The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(83)

When I stepped beyond the borders of the story, I felt it in my teeth and my belly button and the roots of my hair. Behind me the brother groaned, stumbling heavily against Janet. Finch put an arm around me, and his heat neutralized my cold.

We stood at the edge of a shallow valley filled to the knee with fog.

I sucked in air that tasted like rain and barbecue. Not too far away, a little girl moved through mist that reached almost to her neck. Beside her, a man in a white T-shirt laughed, lifting her onto his shoulders. She wore beat-up Rollerblades.

My whole body was cramped and half-asleep. The sun was hot; I was hungry. My nose itched like I was allergic to something, and I stank. Finch did, too. His smell and mine were rank and human in a way that made me weak with longing. The brother staggered forward, his eyes round. He kept looking back toward the trees we’d left behind, then at his hands.

I sank down to the grass and cried. As I did, I swore I could feel the shiny black washing out of my eyes.

“You saved me,” I said when I could speak again.

“I tried,” Finch said. “But I think maybe you finished the job.”

I shook my head, thinking of the horse blinking into view from empty air. “No. It was too … I lived for years in that thing. In that story.” The whole stretch of it spun before my eyes like a carousel. The cold queen, the absent king, my own dark appetites. “For how long?”

“I don’t know how long we’ve been here,” Finch said softly. “Time doesn’t work right, so nobody bothers keeping track.”

“How are you alive?”

“The guy who cut my throat—he was on his way back to his own story—he dropped me pretty close to a refugee village. Left me to die. It was close, but they patched me up. Healing took some time.”

“And Janet?”

“We learned quickly we had a mutual acquaintance,” she said. “We found out what happened to you, and we decided—well, we thought we might help you along a bit. It was his idea.” She looked at Finch, and the motherly pride in her eyes made my heart bob like a buoy.

“You were there,” I said. “Through all of it. You were—always on the edges, trying to get me to notice you.”

Finch laughed. “Dang, Alice. I knew you’d see me eventually.” His laugh had changed—it was a man’s laugh, rumbling under the rubble of his throat. It made me shy.

“Hey!”

The man in the white T-shirt had noticed us; he was waving from the sea of mist. He carried his daughter into one of the cottages squatting on the rising side of the valley, then jogged toward us. But not too close.

“Good travels to you,” he said cautiously.

“Do you have water?” Janet asked. “Food? They could use it.” She gestured at me and the redheaded brother.

The man’s face cleared, and he smiled. “I’m ex-Story, too,” he said.

“How’d you—” I began.

“The clothes. And the smell. Like burnt hair and, you know—” He plucked at the air with his fingertips. “That magic smell.” He was handsome. Twenty years ago he might’ve been somebody’s prince. Or somebody’s poisoner. The Hinterland didn’t tell nice tales.

He brought us a bucket of water, and I sucked down cups of it till my stomach ballooned. The redheaded brother didn’t speak until he’d done the same. He kept smacking his lips, letting the water run over his chin.

“I can taste it,” he said. “It’s sweet and it’s … dusty. Like stone. Can you taste it?”

I knew what he meant. Everything I’d ever eaten or drunk in the story paled next to the electric flavor of this river water. “Yeah. I can taste it.”

He looked at his hands again, trailing his fingers through the air like he was on something. “Look at this. It’s all me, doing this. It’s mine.” He looked up at me sharply, suddenly fearful. “It’s over now, isn’t it? No more story? No more dying?”

I could see Janet hovering over my shoulder, aching to dart in and start asking questions. I ignored her, ignored Finch. I looked at the man who had followed me to another world, to coax me home with gifts that carried me through the Halfway Wood.

His eyes were hazel, and broad freckles dusted his cheeks. It was the details that could drive you crazy—did the Spinner really create him just so? Did she decide on that wedge of darker brown in his left eye? Did she engineer my love of honey?

“Why did you take me?” I asked. I tried to say it gently.

He smiled faintly, his gaze going inward. “I did it for her. For the thief.”

“The thief? You mean … Ella?”

He poured a cupful of water over his hair, tilting his face toward the pale sun. “Before she stole you, she wanted to steal me.”

Oh. Fourteen years my mother spent alone with Althea in the Hazel Wood. But not all alone, not with the Halfway Wood so close.

“But if you … if you loved her. Why did you want to take me away from her?”

“I wanted to help her. And you. And, yes, myself. You were never going to be free, not until we broke it. I’m right, aren’t I? You were never really free?”

I shook my head. I felt stunned and hollow, looking at this stranger my mother might have loved. I would never reach the bottom of what Ella gave up for me. I would never know all the secrets of the life she left behind to run with me. “So what now?” I asked hoarsely. “Are you going back through the woods? To find her?”