As soon as her head broke the surface, she could hear what he was saying.
“What in heavens are you doing?” he shouted, red in the face and shaking. “Why didn’t you come out of the water? Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“What?” She spat water out of her mouth and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Me? Kill myself? What are you talking about? I was only drowning, no thanks to—”
“Drowning?” he said, flabbergasted. “Alice, the water is only knee-deep!”
Ah.
That would explain how she was currently standing.
Alice looked down and around herself and spotted her skirts floating only a few feet away. She cleared her throat and said, “If you’ll please excuse me,” before making her way toward the clothes.
The water was clear and the color of turquoise. It wasn’t cold and it wasn’t hot but it was very wet and Alice was looking forward to being out of it. Once she’d secured her skirts and made her way back to Oliver, he gave her a very round look and seemed to think it best not to comment any further.
“Well?” she said, head held high as she shivered in the breeze. “Where from here?”
“Straight ahead,” he said, nodding toward the shore.
Land was just a faint line in the distance, but she could see it, so she told him so. She followed Oliver as he went and asked no additional questions outside of the five questions she did ask, and paused only to sneeze when her nose required it.
She was just in the middle of a sneeze, in fact, when she noticed the wet carpet under her feet. They were very close to the shore now, and she could see straight to the end: There were tens of dozens of ancient rugs laid out along and up the sand, cutting a vertical line to land. Each rug was a rich red, but woven with threads of gold and violet and sea-foam green into intricate, abstract, faded floral patterns.
It all felt very proper.
Furthermore was welcoming them, and suddenly Alice was glad to have arrived. Suddenly she wasn’t cold or wet at all. In fact, suddenly she was warm and her skirts were toasty and her hair was dry and her bare feet were walking on the thick, plush Persian rugs that had been laid straight across the beach. They were heading nowhere as far as she could tell, but she didn’t mind. The sky was very pink and the clouds were very blue and the air was sweet as lemonpearl and she felt very cozy and very lazy and very this and very that and very—
“Alice!”
Oliver tugged on her arm and she heard it snap. Not her arm, no. But something. Something snapped. Suddenly they were on the sand and not the beautiful rugs and she felt very cold and very worried and very hungry and very—
Oliver was snapping his fingers in front of her face. “Alice? Alice. Alice.”
“What?” she said, frowning. “What is it? What is the matter?”
“You musn’t stay on the rugs for long,” he said urgently. “Furthermore can be tricky when you’re not paying attention.” He pulled her to her feet. Only then did she realize she’d sat down.
“Where are we?” she asked, looking around. Oliver had nudged them back onto the beach, but that didn’t change what she saw. It was a barren landscape, nothing but sand and sea, not a person in sight.
“We are at the beginning,” he said, and that was all.
They stood in the sun and said nothing more, and Alice was so confused she couldn’t even remember how to say so. Besides, she was distracted. Oliver was holding her hand now and, though she tried to shake him off, he wouldn’t let her.
“You need to be careful,” he said to her. “We are currently at the entry of Slumber, which is just one of the sixty-eight villages we must travel through, and each village has its own very specific rules. We cannot break a single one if we are to find your father.”
“Not a single rule!” she said. “In sixty-eight villages!”
“Not a single rule,” he said. “In sixty-eight villages.”
“But how will we know all the rules?” she asked.
“I will teach them to you as we go. I lived in Furthermore for an entire year,” Oliver said, “so this is all very common to me now, but I imagine it must be very strange for you.”
“Yes,” she said, sneaking a look at him. “Very strange, indeed.”
Oliver was looking around carefully, his eyes darting every which way. It was as though he was seeing something she could not, something he was afraid of.
“And now?” she asked. “Where do we go now?”
“We don’t go anywhere,” he said. “We wait for the sun to sleep.”
Alice wanted to believe Oliver was joking, but she couldn’t suss out the humor in his words. “Oh?”
Oliver nodded. “Though we won’t wait too long, I hope.” He squinted at something in the distance. “The sun in Slumber is terribly lazy and always forgetting the time. It naps so frequently that its people have stopped waiting for sunshine. Their village only appears in the dark.”
“Oliver,” said Alice, “are you being deliberately absurd?”
It was odd, but for a girl born and bred in magic, Alice could be disappointingly unimaginative. But then I suppose there was good reason for her reaction. After all, the people of Ferenwood had always used magic in the same steady, reliable ways, and Alice had never known magic to be manipulated frivolously; she’d no idea what a little recklessness could do. The magic of Furthermore was entirely foreign to her.
But Oliver still hadn’t offered an answer to her question. He was rifling through his bag again, and this time Alice heard the unmistakable clink of coins.
She narrowed her eyes and poked him in the shoulder. “What else have you got in there?”
Instead of responding, he unhooked their hands and folded himself into a seated position, settling in for a wait. Alice very cautiously followed suit, and she was just about to ask another question when Oliver tugged something out of his bag. It was a small notebook.
