Something cracked at Aspen's throat. Then it happened again. A line of little breaks against the skin, running from the base of her throat toward the side of her neck. Her hand flew up.
Nothing there. Still nothing there. Skin, pulse, warmth. Then something hit the heartwood by her foot.
Tick.
Another.
Tick.
Then three more, close together, like invisible seeds shaken from a pod. She looked down and saw nothing. Only the dark floor, the drop beyond it, Quinn's shadow beside her own. But the beads kept landing where no beads were, tiny hard sounds scattering around her toes.
The necklace was still on her. She could feel it. Just barely. That narrow and warm something in—on her skin, but it was no longer whole. The warmth stuttered now. It came in uneven patches, one pulse soothing her breath while the next missed completely. Her ribs opened up too fast. Her fingers started shaking before the fear finished reaching them.
"No, no please." Her hand dropped to the floor. She swept her palm over the heartwood, slow at first, then faster. Nothing. A warm groove in the wood. A smear of sap. Then the pad of her thumb caught on a point she could not see. Hot pricks flashed up her wrist.
"Ow—" she lifted her fingers. The bead stayed invisible, but the cut made its shape. Red blood and blue sap welled from her thumb and curved around the unseen thing caught between her fingers, outlining half a broken circle in wet light.
Aspen stared at it. I'm bleeding. Not red, not entirely. The same blue behind her eyelids also threaded through this liquid, bright enough to glow faintly against the air, gathering around a bead that was not there and dripping onto wood that was. The thought came apart slowly.
This body can bleed.
The thing keeping her calm could crack. There was nothing between her and the next cut. This was not a costume.
Mom can't help me.
Her thumb kept bleeding around the invisible bead in tiny blue pulses. Then her knees locked so hard the wing-roots at the base of her spine pulled tight.
Am I going to die?
Her mouth sucked in air that would not become a sound because some damaged part of the necklace still tried to fold the panic into something breathable. It failed halfway. The air came in pieces. One clean inhale. One ugly hitch. One thin, useless exhale through her teeth. Her fingers trembled harder, and the broken bead clicked against her nail, a delicate little sound for something that had just proved she could be cut.
Cut. Killed. Targeted. Someone could put a wound in this body and the body would open. Sap would come out. Breath would stop. The wings might twitch like a dead fly's. The six triangles below would not make that impossible. They only made her easier to point at. The scars in her palms would be the last thing she'd see. The Rooci would watch.
And maybe they wouldn't care. The necklace pulsed again, late and weak. Calm tried to cross her throat. Her hand closed around the broken bead until its edge bit deeper.
"Why?" She looked at Quinn. The old woman was watching her thumb, not her face. Watching the bead-shaped curve of blue sap. Watching the proof fall, drop by drop, onto the terrace as if every part of this had a place in some older pattern Aspen had not been told.
Something hot moved through Aspen so cleanly it almost felt like balance. A hard, animal part of her found its feet inside the borrowed body and stood up. She lunged.
Her clean hand caught Quinn's collar first. The bleeding one followed, smearing blue across the rough cloth as her fingers bunched it in both fists. She yanked the old woman close enough to smell bitter leaf under her breath, close enough that Quinn's thorn-dark hairpins filled the edge of Aspen's vision. The woman came too easily, not because Aspen was strong but because she allowed the distance to close.
Aspen's wings flared behind her before she knew they had moved, orange and gray snapping wide into the updraft.
"Did you know? That he'd come?"
Quinn did not look at Aspen's fists. Not at the blue sap soaking into her collar, nor the orange-gray wings spread behind her like they knew how to threaten. She looked at Aspen's eyes and stayed there.
"What would you have done if you knew?"
Aspen's grip tightened. "Maybe—" the word found nothing to stand on.
Maybe I could run. But where?
The terrace had no railing, the hollow had no ground, and she did not know how to fly.
Or I could fight…?
…
Maybe scream.
The broken warmth at her throat pulsed once, late and gentle, like it was still trying to be useful. She knew that without it, she would probably already be on the floor.
