Their hideout took me by surprise. One minute they were in sight, and the next they’d disappeared. I thought I’d lost them, and a stab of disappointment made me rush forward heedlessly. I caught myself right on the lip of a hollow so deep and so narrow, I would have fallen headfirst into it.
Below me, nets of woven leaves were strung across the top of the ridge, cleverly hiding the camp from view without making it obvious that anything was hidden. The rain drove harder, dripping off my hood and onto my shoulders as I crept along the top, looking for a way down.
I stumbled onto the path quite by accident. It was built so carefully, I missed it until I’d gone on it for quite some time and realized I’d been slowly descending. Now the horses disappearing made sense. This path probably wound down the slope into the camp itself.
Just as I realized this, I heard voices echoing through the ravine and panic surged through me.
A mouse.A mouse.I turned back, running up the cut, concentrating with everything I had. I should not have followed them this far. What had I been thinking? I felt a wave of sickness but pushed even that toward the mouse as I went as quickly as I could back the way I’d come. Step-by-step, I disappeared, letting the forest swallow me into safety.
The rain pattered against the leaves, beading like fallen crystals. It reminded me of the gems twinkling under the candlelight of the Emperor’s room and the crystals embedded on the scarlet thread. I felt sickened by the memories—but the small click of magic settling into place when the bandit looked at me meant I wasn’t hopeless. I had been cursed at birth, a danger to those around me, but now, I had this chance to become something more than a vessel of destruction. I never wanted to see those rooms again, and yet I found myself already planning how I could navigate them, now that I could sense the shape of my magic. In that moment, it was almost nothing to turn my thoughts back to the little hut, to hold it in front of me like a beacon.
Daylight waned, but I kept going, and when the cat-shaped flames appeared beside me, I was hardly surprised. I didn’t tempt its wrath by trying to pet it or grab it, but his glow reassured me, and the hellcat stayed close. Together we crossed through the cluster of rain-darkened boulders, and finally I staggered across the threshold from the forest to the old woman’s grove.
The forest winked out.
Night swallowed me whole.
XVI.
To Burn
Ifroze, standing on nothing, hands outstretched in sudden panic. The whole world had gone away, replaced now with the abyss. Far from me, on some kind of horizon—if you could call it a horizon—stars trailed thick dust and strange light. It reminded me of that place between the shards when Death had kissed me. Except now I wasn’t falling. I stood firm. Soundless. Airless. Was this what it was to die? To see on the other side, without having crossed? Carefully, I took a step back.
That fathomless abyss disappeared. The rainy forest once again surrounded me. Ahead of me, the grove waited. The hellcat meowed at my feet, but even he sat at the edge and waited, the rain hissing into the flames of his back.
The old woman said to go inside and light a fire to call her. But if I took one more step the entire grove would disappear. How did I get to the hut I couldn’t even see through the abyss? If I walked forward into this endless night, lit only by the far stars, would I be entirely lost?
I could turn around, return to the château. I would likely recover in a few weeks. My apprenticeship would continue, and if I could never return here, the grove would become only a faint memory of my earliest days in Death’s home.
But I was desperate to be both strong and powerful. I wanted Lord Death’s gaze on me with admiration, with surprise, with longing, even.Maybe he’d one day show me places such as these, but I was already here, stepping into these mysteries without him. I had started believing in who I might become, imagining myself beside him.
I clenched my fists tight. I tried to fix my gaze on the darkened windows, judging the distance through the rain as best I could. Turning my feet in the direction of the hut, I took a deep breath and stepped forward.
The forest once again was snuffed out like a candle. The stars became the sky. The dark fell away under my feet. My stomach dropped, seeming to fall endlessly even though I stayed, for all I could tell, in the same place I’d stepped. Holding the fear tight inside my belly, I breathed out and took another step. Then another.
Out of the corner of my eye, the stars and their dust began to move. I almost made the mistake of looking at the movement but caught myself in time. I kept my gaze fixed on the empty spot in the dark where I thought the hut should be waiting, and as I focused, the stars swirled in earnest, blooming, traveling in hot waves across the dark.
This glimpse of the abyss terrified me, but it was a different kind of terror—one that soared through me and made me feel as if I could hold everything that wanted to tear me apart. I knew nothing, but I knew enough to be here. I was no one, but I walked with the gods. I was a wretched woman, but hadn’t the whole world sprung from the womb? I saw it now and was changed. The currents. The movement. White heat and solid water and frozen clouds. I could reach into that dust and pluck out a grain of life, and it would grow an entire world. As I marveled, beyond the currents, the faint shadows of other things moved. The gods and their creatures, backs turned, going on about the business of immortality and other worlds. With my gaze never leaving the spot where the hut had been, I could see it all. Even the hellcat who followed at my heels, flames tampered in the airless weight of the dark.
I forgot to fear oblivion, and that also changed me. When my feet stumbled onto an invisible step, I remembered what I had set out tofind. I climbed the unseen steps of the hut and waited for the hellcat to come in behind me before closing the door on the strange dark world.
Inside, the hut was empty and untouched from the day before. The rain pattered softly on the roof, and out the small window the grove lay peaceful under melting snow. I squatted at the cold hearth and poked at the coals—they were wet from rain that had dropped into the chimney. Sighing, I looked around the hut for anything to start the fire. There was nothing but a few pieces of wood the old woman had brought in and never put on. At least they were dry. I laid them in the hearth and turned to the hellcat, who was batting at the edge of a thread from a dusty spinning wheel in the corner. “Pspspsp,” I called, wiping my hands on my skirts.
The hellcat looked at me as if it couldn’t believe I was asking, but after I repeated myself, it sniffed and slowly walked in my direction. “Thank you, sir,” I said formally as it sat beside me. Using my teeth, I ripped off the edge of my shift hem and held it to his flaming fur. At first, nothing happened, and I felt rather foolish. I had been able to pick him up after all—the flames had not burnt. But what was an immortal hellcat without actual fire? I tried to reach into the other world, the place where the hellcat existed as itself. Then, the cloth caught so fiercely it burnt my fingers. With a screech, I threw it into the coals. It fell upon the branches and immediately began to burn.
The fire leapt bright and crackling warm. My fingers were blistered and stung but I tried to pet the hellcat in thanks. It bit me and walked off.
I winced and rubbed my hand. Night was falling outside. How long would it take the old woman to arrive? I stayed on the floor near the fire, exhausted and fighting the ever-present nausea as the gray light dimmed and the rain came harder onto the roof.
It was the whisper of the spinning wheel that made me turn.
A queer feeling moved through the bottom of my stomach. “Grandmother?” I asked.
The old woman sat at the wheel, head tipped back, and her greatmane of gray-streaked hair wild and loose, pulling at thread that wasn’t there. She turned at my words, her eyes rolled back into her head, only the whites visible, and her hands in the shape of taloned claws pulled away from the spinning wheel. It must have been my head, but I could not make sense of her features. The lines of her face kept moving between a raven and crone. Bird or woman. Woman or bird.
“I’ve come for your help,” I said, my voice firmer than my trembling knees.
Her eyes rolled forward and scanned the room, finding me standing there looking dumbstruck. “You have found my hut.” Her gaze gleamed with a sharpness that had not been there before. “No, no. Don’t fuss, I am all right. There was nothing wrong in the first place, child, though I know it looks dramatic.” As if nothing more out of the ordinary than a sneeze had occurred, she shuffled around the hut and put a kettle into the fire. “Why did you seek me out this dreary day?”
