I followed, leaving my gloves on the bar. I knew without looking that the freeze was spreading; I could feel an itchy flutter over the skin of my neck.
She led me behind the bar and through the swinging doors. If I’d thought about it, I would’ve expected them to open onto a back room like the one at Salty Dog—boxes, coats, maybe a messy desk.
But they led straight out onto a cobblestone street. It was empty, lit by the moon peering between rooftops. Across the way was a shop window warm with candles, their flames making the toys behind the glass glimmer. There were puppets and instruments and a lake of blue tin, crossed in tidy arcs by tiny tin skaters. Masks, hoops, a carnival doll in aged lace with a face of polished wood. At the center of it all stood a model castle that looked like a wedding cake. I could see movement in its tiny windows. I took a step closer, and the Spinner stopped me with a hand.
“Don’t get too excited. That’s not your story.”
As I turned away, something moved in the darkness beyond the window display—a shape too long and slender to be human. I shrank back, following the Spinner.
Propped against the wall of the bar were two bicycles. She climbed on one and I took the other—a vintage beast, heavy as hell with soft, underfilled tires.
“Go quiet,” said the Spinner, her whisper carrying back to me, “and don’t interfere.”
It was a good warning. The village we rode through was sleeping, but it was filled with wakeful things.
We rode past a house that hung too close over the road, as if it had outgrown its lot. Three women moved like mist around its eaves, reaching up to tap their fingernails against its windows. One looked around at me, her eyes pale marbles, and I pedaled faster. A few streets down, a small figure in a nightgown lay on the very edge of a rooftop, arms reaching toward the moon and one foot hanging down to kick at nothing. I saw her for a moment and wondered if she was Hansa.
At the village’s edge sat its largest, loveliest house, backed by a long, torchlit garden. In it a boy paced and held his head and spoke to the air. I could see the barest shimmer in it, could almost make out who or what he spoke to, before we wheeled past into dark.
The road that carried us out of town was glittering red dirt. The moon hit it at funny angles, throwing spangled bits of light into my eyes.
“Stay on the path,” the Spinner said, “no matter what we see in the woods.”
Her voice had changed. She was still a figure on a blue bicycle, but her speech was low and rough, and the shape of her had swelled.
She grinned back at me, white teeth in a hard, unfamiliar face. “Best not to go through the woods looking like a tavern wench. Too tempting for some of the stupider Stories.”
I kept my eyes on her back awhile, watching for another change, but the woods were distracting. The trees woke up as they scented the Spinner. They thrashed their branches, filling the air with their thick, resinous breath. It got into my nose and under my skin and made me question my reasons for following this stranger through the fairy-tale woods.
For Ella, I reminded myself. To finish my story.
But she couldn’t have felt further away.
The road changed to white stone and narrowed, snaking like a necklace through the boiling heads of the trees. I was slicked with sweat and stuck all over with leaves that bleached pale as they fell. None of them landed on the Spinner.
A sudden metronome beat rose from the swirl of trees and night. It filled my chest like a heartbeat and threw off the rhythm of my breath.
“What is that?”
The Spinner braked just off the road. I stopped beside her and looked at the side of her face. The blue eyes were the same, but her features were heavy and blunt.
“Don’t watch me, watch the road.”
Down the path of white stones just wide enough to hold them came a caravan. In front and following behind, men in military dress on high black horses. Between them, two horses carrying a litter. I winced to see them sag under its weight, then breathed in hard when I saw what was inside it.
A woman so pretty it felt like a trick. Her head was shaved and she wore no jewelry; there was nothing to protect you from her face. I looked at it from one angle, then another, watching it change like a hologram. The ice climbed my throat with reaching fingers.
I couldn’t breathe, and the metronome tick was maddening. It came from the woman in the litter. A woman in bridal white, ticking like a clock. Her beautiful bare head turned in a dozen quick beats, and her eyes fixed on mine.
The Spinner moved between us, wrapped warm hands around my throat. The ice receded under her fingers till I could breathe again. “Not yet, Alice-Three-Times,” she whispered.
I sucked in icicle air. Not yet?
When the Spinner moved away, the caravan had passed.
“Not yet?” I said. “What does that mean, not yet?”
“It means the only way out is through. Through the woods, through the story, through the pain. Did you think you’d get what you want for free?”
I fell back, chastened. “Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”
“I told you. ‘Once upon a time.’”
I slipped on loose white stones, rolling my bike’s dead weight back onto the road. “What does that even—and why on bikes? Wouldn’t horses be faster?”
“Horses are unpredictable,” said the Spinner. “Even for me. They tend to turn into Stories halfway there.” She turned and pointed a finger at me, her face irritable and as human as I’d seen it. “Never trust a Hinterland horse.”
We rode on. My legs grew tired, then numb, then tired again, as we pedaled for a long quiet space that felt endless. Once I saw a face watching me from between branches. It was there and gone so suddenly, its eyes so sensitive and sad, it took me a moment to register it wasn’t a human’s face but a bear’s, standing on its hind legs watching the road.
