The Land of Yesterday

by K. A. Reynolds

  The mists thinned even more at the mantra of daisies. And Cecelia’s jumbled memories fell into place. This was not Widdendream. They were not her family. This was not her home. She was inside the Castle of Never More and Once Again—a place that wanted to trap her in its walls and steal all her tomorrows.

  She had to escape from these foul paper things.

  As fast as she could, Cecelia ducked out of the Mother thing’s embrace. She darted for the hall, paper parents hot on her trail. Mists scourged the corridor like a raging river. Yet the harder she focused on daisies, the more the mists, and her mind, cleared.

  The Father thing called through the fog as Cecelia thumped up the staircase. “Cee-Cee, we don’t want to be late for the picnic. Come back like a good paper girl.”

  He was close behind.

  The Mother thing grabbed Cecelia’s hair; a clump ripped out in her grasp. “Come back, Cecelia,” the Mother thing crooned in her lullaby voice. “I’ll love you like an only child, the way you’ve always wanted.”

  “You’re wrong!” Cecelia snapped, sprinting ahead. “It’s better to have loved someone than to never have had the chance to love them at all.”

  The Father thing grabbed Cecelia’s flesh ankle and squeezed. Numbness washed up her leg from toes to hip, trailed by a rumpling crunch. Her left leg had succumbed to paperness, too. The paper devil grinned up at Cecelia with sharp parchment teeth, and then laughed, as her hair fought the beast to get her free.

  Cecelia focused on her brother and on how somewhere her parents still needed her. Thoughts of them weakened the mists and music even more. The Father thing hissed and let go of her leg. All at once, the house she mistook as Widdendream lost its glamour and revealed its true form.

  She wasn’t running up Widdendream’s staircase, and these weren’t Widdendream’s walls. The dark medieval stairwell of Yesterday’s castle appeared. Torches perched on musty walls. Paper rats scurried past her boots as she ran. The parental creatures scuttled like venomous spiders up the ancient stone steps, hissing Cecelia’s name.

  Daisy in hand, Cecelia followed her intuition, her memory, and her light to the location she first mistook as her mother’s bedroom, and threw open the door.

  Chapter 18

  A Prisoner and a Daring Escape

  Cecelia slammed the heavy wooden door behind her and locked it. The evil Mother and Father things were right behind her. Holding the handle, Cecelia felt it jiggle, twist, and then turn. She heard them breathing behind the door with paper-bag lungs and gripped the handle harder. Her parchment hands kept slipping over the circular knob.

  Maybe if she couldn’t get a good grip, they couldn’t either.

  The walls were hand-cut stone. Torches lined the room; firelight blazed from iron sconces; shadows loomed long and wicked. What at first had appeared as Widdendream must have been a trick of the mist.

  Cecelia’s gaze fell. She’d been so focused on the paper devils trying to snatch her she hadn’t noticed how her light had grown. Or how, since entering this room, it glowed like a mazarine sunrise through her dark paper skin. Colored mists leaked in from under the crack in the door. They snaked her body, drawn to her light, trying to extinguish it for good. She’d been able to fight them off earlier, but didn’t want to take any chances.

  Wrestling off the extra sweater the Mother thing forced onto her, Cecelia rolled it up and laid it across the base of the ancient-looking wood door to stop the leak. The sweater seemed to be working.

  Still facing the door, the scent of rain and daisies and her mother’s perfume circled Cecelia. She paused to inhale the sweet scent. When a noise, more like a whimper, echoed from the back of the room, Cecelia swung around at once. A cage, identical to the one inside Cecelia’s body but tall as the ceiling, held someone who looked like her true mother captive inside.

  “Mother?” Cecelia sprinted to the cage. “Is it really you?”

  Mazarine’s eyes were closed. Her body hunched on the floor. She wore her favorite gray dress, the one she had on the morning she left for the Land of Yesterday, and her best tall boots. Midnight-blue hair swayed about her shoulders in a nonexistent breeze. She wasn’t the same mother Cecelia remembered. Much of her skin had turned as blue and hollow as Cecelia’s, and her dress had papered, too. From what she could see, everything but her mother’s neck, legs, and boots had transformed.

  “Mother, it’s me, Cecelia.”

  Mazarine didn’t move so much as an eyelash.

