There were traces of narrative here, yes, and not just the narratives that wafted from my companions like the smoke from a candle. When I narrowed my eyes, the walls glittered like glass. When I inhaled sharply, I could taste rampion on the back of my tongue. No matter what Henry might have experienced while she was trapped in the whiteout wood, she had done at least one thing correctly. She had brought us to the place where Birdie was hiding.
The hall ended at a junction, continuing off in three different directions. We stopped, considering our options.
“This is not an episode of Scooby Doo,” said Andrew, before Henry could speak. “We are not splitting the party.”
“We don’t need to.” I paused for a moment, realizing I was the one who’d spoken. Lovely. Everyone was looking at me now. Even better. I pointed down the left fork. “The narrative energy’s coming from that direction. I can’t tell you exactly what the story is, but we’ll find it that way.”
“Better than a hunting hound,” said Henry. “Andy, you’re with me; Jeff, keep Demi safe. Demi—”
“If I see her, I’ll pipe her back into the Stone Age,” said Demi.
Henry smiled. “Good girl,” she said, and began walking.
Apparently, Ciara and I didn’t need instructions. That was unsettling. We were useful tools in whatever plan Henry was enacting, that much was clear, but thus far, she had acknowledged our presence as little as possible. We exchanged a look and followed her. My shoulders were tight with worry, and from what I could see of Ciara’s posture, hers were much the same. Good. Whatever we were walking into, we weren’t doing it while off our guard.
Henry and the others had managed to get a lead on us while we were hesitating. I was about to turn a corner when there was a strangling sound, and the soft clang of something hitting the floor—something the size and shape of a concert flute.
“Demi!” I shouted, and whipped around the corner, only to find myself facing one of those scenes that make me question the reality in which I live.
Ropes of dingy golden hair hung from the ceiling, and had lashed themselves tight around the throats of my teammates, hoisting them off the ground. Demi, as the smallest and lightest of the four, had been lifted the highest; she clawed at the hair around her throat, feet kicking helplessly at the air.
Andrew and Jeffrey were kicking as much as she was, but Henry wasn’t moving: she hung still as the grave, like she had retreated back into her coma. The sight of her motionless body sent rage singing along my every nerve, hot and uncontrollable.
I turned to Ciara. “A knot is a kind of lock, get them down,” I spat, before grabbing the nearest hank of dangling hair and beginning to pull myself up it, hand over hand, like a pirate scaling the rigging, or a little girl in Massachusetts climbing a tree. She was never far from me, that girl I had once been, all anger and action, an arrow in quest of a bow.
She never did find her bow, but a story found her, and tried to make her into a better weapon. It failed, or maybe it succeeded: it made her into me, and I wanted nothing more than to strike at the heart of every story that had ever harmed a child.
The hair pulsed under my hands like the umbilical cord of some terrible living thing. I squeezed tighter as I climbed, hoping I would do some injury to its owner. Something above me moaned, although whether it was from the pressure or from the weight of all the bodies tangled in its hair, I couldn’t have said.
“Drop them and I might not knock out all your teeth,” I called into the dark at the rafters. “If you enjoy chewing, you’ll back down.”
The hair pulsed, but did not retract.
“Suit yourself,” I said, and kept climbing.
The hair of a Rapunzel is stronger than a normal person’s: it has to be, to allow for use as an impromptu ladder. It also distorts space in small, subtle ways, allowing the climber to reach the top before their strength gives out. In half the time I should have needed, I had reached the top of the hair and pulled myself up onto the rafters, where a wild-eyed blonde woman in an ill-fitting floral dress crouched.
She smiled when she saw me. “Are you my prince?” she asked.
I hesitated. The fact of her narrative washed off her like a wave, but her smile was vacant and innocent. “How long were you at Childe?” I asked.
She looked at me blankly.
Right: she was a Rapunzel. “How long were you in the tower?”
