The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(45)
Scooting them out of the way of traffic—a man on an oddly balanced three-wheeled cycle, who ignored them from beneath the brim of his hat—Iolanthe swept off her cloak. She folded it into a bundle so impossibly tight it made Finch remember she’d been a sailor, and tucked it into her bag. Over her black jeans, bleach-stained black T-shirt, the exposed black straps of her bra, she pulled on a high-necked black dress. It fell around her heavy hips with a swish.
“Camouflage,” she said.
Finch looked down at his patched-up Frankenjeans, the blue Hanes T-shirt he’d won from Lev in a particularly intense game of Egyptian Rat Screw. His shoes were more duct tape than canvas. And his skin was brown, which hadn’t signified much among the refugees of the Hinterland, but might mean something in a place that looked and smelled like a scene from Great Expectations.
“You’re fine,” she told him. “This place is used to travelers—think of it like a port city. It’s just, they do have certain ideas about ladies here.”
On ladies she dropped like a bob into a curtsy that would’ve been ironic, were it not so deep and perfectly done.
Who the fuck are you? This time Finch said it in his head. He was biding his time.
Now properly attired for who knew what, Iolanthe led them down the widest of the roads, still so narrow he doubted this was a world built for cars. There was more foot traffic the farther they went, and more shop windows open to the evening, selling food and clothes and tools and toys. Finch searched the faces of the people they passed, but they were a diverse, disinterested crowd, and after a while he paid more attention to the windows.
“Don’t look too closely,” Iolanthe said sharply. “They’ll make you buy something.”
“I have exactly zero dollars,” Finch said, though it wasn’t true. He still had forty-seven U.S. dollars and thirty-eight cents in his wallet, which he was too superstitious to toss.
She threw him a look. “They don’t want your money.”
Iolanthe barreled down the street, looking to neither side. Afraid of losing her, or of invoking some binding buyers’ rule of the market, he followed, but things still caught his eye: a window full of small, densely focused paintings of mermaids, and another hung with gossamer-weight butterfly nets, handfuls of jeweled insects stuck into their webbing. The blue eyes of a man selling tins of tea; the man was leaning forward, smiling, when Finch ripped himself away. In an alcove between shops, a puppet show played out beneath a dusty curtain. Two jointed wooden puppets clacked over a painted backdrop of a familiar city skyline. The girl puppet had a cap of pale hair, the boy a cloud of dark. Between them they held a green book, its title written in tiny gold print.
“Wait,” Finch said, slowing down, but Iolanthe grabbed his hand and tugged him into the thickening crowd.
“If you stop, they’ll want you to buy something,” she called back.
They walked deeper in, past increasingly urgent sellers and their wares—twitching piles of ballet slippers, bumpy fruits, a window full of telephones (candlestick, rotary, princess, tablet) that made Finch do a double take—before stopping in front of a shop he’d have missed on his own. Its window was frosted glass, firmly closed. Iolanthe rapped on the door beside it, winking conspiratorially at Finch. As if he were in on the joke. As if he had any idea where they were, and who they were about to see. He gripped his bag in front of him, packed in the Hinterland less than twenty-four hours and exactly two worlds ago.
The woman who opened the door was Baba Yaga to the life, with eyes like milky jade, straight-up George Washington teeth, and the leathered skin of an aging French film star. She was built like a sparrow but moved like a battleship: slow and deliberate, with a hand to her back.
“You,” she said crankily, eyes on Iolanthe. “Back from nobody knows where, dragging I don’t know who, selling gods know what. Nervy little bitch.”
“Hello, Grandma June,” Iolanthe said comfortably. “I know I’ve been away too long and you thought I was dead and I’m a dreadful child for never bothering to write, but here I am anyway. Can you forgive me?”
The woman flapped a dismissive hand. “Depends what you’ve got for me. Come in, before you stand still too long and the market thinks it’s caught two buyers.”
“Is that really your grandma?” Finch muttered.
“Hell, no. Watch your back around her, she’ll steal the gold from your teeth if she thinks she can get away with it.”
The door shut behind them with a sinister snick, and Finch blinked in the abrupt gloom. Though it wasn’t really gloomy; it was the stained red of a forge, or the inside of a dragon’s belly. The place was a curiosity shop, or else a really, really esoteric thrift store. It was full of delicately balanced metal instruments, and pieces bristling with exposed circuitry, and the kinds of carved wooden objects that look like they’ve got a trick to them: a secret compartment, a hidden blade.
“Well.” Grandma June bustled behind a countertop and turned on a lamp, casting a circle of clean white light over the three of them. “What have you got for me?”
Iolanthe presented Finch with a flourish, like she was whipping a drop cloth off a statue. “A scavenger, fresh from the Hinterland.”
“Hinterland? Scavenger? You’re telling me that place is in a state to be scavenged?” The old woman rubbed her bristly chin. “Serves her right, doesn’t it? Well, don’t stand there blushing. Show us what you’ve got, this isn’t my first time.”