4

THE STRANGER

And he placed a tower in the center of the Sunlit Lands and called it Far Seeing.

FROM “THE ORDERING OF THE WORLD,” AN ELENIL STORY

It felt like someone had put cinder blocks on her chest. Transparent tubes snaked into her nostrils. A red plastic band clung to her wrist. Sensors were stuck to her chest, an IV line dripped into her left arm, and a clip on the finger of her right hand monitored oxygen levels. Her lips were dried and cracked.

The hospital again. More and more of her life found its way here. Appointments, tests, paperwork, treatments. Meetings to talk about tests and treatments. The harsh lights, the antiseptic smell that came even through her oxygen tube, the incessant beeping and nurses checking in and noise. She hated finding herself here. Hated that she couldn’t make it through one day of school, hated the reminder yet again that she should just stay home like a good girl, hidden away and waiting, alone, for the end to come.

Darius was in a chair beside the bed. Jason was sitting in a windowsill to Darius’s left, half an arm’s length away. Even with only two visitors, the room felt crowded.

Darius touched her hand gently. “You’re awake.”

Madeline looked at her hospital gown. “How —?”

“They cut off your clothes,” Jason said. “Don’t worry, they kicked us out until you were dressed.”

“Are my parents here?”

“Not yet,” Jason said. “The hospital called.”

“I texted your mom,” Darius said.

Jason was chomping on an apple. “When I said you looked terrible, I didn’t realize how low the scale goes, you know? You looked pretty good earlier, all things considered.”

Darius punched him in the arm.

“What was that for?”

Madeline asked, “What did the doctor say?”

Darius’s brow furrowed. “You don’t remember?”

“Was I awake?”

“You told them we could stay,” Jason said. “And that it was okay for us to hear, um, your diagnosis.”

Madeline blushed. She hadn’t really told the other kids at school what was going on. Darius knew the basics. Jason, weirdly, seemed to have figured it out, but they never talked about it. She didn’t want to talk about it at school, didn’t want to answer the endless questions. What’s interstitial lung disease? Is it common in teens? Will it kill you?

Scarring in the lungs. Not really. Probably, yes.

Madeline’s scarring was advancing. Every hour, every minute, it progressed through her lungs, like an army gaining a few yards each day. Where the lungs scarred, they didn’t process oxygen. Eventually she’d run out of usable lung tissue, and she’d asphyxiate. It was only a question of how long. All the doctors’ appointments and medications and oxygen tanks were to prolong her life, not save it. She was on the list for a lung transplant, high on the list, actually —no previous illness, a fatal disease that wasn’t responding to treatment, she was young. But every time a donation came up, something got in the way. The tissue went bad. Another donor somehow jumped in line. Her application was mysteriously deleted. It was like an unseen hand kept intervening, frustrating any chance of her getting better. And now she was getting so weak, the doctor wasn’t sure she’d survive the surgery. She cleared her throat, which felt raspy and raw.

“Could I get a drink?” Madeline asked. “Maybe some ice chips.”

“I’m on it,” Jason said, stepping away from the window.

Darius said, “Could you bring her something soft to eat, too, like some applesauce?” Jason nodded and scooted out of the room.

The oxygen tubes in her nose rubbed, and her arm felt stiff and uncomfortable where the IV entered. Darius leaned in close and squeezed her hand.

A blinding light hit her full in the face. Her first thought was that it was the kind of light they put in an operating room, the bright white light surgeons use, but it wasn’t in one place, it seemed to come from all over. Her second thought was that she was passing out or something, but she knew what that felt like, had experienced the light-headed, rolling blackness more than once, and this wasn’t that.

Then the light started to burn, and she could feel it searing her skin. It seemed to be coming from the end of the bed, so she turned away, but even with her eyes shut, that white light pierced her eyes, as if her eyelids weren’t even there.

The light disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving the room dim and Madeline shivering in the sudden cold. Darius’s hand still held hers, but it was rigid, though still warm. He was leaning toward Madeline but not moving or blinking. She slipped her hand away from his, and he didn’t move, didn’t so much as breathe.

“Darius?” What was happening? Was this a hallucination brought on by lack of oxygen? She felt coherent, but her brain couldn’t process what she was seeing. Her own heart ratcheted up, beating faster. She took a deep breath, ready to call for help, and instead gave an involuntary shout when she looked toward the door.