“Long time, long, long time,” she said. “So long Mother forgot where to find me, and had to send her friends to bring me here. They said to watch the hall while they went for my prince.” Her smile became a pout. “They’ve been gone a long time. People keep pulling on my hair.”
The compulsion charms at Childe were virtually narcotics. If they hadn’t disconnected her from reality, the withdrawal after her summary removal would have done it. “My friends are caught in your hair,” I said. “Let them go.”
“But Mother’s friends said—”
“They lied to you. They don’t know where your prince is. But I do.” I spread my hands, showing that they were empty. God above, I hate non-violent solutions. “Let them go, and we’ll cut your hair and take you to him.”
She looked at me suspiciously for a while. Then she nodded.
There were several crashes from below, followed by a scream.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake—stay here!” I snapped, and grabbed a loop of her hair, and jumped.
# # #
Descending from a height on a ladder of human hair is not to be recommended; descending from a height on a rope of same, less so. I reached the floor in a matter of moments. Demi, Jeffrey, and Andrew were on hands and knees, wheezing and clutching at their throats. Ciara was stroking a lock of hair, teasing the knots away, leaving it straight and shining.
And Henry was gone.
Jeffrey saw me and pointed, still wheezing, to a hole in the floor. I dropped the hair I was holding and rushed to drop to my knees beside the pit, looking down.
Henry dangled some three feet down, her hands locked on a broken bit of flooring. She frowned when she saw me.
“Took you long enough,” she said.
“I was busy,” I replied. The cold still came off of her in waves. She was helpless. Whatever was wrong with her, she couldn’t use it against me now. “How are you feeling, Henry?”
“Like I’m about to fall into the basement. Help me up.”
I didn’t want to. I wanted nothing more. “You’ve been acting weird since you woke up.”
The look she gave me was pure disbelief. “You want to talk about this now?”
“You got a better time?”
“Yes. When I’m not hanging on for dear life.”
She sounded like herself on that last phrase: annoyed and anxious and barely holding on to her temper. I wrestled with my conscience for a moment. If she had come back wrong, I was risking my team by saving her. If she was just disoriented . . .
Either way, she was still my friend. I thrust my hand down into the hole, and she grabbed it, grinning briefly.
“Thanks,” she said, and pulled herself to safety.
# # #
Birdie and Elise were long gone by the time we coaxed their abandoned Rapunzel down from the rafters and went searching for them. We waited for the cleanup crew out on the lawn. Ciara continued to comb out the Rapunzel’s hair with her fingers, cooing sweetly to keep the girl calm. Henry stood off to one side, talking quietly with Andrew and Jeffrey, while Demi played her flute for a murder of crows that had collected. I looked that way and smiled.
Then I paused, feeling a chill work its way through me.
The grass around Henry’s feet was dead and brown. The grass everywhere else was still growing green.
Whatever was wrong, it wasn’t over yet.
HOLLY TREE
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 709 (“Snow White”)
Status: INCURSION STATUS UNCLEAR
Summer is an impossibility in the whiteout wood, the liminal space set a
side between the story and the sigh for the use of the snow girls, the apple girls, the blood and ice girls walking through the steps of their ancient, unkind tale. They blend into the trees, black and white and red, colored to match the world around them. Theirs is a perfect camouflage, and it has always served them well when they stepped out of the palace and into the pines. No one can find them in the wood if they don’t want to be found. No one can hurt them there.
No one, except for one another.
She lay where she had fallen, a bloodless body on the bloody snow, and the only motion was the wind running its fingers through her bark-black hair, ruffling it like an anxious mother. Get up get up get up, whispered the wind, and the goosedown girl, the ruby girl, the coal girl remained as she was: unmoving, unaware, as much a part of the wood as any rock or tree. She hovered in a space between living and dying, and it was anyone’s guess which way she would go, for she had eaten the apple; she had fulfilled her part of the compact, and once the apple has been eaten, it becomes both very hard and very easy to kill the princesses of garnet and char and bone. She had no glass coffin, but she had the ice in her hair and the snow all around her, and every snowflake that fell was clear as a whisper.
