Every Heart a Doorway(4)

"Sometimes," admitted Nancy. There had been banquets, yes, feasts that lasted weeks, with the tables groaning under the weight of fruits and wines and dark, rich desserts. She had tasted unicorn at one of those feasts, and gone to her bed with a mouth that still tingled from the delicate venom of the horse-like creature's sweetened flesh. But mostly, there had been the silver cups of pomegranate juice, and the feeling of an empty stomach adding weight to her stillness. Hunger had died quickly in the Underworld. It was unnecessary, and a small price to pay for the quiet, and the peace, and the dances; for everything she'd so fervently enjoyed.

"See? Then you understand the importance of a good dinner," Sumi started walking again, keeping her steps short in deference to Nancy's slower stride. "Kade will get you fixed right up, right as rain, right as rabbits, you'll see. Kade knows where the best things are."

"Who is Kade? Please, you have to slow down." Nancy felt like she was running for her life as she tried to keep up with Sumi. The smaller girl's motions were too fast, too constant for Nancy's Underworld-adapted eyes to track them properly. It was like following a large hummingbird toward some unknown destination, and she was already exhausted.

"Kade has been here a very-very long time. Kade's parents don't want him back." Sumi looked over her shoulder and twinkled at Nancy. There was no other word to describe her expression, which was a strange combination of wrinkling her nose and tightening the skin around her eyes, all without visibly smiling. "My parents didn't want me back either, not unless I was willing to be their good little girl again and put all this nonsense about Nonsense aside. They sent me here, and then they died, and now they'll never want me at all. I'm going to live here always, until Ely-Eleanor has to let me have the attic for my own. I'll pull taffy in the rafters and give riddles to all the new girls."                       
       
           



       

They had reached a flight of stairs. Sumi began bounding up them. Nancy followed more sedately.

"Wouldn't you get spiders and splinters and stuff in the candy?" she asked.

Sumi rewarded her with a burst of laughter and an actual smile. "Spiders and splinters and stuff!" she crowed. "You're alliterating already! Oh, maybe we will be friends, ghostie girl, and this won't be completely dreadful after all. Now come on. We've much to do, and time does insist on being linear here, because it's awful."

The flight of stairs ended with a landing and another flight of stairs, which Sumi promptly started up, leaving Nancy no choice but to follow. All those days of stillness had made her muscles strong, accustomed to supporting her weight for hours at a time. Some people thought only motion bred strength. Those people were wrong. The mountain was as powerful as the tide, just  …  in a different way. Nancy felt like a mountain as she chased Sumi higher and higher into the house, until her heart was thundering in her chest and her breath was catching in her throat, until she feared that she would choke on it.

Sumi stopped in front of a plain white door marked only with a small, almost polite sign reading KEEP OUT. Grinning, she said, "If he meant that, he wouldn't say it. He knows that for anyone who's spent any time at all in Nonsense that, really, he's issuing an invitation."

"Why do people around here keep using that word like it's a place?" asked Nancy. She was starting to feel like she'd missed some essential introductory session about the school, one that would have answered all her questions and left her a little less lost.

"Because it is, and it isn't, and it doesn't matter," said Sumi, and knocked on the attic door before hollering, "We're coming in!" and shoving it open to reveal what looked like a cross between a used bookstore and a tailor's shop. Piles of books covered every available surface. The furniture, such as it was-a bed, a desk, a table-appeared to be made from the piles of books, all save for the bookshelves lining the walls. Those, at least, were made of wood, probably for the sake of stability. Bolts of fabric were piled atop the books. They ranged from cotton and muslin to velvet and the finest of thin, shimmering silks. At the center of it all, cross-legged atop a pedestal of paperbacks, sat the most beautiful boy Nancy had ever seen.

His skin was golden tan, his hair was black, and when he looked up-with evident irritation-from the book he was holding, she saw that his eyes were brown and his features were perfect. There was something timeless about him, like he could have stepped out of a painting and into the material world. Then he spoke.

