Blue stayed behind her eyelids. Not the quick red-black flicker of waking in her own room, not the soft dark that broke when morning reached through curtains, but blue already waiting there, thin and veined, mapped across the inside of her eyes like roots in her skin. Even with her eyes shut, the room had a color.
Her body woke in pieces that did not report to her in the right order. By the time she thought hands, the wings had already shifted the silk behind her. They tightened at her back, the broad surfaces shivered once as if trying to shake sleep from their powder. Then her fingers responded, curling against the silk. Then the taste of ash behind her teeth.
Warmth pressed into her chest. Five points. A palm. I'm being touched..? Fingers spread over the place her breath kept forgetting to use. Heat gathered under each fingertip in little circles, and her body followed them upward. The hand did not search for the right place. It arrived there.
She opened her eyes to a woman leaning over her. Emerald eyes held still on a face that did not waste motion: not at the pinch at Aspen's mouth, the jump in her throat, or the tiny pull of her fingers against the silk. The woman's gaze caught each one without a twitch. Her auburn hair fell in a clean, ordinary sheet beside her cheek, almost normal enough to trust, until she spoke.
"I've heard that you've woken in gillebrist, Hermit."
Aspen tried to jerk away and got nowhere. The woman's palm stayed planted below her collarbone, fingers spread, sleeve brushing Aspen's skin, but something else touched her too. A ring of small weights pressed around the woman's wrist, beads she could not see. But they clicked softly against each other whenever the warmth pulsed. Each click landed a fraction before Aspen's breath changed.
Her scream came out small and hoarse. "Who are you? Why is your hand doing that?"
The woman's eyes did not widen. They narrowed by less than a blink, just enough for her green irises to sharpen under her lashes. "So Raine was right," she whispered, not to Aspen, but past her, into the blue seams in the walls.
Her free hand rose without disturbing the rest of her hair. She selected one auburn strand from beside her cheek and drew it down in front of her left eye. Both emerald eyes fixed on it until they almost crossed, the rest of Aspen, the room, and the hand on Aspen's chest seeming to narrow into that single trembling line. Her thumb and forefinger began turning it in small, exact circles, winding the hair until it kinked against itself and tugged at her scalp.
"No scent," she whispered. One turn. "No memory." Another turn. "Her Cridh answers. Rest of the Council must know." The strand trembled in front of her pupil, copper-thin, and her eyes followed every shake. Aspen understood only the counting: one turn for each thing wrong with her.
Aspen lifted her hand between them. It came up loose at the wrist, fingers bending in the wrong order, and passed once through the space between the woman's eyes and the trembling strand. "Hello?" Aspen said. Or tried to. It came out flat and wet.
The woman's pupils snapped off the strand and fixed on Aspen with an animalistic focus. The strand stayed twisted between her fingers. "Do you truly not recognize me?" she asked. "Have you not sensed my Ammunta?"
Something under Aspen's tongue lifted, then fell flat, like a sneeze that forgot how to happen. Aspen stared at her. Not a scared stare this time. A tired, open-mouthed stare, the kind she saved for Jamie when he explained why his cereal tasted purple.
"Are you high?"
The woman's face did not change. She only waited.
Aspen pushed herself up on one elbow, enough to see more than the hand on her chest. The woman wore white robes with no sleeve-stains, no grime at the cuffs, no place where a careless hand had touched and been allowed to remain. Aspen's eyes caught on the sleeves first, then the high collar, then the place where the fabric opened around her back.
Wings. Not the green ones of the last girl. Not the orange ones at her own back. These were narrower, held close behind the woman's shoulders, pale at the base with dark eye-shaped markings near the lower edges. Each mark was ringed in brown and faint purple like something had painted pupils onto the wings to watch for her while the woman did not blink. Aspen could not tell which eyes she was supposed to avoid.
Her gaze snapped back to the woman's face. Those emerald eyes waited there, steady and already looking at the exact place Aspen would return to.
