Her voice was raw now, her head bowed low. I blinked and the room seemed to stutter; Althea was standing, and the bed she’d been sitting on was cast in deeper shadow. The glow of moonlight on snow no longer came through the window.
Althea went on. “The queen realized it wasn’t the kingdoms that had changed—it was her. She didn’t need to find a door, she had become one. A bridge, too. A place where the demons could get in. So she and her daughter ran away to a castle in the woods. The Other Kingdom followed, and over time the woods around the castle became as twisted as an oak, torn between the two kingdoms.
“But still the queen’s daughter, the princess, grew up strong. She grew up fast and fleet, forever running between the Other Kingdom and that of her birth, because she couldn’t remember a life that was any other way.”
All the magic had gone from her telling. She spoke fast and flat. The room was changing, and Althea was, too. Her shoulders slumped; gray licked through her hair. Without warning, her gaze swiveled toward my face. Her teeth were stained, and her eyes spun like pinwheels.
Ella was gone. The room was the same, but different. The bed was humped and tarnished, and dust lay over everything like a veil.
“You’re here.” Althea’s whisper cracked in the middle. She was looking at me. “Is it you? Is it you, really?”
She was a ghost. Or a mirage. She had to be. The hunger in her voice should’ve made me wary, but my own hunger rose up to meet it. “It’s me. It’s Alice. Your, your…” I couldn’t say it. Granddaughter.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky Althea,” she said, low, moving closer till I could smell the sweat on her skin, the bitter almond on her breath. I froze, my heart hammering like frozen rain, and she spoke the rest of her tale into my ear.
“The Other Kingdom didn’t hurt the queen’s beloved daughter, because she was too clever. Clever Princess Vanella.” She hissed the princess’s name—my mother’s name. “Until the day the princess found a baby in the Halfway Wood, left by her parents and their hunting party to sleep beneath a tree. Cherry blossoms had fallen into her bassinet. The baby squeezed them between her little fingers, staring up at the princess with her black, black eyes. The princess loved her right away. And she stole her out of her fairy tale.”
My heart knew before my head. It beat tiny throbs of adrenaline, like a poison drip telling me to run, run, before you hear something you can’t forget. I didn’t run. I let her tell me the rest of our story.
“Alice-Three-Times,” she spat. “You were plucked from your story like a cherry blossom by a girl who didn’t know what she did.”
My mind moved like a cold computer. “I’m here to find Ella,” I said stupidly. “My mother.”
“Your kidnapper. That girl is nobody’s mother.”
For a long white moment my mind wiped clean. I couldn’t even picture Ella’s face. I didn’t know my hand was raised till Althea stepped back, out of range.
“Look at you.” Her laugh was an ugly thing. “Still feral after all these years.”
I dropped my hand, wrapping my arms around myself as Ella came back to me in pieces. Bony hands and breath in the dark and the sharp line of her profile as she drove. She’d never looked like me. I’d never wondered why.
I used to picture a father somewhere, someone Ella had loved, at least for a little while. That was a lie, too.
“I don’t believe you,” I whispered. Another lie.
“You were her favorite story.” Althea’s voice grew gentler, a little. “She liked how angry you were. Like an avenging … well, not an angel.”
“I’m a girl,” I said fiercely. “I’m a person.”
“You’re both, and neither. You’re a story, but that doesn’t make you any less true.”
I felt like I was watching myself from the outside, a girl with blurred edges holding herself like a child. The image stamped itself onto my brain, one of those out-of-your-skin moments that turns into memory while it’s still happening. This is the day my dead grandmother told me my mother wasn’t mine. That I was a character in a story, plucked from another place.
“She ran away from you,” I told Althea, watching the words land like a slap. “We both did. I grew up in the world. I remember it—I remember skinning my knees and reading library books and eating crap food from the gas station. Sick days watching bad TV. I remember life happening in the right order, and, and bus rides, and being lonely. I remember all of it!”
“Do you?”
I stared at her, then down at my hands, rough and chapped and un-fairy-tale-ish. I thought of the way my life faded out behind me, faint scratches on the earth washed away like footprints on dirt.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “And you’re dead. And I’m here to take Ella back.”
“Take her back? From who?” She smiled at me coquettishly, a ghost of what she once looked like, back when hers was a face to look at. She’d become very old since she was a woman telling her daughter a story in the dark.
“From the Hinterland,” I said unsteadily. “They took her.”
Althea shook her head. “I assure you, they did not. You’re the one they wanted, Alice-Three-Times. She was just”—she flipped her hand—“a distraction.”
Bait. Finch was right. Ella, wherever she was, had been bait.
“So where is she, then? If not here, where?” My voice rose. “I don’t care if you’re a ghost or a memory or a, I don’t know, a hologram, but please. She’s your daughter. Please tell me how to get her back.”
“You think I’m a ghost? I haunt this old memory palace, and it haunts me, but I’m not dead.” She grabbed my hand, shoved it against the sloping bread-dough skin beneath the yellowing stripes of her shirt, right where her heart would be.
A dim beat fluttered against my fingers.
Alive.
“But … but the letter…”
“It reached you? I wasn’t sure it would. The death letter was to get her to bring you back.” She laughed, harsh and sad. “Even that wasn’t enough. So why now? What made you come back now?”
My heart crunched in on itself. After everything, I still wanted to think all of it had been her—that she’d sent cold fingers into the world to draw me here. Because she … what? Loved me? Wanted me? Stupid Alice. I liked to think I’d put my old dreams behind me, but here I was talking to one, and she made me feel five years old.
But Ella loved me. My mother. My kidnapper. The Thief, Hansa had called her.
She was still mine, maybe more now that I knew it had been a choice. My longing for her rearranged itself in my chest. It felt like a new-hatched thing, wet-feathered but fierce. I set my jaw and let it be the lifeline that would pull me from the quicksand of this hot, close room, the smell of dust and the night crawling over the windows.
“Ella was gone,” I said. “They took her somewhere—somewhere in New York, maybe, I don’t know. And the book—your book. It was haunting me. Twice-Killed Katherine. She … got me to come.” I found I couldn’t tell her about Finch. Seeing Althea like this would have broken his heart.