I don't wanna wear this...
The cream cloth unfolded into something that looked like a shirt if a shirt had given up on having a back. There were two sleeves, a soft front panel, and dark ties hanging from the sides. Behind it, the fabric split around two long, silk-edged openings meant for wings, because of course the clothes here had accounted for the giant moth situation. One silk edge was softer than the other, worn smooth where a wing-root had passed through it too many times.
She got one arm through. Then the other. That part was normal enough to be insulting. The problem came when she tried to pull the back into place and one wing flattened wrong under the cloth, its membrane folding with a dry little shiver against her spine.
Why didn't anyone teach me how to wear this bullshit? She twisted her shoulder. The wing dragged with it, not folded or free, just caught in a stupid halfway shape that pulled something in her spine. She reached back, missed the slit entirely, and hooked two fingers into the silk edging instead. The cloth jerked up around her neck. One dark tie swung forward and stuck to her elbow.
For one second, she stood there with her arm pinned, her wing crimped, and the front of the shirt slowly climbing toward her chin. Just fucking fit. The wing lifted by pure accident, not all the way, just enough for the cream panel to slide under the root and settle where the stitching had clearly expected it. The motion was too neat to be luck and too late to be hers. She rolled her sore shoulder after.
Time for the other one.
✦
She got the second wing in on the third try, tied the dark cords in a knot ugly enough that Quinn would probably diagnose it, and pushed through the curtain before the clothes could invent another problem.
The passage outside still curved like it wanted to swallow her. She turned left because the floor had been worn smooth in that direction, following the shallow rub of feet through the carved heartwood. The cream cloth shifted when she walked. Not loose. Not tight. Just aware of every place her body was no longer the shape she expected. The ugly knot she made tapped her ribs with every step, announcing her before she reached anyone.
The passage opened into a broader room lit by more low blue mushrooms tucked into wall-hollows. Living room? Guess everyone needs one of those. A row of wing-brushes hung by the entrance, bristles turned inward, each handle stained by a different hand.
A table sat a little to her left, its legs connected to the floor as if it had grown from it. Raine was there, folded into a chair with two clean gaps cut through the back, her wings resting through them. She had something in both hands.
At first Aspen thought it was a clod of moss. Then Raine tore a piece off with her teeth, and the inside pulled apart pale and soft, threaded with glossy sap that stretched before breaking. Cream clung to her thumb. She noticed it, stared at the smear for half a second, then licked it off.
So that's what a dreamcake is. A moss lump with tree syrup guts.
Damn, that was a great quote.
Another one sat untouched at the empty place beside her, set on a flat bark plate. Someone had turned the spiral toward the chair. The dreamcake's green-brown outside had been pressed into a rough oval, but one side had split open, leaking a slow bead of that pale cream onto the plate's grain. Aspen stopped at the edge of the hallway.
Raine did not look at her right away. She pinched off another piece, smaller than the first, then smaller again. She never brought the smallest piece to her mouth. Quinn stood near the table with her sleeves pushed up, sorting something into a shallow bowl. She glanced from Aspen's crooked knot to the wing-slits sitting wrong on one side of her shirt, then to the way Aspen held her shoulders too high, keeping the cloth from touching the wing-roots.
Her mouth twitched. Then she pointed at the empty chair with two fingers. "You hungry? Seems like you put a lot of energy into putting that thing on."
It can't be that obvious. I don't look stupid, right?
She looked down. One dark tie had been caught through the wrong loop and now crossed her stomach like a sad little seatbelt. And she could feel that the right wing-slit at her back had twisted, the silk edge bunching against the base of her wing in a way that made it keep lifting and settling, lifting and settling, like it was trying to shrug the shirt off by itself.
Cool. Elegant. Very local, very savvy.
Aspen approached the table and ignored Quinn's stare. Dark rings had been burned into the surface where one would imagine a plate to be. Placement marks. Why not just use plates? She reached for the empty chair. The chair was also part of the floor, its legs rising from the same type of root-webbing that connected the table. Its back was split by two wing gaps worn glossy along the inner edges and the left gap was polished lower, as if one wing had always rested heavier than the other.
Aspen stared at it. Quinn did not help. Raine finally looked up from her dreamcake.
There was a small peg near the chair's right leg. No. Four pegs, Aspen realized after a second. One tucked beside each leg, half-hidden under the skirt of root-webbing that had grown around the wood where chair met floor. She pretended she had always seen them before nudging the nearest one with her toe. Nothing happened. She nudged harder.
The peg slid inward with a stiff wooden click. Under that leg, a flat little wedge pushed out from the leg's base and pressed into the root-web. The pale fibers stretched, thinned, then snapped back from the leg in tiny curling threads. Not cut. Peeled. Like the chair had been unstuck from a scab.
Why design all this when you could just... rip it from the floor? Actually, why is it connected in the first place?
Quinn seemed to read her thoughts. "Wister made these. Girl got tired of birthing normal chairs every market day and decided her new ones would have manners. These are a lot more convenient for my old bones."
