Chapter 78
THE WAY
I stuff the CD player into my jacket, keeping hold of the rosemary twigs in case I need them later, although the concept of “later” now feels as remote as the moon.
I take a step forward, then another, and keep going until my brain understands that the Heath is gone.
There is a path nearby, soft grass and pine needles building slowly from the dry clay like a beckoning hand. I periodically look over my shoulder to make sure it hasn’t closed up behind me, that this fairy-tale realm can only play so many tricks at once.
It delivers me down an avenue of tall, wizened chestnut trees. As the foliage covers up the dawn completely, the way is lit by pinecones hollowed out in the middle to house tealights. My heart whirs. Someone put those there. I am closing in on other people. Other beings.
Layla’s compass still refuses to land on a direction: Earth’s magnetic field has no power here.
I cross a stone bridge lined with ferns, and climb through a steep, low-ceilinged tunnel of hawthorns, after which my footsteps start to crunch on frost. My breath appears in clouds, as white as my hands: I dressed for a crisp sunrise in June, not midwinter.
I try to check how long I’ve been walking, only to find that my wristwatch has stopped.
For the first time in years, I think of Sander’s pocket watch, and its odd, mesmerising sheen.
Has it been an hour yet, back on the Heath? Are the others panicking?
I can’t think about two worlds at once. I am here, wherever “here” is.
Something flickers in the corner of my eye, up and across – a fox. A red squirrel. A water vole scampers from one side of the avenue to the other, and I realise I have reached the peak.
I find a flagstone clearing, dappled with shadows in the shape of fine, twisted branches.
Déjà vu fills me to the top of my skull. I know this place. These stones.
Of course. A dream isn’t a world unto itself, but a glimpse into another. Aurora’s mind could wander while her body slept; perhaps mine had done the same, that night of the Great Storm. Easy to forget upon waking. Easy to erase.
I look up and almost fall backwards at the sheer height of the dark trees around me.
They’re like California redwoods, taller than skyscrapers, their ceiling of spindly topmost branches crowding out the sky.
Stars – actual, volatile, silver-and-fire-blue stars – hover at different heights like lanterns, and I don’t know how my eyes can stand to look.
Between them, from mullioned windows (trees with mullioned windows!), long medieval pennants with faded crests hang ragged and flat in the absence of breeze. Everything glitters with frost.
‘Sander?’ I flinch at my own voice, how strange it sounds in this place, on this air. As if I’m speaking into a wall. I turn in a slow circle, looking for signs of life in the windows. How do I call out to him without drawing unwanted attention? ‘Sander?’
More rustling among the ferns and brambles.
A straw-coloured hoof creeps out of a holly bush.
My mind, still following human logic, expects a horse.
But the hooves are connected to human legs, a skirt of ivy leaves, a pan-pipe, long dark hair covering a honey-brown chest, and an impossibly beautiful face.
The stranger eyes me warily, silent even as their hooves patter back and forth, in a movement which I recognise, slack-jawed, as a bourrée. Viewed from the side, they aren’t hooves at all, but toeless feet with hyperextended arches.
Over their shoulder, a raven ruffles its feathers until it becomes a man with luminous black skin, regal, tall on pointed feet of his own.
He wears a pendant around his neck: a skeletal beak.
When he puts it to his lips, a corvid caw fills the clearing.
The honey-brown being next to him looks at me differently now – with recognition.
I went into this prepared for unknowns, but not these unknowns.
Not this many at once. My breath snags; I run down the first alley I see, squeezing through holly instead of brick.
Just as I’ve untangled my hair from the leaves, I slip on a sandbank and fall down a level onto my knee, hard. The rosemary twigs fly from my hands.
I have stumbled into a forest cathedral, thriving and decaying, majestic and ruined, its architecture at the mercy of the earth.
In my ten seconds of flight, more uncannily beautiful faces have appeared in nooks and doorless doorways.
Their silence is uniform; the only sounds are my gasps and the misty rush of waterfalls.
‘Sander?’ For better or worse, attention has now been drawn, so I shout louder, trying to project my voice the way I used to power my limbs through a grand jeté. ‘Are you here? Sander!’
And then, in the gathering crowd of eldritch creatures and celestial beauties, a human face.
‘Glen.’
In the split second our eyes meet, I fear he’ll run away, but he elbows his way through the onlookers towards me. They tower over us both. Some murmur with intrigue, others tut at being pushed aside, but none utter a single discernible syllable.
‘You know where he is, don’t you? Glen, I’m not leaving until—’
He skids into me and presses a hand to my mouth, looking around in panic, an emotion I hadn’t thought he was capable of.
‘Stop talking. You can’t be here.’ He lets me go but keeps whispering into my ear. ‘How did you cross over? No, never mind that, there’s no time. However you did it, you must undo it. You must go back.’
‘I’m not—’ I bite off my words and silently mouth: I am not leaving without Sander. I figured out the note, I followed his instructions. Where. Is. He?
Glen’s face falls. He turns his palm up and runs the index finger of his other hand down it, as if reviewing a list. The note…
? He grabs my shoulders with even greater urgency.
‘You need to run,’ he says, pained. ‘It’s too late for Sander, there’s nothing to be done for him.
I’m sorry. But he can’t leave. He can never leave again. They’ve decreed it.’
I push him off and say loudly, before I can stop myself: ‘What do you mean “they’ve” decreed it? Who’s “they”?’
The waterfalls keep flowing through the silence. Like a passing cloudburst, dark green leaves cascade from on high, carpeting the flagstones. The hushed creatures bow their heads and part in perfectly synchronised bourrées.
The figure who steps into the clearing makes me suddenly, irrationally, wish I’d worn something smarter, put on make-up, my best pearls. I feel like a tarnished teaspoon before a diamond chandelier.
His footsteps make no sound on the stone, but they do release the sharp, bright scent of a hundred crushed leaves.
He wears a crown of silver birch inlaid with frost, and a gossamer-light spider’s web cape that flutters in its own breeze.
His chest is adorned with white medallions which, as he comes closer, I realise are snowflakes preserved in their crystalline intricacy, never to melt.
Powders of slate and nightshade have been brushed over his eyes up to his temples, matching the high slope of his cheekbones.
He is so beautiful it is no longer beauty, but terror.
Staring up at him makes me feel as insubstantial as a pencil sketch.
Beware the king of the fairies.