“Em.” Romie’s familiar voice breaking through the din. She looked at Emory with consternation. “What did you see?”
Emory didn’t know which was worse: Mrs. Amberyl’s bleak vision or the ghostly voices in her ears. She had the sudden thought that maybe it was all related. That the darkness called forth by her magic might be connected to whatever blight was sweeping through the worlds. With a shuddering breath, she said, “The answer to fixing all of it lies at the center of all things. With us going to the sea of ash.”
Just as Romie had always believed.
“You kept this from me,” Aspen said to her mother, voice trembling with barely contained anger. “I have been hearing the call of these other worlds ever since I ascended, and you made me feel like what I was seeing wasblasphemous. When all along, you were hiding this truth from me.” Aspen wiped away angry tears. “Do you have so little faith in me?”
“Aspen—”
“You would have gotten rid of Emory and Romie and let our world rot away to nothing instead of trusting that I might be able to fix it.”
“This has nothing to do with trust. I was only trying to protect you.”
Aspen scoffed. “And look where that got us. If you’d told me the truth the minute Emory and Romie arrived, the three of us could have left the Wychwood before this sickness got to Bryony. I could have saved her.”
The brokenness in Aspen’s voice seemed to change somethingin Mrs. Amberyl’s demeanor, finally cracking that hard exterior.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I thought I was doing what was best.”
“You were wrong.”
Emory’s heart ached with empathy for Mrs. Amberyl. The High Matriarch had only wanted to save her daughters, even if it meant risking her own people, her whole world. She would have rather seen the Wychwood reduced to nothing than sacrifice either of her daughters. Two lives over an entire world—overmultipleworlds, if her vision was any indication.
It felt selfishly cruel, in a way, but Emory saw it for what it was: a mother protecting her children however she saw fit. A part of her wishedshewould have known such fierce protection instead of a mother who’d cared so little about her that she hadn’t wanted her at all.
Aspen looked between Emory and Romie, chin lifted in determination. “I’ll go with you to find this door and all the ones after.”
“Aspen—”
“No, Mother. You don’t get a say in this. You’ve made a mess of things; now it’s up to me to fix it.” Aspen sat beside her sister, tenderly brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “Maybe in restoring the woods, we can restore Bryony’s essence to her body.”
Romie looked at Emory expectantly. “Well? We need you, Em. You’re a key piece in this. The scholar on the shores. We can’t go through these worlds without you.”
Everything in Emory wanted to say no, to just find the door and book it back home and leave her terrifying ghosts behind and the witches to deal with their own problems. But Mrs. Amberyl’s vision haunted her. That all-too-familiar coastline ravaged by floods, as though the tides were all out of sorts, their link to the moon severed and skewed and wrong. If this sickness wasspreading across worlds, then perhaps they wouldn’t even have a home to go back to.
Unless they helped save it.
And perhaps, in the process, the ghosts that plagued her would finally leave her alone.
18KAI
THE TIDE WAS LOW WHENthey reached the cove, making it easy for them to slip into Dovermere. A blessing, given the unpredictability of the tide. One good thing about this fucked-up day, at least.
The pull of Dovermere was undeniable, beckoning Kai forward with a hungry sort of eagerness. In his mind, he heard Selandyn’s voice mingled with that of the umbra in his nightmares, speaking in that ancient tongue.
Open the door.
Despite the warning bells sounding in his ears and the feeling that something waited for him in the gloom of the caves, Kai’s strides were steady, his sense of purpose unmarred.
There was no going back now anyway.
Behind him, Baz was still debating with Nisha and Vera on whether the two of them should be here at all.
“If you’re going through the door to other worlds, I’m comingtoo,” Nisha said. “I’m arguably just as big of a fan ofSong of the Drowned Godsas you are.”
“This isn’t some fun little adventure we’re all merrily going on,” Baz cautioned. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us on the other side of the Hourglass—much less if we can actuallysurviveit.”
“We’ll survive it,” Vera said with unfounded confidence.
