The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(70)

“What was that?”

“She started following the Stories. I don’t know how she managed to do it without being killed, but she did. She talked to the characters in the margins for the bits she couldn’t witness—the nursemaids, the middle sisters. She communed with dead kings and murdered wives; all those poor shades haunting the edges of things, desperate to talk. Then she’d come home and tell them to me. ‘I’m a journalist,’ she’d say. ‘This is what I do.’” Janet scoffed. “Like she’d been doing war reporting, instead of writing about what to wear to hunt a husband.”

Something broken in me ached at her words—a world ago, Finch had described Althea as writing like a war reporter. I wished I could tell him he’d been right.

“Eventually, of course, she followed the stories to their source,” Janet continued. “The Story Spinner.”

I heard the reverent space she put around the words, the capital S’s. She said they didn’t have a god here, but maybe this was something close. “Who’s the Story Spinner?”

“It’s in the name, isn’t it? In this place, it might as well be World Builder. She’s as good as. Story is the fabric of the Hinterland. Althea convinced the Spinner to make her a story she could use like a bridge. And then she just”—Janet tiptoed her fingers up the air—“climbed it right out of here.”

“She climbed—what? Words? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Ingrid eyed me oddly, but Janet cracked a smile. “Sense,” she said. “The last bastion of the struggling refugee.”

“So she made her way back. Fine. But how did that—what did you say? Rip holes in the world?”

Surprisingly, it was Ingrid who replied. “It started just before I met Janet. People from that world slipping in, those from this one slipping out. At first we thought it was new stories getting started. It happens from time to time—girls get abducted by kings, mothers murder their sons. Then we wondered whether there were doors opening onto other worlds, or hells.” Her Hinterland accent was clipped and compelling. It made me think of the dark shapes of icebergs, the light of a cold white sun.

“But rumor came of a place in the woods, a thin place where you could walk right out and back in again. It was discovered by a prince, a fourth son out of seven—his parents and his youngest brother were Stories, but he wasn’t. He put it under guard for a while, until he and his men were killed by the Briar King. Then things got much worse.”

“Worse how?”

“Stories started using the door, when they could sneak away. They like to cause trouble in your world.”

“How was that Althea’s fault?”

“Tales from the Hinterland,” Janet said bitterly. “She took the stuff that makes this world run and put it into a book, a book that got printed and shipped all over her world. The stories were read, they stuck in people’s brains, they got told and retold and dreamed about. New bridges were built—fragile, uncontrollable things between the worlds. Most of them were one-ways, rifts where people who loved the stories found their way through. I never understood what made the Briar King’s door so stable, but now I see—it’s on the other side of Althea’s Hazel Wood.”

“She was trying to contain it,” I said, unsure why I was trying to defend her. “She thought if she stayed in one place, and shut herself off, it would be better than leading them around the world.”

“If she was really so considerate, she would’ve killed herself,” Janet said bluntly. “We’ve had refugees as young as ten, little girls obsessed with fairy tales, and now they’re stuck living at the fringes of them.”

“Couldn’t the Story Spinner do something? Send them home?”

“You think she’d take that risk again? She’s been too busy trying to reverse what’s been done. The only people she sends through now are working for her, trying to clean up Althea’s mess. A few of the lost find their way back home on that errand—they track down copies of the book and destroy them. But, intentionally or not, Althea has made herself into a lesser Spinner. My guess is she doesn’t know how to control it. Every copy of her foolish book could be ash, and she would still serve as a bridge.”

“I think she wanted to,” I said, low. “Kill herself, I mean. That’s why she wanted me back—as long as I was out there, she couldn’t…” Then I stopped short, remembering what they didn’t know about me. The words sat on my tongue, burned my stomach when I swallowed them down.

“Wanted you back? What do you mean, she wanted you back?” Janet eyed me, sharp as a terrier.

“She…” I clutched my stomach. “It’s none of your business!”

“Yes, it is. Answer me, and the pain will stop: who are you?”

My stomach stopped burning the instant I pulled off the gloves, laying them flat across my knees. They looked like the hands of a corpse, but flexing, eerie, alive. Ingrid gasped so hard it was funny and moved in front of Janet. Janet just looked at me like I was Christmas and the Fourth of July wrapped up in one.

“My god. You’re not anybody’s granddaughter, you’re the prodigal returned. No wonder she pushed you back through!”

“You know who I am?”