  Slithering and shuffling sounds eked in from the hall. Cecelia glared at the door. Yesterday’s minions weren’t going to claim her or her mother, not if she had anything to do with it.

  Cecelia tugged on the cage’s heart-shaped padlock, but it wouldn’t budge. She thought maybe she could flatten herself out enough to squeeze through the bars, but her own cage made doing so impossible. Cecelia twisted the lock, kicked it, and punched it, until finally her hair intervened. It picked the lock easy-peasy, and Cecelia slipped inside.

  “Mother?” Cecelia knelt beside Mazarine. Her skin looked as rough and dry as sand, yet, even still, she retained her beautiful glow. Up close Cecelia realized her mother’s eyes had papered, too. “Are you awake? Please tell me you’re okay.”

  Mazarine’s eyelids fluttered like a raven’s wings. She raised her head in a slow arc, and said with a sigh, “Oh, Cecelia. My beautiful girl.” Cecelia wanted to cry. It really was her. She tried to speak, but no words came. “I knew you’d come for me.”

  Outside the castle, wind gusted past all and everything. Grains of sand whipped the window glass like countless granular hammers as Cecelia helped her mother sit up, and kept one eye on the door.

  “What happened? Why are you locked in this cage?” Cecelia rested a palm on her cheek—she felt so cold. Like a no-mittens, midwinter’s-night cold. “How did you turn into paper?”

  Mazarine shook her head. “The mists lured me into the castle. One of them pretended to be Celadon. Like a fool, I believed it and followed it into this cage.” Chin wavering, Mazarine stifled a cry. “Then it trapped me. I cried so hard, and for so long, time seemed to stop. Soon, I’d turned into this. Your father would have known better.”

  Distressed as her mother was, Cecelia decided not to mention her father’s kidnapping, or Widdendream’s madness. Or that Celadon had died a second time and what remained of his paper body lay housed in a cage near her heart. However, there was one thing she needed to do without delay.

  “Mother, before anything else happens, I need to give you something.” Cecelia touched the letter for her mother still tucked inside her pocket.

  “Of course.” Mazarine straightened up.

  Cecelia inhaled a deep breath, and placed the letter in her mother’s hands. “I wrote this for you with the special pen you gave me. The one you said was—”

  “Powerful enough to bring writer and reader together, when combined with the ink of the heart,” Mazarine said fondly. “I remember.”

  “After you left, I thought that if I wrote you a letter with my saddest tears and you read it, it would bring us back together, like magic. Then you’d understand how sorry I was for everything I’d done, all the hurt I caused our family.”

  Mazarine accepted her daughter’s letter of tears and put on a brave smile. “No, it’s me who should be sorry. I was so lost in grief. It was as if half my heart had crumbled to dust. I didn’t know how to act, what to feel, how to move forward. I couldn’t find myself. I became obsessed with getting Celadon back, but not once did I blame you.” Mazarine stroked Cecelia’s hair. “Don’t you know? I would have done the same for you.”

  Heat pinched the backs of Cecelia’s eyes. “I thought you hated me for what happened to Celadon. I thought you blamed me like I blamed myself. I worried you might never forgive me.”

  “Now you listen to me, Cecelia Andromeda Dahl. There is nothing to forgive. I love you more than anything in this world or the next, the same way I do Celadon—with a love like a wild horse with no hop
e of being tamed. I told you as much in the letter I wrote you. Didn’t you read it?” Mazarine held up the envelope Cecelia had given her moments ago. “I figured you had, since I got yours.”

  Cecelia’s eyes bugged. “What? You did get my letter? The one I sent before I left home? You got it and wrote back and that’s why my letter looks different?”

  “That’s right. The Caterwaul, which you must have met, caught it in the desert.”

  The Caterwaul.

  “The Cat Guardian found your letter, opened it, and told me it had never read a more moving plea. But because the Law of Yesterday prohibits it from releasing those who came here of their own free will, all he could do to help was give me your letter and enough time to write you back. I explained everything in the letter I wrote you, the one you’re holding now.” Mazarine’s hair wrapped Cecelia in paper ribbons. “I hope one day you can forgive me.”

  Cecelia ripped open the strange little crystalline envelope colored in the shade of tears and eagerly read her mother’s words. The note was long, and heartfelt, and more beautiful than Cecelia could have ever imagined. However, the loveliest line she’d ever read in her life was this: My dearest Cecelia, you are the heart that beats alongside my heart. No matter where I am, I am never far from you.

