The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(76)
We rode on. My legs grew tired, then numb, then tired again, as we pedaled for a long quiet space that felt endless. Once I saw a face watching me from between branches. It was there and gone so suddenly, its eyes so sensitive and sad, it took me a moment to register it wasn’t a human’s face but a bear’s, standing on its hind legs watching the road.
At the darkest part of night, when the moon had waned to a sliver, the veil of trees to our right fell away, revealing a lake. The water was flat as a level and dense as mercury, welling like a bead against its banks. Here and there something glimmered under its surface—tracings of green or purple sparks; a hard arc of bubbles that could’ve been white skirts, or a drifting mass of fins. Pale palms pressing up, as if against the underside of ice. The cold in me spread down, seeping past my thighs, making my stomach churn and my knees pop with every pedal. Finally the water ended and a line of trees began, covered with glossy black blossoms.
Just before dawn, I heard the crackle of firelight among them, and smelled smoke. Then came music—a wild, sad music that slipped away like a fading dream every time my mind tried to catch it. I slowed down to hear it, to try to place the instrument.
Not an instrument, a voice. A sweeping voice with a bracing range that made even the trees go quiet. I tilted my head back to watch the sky.
Then the Spinner was there, rolling her eyes, singing “Yellow Submarine” at the top of her lungs and slapping me hard. “Pedal!” she yelled between verses. “Have some pride in your pedigree! You’re not some idiot refugee, you’re Alice-Three-Times!”
I followed her, anger thudding dull behind my eyes. Once we’d left it far enough behind, the music crept from my body like a sugar high, leaving me shaky.
At the end of night the forest ended sharp as a knife, the road turning from a narrow chain to a broad white ribbon. The last of the moon slipped away and the sun bellied up, the two shouldering past each other for one radiant moment that seared brighter than fireworks and filled me with a rush of joy.
Until the Spinner turned us toward the castle.
Home.
The word swam up from the same neglected place inside of me that knew the name of the Briar King, and recognized the contours of this world in the way I’d know the breadth of my own body in the dark.
It looked like an abandoned toy. The road wound toward it, and it grew up from the road, made of the same white stone. It was a rambling thicket of turrets and dull windows and decorative outcroppings. At their center was a narrow tower slashed with murder holes. The whole thing wore a shroud of fog that breathed and twisted under its own weather.
I planted my heels hard in the road, tasting bile at the back of my throat. “I’m not going in there.”
The Spinner laughed, and I startled back. She’d changed again. Her face was a soft circle, her hair cropped shorter than mine. She was dressed like a knight.
“And yet,” she said, hand on the hilt of a narrow sword, “there’s no way out without first going in. Once upon a time, Alice-Three-Times.”
Her final words had an extra resonance to them, a blur. Like they wore a mask to hide their true intentions.
Don’t trust her. But my heart was slowing, and the thought found no purchase.
The fog drifted and spun, moving like steam over tea. A black shadow hovered around me, a migraine aura narrowing in on the spiky shape of the castle. We were walking our bikes toward it, not riding, and I couldn’t remember when I’d stopped pedaling. My mind felt curiously blank.
The Spinner’s back wheel made a chewed-up, motorcycle sound. I leaned to yank out the playing card stuck in its spokes.
Twice-Killed Katherine’s face looked up at me—two of them, in flipped mirror image like a queen card. In the top she looked freshly fed; at the bottom she was gaunt, her hair run through with a frail skunk stripe.
The Spinner snatched it away, tore it in two. “Refugees,” she muttered. “They have funny ideas about fun.”
The sight of Katherine’s feral face shoved me back into myself. The shadow receded, and I could see the orange wash of sunrise on white stone, the overgrown curves of gardens stretching behind the castle. My hands sticking out of my tunic sleeves like scarecrow limbs made of ice.
“Ella,” I whispered. “Mom.”
The Spinner cocked her head. “Nothing goes into the story but you,” she said. “Right now you’ve got your other life all over you—they’ll smell it on your skin.” She gave me a smile that should’ve been beguiling but made my shoulders rise protectively. “They’ll be jealous. The quickest way to end this is to begin it, and that’s no way to start, is it?”
The condescension in her voice almost made me buckle. The quickest way to end this, like she believed I could. But she didn’t. She never had. That wasn’t why she’d led me here.
She was a jailer taking me back to my cell, and I was letting her. Based on the idiot notion that somewhere inside it was a key.
The castle grew larger as we moved closer, giving me a dizzy, shrinking feeling. The shapes of it sharpened, but everything else was flattening: the scent of green and pollen and rain, the smoky taste of morning. Birdsong and breeze went tinny, like I was hearing them through bad speakers, then cut off short as we stepped into the castle courtyard.
I sniffed in hard, let air run over my tongue—tasteless. The castle was a dead place.