They’d only just gotten back to their rooms when a knock came at the door. Aspen pushed inside the parlor without so much as an invitation, a roll of parchment tucked beneath her arm.
“Is Bryony all right?” Emory asked.
“I told her to lock herself in her room. There’s no knowing what those boys will do after what they saw.” Aspen studied her. “What you did back there… You’re not just a Healer, are you?”
“No.”
Romie threw her hands up in exasperation, muttering something about how they’d be burned at the stake for this.
But the distrust in Aspen’s eyes faded as Emory explained how the Glamour worked. “Will this enchantment last?”
Doubt lanced through Emory. She had as much practice with Glamour magic as she did with Memorist. What if her mastery of it was just as mediocre?
As if sensing she wouldn’t get a clear answer, Aspen unrolled the parchment she’d brought, laying it out on the divan. “I found this the other day in my mother’s study.”
It was a map, beautifully detailed in sepia ink. Emory recognized Amberyl House at the edge of the Wychwood. There were other smaller houses all along the woods and, farther south, villages that did not border the woods at all, which must be where normal townsfolk lived. The Wychwood itself stretched northward, on and on, engulfing the full top half of the map. Curving lines of silver ink ran haphazardly through the entire parchment. One such line was thicker than the rest, and hugged the side of Amberyl House, leading deeper north into the woods.
“What are these?” Emory asked, tracing the silver lines with a delicate finger.
“The ley lines,” Aspen said. She pointed to the tip of the thick silver line close to Amberyl House. “This is where we found you. Butas we know, whatever door you came through clearly isn’t here. So it got me wondering… what if we can’t find it, because that was the doorin? And to leave, you must find the doorout.”
Aspen traced the line where it curved upward, going deeper into the woods before curving down again, as if circling back to the initial point. Then it looped inward again, and Emory understood that it was forming aspiral.
But the line Aspen was tracing cut off, leaving the spiral incomplete. Her finger stopped where the line did, broken by a black smudge Emory hadn’t noticed before. In fact, a whole section of the map had been smudged off, blotted out by what looked like a giant ink spill. As if someone had wanted to erase an entire section of the world.
“I believe you’d find this door at the center of the woods,” Aspen said. “At the very innermost tip of the spiral ley line.”
A door in, a door out.
A descent through worlds, spiraling deeper down until they reached the sea of ash.
“If I stand on a point of power on the ley line,” Aspen continued, “it will amplify my scrying, and I can search for the door’s location. I can help you find a way out of here before…”
“Before your mother comes after us on the black moon?” Romie supplied in a mock conversational tone. “When is that, by the way?”
“Tomorrow.” Aspen didn’t look the least bit surprised that they knew about that. There seemed to be a battle of wills raging on inside her. “You have to understand… things are happening here that have our coven scared and looking for someone to blame. My mother believes this all started with your arrival. Others are more inclined to point fingers at my sister, after what happened. I worry things will escalate and lead to Bryony getting hurt.”
“You think with us gone, everything here will have a chance to go back to normal,” Emory said.
A nod from Aspen.
“So why won’t you come with us?” Romie pressed. “You and Bryony both.”
“And go with you on this quest through worlds?” Aspen gave a wistful smile. “The Sculptress chose us to be the next High Matriarchs, not to abandon the Wychwood.”
Emory could hear Mrs. Amberyl’s influence in her words, but Aspen’s eyes betrayed a longing for something she couldn’t have.
“That’s not how the story is meant to go,” Romie said with a tinge of exasperation. “There’s no point going through the door if the witch won’t come with us.”
Romie was clearly disappointed, but Emory wondered again if they were only grasping at straws, seeing meaning where there was none. In their world, the entire Selenic Order bore spiral marks, yet as far as she knew, it didn’t mean they werechosen. So what was it that tied them to the fates of Clover’s characters? It was Emory’s Tidecaller blood that allowed her to open doors. It was Romie’s Dreamer magic that let her travel unscathed between worlds. And it was presumably Kai’s Nightmare Weaver power that made him hear the song that called to all three of them, and he didn’t even have a spiral mark to speak of. Maybe Aspen’s mark was purely coincidental.
“Please tell me I’m not imagining things, at least,” Romie said. “That you do hear the call of other worlds.”
Aspen seemed to chew on her next words. “When you first arrived, I did feel this instant sense ofkinshiptoward you. I didn’t know why then, but now… I think it’s because you’re not the first souls from other worlds that I’ve encountered.”
Romie’s eyes widened. “What? How—Who?”
“Like I said, my scrying is different from other witches’. Oftentimes, the eyes I see through… they see things that are too strange and inexplicable to be of this world. There is one mind inparticular I keep coming back to.” A small smile played on her lips. “Tol, his name is. His world is so unlike this one. And his magic… I can only describe it as shifting into a beast of sorts, and I can say with the utmost confidence that there is no such magic in these parts.”
