Fig left the caravan in the night without warning. The idea of parting filled her with such unease she resolved to avoid it altogether. She did not know how to clasp hands, press her torso to a stranger, put into words what future she wished them. She left, instead, a few parcels labeled only by portraits scribbled on paper that she’d asked Wren for. He’d seemed excited, she remembered with a strange pang in her chest — he thought she’d wanted to keep a journal of her own.

For Wren, a bulb she’d sniffed a strange magic on and dug up while foraging. For Quil, a mink collar for his coat. For Altair, the bedroll she’d softened with feathers. And for the children who had warmed to her despite her strangeness, a waterskin filled with tree sap. On the last full moon she had shown them how to boil the sap down into syrup and pour it over snow to make candy. She’d been younger than any of them when her mother had first showed her — when together they had carved shapes into the snowfall with their fingers and filled them like panes of golden glass.

Some days she could forget why she was on this journey and live only for the sky above and the ground below. On days like that, she longed for her mother so fiercely she couldn’t bear to open her eyes to the sunset without the musk of her long, oiled hair, the warm circle of her arms around Fig’s shoulders.

She was so close now. Sister. Knowledge. Rescue. Reunion sweeter than all the sap in all the forest.

It was this vision that pushed her to gather her things when all but the first shift of the night succumbed to sleep, that guided her feet as she trudged beneath a sky dark with an oncoming storm.

They would weather it without her, she realized. And, soon enough, they would all arrive at their final destinations. She was just another caravaner meant to dissolve off the edge of their group — that had always been her intention. And yet to leave made her heart ache in a way she did not understand.

The dove had waited patiently for her to prepare her parting gifts. It flew in small circles and landed on her shoulder to nuzzle against her hair. Fig had never met such a friendly bird — if it were truly a bird at all. When she cleared the edge of the tents, it flew ahead like a star against the night.

---

She had expected to reach the Asylum before sunrise, given the dove’s excited flutterings, but she walked all through the weak morning light and into the afternoon. While it had been the peak of summer when she’d left home, the air near the mountains was thin and cold, the days short. The caravan had just begun to turn away from the craggy cliffs when she left, but it seemed her path lay upward.

Her mother had described mountains to her before, but stories had not prepared her for every breath she took to feel like ice in her lungs. How, despite the cold, her thighs burned as she crawled up each rocky incline. She was not threatened by hostile plantlife or creatures, but by the cold’s ferocity as snow piled on her hooded shoulders, by how tired she grew with each step.

She made camp earlier than usual. The sun still sat upon the horizon when her fire flickered to life. She devoured dried meats and wiped her brow of sweat that had frozen there then melted in the firelight. Why would a settlement for the unwell be in such a hostile place?

The dove did not seem disturbed by the elements, but was rather in increasingly good spirits. It rolled in the snow as Fig rested her aching legs. They spent two more nights this way — the air thinning further as they climbed, Fig collapsing with exhaustion earlier and earlier. On the third night, she was unconscious as soon as her head touched the ground.

She dreamt of the clearing in front of her home. It was spring. It was warm. The trees bore small green buds like kernels of corn. She was whittling. She turned a log of birch over in her hands, then cut long strips from the wood in smooth curves.

“You’re almost there!” a voice shouted giddily, far away then suddenly close. The scene shook. Fingers burst from the trunk of the tree closest to Fig then ripped it in two from the inside. A woman with treebark skin tumbled out.

Fig jumped to her feet and back, raising her knife.

Sap clung to a wide mane of dark curls as the woman stood. “It’s just me,” she giggled.

Fig recognized the voice. The jade witch, the water woman — Clover. Fig’s head pounded. Before, the seer had entered her dreams like dipping into a pond. Tonight, it was as if she had ripped a door in the back of Fig’s skull.

The witch peeled shingles of bark from her face and arms to reveal smooth, dark skin. She wore a simple dress of woven linen not unlike one Fig had owned herself. Almond eyes and a wide mouth settled at the center of her heart-shaped face. “Sorry, I got excited.” She smoothed the dress against her stomach. “This is nice. Is it yours?”

“Where have you been?” Fig demanded. She felt the chill of reality at her fingertips and did not lower her knife. “I haven’t heard from you in over two moons.”

“You didn’t need me until now,” the witch crooned, her cadence familiar and yet different, here. Deeper.

“I was almost poisoned to death. I got caught in a trap by a hag. An occultist shattered my ribcage,” Fig spat.

Clover’s eyes grew wide. “Ah.”

“You’re a seer, aren’t you?” Fig asked.

“I am.”

“And you called yourself my friend?”

