I lay on my own makeshift bed, which was a thickness of blankets and a neatly folded one to pull up over me. Which I didn’t need right then, because the embers in the fireplace were still putting out good heat. Looking at them as they waxed and waned was hypnotic. The wolves were quiet with no moonlight to crazy them up, but a little wind was playing around the eaves, the sound sometimes rising to a low cry when it gusted, and it was impossible for me not to think of how far I was from my world. Oh, I could reach it again with just a short walk up the hill, a mile down the buried corridor, and a hundred and eighty-five spiral steps to the top of the well, but that wasn’t the true measure. This was the other land. It was Empis, where not one but two moons raced across the sky. I thought of that book cover, the one showing a funnel filling up with stars.
Not stars, I thought. Stories. An endless number of stories that pour into the funnel and come out in our world, barely changed.
Then I thought of Mrs. Wilcoxen, my third-grade teacher, who ended each day by saying, What have we learned today, boys and girls?
What had I learned? That this was a place of magic operating under a curse. That the people who lived here were suffering some sort of progressive sickness or disease. I thought I understood now why Dora’s sign—the one Mr. Bowditch had printed for her—only needed the shoe poem on the side that faced the abandoned city. It was because people came from that direction. How many I didn’t know, but the blank side of the sign suggested that few if any came back. If I assumed the cloud-obscured blob of sun was setting in the west, then the young man and woman I’d met （plus all the rest of the people in the shoe-exchange program Dora and her brother were running） were coming from the north. Evacuating from the north? Was it a rolling curse, maybe even some kind of radiation originating in the city? I didn’t have nearly enough information to be sure of that, or even half-sure, but it was an unpleasant thought just the same, because that was the way I was planning to go with Rades. Would my skin begin to turn gray? Would my voice begin dropping in register toward the growl of Dora, and Leah’s lady-in-waiting? There had been nothing wrong with Mr. Bowditch’s skin and voice, but maybe this part of Empis had been okay, or mostly okay, when he was last here.
Maybe this, maybe that. I supposed if I started to see changes in myself, I could turn around and beat feet.
Help her.
That was what the gray maid had whispered to me. I thought I knew a way to help Radar, but how was I supposed to help a princess with no mouth? In a story, the prince would find a way to do that. It would probably be something unlikely, like Rapunzel’s tears turning out to have magical sight-restoring properties, but palatable to readers who wanted a happy ending even if the teller had to pull one out of his hat. I wasn’t a prince anyway, just a high school kid who had found his way into some other reality, and I had no ideas.
The embers were their own magic, waxing when the wind swirled down the chimney, waning when the gusts died. Looking at them, my eyelids seemed to gain weight. I slept, and at some point in the night, Radar crossed the room and lay down beside me. In the morning the fire was out, but the side of me she was lying against was warm.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Leaving Dora. Refugees. Peterkin. Woody.
1
Breakfast was scrambled eggs—goose eggs, by their size—and chunks of bread toasted over a new fire. There was no butter, but there was wonderful strawberry jam. When the meal was finished, I cinched up my pack and put it on. I clipped Radar’s leash to her collar. I didn’t want her chasing any giant rabbits into the woods and meeting this world’s version of a Game of Thrones direwolf.
“I’ll come back,” I told Dora, with more confidence than I felt. I almost added And Radar will be young again when I do, but thought that might jinx the deal. Also, I still found the idea of magical regeneration easy to hope for but harder to believe, even in Empis.
“I think I can stay at Leah’s uncle’s house tonight—assuming he’s not allergic to dogs, or something—but I’d like to be there before dark.” Thinking （it was hard not to） wolfies.
She nodded, but took my elbow and led me out the back door. The lines still crisscrossed the yard but the shoes, slippers, and boots had been taken in, presumably so they wouldn’t get dampened by the morning dew （which I hoped wasn’t radioactive）。 We went around the side of the cottage and there was the little cart I’d seen before. The sacks with the greenery poking out of the tops had been replaced by a package wrapped in burlap and tied with twine. Dora pointed at it, then at my mouth. She held a hand in front of her own mouth and opened and closed her partially melted fingers in a chewing gesture. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.