  The heat behind Cecelia’s eyes doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and suddenly, a series of midnight-blue gems plunked to the stone floor. They were translucent and hard as diamonds. She caught a few in her hands.

  Her heart twisted at the truth of them.

  “I’m . . . crying.” Cecelia’s laughter bounced off the walls. “The last tears I cried were the ones in my letter to you.” She laughed harder. “I thought I never wanted to cry again, but it feels good, really, really, good.”

  Mazarine gave her a sorrowful smile. “I’m sorry for leaving you, Cecelia. I just couldn’t let Celadon go. And because of that, I put us both at risk. This is my fault.”

  “No. It’s not.” Cecelia took her mother’s hands. “You didn’t know this would happen. That makes this an accident, and they aren’t anyone’s fault. That’s why they’re called accidents.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart. But I’m not as strong as you are.” Tears balancing on her lower lids, Mazarine squeezed Cecelia’s hands. “It seems your wisdom has eclipsed my own.”

  “How about, just for now, I’ll be strong for you?” Cecelia replied. “Being there for each other is what families do, right?”

  Sparkling, crystal-like tears, identical to Cecelia’s, bounced off Mazarine’s cheeks. “Yes, that’s right.”

  Cecelia hugged her mother again, wanting to take away her pain. Though, deep down, she knew all she could do was be there for her, if and when her mother needed her.

  The torches on the walls sparked. Stale air knit around them like wool. Shadowy rivers of mist, twice as thick as those from before, pushed through the stones in the floors and walls.

  “Mists.” Mazarine leaned against the bars, blinking heavily. “They create illusions to slow us, trap us into staying. They’re what have been keeping me weak in this cage.”

  The room filled quickly with smog.

  Cecelia shook the sleepy mists from her brain and calculated how to escape. “Mother, can you stand? We need to get out of here.”

  Mazarine nodded. “I think so.”

  Cecelia helped her up. Dark storms battled outside, whipping sands and howling winds. Trystyng and Phantasmagoria were out there somewhere. The mists had made her forget them.

  Not anymore.

  “Hold your breath as long as you can,” Cecelia said, coughing. Mazarine nodded with puffed cheeks while Cecelia listened at the door.

  The halls were silent. Where could the parent things have gone? If she led her real mother into the hall and those things attacked them, who knew what could happen? Even if Cecelia could fight them off, she didn’t think her mother was strong enough to defend herself.

  Make a decision, Cecelia.

  Slowly and carefully, she opened the door and peered into the hall. The mists fogging the bedroom blew through the doorway and slithered along the floor to the right. Cecelia saw no evil paper things. At once, her mind began to defog. Cecelia inhaled fresh air and whispered, “Let’s go. The coast seems clear.”

  Mazarine heaved mighty breaths. Cecelia’s torn ankle wavered, but didn’t bend. As they stepped into the hall, the mists vanished.

  To their surprise, on the floor at their feet were a series of makeshift arrows pointing up the corridor to their right. But that wasn’t the most extraordinary part: the arrows had been arranged with daisies.

  Mother and daughter shared a glance. Mazarine shrugged. Cecelia swore the daisies weren’t there earlier, but they’d never led her wrong before.

  Chapter 19

  A Trail, a Lock, and an Unusually Heroic Key

  Lightness and darkness meandered the walls in shadows of orange and black. Cecelia and Mazarine followed the flowery arrows through the dim corridors this way and that, all the way to a bare stone wall.

  “What now?” her mother whispered, wavering on noodling legs. Cecelia’s paper limbs were still in good shape, yet her back had started to numb.

  Cecelia inspected the passageway behind them, scanning the cracks between stones. She saw no mists or cruel paper ghouls. Why would the daisies and whoever left them lead Cecelia and her mother to a wall?

  No, not a wall—a trapdoor.

  Cecelia spotted the distinct outline in the stones. She and Mazarine pushed on the secret exit together, yet the door wouldn’t open.

  “Cecelia, do you see that?” Mazarine squinted at two symbols chiseled into the rock. The top one was small, deep, and oddly shaped, unlike the larger, more recognizable indentation underneath. “Do those two shapes look familiar to you?”