A spark of heat jumped under Aspen's sternum. It did not spread like pain. It separated. Her skin answered before she did: a twitch at the collarbone, a warm dot behind the ear, a pulse under the tongue, a pressure at the bridge of her nose. Those points struck again in the same order. Collarbone. Ear. Tongue. Nose. Then again, faster, each pass shaving off the space between them until they stopped feeling separate and became one little machine turning under her skin. Her stomach turned. Her throat closed around the order rising from below. Her tongue flattened in waiting. The pattern touched the back of her mouth and became taste.
Honey.
No. Nectar. Still in the flower. She could feel the shape of it: a soft blossom pressed against the roof of her mouth, petals layered so close they dragged over her tongue when she breathed. That sweet nectar leaked from the seams, sticky and warm in the grooves of her teeth. But beneath the blossom, something hard held its shape: a closed green bud at the center, packed tight enough that no sweetness could get inside.
She swallowed, and the taste did not go down. It opened. Her mouth shaped the words before she understood them, each syllable rising through the sweetness like bubbles through syrup.
"High Priestess..?"
"Mabla."
Aspen's tongue stayed lifted behind her teeth, still waiting for the next taste. Nothing came. Just her own mouth again, tongue longer than she remembered. "What?" She swallowed hard. "What was that? Did I just—"
Her eyes dropped to the hand on her chest.
She's too close.
The woman's palm sat below her collarbone like it belonged there, fingers spread over the thin fabric, the heel of her hand pressing just enough to keep Aspen's breath short. Aspen grabbed at the wrist with both hands. Or tried to. One hand landed too high, over the sleeve. The other caught skin. Under her grip, invisible beads shifted with a soft click-click-click that she felt more than heard.
"Don't," High Priestess said.
Aspen's nails dug in. "Move. Move. I need personal space."
"It is how I am keeping you fiet."
The word landed on the woman's hand, not on Aspen. "That's not a word!" She tried to sit up harder. Her head came forward first, her shoulders followed, then the weight behind her back dragged a moment late and pulled her crooked. She cocked her head without meaning to, like that would make the woman less directly above her. It did not. High Priestess stayed close enough that Aspen could see one pale thread caught in the seam of her white collar.
"Raine brought you here," High Priestess said. "You fainted."
Raine. That's the girl I hit? Aspen's chest started moving wrong. Too fast at the top, not enough at the bottom. The High Priestess's hand moved with every breath, riding it, controlling it, and Aspen hated that more than the heat. "Okay. Great. Get off me."
High Priestess did not move.
Aspen planted both feet against her and pushed. Her knees shook. The new joints in her toes bent against the robe, searching for leverage. The woman's sleeve wrinkled under her soles, but her body stayed exactly where it was, as if Aspen were pushing against a shut door painted to look like a person. The silk beneath Aspen bunched. High Priestess's sleeve did not slide.
"The hell?" Aspen pushed again. This time her own back slid against the silk. "How heavy are you?! Why are you so close?"
"To be sure of your condition." High Priestess's arm did not move. Aspen kept pushing anyway, because sometimes furniture gave up when one was annoying enough. But the wrist in Aspen's hand stayed level. Not stiff. Worse. Relaxed.
Aspen stopped. She looked at the woman's eyes, then down at the hand on her chest, waiting for one finger to shake. One knuckle. One little human failure. Nothing. "Okay," she breathed, and dropped back into the silk like a defeated noodle.
Her eyes crawled over the woman's face because her body could not go anywhere else: Normal nose. Normal chin. Normal hair. Extremely not-normal everything else.
Okay, let me try this. "There's something wrong with your hand. Please take it off."
The woman raised a brow. "What exactly?"
Aspen frowned. "Uh." She looked at the fingers spread over her chest. "They're stabbing me. It really hurts."
"Sorry." The hand stayed there.
Aspen stared at it. Desperate circumstances.
"I'll lick you then."
High Priestess's hand shot back like it burned.
Aspen's mouth hung open for one useless second before her body shot up. Her lungs caught halfway, sucking at air that felt thinner outside the silk-filled cocoon, and every limb locked at once. Her eyes jumped around the room looking for a corner, a doorframe, a light switch, anything shaped like a way out.
No.
