Whichwood

  Oliver scrambled up the side of the cart to join her.

  From where they stood, Alice was now even more visible: the young Ferenwood girl was standing small and alone in the distance, and she cut a sad, half-slumped figure in the snow. But whatever you might think of Laylee, know this: Her conscience had not yet broken, and it tormented her now perhaps more than ever. Laylee secretly wished she were a normal child—the kind who could make friends and amends all in the same day—but Laylee was simply too wounded herself to know how to undo the hurt she inspired. Her heart, thudding around inside her, was already panicking at the very idea of apologizing to Alice. No, she was too raw, too terrified of rejection to say she was sorry—

  Because what if her apologies weren’t accepted?

  What if she made herself vulnerable only to have her faults thrown back in her face?

  No, no, it was safer to stay angry, she’d concluded, where nothing could ever touch her.

  Luckily, Oliver had no such scruples.

  He cleared his throat and said, as carefully as possible, “Why, um—why is Alice standing all the way over there?”

  Laylee had already pried the lids off several coffins by the time Oliver asked his question, so she was breathing hard and hauling open caskets onto the snow when she said, “I told her that if she didn’t like this line of work, she should leave.”

  Oliver froze in place, stunned. “Why in heavens would you do that?”

  Laylee shrugged. “She said her magic wasn’t suited to washing dead bodies.”

  “But—Laylee—”

  “And anyway she keeps demanding to know what’s wrong with me—as though I’m a nut to be cracked.” Laylee dragged down another casket, exhaling a sharp breath. “But there is nothing the matter with me.” She looked up to meet Oliver’s eyes as she said this, but once she stopped moving, her hands—visibly shaking—belied her words.

  Laylee pretended not to notice and moved quickly to reach for another coffin, but Oliver had the good sense to stop her. “If there’s nothing the matter with you,” he said, “then what’s wrong with your hands?”

  “Nothing,” she snapped, closing her trembling fingers into fists. “I’m tired, that’s all. We had a very long night.”

  Oliver faltered—for he could not deny that this was true—and finally relented with a sad sigh. “All Alice wants is to help you,” he said.

  “Then she should be over here helping,” said Laylee.

  “But you just said you told her not to.”

  “When someone really wants something,” Laylee said, dragging another coffin to the ground, “they’ll fight for it. She does not appear to be much of a fighter.”

  Oliver laughed out loud and looked away, shaking his head in the direction of the sun. “Only someone who didn’t know Alice at all could say something like that.”

  Laylee did not respond.

  “Goodness,” Oliver said, now squinting across the field at Alice’s lonely figure. “I can only imagine how thoroughly you broke her heart.”

  Now Laylee looked at him. Glared at him. Angrily, she said, “If what I said broke her heart, then her heart is too easily broken.”

  Oliver cocked his head, smiled, and said, “Not everyone is as strong as you are, you know.”

  At this, Laylee went numb.

  “You misunderstand me entirely,” she said quietly. “I’m not strong at all.”

  Oliver, who understood at once the depth of this confession, never had a chance to respond. He was still searching for the right thing to say when Laylee went abruptly rigid—her spine ramrod straight—and inhaled a short, sharp gasp as her crowbar fell, with a dull splash, into the slush. Laylee’s legs buckled beneath her and she staggered sideways, toppling into Oliver, who’d come running forward to help, and though he pulled the mordeshoor to her feet, fear and panic were colliding in his eyes, and he cried out for Alice as Laylee shook in her skin. And in the fraction of a second Laylee made the mistake of meeting his gaze, Oliver had looked too long—and learned too much.

  Something was desperately wrong.

  Alice was now charging toward them—her face fraught with terror as her long, pale hair tossed around in the wind—and Oliver sank to his knees as he searched Laylee’s face for signs of trauma.

