Author's Preface
Usually waking was dark first, then ceiling, then the stupid dry taste of her own mouth. This was color.
Aqua swam behind her lids in branching threads, not light exactly, not dream, but a living stain laid through the thin skin of her eyes. Every time her pulse moved, the blue-green moved with it. She could see herself with her eyes shut. Not her face but her veins, glowing, the inside of eyelids that had no business being hers.
She tried not to wake up.
That made no sense, but her whole body agreed. It lay very still around her, too large in some directions and too delicate in others. Her back felt crowded. Heavy, but not like a backpack. Weight grown from her, pulling at deep little anchors under the shoulder blades. The wings were folded tight, and she knew that without touching them. Knew it the way she knew when her jaw was clenched. Knew it with a private, disgusting certainty.
Her mouth tasted green. Her tongue pressed against teeth that were almost right. Her fingers twitched, and too many joints answered inside the silk.
I already woke up.
For one second, there was no panic searching for an exit. There was only the exit not existing. Behind her shut lids, aqua veins branched so clearly she could almost see her own eyes moving under them, quick and wet and afraid, hunting the blue membrane for a way out. Aspen was the part thrashing in the dark. The body was the dark. Her new heart did not beat any faster.
She opened her eyes with no sweat running down her brows.
A woman’s face was close above hers.
This woman was older than the last. Chestnut-colored wings. Her emerald eyes held open and fixed on Aspen. Tear tracks had dried pale on the woman's cheeks; fresh ones cut through them, fat at the lower lashes, slipping down one after another. But her eyes did not behave like crying eyes.
They did not blur around Aspen. They did not search her face for help. Aspen's wrong hand twitched at her side and the woman did not look. One wing scraped the silk and the woman did not look. Those green eyes stayed exactly where they were, clear through the water, pinning Aspen’s face while the rest of her face leaked.
Only the skin under one eye gave her away. A tiny muscle pulled tight, held, released, pulled tight again. The tears kept coming through it.
“Where is your ash, Hermit?” the woman asked.
"What?" Aspen's voice scraped ugly out of the borrowed throat. “Who are you?”
The woman’s fingers rose to her own eye. Aspen expected her to wipe the tear away, but she didn’t wipe. Thumb and forefinger touched the wet green iris itself. The lower lid pulled down. The eye stayed open under her fingers, too open, glossy and still, while she pinched at something Aspen could not see.
Nothing came out. The woman’s fingers drew back by the smallest distance, careful around empty air. A tear clung to the place between her fingertips, bending around whatever was there. She did the other eye the same way: lid dragged, green iris fixed, two fingers taking hold of nothing and removing it.
Her eyes looked more naked after. She stopped crying.
Nothing else changed. Her mouth stayed in the same hard line. The little muscle under her eye held tight. The wet tracks stayed wet on her cheeks. But the next tear, the one swelling bright at her lower lid, did not fall. It trembled there, fat and ready.
The woman looked through Aspen for one more second. The tear dropped.
“Raine was right,” she whispered.
Another tear rose immediately to the rim. It did not spill. It waited there, round and bright, while the woman’s face stayed locked around it. Aspen could see the waiting. Tears were supposed to happen to a person. These had begun listening.
The woman’s hand lowered, still holding nothing carefully between two fingers. The next tear dropped.
“No scent.”
Another one formed. Held. The woman’s gaze did not move from Aspen’s face.
“No memory.”
Aspen stared at the lower lids. The woman's eyes were letting water out one fact at a time. Another tear gathered, larger than the last, fattening until it trembled against the lashes. It waited through one breath. Two.
“Different Cridh.”
The woman closed her fingers around the invisible things she had taken from her eyes. Her cheeks were striped wet and still. No new tear came.
“Okay. No more time to grieve.”
Something under Aspen’s tongue lifted, then fell flat, like a sneeze that forgot how to happen. She gave the woman the kind of look she saved for Jamie when he explained why his cereal tasted purple.
Her eyes stayed on the woman’s fingers, still pinched around nothing. The air between them should have been empty. It was empty. But the tears had bent around it. Her brain kept going back there, touching the blank spot and coming away with no shape. The green taste was still there in her mouth. Her wings were still there. The woman was still holding invisible eye-things between two careful fingers.
So Aspen reached for the only question with a floor under it.
“Uh. Hello, Ma'am. Are we in Georgia?”
The woman's wet green eyes held on Aspen’s face, and for the first time they lost their clean place by a fraction.
