Page 89 of Foresyth Conservatory
I had pinned it the second he walked into my shop.
His pentagonal cane. The crystal I brought out with five-fold symmetry.
The night of Julian’s death—maybe it wasn’t just his sacrifice.
Maybe it was meant to beall five of them.
My stomach twisted, nausea climbing up.
“I’m sorry, I’m feeling unwell. I’ll have to excuse myself,” I said, standing too quickly.
Nina looked up at me with a furrowed brow, her mouth open mid-sentence. I had lost track of the conversation.
“Do you need any help?” Sequoia offered.
“No, I’m fine. I think I just need to lie down. If you’ll excuse me,” I said.
Horror lodged itself in my throat—raw, acidic, choking out anything else. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think beyond the sharp, metallic taste of it. But if that hadn’t come first—if terror hadn’t sunk its claws into me—I think the anger wouldhave swallowed me alive. It pulsed just beneath the surface, waiting for the moment fear loosened its grip. I jumped out of my seat, feeling the urge to wretch.
The Meister gave me a curious look, as though suspecting I had made some realization. But in the next moment, he nodded, releasing me from the Circle. “Of course,” the Meister said. “We are about to conclude. Rest, Ms. Blackburne.”
*
“Are you okay?” It was Aspen at my door no more than twenty minutes later. His brows were knit so tightly I could have balanced a Skorn card between them. It made me suspect he actually cared. In his hand, he nervously twirled a pen made of spun and twisted glass, the delicate craftwork fragile in his tense grip. No doubt, it wasthepen. I opened the door further to let him in.
“I’m fine. Something at Circle just made me need to step away,” I said, not wanting to share the full truth but finding it hard to evade now.
“You can tell me what you’re thinking,” Aspen said carefully, setting the pen on my desk. I crossed the room and pocketed it before he could change his mind. “Even if you’re distrustful, I still trust you, Dahlia. I didn’t even ask why you needed this.”
I studied him for a long moment. He’d shown me his workshop. He’d given me the pen. He’d done otherthings, too—offered pieces of himself I hadn’t asked for but had taken all the same. The truth was, I’d already lost the battle of holding back from him. And God, I needed a friend.
Maybe—just this once—honesty wouldn’t be a mistake.
“The tree in the sitting room. It was the one Julian hung himself from,” I said. Aspen’s gaze was steely, but he nodded. “The tree itself is covered in runes. That’s what I was noticing the night you came into the sitting room and found me by it. A piece of the bark had peeled off, and I realized there were runes all over it.”
“That’s strange,” Aspen said, but his expression didn’t match.
I knew it was dangerous to tell him what I was thinking, but there was something in the back of my mind that wanted to let him in. I had felt so alone these past two months—or years, really—that part of me relished his company, despite how dangerous it was. My dagger was in my bag, just under my pillow. I knew what I was about to reveal was risky, so I made my way to my bed and sat down, feeling for the hilt.
“When I was recalling the story of Odin in Circle tonight, something clicked. Julian hung himself to leave a message. He had died as a sacrifice—one that wasn’t his to make. Sequoia told me that the night he died, you all were performing some kind of ceremony, and that you took a potion. Do you think it was meant to kill one of you, or all of you?”
Aspen’s lips became a flat line. He came around my bed and sat next to me, and I gripped the hilt of the knife even harder, feeling my knuckles turn white. He was quiet for a long moment, and I felt beads of perspiration forming on my neck.
“Not all of us,” he said finally.
I let the words sink in.
“But one of you,” I pressed.
“Yes, one of us was supposed to die,” Aspen said. He ran his hand through his hair, his nervous tell. “But it wasn’t supposed to be Julian.”
I waited for him to say more, but when he didn’t, my pulse quickened as I let out the only word I could muster. “Why?” It was a simple question, but it dropped to the bottom of my stomach like an anchor.
“Damn it, Dahlia. I could bekilledfor telling you this,” he said, turning to me, his eyes as sharp as the dagger I was gripping. He was torn—he wanted to let me in, but there was a primal fear in his eyes that was holding him back.
But then he finally unraveled.
“The Meister, he’s much more powerful than you can imagine. He has us perform an elemental ceremony into soul flight once a year. It requires a lot of magick—it’s the riskiest thing we do, right after the Spring Symposium. There’s a chapter on it inThe Book of Skorn. Khorvyn had written that if the ceremony works—when all the elements, fire, water, air, and earth are united—the practitioners would be able to tap into the material form of the Shattered Mother and access her purest form of power. Khorvyn claimed to have achieved it himself.” Aspen paused, looking away at something out the window. “The Meister has been doing the ceremony for years. But every time it ends with the same outcome: a student sacrifice. The weakest among us don’t survive the ceremony.”
