The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(22)

“Christ. Your head’s on fire, but your hands are freezing.”

I had a sudden terror that my eyes would go black. But I was too tired to do anything about it, too weak even to walk to the bathroom; when I thought I might actually wet the bed, my mom had to help me down the hall.

Back in bed, the cold warring in me finally won out over the heat. Ella wrapped me in a robe and buried me in blankets dug out of summer storage. Her voice was drawn up tight.

“If you’re not better soon we’re going to the hospital.”

It can’t get worse than this, I kept thinking. This is as bad as it’ll get. But I was always wrong.

I drifted off eventually, me under the covers and Ella on top, holding the lump that was my hand below. The long white road between waking and sleep stretched like taffy. My bed and my mother and the walls of my room melted into trees and castle walls and a courtyard spinning with snow.

It was the Hinterland, trying to break through. I wavered there, on the precipice of dreaming, and I fought it. But I was weak, and I staggered, and I fell.

When I stood up, I stood on a curve of sand, lapped at by dark water. Behind me huddled a line of shivering trees. The sky was so low I could touch it, like there was no air here that wasn’t sky.

I was in the Hinterland. Not a dream of it, but the thing itself. It was altered: the land felt wilder. Unlatched. There was a looseness to it and a saturation too, the trees too close to the sea too close to the sky, like someone had grabbed up a fistful of the Spinner’s dark country and squeezed. The trees were bedded in a roiling black mist and stars crowded overhead, so beautiful and bright I forgot to be afraid. I was alone, watching the stars watching me.

Then one of them trembled.

It stepped out of its constellation. In the big, soft, humming silence, the star pitched itself into the sea. It was a fizzing ball of sodium white that became a girl as it drew nearer, with streaming hair and the noble, blunt-cut face of a figurehead. It slipped silently into the water, shining briefly below the surface before its light went out.

Others followed. One by one, then whole constellations, drawing courage from one another’s plunge. The air thickened with plummeting stars like sparks thrown off a downed power line, till my sight sang purple and white.

After the last star fell, the moon hung like a lonely searchlight. I wondered if she knew that her granddaughter, Hansa, was dead. I wondered if she mourned her. I watched as she lowered herself through the dark.

She was an old woman in her perch in the sky, a maiden crossing the horizon line, and a child when she touched the surface of the sea. She glowed beneath the water for a long time, lighting it the dreamy mermaid green of a motel pool.

I stood on the beach and watched her wane, feeling the shift of sand under my feet and smelling the sulfur of the fallen stars.

When the moon went out, there was nothing left but sand and water and empty sky. The trees whipped up wilder and the sea slid higher, moonless and misguided, till its cold fingers locked around my ankles, my knees, my hips. I heard a sound like splintering and a faraway singing, so high it made my scalp prickle, so low it made my knees bow, then the endless rushing of water falling over the edge of the world.

I could hear someone crying, someone moaning, someone writhing in their sleep. I knew it was me, that Earthbound version of me, but I couldn’t reach her. The water was to my chest now, to my throat, and I was lifted.

Something was being taken from me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was precious. I was back on the precipice: here, in a Hinterland running together like finger paints, and there, in Brooklyn, the press of my mother’s arms holding me together.

For a moment both worlds held me in their grip, one of them dying but both of them strong, and I was wrung like a rag between them. At every joint and join I came apart and I thought that was the end of me, but I reconnected with an electric pop, and when I screamed, I screamed in both worlds. And though I couldn’t hear it, I knew every Hinterlander on Earth screamed with me.

Then that world let go, dropping me back on my bed, in the city, with my mother’s face over mine, terrified and smeared with tears.

“Alice, hold on. Alice, I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”

She said it like she was speaking every promise over a rosary bead, till she understood that I was looking back, that I was awake again, returned from wherever I’d been taken. My eyes burned with falling stars and my skin puckered with the chill of a dying land beneath an emptied sky.

“It’s dead.” I gripped her hands so tightly she winced. “The Hinterland is dead.”





12


Everyone felt it.

Sophia and Daphne and Robin and the rest of them. All the fallen kings and eldest sons and cruel queens and maidens cast in colors of ebony and copper, blood and salt. Everyone knew it in their bones when the world we’d abandoned left us for good.

I didn’t know that yet when I woke up, sweat-soaked and thirstier than I’d ever been. Ella lay on the floor beside my bed, watching The Good Place on her laptop with the sound on low.

I watched her for a minute before she noticed I was awake. Her mouth turned down, hair sweaty at the temples. She’d pulled off all her rings, her hands looked undressed.

I wondered if Finch had felt it, wherever he was. Probably not. He was born here, he was of the Earth. I guess he’d feel it if his was the world that drowned its stars and spun out into particles.