At the foot of her bed stood a tall, slender man. He had the palest skin she had ever seen, almost the color of platinum, with a bluish undertone. His silver-white hair was fine and long, falling to his shoulders. He wore a brocade jacket with pale-pink roses worked into the silk and veins of gold shooting through the design. Stiff lace blossomed from his sleeves, nearly covering his gloved hands, and more lace covered his neck, where a white cravat was tied with perfect grace. He inclined his head to her.

“It is customary you should bow,” the man said. “But there will be time to learn such pleasantries. I am called Hanali, and I have come as a representative of the Sunlit Lands.”

Madeline tried to speak but found herself choking instead. It was like a dream, but in a dream she wouldn’t be in so much pain, would she? Darius still hadn’t moved. She managed to get a breath and said, “What did you do to him?”

The slim man looked at Darius as if seeing him for the first time. “Ah. Your friend is unaware of our conversation. After our business concludes, he will continue about his day.”

Something about the strange man reminded her of the lady in the garden. Madeline didn’t know if these were hallucinations or fever dreams or real, but the woman had gone away when Madeline gave her what she wanted. Maybe the same would be true for this strange man. “What do you want?” she asked.

“More importantly, child, what do you want?”

Annoyance flared up in Madeline. She gestured to the tubes coming out of her body. “Nothing you can give me.”

Hanali reached into Darius’s jacket pocket, slid out his cell phone, and dangled it in front of Darius’s face. With a flourish he released the phone, and it stayed there, unmoving, floating in the air. “Which is easier? To stop time or heal lungs?” Hanali asked.

Jason walked through the door. “Stop time? Huh. Is that what happened?” He had a cup of ice in one hand, and his arms were full of pudding cups. “The nurses stopped talking all at once. I thought it was performance art.”

“Starless night,” Hanali said. The way he said it, it sounded like a curse. “How are you unaffected by my spell?”

Jason dumped all the pudding cups on Madeline’s bed and handed her the cup of ice. He shrugged. “The world is full of mysteries. Why are you cosplaying at a hospital?”

Hanali gaped at him. “You can see and hear me and move about.”

Jason tore open a pudding. “I forgot spoons.”

“This has never happened in my lifetime.”

“Wait!” Jason dug around in his pockets. “Here they are!” He held one out to Madeline. She shook her head, popping an ice chip in her mouth and sucking it.

Hanali’s eyes narrowed. “Did an old woman speak to you? Did a stranger approach you in a garden?”

Madeline’s ears perked up. He knew her, then, the Garden Lady. Had she spoken to Jason, too?

Jason shoveled some pudding into his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, dude.”

“Remarkable.” Hanali turned reluctantly away from Jason. He tugged on the frilled cuffs of his sleeves, straightening them. “I am here, Madeline Oliver, to offer a bargain. In exchange for one human year of service to the Elenil, lords of the Sunlit Lands, we will cast a magic spell that will heal your lungs. You will be able to dance and run and sing again.”

Madeline’s chest ached. She didn’t understand everything the strange man was saying, but she had caught the basics. A year of work in exchange for healing. “I won’t last a year,” she said. She glanced at Jason. He had paused, another spoonful halfway to his mouth. “The doctor said three months. Maybe a little more.”

“We would, of course, give you the magic as soon as our terms were agreed upon. You can have your breath returned to you this very day. You will come to the Sunlit Lands, and in one human year we will return you to this place, permanently healed.”

Jason said, “Wait, why are you going to school if you only have three months to live?”

“My friends are there,” Madeline said. And then, to Hanali, “Explain this again. You want me to serve . . . the Alelni?”

“Elenil. They are the lords of the Sunlit Lands.”

“Hawai‘i, I’m guessing,” Jason said.

The strange man scowled. “The Sunlit Lands are not part of Earth —they are another world. Smaller than Earth, but full of magic. No doubt you’ve read of such places. Faerie lands.”

Faerie lands. Something about the way he said it set off all the associations in her mind, all the places she knew and loved: Meselia in the books of Mary Patricia Wall. Narnia. Hogwarts. Earthsea. How many times had she pushed her hand against the back wall of a wardrobe or stood in front of a painting wishing she could jump into it? How often had she wished for a magic ring or button, a hidden passageway, a garden gate grown over in ivy that would transport her to some magical land? She thought of the hobbit Samwise Gamgee and his aching desire to meet the Elves, and she, too, felt a piercing longing to walk among a strange and beautiful people. She thought of Lily and Samuel standing at the portal beneath their stairs, watching the color-swirled space where the gryphon had gone. They had been afraid and just scarcely believing. She remembered Lily’s words in The Gryphon under the Stairs. “There must be something better, I know it in my heart,” Madeline whispered, and for the first time in many months she felt a flutter of hope. Every book she had read in her entire childhood, every book she still cherished, had prepared her to believe in a moment like this.

