Chapter 11:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

In the morning, grandmother was at the window of Briar’s empty room.

She stood with her back to me, looking out at the mountain, both hands clasped behind her. She looked like someone who had already moved on to the next thing.

“Bring your mother,” she said, without turning. “There’s work.”

I went to find my mother. My mother was in the kitchen. She looked at my face and then looked away and put her cup down and said, “All right,” and that was the full extent of what passed between us about Briar.

We followed grandmother to the back of the mountain.

I had been this way before, tracking the funeral procession in the dark. In daylight it was different — more ordinary, just a path, pebbled and rooted and slightly too steep in places, the kind of path that exists because people have walked it many times before. Birds. Wind through the pines. I concentrated on where I was putting my feet.

Mother carried Briar over her shoulders.

Briar was wrapped in cloth, tied at both ends. My mother was not a large woman. She walked without speaking and did not stop to rest. I watched her and thought about all the things I didn’t know about her, which was most things.

The cave entrance was the same overgrown notch in the rock I’d found before. Grandmother held back the growth with her cane and nodded us inside.

What was on the other side of it had no business being there.

The path went down in steps — smooth, fitted jade, deep green shading to black, polished to a reflective surface. The walls held night pearls set directly into the rock at even intervals, each one casting a cool, sourceless glow. No torches. No shadows. The light simply was, coming from everywhere and nowhere, steady and cold as a winter afternoon.

𝘋о𝗐𝘯l𝘰𝘢𝗱𝗮b𝗅𝖾 𝘗𝖣𝖥𝘴 𝘰𝗻 g𝘢l𝗻o𝗏𝘦𝘭s.𝗰𝗼𝘮

I had grown up with jade. I knew what it cost, what a piece the size of my palm could buy. The floor alone, just the floor of this entrance passage, was worth more than the village’s entire annual extraction.

I wrapped cloth around my feet to muffle the sound of my steps and followed.

The passage opened into a chamber.

In the center of it was a pool — roughly circular, perhaps ten paces across — filled with a liquid that was not water. The color was deep red, and it moved, very slowly, with the thick patience of something that has been in motion for a long time. The smell reached me before anything else: ferrous and sweet and wrong, the way sweetness can be wrong when it’s coming from the wrong thing.

Blood. Old and new both, layered.

My mother set Briar down at the edge of the pool and stepped back. Her face was the face she wore when she was not wearing any face at all — emptied out, waiting.

Grandmother was already moving around the pool’s edge, not looking at us.

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