The Night Country

14

If you ever have the chance to bear witness to a dying world, don’t.

Ellery Finch didn’t know what he was doing when he cracked open the golden prison that held Alice Proserpine, Alice Crewe, Alice-Three-Times, and let her loose.

He learned quick.

Her departure from the Hinterland left a tear in the skin of his world. For a while there, saving her had been his life. His obsession, his penance. He’d watched her grow up from afar, sealed inside her tale. With some help, he’d sprung her loose. Or he guessed it was Alice, in the end, who’d saved herself. But he’d started the thing.

It should have been enough. When he said goodbye to her she was wearing a heavy dress that could’ve been a McQueen and shoes that might’ve been spun from cobwebs and her eyes were a raw, desperate brown. The scent of her broken story hung around her still.

He watched her disappear over the Hinterland’s tricky horizon line, riding away on a rusty red bicycle. When she was gone from sight, the very last tether between him and his old life, the one he’d lived on Earth, snapped. Their tale together was through.

He had his own life in the Hinterland. Of course he did. That world, the one he’d sacrificed decency and a hefty amount of blood to gain, was beautiful and befuddling, inexhaustible and heedless. Its trees told stories. Its grass was fed by them. Finch had never come so close to having a book hold him back. There were patches of sky where the stars moved like living fireworks, creeks where girls with corpse-colored skin and dirty hair sang like bullfrogs and watched him through hungry eyes. He had friends there, other refugees, who understood without asking that he had more scars than the ones you could see.

In the days after Alice left, he tried to remind himself why he’d stayed. He and his friends—Alain, a broadly built Swiss guy who worked at the tavern, and Lev, a laconic Venezuelan who ran an occasional smithy—went skinny-dipping in a pool behind a tumbledown castle, lining the shore with lanterns. They trekked through the constant early summer that reigned in the heart of the Hinterland, up across an afternoon of cold spring, over a fiery stripe of autumn, and into the hushed halls of a winter so enchanted and still, walking through the trees felt like church. They camped one night in a cove of glittering sand, where a white-furred stag took to the waters each night, and cried to the stars in the voice of a human soprano.

They’d had years to learn the movements of the Stories and steer clear. It should’ve been easy. But ten days after Alice left, Finch woke up in his sleeping bag on the cove’s cold sand, in the silvery, predawn hour, with a girl crouching beside him.

He didn’t speak. Neither did she. She was younger than he was—twelve or thirteen, he’d guess—with dark blue eyes and a solemn little face. In one hand, she held a compass.

She was a Story. That enervating Story scent came off her, and her skin had the radiant tackiness of a makeup ad. She shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t have noticed him, certainly shouldn’t be hanging over him like she was waiting for him to speak. If his friends were awake, too, those cowards sure weren’t showing it. Finally he became too nervous to stay quiet.

“Hi,” he breathed.

“Hello.” She had a scratchy little voice, like Peppermint Patty.

“Um. Did you … want something from me?”

She shrugged. Nothing to say, and no apparent intention of leaving. Finch had the most inappropriate flare of social anxiety.

“My name’s Ellery. Finch.” She didn’t seem like she wanted to kill him, but still. Maybe it would be harder for her to do it if he had a name.

“My name’s Hansa,” she replied. “I’m meant to be somewhere else today. But I decided I didn’t want to go.” She looked a little bit proud of herself, a little bit astonished. “My grandmother will be mad at me, I suppose.”

Hansa. Hansa the Traveler. The moon’s granddaughter, heroine of one of Althea Proserpine’s tales. Finch bit down hard on a helium panic.

“Where are you supposed to be?”

She shook off the question like she was shaking off a fly. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said cryptically, and stood, the rising sun slicing sharply over her shoulder. “Well. Goodbye.”

Now that she was actually going, Finch was oddly frantic for her to stay.

“Wait! Are you—I mean. This is weird, right?” He looked around, at the quiet sand and lightening sky and the corroded metal of the water. “That you’re here? That you’re—” Free. Outside. Of your tale. He wanted to say it, but he didn’t want to piss her off.

The little girl was already looking away, bored. “I’ve never swum in the sea before,” she told him. Then she took off, legs scurrying toward the water like a sandpiper’s.

Finch watched her for a minute, his jaw feeling slack yet tense, like he’d been clenching it all night.

Lev whistled from the sleeping bag behind him. “Look at that. Another one of the Spinner’s birds flown free.”

“Another?”

“Her, your Alice.” He looked at Finch, the sun on his glasses making his eyes into silver circles. “I think you’ve started something.”

Neither spoke for a moment, watching the unlatched Story splashing at the water’s edge. Behind them, Alain was still asleep.

“I wonder.” Lev’s voice was quiet, amused. “If this is because of you, I wonder if the Spinner’s mad. I wonder if she’s the vengeful type. I’d bet she was, wouldn’t you?”

She is, Finch could’ve told him. She’d shown her face to him—one of her faces—just once, back when he was trying to break Alice free. She’d been amused, flirtatious, and frightening by turns. He figured it was just a matter of time before she showed up again. That was one more reason he couldn’t sleep.

Finch was pissed at Lev as they packed up their stuff. Pissed as they both agreed without talking not to say anything to Alain. Still pissed as they set off on foot toward home.

Alain was talking about some new invention he’d made, an amplification system Finch knew without knowing more was a bad idea. It didn’t do to call too much attention to yourself here. They were walking through a quiet stretch of trees on the edge of a pretty town when Lev spoke up.

“Hansa lives there,” he said.

Alain, interrupted, frowned. “Hansa who? From-the-story Hansa? Who cares?”