Jason spoke up, his mouth still full of pudding. “Sounds like Harry Potter–land. Which means more school. If you want to learn magic, it apparently involves a lot of school.”

“It is more like Mount Penglai,” Hanali said. “Or Tír na nÓg.”

Madeline tried to mask her excitement. She wanted to leap up and take Hanali’s hand and do whatever was necessary to go to these Sunlit Lands, but she needed more information. “Why do the Elenil need people like me?”

Hanali smiled, and his teeth were white as seashells. “The Elenil scour the world for people in need —people without food, or in the midst of a crisis, or dying. If the magic of the Elenil can help, we make an exchange. Some small token of their lives in exchange for a bit of magic. Your world has precious little magic, so our help is keenly felt.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” Jason said, opening a second pudding cup.

Madeline shushed him. “What is it like? The Sunlit Lands?”

A smile spread over Hanali’s face. “In the heart of the Sunlit Lands lies the capital city of the Elenil. The Court of Far Seeing is bright and beautiful. All things fair and wonderful are there. There is music in the city squares and art upon the streets. No one is hungry, and the white towers fly crimson flags in the warm breeze from the Ginian Sea. Above the city stands the Crescent Stone, bright beacon of our magic, a reminder of the good things available to those who inhabit the blessed city.”

“If this place is so great,” Jason said, “why do you need us? You need janitors or something?”

Hanali glared at Jason. He yanked on the lace at his cuffs, pulling them down over his hands. “A corrupted people called the Scim live to our south. They call themselves servants of darkness, of shadow, and they wish to tear down the Court of Far Seeing. We are in need of your help in this conflict.”

Madeline coughed for a minute, holding up a finger to pause the conversation. “So . . . what exactly is the agreement? What do I have to do?”

“You agree to serve the Elenil in our war against the Scim for one human year. In exchange we will heal you. You must leave your friends and family behind. You will not be able to say good-bye or explain your absence.”

Another coughing fit overcame her. When a coughing attack came, she couldn’t think about her mother or father, her friends, Darius, school, the way she liked to wake in the morning and lean her head on her windowsill, listening to the birds in the garden. She could only think about the way her chest constricted and squeezed every molecule of oxygen out of her body, of the blackness that pressed in against her eyes, and the burning pain that burst through her every cell. She knew how her life would end . . . like this, a million minuscule knives in her chest. One day, she would inhale, pull as hard as she could with her ruined lungs, and there would be nothing. Just thrashing and panic and death. There would be no peaceful final smile, no gentle bedside farewells. Wouldn’t this deal be better than that? No good-byes, but she wasn’t going to get good-byes when she coughed herself to death, either, not really. And she’d be back in a year. Panting after the coughing fit, she tried to wheeze out an answer, but Jason spoke up first.

“No offense,” he said, “but this is one of those candy-and-strangers situations.”

“Not having candy and not being able to breathe are quite different,” Hanali said.

Jason said, “You’re recruiting desperate people who won’t ask questions. What’s your angle?”

Hanali’s smile remained on his face, but his eyes bored into Jason. His words came out clipped and perfectly enunciated. “A human year of assisting in the war against the Scim in exchange for healthy lungs for the rest of her life. The conditions are plain.”

Jason sat at the foot of Madeline’s bed, putting himself between her and Hanali. “It’s a bad idea, Madeline. You could die in the war. You won’t be able to say good-bye to your friends and family. Also, I don’t trust this guy.”

Madeline shook her head. Jason didn’t understand. She didn’t expect him to. How could he know what it was like to stand on the precipice of death, never knowing if this was the last time you’d pull a breath? Sometimes she was terrified she’d go faster than the doctor said, but if she was being honest, there were also days when she was afraid she’d last longer than the doctor said. She couldn’t take this pain, this slow descent. If there was a way out of this sickness, what price would be too much? “What’s the worst that could happen, Jason?”

“You could be eaten by a dragon.” He looked at Hanali. “Are there dragons?”

Hanali raised an eyebrow. “Dragons?”

“Giant lizards that breathe fire? They have wings. Hoard gold. Eat people.”

“No, we do not have ‘dragons’ in the Sunlit Lands.”

Jason shrugged and looked back at Madeline. “You could get gored to death by a unicorn.”

She almost laughed at that. “Better than suffocating.”