"What'n the fuck are you doing in here again, Sumi?" he demanded, Oklahoma accent thick as peanut butter spread across a slice of toast. "I told you that you weren't welcome after the last time."

"You're just mad because I came up with a better filing system for your books than you could," said Sumi, sounding unruffled. "Anyway, you didn't mean it. I am the sunshine in your sky, and you'd miss me if I was gone."

"You organized them by color, and it took me weeks to figure out where anything was. I'm doing important research up here." Kade unfolded his legs and slid down from his pile of books. He knocked off a paperback in the process, catching it deftly before it could hit the ground. Then he turned to look at Nancy. "You're new. I hope she's not already leading you astray."

"So far, she's just led me to the attic," said Nancy inanely. Her cheeks reddened, and she said, "I mean, no. I'm not so easy to lead places, most of the time."

"She's more of a ‘standing really still and hoping nothing eats her' sort of girl," said Sumi, and thrust the suitcase toward him. "Look what her parents did."

Kade raised his eyebrows as he took in the virulent pinkness of the plastic. "That's colorful," he said after a moment. "Paint could fix it."

"Outside, maybe. You can't paint underpants. Well, you can, but then they come out all stiff, and no one believes you didn't mess them." Sumi's expression sobered for a moment. When she spoke again, it was with a degree of clarity that was almost unnerving, coming from her. "Her parents swapped out her things before they sent her off to school. They knew she wouldn't like it, and they did it anyway. There was a note."

"Oh," said Kade, with sudden understanding. "One of those. All right. Is this going to be a straight exchange, then?"                       
       
           



       

"I'm sorry, I don't understand what's going on," said Nancy. "Sumi grabbed my suitcase and ran away with it. I don't want to bother anyone. … "

"You're not bothering me," said Kade. He took the suitcase from Sumi before turning toward Nancy. "Parents don't always like to admit that things have changed. They want the world to be exactly the way it was before their children went away on these life-changing adventures, and when the world doesn't oblige, they try to force it into the boxes they build for us. I'm Kade, by the way. Fairyland."

"I'm Nancy, and I'm sorry, I don't understand."

"I went to a Fairyland. I spent three years there, chasing rainbows and growing up by inches. I killed a Goblin King with his own sword, and he made me his heir with his dying breath, the Goblin Prince in Waiting." Kade walked off into the maze of books, still carrying Nancy's suitcase. His voice drifted back, betraying his location. "The King was my enemy, but he was the first adult to see me clearly in my entire life. The court of the Rainbow Princess was shocked, and they threw me down the next wishing well we passed. I woke up in a field in the middle of Nebraska, back in my ten-year-old body, wearing the dress I'd had on when I first fell into the Prism." The way he said "Prism" left no question about what he meant: it was a proper name, the title of some strange passage, and his voice ached around that single syllable like flesh aches around a knife.

"I still don't understand," said Nancy.

Sumi sighed extravagantly. "He's saying he fell into a Fairyland, which is sort of like going to a Mirror, only they're really high Logic pretending to be high Nonsense, it's quite unfair, there's rules on rules on rules, and if you break one, wham"-she made a slicing gesture across her throat-"out you go, like last year's garbage. They thought they had snicker-snatched a little girl-fairies love taking little girls, it's like an addiction with them-and when they found out they had a little boy who just looked like a little girl on the outside, uh-oh, donesies. They threw him right back."

"Oh," said Nancy.

"Yeah," said Kade, emerging from the maze of books. He wasn't carrying Nancy's suitcase anymore. Instead, he had a wicker basket filled with fabric in reassuring shades of black and white and gray. "We had a girl here a few years ago who'd spent basically a decade living in a Hammer film. Black and white everything, flowy, lacy, super-Victorian. Seems like your style. I think I've guessed your size right, but if not, feel free to come and let me know that you need something bigger or smaller. I didn't take you for the corsetry type. Was I wrong?"