Lev just smiled like a goddamned sphinx. “We should walk through it. Nobody’ll be awake yet, come on.”

He was like that. Quiet and chill, then suddenly an anarchist, basically daring you not to have the guts.

For once Finch was a step ahead: he’d walked through that town before. He’d dared far stupider shit since landing in the Hinterland. Almost dying will do that to you. And besides, Althea had done it when she was collecting her tales. For a while he’d tried to follow in her footsteps, just to see if he could survive that, too.

“Let’s go,” was all he said, turning toward the town.

If Norman Rockwell ever illustrated a fairy-tale book, he’d have painted this town. A blue haze hung over it, like the steam that sometimes came up off the sea. The houses had thatched tops and candy-colored doors and secretive windows roosting in ivy. Finch could see a woman through one of them, running a brush through her heavy hair.

Alain was afraid, Finch could tell by the way he walked. Lev, though. That fucker was cocky.

They were coming up on a small yellow cottage that seemed a little more solid than the rest, though Finch couldn’t have explained why. Then he saw it: a blackness ran around the cottage’s base. It looked ephemeral at first, a trick of your eyes or the light, the kind of thing you should be able to blink away. It resolved, as they came closer, into a thin layer of simmering mist. It made the house look like it was a countdown away from taking off.

“What is that?” Lev muttered. He looked at Finch, sly. “Must be Hansa’s house.”

He walked toward it in his enviable leather hiking boots. They were still in excellent shape, though he’d been in the Hinterland longer than Finch had. He bent over just beside the mist, hands on his knees. “Huh.”

“Don’t,” Finch said sharply, as Lev nudged the mist with his boot.

He spoke the word to no one. In the moment between opening his mouth and speaking, the mist claimed Lev. It wicked him into itself like a sponge taking in water. Mischief managed.

The Hinterland was a clock, perfectly weighted and balanced and spinning in time. The refugees lived tucked among the cogs, learning when to duck and what parts of their borrowed world to avoid.

Finch, it turned out, had fucked with that clock. Alice’s removal wasn’t smooth and surgical. It was a fist plunging into the guts of what the Spinner had made, and ripping out a handful of smoking pieces. The center could not hold.

After Lev disappeared, Finch got drunk. He and Alain, shaken, sick, run through with guilt—Finch’s worse for having been halfway hoping something would happen to shake Lev’s infuriating cool, but not something like this—holed up in the tavern. Lights off, doors locked, they sat at the bar in companionable horror and drank. There was no one to tell, no one to report this to, no next of kin to notify. There was just them, trying and failing to fathom what the hell had happened to their friend.

The shadows were long and Alain asleep when Finch had a hypothesis.

He’d spent hours in Alice’s castle before her tale broke. Sneaking in through its many doors, circling its grounds. He’d moved among its footmen and handmaids and cooks, all the nearly invisible figures that kept a fairy tale afloat.

He’d breached it first at night, and then, when he got a little braver, during the day. The whole place fizzed like a fishbowl full of magic, but it was only where Alice was, where the air got woozy, that it was dangerous. It was a weird and winding place, full of doors that wouldn’t open, staircases that led nowhere, odd rooms that had no place in her tale. There was a courtyard at the castle’s heart where it never stopped snowing, a nestled globe of permanent winter.

Even inside a nightmare, the Hinterland could be beautiful.

Now he left Alain sleeping behind the bar and walked out into the alarmingly sweet evening air. He’d bicycled drunk before, more times than he cared to count. But the dizziness he felt wheeling away on his bike couldn’t be blamed on intoxication. He pulled over, checked the bike’s chain, squeezed the tires. The slight vertigo that made him list to the side, that pressed down on him funny from above, wasn’t confined to biking: it was systemic. It was atmospheric. There was something off-kilter in the very air of the Hinterland.

He pushed the bike the rest of the way. Alice’s castle should’ve been showing itself through the trees, slices of darker dark between branches. The white stone path broadened and still he didn’t see it. He thought he might’ve gotten lost somehow, until he came to the familiar dip in the road, the half-circle of honeysuckle bushes, and the open plot of land on which the castle crouched.

On which it had crouched: the castle was gone. All of it. Gates and stables and mossy stone walls. Hidden rooms and corridors and all the other odd fancies of the Spinner. It wasn’t burned to ash or left in ruins—it was gone. In its place was a low, swirling mist, an eye-aching emptiness that shimmered in places like lights on water.

It was the same blackness that had hooked its fingers around Hansa’s cottage. But it had spread, and consumed. Alice’s tale had broken, and in its wake was annihilation; Hansa stepped off the path of her own story, and the destruction of it had just begun.

His hypothesis had proved correct.

In the deep dark middle of the night, he went back to Hansa’s. For a long time he watched the place where Lev was lost. When nothing happened, he walked away, ten long steps. Then he turned and ran at the cottage, throwing himself over the blackness at its roots. Safe on the other side, he let himself in.

He walked through the cottage’s quiet rooms, running his eyes over its beds and curtains, its dishes and chairs. Moving through one of the upper bedrooms, he paused. There, on a low table, sat a little spyglass made out of a rosy metal. For a long moment, he looked at it.

He took it. From the kitchen he took a wooden spoon with a ship’s silhouette burned into its bowl. From a windowsill, a little mechanical fox that twitched its anime eyes and its three tails and made a whirring sound. He couldn’t say why he did it, just that these particular objects made his fingers itch and he knew that soon enough they’d be lost, along with the cottage and whatever was left of Hansa’s tale, to the spreading fog.

He dropped them into his old leather bag, jumped to safety, and ran all the way home.