A Place to Stand – 6

High Priestess gave the word meds no answer.

The word had no root here. Aspen saw that almost immediately. No recognition passed through High Priestess’s face, no matching word rose behind her eyes, and the lack of recognition should have made the question useless, except High Priestess seemed to find use in the failure itself.

Her gaze held on Aspen’s mouth for a long breath, on the small working motion of the tongue against the rear gum, on the tears and spit and the ruined shape of a girl trying to name an intervention with a tool she could not recognize.

Then her eyes dropped to the robe. Aspen’s fingers were still buried in it. The black fabric had twisted into cords under her knuckles, dark and heavy, with a faint shine where tears or saliva had touched it. High Priestess looked at that too. The look held no softness Aspen could use.

It had the awful steadiness of someone seeing a fever break and making note of what the body did before it cooled.

High Priestess lifted one hand.

Aspen flinched through the jaw first.

The woman paused only long enough to register the flinch, then continued lower, away from the mouth, and set her fingers over Aspen’s hand. She removed Aspen from the robe with the same gentleness as before, thumb pressing one finger loose, then the next, until the cloth slipped free and fell back against the black gown.

High Priestess smoothed the crease with two strokes, as if the damage to the robe had more immediate business than the damage inside Aspen’s mouth. Her own tear tracks had dried, just slightly pale near the jaw.

She gave Aspen no name for what had happened.

She looked once at Aspen’s mouth, once at her eyes, and then toward the room beyond the curtain. “Hermit’s home is next.”

The curtain waited at the far side of the room, pale fabric marked with its triangle, and High Priestess crossed toward it.

Aspen remained standing with her hands clamped shut, watching the black gown move away from the place where High Priestess had opened her mouth. The space between them should have made the room easier to breathe in. It did the opposite.

The distance gave Aspen too much room to feel the back of her jaw.

High Priestess reached the curtain and set two fingers against the fabric. “If the tree stilled for every wound, there would be no need for prayer.”

Aspen’s fingers crushed harder into her palms. The hands looked almost delicate from outside, pale and long and folded on the silk, but inside the grip there was a private violence she could choose. Knuckle against knuckle. Nail into skin. A thin crescent of pain under each fingertip.

Her choice could live there for a second.

The room could keep moving. High Priestess could keep refusing to name what she had done. Aspen could still decide that following was the fastest route to evidence.

I’m going to—

The wings made the decision ugly and physical.

No, no. What am I thinking?

The wings tightened under the gown in one hard coordinated draw, upper pair and lower pair pressing close with a rigidity that ran through the roots into her shoulders. The borrowed body gathered itself for movement, giving Aspen another answer before she had finished authorizing it.

High Priestess noticed, because of course she noticed. Her eyes flicked from Aspen’s face to the tension at her back.

“Wings won’t fit like that,” she said.

Aspen stared at the lifted curtain, kept her fists tight, and let the remark die without a response. If the body wanted to walk, then it could walk her toward Hermit’s home, toward the ash triangles, toward whatever records this world kept.

She told herself that she would learn what High Priestess had planted, how it dragged her anger into Dr. Halloran’s room, and what part of the working had failed enough to let her notice.

Her wings listened obediently.

✦

The hall bent away from the room in a slow leftward curve, and the first thing Aspen understood was that nobody could carve this place into obedience.

The wood had only been persuaded. The floor rose from the same living mass as the walls, smoothed into a walking path down the center, warmer than the air and faintly springing under each step, with hairline cracks filled by hardened blue sap where some old split had been sealed and sealed again.

Along the sides, the heartwood swelled into grooves and shoulder-height bulges polished by years of hands, wrists, wing-joints, people leaning while they spoke or waited for someone beyond a curtain to finish.

The people had taught it domestic habits. The result still remembered that it was older than them.

High Priestess moved through it as if she had never once questioned where to put her feet. Aspen followed with both fists tight. The new fingers ached, and she relished the familiar pain while the hallway tried to become a different hallway behind her eyes.

