Cradling Lisbet, Anya moved through the house. It was cold and smelled of coal dust and iron. In every fireplace curled heatless flames. On every table were plates of rotting meat, or glossy dark flowers with pollen dripping livid from their hearts.
When she opened the front door she saw the sickness spread beyond the house. The branches of trees had become slender bones, the dust of the road crackling ashes.
I did this, she said to herself. I killed my sister—her death made a door, and the door opened onto death!
It took hours, but she dug deeply enough into the burnt earth to bury her sister. Then she set off toward town, to see if she could find anything living.
Town was a place of strange horrors. Not a body to be seen, just a heavy sky that bathed the whole world in light the color of disease, and locked houses, and windows painted a blind black.
Anya grieved and wandered but never wearied. She needed neither sleep nor food nor drink, and when she ran the bone knife over her own wrist it made no nick in her skin. In desperation she scaled the vines spilling over the walls of a cottage, hoisting herself onto the crumbling gray shingles of its roof. From there, she jumped.
She drifted to earth like an autumn leaf, touching down unharmed. There she lay, praying for an end, though every prayer tasted as bitter as the lie that had killed her sister.
It was then that the voice spoke to her once more.
It had been a long time since she’d lain on the floor of her mother’s bedroom letting it whisper secrets into her ear. Longer than she thought. Far away, her stepmother was dead, killed by a fever. Her father had taken a new bride, who’d borne him a son.
Will you take me back home? Anya pleaded.
You’re asking the wrong question, the voice replied.
It led her through town, back to the grave she’d dug in front of her father’s house. From it a black walnut tree had grown. Its rustling leaves were the only moving things in the blighted land. “Lisbet,” Anya said, and laid her hand on its trunk.
With a rustle like a sigh, the tree dropped three walnuts into her hands. She cracked them open one by one.
The first held a satin dress the color of moth’s wings.
The second held a pair of slippers with the black shine of petrified wood.
The third held a translucent stone the size of an eye.
When she peered through the stone, the world around her burst into life. The day was clear, the trees were blooming, and a carriage was bearing down on her. The driver didn’t see her, but the horse did, and reared, hooves high over Anya’s head.
She dropped the stone, returning to her miserable realm. Now she understood what her sister had given her: a window onto the land of the living.
Do with it what you will, the voice told her, but do not squander your sister’s gifts.
Anya waited until the green light had faded to murk, marking night in this in-between place. She put on the moth-wing dress and the slippers. She combed back her heavy hair. Then she raised the stone to her eye.
She saw her home as she once knew it, when she was a girl with a mother and a father and a sister named Lisbet. She held the stone in place like a peephole, circling the house and looking into its windows.
In one candlelit room she saw a beautiful woman playing the piano. Her father drinking a glass of sherry, his hair lined with gray. And a boy just older than her. He was tall and narrow, growing into manhood but not yet there.
Anya’s father looked at him proudly, clapping a hand to his shoulder. The boy’s gaze roved idly over the room, and his mother at the piano, before landing on Anya.
Frowning, he moved to the window. Anya shrank back as her father joined his son. The boy pointed, but their father looked past her, shaking his head. Finally he pulled the curtains closed.
Anya waited in the garden, in her dress the color of will-o’-the-wisps. When she lowered her arm, she stood in a place of rotting bowers and bone. When she raised the stone back to her eye, she could see the soft grass and the brief starlight of fireflies. She could see the boy walking toward her, his step tentative but his face eager.
“You may ask me one question,” she told him. “But it has to be the right one.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
Anya said nothing.
“Why can’t they see you?” he pleaded.
She stayed silent.
“You are very beautiful,” he whispered, reaching out to touch her. “Why do you hold your hand so high?”
Anya smiled at him the way she’d once seen her stepmother smile at her father. She let him bend close to her mouth, closer, before dropping her arm and returning to the dead garden.
It took her father’s son many nighttime meetings to ask the right question. By then his eyes were hollow with sleeplessness, and he looked at her with a love like hunger.
“How can I get you to stay?” he asked at last.
She smiled and put her mouth to his ear.
She told him how they could be together. How he could remake the world just enough so she could stand beside him.
It would take blood.
She taught him the words to say, repeating them three times so he would remember. She pressed her bone knife into his hand. And she watched as he slid his bleeding wrist over the wall of her father’s house, using it to paint a door. He swayed as he spoke the words, his face, a mirror of their father’s, going pale.
The blood turned into a door that glowed with wicked green light at the seams. Anya dropped the stone from her eye as it swung open.
The boy disappeared, and the light turned into the warm golden lamplight of home. As Anya walked through the door, she could feel the faintest brush of her half-brother, stepping past her into the lifeless place that Death had made.
Then she was standing in her father’s house, alive and alone, and Death didn’t feel cheated because she’d traded him one prisoner for another. She lifted the stone just long enough to peep through it at the boy standing in her place, his face terrified, before putting it into her pocket.
She went to the kitchen and ate spoonfuls of honey, wolfed up fistfuls of meat, let wine run down her chin. Then she climbed the stairs to her father’s bedroom, where he lay sleeping next to his wife. She felt the bone knife she’d snatched back from the lost boy twitching where it lay against her breast.
She didn’t cut her father’s throat. She cut his wife’s. She laid the stone in the dead woman’s hand, where her father would be sure to find it. And hold it to his eye, to see the dead world that crouched beside his own, and the son who would call to him, always, but whom he could never retrieve.
HANSA THE TRAVELER
There was a girl who spoke to the moon. That isn’t enough to make a tale, but to her the moon spoke back.
The girl’s name was Hansa, and she lived with her grandmother an hour’s walk from the sea. Her father was a ship’s captain who came home every year or so, filled their cottage for a time with his tales and laughter, grew restless, and slipped away again.
When he was home he took Hansa walking through the raggedy town that grew up around the harbor. From the port she watched the water smooth into glass and purl into lace and worry itself into great waves beyond the cove. There were things to see on shore, too: a witch who made good-luck charms out of the hair of drowned men. A tinker with a blue eye and a green, so you knew one of the two was fairy-kissed but you didn’t know which. The salt-stained atlas her father bought for her, whose pictures moved of their own accord.