“How big is it?” I blurted. “What is it? What’s beyond it? Did you come on purpose? Is there any way to go back? And how do people become ex-Story?”
She held up a hand to stop me. “It’s quite small. As small as it can be, considering its borders are shifting, unmappable, and nearly impossible to reach. It’s a kingdom of sorts, but it has many queens and many kings. As far as what’s beyond it, I couldn’t say. I did come here on purpose, God help me, and yes, there are ways back. People become ex-Story when their tales are no longer being told. Sometimes it kills them, sometimes it drives them mad, and sometimes they adjust to it nicely and assimilate into the general population. Them I don’t keep track of, though I do like to know when there’s intermarriage. Their children, when they have them, tend to find their way into trouble—or into stories, which I suppose is the same thing. Now, tell me your story, as short or as long as you like.”
I barely had time to open my mouth before I was talking. Whatever she’d had me drink made the words feel like water pouring from a faucet. While I talked, I kept a dim flicker of hope in the back of my mind: that maybe, if I had enough to say, I could keep from telling her the one thing I wanted to keep a secret. At least for now, until I knew how she’d take to having a Story sitting in front of her fire. Curling my white fingers in their gloves, I told Janet about Ella, about Harold and New York and coming home to find her gone. I backtracked and told her about Althea’s supposed death—referring to her as my mother’s mother, close enough to the truth for the truth serum to bear—before jumping forward again to tell her about Ellery Finch, my night in the woods, my hours or days in the Hazel Wood. It was such a relief to speak that it took me a while to notice her face had gone ashen under the warm color of her skin.
“And I met a man on the path,” I said, and faltered. Janet’s hands gripped the arms of the chair, and her eyes looked past me.
She shook her head, trying to smile, then gave it up. “You said you’re Althea’s granddaughter. Althea Proserpine.”
“You’ve heard of her? Have you read her book?”
“No, thankfully. Not a single copy can be found within the Hinterland’s borders. I imagine you’d be thrown to the Night Women if you tried to bring one in. But I did know her—back there. On Earth. Althea was … hmm.” Janet fumbled with something at her wrist, a narrow string of blue beads. Her fingers moved fretfully, making them flash in the firelight. “We came here together,” she said finally.
“Wait, what?” She looked older than Ella but not nearly as old as Althea. Yet she’d been in the Hinterland for … “Fifty years ago you came here? With Althea?”
“Fifty, you said? Fifty years have passed out there?” She laughed a little frantically. “I always imagined I’d—well, maybe I knew I never would, but—I suppose it’s a near certainty my parents are dead, isn’t it? Fifty years, that’s well into the new century, yes?”
I had a brief, dizzying desire to wow her with news of the internet but decided it mattered not at all. “Tell me about Althea,” I said instead.
“Oh, how can I make it quick? How about this: she made a dark deal, and it ripped holes in the curtain that keeps the worlds apart.”
“That sounds a little dramatic,” said my truth-drunk tongue.
“It was pretty goddamned dramatic,” she snapped. “She didn’t even offer to take me back with her, the selfish bitch.”
“Oh,” I said softly. “She was your … you were together?”
“Well, don’t weep for me,” Janet said dismissively. “She was a day-tripper. She mainly liked me for what I could do for her. We had fun, but it never would’ve lasted longer than the summer.”
“The summer Althea found her way into the Hinterland.”
“Of course. We met at a bar in Budapest—she was a pretty American tourist who’d run away from her friends. I was an idiot who never could resist a tough girl. I told her about my fieldwork, and she decided over the course of a cheap bottle that she had to come with me.” Her eyes went unfocused; she plucked the string of her bracelet like a zither.
“Your fieldwork?”
“Doors. Doors between worlds. I started out doing coursework in fairy tales—my parents were professors, my mother at a time when it was rare for a woman to make it as far as she did—but the theoretical became quite real when I found a door in a book.”
“Not metaphorically speaking, I’m guessing.”
“Not at all. Most books’ power is in the abstract, but occasionally you’ll find one with very physical abilities. It was your average fairyland door, quite disappointing if you grew up imagining fairies as air sprites or woodland types—I was stuck underground most of the time. Once I got out again, months later in real time, I was hooked. I dropped the idea of getting a degree and went very hands-on.” Janet had the same strange Hinterland accent Ingrid did, but the more she talked about her past, the more the British in her came out.
“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.