Chapter 13:

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Grandmother moved through the chamber with the night pearl raised, casting its light in slow arcs across the jade walls. The echo had confused her but not stopped her. She was working outward from the pool in a methodical pattern, checking each pillar in turn.

There were six pillars. I was behind the fourth.

When she reached the third and turned toward me, something rolled across the floor and stopped at her feet.

She looked down.

Hazel’s eye — or what had once been an eye, now a clouded sphere that had come loose from the jade as it solidified, preserved in the peculiar way the pool preserved things — sat on the floor between grandmother’s shoes.

Grandmother made a sound I’d never heard from her. Short, involuntary. She stepped back and looked toward the pool, then at the floor, then called out sharply for my mother to come see what she’d done wrong.

My mother crossed the chamber toward her. Two pairs of footsteps, both moving away from me.

I didn’t wait. I went back up the passage the way I’d come, one hand on the wall, moving fast and quiet, and I didn’t stop until I was outside in the cold air with the mountain above me and the sky beginning to lighten at its edges.

I sat on a rock and looked at my hands for a while.

𝗜𝘯𝗌𝘁𝗮𝘯𝘁 𝘢cc𝘦ss 𝘰ո 𝗀𝗮𝗹ո𝗈v𝘦𝗅𝘀.𝘤𝗼𝘮

“If you’re still somewhere,” I said, quietly, to no one in particular, “thank you.”

I didn’t actually believe she was. But it seemed worth saying.

Briar’s absence settled over the house quickly, the way absences do when a person has been difficult to live with and no one is sure how to mourn them. Her room stayed closed. Her things stayed where she’d left them. The village registered her disappearance without much ceremony — another girl gone, another red coffin rumored, another tacit agreement not to ask questions.

Grandmother’s decline resumed as if it had never paused.

The skin she’d taken from Hazel was failing faster than the last one. She moved with a slight stiffness at the joints that worsened through the day, and in the evenings the color of her face had a grayish cast that no amount of powder addressed. She was running out of time in the specific, practical way of someone who has run this calculation many times before and knows exactly what the numbers mean.

She watched me constantly.

Not with suspicion — with something more considered than that. Assessment. The way you look at something you are planning to use and are deciding when.

Two boys were born in the village that month, one after the other. Grandmother had them dealt with and didn’t discuss it, and the mothers of those boys were given jade cream and told to be grateful for their correction. I watched this happen and said nothing and kept the jade cream on my face every day and was, by all appearances, exactly the granddaughter she required.

At night she came to my room.

“Come here, Ivy. Let me put on your cream.”

She settled behind me on the bed and worked the cream into my cheeks the way she always did — slow, thorough, her palms cupping my face with a firmness that wasn’t quite tender and wasn’t quite threatening. The smell of her was worse now. Sweet and organic and wrong, and close.

“You’re a clever girl,” she said. Her thumbs traced my cheekbones. “That’s been true since you were small. But clever girls who watch too carefully tend to come to bad ends. Your sisters were both clever.”

I kept my spine straight and my breathing even.

“I know you were in the cave.”

Her hands didn’t stop moving.

“I caught your scent when I came back up the passage. I’ve known it since you were born.” She said it without heat, the way you state a fact that has no emotional content. “Tell me: did you think you were being careful, or did you think it wouldn’t matter?”

I didn’t answer. She wasn’t really asking.

“I haven’t decided what to do about it yet.” Her palm settled flat against my cheek, and she leaned forward until her lips were close to my ear. “So be a good girl. Don’t make me decide quickly.”

She left.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and pressed my own hands to my face, over the places hers had been, and made myself breathe until the nausea passed. Then I got up and started planning.

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