walked around the room several times, looked out the window, peered up the chimney, and satisfied that it really was a bare, empty room, went back into the passage. She tried the red door next. It opened into a low, filthy room, as black as the inside of a chimney. Rubbish lay heaped in the corners. The light that forced its way through the grimy window barely penetrated the dark at all, and the air was close and foul. It smelled of moss and brackish water.
She took a few steps in. She could dimly make out a wooden chair in the middle of the room, in front of a wooden table. She took a few more steps, and looked back over her shoulder to make sure the door was still open. It seemed suddenly very far away. She approached the table. Tools covered it, and it dripped with what looked like seaweed. Hettie’s eyes narrowed. There were hammers and pliers and odd hooked instruments, and many pieces of thick, wrinkled old paper. A gust came through the door suddenly, rustling the papers, and Hettie saw that they were scrawled with writing and pictures. Pictures of eyes, eyes from all angles, whirls of ink, the veins and nerves like gnarled branches. They seemed to watch her, frowning and glaring and weeping. Hettie shivered and pushed all the papers into a heap and fled, closing the red door tightly behind her.
She didn’t go into that room after that. She would have gone into the blue room often. She asked the faery butler to come in and build a fire. He didn’t. She sat down next to him in the passage and told him he might build some chairs and a table, too, but he never answered.
Hettie didn’t mind. As long as the red door stayed closed, she was all right on her own. The necklace she had picked from the gray face’s remains was always inside her nightgown, flat against her skin, and it reminded her that the thing that had lived here was gone and would not appear suddenly in a corner or hurry down the shadowy staircase. Sometimes, when the cottage felt particularly lonely and the faery butler wouldn’t say a word, or even look at her, she took to clutching the pendant to keep from being frightened.
The metal was always cold to the touch, but the stone … It was always warm.
Hettie found the light when she went to the top of the stairs. At least, she felt fairly certain it was the light she had seen. She had first spotted it in London, in the warehouse. The light had been twinkling in the cottage’s front window then, only a few feet above the ground. Now it was at the top of a long, winding stair, in a window that looked down onto the forest from what seemed like a hundred feet up. The light had come from a candle and something had blown it out.
The candle was yellow and greasy looking. Reddish veins ran just under its surface. Hettie wondered what would happen if she lit it again. She thought of having the candle downstairs to keep the night away.
She reached out to touch it.
And then she heard a sound. Bells. Bells, ringing in the woods.
Her eyes went wide as teacups. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered. And in a wink she was running for the stairs, down, down into the cottage.
“Someone’s coming!” she shouted, leaping the last five steps. The faery butler was still propped against the wall. He didn’t move at the sound of her voice. She barreled past him.
Barthy. It has to be Barthy. He’s had weeks and weeks to find me. …
The bells were nearer now, almost in the clearing. She heard the sound of hooves, crunching through snow, and voices, and high and windy laughter. She slid back the bolt and opened the door a crack.
Not Bartholomew’s voice.
She peeked out.
Not Bartholomew.
A company of riders was coming through the trees toward the cottage. They looked all black-and-white at first—black riders on white steeds, or white riders on black steeds—and with the dark branches interlacing behind them and the snow beneath their hooves, it was as if they were a living extension of the forest itself, like stitchery in a pillowcase.
Hettie hadn’t seen much during her short life in Old Crow Alley, but she knew how horses were supposed to look, and it was not like that. These steeds had four legs and long necks, almost like horses, but their bones were more delicate and their faces sharper, and their manes and tails seemed to be made of water or seaweed or molten glass.
Pale, pointy-faced people sat on their backs. Some were tall and lean like the faery butler. Some were small like Mr. Lickerish, the wicked Sidhe gentleman who had turned her into a door back in London.
The men wore black waistcoats and black overcoats just like English gentlemen did. The ladies wore gowns of dewdrops, or dresses made of open, flutter-paged books. One, a wizened old woman, was wrapped in so many swaths of black that she looked nearly swallowed up. Her head was bent and her hands were knotted tightly through the mane of her steed.
At the head of the company sat a small faery lady with a strange smile on her face. It was not a happy smile, but it was very wide. The lady wore a dress of fish bones, sewn together with what looked like spiderwebs, and as the riders came into the clearing and halted to dismount, Hettie was a little bit afraid all the threads in the lady’s dress would snap and the whole costume would unravel at her feet.
Nothing like that happened.
The faery lady did not dismount. Instead, her steed shrank beneath her, bones grinding and re-jointing, until in its place stood a tall, mischievous-looking youth with sharply slanted eyes. He held the lady in his arms and then placed her daintily on the snow. The other steeds did the same.
The lady in the fish-bone dress looked about briefly, chin tilted to a haughty angle. Then she strode toward the cottage.
Hettie spun away from the door. “They’re coming here,” she whispered, hurrying back to the faery butler. “Get your knife! Get your knife, do something, they’re coming!”
Still the butler did not move. For a moment Hettie thought he was pondering something, but then she saw his face. His skin was stretched and ashen. Little muscles twitched in his cheek, and his green eye was wide and dull. He wasn’t going to move, Hettie realized, and her heart dropped. He was frightened out of his wits.
She glanced back at the door. Through the crack, she could see the hem of the faery lady’s dress sweeping forward across the frozen earth. She gave the butler one last angry shake. Then she slipped down the corridor and up the stairs.
She heard the faery lady knock on the open door, three sharp raps. “Belusite Number 14!” the faery called. “We come to collect.” The hinges protested.
Hettie ran, up, up toward the window and the candle. Below, feet tramped. She could hear voices everywhere suddenly, under the wooden treads, floating up the stairs after her. Doors slammed. After a few seconds the voices turned to angry shouts.
They wanted the person who lived here. And the person was not here.
At last Hettie came to the high window and scrambled up onto the sill. She looked down through the black branches at the scene below.
The faery lady had come out of the cottage and was swirling here and there, as if she were at a garden party and not in the middle of a vast, dead forest. Three gentleman-faeries were standing behind her, all in a line, not moving, and as far as Hettie could tell, not speaking. The old, old woman in her shawls and wraps was hunched against the roots of a tree.
And the faery butler …? Two horse-people had him by the jacket and were dragging him out of the cottage, his long legs trailing in the snow.
Hettie gasped. Why didn’t you run? she thought desperately. You could have hidden! You could have hidden somewhere!
The horse-people threw him to the ground. One held him in the snow with a bony, sharp-toed foot, and the other kicked him, right in the stomach. Hettie heard the scream, saw blood spatter the whiteness.
She didn’t wait to see more. Whirling, she ran from the window and down the stairs. The treads flew by beneath her feet. She didn’t like the faery butler. Usually she hated him. But he was the only thing she had left of