In Mercy, Rain (Wayward Children, #7.5)

by Seanan McGuire

Jack Wolcott was twelve years old when she descended an impossible staircase tucked away inside her grandmother’s old costume chest and found herself in the sort of wild, magical land that people who had never once been to wild, magical lands enjoyed writing stories about. She suspected that some of those people might have had impossible staircases of their own, staircases that ended at doors entreating travelers to “be sure,” as if anyone could be sure of anything after going down so many stairs. She further suspected that none of those people had found stairways to the Moors. She’d never been encouraged to read fairy stories, or she might have known better than to open the door, but she’d grown up in a world full of them, and exposure to the background radiation of childhood had been enough to give her the basic shape of the worlds people liked to dream about, worlds where children could fly in veils of pixie dust, or grow bigger and smaller by drinking the right flasks of improperly labeled chemicals, or become royalty by stumbling out of the right wardrobe. None of those worlds looked like the Moors. Children could fly here, if they were gargoyles from the high castles, or if they had masters unethical enough to graft a bird’s wings onto their shoulder blades, where they would inevitably shred muscle and pulverize bone, but might offer a moment’s flight before that messy end. Drinking improperly labeled chemicals might cause uncontrolled growth, fungal and ceaseless, u...