  For a girl so unaccustomed to company, it was a curious, terrifying sensation to be so intimately held—but this matter of physical closeness was a mere trifle on Laylee’s long list of concerns. The thing was, she didn’t trust these odd children, and she couldn’t help but feel that the timing of their arrival, their absurd demands to help her, and her sudden, unbidden frailty had coincided in a way that was more than a little suspicious. She was not, as you might have expected, particularly moved by their compassionate faces, and she would not allow herself to be romanced by any moment that demanded she be weak—not here and not now—and especially not while in the company of those whose hearts and minds she still doubted.

  So she did the only sensible thing she could think of: As her motor skills were slowly returned to her, she mustered what little strength she had left and ripped herself free of Oliver’s embrace. Half dragging, half stumbling, she ran home—paying no mind to Oliver’s stunned cries or Alice’s shouts of surprise—and, collapsing as she crossed the threshold, she locked the heavy wooden door behind her, leaving the tortured pair of Ferenwoodians in her wake.

  Alice and Oliver pounded against her door for at least a dozen minutes before their throats went raw from shouting and their fists were bruised by the effort. Finally, fatigue and defeat collapsed into one complicated failure, and silence flooded the halls of Laylee’s home. Relieved, chest heaving, Laylee finally made an effort to move. But in the time it took her to get to her feet, the peace was split open by a series of piercing screams.

  Maman was in a right state.

  Her disappearance the night before was owed to her cowardliness and nothing more; Maman’s fragile spirit had been frightened by the disturbance of strangers, and so she’d hidden instead of helped, and now she’d reemerged, more irritated and more impossible than ever. Let us remember that Maman was visible only to Laylee (who’d not shared her spirit-speaking abilities with a single living soul) and, as a result, no one could see or hear what was happening to her now—not even Alice and Oliver, who’d pressed their tired ears against her door, hoping for a sound of life.

  Sadly, only the dead were making any noise at the moment, and it was all Laylee could do to keep from screaming out loud. Maman had cornered her, screeching and wailing about the state of Laylee’s filthy clothes.

  This last bit was difficult to ignore.

  All three children were exceptionally filthy. Not only had they spent the night scrubbing corpses, but they’d then promptly fallen asleep in the waist-deep snow. They’d been mucked up and melted on, and—though she couldn’t have known it at the time—Laylee had fallen asleep on a small family of spiders, and their broken legs were still caught in her eyelashes. It was a small mercy then that Laylee had been too preoccupied to welcome her guests inside or offer them something to eat; had she done so, Alice—who’d just picked a fingernail out of her ear—might’ve arranged the contents of her stomach all over the poor girl’s floor.

  But Alice and Oliver were either too exhausted or too afraid to pursue Laylee any further. Oliver wouldn’t dare break another bedroom window, nor could he bring himself to use his magic against her. Heartbroken, he’d given up entirely, slumping to the ground behind Laylee’s door and saying nothing at all, only occasionally shooting dejected, harried glances at Alice instead of speaking aloud his fears. No, he couldn’t have known how awful Laylee was feeling, or how terribly Maman was torturing her at that moment.

  “Filthy, useless, foul girl—”

  Laylee clapped her hands over her ears.

  “—nasty hands, nasty hands, blistered fingers and broken
skin—”

  Laylee squeezed her eyes shut.

  “—never raised you to be this way, to live like an animal, never clean, never clean—”

  Alice had managed to peek through a part in one of the window’s curtains, but Laylee’s furrowed brows and pinched lips were impossible to understand. In fact, Alice, a decidedly tender girl, couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps she and Oliver were the problem—

  “Hiring strangers to stay the night, too weak to do the work yourself—”

  —and though they were indeed a small part of the suffering, they were actually a very important part of the solution. They just didn’t know how much.