“Right,” he said, perusing its pages. “I nearly forgot.”
“What is it?” Alice asked. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter yet,” said Oliver. “I’m just checking things. Making certain and so forth.”
“Making certain of what?”
“Oh, just sun cycles and such.” Oliver was reading with great focus, following a few scribbled sentences with his finger. “Mmm,” he said. “We should only have to wait here a few moments longer.” He looked up. “What sensational luck. If we’d arrived any later, we’d have had to wait at least a good hour for the sun to sleep, and it would’ve been the most anticlimactic introduction.” He turned back to his notebook. “This first bit of the journey can be terribly boring, you know.”
Alice frowned. “Oliver, what—”
“Oh, ho!” Oliver jumped up with a start, squinting up at the sky. “There we are.”
“What?” Alice asked, scrambling to her feet and looking around. “What’s happening?”
Oliver nodded at the sun. “There. He’s just about to take his nap.”
“But—”
“Now give us a second, Alice,” Oliver said impatiently. “It takes him a moment to roll over.”
Alice blinked, and the world went black.
Alice had never in her life seen such darkness. Back home they had moons and planets and so many stars that the nighttime was never really night. Not like this. This was something she could not adequately describe. They had been plunged into a sky where everything had been snuffed out. She blinked and blinked and the blindness sent a chill through her heart she could not shake. A fear of the unknown, of the unseen, of what could be waiting for them here in this new world—it would not leave her.
“Oliver,” she whispered.
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t we pass through when the sun was awake? Wouldn’t that have been safer?”
Oliver
shook his head. “Slumber is the entry point into all of Furthermore, and as such, the security measures are severe. Any visitors foolish enough to enter at sunlight are seen and snatched up in an instant.”
“But why?” Alice asked. “Snatched up for what?”
“Snatched up for what? Are you quite serious?”
“Oh, and you’re surprised, are you?” Alice crossed her arms, irritated. “Surprised I know not a single thing about this land I learned existed only a moment ago?”
Oliver was slightly mollified. “Right,” he said, and sighed. “My apologies. It’s just that it seems so obvious to me.”
“Well when will it be obvious to me?”
He squeezed her hand. “Soon, I’m sure.”
“But how soon?”
“Patience, Alice. Best to introduce yourself to patience now, so that it might find you when you call upon it later.”
“But I have so many questions,” she said, tapping his shoulder very hard. “Why would they want to snatch up visitors? Is that what happened to Father?”
Oliver smiled at her in the dark. “Not exactly, no. Your father is ten steps smarter than all that.”
“But—”
“While I’d like to answer all your questions,” he said lightly, “we’ve little time to spare and many appetites to avoid. I won’t be the reason you end up in someone’s stew tonight.”
Alice had not a single idea what he was talking about and she told him so.
“Well,” said Oliver, “if you don’t already know what to fear in Furthermore, I can’t imagine you’d want to change that now. Perhaps it’s best to be ignorant just a moment longer.” And then he held up a finger and peered up at the sky.
A moment, it turned out, was all it took.
The sky exploded with light, shot through with so many stars and moons and glittering planets that it was blinding in a whole new way. It looked as though the night sky had tried to snow but the flakes had fallen upside down and gotten stuck.
It was, in a word, magical.
Not just the sky, but the whole village. People appeared out of nowhere, shops and businesses busy in an instant. Food was cooking and chimneys were puffing and children were crying and parents were shouting and the hustle and bustle was all it took to shuffle Alice right along, right into the heart of it, and she felt her spirits soar despite her many worries. Eyes wide-open, Alice took it all in. This was a real adventure, wasn’t it? This was what she’d always dreamed of. And, oh, to find Father in the process! She nearly ran into the arms of this new world.
But first, she had priorities.
“Alice, no!”
Oliver tackled her.
“But I’m hungry,” she said, staring at the flower she’d nearly plucked out of the ground.
“You musn’t,” he said. “You can’t. And you absolutely shouldn’t.”
“But—”
“No,” he said firmly. “Only on special occasions are visitors allowed to eat anything in Furthermore. And this is not one of them.”
“Only on special occasions?” she said back to him. “And what are they to do until those occasions arrive?” Her hands were on her hips now. “Are they expected to starve?”
“Yes,” he said, and very gently and with a smile she did not anticipate. “Now,” he said, clapping his hands together, all business. “Will you be requiring use of the toilets? There’s only one set of toilets in all of Slumber and they’re right here at the start, so best to use them now if you need to. It’ll be a long trip, you know.”
“I—well, yes. Okay.” Alice dropped her hands and looked away. It was hard on her pride to be treated like an imbecile, and she hated the way Oliver seemed to know so much and she so little. She was fighting no small battle to be cooperative, if only for Father’s sake, but her patience had little practice. “But I’m also very hungry,” she said, determined to be heard. “I haven’t had any noonlunch.”
