We hadn’t brought a tent. Even if it rained, we couldn’t afford to blind ourselves like that when we slept.
“We’re ready now,” I told Beauclaire.
He took us back out to the main room, through two more doors, and into a room that was so utilitarian, it must have belonged to the original building. There was a closet door on one wall, and it was to this he led us.
Zee took a deep breath. “This one wasn’t here last month. There are too many doors to Underhill in too small a space.”
“We know,” said Beauclaire.
“It’s not safe,” said Zee.
“We know that, too.”
Zee snorted. “Well, somebody doesn’t, because she can’t make doorways where she isn’t invited.”
“Is this doorway acceptable?” Beauclaire asked me, ignoring Zee’s taunt.
I looked at Aiden, who shrugged. We both looked at Zee.
“It doesn’t matter where you go in,” he said. “These doorways are all too new to have found an anchor in Underhill. That means they’ll drop you someplace random. Just make sure you are holding on to each other when you go—or you’ll all end up in different parts of Underhill.” Beauclaire opened the door and stepped back. Jesse hugged her father, hugged me, then hugged Aiden.
“Don’t get them killed,” she told Aiden.
“I’ll try not to,” he said earnestly.
“Don’t get stuck,” she said.
“I’ll try not to,” he told her.
“Good enough,” she said. “If you try, Dad will do the rest.”
“Safe journey,” said Zee.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” said Tad.
“I love you, too,” I said, and, holding on to Adam with one hand and Aiden with the other, crossed over into Underhill.
—
We had to go down three cement steps to get to the ground. When Aiden went back and shut the door behind us, I turned to see that the door was set in the back of a building that looked like the back of the building we’d gone into.
But my bones hummed with the magic—it was like standing on a washing machine permanently caught in the spin cycle.
“It’s a good idea to shut doors behind you in Underhill,” Aiden told me. “People who are chasing you usually go somewhere else.”
He looked around, his breathing a little fast, and his weight shifted from foot to foot like a deer waiting to see where the danger emerged, so he could flee in the opposite direction as fast as he could.
We had emerged into an anticlimactic, bland landscape that looked very much like the area around the reservation. We were on the top of a small hill at the base of larger hills. Below us was a grassy valley with a river running through it. If it hadn’t been for the lack of civilization—roads, wires, squashed beer cans—it could have been anywhere near Walla Walla.
Okay, it could have been anywhere near Walla Walla if there had been beer cans on the ground and a sun in the bright blue sky. There was no sun in the sky. There were shadows, and, from how the shadows lay, we were approximately the same time as it was back on the reservation. I just couldn’t see any reason for the shadows.
From what Zee told me, time in Underhill could be capricious—but not as badly as in the Elphame of the fairy queen I’d encountered. We might lose or gain a few days or possibly a week. But we were unlikely to lose years or decades.
I turned slowly. We had a clear field of vision, but I couldn’t see anything that looked out of place. At the thought, I turned to look for the small building we’d exited from—but there was no sign of any building anywhere.
“Do you know which way to go?” I asked. “Have you been here before?”
“I don’t think that I’ve been here, precisely,” he said. “But I know which way to go. Mostly I find my way around by the way it feels here.” He thumped himself on the chest.
I tried, but I couldn’t feel any kind of pull or push in the magic.
“It took me a while,” he said. “This way.”
And he set off, straight up the hill. We walked for hours. Aiden’s terror subsided, though it never quite left him. Adam ranged a little, his nose to the ground and his ears alert, but he never traveled out of sight. He didn’t chase the white bunny that first appeared in glimpses, then ran across our path. Twice.
“He’s not a dog,” I commented loudly, spinning in a slow circle to look for something, I don’t know what it was. “He’s not going to chase a rabbit and leave us behind.”
I could feel the urge to chase that rabbit, and I seldom felt the need to hunt when I was on two feet. Adam didn’t even lunge at the rabbit when it emerged from a hollow just beyond his nose.
He did growl, though.
“It’s not a real rabbit,” said Aiden unnecesssarily. “After a while, even before I had magic, I learned to tell the difference. I survived a long time without magic—but I had friends then.”