The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(50)

I am lost, he wrote.

I am lost and stupid and doing this all wrong. He watched the words disappear.

Then he was off, writing in a fever, the words vanishing into the page, barely remembering what he’d said from one line to the next. His head was full of giddy images of Alice. Her face tilted over the letter, the elfin bend of her ear peeking through yellow hair. Her fierce gaze eating up his words.

When he finished his eyes were so wide he could feel them drying out. Every time he closed them, a firework burst in his chest: of anticipation and anxiety and a kind of sweet panic. He recognized the feeling from the time he dropped a carefully copied-out Neruda poem into his ninth-grade crush’s locker.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, laughing at himself, then rolled over and shoved his face into the pillow. It smelled like dead people’s dandruff. He said her name into it, and felt shy.



* * *



Earlier that day—though Finch wasn’t sure how to account for days stretched across multiple worlds—Iolanthe had walked him to the six corners, then left him there as she darted back down the street. She returned carrying two bottles of a carbonated lemony drink, not sweet, and a stuffed, greasy-bottomed bag that smelled like heaven. They sat on a curb and ate right there.

“You don’t want to eat in the gray world,” she said, around a mouthful of something midway between a bao and a knish. “Death gets into everything, makes it taste like black licorice. It’s the same way in the Hinterland, in the land of the Dead.”

Finch was going hah, hah to cool his mouth after biting into a boiling-hot pastry; now he stopped short. “Wait. You went to the land of the Dead?”

“Of course. I went everywhere.”

“That’s…” Amazing, he could’ve said. Incredibly foolish. Terrifying, to be frank. “Extremely metal,” he finished finally. “How’d you get in?”

“I followed the Woodwife.” She looked at her hands, neatly sectioning her knish to let the steam out. “How about you? How did you get in?”

Finch stilled. He hadn’t told anyone he’d gone into the Hinterland’s underworld. He thought he never would. Those were dark days, best looked at sideways: his nihilistic expat period, when life was one long string of double-dog dares that could’ve killed him.

“I followed Ilsa’s golden thread,” he said quietly. “In, and out again.”

“I knew it. I could tell right away—that you’re like me, that you’ve come too close to it.” She smiled faintly and touched her neck where his was striped with a scar. “I think you’ve come too close to Death more than once.”

She had no scars he could see, but right then Finch had the oddest vision: of Iolanthe as a creature many times mended. He could almost see the cracks in her carapace, and the light that came through.

“I think you have, too,” he said, then looked away, unsettled.

They didn’t speak again till they were done eating. Iolanthe stood, pulling out the book that had brought them there.

“Brace yourself,” she said. “The doors can be rough on a full stomach.”



* * *



Back in the dead world, Iolanthe assigned them each a room on the castle’s second floor. He figured they’d be massive and opulent, like the library, but his had the constrictive, smoke-stained feeling of a chamber built in an age when everyone had ten kids and died before they were thirty. He’d had the sense, closing the door, of sealing himself away in a tomb.

He wrote his letter to Alice. Lay down, got up, lay down again. When he peered out the window, a glassless circle the size of his two hands cupped, he saw the kingdom laid out like fallen dominoes. Again came the tricksy flicker of distant movement. Finally he climbed under the bed’s moldering blanket, certain he’d never sleep.

The light hadn’t changed when he woke chilled with sweat, his body turned like the arm of a clock and his covers kicked to the floor.

In sleep he’d flown over the Hinterland, the land wrinkled beneath him like the surface of a globe. He’d watched as mermaids beached themselves, singing torch songs, and the last of the castles came down. It could’ve been just a dream. But maybe he’d seen a true vision of the world’s last gasp. Still caught in the drifting headspace between sleep and dreaming, he wrote Alice another letter. It felt like he was talking to himself; it felt like she was right beside him. He wasn’t sure which instinct to believe.

The dream and the letter left him with a heartburn hurt and the need to move. He laced up his shoes, slipping out of his room and past Iolanthe’s. He figured he’d poke around the library. But halfway down the stairs he heard a woman’s voice.

Iolanthe’s, coming from below. His stomach seized, but when he found her, she was alone. Sitting at a long table singing a wordless song, breaking between verses to drink from her red glass bottle.

Finch stood in the shadow of the stairs. Against all odds, he knew the song. Ingrid sang it sometimes, on late nights with Janet in her lap and a glass or two of cider gone to her head. Ingrid had put words to it: of hope and longing, and the distant shores of home. Iolanthe’s voice turned it into something else. Something raw-edged and utterly alone. He could taste the salt on it, imagine her singing it as she sliced through the Hinterland Sea. A flyspeck on its waters, the stars peering down. When he couldn’t take any more, he crept back up the stairs.