He tells her about moving from place to place to place and never feeling like he ever belonged in any of them, how wherever he was he would almost always rather be someplace else, preferably somewhere fictional.
He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything. That none of it is important. That who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will.
He tells her things he has never told anyone.
About the man who broke his heart in such a long, drawn out process that he couldn’t discern hurt from love and how whenever he tries to sort out how he feels now long after the end of it the feeling is just a void.
He tells her how the university library became a touchstone for him after that, how when he felt himself falling he would go and find a new book and fall into it instead and be someone somewhere else for a while. He describes the library down to its unreliable lightbulbs and finding Sweet Sorrows and how that moment unexpectedly changed all the moments that followed.
He reads Sweet Sorrows to her, relying on memory when the starlight is not enough to illuminate the words. He tells her Dorian’s fairy tales about castles and swords and owls, about lost hearts and lost keys and the moon.
He tells her how he always felt like he was searching for something, always thinking about that unopened door and how disappointed he felt once he went through another painted door and that feeling still didn’t go away but how for just a moment in a gilded ballroom preserved in time it did. He found what he had been seeking, a person not a place, a particular person in this particular place, and then the moment and the place and the person were gone.
He recounts everything that followed, from the elevator crash to the voices in the darkness to finding Simon in his sanctuary attempting to record the story and out through the snow and past the phantasmagoric holiday party and into the woods with the stag until he brings his story into the clearing that they currently inhabit, describing it down to the details of the ships carved into her gown.
Then, with nothing left to tell that he has carried with him, Zachary makes things up.
He wonders aloud where one of the frozen ships in her gown is heading and as he speaks the ship moves, sailing out over the icy waves, away from Mirabel and across the snow.
The forest changes around it, the trees fading as the ship sails through them but Zachary remains in his chair and the ice version of Mirabel stays with him, listening, as he finds his way forward, slow and stumbling when the words won’t come but he waits and he does not chase it, he follows the ship and the story where they wish to go.
As the ship sails the snow melts around it, waves swirling and crashing against its hull.
He pictures himself on this ship as it crosses the sea. Dorian is there and so is his lost owl companion. He adds his Persian cat for good measure.
Zachary imagines a place where the ship is going, not to take its inhabitants home but to bring them somewhere undiscovered. He sails the ship and the story to places it has not yet traveled.
Through time and fate and past the moon and the sun and the stars.
Somewhere there is a door, marked with a crown and a heart and a feather, that has not been opened.
He can see it right in front of him, shimmering in the shadows. Someone holds a key that will open it. Beyond the door there is another Harbor on the Starless Sea, alive with books and boats and waves washing against stories of what was and what will be.
Zachary follows the stories and the ship as far as he can and then he brings them back. To right here and right now. To this snow-covered moment that is once again surrounded by a forest covered in keys.
Here he stops.
The ship anchors itself back in the frozen gown with its monsters.
Zachary sits with Mirabel, together in the post-story silence.
He has no idea how much time has passed, if any time has passed at all.
After the silence he stands and walks over to his audience. He takes a small bow, leaning in toward her.
“Where does it end, Max?” he whispers in her ear.
Her head turns swiftly toward him, staring at him with blank ice eyes.
Zachary freezes, too surprised to move as she lifts her hand and reaches not for him but for the key dangling from his neck.
She takes the long thin key that was hidden in Fortunes and Fables, separating it from the compass and the sword and holds it on her palm. A layer of frost forms over the key.
She rises from her chair, pulling Zachary upright with the motion. Her gown crumbles, sending the ships and the sailors and the sea monsters within its tides down into their icy graves.
Then she pushes her palm and the key upon it against Zachary’s chest, between the open buttons of his coat.
Her hand is so cold that it burns, pressing the white-hot metal into his skin.