here? Nope, I’m not equipped to do an orientation. Wait, you didn’t bring any food with you, did you? Like … packaged stuff?” He scanned me—sweatshirt, jeans, no bag. “Okay, that’s a no.”
“Orientation?” I echoed, glancing back toward the girl. She was gone, the tree trunk seamless. “And what did you say before? About a story and a story?”
“Jesus, no wonder you almost followed the Woodwife into hell. You’re green, aren’t you? Like, just-fell-through-a-mirror-in-Tunisia green?”
I thought about telling him I was Alice-Three-Times, seeing if he’d give me the rest of his candy bar. But I decided against it. “Is that how you got here?” I asked. “A mirror in Tunisia? Are you the only one?”
“Agh.” He shoved the rest of the chocolate in his mouth, stared at me while he chewed. “Okay, I’ll tell you the basic deal. The very basic deal, then you’ve got to find someone who’s actually good at this. First off, of course I’m not the only one, assuming by ‘only one’ you mean the only jackass stupid enough to think it was a good idea to beg, borrow, or steal his way into a place without record players, bourbon, or chocolate. There are lots of refugees here. From Earth and from other places—or so I’ve heard. Second, stay away from the Stories. You’ll know them when you see them. If they glow at the edges, move like they’re in a trance, smell like smoke or flowers or salt, or generally look like they belong in a murder ballad, steer very, very clear. I knew a guy, a classicist from Cambridge—got in through a wishing well—who tried to save the Skinned Maiden before she got skinned. Christ, was that a bad idea.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t make me spell it out for you. Look, did you mean to get in? Because it kind of seems like you didn’t.”
Against his will, it seemed, he was becoming interested in me. “I didn’t mean to get in. Someone pushed me,” I clarified.
“Well, that’s … that’s maybe more than I want to get involved in.” He looked shifty. “I don’t want to be a dick, but I’ve got a decent thing going here. Finally. I’ve got a girlfriend—ex-Story, so that keeps things pretty interesting—and I was taking a walk so I could eat this without her staring at me. They think packaged food is disgusting.”
He kept talking, but I didn’t hear anything after ex-Story. “What do you mean, ex-Story?” I interrupted sharply. “Does that mean she used to be a, uh, a character?”
“Pretty much.” His eyes flicked over my shoulder; he was getting bored of me. “Look, if you follow this path long enough you’ll find a little old woman who’ll ask you to do something—carry her pail, chop her wood, whatever. Just do it, and use the wish she grants you to find Janet. You understand? Don’t ask to be sent home, or to be made into a princess or whatever. She can’t do that much anymore; she’s ex-Story, too. Tell her to send you to Janet, and she’ll know who you mean.”
“Old woman, Janet,” I murmured. “Got it.” My mind was spinning around on a hamster wheel, thinking of the implications of being ex-Story. Even from inside the Hinterland, maybe I could find a way to get free.
“That way,” he said, pointing me down the path. “It might take five minutes, it might take an hour. Good travels.”
“Thanks,” I said, sticking out my hand.
He took it, then yelled, pulling his fingers back like I bit him.
“What? What happened?” I asked. He held his fingers to his mouth, staring at me. Staring at my hands.
“Shit,” he said. “You’re Story, aren’t you?”
“Huh?” I looked down at my hands and gasped.
They were the blitzed white of a cheap wedding dress, so pale they were almost blue. My nails were translucent, chunks of carved ice. “What the hell!” I said, jumping backward like I could get away from them.
“I meant no disrespect, my lady!” The man bowed, walking backward. “I didn’t mean to meddle. Good travels to you!”
“Wait!” I cried, and threw out one hand. He froze, like I might have the power to shoot ice rays at him. For all I knew, I did.
“I need gloves,” I said.
He hesitated before shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket, coming up with worn leather gloves. He balled them up, tossed them to me, and ran.
I caught them against my chest. They were too big and smelled like cheap chocolate, but I felt better as soon as the white of my fingers had disappeared. My heart squeezed when I remembered the story Finch told me in the diner: Alice-Three-Times swallowed ice, and it made her—me—into a frozen zombie. Katherine’s fiery touch in the parking lot—that cold, awful feeling wasn’t hers, it was mine. Her touch, the touch of the Hinterland, woke it up.
