Chapter 1: The Door in the Hedge Was Open

Maren found the gap in the hawthorn on the morning of her grandmother's funeral, which was either the worst possible timing or the only timing there could ever have been. She was wearing borrowed black and shoes that pinched, and she had walked to the bottom of the orchard to be somewhere the casseroles were not.

The hedge had a door in it. Not a gap — a door: lintel of twisted branch, threshold of pale root, and a darkness beyond that did not match the sunlit field she knew stood on the other side.

Her grandmother had told her about the hedge exactly once, and had never repeated herself, because the telling had been a warning and warnings lose their shape when handled. The price is never the price, she had said. Remember that, and you may go anywhere.

Maren looked back at the house, where sixty people were eating funeral ham and saying what a long life it had been. Then she stepped through, because she was twenty-three and grieving and because the door, after all, had been left open — and doors left open on the day of a burial are an invitation from somebody.

A Faerie Queene