“It’s changing,” he mutters, more to himself than the rest of us. “Reacting.”
“Reacting to what?” Cassius asks.
Sylvian stares at me, and I don’t like the look in his eye. “Maybe it wants something.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Oberon snaps. “It’s a plant, not a person.”
Sylvian says nothing, but his face says everything.
By late afternoon, we’ve run every path in our quadrant of the maze, and every one ends in a snarl of roots. The crows are thicker now, filling the air with noise. One lands on Oberon’s head, tangling in his short brown hair, and he swats it off so hard that it squawks loudly, as if offended.
I’m so tired I could sleep standing up. Ashton is the only one who doesn’t seem bothered. He’s humming, picking crows’ feathers off the ground and tucking them behind his ears. It’slike he sees no difference between being in the labyrinth or being at the castle.
We regroup in a tiny clearing, hedges pressing in so close it feels like a fist closing around us.
“I say we burn through,” Oberon says. “Light the fucker up. If it’s alive, let’s see how it likes fire.”
Cassius shakes his head. “You’ll trap us in here and light everything on fire.”
Oberon glares. “You want to sit here and rot?”
Ashton perks up. “Maybe there’s a door? A secret passage?”
“Checking for a secret passage does seem better than burning alive,” Sylvian offers with a shrug.
With no better ideas, everyone goes to the latest dead end and starts pushing around at the hedges. I walk the perimeter, running my hands along the hedge. At first, it’s just the normal texture, bristly, sticky, with the occasional thorn. But after a while, I notice a stretch where the branches are softer, almost spongy, like peat moss. When I press, the wall gives a little.
“Here,” I say, not sure if I’ve found something or not.
Ashton is at my side instantly, hands on the hedge with me. “You feel that?” he says. “Like a giant’s lung.”
I nod, and for a minute, we’re both pressing into the soft spot, grunting with the effort. Oberon and Sylvian come over to watch, but neither helps at first. I’m pretty sure they’re deciding whether or not this is another dead end, so to speak.
“It’s pointless,” Oberon says, but even as he speaks, Ashton digs his heels in and slams his shoulder into the wall right beside where I’m pushing. There’s a sound—wet, tearing—and suddenly the hedge splits open. I tumble through and hit the ground hard, and then another body lands hard on top of me.
“Ow,” says Ashton, breathless.
He rolls off me, laughing even as he cradles his elbow. I scramble to my feet and look around. We’re in a clearing, but notthe same one as before. The sky above is a weird, flat gray, and the walls here are higher and more tangled than before.
Behind us, the hole in the hedge is gone. The hedge is clean, seamless, as if it never existed.
I immediately panic. “The others?—”
“They’ll get through,” Ashton says, brushing leaves from his hair. “Give them a minute.”
I stare at the hedge, waiting for someone, anyone, to crash through after us. But the silence is absolute, not even broken by the sounds of the creepy crows. Ashton doesn’t seem concerned, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’re being watched. Or that we just failed some kind of test.
“Let’s try to go back to them,” I suggest.
Ashton shrugs, and we start pushing at the hedge again. But on this side, it isn’t spongey. There’s no give at all. It’s exactly like every other part of the hedge.
Which is concerning.
“We shouldn’t be split up,” I say, leaving the hedge behind and pacing the edge of the clearing. “Should we? That… that makes things more dangerous, right?”
He grins, lopsided. “You don’t have to worry when I’m around, Little Human.”
I don’t answer, because Iamworried. I walk the perimeter again, running my fingers along the hedge. Every inch is knotted, thick, impassable.
