"You guys have baths, right?" Aspen said too fast. "Or, like, water. A tub. Anything people use to get clean and not be covered in maybe-not-poop. Right? Please?"
Quinn looked at her for one long second.
Then the old woman laughed under her breath. "Aye, we've discovered washing." She turned toward the curtain and crooked two fingers without looking back.
Aspen followed because the alternative was standing there with paste drying on her knees and Raine breathing behind her.
The curtain lifted around Quinn's shoulder and fell after her. Aspen stepped through next. Behind her, Raine did not move at first. Then came the soft drag of one foot. She followed with her wings narrow enough to fit the passage, but the lower edges stayed lifted, tense green crescents that never quite settled against her spine.
The passage beyond the room was not a hallway in the way Aspen knew hallways. There were no corners. No flat ceiling pretending the building had been measured first. The whole thing curved around them in a long wooden throat, wide enough for Quinn's bent shoulders and Raine's folded wings, but not much more. The floor had been worn smooth down the center by feet, while the edges still rose in natural ridges, root-knuckled and dark with old sap.
Mushrooms pulsed from little scooped hollows along the walls. Not randomly. Someone had cut the wood around each cluster in careful crescent shelves, letting the blue caps sit there like eyes in their sockets. Thin threads of pale fiber ran between them, pinned into the grain with bone staples no longer than Aspen's fingernail.
Farther down, curtainways lined the sides, each one marked differently: one with a closed triangle stitched in black, one with three pale knots along the hem, one with a strip of blue fiber tied around the pull-cord. Aspen looked back to the one they had just left and noticed the curtain hung differently from this side.
On the room-facing side, it had carried a proper triangle. Here, etched into the weave, was the same shape turned downward: three thin lines meeting around nothing, point aimed at the floor. The center had been left empty, but the fibers around it were darker and thumb-worn.
Aspen paused. Her mouth remembered High Priestess's hand before the rest did. Thumb beneath her lip. Two fingers at the corners. The same downward point made over the place her name had almost escaped. She touched her own lips with one hand and pointed to the curtain with the other. "That. What does that mean?"
Quinn turned back, tapping against her chin with one finger. "Outer one is the asking one, you show it to whatever needs reminding not to listen."
Aspen's lips went cold. "Whatever? Not whoever?"
Quinn followed Aspen's finger to the hollow triangle. Her face did not change much, but the skin beneath one eye tightened, and she let out a long breath through her nose. "Guess we're starting very far back."
Aspen lowered her hand. Quinn turned full toward her. "Do you remember what my girl said when she made the thing on your neck."
Aspen's fingers went to her throat before she meant to. As always, she felt nothing but skin. Your girl? Like a daughter? She glanced down at her collarbone. How do you even know this thing is here? It's invisible.
Quinn watched the question pass over Aspen's face and did not answer.
Aspen swallowed. "Something about a Rooci Carthanna?"
Raine's wings shifted behind her. Quinn nodded once. "There." Then she lifted both hands to her face, making rough circles around her eyes. It was like a child making spyglasses out of hands, except Quinn's version had no play in it. Her gaze looked through the two small rings straight at Aspen, and then she turned to the looming mushrooms.
"The Rooci watch over us."
Aspen's stomach did a slow, careful drop. Quinn lowered one hand. With the other, she made the hollow triangle: thumb beneath her lower lip, two fingers spread to the corners of her mouth. "Unless we ask not to be watched in the way we've all agreed to understand."
Aspen looked back at the curtain. So it's a privacy sign. Or really, a please-don't-let-the-invisible-things-watch sign. The necklace pulsed once, sanding down the edges of her thoughts. Just the edges.
What do I even ask first? How many? Can we touch them? Can they hear my thoughts? Does the sign actually stop them, or is everyone just politely pretending?
Is one of them watching right now?
Her eyes lifted toward the curved wooden ceiling before she could stop them. The mushrooms glowed quietly back.
Okay. Fuck that. I can't think about anything and everything.
While I'm still calm right now, I should focus on the basic things. Basic knowledge. Bath. Clothes. Whatever Cridh is. Whatever that's going on.
Do not start with the invisible perverts. Do not start. I can do this. I am calm.
"Yep," Aspen sighed. "Normal. Basic things first."
"Wise by accident," Quinn said, and turned down the passage.
They walked on. The artificial fungi lamps thinned as they went, replaced by paler growths nested low in the wall. These outgrown caps were wet and almost pearl-gray. The air changed before the next doorway appeared, warmer and damp enough to gather on the edge of Aspen's wing. A mineral sweetness clung beneath the tingly sap-smell, like water left too long in a wooden cup.
The curtainway ahead breathed mist from its lower edge. The fabric was darker than the last, heavy with moisture. Droplets collected along the woven strands and fell one at a time into a shallow groove cut across the floor. Quinn pushed the curtain aside. Warm vapor rolled around her wrist.