“I did.” She smiled.

“And yet you have not helped me at all,” Fig seethed. She stepped forward. “You see the future? You travel through dreams? Yet here I am, freezing to the edge of death on some mountain.”

“I’m sorry,” Clover replied, solemn. She cupped Fig’s fist and the handle of her knife between her hands. “Seering involves leaving more unsaid than said. The past, the future — if you were to see it as I do, even for a moment, you’d be more corpse than girl.”

Fig tensed. The witch wore the same easy smile as always. If her words were a threat, Fig was in no position to understand it.

“It’s only been an hour or two for me. But it seems you’ve been on a long journey,” Clover continued. “You are very strong.”

“Only an hour?” Fig dropped her arm. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t spend a lot of time outside of places like these,” Clover waved and the clearing solidified. The chill from Fig’s fingers vanished — it was spring again, warm and sweet. “It flows differently here.”

Fig searched for magic but found none. This false world was beyond her. “You said I’m almost there,” she repeated. “You know where I am.”

“I can feel her,” Clover said dreamily. “You’re so close to her.”

“She’s in a place called the Asylum.” Fig frowned. “It could be dangerous.”

“It shouldn’t be, for us.”

“You know it?”

“In a sense,” Clover admitted, her smile faltering.

“If you knew this was where she was, why not tell me? Why send me to the demon, to the caravan, to the hag?” Fig demanded.

“All magic has limits,” the witch sighed. “The closer you get to her, the more I can reach you. You’re a slippery girl to find, you know.”

“Why?” Fig crossed her arms.

“Excuse me, but,” Clover hesitated, “you’re empty. Almost nameless. There’s nothing to grab on to, nothing to search for. Your mother’s protection staved off both woe and wonder.”

Fig absorbed this in silence. It was as she’d guessed — her mother had a plan beyond her understanding. Her name, her magic — their absence kept her safe. By renaming herself, she’d pierced this safety. But, in turn, the world had opened. She knew more than she did.

“My mother, her name is Iroche,” Fig said firmly. “She was part of the Fastened pack of occultists. Some call her kinslayer. She has long, dark hair and purple markings on her skin.” She held the image of her mother in her head so solidly that the woman appeared, hazy at first, then crisp at the edge of the clearing. She wore the long shawl they had knit together last winter, her hair braided back as she wore it when it rained.

Fig watched her mother stretch her arms as she walked around the dream, roll her neck as she did each morning. She was beautiful.

The girl blinked back tears. “Yes, just like that. I can share my memories of her with you. You can use all that to find her, can’t you?”

Clover watched the new entrant with an unreadable expression. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Why not?” Fig demanded. She had traveled an uncountable distance, suffered and bled. Now, with a seer in front of her, the information she had collected might amount to something.

“She is beyond me,” Clover replied, voice soft. She gathered herself back into gentle determination. “Iraya will be able to help you. She is the only person who can help you.”

Fig’s brows furrowed. “Why?”

“If we are successful, you may ask her yourself.”

“If?” Fig questioned. She remembered the hag’s warning. “Is she even alive?”

“She’s alive,” Clover insisted. “I’ve worked quite hard to push her to the surface. Once you’re inside, you can pull.”

“I don’t understand,” Fig stammered. “Pull what?”

“All in time,” Clover yawned. Her lashes drooped as her skin hardened and cracked like a loaf in the fire. It darkened as it toughened back into bark.

“What’s happening?” Fig asked.

“I need to go,” the witch said, blinking hard. She stepped discomfortingly close. “You look so different, after all. That will help, I think.”

“Help with what?”

Clover took the knife and wood from Fig’s grasp and dropped them to the grass, then interlaced Fig’s hands with her own. “First, you do not know Iraya. That is our greatest obstacle. The Asylum’s keepers do not welcome strangers, and so you must demonstrate your care for a resident to enter.”

“How am I meant to do that?” Fig resisted the urge to lean away as Clover’s palms roughened to wood against hers.

“You have to let me in. I will pass the trials.”

“What?” A tinge of panic ran up Fig’s spine.

“Our connection will only grow stronger as you get closer. I can use Iraya’s mind as a conduit into yours. When you get to the gate, go to sleep,” Clover instructed. She pressed her legs together as they fused into a speckled trunk.

“I don’t—” Fig sputtered.

“Everything will work,” Clover smiled a final time, her teeth shining. Her face vibrated with excitement despite the bark creeping up her neck. “Sleep well, honey.”

Fig pulled her hands back from the two wooden branches left in the witch’s wake. A new oak loomed in the center of her yard, unfamiliar, foreign.