Her own home would’ve had beige paint rubbed shiny near the bathroom door, carpet flattened down the middle. The AC vent would breathe cold over her ankles, and Mother’s room would stay shut at the far end with no light under it.

The memory did not replace the tree. It only gave the tree a place to stand in her head, which made the living warmth under her feet feel more disgusting, because some part of her had just filed this place under home.

And like home, the mushrooms here were too tended to be wild. Tiny aqua caps grew from seam-lines in the walls, clipped to a path-light low enough to guide feet without filling the whole passage; shelf-blooms sat in hollows like lamps, their undersides brushed clean of powder; near some thresholds, little fans had been trained into collars around the curtain frames and then cut back before they could spread across the cloth.

Even the tree’s pulse seemed to have been folded into routine, warming the floor in intervals and drawing a faint synchronized breath through the curtain hems. Like pipes ticking after a shower and the refrigerator motor turning over at night. Aspen felt the comparison was wrong and still felt it forming.

But what she had no comparison for was the triangles that faced her from every curtain.

Upside-down, raised in thick thread or darkened with some kind of powder, rough enough that a passing hand could know the mark by touch.

Aspen did not have the whole language, but she had the pressure of the sign now: the room behind has inwardness; the hall does not get to see. A triangle with its head turned to the ground wanted to conceal something. This was a hallway full of locked doors, but this made privacy look like ritual instead of warning.

Why do they want to hide so much?

A little loop of dried mushroom ribbon hung beside one curtain, a comb beside another, a bowl of pale ash on a grown shelf near a third. Private rooms, tended rooms, rooms with rules for what crossed their mouths.

Her jaw throbbed around the buried softness.

The room they had left made her nauseous in a new way she could barely hold. High Priestess had placed the small soft thing where the body would keep it hidden. Hidden room, hidden working, hidden thing pressed high into the gum, and each time Aspen tried to let those facts touch the center of herself, the pressure in her jaw turned the thought aside and gave her Dr. Halloran instead.

White sleeve. Paper sheet. Careful voice. Aspen looked hard at the hallway to keep the doctor from filling it.

She counted the cut edges of mushrooms, the polished grip-straps grown near a turn, the wing-dust caught in shallow grooves where people must have brushed past for years. The hall listened by swallowing.

Swallowing the nightlight, door, waiting room, bathroom shelf, the narrow place outside a bedroom where she learned how to listen before knocking. She did not know whether the shell was doing that or whether she had always been this easy to drag backward.

High Priestess’s gown whispered ahead and then lost itself in the warm air. The conflict from the hidden room did not echo after them; the house absorbed it like another sound it had been trained to manage. So Aspen kept it all in her head, forcing the thoughts to resound through her skull. They all converged to one point.

I’ll make you pay.

Even if she wasn’t sure if she meant High Priestess, or Halloran.

The passage widened into a main room. The ceiling lifted. The air loosened. The light spread from cultivated blooms along the walls to a larger table set a little left of center, and two people sat there waiting in the table’s glow.

Aspen knew the younger one before she knew the name: the woman she threw the bowl at, blonde hair with blue-green threads in it like ribbons, shoulders held too high, face tight with a kind of worry that had already chosen Aspen as its source.

For one second, the girl became Mara Patel from tenth grade, standing outside the counselor’s office with her sleeves pulled over both hands, smiling like the smile could hold her face together if nobody asked the wrong question.

Mara had always looked sad in a way that made other people lower their voices. This girl had that same careful break in her, that same effort to stay useful while something in her was already spilling.

Aspen blinked, and the blonde hair came back. So did the wings, tree-light, living table. The girl she threw the bowl at.

She’s less alien-looking than I remember.

The thought should have made Aspen feel better. It did not.

Beside her sat an old woman with hands that looked used to dressing wounds, though her eyes did the sharper work first. They moved over Aspen quickly: wet mouth, clenched hands, rigid wings under silk, High Priestess’s robe, the space between them, the kind of crying that had already stopped being loud.

The old woman looked at Aspen as if the damage had a pattern, and Aspen felt herself being understood in pieces she had not offered.