“Try,” he whispered, so quiet it was almost a breath. “Remember.”
He was a man I’d seen twice before he’d come with his brother to present me with ice, but I couldn’t remember how or where. Not family, not servant, not soldier. Who was he? I saw the dusty blue side of a carriage, a hoop fallen on grass.
That wasn’t quite right.
I saw a rusty blue Buick, the Hula-Hoop I’d been spinning doggedly over my hips when he pulled up beside me.
“Hi,” he’d said.
I’d ignored him, annoyed he made my hoop fall.
“I’m a friend of your grandmother’s,” he told me. “The writer, Althea Proserpine. She wants to meet you. Will you come with me to see her?”
My head snapped up. “Does she have horses?”
“Lots of them. And a swimming pool. She wants very much for you to visit, Alice.”
I’d let the hoop roll to a halt and climbed into his car. I clicked the heels of my white cowboy boots together like Dorothy, for luck, and we were off.
The memory crashed through the delicate webbing that kept my world together. I shivered and thawed on the grass, sending off meltwater and seized with visions. A woman in white denim overalls studded with cigarette burns. The sound of her quiet cursing, waking me to a sea of brake lights stretched out on the road ahead. Go back to sleep, Alice.
Her name. What was her name? The memories boiled up—Christmas lights on a whitewashed wall, slipping my legs out from beneath hers in early morning. The smell of coffee beans, cheap macaroni, burning sage. The sour crunch of my ankle when I jumped from a crabapple tree and she wasn’t quick enough to catch me. The feeling of her beside me in the world, the invisible searchlight that stretched between us.
“Ella,” I wheezed from my frozen throat.
The man didn’t hear me; he dipped his ear closer. “Do you remember me?”
“Blue Buick.”
He grinned. “We’re changing it already,” he whispered. “It’s almost broken. I needed you to come back here, so you could help me break it.”
“Why…”
“Because I’m not a page in a book,” he said, cradling my head.
Then he screamed, a high rabbit sound that boiled the last of the ice from my blood.
He fell onto me, pinning me to the ground. I was still weak, and it took longer than it should’ve to get free. It took an age. When I finally struggled out from under him, I saw the ax in his back. Behind him stood his brother, humped and frozen and watching me out of dead eyes. All around us the air thrilled with silver sparks, so bright I squeezed my eyes shut. I could still see them against the hot red of my eyelids: a glowing tapestry of threads. Tiny, even brighter flickers of light ran like spiders around the hole we’d snagged in it: a hole the shape of the redheaded brother who’d tried to change our story. I winched my eyes open and saw the raw threads being snipped and stitched back into place by invisible fingers.
A handful of tiny, spidery points of light jumped toward me. I shrieked and scrambled back, my movements dulled by cold. One of the lights reached my temple, burning through it like a fleck of ash thrown off by a bonfire. First I felt it on my skin, then under it, burrowing there and rearranging my brain.
“Ella,” I gasped, holding her in my mind’s eye. Her brown eyes, her long blonde hair … no! That wasn’t her, that was the other mother. The one who made my cruelty grow like a vine.
More of the sparkling things jumped at me, as the redheaded man moved limply on the ground. His brother fell back to earth, dead again once he’d done what the story needed him to do.
“Spinner,” I whispered. I remembered her now, how I’d followed her like a lost dog into the twisted heart of the Hinterland. Into the story I meant to break free of, long, long ago. Because this wasn’t a life I’d been living, it was a story.
When it was far too late, she’d told me there was no way out. But she hadn’t told me it was because the story fought back if you tried. The spider-sparks still worked in the air, moving the weaving back to rights. They pulled the ax from the younger brother’s back, they sizzled into my brain, they put him on his feet and closed up the rip in his flesh.
He couldn’t die, I realized. Until it was part of the story. It would be me who would kill him, as I had his brother. Because in this story, I was the monster.
But was that really me? Horror hardened my skin. It sent the cruel little sparks bouncing off it like fire off a forge. I held on to that tenacious spike of fear and rage. I couldn’t let my story end this way.
The redheaded man stood, but barely. His eyes were wild; he leaned over his knees and vomited up a thin yellow bile.
“We have to go,” he panted. “Before…”
Before it happened again. I moved between him and the corpse on the ground. If I was a monster, at least I could be a helpful one.
“Get on the horse,” I said. It came out slurred, like I was on Novocain.
I grabbed the ax from where it lay next to the dead man. The threads glittered to life, an angry matrix that flexed around my fingers on the handle, biting at my skin with a pain that started out irritating and turned to agony.
“Get on the horse,” I said, turning my face from the sizzle of my skin. “Now!”
Still gasping, the younger brother heaved himself onto my dowry. On the ground, his brother jerked, then rose, lurching, his movements close enough to human to make the differences horrifying.
I wrapped my burning hands tight around the ax handle. The corpse watched me through eyes like frozen forget-me-nots, and lunged.
I smelled sweat and ice and something rank and unplaceable, before swinging wildly. The ax thudded into his shoulder with the sick sound of a boot on mud.
He looked down at it, then up. I swore he smiled at me, his teeth small and gray, before folding his hands around my throat.
Can you really die in a story?
Maybe not.
But you can die in a whole world built for it, full of cruel queens and black-eyed princesses and men with hands meant for violence. At least for a little while. My vision opened and closed like a butterfly’s wings and my head fell forward. The corpse laughed again, till I arched up and fixed my lips on his.
I blew. Not ice this time. I blew out ice’s opposite: the heat and the rage of being away from Ella. Trapped here. Forced into the role of murderer by a distant storyteller with no horse in the race. I did it because a girl doing nothing in a fairy tale ends up dead or worse, but a girl who makes a decision usually gets rewarded.
My reward was this: the taste of metal and sweat on lips like two cold maggots. His hands slackening on my neck. Dropping to his sides. He made the horrible grinding sound of a motor failing and fell to the ground. I angled my head to the side and pulled the ax from his chest.
When I turned I felt like I was wearing twenty tons of iced-over armor. I moved, shivering, toward the horse. It shied away from me, from the insect onslaught of sparks surrounding me. The redheaded brother leaned down and covered its eye with one hand, whispering soft things into its ear.
The fabric of the world was fully visible now, a glittering weave that snagged around us both. I hefted the ax and swung it through the threads suspended between me and the horse, but nothing changed.
“Goddammit!” I screamed. I fell to my knees and started crawling. The horse, surrounded by the glittering, shivering source code of the world, did what I’d have liked to do: reared back in holy terror and ran.