THE Innard Stairs were blocked.
Hettie and the faery butler skidded to a halt and stared in horror at the pandemonium below. Faeries. Hundreds of faeries swarmed up the steps in a glistening swath of gowns and masks. They slipped, fell, wriggling over one another in their attempt to flee the lower stories. Jackets and skin hung in shreds. Some of the faeries bled, slow strings of black gore.
“There is no way out,” said the faery butler. The cord that bound Hettie’s wrist dropped from his hand. He stood perfectly still, watching the guests boil up the steps. Below in the house, a jarring crash sounded.
The Glass Wing.
“There is now,” Hettie whispered, and this time she was the one pulling the faery butler, down, down into the writhing mass of Sidhe.
The faery butler let out a shout. Hettie thought she might have screeched a little bit, too. Then they smashed into the oncoming faeries, into a wall of silk and muscle. At first the panic was too great. Legs and arms and masked faces were everywhere, and the pushing threatened to wash Hettie and the faery butler back up the steps. But Hettie wasn’t going up there again. She hooked her foot into the boot of a faery gentleman and clawed her way up his waistcoat and began leaping across the top of the throng, from shoulder to head, hurtling down the staircase. Faeries were tumbling everywhere, over the banister, flipping into the dark. They shrieked at Hettie, but she didn’t stop. She had to get to the bottom. She could already see the lower hall. Then a hole opened up in front of her and she dropped. Shoes pounded down around her.
She began to crawl on hands and knees, step after step after step. A sharp red block heel came perilously close to mangling her hand. Then a lady in the mask of a wolf pulled her to her feet and shook her. “He will kill us,” she whimpered, not really at Hettie, though her fingers dug into her arms. “Kill us all for coming. Oh, Piscaltine, you fool, what have you done, what have you done?”
Hettie tried to pull away, but the faery wouldn’t let go. Hettie was being pushed up the stairs again. The lady clung to her, screaming, her fingers bruising. Then the faery butler was at Hettie’s side. He snatched her away from the lady. Hettie was swooped up into the air. And he practically hurled her down the remaining steps. She felt so high up, so high she would break every bone in her body when she landed. The last of the madness flew away beneath her. She fell with a thud in the lower hall and rolled over the floor.
A second later she was up on one knee, head pounding. The hall was almost empty now. Only a few stragglers were rushing down the trampled pathway of leaves and branches. Wrong way, Hettie thought as she passed them. There’s no way out up there. You’ll all be trapped. For a brief instant, Hettie thought now might be the time to slip away and lose the faery butler. But then he landed next to her and she was running with him, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to be.
They came to the place where the guests had been received, where the path of ivy led away toward the Wings of Glass and Mildew.
Boom. Another crash, some ways ahead. They turned a corner. Above, Piscaltine’s flags and banners flickered in a gust of wind. They went down three steps. Boom. Around one more corner and into a hallway made of green and pale blue glass.
Boom. The crashes were coming closer.
Boom, boom, boom, louder and faster, and then the hallway shattered and three statues stood before them, taller than the faery butler, their heads bowed under stone hoods. One of them stepped forward, a long silver blade in its hand.
The faery butler flew at the statue, and even in his decrepit state he was faster than anything. Just as the statue swung its sword, the faery slid onto his knees, head back, eyes looking up at the ceiling. The blade hissed over him. In an instant the butler was back on his feet, whirling, smashing his own knife into the statue’s head.
The knife snapped with sharp ping. The statue didn’t even flinch. It turned, slowly, and brought up its sword again. The faery butler scrambled to his feet. Hettie didn’t see the rest, because just then the other two statues stepped toward her. Their swords swung. She dropped to the floor and twisted onto her back. She saw the blades descending, descending. For an instant she glimpsed under their hoods, saw stone faces and stone lips. Then she slid to the side and the blades cracked down beside her. She was on her feet in a blink. The broken walls of the Glass Wing were so close. She leaped. Cold air slapped at her and grass crushed under her. She rolled out into the field beyond.
The faery butler followed a second later, already running.
“What are they?” Hettie screamed, leaping to her feet and flying after him. She could barely keep him in sight. The fog was so thick and the faery butler went so fast, sometimes dropping onto all fours like a dog. Like a pity-faery, Hettie thought.
“I don’t know!” he screeched back over his shoulder. “The Sly King’s, most like. He is angry about something. You. You, and Piscaltine for keeping you. The Duchess of Yearn-by-the-Woods has fallen from favor, methinks. And her head from her shoulders.”
