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“Fiddlefuck…” And expecting to be seized at any moment, she brushed aside the crystal shards and sat beside the hole, lowering first one foot and then the other into the hunger of the void.

Somehow the anticlimax of not being yanked into the depths made her even more nervous. She wondered if the woman she’d seen behind the crystal facet had been related to the Wickedish Witch of the East-southeast. Somehow, she doubted it. That place had had a softer feel to it, as if salvation were never more than the turn of a page away. This all felt far more real.

By degrees, she descended into the rocky throat, toes searching blindly for footholds as her hands scraped on the cave floor, slowly losing purchase.

Rose had already escaped one world for another by threading herself through subterranean guts. Burrowers, that was how Badger had described himself and her. Merlin’s cave had opened other routes to her, but for this book, it seemed it was to be another crawl.

The way became narrower, dirtier, warmer. Rose descended by bracing herself against opposite walls, coughing on what tasted rather like soot. Her questing foot found an obstacle and sent it clattering away. Moments later, she was only half surprised to emerge filthy and sore into a large hearth. The room beyond the chimney seemed disproportionately small given the size of the fireplace. A cottage by the look of it, cluttered with all manner of stuff.

Rose righted the empty cauldron she’d knocked over, avoided the spinning wheel and stool, and approached the crowded table where two candles burned, one to either side of a large goat’s skull.

“Hello?” Rose eyed the narrow stair that led to an attic or a floor above. Not exactly a peasant’s hovel then…

The place had a faintly musty smell to it, cut with various other scents, some tantalizingly familiar, others alien, some with more of the farmyard to them than anything else. Rose breathed in more deeply.

“I know this place…” She knew the smell.

She turned slowly, trying to map the elusive vapor of memory to something concrete. “The fireplace…”

“Thou always entered by that way.” The mildly amused voice came from behind her. “Though I possessed a most functional door.”

Rose spun around, and there by the stairs, where she had most certainly not been a moment earlier, stood the Chimney Woman.

“Thou discovered thy liberty then.”

At four, Rose had thought of the Chimney Woman as old, but in truth she might not even be thirty, aged only by the bulky heap of her several dresses, and by rogue streaks of gray in the blackness of her hair.

“You’re the…Chimney Woman…” Rose looked sheepishly back at the fireplace.

“Hannah Cooper.” The woman made a mocking curtsy. “No escort today, I see. Will she come a-hunting, dost thou think?”

Rose shook her head. Hannah Cooper might have brewed potions with the little girl who came to her under the Muse’s protection, but ten years later Rose wasn’t sure how much of the witch’s good behavior was due to that oversight.

“Good.” The witch dusted off her palms and wiped them on her apron. She frowned. Looked from the chimney to the door. “Wait…” She walked slowly toward her own front door. “Something’s different.” She glanced back at Rose. “Something besides you being all grown up. And that’s a strangeness in itself.”

“I came for help…” Rose said.

“Help can help itself.” Hannah shook her head and the massed tangles of her hair. “I gave you all the help you were owed on the day you left.” Her language was growing less strange, the “thy’s” and “thou’s” slipping away. “Something has changed.” She looked sharply at Rose. “How did you get in?”

“Th-th-through the chimney.”

There was no doubting Hannah was a witch when she turned those green eyes Rose’s way, and her power distorted the very air between them. The force in that stare reverberated in Rose’s chest.

“I’d believe that of the Muse, because I saw her do it. But not you, child, not my little burrower. You’ve grown, I smell someone’s touch on you, all kinds of strength there…Old and older still. But not yet sufficient to make it past the seals put upon this place.”

“Through the chimney,” Rose said with more confidence. “You live in a book.”

“We all live the story of our lives, child. I wrote myself into this one. It seemed like a good idea in the year of our Lord seventeen and twelve. Less so now, whenever now is. You, on the other hand…” She held her hand out as she had when Rose was a child and she would lead her around the house, which had always seemed to unfold around them. “You were written. But there are strange magics at work when a parent writes a child. Especially a lost child. Especially…a baby. Especially when that parent weaves words as well as any witch has ever wrought a spell. You were written in blood, Rose. Someone poured the whole of their heart into capturing you within the alphabet. Like the golems of the Jews but fashioned in ink rather than clay.”

“Like Pinocchio?” Rose said, remembering the wooden boy she had once played with outside a circus tent.

“Him I don’t know.” The witch looked at her door again. “Open it!” Her voice rang out trembling and echoey, as if she had spoken in some great vault of stone.

Rose felt the compulsion settle upon her but shook it from her shoulders before marching haughtily to the door of her own free will. She set her hand to the iron handle and looked back at Hannah. “Freedom is the only thing of value. You told me that.”

The door opened with a tortured squeal of hinges, admitting sunlight and fresh air. Fields, trees, and hedgerows lay beneath an achingly blue sky.

The witch clutched at her chest as if mortally wounded and fell to her knees, grasping at the table for support, pulling down a bowl, which shattered and sent pieces skittering across the flagstones. “It…There’s an outside…”