That High Priestess had looked at her panic and made the correct cruel choice.
That everyone here had been treating her like something newly hatched, half-blind and soft-shelled, because apparently—am I really this useless?
Why can't I do anything? Her fingers opened. Quinn's collar slipped free, wrinkled and stained blue where Aspen had held it. The invisible bead stayed caught in her bleeding hand. She could feel its broken edge every time her thumb twitched.
She did not step back. She folded inward instead. Her wings dragged down from their flare, not closing, just losing the clean threat of it. The updraft moved through the orange-gray membranes and made them tremble in little uneven shivers. Her shoulders locked. Her jaw locked. Her knees kept their hard line, but everything under the line was shaking now: thighs, fingers, throat, the soft place behind her tongue where words began before they were ready.
"I don't know," she whispered. The rest came shambling. "I don't know, okay? I don't know what I would've done. I don't know anything. That's the problem. I don't know where I am. I don't know what we are, or what a Hermit is or—or why? Why am I here?"
Her bleeding thumb curled around nothing and found the bead again. "Why does he want to kill me? I didn't even—"
Her tongue caught at the back of her throat. "I went to sleep. I think—that's it. I went to sleep like a normal person, and Jamie would've woken me up, and Mom. Mom would've come home. Where is she? Why didn't I get to say bye? Is that fair?"
The bead clicked against her nail.
"Mom doesn't even know. She doesn't know I'm not there. Or maybe she does now. Maybe Jamie came and saw my empty bed and my phone and they all think I ran away or died or—am I going to die? Really? How could I die? I'm not nothing! Why me—how could that just happen?"
She looked at her hand like she had forgotten it was part of the sentence. That blue sap had gathered in the crease below her thumb, the notch where Lyra's scars shone brighter. It was too bright, too calm. Yet the finger it came from could not stop shaking.
Quinn's hand lifted. Not toward the necklace but to Aspen. A careful, old hand, palm open, stopping short of the wing-root this time. The mushrooms near the terrace brightened. Quinn's hand paused.
A shadow fell across her face from above.
The mushrooms along the terrace wall had brightened before she did. Not the hard white they had shown at the gaps. This was different. Blue light gathered at the caps and pulled upward in trembling threads.
The sap in her thumb answered next. The little notch beneath her left thumb lit around the cut, blue spreading through the old scar-lines in a narrow flare. The bead in her grip stayed invisible, but the blood around it shone brighter, turning the broken curve into a small wet crescent.
Warmth pressed behind both eyes, deep in the sockets, high and inward, until her lower lids tightened and water gathered along the rims.
She did not breathe in, but the smell came anyway.
A polished coin lay flat against her tongue.
It was old and warm from someone else's hand. Wrapped in beeswax soft enough to hold a thumbprint, smelling faintly of turned soil, dead skin, and the inside of a wooden shrine after rain. For one second, it was almost gentle. Almost clean. The kind of sweetness people used to preserve things they were afraid to lose.
Then the aftertaste came through. Brass rubbed smooth by generations of fingers. The beeswax softened none of it for long. Its sweetness thinned, peeled back, and left bitter almond skin caught behind Aspen's teeth.
Hierophant.
Rotten flesh sealed inside bronze, darkening where no air could touch it and still insisting on the shape of a man. Above them, he did not land.
He hung in the updraft over the terrace, red wings open and barely beating, white robes dropping straight despite the moving air. The mushroom-light climbed the lower edges of him and stopped before his face, leaving only the suggestion of eyes, a chin, and the gleam of pale skin like porcelain.
His shadow tilted toward Aspen. His voice came mild enough to be worse than anger.
"The necklace cracked before you did. Good. There's no need to grieve."
Aspen's lips parted, then shut again. The invisible bead clicked against her nail, sharper than any answer she had.
"I can make this fair for you."
Her eyes sharpened on him all at once.
"There are seven days until we can kill him. Do you wish to drive the blade, Hermit?"
Fair was a word people used right before they gave something and explained why she should be grateful.
She would take it with her thumb still bleeding.