Once again, she stood alone in a circle of trees.

She woke to the same spun sugar taste as always. But this time, the ache in the back of her head remained. Whatever the witch had done to enter her dream, it was more forceful than usual. Fig rubbed the spot nervously. She did not like what that implied for the next step in their plan.

As the dove flew in smooth arcs up ahead, Fig trudged through rock and snow. Clover had led her to the demon, then to the Asylum. They seemed to share the same goal, at least for now. Cathea had delivered someone here and received the instrument to summon the dove in return. Clover’s assertion that Fig must demonstrate a relationship to someone inside to enter followed, then. Those who brought the Lost could return; those who cared for them could enter.

Could she care for Iraya? Fig had tossed the thought often as she lay in the back of Quil’s rumbling wagon, as Wren and the children regaled her with stories of their siblings — older and younger, wiser and duller, brave, fearful, mischievous, trusting. A sibling was a mirror, a partner, a fact of life so inescapable it was difficult for those with to comprehend a life without. Where then, did she lay? The most singular child conceivable, suddenly part of a pair?

No theory for Iraya and their mother’s separation made sense. Fig’s mother would never be apart from her on purpose, and she imagined the same would be true for an elder child. They must have been torn apart by some violence, by whatever falsehoods Vaani believed.

While Fig had, at first, been jealous of Iraya, her time alone on the mountain had packed those feelings beneath her aching feet and made room, instead, for a cautious hope. To discover this sister was to discover a new facet of her mother. Nothing could be more precious.

Fig was focused so thoroughly on her icy steps the dove had to chirp to bring her attention to the hulking white gate before her. Her vision doubled as Iraya’s candied memory of the gate layered over what she saw — two great tree trunks many times her height crowned with skillfully carved crossbeams. She blinked against the memory, so oft recalled, made real. When she stepped forward, her mind was her own again.

Up close, Fig could see the flecks of gold painted into the surface of the wood. Iraya had not noticed that. Fig pressed her palm to one of the trunks and felt the same magic that trailed behind the dove — warm steam, pine, some sort of citrus.

Beyond the gate, centered in its grand frame, stood two stone statues. The first, a woman in a long-sleeved robe in a style Fig had never seen. The second, a monkey with a wide, flat face ringed by spikes of hair. Both figures covered their eyes with their hands. Snow coated the top of the woman’s coiffed hair and the monkey’s jagged head.

Fig regarded them with curiosity. Their magic was of the same stock as the dove and gate. It fogged above their heads if she unfocused her eyes. But there was a trace of something else, something she couldn’t place. The ground beyond the gate was different, somehow. Not just the ground — everything. The trees, stones, even the air beyond the gate was lighter, as if the sun had emerged to brush it from a firm line of clouds.

Satisfied with her attention, the dove flew away. Alone, the two statues scared Fig more than they had in the bird’s company. Their exposed mouths rested in impassive lines. She looked around for any other information or instruction but found none.

She had trusted the seer to take her this far. What was one sleep more?

She stepped off the path and nestled herself against a large rock. Too anxious to sleep, she counted snowflakes when they fell onto the dark suede covering her knees. As each landed, fractaled, melted, she was a breath closer to her mother. She repeated that to herself that as she inhaled the thin mountain air, exhaled the heat from her chest.

Clover was waiting for her before her dream fully materialized. Each detail of the seer sharpened while the darkness behind her blurred like fogged glass. Today she wore trousers and a blouse in a style Fig did not recognize — all sharp angles and pressed seams. Her hair was styled in large, puffy spheres that fell down her back like chains of daisies.

“You’re back!” the witch cried. “I was starting to worry.”

“It’s been less than a day,” Fig sputtered. She’d made good time.

“Has it?” Clover kicked at the ground beneath her. A beach rippled into clarity around her foot as a wave of salty air blew across Fig’s face. It was the beach from her first dream of Clover, dark with night. “It’s been almost a year for me.”

“What?” Fig gasped. “It’s barely past noon.”

“Thank goodness,” the witch sighed. She stepped forward again, taking Figs hands. Her skin was neither warm nor cold — rather pure force as if her squeezing was a compression of air. Fig again resisted the urge to pull away. “What did you see beyond the gate?” Clover asked.

“Two statues. There’s a woman and a monkey, both covering their eyes.”

“Excellent,” Clover whispered more to herself than to Fig.

“Have you been here before?” Fig asked, eyes narrowing. “In person?”

“No,” Clover admitted, sheepish. “But my foremothers tell stories. And the mages have entire books dedicated to the folklore of the Asylum.”

“The mages?”