Behind her in the fog, Hettie heard shouts and the ring of metal coming after them. She strained to see something in the whiteness, but there was nothing. The fog swirled on all sides, endless and blinding. Only the patch of grass she moved over was visible, as if the fog were afraid of her and hung back.
“But I didn’t steal his stupid necklace!” she shouted. “I—I left it, or dropped it somewhere—” She couldn’t even remember anymore. The other one was still with her though, knocking inside her nightgown as she ran.
“It’s not about the necklace.” The faery butler appeared, grabbing her hand. “I told you, you’re the Door. Red lines. Branch hair. You’re so obviously a Door. And the lady Piscaltine keeps you locked up and hidden, as if you were nothing at all, as if you were a nobody. The Sly King will be furious with her for not delivering you to him.”
Behind them, Hettie could hear footsteps now, beating the grass. How close are they? She couldn’t tell. And then there was the rattle of a harness, and the footsteps became hooves, galloping.
“They’re after us!” the faery butler shouted. They sped into the fog.
Hettie’s side ached terribly. It was all she could do to keep her legs moving. Somewhere she heard a horn, low and groaning. And a river? Was that water rushing nearby?
“Where’ll we go?” she gasped. “We might be going in circles and you wouldn’t even be able to tell!”
The river sound was coming closer though, a gurgling, somewhere up ahead. So were the hooves. Then, without warning, the field dipped down a steep grassy bank and there was a waterway, black and deep.
The faery butler let go of her hand and hurried along its edge, sniffing, waving his long fingers over the water. He went a few paces, peered about, went a few more. The horn sounded again, and all at once the fog was filled with terrible cries. They were not even that far away from Piscaltine’s house. In the fog, what seemed like miles might not have been more than a few hundred feet.
“Here we are,” the faery butler said, his voice low and urgent. Hettie followed his gaze. A boat was moored to the bank of the river. Or grown to it. Like a great white caterpillar, it clutched the grassy slope, pale tendrils hugging the dirt. The faery butler herded Hettie onto its deck.
“Hartik,” he said. “Mahevol Kir.”
The boat seemed to shrivel, the wooden tentacles drawing in around its belly. A second later the boat was picked up by the currents and pulled into the middle of the river.
Not a moment too soon. Florence La Bellina bloomed out of the fog like a bloody flower. Her horse looked like her, black coat, white mane, eyes like pits. It skidded to a halt on the bank, and Florence stared at Hettie, her shiny doll’s face a mask of rage. Hettie stared back, breathless and aching, watching her until she was swallowed again by the fog.
The boat was very strange. It sliced through the water without a sound. Its sail was silver, glimmering in the mist, and it had two eyes in its prow, half-lidded and very haughty looking. A trapdoor was in its deck, though there were only shadows and squeezing, glistening tubes underneath. Sometimes the pale tendrils that twisted along the boat’s sides would skim over the waves like the legs of a sea creature.
But when Hettie looked over the railing at the boat’s reflection it was even stranger. It was as if a different boat were attached to the bottom of this boat, upside-down in the water. The mirror-boat was moss green. The mast was broken and the sides were full of gaping holes, the tendrils dragging, limp in the waves. Even Hettie’s reflection looked worse. It was difficult to see because the ripples in the water kept cutting the image into ribbons, but it seemed to Hettie that her reflection was wrinkled and stooped, as if it were a hundred years old. Its hands clutched the railing like claws.
They had been on the boat for what felt like an age, Hettie and the faery butler, sailing on black water through white fog. The only sound was their breathing, close and muffled, and the hoofbeats. Florence’s horse, following them along the river’s edge. Hettie tried not to hear that part. She walked the boat prow to keel so many times she could picture every twist in the railing. She squinted at the eyes in the prow. Now she was occupying herself by staring at the figure in the water. The figure stared back.
It did everything she did. Hettie waved at it. It waved back. She smiled, wondering if it would smile, too. It did. It curled back its lips and opened its mouth, but there were bugs in its smile, black beetles and thousand-footed centipedes scuttling across its old, dead teeth.
Hettie gagged and snapped her mouth shut, half-expecting to feel the insects wriggling over her tongue.
“A Shade of Envy,” the faery butler said. Hettie started. “That’s what it’s called. The boat. It was Lady Piscaltine’s. Very fitting.”
