Chapter 17 Emory
EMORY WAS STILL VIbrATING WITH the force of her power—with the adrenaline that thrummed in her veins, no longer silver but red. She barely registered Bryony’s limp form as Mrs. Amberyl whirled on her.
“You did this,” the High Matriarch seethed. “You killed my daughter.”
Emory recoiled. All the residual power inside her subsided, leaving her hollow. “I…” She looked at Bryony, held in her sister’s arms. Oh Tides. Had she killed her? “I was trying to save her…”
“She’s still alive,” Aspen said, eyes wet with unshed tears. “Bryony’s still breathing.”
Still breathing, though her eyes remained vacant.
Emory’s own breathing became shallow. Everyone started talking around her.
Not a single word registered as shadows pressed in, the ghosts drawn by her magic.
A heavy feeling rested on her chest, and she imagined as soon as she looked at the darkness, acknowledged it was there, she would shatter beneath its weight.
She was barely holding herself together as they were ushered back to the house, Bryony’s unconscious body carried there by the strongest of the men.
They took the young witch to her room. Healers were summoned.
Sage was called for, in what Emory imagined was a way to prevent the demon from returning.
Mrs. Amberyl had Emory and Romie sent back to their rooms, her normally stoic, sharp voice laced with a desperate note now.
Like she, too, was struggling to keep herself together.
“What was that back there?” Romie asked as soon as they were alone. Her face was drawn and pale. “You looked like you were about to Collapse and wipe away the Wychwood altogether.”
Shame roiled in Emory’s stomach. She wondered if she would have eventually Collapsed if Mrs. Amberyl hadn’t pulled her off the ley line when she did. But it hadn’t felt like it. The power coursing through her had only made her want more.
“The ley line,” Emory heard herself croak. “It’s like it expanded my limits so that I couldn’t Collapse.”
“That’s not the only thing it did.”
“What do you mean?”
Romie watched her with a guardedness that broke Emory’s heart. Like she expected Emory to Collapse here and now, hurting her like her father’s own Collapsing had hurt others.
“I only wanted to help,” Emory said in a small voice when Romie remained quiet.
But if she hadn’t tried pulling Bryony out of that trance, the young witch might not have fallen into the comalike state she found herself in now.
Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.
“We should get some rest,” Romie said, not daring to look at Emory as she headed to her room. “Who knows what the witches will do with us now.”
The brusque dismissal might have stung more if Emory didn’t suddenly crave the solitude. Alone in the parlor, she hugged herself to keep from falling apart as her ghosts clamored for her attention. All she could do was fight back tears.
Just like in her nightmare, her ghosts formed a tight circle around her. Accusations slipped from their lips in a cacophony of sound that called to mind the demon’s guttural tongue.
Emory shut her eyes. “It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real,” she mumbled to herself, as though she could banish them by the sheer force of her desperation.
An icy breath caressed the side of her neck, sending shivers down her spine. She whirled on Keiran’s ghost, stumbling backward at how close he’d been.
“Why won’t you leave me alone?” she asked in a broken whisper, tears falling in earnest now.
Every part of her screamed at her to move, to shove him back, to close her eyes and pray to the Tides that these ghosts would disappear, that she would wake and find that all of this had been some horrible nightmare.
But she didn’t think she deserved to be let off that easily, especially not after tonight. This was her fault—Bryony, and everything that came before it. All her fault, always her fault.
Just like in her nightmare, she thought that maybe the world would be better off without her.
But something else inside her revolted at the thought. These ghosts manifested when she used magic because she was ashamed of what she had done, what her power meant. The destruction it had left in her wake.
Everything you touch crumbles to dust.
Except—hadn’t her magic also done good? She wasn’t to blame for everything.
And she was tired of making herself small as a form of self-punishment.
She didn’t deserve this. She’d done enough atonement for her mistakes, and her dampening herself, making herself mediocre again, helped no one, least of all her.
The ghosts around her seemed to sense the shift in her mind.
The look in Keiran’s eyes turned violent.
The others around him too. And suddenly it was as if they were pouncing on her, drawing all the darkness around them and looking to suffocate Emory with it.
