“Over here,” Baz said, starting in the direction the magnifying glass showed him the others had gone.
They came upon a hollowed-out tree trunk Baz would have recognized even without the magnifying glass, having heard it described by both Emory and Kai. It led to the basalt column cave deep below the earth. And there was the door, closed now after the others had gone through mere moments ago.
The rib of the original witch was still embedded in the spiral groove. Carefully, Baz picked it up. On the floor was a mound of clothes that could only have belonged to the witch. To Asphodel. Before Clover imbibed all that she was.
Looking away from the gruesome sight, Baz pulled on the threads of time around the bone—a lifeless, magicless bone now that it had already opened the door… But there. As he breathed in time and breathed life out, the bone became what it once was. It had life again,magicagain, full of the witch’s essence. It was warm in his hand, thrumming faintly with power, as if the witch herself were whispering to him.
Baz couldn’t bring Asphodel back from the dead. But he would make sure her death had not been in vain.
He pocketed the rib bone, tucking it safe. The first key he needed, acquired. The first piece that would undo the mess Clover had made.
Baz looked at Jae. “Ready for the next world?”
They could have stayed in the Wychwood forever to explore this place they’d both dreamed of for so long. But time was of the essence, even with Baz holding its reins.
And so they found themselves in the third world, the scorched landscape of the Heartland a jarring sight after the lushness of theWychwood. They stood at the foot of a volcano Baz knew to be the Sunforge, surrounded by rivers of fire that made the air unbearably, swelteringly hot.
A loud wail sounded at the heart of the volcano. For a second, Baz thought it would erupt—that he and Jae had walked themselves right to their fiery end. But the sound was not that of lava and rock. It was pain.
They ran into the Sunforge just in time to see a blond head disappear through the door to the fourth world.Clover. They had missed him by a second, could see the carnage he had left behind. The discarded golden armor and sword of the warrior, whose body must have dissipated like Asphodel’s did. And sprawled in front of the door, wheezing its final breath as blood pooled from horrid wounds, was a colossal dragon.
Baz and Jae stood rooted to the spot at the sight of it. Its eyes were fixed on them, as if they were the last thing it had seen before death took it. And Baz hated Clover all the more than he already did in this moment, to see the kind of monster he’d already let himself become at this point.
Jae laid a delicate hand on the dragon’s snout, bowing their head as silent tears spilled from their eyes. The door had closed behind Clover, revealing the solid gold heart of the warrior fitted at the center of the golden spiral on the wall of black stone. Baz picked up the heart of this warrior Clover had killed and breathed life back into it. He pocketed the heart and felt the bone hum even more as it came into contact with it.
And Baz couldfeelthe stories these two keys told. The witch’s story with her twin sister and the demons and the honeyed promises of Clover. The warrior’s tale with her induction into the draconic knights and this dragon that had bonded itself to her.
It was as if, as he pulled back the threads, made these pieces alive again, they shared their stories with him in exchange. Theywere the characters of the book he had first fallen in love with, the book he himself had written; but they were real people, too, people he was discovering under entirely new lights. Baz considered them old friends and new acquaintances all at once, and it was the strangest thing, but he felt like he was something of a hero, too, carrying these two legends who had lived in his mind for so long, who had shaped his childhood and everything that came after.
Baz couldn’t bear to leave here without trying to make something of the gruesome carnage Clover left behind. He took the warrior’s armor and sword and propped them up against the dragon’s chest, near where he assumed the beast’s heart would be. Jae illusioned a wreath of wildflowers that they laid atop the armor and wove around the gold sword.
“A warrior sprang from this world as improbably as the flowers that bloom in its arid wilderness,”Jae intoned.
Emotion caught in Baz’s throat.“She is the heart of her world,”he added softly,“the bright burning core of it.”
And she had died at the hands of a monster who took that brightness for himself.
They couldn’t let her death be in vain.
Just as Baz wielded the pocket watch that would bring him and Jae to the next world, taking them ahead in time to Clover’s next victim, he thought he glimpsed someone watching from the shadow of the slain dragon. A stout frame that called to mind mismatched suits and peculiar goggles. But the pocket watch took him away before he could be sure.
The fourth door atop the snowy peak was one Baz had seen in countless illustrations, yet it still managed to take his breath away. There were no signs of vicious carnage here, only the heavy snow, the whistling wind, and the quiet beneath. It somehow made the place all the more foreboding.
Jae pointed to the discarded clothes half buried in the snow. All that was left of the guardian Clover had slain. The door was closed, and in the spiral in the middle of it swirled a curious, immaterial substance that must be the guardian’s soul.
“How exactly are we going to carry that?” Jae asked.
An astute question that neither of them had thought to consider.
The snow pelted them harder, the cold seeping through their bones as the light quickly faded from the sky. Night was coming, and with it came that curious sensation of being watched again. Baz tried to spot Equilibris—he was certain it was him he’d seen back at the Sunforge, though why the god would be following him, he had no clue. He could see nothing through the blizzard.
They needed to grab the remaining key and get out of here before he lost his composure.
Jae suddenly moved with the certainty of someone driven by an idea. They pulled something peeking out of the snow: the guardian’s lyre. Except the instrument wasn’t gold like it was depicted in the book, but plain, humble wood. This wasn’t the lyre that would be used by Clover two hundred years from now to bring Atheia back.
Jae looked the instrument over. “This world’s magic is tied to song, right? If this lyre was the guardian’s, it held meaning to him, is connected to him. Maybe we can use it to trap his soul somehow…”
The sound of flapping broke through the howling blizzard as a winged horse landed beside the gate. It was magnificent, its coat a dazzling white, its dark eyes full of keen wisdom. Baz gaped at it. Jae nearly dropped the lyre as the horse padded toward them, tucking its wings against its side.
