Until he grew bored of the stepmother, just as he’d once grown bored of his wife—just as he’d always been bored of his daughters. He kissed the stepmother goodbye, nodded at his daughters, and was gone.
It didn’t take long for the stepmother to grow impatient. She snapped at the girls, slapped them at the slightest provocation, carried scissors in her pocket to cut off hanks of their long hair when they displeased her. Every time she left the house, she locked the girls up—to keep them from misbehaving, she said. She kept them in their mother’s room, where the windows were rusted shut and the dark stain on the floor taunted Anya like a vile black eye. Their mother’s bed had been chopped into firewood at their father’s command, all the pretty things she’d surrounded herself with locked away. They were just two girls in an empty room with a poisonous blot on the floor.
At first their stepmother stayed away for a few hours at a time. Then for whole days, then entire nights. The first time she left them locked up from dusk to dawn, Anya beat on the door and screamed till her throat and fists were raw, but no one came.
When the stepmother finally opened the door, she wrinkled her nose at the smell and gestured at the chamber pot. “Empty it,” she said. Kohl and rouge melted into candy swirls on her cheeks; she wouldn’t meet her stepdaughters’ eyes.
Finally there came a day when she locked them in with a bowl of apples and a jug of water and never came back. The sun rose and fell, rose and fell. On the third day Anya looked out the window and saw the servants walking away from the house one by one, their belongings on their backs.
The house was empty. The apples were eaten, the water long gone. The windows stayed shut and the glass wouldn’t give, even when Anya smashed at it with her boot.
That night the sisters lay together in the middle of the floor, trying to keep each other warm. Then Anya heard a sound she’d nearly forgotten. It was a sound like leaves rustling together outside the window.
It came from the bloodstain on the floor. Slowly she inched her way toward it, resting her ear just over it and holding her breath.
It was deep, deep in the night when the rustling resolved into a voice.
You will die, the voice told her.
Anya rolled back onto the floor, angry. I know, she replied fiercely, in her mind. We’re half-dead already.
You will die, the voice said again. Unless.
And it told her how she could save herself and her sister. How she could remake the world just enough so that they could live.
It would take blood.
The next morning Anya told her sister, Lisbet, what she’d learned: they must make a door. Their mother wasn’t dead, she was gone—she’d used magic to make a door, and it had taken her far, far away. Their mother’s blood had spoken to Anya, and told her how to make a door of their own, to meet her.
It will take blood, she told Lisbet, but it can’t be mine.
It was a lie. She wasn’t bad, she was frightened. The idea of opening her own veins filled her with a sick terror that felt like falling, forward and forward without end. She ignored the bitter taste of the lie in her mouth.
She took the bone knife from the place the voice had told her she’d find it: behind a loose brick inside the cold fireplace.
It can’t be mine, she said again, because I’m the sorcerer. I must make the door, and you must sacrifice the blood for it.
Lisbet nodded, but something in her eyes told Anya she knew the words were a lie.
It made her angry. When she drew the blade across her sister’s wrist, the anger made her careless, and the blade bit too deep.
But Lisbet said nothing as her sister took her wrist and used it to paint a door.
She painted the sides of it first, in two continuous lines, scraping Lisbet’s wrist across the stone. She lifted her as high as she could to paint a lintel over the top. When Anya eased her down and set her back on her feet, Lisbet was as white as the flesh of an apple.
Anya turned away from her sister’s drained face and said the words that would make the blood into a door. Words the voice had said into her ear, three times so she’d remember.
All at once the stone wicked up the blood, and the red of it became lines of warm white light. The newly made door swung toward them, letting out a breath of warm air and a scent like clean cotton. They held hands and watched it open.
Then Lisbet moaned, and swayed, and crumpled to the ground. Her cold fingertips stretched out before her, nearly touching the door.
The door that wasn’t there, and then was. The door that her lifeblood fed.
At the moment she let go her last breath, the white light shuddered and went green. The green of infected wounds, of nightmares, of the rind of mold that crawled over week-old bread. The cotton scent turned dusty and stuck in Anya’s throat.
She threw herself against the door, but it was too late. It opened, inch by inch, yawning with dank air like the mouth of a cellar.
Anya didn’t think her mother could be behind that door, but she had nowhere else to go. She lifted Lisbet and carried her through.
Behind it was a room like the one they’d left—but reversed. Anya’s eyes went to the dark stain on the floor. It was fresh and pooling red. She ran across the room, still holding Lisbet’s body, and wrenched open the bedroom door.
The hall behind it curved left instead of right, and the lanterns on the wall were gone, replaced with paintings of people Anya didn’t recognize. Their eyes were burned-out holes and their mouths were wet and red. The hall hummed with that same heavy green light.
Cradling Lisbet in her arms, Anya moved through the house. It smelled of coal dust and blood. In every fireplace curled low green flames. On every table were plates of rotting meat, or blackened flowers with livid yellow pollen dripping from their hearts.
When she opened the front door she saw the sickness spread beyond the house. The branches of trees had become slender bones, and the dust of the road was crackling ashes.
I did this, she said to herself. I killed my sister—her death made a door, and the door opened onto Death!
It took her hours, but she dug up enough of the burnt earth to bury her younger sister. Then she set off toward town, to see if she could find anything living.
Town was a place of strange horrors. Not a body to be seen, human nor animal, just a heavy green sky that bathed the whole world in a light the color of disease, and locked doors of houses, and windows painted a blind black.
Anya saw no one. She needed neither sleep nor food nor drink, and when she ran the bone knife over her own wrist it didn’t make a nick in her skin. She climbed the dense black vines spilling over the walls of a cottage, to the crumbling gray stones of its roof. She jumped off.
But she drifted to earth like an autumn leaf, touching down unharmed. There she lay, praying for an end, even though every prayer tasted as bitter as the lie that had killed her sister. It was then that the voice spoke to her again.
It had been a long time since she’d lain on the floor of her mother’s bedroom letting it whisper secrets into her ear. Longer than she thought. Far away, her stepmother was dead, killed by a fever. Her father had taken a new bride. He had a son.
Can you take me back home? Anya pleaded.
You’re asking the wrong question, the voice replied.
It led her through town, back to the grave she’d dug in front of her father’s house. From it a black walnut tree had grown. Its rustling leaves were the only moving things in the land of Death. Lisbet, Anya whispered, and lay her hand on its trunk.