“We need to focus,” Clover insisted. Tonight was the clearest Fig had ever seen her. No jade skin, no water hair, no bark creeping up her legs. Small curls fell like springs at the edge of her forehead. She had a mole at the top of her left cheek. She was older than Fig, with hollows beneath her eyes.

“How do you know Iraya?” Fig countered.

“The story is longer than we have time for.” Clover’s smile tilted in apology. “I visit her the way I visit you. I’ve done so for a long time, now.”

“Were you friends before,” Fig paused — there was so much she did not know. “She came here?”

“No.” Clover shook her head, her hair bouncing like passing clouds. Her face scrunched, pleading. “She can tell you more when she’s awake. I’m sorry, but we really must hurry.”

“Fine,” Fig sighed, attempting to quell her frustration. “What do we need to do?”

“I will take over your body,” Clover said plainly. “You’ll stay here, dreaming. It will be unpleasant.”

Fig recoiled.“Unpleasant how?”

“Your mind will resist the intrusion. I need you to push through that,” the seer instructed. “Parts of us will bleed together. You need to find a way to stay here while I pass the trials. If you leak forward, they’ll know what’s happening.”

“What would they do?”

“I’m not sure,” Clover admitted. “We’re cheating their security. The trials are meant to keep strangers from entering, and you’re a stranger.”

“Isn’t there some other way?” Fig asked. “I can prove Iraya and I share blood.”

“That doesn’t matter here the way it does to your people.”

Your people. Fig looked at her curiously, then with anger. “You said this would be safe.”

“I said it will work,” Clover insisted. Her face was uncharacteristically hard. “It is our only option.”

“You could come here.” Fig crossed her arms.

“I wish.” Everything about the witch softened, sloped. “You don’t understand the extent to which I wish.”

The rush of emotion made Fig uncomfortable. “Fine. What next?”

A white marble archway appeared to their left. The interior beyond was blindingly bright in the darkness.

“You go through there,” Clover ordered, relieved.

Another carved wooden doorway appeared opposite to the first, through which Fig saw flakes of snow, her own shivering knees.

“And I through here.”

The crosswinds of both doors began a frightening howl of wind.

“How will I know when it’s done?” Fig yelled over the sound.

“I’ll come get you!” Clover yelled in return, her face split by a blinding smile. “Good luck!”

The witch counted them off from three. Cold wind whipped between them so ferociously Fig could barely hear. She hesitated, but there was nowhere for her hesitation to cling to. She thought again of her mother rolling her neck in the sunlight, gathering her shawl at her shoulders. She must go forward. She must.

On “One,” Fig braced against the light as she walked away from her body through the door.

She was in the clearing again. The marble archway disappeared behind her as immediately as it had materialized, silent and impossible. She held no wood, this time. No knife.

Ahead, familiar trees: one marked each year on her birthday to measure her height, one fastened with targets to practice archery, a third she’d crawled up day after day to watch robin chicks hatch in the spring.

Behind her, the home she had left behind. A garden, meticulously tended, a window decorated with charms and feathers, a chimney puffing dark smoke. Fig’s chest ached. She stepped towards her cottage. Perhaps, in this world between worlds, her mother was home and safe. Fig could open the door and bury herself in the musk of her, the circle of her arms. She could forget the cold and have a dinner of steamed leeks and stew. She could live, however briefly, blanketed by all she’d ever known.

But before she could even lift her back foot, the ground rumbled. She heard, inexplicably, the rush of water. Her head swiveled. The river was nowhere near here, but foaming water lapped at the edges of the trees. It receded, then returned with force as the air grew thicker, saltier. The next wave uprooted the trees and pulled them backward into darkness. Fig’s house puckered off its foundations as if it was crusted onto fabric pulled taut. She rushed forward to clutch the windowsill but the waves were too forceful, too large. Receding water tugged the cottage from her grasp and into the forest.

“No,” she cried, fingers burning from the friction. She was losing everything. She was losing everything again.

She searched desperately for some high ground to escape the water. The grass of the clearing heaved beneath her, the sky above stretched and swallowed. The circle of grass upon which she stood rose as if birthing a mountain, the forest swallowed by ferocious water. As the clearing soared into the sky, the water dashed itself upon the pillar of stone it left below.

Soon, she stood alone on an island of grass. In all directions, a roiling sea. Her limbs loosened with the false logic of dreams. The water rose to lick her ankles. She wondered how long she could swim. Now it brushed up against her knees. She wondered how long she could hold her breath. Clouds consumed the sun darker, darker, until all went black. She stretched her arms and legs and fell back upon the water until it raised her up, up, flush with the sky. She should be scared, she realized. There was a part of her, somewhere else, that was. Fear coiled around her ankle and tugged.

