The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(28)

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.