Lysander barks out a bitter laugh and sinks to the floor. Swiping his hood onto his head, he kicks out his feet and settles in to wait. After a minute, Asher joins him. He lowers himself with a grunt, forearms draped over bent knees.
“Are we going to sit here until she comes out?” asks Lysander.
Asher lets his head fall back against the wall. “Looks like it.”
“Pathetic.”
It’s nearly night by the time the door swings wide. They both launch upright, knocking one into the other in their haste. Poppy stands on the threshold, her eyes big. Lysander braces himself to be admonished—chewed out and then chased away.
“It’s Ellie,” she says instead. “She was here.”
“What do you mean?” Asher cuts a glance at Lysander. “What do you mean, she was here?”
“There’s something on the wall behind the crib. Come look.”
They pile into the room to find Shea on her knees, her flashlight trained on a section of wall along the crib. Lysander doesn’t need to get close to know what the majority of the writing says. He’s heard it all his life, chanted over him like an exaltation. His legacy, written in blood.
From the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast.
Shea kneels before it like a priestess at an altar. His own personal cataclysm. A cog in the chain of his psyche. Pull her loose, and what then? He can already feel it, building inside him. A reckoning. An upheaval.
“Look,” says Shea. “It’s right here. She wrote it in our code.”
He bends in close, elbowing Asher out of the way. Among the myriad inscriptions, a single line of nonsense words has been carved into the cedar with a knife.Hgzb zdzb uiln gsv uozgdllw.
“What does it say?” asks Asher.
It’s a minute before Shea answers, running trembling fingers over the disrupted grain as she translates the schoolyard cipher. Finally, she rises to her feet. Her flashlight arcs feebly through the room. She’s a pale blade of light, knifing through the dark where he grew.
“It says ‘Stay away from the Flatwood,’?” she says. “And it’s a message for me.”
O, then, what graces in my love do dwell,
That he hath turned a heaven unto a hell!
Shakespeare’sA Midsummer Night’s Dream
Camellia Thorley knew they were coming.
She’d been there, in that strange little house with the wall full of writing, and somehow—impossibly—she’d known Shea would pass through, too.
“Buthowdid she know?” she demands, circling back around for the umpteenth time. “Ididn’t even know I’d be there.”
“Maybe it wasn’t her,” says Asher, giving her the same answer he’d given her the last six times she asked. Just like the last six times, he adds, “Or maybe the note was left for anyone who might stumble on it. It’s not like it was addressed to you.”
It’s been this way for the past hour—her questioning, and him maintaining his stance.We don’t know for sure. We don’t have any answers. We keep going as planned.If she was in possession of a sword, she’d run it clean through him.
“It’s a code Ellie and I made up,” she snaps, irate. “Infourth grade.Who else would she have left it for?”
They’re just outside St. Augustine—their penultimate pit stop before the revel. It’s the sunniest it’s been in days: hot and bright, no shade for miles. They hunker down for the day in an empty bungalow on the bounds of the Flatwood. The house is boxed in by several narrow columns of towering longleaf, surrounded in every direction by swaths of glossy gallberry and stunted slash pine. It was built for summers, with cool tile flooring and a sun-splashed facade. Lys is forced to shelter in the windowless half bath for the duration of the day.
It’s a relief, being out of his crosshairs. She’s been tied up in knots since their fight, too angry to forgive him, too hurt to try. Too terrified that he might sense it on her—the fact that she’s planning to leave.Come to the revel. Alone.The woman’s advice is at odds with the warning Camellia left. She isn’t quite sure how to reconcile them.
And just like that, she’s circled back around again.
“Ellie must be traveling with someone,” she insists. “Someone who knew where that cabin was, and how to get there without running into trouble.”
The atlas sits on the kitchen table between them, the route to the revel traced in black. Asher stands over it, his jaw wired tight. She can practically hear him running out of patience.
