Every Heart a Doorway(7)

She'd been gone for six months, from their perspective. One month for each of the pomegranate seeds that Persephone had eaten, back at the beginning of things. Years for her, and months for them. They still thought she was dyeing her hair. They still thought she was eventually going to tell them where she'd been.

They still thought a lot of things.

"It gets better," repeated Jill. "It's been a year and a half, for us. But we don't lose hope. I keep my iron levels up. Jack has her experiments-"

Jack didn't say anything. She just stood and walked away from the table, leaving her half-eaten dinner behind.

"We're not cleaning up after you!" shouted Sumi, around a mouthful of food.

In the end, of course, they did. There was really no other option.





3

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

ACCORDING TO WHAT Nancy's parents had told her about the school, the mandatory group therapy had been one of the big selling points. What better way to bring their teenage daughter back from whatever strange hole she'd crawled into than having her sit and talk to people who'd suffered similar traumas, all under the watchful eye of a trained professional? As she sank into the embrace of a thickly padded armchair, surrounded by teens who twitched, chewed their hair, or stared moodily off into space without speaking, she had to wonder what they would have thought of the reality.

Then the eight-year-old walked into the room.

She was dressed like a middle-aged librarian, wearing a pencil skirt and a white blouse, both of which were much too old for her. Her hair was pulled back into a tight, no-nonsense bun. The overall effect was of a child playing dress-up in her mother's closet. Nancy sat up straighter. The school's brochures had mentioned an age range of twelve to nineteen, allowing both the precocious and those who needed a little time to catch up to attend. It hadn't said anything about children under the age of ten.

The girl stopped at the center of the room, turning to look at each of them in turn. One by one, the fidgeters became still; the hair chewers stopped chewing; even Sumi, who'd been doing an elaborate cat's-cradle with a piece of yarn, lowered her hands and sat quietly. The girl smiled.

"For those of you who've been here for a while, welcome to Wednesday night group. We're going to be sharing with the high Wicked visitors tonight, but as always, the discussion is open to all." Her voice matched her body. Her tone was older, cadenced like an adult woman's, rendered high and strange by her prepubescent vocal cords. She looked at Nancy as she continued. "For those of you who are new here, my name is Lundy, and I am a fully licensed therapist with a specialization in child psychology. I'm going to be helping you through your recovery process."

Nancy stared. She couldn't think of anything else to do.

As Lundy walked over to the one remaining chair, Kade leaned over and murmured, "She's one of us, only she went to a high Logic, high Wicked world where they kicked visitors out on their eighteenth birthdays. She didn't want to leave, so she asked one of the local apothecaries to help her. This was the result. Eternal childhood."

"Not eternal, Mr. Bronson," said Lundy sharply. Kade sat up and settled back in his own chair, shrugging unapologetically. Lundy sighed. "You would have gotten this at your orientation, Miss, ah … ?"

"Whitman," said Nancy.                       
       
           



       

"Miss Whitman," said Lundy. "As I was saying, you would have gotten this at your orientation, but: I'm not living out an eternal childhood. I'm aging in reverse, growing one week younger for every month that passes. I'll live a long, long time. Longer, maybe, than I would have had I continued aging in the usual way. But they threw me out anyway, because I had broken the rules. I'll never marry, or have a family of my own, and my daughters will never find their way to the door that once led me to the Goblin Market. So I suppose I've learnt the danger of making importune bargains with the fae, and can now serve as a warning to others. I am still, however, your therapist. It's amazing, the degrees you can get over the Internet these days."

"I'm sorry," whispered Nancy.

Lundy waved a hand as she sat, dismissing Nancy's apology. "It's no matter, honestly. Everyone finds out eventually. Now. Who wants to share first?"

Nancy sat in silence as the other students talked. Not all of them: slightly less than half seemed to have been to a world that fell on the "Wicked" side of the compass, or maybe that was just the number who felt like sharing. Jill recited an impassioned paean to the moors and wind-racked hills of the world she'd gone to with her sister, while Jack only muttered something about burning windmills and the importance of fire safety in laboratory settings.

A girl with hair the color of moonlight on wheat stared at her hands while she talked about boys made of glass whose kisses had cut her lips but whose hearts had been kind and true. The girl who was too beautiful to look at directly said something about Helen of Troy, and half the room laughed, but not because it was funny; because she was so beautiful that they wanted nothing more than they wanted her to like them.

Kade made a brief, bitter speech about how Wickedness and Virtue were just labels and didn't mean anything; the world he'd been to was labeled "Virtue" on all the maps, but it had still cast him out as soon as it realized what he was.

Finally, silence fell, and Nancy realized everyone was looking at her. She shrank back in her seat. "I don't know if the place I went was wicked or not," she said. "It never seemed wicked to me. It always seemed  …  kind, at the root of things. Yes, there were rules, and yes, there were punishments if you broke them, but they were never unfair, and the Lord of the Dead took good care of everyone who served in his halls. I don't think it was wicked at all."

"How can you be sure, though?" asked Sumi, and her voice was gentle, underneath her jeering tone. "You can't even say Wicked right. Maybe it was evil to the core, filled with wiggling worms and bad stuff, and you couldn't see it." She slanted a glance toward Jill, almost as if she were checking the other girl's reaction. Jill, whose eyes were fixed on Nancy, didn't appear to notice. "You shouldn't close doors just because you don't like what's on the other side."

"I know because I know," said Nancy doggedly. "I didn't go anyplace bad. I went home."

"That's the thing people forget when they start talking about things in terms of good and evil," said Jack, turning to look at Lundy. She adjusted her glasses as she continued, "For us, the places we went were home. We didn't care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn't have to pretend to be something we weren't. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world."

"And on that note, I suppose we're done for the evening." Lundy stood. Nancy realized with a start that somewhere in the middle of the session, she'd started thinking of the little girl as an adult woman. It was the way she carried herself: too mature for the body she inhabited, too weary for the face she wore. "Thank you, everyone. Miss Whitman, I'll see you tomorrow morning for orientation. Everyone else, I'll see you tomorrow evening, when we'll be speaking to those who have traveled to the high Logic worlds. Remember, only by learning about the journeys of others can we truly understand our own."

"Oh, lovely," muttered Jack. "I do so love being in the hot seat two nights running."

Lundy ignored her, walking calmly out of the room. As soon as she was gone, Eleanor appeared in the doorway, all smiles.

"All right, my crumpets, it's time for good little girls and boys to go to bed," she said, and clapped her hands. "Off you go. Dream sweetly, try not to sleepwalk, and please don't wake me up at midnight trying to force a portal to manifest in the downstairs pantry. It isn't going to happen."                       
       
           



       

The students rose and scattered, some moving off in pairs, others going alone. Sumi went out the window, and no one commented on her disappearance.

Nancy walked back to her room, pleased to find it bathed in moonlight and filled with silence. She disrobed, garbed herself in a white nightgown from the pile Kade had given her, and stretched out on her bed, lying atop the covers. She closed her eyes, slowed her breathing, and slipped into sweet, motionless sleep, her first day done, and her future yet ahead of her.

* * *

ORIENTATION WITH LUNDY the next morning was odd, to say the least. It was held in a small room that had been a study once, before it had been filled with blackboards and the smell of chalk dust. Lundy stood at the center of it all, one hand resting on a wheeled stepladder, which she moved from blackboard to blackboard as the need to climb up and point to some complicated diagram arose. The need seemed to arise with dismaying frequency. Nancy sat very still in the room's single chair, her head spinning as she struggled to keep up.