Feeding off her guilt, shame, every negative emotion she’d been feeling.
She wouldn’t let them.
“Leave me alone!” she screamed, throwing a vase at Keiran’s translucent face.
It went through him and shattered on the floor, eliciting a cruel smile from his ghost. Emory let out a defeated whimper and crumbled to the floor amid the broken ceramic.
Drawing her legs close to her chest, she buried her face in the crook of her arms and waited for the darkness to pass as sobs racked her body.
When she looked up some time later, the ghosts were gone. Romie’s door was still tightly shut, as if she had not heard the scream or the breaking vase or the sobs.
As if she had chosen not to.
Aspen knocked on their door at first light. “The matriarchs have come to a decision about what to do with you.”
Emory’s stomach dropped. The witches had wanted her and Romie gone after Bryony got possessed the first time; surely they would be out for their necks even more now that Bryony was in the state she was.
They followed Aspen to find Mrs. Amberyl at Bryony’s bedside. The High Matriarch had bags under her eyes, her mouth lined with profound worry. Bryony’s small hand was tucked in her mother’s grasp. With her eyes closed, her chest slowly rising and falling, she appeared to be sleeping.
“Will she be all right?” Romie asked.
Aspen’s face was grave. “We don’t know. Her consciousness is stuck in the astral plane now. There’s no knowing if she’ll find her way back to her body.”
It struck Emory how eerily alike this was to the eternal sleepers from her own world—Dreamers whose consciousness got lost in the sleepscape, leaving behind their bodies in a comalike state.
Mrs. Amberyl stared at Emory with an indecipherable expression. “What do you think happened in those woods?”
Emory blinked at the question. She wanted to defend her actions, to explain that she was only trying to save Bryony from the demon inside her.
Instead, she said, “I think you’re right to believe your forest is rotting because of us.
Whatever it is we might have woken in the space between worlds, whatever it is that possessed Bryony…
it’s the same. And it’s looking for me.”
Tidecaller, it had said in recognition when it saw her silver veins. The hunger in that word, how the demon seemed to crave her power, excited by the prospect of her within its reach.
“Did Bryony tell you the story of the twins and the demons?” Mrs. Amberyl asked.
Emory blanched. “Yes. And that you believe we’re trickster demons.”
“That story is a lie designed to hide a darker truth,” Mrs. Amberyl said.
“The real story is this: long ago, twin witches did bear the Sculptress’s mark, an anomaly in our long-standing traditions in which a singular witch holds that honor.
Asphodel and Oleander, they were called.
One day, a stranger appeared to them, bearing a spiral mark like yours.
The stranger’s coming opened the door wide for demons to escape the netherworld and poison our woods, the same way they are rotting now.
The stranger convinced the more impressionable sister, Asphodel, that they were meant to travel through worlds together and petition the gods at the center of all things to heal our broken worlds.
“The other sister, Oleander, stayed behind, acting as a bridge between the Wychwood and her twin, who traveled from it, possessing the ability to scry into her sister’s mind.
Asphodel was always meant to come back, but she never did, not even once the rot receded and the demons were cast back to the netherworld.
Oleander could no longer feel her twin’s essence, could no longer commune with her through scrying.
She tried to go after her, but found she could not go through the door.
Asphodel was forever lost, and Oleander could only curse the stranger who had taken her to her death. A trickster demon indeed.
“Oleander swore she would never let our kind be tempted out of the Wychwood. She concealed the truth in her journals, hid away all evidence of doors to other worlds, even from the other matriarchs. The only one she shared this with was her successor. And so this secret was passed down from High Matriarch to High Matriarch.”
Mrs. Amberyl turned pleading eyes to Aspen.
“I would have shared this truth with you eventually. But then we found two strange girls half-drowned beneath a waterfall, and the woods began to decay, and your sister ascended bearing the Sculptress’s mark and showing signs of demonic possession.
I knew then that the past was repeating itself, and I swore I would not let my daughters know such fates.
“The others believed the problem lay in Bryony’s possession. But I knew it originated with you.” Mrs. Amberyl sneered at Emory and Romie. “That your coming here meant you would try to convince my daughters to follow you to the center of the universe, just as the stranger who came before you did.”