"Bath. Do I have to teach you how to take one?" she smiled.
"No. No, I'm good. Thanks." Aspen stepped past her too quickly, then slowed as the damp air touched her face. "I mean, I don't know a lot of stuff here. But I can bathe. Generally. Water and I meet often."
Why the hell did I say that?
Quinn's mouth twitched. "Good enough." She let the curtain fall halfway between them. "I'll fetch you another pair of clothes." Her eyes moved to Raine. They stayed there for a moment too long. "And Raine will... go eat a dreamcake."
Raine nodded vigorously. Quinn pretended not to see it. "I'll hang the new pair by the curtain. Clean yourself first. Don't drink the sap. Don't put your face under unless you want sap in both ears. Scrub the paste on yourself before you get in the sap. If it tingles, that's good."
The fuck? Aspen nodded. "Got it."
"And don't claw at the tub."
Aspen cocked her head. "Uh, wasn't really planning to."
"Did you plan to get covered in that?" Quinn retorted and let the curtain drop.
Wait, you never clarified if this was poop. This isn't poop, right? No, no. It can't be poop. Doesn't smell like poop. It's not poop. Chill.
Their footsteps started away. Quinn's were easy to tell: slow, dry, heel first, then the soft scrape of her other foot catching up. Raine's came after hers, lighter and uneven. Twice, Raine stopped. Twice, Quinn did not. After the second pause, Raine followed again, the sound of her steps tucked close behind the old woman's like a stray that had not yet decided whether it wanted to be left or led.
Aspen listened until the footsteps became part of the tree.
Then she listened longer. Long enough for the silence to stop being proof and start being something she had to stand inside. Something with a presence that she'd grown to relish.
Her hand stayed lifted in front of her, fingers slightly bent toward the curtain, as if still waiting for their instructions. Her feet had stopped unevenly: one flat on the warm wood, the other half-turned toward the exit. Ready to follow. Ready to run. Ready to do nothing.
She lowered her hand one finger at a time.
Okay. This is okay.
The thought did not move anywhere useful. She looked at the bathing room instead. It was too practical to be comforting. The walls curved in warm, polished wood, darkened gray by steam and hands. Thin grooves had been carved down the heartwood in branching paths, catching droplets from the ceiling and feeding them into a shallow channel around the floor. The channel ran to a squat wood jar tucked beneath a shelf, where water fell through a plug of pale fiber.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Not plumbing, but collection. The tub sat in the center, low and oval, carved from one dark piece of trunk. Two deep notches had been cut into the back rim, spaced wide enough for wings to rest without being crushed. The inside was smooth except near the bottom, where faint parallel scratches marked the wood in little frantic sets. Some sets overlapped, new grooves over old.
People actually clawed at it?
She looked at her—no, not her hands. Lyra's hands. The nails were longer than Aspen had kept hers, narrow and slightly curved, with a single vein of sap faint beneath the keratin.
She flexed the fingers. They flexed back too easily. "Not planning to," she repeated to herself, and hated that the hands looked capable for the task.
The tub had no drain. Beside it stood three covered buckets and a squat black bowl with a lid tied down by a strip of barkcloth. A thumb-width smear of pale yellow paste had dried along the rim, glossy in the mushroom-light. Not the gray-brown paste on Aspen's knees. This one looked cleaner and somehow worse, like crushed fat mixed with flower pollen and something medicinal enough to punish skin.
She crouched in front of it. The smell reached her before she touched the lid: bitter leaf, wet bark, and the sharp green sting of stems snapped open. Gross. She lifted the cover. The paste inside held the shape of the last fingers that had scooped it. Four grooves. A thumb drag deeper than the rest. Someone else's handprint fossilized in yellow.
"Scrub the paste on yourself," Aspen repeated under her breath. "Then get in the sap. If it tingles, that's good. Totally normal sentence."
The tub's liquid steamed beside her, faint aqua and luminous. Too thin to match the rest of the sap in this place, but too slow to be water. Blue threads drifted through it in loose curls, disappearing when they reached the surface.
Aspen dipped one finger into the yellow paste. It was warm, like body-warm. She jerked her hand back, then felt stupid and looked at the curtain, as if Quinn might have seen through it.
No footsteps.
No Raine.
And by the inverted triangle on the other side of the curtain, hopefully nothing invisible.
Just the drip, the steam, the old scratches in the tub, and Aspen standing there refusing to get naked with someone else's skin.
A yellow paste sat on her fingertip. The little mound of it. Warm. Glossy. Ridged where her fingerprint had pressed into it. One dark fleck rested near the edge.
She stared at it.