“Georgia...?” she said. The word came out carefully, copied badly from Aspen’s mouth. “What are you saying?”
The woman took one step back, like she was making room for a spill. Aspen pushed herself upright inside the hollow. Silk came with her in reluctant strings, peeling from her calves, her waist, the undersides of the folded wings; each thread let go with a tiny wet tug, then clung somewhere else.
She swung one leg over the lip of it. Her foot found the grey wood floor, and heat beat up through the sole in slow pulses, not painful, not kind, just counting her. The other foot followed badly. The wings dragged behind her for half a second, caught in the silk, and the pull went deep under her shoulder blades, so intimate and low that she sucked a breath through her teeth before the threads finally slipped free.
Aspen stood there with silk hanging from her like shed skin, trying not to feel the empty hollow behind her still shaped exactly like a place she fit.
“You're right.”
A laugh tried to happen in the back of Aspen's throat. She looked for Earth in the room and came back with gray.
There were no corners in the room. No top right. No safe diagonal. Her eyes kept asking for ninety degrees and getting bark. The room rose in one continuous curve, floor into wall, 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. All one surface—no. Not surface. Skin.
She groaned and dragged both hands up over her face. Too many finger-bends pressed into her forehead. She squeezed her eyes shut inside her palms and still got blue, thin aqua branching through the meat of the lids.
Shit. Shit. Shit. This is too much. Why? Why the fuck is this happening to me?
Grey wood swirled over the ceiling through her fingers. There was no plaster or dusty fan. What replaced them were slow grain-loops and ridges, curling into themselves. The triangles from before were gone. Aspen’s eyes came back down to the woman. Black gown. Wet cheeks. Green eyes. Shoulder.
Past the shoulder, there was a curtain where a door should have been, hanging heavy and smooth.
The triangle was on it.
Three lines pressed into the curtain’s surface, point-down. Not powder or ash this time. It was cut in so cleanly the material shone pale at the edges.
Aspen’s arm shot out. “There. There, that’s it. That thing again.”
The woman turned. Her eyes reached the curtain and stayed there. The tears on her cheeks did not move anymore, but the skin around them tightened.
“Again?”
“Yes, again. When I woke up, there were a bunch of them on the ceiling. And there was this girl with wings like you, and she was frozen, and then the crystal thing broke, and she fell, and she tried to smell me—”
“Frozen,” the woman said. She stepped over to the curtain at the other side of the room but did not touch it. Her hand lifted, hovered, lowered again.
“Was the triangle like this, or was it upside-down?”
Aspen cocked her head. “Uh. Upside-down, I think.”
“Then she did not want this seen.”
“Who didn't?”
“The previous Hermit.”
Previous put body-heat on everything. The silk hollow in the wall, the green taste in her mouth, the wings folded under her back—none of it felt new now. It felt vacated.
The woman looked from the etched triangle to Aspen, then back again. “And seven days before the ceremony.”
Aspen stared at the triangle until the three lines seemed to press into the inside of her eyes. She said it before the whole of it reached her.
“So all this was on purpose.”
The words seemed too small after they came out, almost childish, like calling a house fire “hot.” Purpose had been hiding in every thing she had touched. None of it scattered when she looked at it. A prank had edges. A cosmic accident spilled outward. This sat around her with the neatness of teeth already closed.
Aspen looked down at her long pale fingers, the extra joints flexing once in the dim, and understood that even her confusion had probably been allowed for.
That first girl I woke nearby was frozen until I threw the bowl. All those ceiling triangles went away when I threw it. Why was I chosen? Why give me her body? Or was it God?
The woman turned toward her, slowly now. “Then tell me, what are you supposed to be?”
Aspen blinked at her. “Ah. Well, I'm Asp—”
The woman crossed the space in a snap of black cloth and sealed a hand over Aspen’s mouth. She lifted her other hand between them. Her thumb touched the indent beneath Aspen's lower lip. Her forefinger and middle finger spread to either corner of Aspen’s mouth, making an inverted triangle over the place where her name almost escaped.
“Do not use your Ainm so lightly,” she said. “You are like a child.”
I can't use my name here?
Aspen’s tongue stayed ready for the rest of it. The name had not vanished. It was still there, crowded behind the woman’s palm: the bitten-off p, the easy little fall into en, the whole familiar shape of herself waiting to come out. Her mouth kept trying to finish it. A tiny useless push against skin.
