The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(29)

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.





15


I pulled out Persuasion and read the letter again. Then the second letter, the one that proved it. How had he done it? That mattered less than that he’d done it at all. Wherever Finch was, he was thinking of me. Missing me. My eyes were wet, my lips felt nervy under my touch. The air tasted heady and my whole life looked different under the spotlight of knowing this one incredible thing: he was reaching out for me.

I’d thumbed over the brief story of me and Ellery Finch so many times it was falling to pieces. The boy I’d used without telling myself I was using him. The boy who’d betrayed me, saved me, then abandoned me to this world, alone.

Not alone. I’d come home to Ella. He’d gone on, following the thread he’d tugged when he learned about the Hinterland, that led him on a journey to other places. That boy has other worlds to explore, I’d been told. We’re not always born to the right one.

I’d asked myself the question a thousand times, and I asked it again now: Who was Ellery Finch? I hadn’t paid enough attention when he was right beside me. The possibility that I might get another chance to find out glowed in me, electric.

I rolled onto my back and pulled up his sleeping Instagram. Mostly it was shots of street art and squares of sunlit water, pretentious quotes written on dirty windows and pictures of his friends, good-looking people with shining faces who made me feel jealous years too late. But there were a few of just him: lying in the curves of a snow angel, drinking beer on the ferry. Backlit on a rooftop, sun setting behind him.

Something else was keeping me up, filling me with a fine white fire, pushing away thoughts of silent attackers and blood in bathtubs and the death wish that followed my best friend around like her shadow.

Magic. That letter, written by a lost boy and delivered here by unseen hands, it was magic. There were other worlds out there, I’d almost forgotten that. And all enchantment hadn’t died with the Hinterland. I had a feeling I hadn’t had in a very long time: of possibility. Of the world, the worlds, as a vast place, where the cost of magic wasn’t always so horribly high. Where it could take the shape of something simple and beautiful. Like a perfect paper flower.

I sat up in bed and called Sophia. She picked up on the third ring, and said nothing.

“You left me,” I said. “On the fire escape.”