No corners. Nothing in it offered an angle sharp enough to hide behind. The room rose in one continuous curve, floor into wall into ceiling, gray wood bending overhead like the inside of a closed fist. Dark knots sat in the grain at uneven heights, old oval scars grown shut instead of hammered in. No seams. No trim. All one surface.
Her vision slid over it and found the wrong things to grab. Mushrooms grew from the walls in soft blue clusters, tucked into grooves and cracks like teeth coming in wrong. One pulse traveled through them. Then another. The pulses kept time with the beads at High Priestess's wrist. The light thickened, thinned, thickened again, throwing watery shadows over the room's almost-furniture.
Almost. To her left, a desk did not sit against the wall. It came out of it, one flat slab of wood grown from the curve, its legs fused into the floor like roots that had forgotten to keep going. Four pale scars marked the floor near its feet like scars, as if it had been ripped from the wood's skin. Across from it, shelves bulged from the wall in uneven lips. A basin hung under a mushroom cluster, not attached, not separate, just there because the room had decided it needed one.
And behind her was that indent in the wall. A moth's mistake for a bed.
She threw herself sideways, aiming for the open space between the grown-desk and the curtainway. Her feet hit the floor first and trembled. They were too narrow, with an extra joint in her ankle she couldn't figure the use for. The joint wanted to spring. She wanted it to stand. Her knees snapped downward, the weight on her back swung after her late, and her whole body pitched forward.
Her chin hit the wood. The pain arrived a beat after the sound, bright and stupid—very stupid. Her teeth clicked together. Her hands slapped down too far ahead of her, fingers splayed, blue pulses jumping under the thin skin.
She looked back at High Priestess from the floor. The woman had not chased her. She still stood beside the silk-filled hollow, white robes arranged exactly where they had been, one hand now resting on her hip. Her invisible beads clicked once as she sighed.
Fuck you! Aspen shoved herself up on both hands. Bad idea. Her balance rose with her, not from her hips like it was supposed to, but high between her shoulder blades, dragging her chest backward while her legs tried to go forward. This wasn't so hard before? She got one knee under her. Then the other. The wings answered late, lifting in a crooked twitch behind her, and the whole room tilted half an inch to the right.
She ran anyway. Her first step landed on silk-slick wood. Her second caught the lower edge of her own wing. Not hard enough to hurt, exactly. Enough to feel the thin membrane fold under her toes, warm and powdery, the blue veins inside it twitching like a second set of nerves. Her whole back tried to snatch itself away from her foot.
She windmilled one arm and hit the basin shoulder-first. The basin lurched on its ribs, tipped, and emptied a gray-brown paste down her front. The paste came out in one thick sheet, as if the basin had grown a tongue and dropped it on her. The paste hit her collar, her mouth, one eye. Cold first. Then warm. Then sticky like skin. Blue threads clung between her lashes and stretched when she blinked.
"No no no no—" She clawed at her face and only spread it, turning it streaky and awful across her fingers. Her feet kept trying to run under her but every shove sent her knees a different direction.
Behind her, High Priestess said something low. Aspen did not listen. She spat paste, found the curtain-shaped blur in the wall, and launched herself toward it with both arms out.
The room stretched. Then stopped. She hit white robes.
High Priestess caught her under the arms, perfectly balanced, as if Aspen had been delivered there by appointment. Her fingers avoided the wing-roots without looking.
"Nooooo!!!" The warmth entered before the words finished. Not a flood. Her hands opened for her. Fingers first. Then wrists. Then the trembling cords in her forearms, each one unclenching in little clicks she could feel but not hear. Her shoulders sagged against High Priestess's grip while the rest of her kept trying to run.
Her eyes snapped up to High Priestess's face. In the green of the woman's eyes, Aspen found a small, bent reflection: a girl held under the arms, mouth open, cheeks wet, lemon-yellow eyes shining too bright in a face she had never worn. Gray hair clung to one side of it in damp strings, flowing freely at the shoulders, with gray-brown paste smeared through the ends.
Her hair was supposed to be brown. She cut it to her neck because anything longer made her back itch. Her eyes were brown too. Regular brown. Boring brown. Hers.
The yellow-eyed girl in High Priestess's gaze blinked when Aspen did.
Aspen waited for the girl to blink late.
She did not.