The Hazel Wood: Chapters 25–31

Janet was better at subterfuge than her girlfriend.

People come here from your world—my world, once—by various means, sometimes accidental but more often on purpose. I’ve made it my job to welcome them, warn them, and keep track of them. The numbers get a bit dodgy, of course, what with all the things you can fall into or get eaten by.

“That’s the real problem with the Hinterland,” Janet said, ostensibly to me.

“A large coincidence, that is. I’m sure you hate having the excuse to talk about her.” But Ingrid said it without rancor, moving to stand behind Janet and rest her hands on her shoulders.

“Sense,” she said. “The last bastion of the struggling refugee.”

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

Her shoulders were hunched respectfully; I was worried she might try to genuflect in my direction.

When I pressed two fingers gently to my sternum it made my heart feel like it had brain freeze.

When I blinked, I could see faces in the bark—funny ones, wizened ones, lovely ones.

The bartender was a massive man wearing a dashiki and an impressive brown beard.

He plied me with free cups of a buttery yellow beer that tasted exactly like kiwis, and I sang rustily for his recorder—“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Landslide,” “Billie Jean.”

“Look at yourself—at your hands. It’ll reach your mind soon, you know. It’ll reach your heart. They’ve been waiting a very long time for you to come back—the queen, the king. And stasis is worse than stories, they say.”

We rode past a house that hung too close over the road, as if it had outgrown its lot. Three women moved like mist around its eaves, reaching up to tap their fingernails against its windows.

A sudden metronome beat rose from the swirl of trees and night. It filled my chest like a heartbeat and threw off the rhythm of my breath.

I fell back, chastened.

It was a rambling thicket of turrets and dull windows and decorative outcroppings.

Her final words had an extra resonance to them, a blur. Like they wore a mask to hide their true intentions.

She gave me a smile that should’ve been beguiling but made my shoulders rise protectively.

The condescension in her voice almost made me buckle.

We entered a hall so high and vast it felt like a gym, its gilded corners softened by mossy masses that had to be birds’ nests.

Seventeen years. Seventeen years in this rictus. Finally I was grateful time worked differently here. Maybe it felt faster to them, like time passing in a dream.

“Nobody can fix a broken machine if they don’t have the parts,” she said, and led me into a passageway whose floor prickled with rushes. Here and there they rustled with tiny things moving in circumscribed paths.

The dark was vast and pendulous.

But that word plucked at something else in my rapt, nascent baby brain.

But that word plucked at something else in my rapt, nascent baby brain.

By then I knew the king wasn’t really my father—a contingent of men had spent a few weeks at the palace some months before I was born.

When my eligibility was announced, I knew I could be frivolous. A princess can set rules for her suitors, even a blackhearted girl like me.

I was frozen, trussed, on my way to a life of servitude, but the follower—that was what filled me with fear.

I saw a rusty blue Buick, the Hula-Hoop I’d been spinning doggedly over my hips when he pulled up beside me.

I winched my eyes open and saw the raw threads being snipped and stitched back into place by invisible fingers.

I held on to that tenacious spike of fear and rage.

The brother thumped hard to the earth, keening as the wind was knocked out of him.

“Every ex-Story I spoke to says the stories broke one of two ways: they were wound down by the Spinner, or picked apart by an inciting incident. And that inciting incident always had to do with a refugee wandering in at the wrong time. From there we extrapolated—” She stopped short, looking at me and Finch.

“Every ex-Story I spoke to says the stories broke one of two ways: they were wound down by the Spinner, or picked apart by an inciting incident. And that inciting incident always had to do with a refugee wandering in at the wrong time. From there we extrapolated—” She stopped short, looking at me and Finch.

The sky was a mottled blue, the sunlight strange.

The sand was glittering white, then dun, then grassy, then just grass.

I tried to glean clues about how much time had passed from the make of the cars, without luck.

I was slower to anger now, more circumspect.

The psychic wasn’t in—she didn’t start work till noon, and it was ten a.m. on a Sunday—but the room was half-filled with people who had singular faces. Cruel features, or lovely ones, delicately drawn.

Every week, the Hinterland’s refugees gathered in the psychic’s parlor to talk. Drink coffee. Settle grievances.