People ignored it, misheard it, called it from downstairs, wrote it on worksheets, shouted it when she was in trouble. But it had always passed through her without needing permission. It was the thing she reached for before sorry, before stop, before I don’t know.
“Wait, is that why you haven't mentioned your... Ainm?”
The woman stilled, the kind of pause adults made when a child asked why knives were sharp. Her fingers stayed over Aspen’s mouth. Her eyes lowered to Aspen’s nose, then back to her eyes, and something in her face folded itself into patience so carefully it was almost rude.
“Much like a child,” she said, “you haven’t learned to open yourself.”
Aspen tried to speak against her palm. The woman removed her hand and spoke again.
“Smell me.”
Aspen’s face moved before she could stop it. Her nose wrinkled, her upper lip pulling back from the almost-right teeth. The hell? The words landed with all the private ugliness of being told to lick someone’s sleeve.
Then the first woman came back to her: pale face, green wings, leaning toward Aspen from the floor—trying to smell her.
Aspen’s disgust stopped halfway and became curious. She leaned in with her nose wrinkling before she even took the breath. At first she got everything except what she was supposed to get: the black gown’s bitter dye, a cold mineral dust caught deep in the folds, the grey wood’s warm pulsing sourness rising from the walls and floor together, and underneath that the faint glassy tang from whatever invisible things she had pulled from her eyes.
Aspen sniffed again, harder, and the smells separated with a new, awful sharpness, each one sliding into place as if her nose had grown fingers; cloth here, salt here, wood underneath, powder on skin, heat from the room, the small damp edge of breath.
But where the woman should have been, where some private animal fact of her should have entered Aspen and said person, there was a clean absence that made the rest of the smells feel arranged around a cut-out shape.
She was close enough to see the pores beside the woman’s nose, close enough that any normal body should have announced itself by now with sweat, scalp, mouth, sleep, fear, something; instead Aspen’s nose kept reaching the same blank place and sliding off it, like the woman had skin and tears and warmth but no hidden self for the air to carry.
“I can't smell you.”
“When children fail at this, it is because they cannot understand the people around them. I hope that is not the case for you.”
The insult should have reached her first, but Aspen was still stuck on the mechanics of it. To smell someone, she had to understand them. Not their soap, not their clothes, not the wet salt on their face, but the person under all of that—the closed room of them.
Her eyes went up to the woman’s eyes because that was where people kept pretending the room had windows.
The green held her there, giving a small, bent reflection: A girl with her mouth open. Wet cheeks. Honey-yellow eyes shining too hard in a face Aspen had no memory of making. Grey hair stuck to one side in damp strings, loose past the shoulders, the ends muddied with pieces of white silk.
Her hair was supposed to be brown. She kept it cut at her neck because longer hair made her back itch in the summer. Her eyes were brown too, the regular useless brown everyone had until she needed them to be hers.
Aspen watched for the delay. Some tiny mistake. The reflection catching up a breath late, proving it was only glass, only surface, only this place doing another stupid trick.
It blinked with her. Exactly.
A small, mean part of her had been waiting for the woman to turn into scenery if Aspen stared hard enough. But the woman’s eyes stayed wet and green and occupied, and inside them Aspen’s stolen face kept being hers on time.
She understood, with a hot little shame under the fear, why there was no scent.
The woman's green eyes held Aspen through the little wet tremor still clinging to them, and then her pinched hand rose between their faces.
At first Aspen saw nothing but two fingers held too carefully apart. Then the tear caught on whatever lived there invisibly, stretching into a thin curved film. The air bent. A sliver of the woman’s face warped through it—green eye pulled long, cheek broken into a pale crescent, mouth floating half an inch from itself. Not glass. Not quite water. Something clear enough to hide until grief stuck to it.
The woman held it there until Aspen stopped looking past it.
With her other hand, she pointed to her own eye.
“I am High Priestess.”
No smell came with it. No secret animal fact opened in the air. It was not the same kind of word as a name. It sat outside her, black gown, wet cheeks, green eyes, a title laid down where Aspen could see it.
Then High Priestess pointed at Aspen.
“And you are Hermit.”
The word landed on the borrowed body before it landed on her. The wings tightened under the silk. The long fingers flexed once against her own thigh, answering before Aspen could refuse.
She had been holding one last small thing between her teeth: I don’t know this, so it isn’t mine. I don't belong here.
“Whether you remember your ash or not.”
Not remembering did not save her from Hermit.
Ash was not just powder in a bowl.