At the darkest part of night, when the moon had waned to a sliver, the veil of trees to our right fell away, revealing a lake. The water was flat as a level and dense as mercury, welling like a bead against its banks. Here and there something glimmered under its surface—tracings of green or purple sparks; a hard arc of bubbles that could’ve been white skirts, or a drifting mass of fins. Pale palms pressing up, as if against the underside of ice. The cold in me spread down, seeping past my thighs, making my stomach churn and my knees pop with every pedal. Finally the water ended and a line of trees began, covered with glossy black blossoms.
Just before dawn, I heard the crackle of firelight among them, and smelled smoke. Then came music—a wild, sad music that slipped away like a fading dream every time my mind tried to catch it. I slowed down to hear it, to try to place the instrument.
Not an instrument, a voice. A sweeping voice with a bracing range that made even the trees go quiet. I tilted my head back to watch the sky.
Then the Spinner was there, rolling her eyes, singing “Yellow Submarine” at the top of her lungs and slapping me hard. “Pedal!” she yelled between verses. “Have some pride in your pedigree! You’re not some idiot refugee, you’re Alice-Three-Times!”
I followed her, anger thudding dull behind my eyes. Once we’d left it far enough behind, the music crept from my body like a sugar high, leaving me shaky.
At the end of night the forest ended sharp as a knife, the road turning from a narrow chain to a broad white ribbon. The last of the moon slipped away and the sun bellied up, the two shouldering past each other for one radiant moment that seared brighter than fireworks and filled me with a rush of joy.
Until the Spinner turned us toward the castle.
Home.
The word swam up from the same neglected place inside of me that knew the name of the Briar King, and recognized the contours of this world in the way I’d know the breadth of my own body in the dark.
It looked like an abandoned toy. The road wound toward it, and it grew up from the road, made of the same white stone. It was a rambling thicket of turrets and dull windows and decorative outcroppings. At their center was a narrow tower slashed with murder holes. The whole thing wore a shroud of fog that breathed and twisted under its own weather.
I planted my heels hard in the road, tasting bile at the back of my throat. “I’m not going in there.”
The Spinner laughed, and I startled back. She’d changed again. Her face was a soft circle, her hair cropped shorter than mine. She was dressed like a knight.
“And yet,” she said, hand on the hilt of a narrow sword, “there’s no way out without first going in. Once upon a time, Alice-Three-Times.”
Her final words had an extra resonance to them, a blur. Like they wore a mask to hide their true intentions.
Don’t trust her. But my heart was slowing, and the thought found no purchase.
The fog drifted and spun, moving like steam over tea. A black shadow hovered around me, a migraine aura narrowing in on the spiky shape of the castle. We were walking our bikes toward it, not riding, and I couldn’t remember when I’d stopped pedaling. My mind felt curiously blank.
The Spinner’s back wheel made a chewed-up, motorcycle sound. I leaned to yank out the playing card stuck in its spokes.
Twice-Killed Katherine’s face looked up at me—two of them, in flipped mirror image like a queen card. In the top she looked freshly fed; at the bottom she was gaunt, her hair run through with a frail skunk stripe.
The Spinner snatched it away, tore it in two. “Refugees,” she muttered. “They have funny ideas about fun.”
The sight of Katherine’s feral face shoved me back into myself. The shadow receded, and I could see the orange wash of sunrise on white stone, the overgrown curves of gardens stretching behind the castle. My hands sticking out of my tunic sleeves like scarecrow limbs made of ice.
“Ella,” I whispered. “Mom.”
The Spinner cocked her head. “Nothing goes into the story but you,” she said. “Right now you’ve got your other life all over you—they’ll smell it on your skin.” She gave me a smile that should’ve been beguiling but made my shoulders rise protectively. “They’ll be jealous. The quickest way to end this is to begin it, and that’s no way to start, is it?”
The condescension in her voice almost made me buckle. The quickest way to end this, like she believed I could. But she didn’t. She never had. That wasn’t why she’d led me here.
She was a jailer taking me back to my cell, and I was letting her. Based on the idiot notion that somewhere inside it was a key.
The castle grew larger as we moved closer, giving me a dizzy, shrinking feeling. The shapes of it sharpened, but everything else was flattening: the scent of green and pollen and rain, the smoky taste of morning. Birdsong and breeze went tinny, like I was hearing them through bad speakers, then cut off short as we stepped into the castle courtyard.
I sniffed in hard, let air run over my tongue—tasteless. The castle was a dead place.
“Not dead,” the Spinner said. “Just stopped. Missing a gear.”
I startled. “How did you—”
She shook her head, impatient. “The quicker it begins, the quicker it ends.”
The clockwork bride in her litter had eyes like the Spinner’s, I realized. If the Spinner created everything, had she made some of us in her own image? She could wear any face, but she couldn’t get rid of those eyes.
I blinked and saw my hand pushing open the door to the Hazel Wood. Then here, now, pushing at the tall stone doors of the castle.