“The guy who cut my throat—he was on his way back to his own story—he dropped me pretty close to a refugee village. Left me to die. It was close, but they patched me up. Healing took some time.”
“And Janet?”
“We learned quickly we had a mutual acquaintance,” she said. “We found out what happened to you, and we decided—well, we thought we might help you along a bit. It was his idea.” She looked at Finch, and the motherly pride in her eyes made my heart bob like a buoy.
“You were there,” I said. “Through all of it. You were—always on the edges, trying to get me to notice you.”
Finch laughed. “Dang, Alice. I knew you’d see me eventually.” His laugh had changed—it was a man’s laugh, rumbling under the rubble of his throat. It made me shy.
“Hey!”
The man in the white T-shirt had noticed us; he was waving from the sea of mist. He carried his daughter into one of the cottages squatting on the rising side of the valley, then jogged toward us. But not too close.
“Good travels to you,” he said cautiously.
“Do you have water?” Janet asked. “Food? They could use it.” She gestured at me and the redheaded brother.
The man’s face cleared, and he smiled. “I’m ex-Story, too,” he said.
“How’d you—” I began.
“The clothes. And the smell. Like burnt hair and, you know—” He plucked at the air with his fingertips. “That magic smell.” He was handsome. Twenty years ago he might’ve been somebody’s prince. Or somebody’s poisoner. The Hinterland didn’t tell nice tales.
He brought us a bucket of water, and I sucked down cups of it till my stomach ballooned. The redheaded brother didn’t speak until he’d done the same. He kept smacking his lips, letting the water run over his chin.
“I can taste it,” he said. “It’s sweet and it’s … dusty. Like stone. Can you taste it?”
I knew what he meant. Everything I’d ever eaten or drunk in the story paled next to the electric flavor of this river water. “Yeah. I can taste it.”
He looked at his hands again, trailing his fingers through the air like he was on something. “Look at this. It’s all me, doing this. It’s mine.” He looked up at me sharply, suddenly fearful. “It’s over now, isn’t it? No more story? No more dying?”
I could see Janet hovering over my shoulder, aching to dart in and start asking questions. I ignored her, ignored Finch. I looked at the man who had followed me to another world, to coax me home with gifts that carried me through the Halfway Wood.
His eyes were hazel, and broad freckles dusted his cheeks. It was the details that could drive you crazy—did the Spinner really create him just so? Did she decide on that wedge of darker brown in his left eye? Did she engineer my love of honey?
“Why did you take me?” I asked. I tried to say it gently.
He smiled faintly, his gaze going inward. “I did it for her. For the thief.”
“The thief? You mean … Ella?”
He poured a cupful of water over his hair, tilting his face toward the pale sun. “Before she stole you, she wanted to steal me.”
Oh. Fourteen years my mother spent alone with Althea in the Hazel Wood. But not all alone, not with the Halfway Wood so close.
“But if you … if you loved her. Why did you want to take me away from her?”
“I wanted to help her. And you. And, yes, myself. You were never going to be free, not until we broke it. I’m right, aren’t I? You were never really free?”
I shook my head. I felt stunned and hollow, looking at this stranger my mother might have loved. I would never reach the bottom of what Ella gave up for me. I would never know all the secrets of the life she left behind to run with me. “So what now?” I asked hoarsely. “Are you going back through the woods? To find her?”
He smiled at me, the kind of smile that cost something. He looked young enough to be a college student. My stupid, yearning heart dipped as I remembered dreaming, long ago, that he was my father.
“I’ve lived too many lives since I loved her,” he said. “I’ve died too many deaths. It doesn’t just … it leaves an echo.”
It leaves an echo. Would it be the same for me? There’d been moments even before the story, wild, piercing moments, when the Hinterland sang high in my blood and I wondered—should I stay here? If, a world away, Ella might already be gone? Maybe I belonged in this place, where my bones grew in the night and my eyes were black ponds and my cells were made of the same strange stuff that made up the trees and the water and the earth.
But now I was feeling an itch under my skin. Somewhere far away, on some other clock, the days were counting down on my mother’s life. Whether seven years had passed or seventy, I had to get to wherever she was. She deserved to see me this way—as an ex-Story, not just a stolen one.
I turned away from the red-haired brother. “Which way to the border?”
The handsome man had backed up politely while we spoke, pretending not to hear us. Now his face closed like a fist, and he pointed in a general way toward the land stretching beyond the valley.
“I don’t know what could be waiting there for you,” he said. “But good travels to you all the same.”
I turned to Finch. “It’s time. Let’s go home.”
His face was soft and sorry. Janet touched the redheaded brother’s sleeve; she led him gently away.
“Alice,” said Finch.
It dawned on me, what I already should have known. “You’re not coming, are you?”
He sighed and took my arm, walking with me into the fog. It swirled around our knees, our hips, higher. It had a gentle, flexible give, like wet petals against my skin.
No matter how much time had passed in this world or the other, Finch had changed. He’d grown up. At the fringes of my story, in a brutal make-believe world. But that wouldn’t have been his whole life. He must’ve been living with more of the displaced all this time. I pictured him at the refugee bar, falling in love with some Earth girl. In my mind she had a smile without shadows in it, and perfect jeans.
I was feeling more human all the time.
“I’m not going back,” he said, answering my question minutes after I’d asked it.
“Why not?”
“Because this was always what I wanted. Not quite the way I got it, of course. It shouldn’t have been like that. Alice, it shouldn’t have been blood money.” He sounded suddenly, comfortingly unsure.
“I know. You’ve made up for that, don’t you think?”
“I hope so,” he said seriously. “But that wasn’t what this was about. I wanted to see something through to the very end. And I’ve been living here all this time, in this world. It isn’t all bad. It’s beautiful. And strange. And bigger than you’d think. Alice, there’s a whole ocean. And ice caves—oh, you know that. I heard there are pools in the mountains that are a thousand feet deep, and clear as glass.”
“Fairy-tale shit.”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “Fairy-tale shit.”
“And there’s a girl?”
He smiled. It was so kind I almost died of embarrassment. “There might be. But believe me when I say I wouldn’t leave the whole world behind just for a girl.”