“It’s a high price,” Jason said, and for a moment she saw his genuine concern. No bravado, no jokes, just a sweet, almost brotherly desire to protect her. He seemed to think that she didn’t understand the cost, but it was Jason who didn’t understand. She knew the cost. She had been paying it every day since her diagnosis. She was on a journey of saying good-bye, of leaving everything behind. Jason didn’t understand that Hanali wasn’t asking for anything that wouldn’t be taken from her anyway. But he was offering a chance —maybe it was a gamble, maybe it was a bad deal in some way she couldn’t see, but it was a chance at least, which was more than she had now —a chance at life. No one else was offering her that.

“I’ll be able to breathe the entire year?”

Hanali nodded gravely. “So long as you follow the agreement, yes. With the exception of the Festival of the Turning —an Elenil festival day without magic. Other than that, you will breathe freely.”

“So long as I follow the agreement,” Madeline repeated. “How does it work? What do I have to sign?”

Hanali pulled a thin bracelet from his jacket. It had a tiny, clouded jewel set in it and intricate patterns etched into the silver. “No signature. Only slip this onto your left wrist, and we shall be on our way. The power of the Crescent Stone will seal our bargain.”

She turned the bracelet over in her hands. It was lighter than she expected, and delicate. Was she hallucinating? The whole thing was so surreal. But if it was real —and it did seem real —she could be healed. She’d have to leave her life behind for a year, but that was worth it, right? She imagined Darius waking from this strange moment of frozen time to find her gone. Her parents. Her father would sue the hospital into the Stone Age. Her mom would weep and scream and yell and never be the same.

She wished Darius could move. He still sat beside her, frozen and unseeing. She wanted to talk it through with him, ask his opinion. In these last couple years, even before they were dating, he had been there for her so many times, had talked about everything with her. She had been trying to say good-bye, trying to make some distance, but now she wanted to hear his steady, reasoned voice weigh the pros and cons. He would understand, she thought, the excitement of this magical land. He had often said, “If only there was magic, if only there was some way out of this . . .”

So maybe Jason was right. She should think about it. Consider it. For a few minutes at least. She shouldn’t just take this deal and jump headfirst into some world, some war, she didn’t understand.

“I want to think about it,” she said, choking it out before another bout of painful coughing.

Hanali shook his head. “Do not contemplate too long,” he said. “There are others who are suffering, and we can take our offer to them should you reject it.”

“If I decide to . . . to come to the Sunlit Lands, how do I let you know?”

Hanali looked at her carefully. “The Sunlit Lands exist alongside your Earth. Not below or above, but beside. Parallel. You have but to leave this life behind and follow the narrow road that opens before you.”

“Second star to the right,” Madeline said, her coughing growing worse. “And straight on till . . . till morning.”

The stranger crossed his arms, plucking at the lace at his wrists. He reached out and took the bracelet, tucking it into some concealed pocket in his sleeve. “Send your strange friend to find me should you change your mind.”

“Yeah, yeah, we got it,” Jason said. “Now you heard the lady, get out of here. I’m allergic to all that lace.”

“Beware,” Hanali said. “When time crashes in on you again, you will be reminded of your weakness. The shock of reentering normal time can cause great stress on the human body.”

Hanali spun and walked from the room, and the world came to life again. Darius’s phone clattered to the floor and he shouted in surprise, looking down in confusion to find Madeline’s hand no longer entwined with his.

Madeline’s breath left her completely, and her heart rate spiked. She fought to stay conscious. The machines attached to her blared shrill alarms.

“Maddie?”

It’s okay, she tried to say. It’s going to be okay. But she couldn’t speak, couldn’t draw a breath. Her eyes met Jason’s.

“She’s turning blue,” Darius said, pushing Jason back. “Give her room.”

A doctor hurried in, close behind the nurse. “You kids get out,” the doctor said. “Right now.”

“We don’t have time to argue,” the nurse said, speaking over their objections. “If you want us to save your friend, get out now.”

“Jason,” she managed to wheeze. “Bracelet.” She didn’t have any choice, did she? She didn’t have time to think this out, to weigh the consequences. She was drowning. Hanali hadn’t offered her a choice, he had offered her a life vest.

She needed the bracelet. There was no guarantee the doctors could do anything for her in this moment. Tears squeezed out of her eyes, her hands clutched the bedsheets, her back arched up as her body cast about desperately, trying to find breath. Jason paused in the doorway and looked back at her. Had he heard her? Why wasn’t he running to get Hanali? Did he understand how serious this was? She tried to lift her hand, tried to show him her wrist, but then a nurse shut the door, and there was only the shriek of the alarms and the struggle to breathe.