It was too much, too strange, too big to think about all at once. So I set off in the direction the man had pointed me. The path took me past a tiny hut built between two massive trees. An old man sat on a stump out front, watching me with distant eyes. He held something pressed to his ear. I nodded at him, jamming my gloved hands into my pockets.
The thing in his hand squawked, and a string of nonsense words came out. Green scene mean. Stick quick trick. Tokyo alabaster red. King queen chick.
“Is that a … is that a transistor radio?”
The man grunted, writing something down on a square of rough paper. He wrote with a Bic.
“Who are you talking to?” I tried again.
He didn’t seem inclined to answer, so I turned away.
“Whoever’s listening,” he said to my back. “In this world or another.”
“Any luck yet?”
The radio crackled again and let out a descending series of hums in a woman’s voice. It sounded like a vocal exercise.
“Heard lots of things,” he muttered. “But no luck.”
I nodded. “Good travels,” I said, because I thought it might be the greeting here. The old man stared at me strangely and went back to his radio.
The light started to change, going tawny as the sharp shadows lengthened. Where the path petered out to a tiny foot road, I nearly collided with a tall man in black. He had a handsome, avid face covered nose to temples in thin, branching tattoos, and he smelled … awful. And somehow familiar.
He was a Story for sure. It came off him like a hum. I stared straight ahead, adrenaline fizzing in my fingers.
“Good travels,” he said.
I nodded and tried to slip by, but he grabbed my hand. Before I could take it back, he tugged off one glove. My stomach lurched: the freeze was climbing. Unworldly white inched over my wrists.
“Hello, little Story,” he said, and grinned. His teeth were thin and needle sharp.
Then I recognized it—his stink, of rot and ruin with a wild green heart. It was a scent from another lifetime. It was the sickening smell of Harold’s apartment the day I’d come home to find my mother gone—here was the one who’d taken her.
Briar King. The name floated to the surface of my mind like a whisper down a phone line. The Hinterland, revealing its secrets to me. Secrets I already knew, because I was of it.
“You,” I said.
“That’s a very good start,” he said. “Me?”
“You took her. Ella Proserpine. Where is she?”
He pouted at me, childish, his gaze growing dim. “Ella, Ella, Ella. I can’t recall the name.”
Every time his mouth formed around her name, my hands pulsed with barbed cold. “In New York, on the other side of the Halfway Wood. You took her, you left something for me—a page out of the book. Tales from the Hinterland.”
His eyes refocused with a snap. “Oh, yes, I do remember her. Ella Proserpine, the thief. And you’re the little Story girl she stole away.” For just a moment, he looked troubled. “But what are you doing here? Katherine had plans for you in the Halfway Wood.”
“I asked you about Ella. Where is she? What did you do to her?”
“It’s hard to remember what happens out there, don’t you find?” He showed his needle teeth, all at once. “Whatever I did, I assure you she liked it. That world is such a good place to have fun.”
I darted forward and slammed my ice-white palm to his neck.
He gasped. Hoarfrost bloomed under my hand, crawled up his neck, snaked into his open mouth.
I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t stop. And wanting it scared me enough that I dropped my hand, breathing hard. Oh, I was cold. I was chilled through to my elbows now. I tucked them into my body like broken wings.
“What did you do to my mother?” I said it slow, so he would hear me.
The tattoos on his face had gone white; now they pulsed and juddered, warming back to black. He bared sharpened teeth at me and rolled his neck. “I can’t tell you a thing, no matter what you do to me. I never remember much from out there. Though I do remember her.” He shivered with pleasure. “Ella Proserpine. The blood in her sings to me. Her father’s blood, her blood—the same. I never forget the sound, not once I’ve heard it.”
Her father … Ella’s father. My skin shuddered back on my bones. Ella’s father died in the Village before she was born, leaving Althea a pregnant widow. Killed by a junkie, supposedly.
Or by something worse. Something shark-stupid and hungry that followed the scent of an old victim’s blood, pulsing in his daughter’s veins.