  Laylee was usually better prepared for Maman’s insults. Most days she could handle the onslaught of anger, the violent humiliation, the accusations of incompetence. But Laylee hadn’t slept more than a wink in thirty-six hours, and she was collapsing from the inside out. Her body was beaten, her mind was broken, and now her spirit, too, was beginning to fray. Laylee Layla Fenjoon was stronger than most, wiser than some, and absolutely, unequivocally ancient for her age. But even the strong and the wise and the ancient have faltered without compassion or companion, and while Baba had madness and Maman had nonsense, Laylee, in their absence, had locked hands with loneliness, darkness feeding darkness until all light was lost. She could no longer remember what it was like to live without a broken heart.

  It was unfortunate, then, that she saw little value in the company of her strange guests. In them she might have found friendship; instead she found fault and reason to fear, and so she spared them no thought as she abruptly abandoned them. Wordlessly, she charged up the castle stairs, locked herself in the toilet, turned on the water, and fell sideways into the tub—where she would remain for some time. She didn’t care what happened to Alice and Oliver. In fact, she secretly hoped they’d be gone before she returned.

  Dear reader: Laylee would one day look back on these early moments with Alice and Oliver with heartbreaking regret—a remorse so parasitic it would follow her forever. But she needn’t be so hard on herself. It is, after all, a simple and tragic thing that on occasion our unkindness to others is actually a desperate effort to be kind to ourselves. I remind her of this even as I write to you now, but still, she struggles. How very important and infuriating it is to have to remind a smart person not to be so stupid as to give up on themselves.

  TERRIBLY SAD, THIS STORY

  Alice and Oliver weren’t sure what to do.

  Oliver was certain that something was very wrong with the young mordeshoor, but he couldn’t be exactly sure what the matter was, and anyway, Alice was more frustrated than Oliver, because helping Laylee was her task to undertake and she was turning out to be quite bad at it. To make matters worse, the both of them were just about rotting away in their soggy clothes, their skin so clammy with damp that Oliver was beginning to wonder whether his limbs hadn’t been slathered in cold pea soup. Everything hurt: toes, teeth, joints, and eyeballs. They were exhausted and overwhelmed, tired of schlepping through corpse droppings and desperate for a change of dress and a bite of something warm.

  Still, they were strangers in a strange town—and there was much to be disoriented by. What to do?

  Alice had been sent here, to this land of cold and death, as a reward for a Surrender well-done. She was a singularly talented young girl, gifted with a magical skill the Ferenwood Elders had never seen before, and though it took them some time to decide where, exactly, they should send her to do a bit of good in the world, in the end she was sent to Laylee with little explanation. This lack of explanation was not without intention—it was in fact a direct response to her very high score. Alice would have to be clever enough to sort out her path, her task, and its solution—all on her own. (Oliver, it should be noted, had not been allowed to accompany her, but the two of them had been in cahoots for so long now that they paid little attention to laws and their consequences.)

  But Alice’s earlier optimism was quickly disintegrating, and despite ample evidence that Laylee was in dire straits, Alice found herself grasping for a loophole that might deliver her safely back to Ferenwood—and to Father, who, as Oliver noted, was a Town Elder who might be able to smooth things over. It wasn’t a proud moment for Alice, but Laylee had turned out to be prickly and rude and not at all what Alice had expected.

  Even so—

  The thing was, Alice had earned a 5 on her Surrender—the highest score possible—and she should have anticipated the levels of difficulty and nuance her task would involve. But none of that seemed to matter now. Laylee had insulted Alice and shut her out entirely, and Alice felt she’d suffered enough. She and Oliver (who was already too eager to eject himself from the madness) were now happily acquiescing to cowardice and entirely willing to give up and go home.* In fact, in a desperate bid to rationalize an abrupt exit, it suddenly occurred to Alice that there was quite a lot of sense in Laylee having abandoned them. Maybe, she thought, they were no longer needed. Maybe this was the official end of it all. Maybe Alice’s task here had nothing to do with her talent—in fact, maybe that was the twist all along.

  Could it be? Was this all she’d been tasked to do?

