The first thing I heard was the music. A hectic, two-bar tangle, played over and over again. We entered a hall so high and vast it felt like a gym, its gilded corners softened by mossy masses that had to be birds’ nests. A U-shaped table in the center of the room was lined with people. People eating, laughing, whispering to each other, stabbing at their meat. In the center of the room was the source of the awful music: a man in dirty green with a head of dark curls, holding a violin. He sawed at it savagely, in a jerky motion that looked painful.
I froze, and the Spinner stuck hard fingertips in my back. “We are the scariest things in this castle.”
So I crept forward like I was moving through water, waiting every moment for the violinist to turn, to stop playing his horrible song. But he didn’t. Nobody at the table took notice of us, the Spinner in her armor and me in my jeans. The wrongness of their movements crawled over my skin, and in a sudden, horrible flash, I realized why.
They were stuck. All of them. They were moving like butterflies stabbed through with a pin, enacting their last shiver of freedom.
The musician’s tormented playing of the same wild notes. The woman in a heavy headdress, lifting a knife to her mouth, then lowering it, then again. The man who threw his head back and laughed, a gusty sound scraping dryly over a throat that must be bloody-raw. Slowly I circled the musician till I could see his eyes. His head was cast down over his instrument, his hair a curtain between us, but they met mine, straining up in their sockets so I could see their dark blue anguish.
I did this. My leaving—it did this. I broke free of the musician’s gaze with a feeling like gauze unsticking. But now I saw them: all over the room, eyes running over me like searchlights. Dozens of moving points of misery and fear and appeal, as they ate, talked, laughed, a murmur that rose beneath the violin’s twisted notes in a madhouse swell.
I felt myself sinking, and the Spinner buoyed me up, her mouth amused.
“Leave them,” she murmured. “They’ve been alright without you for seventeen years—what’s another minute or two?”
Seventeen years. Seventeen years in this rictus. Finally I was grateful time worked differently here. Maybe it felt faster to them, like time passing in a dream.
I shrugged her off. “You could help them,” I hissed. “You could make them … make them sleep, at least.”
“Nobody can fix a broken machine if they don’t have the parts,” she said, and led me into a passageway whose floor prickled with rushes. Here and there they rustled with tiny things moving in circumscribed paths.
The walls of the passage were hung with tapestries that tugged at my mind like stories left unread: A girl standing on a dock at the edge of a subterranean lake, an empty boat waiting in the water. A woman with a cut-glass face dancing with a man whose eyes were hidden. A little girl I recognized, standing at the prow of a ship.
Against a shadowy corner a man stood bracing himself, forever caught in the act of undoing his belt. In a hell-hot kitchen, a trio of women with burst-red faces made a chorus of ugly music: clank of spoon, thump of dough, eerie scrape of knife over whetstone.
At the center of a room filled with instruments, a child threaded her fingers around the strings of a harp, under the eye of a woman sipping, endlessly, from a teacup. A maid leaned against the wall in another dark hallway, her face wet with ancient tears.
In the castle’s center was a perfectly round courtyard, where snow fell on small figures moving in shudder step: an arm rearing back with a snowball, a slip and a thump on hidden ice. The same shrill cry of hilarity as a snowball hit its mark, which sounded in repetition like the shriek of a dying animal.
I knew I was being corralled toward something, not just by the Spinner but by the bob of the compass hidden in my chest, tugging me toward the heart of the castle, to the foot of a winding staircase of stone.
“Almost there,” the Spinner breathed.
The only way out is through. I climbed. We rose and rose, past landings and tapestries and people stuck in a long record skip: A little boy crying out as a cat bit his finger, the cat rearing in a painful strike. A man and a woman wrapped in a rolling embrace on a lonely landing.
The stairs narrowed into a tight seashell whorl as we climbed into a room that appeared in pieces as we rose. A stripe of cold fireplace, a woman’s goose-pimpled legs where her skirts rode up. A wall unsoftened by tapestries, the bed where a second woman lay with her hair gathered around her like a cloak.
The room was dim. It smelled like a blown-out match and the close breath of the women—one whey-faced on the bed, her belly an oceanic swell and her hands squeezed into angry balls. Her breath was caught in a staccato beat; she’d been arrested at the crest of a wave of labor pain. A midwife with a blunt face hung over her, making a noise that was meant to be soothing.
My legs were almost too heavy to heave over the landing. I knew if I lifted the hems of my jeans I’d see skin gone to white.
“When you were ripped away they crawled back to their starting places,” the Spinner said. “And there they’ve waited.” Her eyes slid over the two women like they were furniture. They slid over me. She breathed out long and slow, her face changing into something I forgot with every blink.
She rolled up her sleeves—she had sleeves again, not armor—and opened her mouth.
“Why did you make me?” I asked her, before she could speak. I felt like a convict standing on a gallows with a noose around my neck, asking after the nature of God. “Why like this? Can I really end my story? Were you ever going to let me go?”
“Let you go?” Her voice was honey on razor blades. “Go to what? This is your purpose—the start of your story. This is what you were made to do.”
“So you lied. I can’t really change anything.”
She smiled at me, a tender smile that sent fear jackrabbiting through my blood. “You won’t want to, Alice. Can’t you see that yet? The Stories are perfect. The Stories are worlds. I made a whole world just for you, and in it you get to do what nobody gets to: you get to live, and live, and live. And everything will come out the way it’s meant to, no matter what. I made it that way.”
“But how is that living?” I whispered.
Something passed over her face, a look of soft indulgence. “You’ve lived more than most already. You burn so brightly, Alice-Three-Times. So much anger, so much ice. A story wouldn’t have waited like this for just anyone.”
“But I’ll be dying, too. That’s the end of my story, isn’t it?”
“That’s what you’re worried about? Dying’s not so hard, Alice-Three-Times. You’ve done it before.”
I went for the stairs. I wouldn’t get far—my legs felt like logs and my breath came out in white clouds. But I wanted my last act as a free person to be one Ella would be proud of. Ella, who bought my freedom with seventeen fugitive years, all so I could throw it away on a gamble.
I was right: I didn’t get far. I barely had time to turn before the Spinner yanked me back around. She touched my cheek and the ice rose to meet her, shivering through me and up to her fingers in waves.
It shouldn’t have hurt. If I was just the stuff of stories, the ice sealing my throat shut shouldn’t have burned like fire and the pain of going breathless shouldn’t have felt endless and the fear rising off my skin shouldn’t have smelled like a cornered animal. The pain was so massive it pressed out reason. I couldn’t even whimper.
The Spinner spoke into my ear. “When Alice was born, her eyes were black from end to end.”
I went blind. My body shuttered in like a telescope and I lost track of my limbs and where my head was and found myself suddenly bodiless, just an awful yawp of cold and dark, and a focused rage that should’ve eaten me up like a cinder.
I was imploding and I had nothing to scream with and my mind was melted plastic and my last clear thought was of the Spinner’s sociopathic blue eyes, etched into the cold glass of my fading consciousness. Then I was nothing in the dark.