The Night Country

20

Janet wanted to meet Iolanthe first. Ingrid didn’t want to go at all. She wasn’t like Janet—a transplant, a born wanderer. Her roots here went all the way down to the world’s bedrock, even if that bedrock was turning to smoke.

“We don’t know where the door in the tavern goes,” Finch said tightly. “But the fact that it smells like everything you want to get home to is a pretty big tip-off it’s dangerous, right?”

“Yes, thank you, I’ve read my share of fairy tales,” Janet snapped. “And while we’re on the subject of devil’s deals, who exactly is this person that popped in out of nowhere, ready to save our lives?”

“A traveler,” Finch said, though he knew that was oversimplifying things. “She wants money, and she thinks I can help her with that.”

“A traveler, listen to him. Do you know what you’re talking about? Do you think we’re playing a game?” Janet’s chill had frayed along with the Hinterland. For the first time Finch feared he wouldn’t be able to convince her, that she wouldn’t come at all.

“The door in the tavern feels wrong,” he half shouted. He hadn’t fully admitted it before, but it did. It had a furtive feeling, an oiliness. Even the round hobbity cuteness of it felt like a vicious joke.

“So our options are these,” he said, speaking low again, calmly. “We stay. Hope the Spinner fixes things. Or we take our chances tomorrow morning and go. Because none of us is walking through that door.”

Finch didn’t sleep much that night. None of them did. He heard the burr of Janet and Ingrid’s voices through the wall hours past dark. They would decide without him whether to stay or go, all he could do was wait and see. His tiny store of belongings was packed, and all the inscrutable treasures of the Hinterland. There wasn’t anything more he could do. Finally, restlessness sent him outside.

Night was tipping softly into day when the front door creaked open behind him. Janet was always after Ingrid to fix that creak. She settled beside him, already dressed in her jeans and open-necked shirt, her trim-cut coat, relics of the Earthly life she’d abandoned decades ago.

Traveling clothes. The fearful grip on his heart eased away. They sat together while the light went blue, then violet, then the powdered silver of pine needles. The Hinterland and its relentless beauty stopped for no one.

Just before sunrise the three of them walked together across the women’s land. Ingrid unlatched the gate on the goat pen and bent over to pick a teacup-shaped flower. She tucked it into Janet’s hair. Their path to the tavern was circuitous now, winding around great starry gaps in the land. Iolanthe was standing out front of it in her black on black, including a cloak with copper stitching at the neck, running a thumb over the empty face of her pocket watch.

First she made Finch show her all the things he’d taken from the broken tales.

“Good Christ,” Janet murmured as he did it. “That’s quite the arsenal.”

Iolanthe’s eyes were alight as she ran her hands over all the little treasures he’d plucked from the Hinterland’s wounds. It filled him with pride to see her lift one, then another, holding a walnut to her ear and shaking it, weighing the balance of a speckled yellow egg. Then she picked up the dagger.

“Hello,” she said. “You’re going to make this a whole lot easier.”

It was an age-stained thing of yellowing bone Finch had taken from a pretty three-story manor house in the town where Hansa had lived. Words ran over its hilt, carved in a language he couldn’t read. Iolanthe shrugged an arm free of her cloak, then paused.

“Almost forgot: I made you a promise.” From an inside pocket she brought out two small booklets. They were bound in the same shade of green leather as Tales from the Hinterland, the print across them embossed in the same gold. PASSPORT, their covers read, above the unmistakable shape of a Hinterland flower.

Alice, Finch thought. She’d had that flower tattooed on her arm. The memory was sharp as an embroidery needle.

Janet practically snatched the passports. Finch could see her hungry mind clicking away. “How do they work?”

“The door.” Iolanthe pointed toward the tavern. “Keep them against your skin as you walk through it, and you’ll get to where you’re going. I’d hold hands if I were you. Tightly.”

“And if you walk through the door without a passport?” Ingrid asked grimly. “What happens to you then?”

“Hard to say,” Iolanthe said. “But I wouldn’t trust it, would you?”

“What about Ellery?” Janet put an arm around him. “Can you guarantee he’ll be safe?”

“No.” Iolanthe smiled to soften it. “But I can guarantee he’ll be interested. Good enough?”

Janet looked at her coolly, then turned to him. She touched a new cut under his eye and a healing one below his lip. Gently, she cupped his chin, looking at the scarred-over line on his throat.

“This is what you want.” She said it without inflection, not a question.

Finch had gotten used to not looking at what he wanted head-on. He’d learned the dreadful lesson of being careful what you wish for, and had taken pains since then not to wish for too much. Nothing more ambitious than to save one girl.

And to dismantle, as it turned out, one entire world.

“I want to see what’s next.” They felt like the safest words he could say. He felt Iolanthe’s eyes on him, and refused to be embarrassed. He brought his arm around Janet, then held the other one out to bring Ingrid in.

It was okay to leave the Hinterland if they weren’t in it. If another world waited for him and Alice was free and he’d drunk so deeply already of this place’s orderly and chaotic magic, he could go. He could let go.

And if he left, part of him whispered, the Spinner couldn’t follow. He’d be free at last of the fear that held him by the neck, the sense that her revenge, when it came, would take him out at the knees.

“Walk through the right doors,” Janet told him. “And perhaps a few wrong ones.”

She tilted her head and ran her thumb tips under his eyes. “When we see each other again, heaven knows where, you can tell me everything. And if this young woman is to be trusted, we can thank you both for our lives.”

Iolanthe’s forearm was already bared. She held the bone knife in her left hand, loose and easy. Tossed it a bit, to get a better grip. With a motion like she was mincing garlic, she made three cuts just above her elbow.

Janet breathed hard through her teeth and Ingrid stepped back, muttering. The cuts welled and spilled, running red over Iolanthe’s sun-browned skin. She stepped closer to the tavern wall and, using her finger as a brush, painted a line of blood in the space between two timbers.

“Stop staring,” she said after a minute. “It doesn’t help.”

The lines she drew were faint, the blood stretched as thin as it could go without breaking. It wasn’t till the line climbed over her head that Finch understood what she was doing.

She was drawing a door. The bone dagger, the blood. The door. Finch knew this story. He’d read it in Tales from the Hinterland.

If Iolanthe was weakened, the only sign of it was the way she caught herself, briefly, against the wall, before pulling a square of fabric from her bag.

“Tie this around my arm?”

Finch did, wincing as he drew the ends together tight.

“Now.” Iolanthe looked close at the dagger, at the words running over its handle, then read them aloud. Their syllables were bright and distant; they swooped and dove like seabirds, lingering on the air before drifting away.

The blood on the wall shifted like a shadow, becoming the seams of a real door. Through those seams, a gray light glowed.

Iolanthe drew her head up and shook out her cloak and looked, for a moment, very solemn. “Ready?”