Romie watched her carefully, expectantly. When Emory couldn’t find whatever words her friend waited on, Romie’s mouth thinned. She turned her back to the fire and said, “I’m going to bed.”
They were so close, yet this rift between them seemed wider than it had been when they were worlds apart.
The embers of their fire were all but spent when Emory woke with a start. Soft cries punctuated the darkness, which Emory first mistook for the sighing of leaves in the wind, or the creaking of branches. But then she saw Aspen’s face, illuminated in the dying light. Her eyes were open, tears staining her cheeks.
Emory lifted herself up on an elbow. “Are you all right?”
Aspen wiped furiously at her eyes. “Yes,” she said in a clipped tone.
But just as Emory lay back down to give her some privacy, the witch spoke again, so soft she barely heard her. “She was the best thing in my life. It’s all my fault. I should have known they’d come for her. I should have done more to protect her. I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t—”
Emory’s heart twisted as Aspen sobbed quietly. They both knew there was nothing Aspen could have done to prevent what happened to Bryony.
Emory wanted to tell her as much, but she remained quiet. She herself was well acquainted with guilt, so she knew such words wouldn’t appease Aspen. Instead, she said:
“Before coming here, back in my own world, people died because of me. I’ve been carrying that guilt with me ever since. I think about the million things I could have done differently. I play out all the what-ifs in my mind. Sometimes I… I wish it had been me instead of them.” She swallowed past the lump in her throat, surprised at her own admission. At how true it was. “But the thing I’ve learned, or rather the thing I’mstilllearning, is that we can’t keep blaming ourselves for something we had no power over.”
The words were spoken as much for herself as for Aspen. For so long, Emory had wished someone would tell her those exact words, absolve her from the deaths she carried with her, but the only person who had such power of absolution and forgiveness was herself.
Yes, it all started when she first went into Dovermere and unlocked her Tidecaller powers. But everything after… She couldn’t have known her presence at Dovermere would draw Travers and Lia back to meet such cruel ends. She had done what she could to avoid the same fate for Jordyn, but she couldn’t have predicted he would become an umbra.
She wasn’t the one who drove the knife through Lizaveta’s throat.
And as for Keiran…
She recalled that brief moment in the sleepscape when he was overtaken by the umbrae, when she might still have done something to help him. The desperate, pleading look in his eyes. The sound of her name on his lips.
Perhaps she should have saved him. Prevented one death, at least, from staining her hands. But she would not allow herself to feel guilt over this one. Not when helping Keiran would surelyhave meant the end for her. Not when his ghost still had her in a choke hold.
But then, she hadn’t actuallyseenhis ghost, or any other, the last time she called on her magic. Only heard them. Perhaps these ghosts of hers were only tied to her guilt, not her use of magic. Perhaps all it took for them to leave was for her to forgive herself.
Emory thought Aspen might have drifted off to sleep until she heard her murmur, “I don’t blame you either.”
20ROMIE
THE FACT THAT ROMIE COULDno longer feel the dark presence in the sleepscape was more unsettling to her than Emory’s complete ignorance of what she’d done on the ley line—the magic she’d leeched from Romie.
Romie had quickly recovered fromthatordeal, plunging into such a deep sleep that night, she’d felt like a new person by morning. Her unease of Emory, though, had not been so quick to disappear. It was only Emory’s apparent unawareness that stayed Romie’s tongue, making her question if she’d imagined everything. And Romie was not one toquestionherself. Ever. But doubt wormed its way into her mind, encouraged by her refusal to believe Emory would have hurt her like that. At least not on purpose.
Maybe what she’d felt on the ley line wasn’t Emory’s doing at all, but the very demon she’d been fighting.
Its sudden exorcism from Bryony, Romie came to realize, coincided too closely with the absence of whatever had been looming in the dark between stars. She was beginning to think they wereone and the same—just like the sleepscape and the astral plane. Which meant whatever had escaped could be following them now.
She could not have been more relieved to find the door when they did.
Even if Mrs. Amberyl hadn’t told them where to find it, Romie would have known they were here by feel alone. They came upon a giant yew tree bigger than the one where the witches did their burials. It was partially uprooted, its roots on one side twisted in a way that called to mind a cyclone. A spiral of roots so old they were nearly worn smooth to the touch. They opened onto a hollowed-out tree trunk, the interior so dark they couldn’t discern how deep it went.
Romie was the first to move toward it, throwing the other two a look over her shoulder. “You coming?”
An odd sense of déjà vu overcame her. She was suddenly on Dovermere Cove, putting on a brave face for the other Selenic Order initiates who would all perish in the Belly of the Beast. She shook the image away as the three of them stepped into the hollowed-out tree trunk. But as the darkness around them thickened, Romie realized she wasn’t the only one having déjà vu. Next to her, Emory’s breathing had become shallow, and Romie understood why.
The cold and the dark…
It was like they were back in Dovermere.
Light suddenly flared from a lantern Aspen held up.
Around them, the ghost of Dovermere instantly disappeared. This was no sea cave, with slick rock walls and mossy tide pools; this was packed earth and spindly roots and twisted vines, with cobwebs hanging every which way and clumps of odd-looking mushrooms growing along the walls.
