The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(41)

On a winter’s day when Anya was sixteen, their mother locked herself in her room and never opened the door again. After three days the servants broke it down, and found—nothing. The door was bolted, the windows locked. Winter howled outside, but the girls’ mother was gone. All she’d left behind was a bone dagger on the floor, in a puddle of blood.

Anya heard the servants whispering about it, and snuck into the room to see for herself. The stain put in her a fear of blood so intense, she took to washing out her monthly rags in the dark.

The servants sent word to the girls’ father that his wife was dead, or gone, or worse, and for a long time heard no reply. Until the first warm day of spring, when he drove up in a carriage the girls had never seen.

Inside it was their new mother. She stepped down onto the cobblestones and smiled at them. She was smaller than Anya, with a heap of pale hair and blue eyes that switched coldly from one stepdaughter to the next.

For six months their father stayed home, besotted with his new wife and tolerating his daughters, who ran as wild as they’d learned to in all the years they’d raised themselves, with both parents out of sight.

Until he grew bored of the stepmother, just as he’d once grown bored of his wife—just as he’d always been bored of his daughters. He kissed the stepmother goodbye, nodded at his daughters, and was gone.

It didn’t take long for the stepmother to grow impatient. She snapped at the girls, slapped them at the slightest provocation, carried scissors in her pocket to cut off hanks of their long hair when they displeased her. Every time she left the house, she locked the girls up—to keep them from misbehaving, she said. She kept them in their mother’s room, where the windows were rusted shut and the dark stain on the floor taunted Anya like a vile black eye. Their mother’s bed had been chopped into firewood at their father’s command, all the pretty things she’d surrounded herself with locked away. They were just two girls in an empty room with a poisonous blot on the floor.

At first their stepmother stayed away for a few hours at a time. Then for whole days, then entire nights. The first time she left them locked up from dusk to dawn, Anya beat on the door and screamed till her throat and fists were raw, but no one came.

When the stepmother finally opened the door, she wrinkled her nose at the smell and gestured at the chamber pot. “Empty it,” she said. Kohl and rouge melted into candy swirls on her cheeks; she wouldn’t meet her stepdaughters’ eyes.

Finally there came a day when she locked them in with a bowl of apples and a jug of water and never came back. The sun rose and fell, rose and fell. On the third day Anya looked out the window and saw the servants walking away from the house one by one, their belongings on their backs.

The house was empty. The apples were eaten, the water long gone. The windows stayed shut and the glass wouldn’t give, even when Anya smashed at it with her boot.

That night the sisters lay together in the middle of the floor, trying to keep each other warm. Then Anya heard a sound she’d nearly forgotten. It was a sound like leaves rustling together outside the window.

It came from the bloodstain on the floor. Slowly she inched her way toward it, resting her ear just over it and holding her breath.

It was deep, deep in the night when the rustling resolved into a voice.

You will die, the voice told her.

Anya rolled back onto the floor, angry. I know, she replied fiercely, in her mind. We’re half-dead already.

You will die, the voice said again. Unless.

And it told her how she could save herself and her sister. How she could remake the world just enough so that they could live.

It would take blood.

The next morning Anya told her sister, Lisbet, what she’d learned: they must make a door. Their mother wasn’t dead, she was gone—she’d used magic to make a door, and it had taken her far, far away. Their mother’s blood had spoken to Anya, and told her how to make a door of their own, to meet her.

It will take blood, she told Lisbet, but it can’t be mine.

It was a lie. She wasn’t bad, she was frightened. The idea of opening her own veins filled her with a sick terror that felt like falling, forward and forward without end. She ignored the bitter taste of the lie in her mouth.

She took the bone knife from the place the voice had told her she’d find it: behind a loose brick inside the cold fireplace.

It can’t be mine, she said again, because I’m the sorcerer. I must make the door, and you must sacrifice the blood for it.

Lisbet nodded, but something in her eyes told Anya she knew the words were a lie.

It made her angry. When she drew the blade across her sister’s wrist, the anger made her careless, and the blade bit too deep.

But Lisbet said nothing as her sister took her wrist and used it to paint a door.

She painted the sides of it first, in two continuous lines, scraping Lisbet’s wrist across the stone. She lifted her as high as she could to paint a lintel over the top. When Anya eased her down and set her back on her feet, Lisbet was as white as the flesh of an apple.

Anya turned away from her sister’s drained face and said the words that would make the blood into a door. Words the voice had said into her ear, three times so she’d remember.

All at once the stone wicked up the blood, and the red of it became lines of warm white light. The newly made door swung toward them, letting out a breath of warm air and a scent like clean cotton. They held hands and watched it open.