Arthur takes two steps forward, another to the left. He slashes, fast and brutal, and wrenches the blade out of splintered bone. The Beasts draw away from him, just a little, and there it is: a way to the House.
I don’t hesitate. I run, arms tucked tight to my chest, head ducked low.
My feet slap on stone. I fly up the steps of Starling House and hit the door hard. It’s locked.
But surely, even in whatever upside-down sideways version of the world we’re in, Starling House won’t turn against me. For months now I’ve fed it my sweat and time, my love and blood. My name is on the deed and my hand held the sword; I am the Warden.
I press my palm to the scarred wood and say, softly, “Please.” I pour all my wanting into the word, all my foolish hope.
I feel a softening of space around me, a sense of unreality, like being in a dream and realizing, suddenly, that you’re dreaming. The world bends for me.
The lock clicks. The door opens. I look back once at Arthur—my brave, stupid knight, my perfect goddamn fool, still fighting, his form vanishing beneath a snarling, ravening wave of Beasts—before I slip inside Starling House.
This is a different Starling House from the one I know. The trim is yardstick-straight and the wallpaper is crisp, unmarred by light switches or outlets. Every piece of furniture is polished and every floorboard gleams. It looks fresh-built, as if the painters left an hour ago. It’s beautiful, but I find myself looking for cobwebs and stains with a weird ache in my chest. The House feels like a mere house, a dead structure that hasn’t yet learned how to dream.
Eleanor isn’t in the hallway, but my feet know where to go. Up one set of stairs, and another, and another, into the attic room that now belongs to Arthur, but didn’t always.
It looks bleak and bare in his absence. There are no pictures tacked to the wall, no warm lamps lit. There’s just a narrow iron bed where Eleanor sits with her ankles crossed and her hands folded. Behind her, its body curled protectively around her, its dimensions hideously distorted to fit inside the room, is a Beast. This one has the short, curved horns of a goat, but its body is sinuous, almost catlike. It makes no move to attack me, but merely watches, vertebrae twitching.
“Hi,” I say, very awkwardly, because I don’t know what you’re supposed to say to a girl who is also a grown woman, a fictional character who is also a person, a villain who might also be a victim.
It seems I chose poorly, because Eleanor doesn’t answer. She doesn’t even blink, just watches me with those hard black eyes.
“I’m Opal.” I hesitate, uncertain whether the names Gravely or Starling would please her or upset her, and leave my first name unaccompanied.
Still, Eleanor watches me. I’m suddenly very tired of this haunted Gothic orphan performance, tired of waiting politely while Arthur bleeds below us. “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need you to call off your, uh, friends.” I gesture uncomfortably to the Beast still curled at her back. “That man down there isn’t your enemy.”
“No?” Some rational part of my brain flinches away from the sound of her voice. It’s too low, too precise, too knowing—an adult’s voice in the mouth of a little girl. “He came to make war on my poor Beasts, did he not?”
“No. Well, maybe, yes, but he has to. Do you know what they do, up there? They kill people. They—my mother—” I feel it again, the weight of the river on my chest, the chill of the water in my lungs.
An odd, furtive look crosses Eleanor’s features. It makes me think of Jasper when he let the hellcat into room 12 even when he knew she had fleas. It’s the first time Eleanor has looked like an actual child. “It’s in their nature.” It’s almost a pout.
I cross my arms and use the same voice I used on Jasper. “What are they, Eleanor? What is Underland? Is this—are we in another world?” I feel stupid saying the words, but I’m also standing in the ghost of a house that hasn’t existed for more than a century.
Eleanor has turned away from me to smooth her hand over the gray seam of her quilt. “I used to think so.”
I want to cross the room and shake her, hard, but her Beast is watching me with an eye like a dead coal. I wait her out, instead.
Eleanor strokes the ridge of its skull, almost lovingly. “I used to think the Beasts came from somewhere else—Hell, I thought at first, then Heaven, then history, then myth—but now I know better. Now I know they only ever came from me.”
“What,” I say, with a degree of patience I find admirable, given that I left most of my heart on the grass three floors below us. “Does that mean.”