The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(22)
“So what if that’s the Hinterland Audrey was talking about?” he persisted. “Maybe Althea took a story from someone who’s pissed, someone who wants credit for it, and…”
“And now they’re stalking her family, forty years later?” I finished. “Some, I don’t know, Norwegian herdsman finally made his way to New York to take ancient revenge?”
The redheaded man’s face flickered across my mind’s eye. I should’ve told Finch about him, but I kept thinking of the last part of that Nelson Algren quote: “Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” I was about a mile from sleeping with Finch, but my troubles were becoming his anyway. I didn’t want to pile on more.
He shrugged. “It’s just a theory. It’s got to mean something. They left a page from the book, for god’s sake. Maybe it’s a code.”
“Look, you need to tell me about ‘Alice-Three-Times,’ in case there’s something in it. Any clue on what I’m supposed to do next.”
“Fine. But let’s go somewhere we can be alone.” He saw my face and smiled, tight and brief. “Alone, like, not where my dad and stepmom can hear us. One of them could actually be home by now.”
We ended up at a diner on Seventy-Ninth Street, the kind of place where even a bowl of matzo ball soup costs twelve bucks. That was what Finch ordered, plus a club sandwich with extra pickles on the side. I got pancakes drowning in blueberry syrup, because that’s what I ate at the diner with the red-haired man. They congealed fast on my plate, and failed to bring any repressed memories flooding back.
I kept my phone on the table between us, my heart sinking a little lower every time I looked at its mute black screen. The whole world was bending around the absence of my mother, like light ricocheting off something too dark to illuminate. I saw my face in the bowl of the extra soup spoon the waitress had laid on the table. My eyes were shocked holes.
Finch ate one pickle, put another on the edge of my saucer, and cut the last one in four and tucked each part into a wedge of his sandwich. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I remember about ‘Alice-Three-Times.’”
His recounting was more detailed than I’d hoped it would be, though he kept second-guessing himself and tangling it with other tales. The basic shape of it went like this.
9
On a cold day in a distant kingdom, a daughter was born to a queen and king. Her eyes were shiny and black all over, and the midwife laid her in the queen’s arms and fled. The queen looked into the girl’s eyes, shiny-dark as beetle shells, and despised her on sight.
The girl was small and never made a sound, not even a cry the day she was born. Sure she wouldn’t live, the queen refused to name her.
At first her prophecy seemed true: the months passed, and the baby failed to grow. But she didn’t die, either. Two years bloomed and faded, and she was still as little as the day she was born, and just as silent, and she lived on sheep’s milk because the queen refused to nurse her.
Then one morning, when the nurse went in to feed her, she found the baby had grown in the night—she was now as big as a child of seven. Her limbs were frail as a frog’s, but her eyes were still a defiant black. It was decided, then: she would live. The king pressed his wife to name her, and the queen chose a name that was small and powerless, an ill-starred name for a princess. The queen called her Alice.
Alice spoke, finally, always in full sentences. She spoke only to other children, mostly to make them cry. And once again, she stopped getting bigger. The years went by, and the royal household started to believe she’d be a child forever, playing tricks on her siblings and scaring the maids with her black, black eyes.
Until, on a morning so icy cold the breath froze on your lips if you dared to go outside, a nursemaid went to wake Alice, and found a girl of twelve sleeping in her bed. She was a creature of points and angles, a colt who could barely walk on her new legs. The servants whispered that she was a changeling, but her eyes were black as ever, and her temper the same: she didn’t talk much, and she appeared places she shouldn’t. The castle had trouble keeping servants, and the queen’s women gossiped that the girl was to blame.
The nursemaid charged with raising Alice learned to fear the day when she’d again find a stranger in the princess’s bed. On the morning she discovered a black-eyed girl of seventeen waiting for her in Alice’s chamber, the woman whispered a curse and left the castle for good.
The princess was young in years but had become very beautiful, and at least looked to be of age. The king, who’d rarely spoken a word to her directly, now watched her with an acquisitive eye. He gave her gifts not meant for a daughter: A dragonfly catch for her cloak, made of red metal. A blown-glass flower that looked like a scorpion striking. The queen made a decision: it was time for Alice to marry.
Because she was the daughter of a king, in a world where these things were indulged, the girl set her suitors a task. Whoever could fill a silk purse with ice from the kingdom’s distant ice caverns and carry it back to her, she’d agree to marry. If they failed, they died. Of course most of the suitors were fools. They rode a day and night to bring the ice for her little silk purse, and it melted to nothing on the way. They brought ice from a frozen stream a mile from the palace, and she tasted their treachery in its familiar, scummy tang. Or they brought diamonds, hoping ice was a metaphor, and lost their lives for the mistake.