She had no true love to kiss her, but she had the favor of the wood, and it was the wood that sent the wind to run its fingers through her hair, whispering Get up get up get up. It wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t the right thing at all.
It was close enough. Henrietta Marchen opened her eyes, and the world moved on.
# # #
I woke with frost on my eyelashes and a pounding in my ears that felt loud enough to shake the foundations of the Earth. The wind howled around me, smelling of apples and blood. Everything was white, and everything hurt.
Piece by aching piece, I pulled myself out of the snowdrift that had formed around me. It was deep enough that I struggled to sit up, the snow crumbling under my hands like it was trying to keep me pinned. I should have frozen to death. Lying in the snow for that long, with no protection but a torn and bloody silk slip? I should have died.
But I hadn’t. With dawning horror, I realized I wasn’t even cold. I might as well have been taking a nap in a sun-warmed, grassy meadow somewhere, and not in the middle of the worst blizzard I had ever seen.
The maze was gone. Adrianna was gone. I was alone with the snow. The last thing I remembered was—
My hand flew to my throat and found only unbroken skin, all marks of Adrianna’s icy blade washed away by whatever magic had put the blood back in my body and kept me from freezing. I was weak—magic isn’t a real solution for blood loss and a severed carotid artery—but I was alive, and that was considerably more than I’d been expecting when Adrianna walked away from me.
I stiffened, something more chilling than the howling winter wind washing over me. Adrianna had called me “little doorway” because she’d been a part of this story long enough to understand one of the hidden sides of the Snow White narrative. We were supposed to be orphans. We were supposed to meet our princes after we fell into a sleep like death, after we ate the apple and were sealed under glass. No one would know if our personalities changed, because there wasn’t supposed to be anyone who really knew us as people. We were cyphers, black and white checkerboard girls, completely interchangeable.
Adrianna had slit my throat and used my blood to open the way for her to enter my body. She was me now. She was standing with my legs and breathing with my lungs, and I was here, and I had no way of waking up.
“Oh, sweet Grimm, what do I do now?” I whispered.
The wind whipped my words away. I had never been more alone.
# # #
Time had always been difficult in the wood, maybe because I’d always been dreaming when I went there. Dreams stretch things out, turning minutes into hours, taking advantage of the brief periods of REM sleep that the human mind is heir to. They also skip over what doesn’t seem important. I trudged through the whiteout wood, fully a part of it for the first time—I was stuck here, after all, just as much a part of the narrative as the others—and realized that I’d never thought about how big it was. It had always been dream distance before, meant to be skipped past. Now that I was walking through every awful inch of it, I wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep and be able to cover miles of snow-covered ground in a second, the way I’d always done before.
Or I could wake up. That would also be nice. If I were asleep, the walk would be tolerable, and waking up would be an option. But I wasn’t asleep anymore.
I stepped between two trees and the wood changed. The wind died; the snow stopped falling, although the ground was still white. It was like it had gone from the worst part of winter to the best in a single heartbeat. Even the air tasted sweeter, like apples and pine instead of apples and blood. This was a winter where snowmen could be built and children could go sledding before fleeing inside for cocoa and cookies.
It still wasn’t a winter I wanted to belong to. I never asked for this.
The clearing ahead of me was ringed with trees, spaced so that each pair formed a rough doorway, with enough space between them that it would be easier to go around than to go through. I took another step forward, and the doorways filled with white-skinned, black-haired, red-lipped women. I knew them, and they knew me. I’d been here before, after all.
The nearest was a tall, thin woman with ashy freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose, sharing her doorway with a shorter, rounder-faced woman whose eyes were a startlingly deep brown. Brown was rare here, rendered fascinating by the monochrome world around it.
