And my heart sank, because I knew this wasn’t any more real than the rest of it. It couldn’t have been, because my grandmother was there waiting for me, sitting on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette.
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23
Althea looked good. She looked real. She wore cigarette pants and a striped boatneck shirt and, oddly, short white gloves. Like the Hazel Wood, she resembled exactly my idea of her—the level blue eyes, the elegant bones. Through the window behind her I saw snowy grounds and a strange white sky, bathing the room in a lunar glow. It made the shadows deeper. A nightlight cast a valiant circle of orange against the wall.
“Do you want to hear a story?” Althea asked.
I froze. Before I could respond, a mulish voice from the bed beat me to it. “No.”
Ella lay in the shadows, arms flung over her head and one foot on the floor. She looked older again—fifteen, maybe sixteen. Too old for bedtime stories.
Althea exhaled a thin haze of blue smoke. “Oh, yes, you do.”
“I really, really don’t.” But Ella didn’t move, beyond propping her head up on her hands. She was old enough now that she looked like herself, dark and fierce and distracted. It took all my strength not to rush to her, but I knew whatever I was seeing wasn’t real. Wasn’t happening now.
Althea began. “Once upon a time there was a beautiful queen and a brave princess and a castle in the middle of a forest.”
“I know that one.”
“Then I’ll go back a little further. Once upon a time there was a beautiful queen who thought words were stronger than anything. She used them to win love and money and gifts. She used them to carry her across the world.” Althea laid out her words like a dealer lays out cards, with a distant, mesmeric precision. “And one day when she was very, very bored, she used them to convince a noblewoman to lead her into another kingdom, a place out of legend, and far beyond her own kingdom’s borders.”
“The Hinterland.” There was a sharp edge to Ella’s voice that saved it from being indifferent.
“Hush. This is my story, not yours. As I was saying, this new kingdom—the Other Kingdom—was strange and dangerous and far from home. The queen quickly grew homesick and set about trying to find a way back. It was said there were doors that could take her where she wanted to go, but they hid themselves from her. And do you know what you do when you can’t find a door?” She itsy-bitsy-spidered her fingers across the air. “You build a bridge.”
I stood rooted halfway between the door and the bed. Althea’s voice worked on me like a shot, loosening my limbs and sharpening my vision, leaving a hot ache in my chest.
“In the Other Kingdom there were many kings and queens, each equally powerful. But the queen set out to find the kingdom’s true ruler—not royalty, but someone far more important. A storyteller. A master of words. When the queen found her, she very convincingly shared her plight—she was a master of words, too—and soon the storyteller whispered the secret of escape into the queen’s ear.
“But the storyteller made a mistake in trusting the queen. When she escaped from the Other Kingdom, she took something with her—something that held the walls of the world in place and kept the stars from coming down. Something she brought back to her own kingdom and shared with all of her subjects: stories. All the stories of the Other Kingdom. She told them, and told them again, and they were told and retold all over the realm.”
Althea’s voice was losing its soporific thrum, like the nap rubbing off velvet. Her eyes gleamed in the weird white light.
“The queen felt rich, richer than she’d ever been, until she realized what she’d done: by carrying the Other Kingdom’s greatest treasure across her bridge, she’d drawn the two kingdoms tight, tight together—until they were like two hills rising side by side, then the sun and the moon in eclipse, then a hand in a glove stitched too snug.”
Sew the worlds up with thread. The words sang in my head and passed away.
My grandmother’s voice dropped to a whisper. “But nobody knew it except the queen. Nobody else noticed when terrible things started happening. When the queen threw festivals, demons arrived in dresses, and hid their red eyes behind masks. If she stayed in one castle too long, a darkness grew over everything and everyone around her, like briars. People from the Other Kingdom slipped through their hidden doors to mock her, for believing she’d escaped. For thinking she’d gotten away with her theft. Then one night, someone from the Other Kingdom snuck inside her castle and murdered her king.”
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.”