How much of our bad luck was him? And how much of it was the other monsters of the Hinterland, slipping in like shadows when we stayed in one place too long? I thought of the stack of newspaper clippings in Althea’s sad yellow kitchen, a history of deaths kept by their accidental enabler. The Hinterland’s sociopaths weren’t just our bad luck, they were the curse of anyone who wandered too close to the Hazel Wood, an acid-burned wall between the worlds where terrible things crawled in.
“If you hurt my mother, I will kill you.” I made my voice patient and calm. “I don’t care if you’re invincible here, or royalty. I’ll kill you, and I’ll make sure it hurts.”
“She’s not your mother, Alice-Three-Times,” he hissed. “And I think you’d be very glad indeed if I hurt the woman who is.”
Then his head twitched on his neck, the animal click of a predator scenting prey.
I followed his gaze to a point of moving green among the trees—a girl walking past us, nearly invisible in a leaf-colored dress. My stomach lurched: she stood chin up like a queen, and there was a head slung over her shoulder like a knapsack. She held it by a fistful of its bright yellow hair.
“Some of us have stories to attend to,” the Briar King said. “You’ll forgive me for not tending further to you.”
He gave me a look that made me want to take a shower in Pine-Sol, and set off after the girl.
When he was gone I picked up the glove where he’d dropped it. Stuffed it in my pocket. Ran.
I ran like something with sharp, pointy teeth was on my trail. It took me five minutes of tearing through trees to outrun the feeling of hands grabbing at me, breath on my neck.
The Briar King. I’d touched him, but he’d touched me, too. My hands thrummed with a poisonous feeling, like I’d picked up something toxic from his skin.
When I finally stopped to breathe, bent over my knees, I realized I’d left the path behind. Before I could curse my stupidity, I looked up and saw an old woman sitting cross-legged under an apple tree.
Aside from her eyes, which were bird-black, she looked like one of the old women you see carrying mesh shopping bags full of knobby brown roots in Chinatown, right down to the pink Crocs. She eyed my bare white hand.
“Hello, child,” she said.
“Hello, Grandmother,” I replied, panting. I’d read enough fairy tales to know the address.
“My back aches with the weight of all my years, but I am so hungry. Would you do me a kindness and pull down an apple from that tree?”
She looked spry enough to outrun me, honestly, but I wasn’t about to argue. The tree she sat beneath winked with green apples.
“Of course, Grandmother,” I said politely. The tree held its breath as I circled it, looking for a foothold. Its bark was smooth, its branches higher than my head.
“I grow weak with hunger, Granddaughter,” the woman said pleasantly.
I rolled my eyes when she couldn’t see me, and put one palm on the tree’s trunk.
It shivered at my touch, curling its branches in like petals, then flailing them out again. A bushel’s worth of apples rained down. The woman put up a pink silk parasol and waited it out. After one clocked me on the temple, I went into a hurricane crouch till they stopped.
“Thank you, Granddaughter,” the old woman said dryly, as I passed her a bruised apple. She dropped the parasol and rose to her feet. Her shoes were looking less like Crocs and more like rose-colored slippers, and her tracksuit unfolded into a glittering gown. Her wrinkles dropped away, leaving a face as fine-etched as a cameo.
“You were kind to me when you thought me an inconsequential old woman,” she droned, like a waitress going through the specials for the last table of the night. “I will repay that kindness by granting you a wish. Only one, so choose wisely.”
Despite the warnings of the Hershey’s man, my mind flashed to all the wishes I might ask for. Answers, for one. A magic mirror, to find Ella. Seven-league boots. Finch, alive beside me—but I didn’t think her powers stretched as far as that. So I sighed and followed his advice. “Send me to Janet.”
Her face fell. “Huh. Too easy.” She grabbed my shoulders, turned me around, and shoved. I stumbled forward. For a moment the world blinked around me like a camera shutter. I fell not onto grass but cobblestones.
Traveling around the Hazel Wood had given me vertigo, but this felt different. It felt exhilarating. When I looked up, I was standing in front of the red-painted door of a pretty cottage. The woods were at my back, and it was nearly night.