A man with a fresh black eye danced alone, blissed on something stronger than liquor. A trio of women with bodies like fronds wound around each other in a way that looked boneless, their edges meeting and melting together in a watercolor blur. I nearly stumbled over a small figure I thought was a child, until she tilted her face toward the candlelight. The look in her eyes made me step back.
Then I saw something that stopped me cold, filling me to the knuckles with starlight.
Finch. Unmistakably, in the heart of the dancers. Finch in a white shirt, his shoulders heavy with shadows. His eyes were alight and his mouth was soft and all of him bent toward the girl he danced with. She was short and fierce and her hair ran over her back in a bright Barbie sweep.
She was me, me with my hair grown long, and she was looking at Finch with an expression I didn’t think my face could hold.
It didn’t feel like an illusion, or a dream. I smelled sweat and spilled wine and candle wax, and tasted blood as I bit through the skin of my lip. I said his name, or tried to, but the music ghosted it away.
Then the candlelight stuttered like a strobe and the crowd changed, shifted, faces sifting through pockets of shadow and light. It came to me that I was seeing a hundred terrible parties melted down into one, full of people too strange and reckless to be anything but Hinterland. Ella was gone but Finch remained, always, at the center of everything, holding me.
The house was tugging at my mind again, unspooling things I’d dreamed, tucked-away things I might’ve wished for, and mashing them together with the memories that breathed from the Hazel Wood’s walls. My breath came short as the other me let Finch run his hands through the whole length of her heavy hair.
She lifted her face—my face—toward his. The music went shivering and slow, and all of me craned toward them as a feeling like jealousy cut its teeth on my heart. His eyes slid shut and his hair moved in an underwater drift. Even as she leaned into him I could see the glint of her open eyes, still watchful, always watchful. I leaned so far I thought I’d fall, waiting for the moment when their lips would touch.
When they did the music went to static. Someone in a half-mask and legs too long for their body grabbed my shoulder. The kiss sizzled like gunpowder in my chest; I felt too stunned to pull away.
“Join the dance or get out, daydreamer,” the person said into my ear, and gave me a hard shove.
It unplugged me from the party like something ripped, sparking, from a socket in the wall, and sent me tumbling back into a long, empty hall. Ella was gone, Finch was gone, and the girl I might have been had never existed. But the party clung to me in a hazy perfume; I could still smell wax on my clothes.
Then far, far down the hall I saw a closed door with light shining out around its seams. The light was warm and it felt right, like everything else I’d seen in this house was a dream, and this was the warm human light of waking up after a nightmare. The light in the cottage you stumble on in the dark, dark woods. I ran to it, and I threw open the door, and I walked into a child’s nightlight-lit bedroom.
And my heart sank, because I knew this wasn’t any more real than the rest of it. It couldn’t have been, because my grandmother was there waiting for me, sitting on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette.
23
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.”