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Rose remembered then that although the cottage had always seemed to own an infeasibly large number of rooms, she had never been out of the front door or seen an unshuttered window. “My friend must have dug your book out of the wall. That’s how I was able to get in.”

Hannah hauled herself back to her feet, her eyes never leaving the open door. “There was more keeping me…this book…closed than a few bricks.”

“I…I saw a woman. A witch. At least she looked more witchy than you. She—”

“Martha Twist. The one who hid my book and put the curse on it. My apprentice. She was too cowardly to risk destroying it, but she made a prison of what I’d wrought. And maybe I gave her the stick with which to beat me. Some books should never be written.” Green eyes flashed at Rose.

“Curse?” Rose faltered. “Is my friend Red—”

“I don’t know, Rose.” Hannah walked slowly toward the door, squinting at the sunlight. “It depends how long the book lay there, how strong Martha grew, and the nature of your friend. But I doubt any good will come of it.” She reached a hand through the door and sighed as the sun’s rays lit her flesh. She took a bonnet from a peg by the entrance and, putting it on, offered her arm to Rose. “Let’s walk, child. And you can tell me why you took such risks to find me.”

In the warmth of an idealized eighteenth-century rural England, Rose Penrose and Hannah Cooper walked together while Rose unburdened herself, telling the tale of her adventures, tactfully excluding the witchicide. She told how she had fled from the bookworm that had been set upon her trail. And how first that bookworm used a man to murder the child that she should have been on the other side of the page.

“So,” the witch said, “a wise old badger has taught you the power of story. Reality navigates seas of possibility, and while we call the path taken ‘real’ and the others ‘fiction,’ in truth one is no more fundamental than the other. Like the threads I spin on my wheel, we are entangled, with each other, with the world, with the planets and the stars.”

“But some stories are told,” Rose said, “and some aren’t. Not every possibility is explored.” She thought perhaps that the blue caterpillar in Wonderland had told her that, or Merlin in his cave, but maybe the idea just created itself on her tongue.

“Correct. Some are told. Written down. Bound. Shelved. Crystalized out of the brew of creation.” Hannah pointed to a wood beyond the wheat field ahead of them. The path they were following, thick with yarrow and bluebells, hedged with hawthorn, led toward that wood. “We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.”

“Where are we going?” Rose asked.

“In an existence where stories—possibility—is the substrate of all that is, one might think that the collection of these tales held a special kind of power.” The witch now sounded nothing like the antiquated figure she had always presented as before. But Rose wasn’t worried that the worm had found her out again and burrowed its way into Hannah’s heart. It seemed rather that, having been opened to the world once more, she was absorbing it at an extraordinary pace. That, or some other power was stepping between the two of them, translating their words and bridging the three centuries that separated the inks with which each had been written. “And where do stories gather, Rose?”

“Between covers,” Rose said. “On shelves.”

Hannah circled her hand.

“In bookshops, libraries—”

“Libraries,” Hannah said decisively. “Are you familiar with Plato?”

“No, but—”

“Greek fellow. Identified the five regular polyhedra and was so impressed with himself he came up with the theory of forms. A perfect form exists for every object, and the actual objects we make or find are just shadows of these archetypes. All nonsense, of course.” She paused as they reached the tree line. “Except for the Library. Every library really is a shadow of the Library. Maybe everything else is too. Because it’s the place where all the stories are.”

Hannah led the way through the wood, which proved to be lighter, more airy, and more organized than Rose had anticipated. It seemed that the trees had been planted in rows, at more or less the same time. And as they pressed on, the undergrowth became more sparse rather than thicker. In fact, the trees had enough space between them for grass to cover the ground rather than the usual detritus of leaf and twig and root. Rabbits or some other unseen grazers had kept the green to a finger’s length, not unlike the lawns in the Muse’s garden.

“A pool,” Rose said unnecessarily. And she saw now that there were more. Lots more. As they walked on, there were pools everywhere. Soon no four trees did not have a circular pool between them, little more than two yards across, the waters unruffled by wind, their reflections of the sky uninterrupted, though you would think to find leaves floating here and there. “What is this place?”

“This is the Exchange.” Hannah looked back the way they had come, and following her gaze, Rose saw that the wood and the pools stretched on into the distance, with no sign of the fields they had crossed or the cottage they had come from. “The Library, the Athenaeum, lies beyond every pool.”

Rose stood amazed, though perhaps less so than if she had not lived a life of wonders. “What does any of this have to do with me? Why is a bookworm trying to kill me?”

“Well, now…that I don’t know,” Hannah admitted. “But”—she raised a hand against Rose’s protest—“the question is undoubtedly bigger than you imagine, and there is no place better than the Exchange for seeing the big picture. The business of living breeds myopia, and few of us ever look much past the end of our ambition, not that many look much beyond the end of our noses.”

“But why is a bookworm trying—”

“From what you’ve told me…” Hannah looked at her hands. “…and by the pricking of my thumbs…I’m far from sure it is trying to kill you. Didn’t it play its part in creating you? I’m sure it wants to use you. But kill you? That seems wasteful, and easily accomplished. Do you think if the great serpent, the snake in Eden, Ouroboros, the wyrm of Midgard, wanted you dead that we would be talking now?”

“What would it want me for?” Rose felt a cold shiver run the length of her despite the day’s warmth.

“What did it make you for, that might be a better question.” The Chimney Woman had never looked more like a witch than in that moment, her green eyes running the length of Rose’s body as if she might be assessing some new component for a potion.

“It didn’t make me! My mother made me!”

“It’s hard to say when the cauldron’s brew becomes the thing intended. When did the process start? Was it with the stirring of the mix? The dropping of the ingredients into the hot water? The lighting of the fire? The gathering in the hedgerows? The decision to create? Or the incident that provoked the need?”

“The worm didn’t make me! How could it be sure what my mother would do?”