Her finger stayed lifted in front of her face. Not shaking. That was the strange part. Her hand should have been shaking. Her wrist should have been loose and stupid with something like panic or shock. Instead it held itself there, obedient as a candle, while something inside her tried to climb out through her throat.
The first sound was barely a whimper. Just a small, wet catch behind her nose. She closed her mouth around it. Another one came softer, the kind of sound a person made when the body had already started and the face was still pretending not to know.
Her eyes warmed. Not enough for tears to fall. Just enough to blur the yellow paste into a little sun-colored smear on her finger.
"Nope," she whispered. The word came out too even. That made her wings tense. She shook her head once, hard enough that damp gray hair tapped her cheek. The almost-tears held at the rims of her eyes, round and hot, then thinned back into her lids without falling. She wondered if they too would have sap in them.
Fine. I'll do this. Not the tub. Not all the way in, absolutely not. I'll just clean the dirty parts. Hands, knees, arms, maybe a little of the face. Places she could pretend were parts, not a whole body. Places she could clean without admitting she was responsible for the rest.
She dragged the paste across her forearm. The yellow smear thinned under her fingers, grainy at first, then slick. It caught in the gray-brown grime and changed color, going dull where it touched the paste from the loom. Beneath it, Lyra's skin looked too pale, too fine. Aspen rubbed harder.
Think facts. I can taste names. Quinn's name had a taste. One that sat on her tongue like dirt and hay. It had stayed in the grooves behind her molars after she swallowed. Her body had learned things about an old woman Aspen had never met, in a tree Aspen had never seen, in a hallway where mushrooms grew out of carved sockets because apparently lamps were alive now.
She gave up and rubbed the paste over her wrist. The scar beneath her thumb brightened just a bit. The body knew Quinn before Aspen did. The body had wings. It knew wings. It knew how to copy the way High Priestess's wings went high in confusion. It knew how to glow when frightened. She wondered if it had even copied the way Raine's own wings tightened, and she had just never noticed.
She scooped more paste with two fingers and slathered it onto the back of her hand. Her breathing stayed neat. Her thoughts did not.
If this were a dream, it had given an old woman hands like bark and a name that tasted of stored winter. It had given Raine a raw place beside her knuckle from pressing the same panic into the same skin. It had given a tub claw marks at the bottom, wing-notches cut into the rim, and a bowl of warm yellow paste with someone else's finger grooves left in it.
And of course they thought of wings here. She spread paste over her other forearm. Not fake until proven fake. There's history here. Her hand paused. So Raine really did have someone. She had known the wrist cue. The scars. A close friend. Or a lover?
She scrubbed harder.
They could have had a nice day today. Whatever that counts as nice here.
Aspen still wanted to find the hidden camera or the exact wrong detail that would make the room fold up and give her back her bed. But the paste still cooled on her forearm. The tub still steamed. The claw marks still waited at the bottom.
What if I never see Jamie's texts again?
Something small cracked at her throat. Not loud or painful. A beat splitting under pressure.
Her hand went still over the paste. Then she scooped up more. Too much this time. There was far too much on her arm. Still, she rubbed it all across until the yellow went thin and hot, until the gray-brown grime broke under her fingers and rolled up in little dead strings. She scrubbed her wrist. Her palm. The scar beneath her thumb. Harder than she needed to. Hard enough for the blue beneath to brighten in sharp little pulses.
"Okay," she said. The word came out scraped clean.
She put the pasted hand into the tub. The sap-water took it quietly at first. Then the yellow paste woke against her skin.
Tiny bubbles gathered along her knuckles, in the creases of her palm, under the nails. They formed too precisely, each little pearl clinging to a dirty place before breaking loose. The gray-brown grime lifted in threads. The yellow paste thinned into cloudy ribbons and unspooled from her arm. They disappeared before reaching the surface.
Aspen hissed through her teeth. Sting and tickle braided together, bright enough to make her fingers twitch under the surface. The feeling crawled hardest through the scars, little fizzing points following every pale seam until the blue beneath them flashed sharp and then steadied.
When she finally pulled her arm out, it came up slick and raw, shining with a thin aqua film. The scars looked newly exposed. The skin around them had gone a pinkish-blue.
She stared at it. "Okay," she said again, quieter. This one meant keep going. The raw-clean strip looked ridiculous beside the paste still drying up her other arm.
The curtain shifted to her right. Quinn's bony hand appeared at the top of the curtain-frame, not entering, only reaching high enough to hook a folded bundle of clothes over the carved peg above it. Cream cloth. Dark ties. Two long openings cut through the back.
"They're ready when you are." Her hand withdrew.
The curtain fell still again, and Aspen rubbed the paste onto her other arm as if she was scrubbing away the last argument she had left.
Jamie would've told her, very lovingly, that the water was blue, and blue meant go. The universe had color-coded the answer for her.