Furthermore(32)

“What is it?” she gasped, looking around. “What happened?”

“You cannot sleep without a dream,” he said urgently. “Never, ever, sleep without a dream.” He looked so rattled; she didn’t know what to say. “They will always try to keep you here, but you cannot stay. Do you understand?”

“No,” said Alice, who was still visibly frightened. “I don’t understand at all. Who will try to keep me? Why?”

“You really don’t know, do you? You truly know nothing of Furthermore?”

“Of course I don’t,” said Alice, defensive. “I’ve heard only rumors of Furthermore, and most of them nonsense. Aside from that?” She looked around. “Well, we are standing on a cloud, Oliver. I can’t possibly make any sense of this.”

Oliver almost smiled. “People are so preoccupied with making sense despite it being the most uninteresting thing to manufacture.” He shook his head. “Making magic,” he said, “is far more interesting than making sense.”

“But we do make magic,” Alice pointed out. “It’s all we make, isn’t it? We spend our lives harvesting magic.”

“Yes,” said Oliver. “We make magic. And what do we do with it? We turn it into currency. We make laws. We build homes, we bake bread, we mend bones. We use magic so carefully you’d think we had none at all.”

“And you think we should do things differently in Ferenwood?”

“No,” Oliver said quickly. “Not exactly. But I do think there’s much to be appreciated in the oddness of Furthermore. There’s something curious about a land that uses magic in a reckless way.” He smiled to himself. “I confess I sometimes enjoy the chaos; it provides a great diversion from the safe, sleepy lives we live in Ferenwood.”

Alice touched a hand to her face, cold against cold, both warming each other from nothing, and kept quiet for a minute. Oliver’s opinions had left her troubled and concerned; and she wondered, for the very first time, whether she hadn’t made a very big mistake in coming here.

Alice didn’t agree with Oliver, you see.

Alice loved her safe, steady village, and for a girl who’d always longed for adventure, she didn’t much care for chaos. In fact, Alice had never even thought of using magic haphazardly, without regard for consequences or the well-being of others. That just wasn’t the way of Ferenwood folk; they were kind and caring people who lived mostly happy, straightforward lives. A lawless sort of magic-making seemed dangerous to Alice. Lawless magic, she realized, would make it easy to hurt someone else. And despite it taking her far too long to discern this, Alice was finally grasping something rather important.

“Oliver,” she said slowly.

“Yes?”

“Are there people in Furthermore who want to kill us?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

Alice felt a pain snatch the air from her lungs.

“Why, Alice,” Oliver said, surprised, “there’s a reason why the Elders keep Furthermore a secret from Ferenwood. This land is like sinking sand. Once you step inside, you’re never really meant to leave.”

“Ever?” she cried.

“Never.”

“But why?”

“I really would like to tell you, but it would take far too long to explai—”

Oliver was silenced by a single, threatening look from Alice.

“Oh, alright,” he said with an air of defeat. “We can spare a few—and only a few!—moments to talk this through. And I suppose it’s best to start from the beginning if you haven’t even a hint of the middle.” He looked around for something to lean on and found nothing but sky, so he began pacing the short length of the cloud. “You know the old song, don’t you?” he said. “About Furthermore and Ferenwood?”

This much, Alice knew. So she nodded and promptly recited:

Farther is more than Ferenwood!

Go as far as the land may reach

A quick dip in the sea

and you’re up to your knees

then cross the sleeping beach.

Time is a hard and heavy rule

You’ll find it behind the door

Adventure is there

(he’s lost all of his hair)

Beyond is Furthermore!

It was a nursery rhyme Alice had known forever. A tale of nonsense, she was told. Just funny words strung together to trick children into sleep. It was only now, as Alice repeated the words aloud, that she saw the secrets between the silliness.

She grew quiet as she finished the poem, and Oliver nodded, recognizing her silent realization. “Long ago,” he said, “in the very, very beginning, Furthermore and Ferenwood were united, despite being split vertically by sea. It was a land called Anymore. Things were different back then,” Oliver said thoughtfully. “Anymore had opened its borders to the non-magical world.”

Alice’s eyes went wide. This, she’d never known.

“Magical folk married non-magical folk and things were alright for a while, but—you know how it is. We can’t survive without magic, and non-magical folk didn’t understand. Mixed magic made it so some children were born with talent while others were not, and they couldn’t always tell right away. Non-magical parents would want to take their children out of Anymore, to go back home, and things seldom ended well. To make matters worse, giving birth to magical babies was very hard on non-magical mothers. Many of them died in childbirth. It was a very dark, very unhappy time.”