I walked toward the trees, shifting and whispering in the rinsed morning light. When I got close their whispering resolved, for a moment, into words.
Not this way.
I stopped short. A sweet release started in my limbs, the feeling a tree must get in spring, when its sap unfreezes and starts to run. When I blinked, I could see faces in the bark—funny ones, wizened ones, lovely ones. I blinked again and it passed, but the feeling remained. Following some inner compass, I turned away from the woods, walking back toward the cottage, then past it.
I didn’t know from acres, but Janet and Ingrid’s cottage backed onto enough cleared land that it took me at least ten minutes to cross it. It was covered in rambling vegetable gardens, an orchard of fruit trees, outbuildings, and long stretches of meadow where goats ripped at grass or watched me with their oblong eyes. I got the feeling they could talk to me if they chose, but they had nothing to say.
At the end of the property was a low white fence, and beyond that a dirt road. I hopped the fence and turned left. A girl in cutoffs passed me on a bicycle. When I turned to watch her go, she was watching me, too, peering back over her shoulder.
The road ambled along between stands of green. I tried to clear my mind and hold on to the feeling that had put me on this path, with mixed luck. I was always shit at meditation, no matter how often Ella made me try it. I smelled salt on the air and almost turned toward it—somewhere, not too far away, was a fairy-tale sea. But the Hinterland sense humming through me said it wasn’t the place I needed to go.
Once, through the trees, I saw a woman who looked like a sleepwalker, beautiful and wearing a blood-colored dress. Her hooded eyes met mine with interest, and she gave a tiny tilt of her head. It filled me with a stupid pleasure. It’s just like one Prius driver nodding to another, I told myself, but it was more than that. Something had changed since yesterday—I wasn’t lost. When the ground suddenly dipped, tipping my step down into a bowl of grass dotted with creamy pink blossoms, I felt like I’d seen it before. And when I came upon a boy all in white lying fast asleep, curled around a silver mirror, I felt like I’d been expecting him. The air around him was thick with magic, shimmering like a mirage over a hot black road. I tiptoed around his body and back up the other side.
I passed a few cottages, an army-green all-weather tent, and a lean-to made of flowering branches. Beneath it sheltered two long-haired children, who watched me pass with hopeless eyes. I hurried my step, thinking they were Stories, but once they were out of sight I wasn’t so sure. When I saw a Tudor-style tavern on a patch of overgrown grass, I couldn’t tell if it was curiosity or instinct that made me stop.
Judging by the sun, it wasn’t even noon yet, but the place was nearly full. When I walked in, less than half the heads bothered turning.
It was, without a doubt, a refugee bar. The crowd looked like the backpackers at a European hostel crossed with the cast of Medieval Times. I saw Converse sneakers and backpacks, peasant skirts and blue jeans. A girl wearing a tunic similar to mine was holding an ancient flip phone in her hand, rubbing a thumb over it like it was a good-luck charm.
The bartender was a massive man wearing a dashiki and an impressive brown beard. When I bellied up to the bar, he was whistling a Beatles song.
“Hi,” he said. “What’ll it be?” His accent was French, I thought. With a touch of Hinterland laid over it.
“What do you have?”
He eyed me hungrily. “New arrival, is it?” His voice carried, and I sensed a ripple of interest in the room. “For you, I’ve got coffee, real coffee, but only if you can pay.”
My hands went automatically to my pockets, empty.
“Not in money,” he said. “In information.”
“About what?” I asked guardedly.
He arched a dark brow and leaned over the bar. This man looked like a Story, but the air around him was thin and breathable, and he smelled like nothing but hops and sweat. “About the world, of course. Ours.”
I had my gloves on and my sleeves pulled down low. “What do you want to know?”
“To start, what year you’re from. Then you get a drink on the house for every post-1972 song you can sing from start to finish. A free meal for each if you let me record you.”
“Leave her be.” A second bartender straightened up from where she’d been crouched behind the bar. “New house rule: no accosting new arrivals till their second time in the bar.”
She smiled at me. Her hair was yellow, and she wore an honest-to-God dirndl that pushed her breasts up. She looked like the St. Pauli girl.
“First drink’s on the house, newbie,” she said.
“But no coffee,” the bearded guy protested. “That’s only for trades.”
“Fine. Tea okay?” She turned and started pouring before I could respond. The tea was a thin brew the color of Mountain Dew. It smelled like pine needles but tasted pleasantly mild.
“Thanks,” I said, trying to peel my eyes off her hoisted chest. The other bartender did not make the same effort. He watched as she hopped over the bar and started gathering mugs and plates from the rickety tables, then spoke to me under his breath.
“Seriously, though. What year is it?”
I told him, and his mouth drew down at the corners. “Oh,” he said bravely. “Well. Did you bring any books with you?”
The other bartender overheard him and rolled her eyes, disappearing through a door behind the bar.
So I told him the plot of Harry Potter. And The Golden Compass. He plied me with free cups of a buttery yellow beer that tasted exactly like kiwis, and I sang rustily for his recorder—“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Landslide,” “Billie Jean.” The recorder looked like something Alexander Graham Bell might’ve used, a jerry-rigged contraption of tubes, exposed wiring, and a skinny arm scribbling over a soft metal plate.
He saw me looking. “I don’t know how it works,” he confessed, flipping it over to show me its empty insides. “It shouldn’t.”
By then a small crowd had gathered around us, including a bronze-skinned woman with a drowsy, just-woken air to her, whom I read immediately as ex-Story. She was accompanied by a boy of about fifteen, wearing hip plastic glasses. An old man in an antique suit sipped endless mugs of bright green tea and listened to my singing attentively, flashing a parchment-colored smile. There were two barefoot dudes who looked like they’d stumbled in straight from Burning Man and put me on edge. They wore twinned expressions of total peace, but the whites of their eyes were shot through with red. The flora might be different here, but something growing nearby could make you high.
People drifted in and out, and the bartender—his name was Alain, and I had it wrong, he was Swiss—served me a plate of flatbread and stew spiced with something that caught at my throat. The shadows grew long over the bar, until finally he sighed and grabbed a leather satchel from the floor.
“I’m off,” he said. “You’re back to Janet’s tonight?” I’d told him where I came from, though not what I was after. He and everyone else in the bar seemed to know Janet.
I shrugged noncommittally and stretched, reaching inward for the otherworldly sense that drove me here. It twitched to life, half-drowned by liquor and talk and human connection. I’d kept my gloves on, and it almost let me forget I didn’t belong with these people. Unless I could figure out how to become ex-Story, this wasn’t my Hinterland. These weren’t my kind.