The Kingdom of Back(38)
Hyacinth turned his face up toward the stars. They seemed to lean down toward him in response. The princeling, came the whisper, echoing around us.
“Why are we here?” I breathed, mesmerized.
He took my hand, then pulled me toward him, pressing his palm against the small of my back. I blushed at the warmth of his skin against mine. “Because I’m taking you up to see the stars,” he replied.
A peal of bell-like laughter answered from above, and a moment later, a dozen threads dropped from the sky. Upon their ends were silver hooks that winked in the night, each one’s curve large enough for a person to sit upon.
Hyacinth grabbed the one nearest to us, tugging twice on it, and up in the sky, a star winked back. He lifted one foot to press down against the hook, as if to test it. Then he pulled me up with him so that we stood together on it.
I started to open my mouth, but my words scattered to the winds as the hook suddenly yanked up, slicing us through the cool air in a shining line. The forest shrank into a mass of tiny limbs below us. I squeezed my eyes shut. Hyacinth laughed at me as my arms tightened in panic around his waist.
When we finally stopped moving, and the pit of my stomach had settled, I hesitantly opened my eyes.
The forest was gone. The meadow had long ago vanished somewhere far below us. We now stood on a hook suspended in a world of clouds, white wisps drifting around us in a mist. Overhead, the stars that I’d always seen as dots were now bright balls of light, blue and gold and scarlet, a sheet stretching to infinity in every direction. They looked so close I thought I could reach out and pluck them from the sky.
The bell-like laughter echoed from somewhere overhead, and I looked up to see the line of our hook disappearing around the top of a glowing star hovering right above us.
“Starfishers,” Hyacinth said. “They like to tempt the gullible, who always take their bait. Then they pull them up into the sky and dangle them there for weeks on end, taunting them until they let them back down again.”
He smiled when I shied away from the sharp hooks. “But they will not harm their princeling, or you,” he added. Still, I noticed him ducking instinctively away from the burning balls of light overhead, as if afraid that the stars might scorch him. “Come.” He stepped off the hook and leapt onto the soft blanket of clouds below us, then held his hand up to me. I took it, stepping down too. The clouds felt like moss made of air between my toes. “I brought you up here so that you can see what I need,” he said.
We walked over to the edge of the clouds. Here, Hyacinth lowered into his usual crouch, while I lay down on my stomach to peer over the side. He swept a hand out toward the world under us.
My gaze followed his gesture to the landscape below, where the expanse of forest spread out beneath us like a darkly woven rug, its edge cut by a ribbon of white sand and the still, silver ocean beyond. I recognized the shore where the witch’s grotto of night flowers had been. Edelweiss covered every field and clearing in sight, their snow-white patches billowing like magic under the moonlight. It was an untouched land, strange in every way—but recognizable too. Here and there, I saw a coastline peeking through the clouds that reminded me of the boundaries of Europe I’d seen on maps. The sight so surprised me that I tugged on Hyacinth’s hand.
“There!” I gasped.
“Everything here is backward.” He smiled. “The kingdom is a mirror of your world.”
A mirror of our world. My eyes roamed across the rolling land. In the northern regions, I could see fires lighting hearths in a village buried in the snow, golden menorahs in their windows. In the east, a massive field of soldiers in blue and white charged across a plain, their movement like the ripple of a flag. I looked on elsewhere as a line of young women, their limbs bound, stood on the gallows as guards held torches to their feet. And far out, where the land shifted to an endless expanse of black ocean, ships as small as dots sailed from the shores in pursuit of the New World.
“How is it a mirror?” I asked him.
“When you hold an image up to a mirror, you see every detail of that image exaggerated, things happening all around you that you might have missed in your everyday life.” He nodded down toward the ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean. “Look hard enough, Fr?ulein, and the kingdom will show you every truth that your world doesn’t.”
A new wind blew past, numbing my fingers and toes. I turned my gaze back down to the mirrored world. Dots of dark-red blood stained the ships’ decks and the snow piled against the village houses’ charred windowsills. Fire consumed the gallows, and cries came from the battlefield.
Every truth. I swallowed hard, but my eyes stayed on the scene, determined to remember it.
Hyacinth’s hand stopped. There, the forest ended abruptly at the banks of a river that encircled the entirety of a castle and its surrounding cluster of villages.
“The castle on the hill,” I whispered.
A massive jungle of black thorns grew on either side of the river, unbreakable and unrelenting, a wall separating man from forest. No lights flickered in the villages. They were abandoned and empty. On the hilltop, the castle loomed, its dark stones decaying, and just as in the story I’d told Woferl on his sickbed, dark phantom figures floated around the castle’s tallest tower, their wispy trails visible even from here.
“I wanted you to see the full expanse of our world,” Hyacinth said when I looked expectantly at him. “It was not always so. The kingdom was once prosperous, in harmony with the land around it. After the queen’s death, though, the king ordered the thorns grown around the river and cut it off from the kingdom within.”