“Good,” Oliver said. “That will help us quite a bit.”
“And how’s that?”
Oliver squinted up at the night sky and, once again, offered no answers. Alice glared at his back. Oliver was secretly relishing his role as leader of the two and, under the pretense of being older and wiser, he hoarded his knowledge, miserly sparing only a sentence or three when he felt he must. But Oliver had underestimated his female companion and her capacity for being condescended to, and he would no doubt pay for his youthful arrogance. With every new slight and casual indifference, Alice was a glass half empty, slowly filling bottom to top with resentment. As for now, all was well enough, as she distracted herself with the splendors of her new environment, but Oliver would later find much to revise in his early moments with Alice Alexis Queensmeadow.
“Now then,” Oliver said, glancing at her, “we have only a couple of hours before the sun wakes up again, and a lot to do before that happens. Best to get moving,” he said, patting her on the back as a parent might. “And let’s get you to the ladies’ toilets, shall we?”
Alice grimaced and trudged on, mildly embarrassed and ignoring the urge to pop Oliver in the nose. She sighed loudly whenever they passed a patch of grass and a promising bud, the grumbles in her stomach growing louder by the moment. She knew she would be a terrible companion if she missed too many meals and it worried her; this journey was too important. She needed to be her best self—healthy and full of energy—and Oliver didn’t seem to care. He was grinning cheek to cheek, happy in a way she didn’t know he could be, and she realized then that Oliver was fond of Furthermore. Happy to be back. Maybe happy to be home.
Strange.
Alice skipped a little as they got closer to the heart of town, abandoning her frustration in exchange for excitement, eager to be seeing and doing new things. This was a thrilling journey for a young girl (and newly twelve years old, lest we forget) who’d never left home in all her life. More exciting still, Slumber wasn’t at all like Ferenwood, where everything was an explosion of color; no, Slumber was black and bright, an inky glow, orange-yellow spilling out of corners, puncturing the sky, creeping past their feet. It was cozy and merry and perfectly odd, and if Alice weren’t so preoccupied with thoughts of Father, she might’ve been more inclined to enjoy it.
There was food, everywhere.
Cups full of nuts standing in bowls, jars and jars of honey stacked in storefronts, glasses full of flowers just sitting on tables. Alice wanted very desperately to eat one. Just one, she thought, couldn’t have been so bad.
She said as much to Oliver.
“That is not food,” he said to her. “Those are decorations. People in Furthermore do not eat flowers. They eat animals.”
“Animals!” Alice cried, and shuddered, thinking of all the cows and sheep and birds back home. The people of Ferenwood lived in peace with living things, only occasionally borrowing milk or eggs or honey in exchange for a lifelong friendship with creatures older and wiser than they. Alice was duly horrified and she suddenly remembered Oliver’s hair, which had always reminded her of silver herring. She pointed an accusing finger in his direction. “You eat them, too, don’t you? Don’t you? Oh, those poor fish!”
Oliver went pink. “I haven’t any idea what you mean,” he said, and cleared his throat. “And anyway, no food is to touch your lips, not here and not at all, at least not until I tell you so.”
She scowled.
He scowled back.
“Remember what I said earlier?” Oliver scolded her. “About how we aren’t to break a single rule if we are to find your father?”
Alice nodded.
“Well, this is the first one,” he said. “So don’t break it.”
“Fine,” she said. And she pursed her lips, quietly hating him.
They crept through town quietly, doing little to draw attention to themselves. Strangers offered them a few glances but little else, wh
ich Alice thought was kind of them, considering how awful she must’ve looked with her sea-washed hair and clothes. Her outfit was fairly ruined and her hair was a wispy nest, and though she looked nothing at all like anyone in Slumber, they didn’t seem to mind. She realized it was because they couldn’t really tell.
In the dark, they were all the same.
“Here we are,” Oliver finally said.
He pointed to what appeared to be a ladies’ toilet. It was little more than a wooden shack standing in the middle of all the dimness, and when Alice gaped at Oliver, all he did was shrug.
So into the shack she went—tick tock tick tock—and out the shack she came.
She shook out her skirts and smoothed out her top before joining Oliver where he was standing, and did her best to appear proper. She cleared her throat a little.
“I’m ready now,” she said.
Oliver glanced at her. “And how are you feeling? Still hungry?”
“Yes,” she said. “Quite.”
“Good. Very good. Shall we?” He gestured to the main path.
“Where are we going?” she asked as she fell into step with him.
“We have to pick up something important while we’re here. I just hope it’ll be in the same place I left it.”
“Oh?” said Alice. “And what is it?”
“A pocketbook.”
Alice laughed. “But you’ve already got one,” she said, nodding at his bag.
Oliver shot her a look. “I most certainly have not.”