Hettie turned away from his voice. She thought about ignoring him. “It’s horrid,” she said finally. “Your whole Country is horrid. It doesn’t have anything nice in it.”
The faery butler sat against the mast, very still. “It does. I’m sure it does. Perhaps we just haven’t found it yet.”
Hettie made a face, but she went to the mast and sat down on the other side of it, so that her back was to the faery butler’s back. “Well, I’m sick of looking,” she said, resting her chin in her hands.
She thought that would be the end of the matter, but the faery butler snorted. “You? You never looked. You wouldn’t see anything pretty if it were sitting under your nose.”
“I would too!” Hettie turned a little, insulted. “And I looked all over the place. There’s just nothing here. It’s all dead.”
“You aren’t dead.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” she said under her breath.
She heard the faery butler shift against the mast. “Yes, it does. You are a little fool.”
“No, you are. Everything keeps getting worse and worse, and I don’t know where I’m going, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
She listened for a sound from the faery butler. For a long while there was nothing. Then, “Do you want to know how I survived the Virduger in Deepest Winter? You thought they had finished me, didn’t you? But they hadn’t. Piscaltine never had them kill me. She ordered them to wound me so that no one could tell the Belusites and the Sly King that I had gone unpunished, but if anything, she was pleased I had gotten rid of another of his servants. I did not know that then. I did not know that until many moons later when I stumbled half-dead up to her house. And now I’m here, on my way to someplace new, someplace better, I hope. Perhaps none of us know how important we are. Perhaps some of us never find out, because we simply lie down and die.”
Hettie peered around the mast at him. She saw that his green eye was glowing again, dully and very faintly.
“I didn’t say I was going to die. I—I just said I didn’t like it here.”
“What is this liking? If you liked everything that happened to you, you would be quite the most feeble person. A thousand things will happen to you, and some of it will be good and some of it will be bad and some of it will be utterly dreadful, but they all . . .” The faery butler paused. “They all lead somewhere.”
“Where?” Hettie inched a little closer. “Home?”
The faery butler’s head was tilted up. He was looking into the distance, into the endless, still fog. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps if we make them to.”
Another pause. On the shore, the hooves pounded. Trees poked out of the whiteness, skeletons in a cotton sea. “When the Sly King has you, and I am gone, try to escape,” the faery butler said. “Try to get away.”
Hettie gaped at him. Slowly his eye went out again. He slumped against the mast as if he’d never spoken. And then, suddenly, the fog lifted. For the briefest instant Hettie saw the river, curling away in front of her, and the moon shone down, and the river became a silver ribbon, a silver road. Hettie gasped. Then the fog closed again, and they were plunged into murk.
She woke up at some point in the night and tried to think. She felt like she should be plotting, scheming a way to escape, but her mind was empty. So many strange and powerful creatures were snapping at her heels, and she didn’t understand what any of them wanted. In London, Mr. Lickerish had tried to make a Door of her and so she had been special and dangerous, but she couldn’t imagine Florence La Bellina would care about that, or the Sly King. It was such a hollow-headed thing the faery butler had suggested. Doors were for escaping, for the faeries to leave the smoke and factories of England and go home. But these faeries already were home. They were already in the Old Country. It had to be something else they wanted. It had to be— Her fingers tightened around the pendant under her nightgown. The warmth spread up her hand. Like it’s alive, she thought, for the hundredth time.
The Sly King had had so many of those necklaces, hanging inside his coat. And he was a king. They were important, then. Perhaps they were magic. She thought of how hers always made her feel braver and better when she held it, and how it never went cold, even in the winter wood and the painted halls of Piscaltine’s house. Perhaps the Sly King really did want her for a Door, and perhaps Piscaltine hadn’t known about any of it and had simply kept Hettie as a pet as she had always supposed. But if it was the necklace they wanted . . .
Hettie slipped the chain from around her neck and hurried to the side of the boat. If it was what they wanted, then they could have it. She could live without it. She could live without a lot of things if it meant she could escape this place. She leaned over the railing and dangled the necklace above the green-black waters.
The ugly old Hettie stared up from the waves, from a broken, mossy boat. Something dark and hairy swayed from her hands. Hettie ignored it. She looked toward the river’s edge. The Belusite was riding, her head turned toward Hettie at an unnatural angle. Their eyes met. Hettie took a deep breath. Then she let the necklace fall. It tumbled toward the water. It struck with barely a sound and sank beneath the waves.