“You still can’t pass.” The creature’s voice was a swallowed thing full of glottal stops and touched with an unplaceable accent. It looked more like a girl now that it wasn’t trying to eat me. Its muddy hair was braided, its mouth almost prim.
“Why?”
“This is my byway. I might let you wander the shore till you’re dead.” Its laugh was full of pin-sharp teeth.
“Or I’ll walk across the ice.”
The thing looked around at the meltwater already rising. Whatever strange magic had frozen it was already fading away. “You can try.”
“What if I give you something?”
It froze, its fish-belly eyes suddenly interested. “Your hair? Your fingers?”
I thought of the paintings of mermaids I’d loved to look at when I was little—bird-winged women crawling over doomed ships, pensive Waterhouse girls running silver combs through their hair.
I pulled the comb from my pocket. It had been plain red plastic when I found it at the coffee shop, and again when I looked at it under the willow tree. But now it glinted like mother of pearl. I ran a fingertip over the unfamiliar carvings in its handle.
The redheaded man had left these things behind for me to find. Katherine wanted me to die in these woods, but someone else had stuffed my pockets with fairy-tale tricks. I thought of Ella, the blade in the bouquet. These woods weren’t going to kill me, or drive me mad. Because I wasn’t Ness. I was Ella’s daughter. I was the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine.
I held the comb up so moonlight skated over its teeth. “I’ll give you this if you let me cross to the other side. Unharmed. Meaning you don’t get to eat or otherwise remove any part of me.”
Fairy tales teach you the importance of precise communication. The thing looked disappointed by my thoroughness, but it was already reaching for the comb. When I passed it into its fingers, it slipped into the water and disappeared.
First I kneeled on the bank. I scooped up enough melt to wash the blood from my hands, reaching for a prayer, a poem, a goodbye that felt right. But all I could think of was the Vonnegut quote Finch had inked onto his skin. I never asked him when he’d gotten it, or why, and now I never would.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
I whispered the words, rubbing at blood that looked black in the moonlight. I closed my eyes and held his face in my mind and said it one more time. And a third, because Finch would’ve wanted things done right in a fairy tale.
Then I stood and pressed a testing toe against the ice. It was already spring ice, midway between freeze and slush. But the shore was so close. I took off across it at a run, sliding and nearly making it before my leg plunged through a sour spot. I felt the numb pain of frigid water and the teasing grip of the creature’s fingers, then it shoved me out of the cold and sent me sprawling onto the opposite bank.
I wanted to crawl back and rinse the mud from my mouth, but I didn’t dare. Instead I walked up the bank till my calves ached. It angled more and more sharply till I had to grab at bushes just to pull myself along, cursing when I gripped a handful of thorns. When I finally reached the summit, I’d cleared the tops of the tallest trees. I looked out over the whole woods, stretching to the horizon below me. The fear I’d held back with sweat, with thoughtless forward motion, settled back around my shoulders.
Then I saw it. Or part of it: in the distance, between the swaying night-green heads of the trees, a patch of something black and unmoving. A rooftop, I thought—it had to be. It had to be the Hazel Wood. I felt the phantom presence of Finch beside me, the lift of wonder he would’ve felt standing here.
A sudden snicking reached my ears, the out-of-place preschool sound of scissors cutting through paper. I turned and saw a little girl sitting on a red-and-white checkered picnic blanket in the moonlight, cutting up the pages of an old atlas. Moonlight lit the crown of her downturned head. I wavered for a moment, wondering if I should creep quietly away, but didn’t. I’d been thrust by the Hinterland into a tale. Maybe, if I let it reach its end, I would escape it.
The girl’s soft little hands ripped pages from the atlas one by one. Green maps threaded with silver rivers, castles and towns marked in ruddy ink. Nautical maps crawling with sea creatures and rippling waves, grounded at each corner by the puffing faces of the four winds. The East Wind seemed to scream as the little girl’s scissors cut it into shreds. She turned the page to a yellow map that glittered. I sucked in a breath as I spied a tiny caravan crossing it, and the scissors descending to cut it in two.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked. I’d reached the edge of her blanket.
She kept her gaze on the atlas, but I could hear the scowl in her voice. It was a funny voice, froggy and boyish. “My grandmother doesn’t like me talking to strangers.”
I looked around for the grandmother, expecting some gorgon to launch herself at me from the other side of the hill. The girl rolled her eyes. Her face was peaky and pointed, but her eyes were beautiful, the color of the oceans she was cutting into confetti. “She’s up there,” she said, jabbing her scissors toward the sky.
I looked upward and saw nothing but the moon, gathering bits of cloud around itself like a shrug. For a moment I could see a face in it. Not a man’s, a woman’s. A beautiful, distant woman who watched me with a disapproving look.
Then the face smoothed itself away, and the moon was just a moon, a perfect orb the flat gold of a Casio watch.
“What if I introduced myself,” I said, “so we won’t be strangers anymore? I’m Alice.”
Her scissors stopped, and she looked up. “You’re Alice?” But she must’ve seen nothing interesting in my face, because she shrugged and tilted her head back down. Snip snip snip. A Queenswood labeled in looping script was sheared away from a tiny ivory castle, its ramparts bristling with spikes. “My name is Hansa.”
Hansa. I knew the name—I’d read it in the contents page of Tales from the Hinterland.
“You’re Hansa the Traveler,” I said quietly, trying not to draw the attention of the moon. “Where are we?”
“You’re stupid for being so much older than me,” she said. Not meanly, but matter-of-factly. “You don’t know we’re in the Halfway Wood?”
“Not the Hinterland?”
“The Hinterland’s that way.” She gestured meaninglessly and flopped onto her stomach. “I’m not allowed to talk with strangers anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m too trusting,” she said primly. It sounded like she was quoting something an adult had told her. “And I made friends with the thief.”
The thief? A character from her story, probably. I wished for the thousandth time I’d read Tales from the Hinterland, that I knew every inch of it the way Finch had. No. Don’t think of Finch.
“Who’s the thief?” I asked, bracing for her to tell me I was stupid again.
“She comes from that side.”
“From Earth? Where I come from?”
“You really are stupid. She came from Earth, but it was a long time ago. She doesn’t visit anymore. Now go away, please, I’m busy.”
I squatted down beside her. “Hansa, one more question, okay? The thief—was her name Ness?”
“No. Her name was Vanella.”
My heart went hollow. “Ella—was here? When?”