  Cecelia cocked her head at the uppermost opening. It almost looked like a keyhole. Cecelia didn’t have a proper key, but she did have a reasonable facsimile. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her mother’s gift to her.

  Mazarine’s eyes sparked in a way Cecelia hadn’t seen since her brother died. “You met the boy and his sheep!”

  “I did.” Cecelia had forgotten about their Joan of Arc until now. “Thank you for leaving it for me.”

  “It was the least I could do.”

  “I love you,” Cecelia said.

  “And I love you.”

  Head high, Cecelia raised the figurine and placed its sword tip in the hole, sure it would work. But the door remained fused shut.

  “What about the shape below that one?” Mazarine asked. “What does it remind you of?”

  Cecelia’s eyes gleamed. “The head of a daisy.”

  Mazarine nodded. “Maybe if we use them together . . . ?”

  “Yes.” Cecelia grinned. “I’ll hold the Joan key and you place the daisy key.”

  “On three,” Mazarine said, picking up the nearest bloom.

  Together they counted, “One, two, three.”

  When Mazarine placed the daisy into the opening, it hardened into a perfect key and fused with the stone. At the same time, Cecelia turned the Joan hard right.

  The secret door opened. Heavy blocks slid soundlessly backward to reveal a hidden staircase going down. Winds, as cold as deep earth, pushed back their hair.

  “Where do you think it leads?” Mazarine whispered into the depths of the black cavern.

  “I don’t know. But we can figure it out together.” In the far reaches of her mind, Cecelia wondered why anyone would help them escape. She was quite sure the Land of Yesterday never let any of its prisoners go.

  Maybe it was Phantasmagoria and Trystyng? A thrill of hope rose within her. Cecelia had been so worried about them since gaining back her unmisted faculties; they were never far from her thoughts. But why go to all this trouble? If the gnomes knew where she and her mother were, why not help them escape in person?

  The secret door closed behind Cecelia and Mazarine, enfolding them in darkness. Cecelia’s lantern
glowed softly through her parchment skin. Dim sconces, hung high on the turret, lit the way down the spiral staircase.

  “Stay close to me,” Cecelia whispered while scanning for mists. “Yesterday sneaks up when you least expect it.” Studying her mother in the firelight, Cecelia frowned. Her midnight-blue paper tresses were peppered with the silver of a timber wolf’s fur; all its spunk seemed gone. “I’ll go first.”

  Crunching and crumbling echoes beat out of the dimness below. The stone staircase shook. The two stared at each other as dust rained from above.

  “What was that?” Mazarine uttered.

  “I don’t know. Better keep going.”

  Tiny bits of debris littered the staircase from whatever had shaken the castle. So far, they had seen no mists or paper monstrosities. Still, Cecelia felt uneasy.

  “Cecelia, your face . . .” Mazarine pointed to the left side of Cecelia’s jaw.

  Sure enough, when Cecelia ran her fingers from jawline to cheek, she found a length of paper. How much more of herself was affected, she wondered, if she hadn’t even felt her face numb?

  The castle rattled. Mazarine grabbed hold of her daughter, steadying her until the shaking passed. “Are you all right?”

  Cecelia smiled. “I’m fine.” A grating sound like stone against stone wound up through the stairwell. They exchanged nervous glances but stayed silent. The torches sputtered in an updraft of wind. “Come on. Maybe whoever’s helping us is leading our way to the exit. Escaping Yesterday is our only hope.” Cecelia took her mother’s hand; when she clasped on, Mazarine’s fingers went limp and slipped free.

  “Cecelia?” Her mother paused on the steps to gape down at her paper abdomen. Her dress and the skin of her middle had thinned, enough to see a small tarnished cage and unlit lantern within her. The castle moaned and shifted around them. Mazarine slid to the ground. “What’s happening to me?”

  Cecelia sped to her mother’s side. “It’s okay—I have a cage, too, and my lantern wasn’t lit at first either.” Rocks crumbled from overhead. Cecelia’s hair formed an umbrella above her mother to protect her. “I think everyone might have secret lanterns inside them. Lanterns that, when we’re especially sad or scared, might go dark and need help lighting again. Sometimes it’s the care of our family and friends that brings back our spark; other times, it’s the care we give to ourselves. Either way, once we’re relit, I think we can help reignite someone else.” Cecelia took her mother’s hand. “If we work together, I know we can make it.”