Birthing? Like what High Priestess did..? Aspen worked her way around the chair as casually as a person could while operating furniture ankles. "Uh, right. So how many people even live here? In this... tree place."
"Couple hundred. I don't keep count anymore." Quinn shrugged.
That's... small. "Is this some kind of village?" Aspen got around to the second peg. Click. The webbing at that leg released with a damp little pop.
"It's better if you saw it for yourself." Quinn pointed towards the left end of the room, where a single curtain hung between them and what could only be the outside. Raine's wings went rigid, the dreamcake breaking in her hand. But Quinn waved her off and spoke again. "We'll talk about that after you've eaten."
"I guess." Third peg. The chair shifted, offended but mobile. Fourth peg. The last roots pulled loose from the chair and flopped onto the grain beneath. The floor kept pale circles where the roots had grown from. Aspen shook her head and sighed before taking a seat. The chair accepted her weight with a low creak, then shifted half an inch forward on its own, locking her close enough to the table that her knees nearly touched the underside. Her wings found the back gaps before she meant to place them there. The left wing settled lower than the right.
A tremble ran up her spine. Not fear this time, but fit. Aspen kept her hands in her lap and stared at the untouched dreamcake leaking cream on the plate in front of her.
"Can't be a baby now," she muttered, because Jamie would have said it worse.
Quinn turned to her. "I'd show you how to bless it, but you probably just want to eat now. Yeah?"
Not really. "Um... yeah." Gotta learn how to say no one of these days.
Raine's thumb stopped at that. She nodded thankfully to Quinn.
Aspen brought one finger to the dreamcake. She only meant to poke it. The mossy outside gave under her fingertip with a damp little dent, springing back slower than bread should. The pale cream welled up through the split and rounded against her nail, glossy and faintly blue at the edges. The cream crawled toward the rings edge, then slowed at the blackened grain.
Quinn leaned forward. Not much. Just enough for both elbows to find the table and for her eyes to settle on Aspen's mouth instead of the cake.
Oh, she's excited. Terrible. Aspen pinched off a piece before she could retreat from it. Raine looked away before Aspen bit down.
The crust tore with a soft moss-rip, and the inside stretched in thin creamy strings until one snapped back onto the plate. Ew. Ew. Ew. She put it in her mouth.
That was a mistake.
The texture came first: cool moss and soft dough. There was a little grit from something ground too fine to chew and too coarse to ignore. Then the sap-cream broke under her tongue, warm and floral and green, spreading through the moss like melted custard. Did they melt flowers into paste for this? She stopped chewing.
Wait. Isn't this kind of like matcha?
Like the weird smashed matcha sweet Mother had bought on vacation from the tiny shop with the plastic display foods in the window, the one Jamie had called "lawn fudge" before eating half of hers anyway. Bitter-green first, then soft sweetness, then that thick paste texture that made her tongue feel too aware of itself.
But this was not that, not with this aftertaste. This had a barky smoke taste under it and a bright sap sting that prickled along her gums and made the blue in her tongue seem to answer. The body swallowed a little before Aspen did. For one stupid second, her hand reached for a paper napkin, a trash bin, or Jamie gagging theatrically across a little metal table.
Then the dreamcake fizzled out. Tiny warm pops moved through the cream, not carbonation, more like the sap noticing her. The back of her throat tingled. Her jaw tightened. Quinn's smile widened by a fraction. Aspen swallowed. The bite went down soft, leaving green bitterness on her teeth and warm cream at the corner of her mouth.
What did I do to deserve this punishment?
She took another bite. Eughhh! It tastes so bad! And another.
Quinn giggled. The sound stayed low in her chest, dry and crooked, but it changed her whole face for half a second.
Raine looked at her. Then at Aspen. Then back down at her own dreamcake, where the piece between her fingers sagged, uneaten.
"You make a fine face for someone who keeps eating," Quinn said.
Aspen swallowed the third bite with effort. "I'm trying to be open-minded."
"You look like you're fighting the food."
"And I'm winning. Spiritually."
Quinn's laugh came again, shorter this time. She shook her head and scraped at the table with her fingernail. "Good. Then let's make a trade."
Aspen paused with a fourth piece halfway to her mouth. "Trade?"
"You keep making that face, and I'll answer what I can. Fair trade, no?"
I suffer. You work. Totally. "I'm not making this face on purpose."
Aspen stared at the dreamcake piece between her fingers. There were too many questions crowding behind her teeth now that someone had opened a place for them. Rooci. Council. Ainm. Lyra. The thing around her throat. The world outside the curtain. Why the chair had roots. Why food fizzed like it had opinions.
But Raine was sitting across from her with her thumb pressed into that raw place beside her knuckle, not eating anymore. Cridh had been the word she threw like it should have hit something inside Aspen's chest.
Aspen lowered the chunk of dreamcake. "What's a Cridh?"
Raine's hand stopped mid-press. Aspen glanced at her before she could stop herself. "She asked me where mine was."