  Perhaps—

  Perhaps they’d done their bit and should now set off for home? Their challenge had, admittedly, seemed too simple by Alice’s usual standards for adventure, but she supposed spending the evening scrubbing filth from the folds of corpses was enough excitement for one lifetime. Alice shared her ignoble thoughts with Oliver, who responded swiftly and with great conviction—

  “Oh, I sincerely doubt it.”

  “But why?” she said, pulling a cockroach out of her hair. “It was awful enough, wasn’t it? That could’ve been the whole of it, don’t you think?”

  Oliver crossed his arms. “Now, Alice, if you want to give up and head home, you know you have my hearty consent. But you can’t also pretend you’ve done what you came here to do. You know full well that there’s something the matter with Laylee—something worse than her mordeshoor business—and we’ve done nothing at all to help her.”

  “Sure we did,” Alice tried to protest. “We washed all those dead people and—”

  Oliver shook his head. “You’re missing the point. Tasks are always assigned based on talent. And you’ve not used yours at all.”

  Alice stared at her feet, hugging herself against the cold. “And there are never any exceptions to that rule . . . ?”

  “I think you already know the answer to that question.”

  Alice bit her lip. It was true. She sighed, and with a sad sort of resignation, she said, “So what should we do?”

  “Well,” said Oliver, “if we’re going to stay here and see this through, the very first thing we need to do”—he shook a few worms out of his shoe—“is find a way to get clean. Second, we’ll need an entirely new set of clothes.” Oliver leaned in and lowered his voice. “I plan to burn this lot”—he gestured to himself—“as soon as it’s off. I suggest you do the same.”

  Alice nodded so vigorously a beetle flew out of her nose.

  Now, for a bit of explanation:

  Alice and Oliver had traveled to Whichwood via magic, but the decadence could have been dispensed with if they had only been interested in a very long walk. Whichwood was a mere thirty-day hike from Ferenwood, which—had either town ever heard of such absurd inventions as airplanes—would’ve made it an easy five-hour flight. As it was, Alice and Oliver had had to travel for days by underwater elevator (the worst possible way to travel), as Whichwood was a town older and slower than even Ferenwood, and they’d not updated their modes of transportation into and out of the city in nearly a century.

  It should also be stated that every magical land (of which there were many) had its own invented reasons for its bureaucratic solitude, and the people of Whichwood were no different: They wouldn’t leave their land for fear of ancient superstit
ion.

  Whichwoodians believed that non-magical people had lost their magic as a result of a pervasive, contagious disease, and the only way to save themselves from that terrible fate was to remain forever quarantined from the infected majority. All magical lands imposed barriers that kept the dizzies (this was slang for the non-magical “diseased”) from discovering their world, but Whichwoodians took this responsibility even a step further: There were no ways into or out of Whichwood except by water, and it was an arduous, extensive journey that few, if any, undertook. As a result, Whichwood was almost entirely forgotten, which was exactly how they preferred it.

  In any case, their fair township had everything it needed and wanted for nothing, so the people stayed within the confines of their own creations, never mixing with the dizzies for fear of being infected by their illness, and always suspicious, even of other magical folk. Their heavy suspicion made them appear an unwelcoming lot, but this was only partly true. The truth was that they were a lively, cultured sort of people—when you got to know them—who felt they had a great deal to be afraid of; it was this last bit—this certainty of fear—that helped substantiate the paranoia that demanded their isolation.

  It was an illogic they shared with Ferenwood.

  The people of Ferenwood, you see, had once upon a time suffered a great and bloody ordeal at the hands of a neighboring magical land (the ordeal being a result of extensive dealings with non-magicals), and were now sheltered to the point of asphyxiation. The Ferenwood Town Elders had decided long ago that caution and caution alone would keep them from further catastrophe, and so the residents of Ferenwood remained, for the most part, happily unaware of their excised freedoms, until one day their village would break this code of solitude to send a thirteen-year-old girl through sea and snow to do a bit of friendly magic.