“And you told Althea about the Hinterland door,” I prompted.
“I did. That kind of knowledge was around if you could pay the right price, which I could—knowledge buys knowledge, and a pretty girl of twenty-six has other currency, too.” She pursed her lips and looked prudish for a minute, daring me to judge her. When she saw I wouldn’t, she continued.
“I was celebrating a very promising lead when I met Althea, and between the liquor and her loveliness, I had loose lips. God, I’m glad I sent Tam out, she’d hate to hear this.” She shot a nervous glance toward the door.
“Anyway, I told her—too much. By the next morning, I already had regrets, but I couldn’t put her off. But she had a … she seemed to have the right spirit for it. Pilgrim soul and all. It was a whirlwind, the weeks we spent planning. Buying supplies, sourcing objects we thought we’d need—cloud powders, books, waterproof boots, a very expensive magical compass that, it turned out, worked in neither this world nor the last. We fell in love, or so I thought, and she never seemed to have a doubt about the Hinterland. I should’ve been suspicious, I know. I’d had years to get used to the idea of leaving the world behind. I’d cut my ties rather harshly. But she did it spontaneously. Thoughtlessly. That came clear when we got here. Painfully so.”
The door creaked open, letting in cold air and the spicy smell of the Hinterland woods. Janet went quiet and watched Ingrid come in, something complicated in her eyes.
Ingrid dropped a heavy armful of split logs in front of the fireplace. “Your refugee is staying the night, then?” she asked, feeding one into the flames.
“Of course she is,” Janet said sharply. “Ingrid, you’re such a snob. I was a refugee myself once, you ever think of that?”
Ingrid shook her head without responding.
“That’s the real problem with the Hinterland,” Janet said, ostensibly to me. “Nobody here has a goddamned sense of humor. Or a god, for that matter. Maybe you need one to have the other. The sense of being at someone’s mercy, so you can laugh about it.” She laughed like she was giving a demonstration.
“You’re tired,” Ingrid said without turning around.
“Too much truth for her,” Janet informed me.
I felt like I did the night I’d watched Ella get drunk on sherry and rip into Harold. It was two weeks after the wedding, and her wifey mask was starting to slip.
“You said Althea made a, um, dark deal to get out of here,” I said, trying to get the conversation back on track. “What was it?”
Ingrid turned around on her knees, eyebrows up. “What are you doing talking about that one? Where’s she come into it?”
“Alice is Althea’s granddaughter,” Janet replied regally. “And she’s the one who brought her up, not me.”
“A large coincidence, that is. I’m sure you hate having the excuse to talk about her.” But Ingrid said it without rancor, moving to stand behind Janet and rest her hands on her shoulders.
“What was the deal?” I repeated.
“What, so you can make the same one?”
“No, so I can…” I winced, grabbing my stomach. When I tried to lie, the stuff I’d swallowed twisted around in there like a snake made of acid.
“Oh, just tell her,” Ingrid said. “The damage is done, and she’ll hear a twisted version of it if she has to ask elsewhere. Everyone hears about the Spinner, sooner or later.”
“I’d rather it be later,” Janet muttered. She turned her cheek into Ingrid’s hand and sighed. “Things were bad here for Althea. There wasn’t someone like me yet, to tell us what to do, and there were very few refugees then. We had to find our way, painfully and slowly. She ran out of whiskey first, then cigarettes, then books to read, and the poor thing ran on all three. Think of a bored child on holiday, but imagine that holiday is forever. Until boredom made her do something very stupid.”
“What was that?”
“She started following the Stories. I don’t know how she managed to do it without being killed, but she did. She talked to the characters in the margins for the bits she couldn’t witness—the nursemaids, the middle sisters. She communed with dead kings and murdered wives; all those poor shades haunting the edges of things, desperate to talk. Then she’d come home and tell them to me. ‘I’m a journalist,’ she’d say. ‘This is what I do.’” Janet scoffed. “Like she’d been doing war reporting, instead of writing about what to wear to hunt a husband.”
Something broken in me ached at her words—a world ago, Finch had described Althea as writing like a war reporter. I wished I could tell him he’d been right.
“Eventually, of course, she followed the stories to their source,” Janet continued. “The Story Spinner.”
I heard the reverent space she put around the words, the capital S’s. She said they didn’t have a god here, but maybe this was something close. “Who’s the Story Spinner?”
“It’s in the name, isn’t it? In this place, it might as well be World Builder. She’s as good as. Story is the fabric of the Hinterland. Althea convinced the Spinner to make her a story she could use like a bridge. And then she just”—Janet tiptoed her fingers up the air—“climbed it right out of here.”
“She climbed—what? Words? That doesn’t make any sense.”
Ingrid eyed me oddly, but Janet cracked a smile. “Sense,” she said. “The last bastion of the struggling refugee.”
“So she made her way back. Fine. But how did that—what did you say? Rip holes in the world?”
Surprisingly, it was Ingrid who replied. “It started just before I met Janet. People from that world slipping in, those from this one slipping out. At first we thought it was new stories getting started. It happens from time to time—girls get abducted by kings, mothers murder their sons. Then we wondered whether there were doors opening onto other worlds, or hells.” Her Hinterland accent was clipped and compelling. It made me think of the dark shapes of icebergs, the light of a cold white sun.
“But rumor came of a place in the woods, a thin place where you could walk right out and back in again. It was discovered by a prince, a fourth son out of seven—his parents and his youngest brother were Stories, but he wasn’t. He put it under guard for a while, until he and his men were killed by the Briar King. Then things got much worse.”
“Worse how?”
“Stories started using the door, when they could sneak away. They like to cause trouble in your world.”
“How was that Althea’s fault?”
“Tales from the Hinterland,” Janet said bitterly. “She took the stuff that makes this world run and put it into a book, a book that got printed and shipped all over her world. The stories were read, they stuck in people’s brains, they got told and retold and dreamed about. New bridges were built—fragile, uncontrollable things between the worlds. Most of them were one-ways, rifts where people who loved the stories found their way through. I never understood what made the Briar King’s door so stable, but now I see—it’s on the other side of Althea’s Hazel Wood.”
“She was trying to contain it,” I said, unsure why I was trying to defend her. “She thought if she stayed in one place, and shut herself off, it would be better than leading them around the world.”
“If she was really so considerate, she would’ve killed herself,” Janet said bluntly. “We’ve had refugees as young as ten, little girls obsessed with fairy tales, and now they’re stuck living at the fringes of them.”
“Couldn’t the Story Spinner do something? Send them home?”