Not an instrument, a voice. A sweeping voice with a bracing range that made even the trees go quiet. I tilted my head back to watch the sky.
Then the Spinner was there, rolling her eyes, singing “Yellow Submarine” at the top of her lungs and slapping me hard. “Pedal!” she yelled between verses. “Have some pride in your pedigree! You’re not some idiot refugee, you’re Alice-Three-Times!”
I followed her, anger thudding dull behind my eyes. Once we’d left it far enough behind, the music crept from my body like a sugar high, leaving me shaky.
At the end of night the forest ended sharp as a knife, the road turning from a narrow chain to a broad white ribbon. The last of the moon slipped away and the sun bellied up, the two shouldering past each other for one radiant moment that seared brighter than fireworks and filled me with a rush of joy.
Until the Spinner turned us toward the castle.
Home.
The word swam up from the same neglected place inside of me that knew the name of the Briar King, and recognized the contours of this world in the way I’d know the breadth of my own body in the dark.
It looked like an abandoned toy. The road wound toward it, and it grew up from the road, made of the same white stone. It was a rambling thicket of turrets and dull windows and decorative outcroppings. At their center was a narrow tower slashed with murder holes. The whole thing wore a shroud of fog that breathed and twisted under its own weather.
I planted my heels hard in the road, tasting bile at the back of my throat. “I’m not going in there.”
The Spinner laughed, and I startled back. She’d changed again. Her face was a soft circle, her hair cropped shorter than mine. She was dressed like a knight.
“And yet,” she said, hand on the hilt of a narrow sword, “there’s no way out without first going in. Once upon a time, Alice-Three-Times.”
Her final words had an extra resonance to them, a blur. Like they wore a mask to hide their true intentions.
Don’t trust her. But my heart was slowing, and the thought found no purchase.
The fog drifted and spun, moving like steam over tea. A black shadow hovered around me, a migraine aura narrowing in on the spiky shape of the castle. We were walking our bikes toward it, not riding, and I couldn’t remember when I’d stopped pedaling. My mind felt curiously blank.
The Spinner’s back wheel made a chewed-up, motorcycle sound. I leaned to yank out the playing card stuck in its spokes.
Twice-Killed Katherine’s face looked up at me—two of them, in flipped mirror image like a queen card. In the top she looked freshly fed; at the bottom she was gaunt, her hair run through with a frail skunk stripe.
The Spinner snatched it away, tore it in two. “Refugees,” she muttered. “They have funny ideas about fun.”
The sight of Katherine’s feral face shoved me back into myself. The shadow receded, and I could see the orange wash of sunrise on white stone, the overgrown curves of gardens stretching behind the castle. My hands sticking out of my tunic sleeves like scarecrow limbs made of ice.
“Ella,” I whispered. “Mom.”
The Spinner cocked her head. “Nothing goes into the story but you,” she said. “Right now you’ve got your other life all over you—they’ll smell it on your skin.” She gave me a smile that should’ve been beguiling but made my shoulders rise protectively. “They’ll be jealous. The quickest way to end this is to begin it, and that’s no way to start, is it?”
The condescension in her voice almost made me buckle. The quickest way to end this, like she believed I could. But she didn’t. She never had. That wasn’t why she’d led me here.
She was a jailer taking me back to my cell, and I was letting her. Based on the idiot notion that somewhere inside it was a key.
The castle grew larger as we moved closer, giving me a dizzy, shrinking feeling. The shapes of it sharpened, but everything else was flattening: the scent of green and pollen and rain, the smoky taste of morning. Birdsong and breeze went tinny, like I was hearing them through bad speakers, then cut off short as we stepped into the castle courtyard.
I sniffed in hard, let air run over my tongue—tasteless. The castle was a dead place.
“Not dead,” the Spinner said. “Just stopped. Missing a gear.”
I startled. “How did you—”
She shook her head, impatient. “The quicker it begins, the quicker it ends.”
The clockwork bride in her litter had eyes like the Spinner’s, I realized. If the Spinner created everything, had she made some of us in her own image? She could wear any face, but she couldn’t get rid of those eyes.
I blinked and saw my hand pushing open the door to the Hazel Wood. Then here, now, pushing at the tall stone doors of the castle.
28
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.