The tall woman’s hands moved in silent speech. Her companion translated, “You got away, but you didn’t get away. Is that true?”
“She cut me.” I touched my throat and stomach involuntarily. My flesh had healed, but the tear in my nightgown hadn’t. I was afraid to look down and see how much blood was soaked into the fabric. “She took my blood. I think she took my body too.”
“She did,” said a new voice, rich with a Nova Scotia accent. I turned. Tanya was stepping out from between two trees, leaving her private clearing for the communal one. “We felt her go. The Cinderella story had been attacking our own, testing the borders of the wood.”
“Ayane told me,” I said, gesturing toward Judi and the woman who was her best friend and translator. “She said it was why the snow was coming down so hard before.”
“That’s true,” said Tanya. Her voice was clear and filled with sorrow.
The last time I’d seen her, the whiteout wood had been using her as a puppet, speaking through her lips because I wasn’t listening to the whispers embedded in the snow. I frowned as I studied her, looking for signs that she remembered our conversation. I didn’t find them. She looked worried, sure, but not embarrassed or angry, either of which would have made sense, given the way our last encounter ended. Who knew that something as ageless and inhuman as the whiteout wood could be tricked with a simple “hey, what’s over there”?
“Adrianna took my body.” Tanya had already acknowledged that, but it felt like I couldn’t stop saying it. It was the most important thing that had ever happened, to anyone. I needed everyone to know, because maybe then, I could start figuring out what I was going to do about it. “She cut me, and she took my body.”
“It happens to the best of us,” said Ayane, and the bitterness in her voice would have been impossible to miss even if I hadn’t come to know her so well. Tanya was my official mentor in the wood, but I liked all the Snow Whites I’d met so far, with the glaring exception of Adrianna. I just wasn’t ready to become their permanent roommate.
“I’m sorry,” said Tanya. She looked to her left. I followed her gaze.
There was a pair of trees there, with no one standing between them. I could see the clearing on the other side, white snow on the ground broken by a scattering of tiny red flowers, like drops of blood. It spoke to me in a way that nothing in the wood ever had, and the word it said was “home.”<
br />
I wrenched my eyes away. “No,” I said. “I’m sorry, but no. I can’t. I have to find a way back. Adrianna—she’s going to go after my team, if she hasn’t already started.” Sloane could hold her own, but Andy had no actual connection to the narrative; he’d be a sitting duck. Demi was too untrained to take on someone like Adrianna, who had been honing her story for decades. And Jeff . . .
I didn’t think Jeff could attack someone who was wearing my face, even if he knew it wasn’t actually me. He was a good guy and a loyal friend. He would have had trouble fighting back before we’d gone and fallen in love with each other. Now that we had, I couldn’t risk him sitting back and letting her do her worst. I knew all too well how bad her worst could be.
“Henry, I don’t think you understand,” said Tanya. “You can take another body, but yours is not there to reclaim. You won’t be yourself anymore. It’s not the sort of thing you can do lightly.”
“Neither is standing here and letting Adrianna kill everyone I care about,” I protested. “If there’s a way, I want it.”
“You can’t control where you go,” said Tanya. “You could wake up anywhere in the world.”
“That’s not true.” The voice was Ayane’s. I turned to face her, but not before I saw the shock and anger in Tanya’s eyes.
Ayane had her shoulders locked and her chin lifted, glaring defiance across the clearing at the other Snow White. “There’s a way to control it,” she said. “It’s not easy, and it’s not fun, but it’s possible. You owe her that.”
“I owe her nothing,” said Tanya. “She lost.”
“I’m right here,” I said. “Tell me.”
Tanya looked at me, and while there was no mercy in her eyes, there was sorrow there. Maybe she’d been trying to spare me, not punish me.
I didn’t care either way. If it would get me back to my team, I would take whatever punishment my story wanted to dish out. I wasn’t giving up. This was not going to be the way my story ended.
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 20
