But then I think of older stories. I think of the five rivers of the underworld: oblivion, woe, wailing, fury, fire. I think of that handwritten note I found so long ago in the margins of Ovid: a sixth river?
The only way into the underworld is to cross a river; the only way into faerie is to fall asleep. I am not in Underland yet, but I know how to get there.
I scoop the water into my hands, a palmful of silver, and drink deep.
Sleep moves through me, tidal, inexorable. I lie back and feel my hair lift from my scalp to float around my face in a bloody halo. I close my eyes and open my mouth, and the river comes in. It fills my mouth, slips between my teeth, slides like warm syrup into my lungs.
My hand finds Arthur’s. I lie down beside him on the riverbed, and sleep.
I am awake. （I am still sleeping.）
I am standing before Starling House, the sky the color of shale, the air hot and motionless. （I am still lying on the riverbed. There is silt beneath my spine and water in my throat.）
Arthur is here, too. He isn’t, I know he isn’t—somewhere above myself I can still feel his fingers beneath mine—but here, in Underland, he’s awake.
He is standing with his back to me, a little ways up the drive. All I can see is his silhouette, but I know him by the too-long tangle of his hair and the set of his jaw, the way his heels are dug into the dirt and his shoulders are braced. He looks like a person who has chosen his direction and will not change it.
Standing between Arthur and the House, watching him with the black pits of their eyes, are the Beasts. They’re more substantial down here, more real and more awful for their reality. They aren’t made of mist now but of meat—I can see sinews moving beneath milky skin, knobs of bone at every joint, claws flattening the long grass. None of them are moving, but all of them are watching the man standing at their feet.
“Arthur!”
It’s just like that awful night when he fought the Beast before. He wasn’t moving, but a new and awful stillness falls over him. When his head turns toward me it looks unnatural, grindingly slow, like a statue looking over one shoulder. His lips move, and it might be the word how. It might be the first syllable of my name. I decide it doesn’t matter.
I run to him, stumbling over the darkened drive. He catches me awkwardly against his chest, one-handed, because there is a sword in his other hand. Old and battered, inlaid with strange silver shapes that glow very faintly: the Starling sword, the same one I left abandoned in the world above.
Arthur pulls away, his hand gripping hard on my shoulder. “What are you doing here? How did you—I made sure—”
“Shut up. Shut up!” All my terror and panic and pain, everything I’ve felt since I reached for him in the night and found nothing but cold sheets, comes boiling to the surface. I know we’re in an eerie not-quite-dream with monsters poised to strike, but I’m so angry I can feel it like a second pulse beating in my skull. I can’t speak so I punch him, good and hard, right where his ribs meet.
“Ow—”
“You deserve it! You left me up there all alone, after we—just when I thought maybe somebody gave a shit about me—”
“I do, that’s why I had to—”
“Leave me? With nothing but a sword and a fucking will?”
“I was trying—I didn’t want—”
But I don’t want him to explain or apologize, because I’m still pissed. Because if I stop being pissed for even a second, I’ll start crying. “Well, I don’t want it. I never did. I wanted you, you bastard, you goddamn fool, and if you didn’t want me to follow you down here maybe you shouldn’t have left.”
He stops trying to explain and kisses me instead. It starts rough—a bruising collision of lips and teeth, the taste of blood and fury like hot metal in our mouths—but then his hand slides from my shoulder to the back of my neck, his thumb framing my jaw. His mouth softens against mine.
When he pulls away, his voice is hoarse. “I didn’t want you to follow me.” He rests his forehead heavy against mine and breathes the next words against my skin. “Thank God you did.”
I discover that my hands are fisted in his shirt. I flatten them against the place I punched him, not quite sorry. “Where are we?” I look up at the Beasts, still motionless, still watching us like hunting birds waiting for a pair of mice to scurry out into the open.
“I don’t know.” Arthur’s body tilts back to face the Beasts. “I thought if I found out where they came from I could end it, like stepping on a wasp nest. I thought I would find another world, not . . .” His eyes flick up to the familiar shape of Starling House looming behind the Beasts.