The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(27)

Its petals were scentless. Papery. They were made of paper, the whole flower was. It was origami-light on my palm. After a bodiless, wondering moment, I tugged at a petal. It fell away with a soundless snap. One after another, they all did. The flower’s heart was a saturated pink. One end of it came away, and I saw that it was a scroll of paper. There were words on the scroll, but I didn’t let myself read them till I’d reached its very heart, where the first words were written.

Dear Alice, they said.

Dear Alice,

I didn’t start my last letter this way, and one day I want to tell you why. I promised myself I’d only write to you once, but I remembered I hadn’t even started that letter right—Dear Alice—and I told myself I could write to you just one more time. I might break that promise. I might write to you again. Would you forgive me if I do? I don’t know if you’ll ever read any of this. But I hope you do. I hope, I hope, I hope.

I pressed two hands to my chest, where my heart beat so fast it was fizzing. Because this time I knew. It was him, it had been him, it was him.

Him. Reaching across stars and through doors and over distances so unfathomable the idea of them made my skin shiver and sting.

It was Ellery Finch.





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.”