“Clover!” a voice yelled. She was suddenly young, small. A strong arm had grabbed her by the leg and pulled her onto wet wood. When she blinked, the darkness was gone, replaced by a billowing sheet. No, not a sheet — a sail.

She sat up. A man with dark skin and close-cropped hair was hitting her back. Salt water burned her throat as it came up in heaving coughs.

“You could have drowned,” the man fumed, his words rolling up and down in a way that was familiar and unfamiliar all at once.

“No,” she said in a little voice that was not her own. “I saw it.” Her vision doubled. The first: the man, the boat, the water she’d vomited onto her lap. The second: the burn in her lungs, the sharp edges of something in her hand, the grip on her ankle. To be pulled up by her ankle was inevitable. It had already happened, even before she dove into the water.

The man was not convinced.

“More of your foolishness, and for what?”

She opened her hand. Curves of wood, a beak, a tail. The finch she had carved for Vaani. The man flickered as if in candlelight. His face thinned, his hair bloomed. The ocean melted away and left only sand.

“What is your name, young one?”

She was back in the alley. She jumped, just as startled as the first time. Vaani crouched behind her, the silk of her dress shimmering in the morning sun. Her face was open, curious.

Fig felt tears on her cheeks.

“I don’t have one,” she insisted. Her voice was far away. “I don’t have anything for you.”

“Is that so?” The enchantress stood. Her unfolding multiplied, multiplied, until she was a giant wrapped in silk. “Shame.”

Fig staggered backwards and fell, then kept falling. When she hit something soft it still knocked the air from her chest. She found herself tangled in blankets and knits, gasping for breath.

“You’re going to be late again,” a dry voice called from her left. She turned. She was in some sort of room littered with books, chalky fabrics, strange instruments. A woman with odd metal hexagons over her eyes stared at her from a doorway. “You know Professor gets testy when you’re late.”

Fig fought against the piles of fabric to sit upright. The woman watched her, undisturbed.

She smirked. “You go visiting your occultist again?” She wore the same strange, angular clothes Clover had worn on the beach, her head wrapped in some dark fabric. The result was utterly foreign. As Fig did not answer, the woman furrowed her eyebrows. Small runes began to glow in rings within the metal perched on her nose. “Wait—”

Fig pulled the covers over her head and returned to darkness. She curled into a ball until the bed beneath and blankets above her melted into stone. A soft, blue light pulsed ahead of her, illuminating her fingertips and the tip of her nose. She shifted onto her stomach and crawled towards it. Spinor’s wort. The blue flower’s spiraling petals pulsed and shifted. She sighed in wonder.

“My violet?” an unmistakable voice called. Fig scrambled to her feet. “There you are.” Her mother smiled, only the very edges of her visible in blue light. “You beat me here.”

Fig ran to her faster than she’d ever run, feet sure in the dark. She ran so fast she was flying.

Stone fell away beneath her feet. She focused only on the glow against her mother’s cheekbones, the curve of her shoulder, but it wasn’t enough. The cave around her disintegrated with every step. Spiky red flowers bloomed beneath her feet as she slowed, then fell. Tears fell onto mottled petals as she heaved herself forward into an endless meadow.

“Sweet seer,” a softer, deeper voice called. “You must let go.”

She looked up to see delicately sewn leather shoes winding beneath the blooms to reach her. A tall woman in a fluttery black dress crouched in the field of flowers. The tips of her braided hair brushed the ground. “Holding on to such things will break you, over time. Your magic can’t contain them all.”

“If not me, there will be no one,” she heard herself say in the voice not her own. Tears hiccuped between each word.

“Some people have no one,” the woman said plainly. “Part of my work is accepting that. It will be yours as well.”

Fig resisted visions of people she did not recognize. An old woman peeling fruit with mottled hands, a man screaming at the edge of an amber cliff, a young girl knitting daisies into a woman’s curls, her face slack with death.

The woman in black snapped in front of her face. The visions dissipated. “Keeping them does not serve the dead, or you.” She had thick brows and full lips. Her face, solid, present, was a comfort. “Come,” she ordered, holding out a hand.

Fig took it. She saw a dark hand, not her own, and grew dizzy. The woman pulled her to her feet and they began to walk through the field, their hands clasped. The woman’s mouth was still moving, Fig realized. She was talking and yet Fig couldn’t hear. Her ears felt fuzzy, itchy. The world swirled. Despite their hands pressed together, her fingertips were cold. Snow began to fall on the field of flowers. The woman did not seem to notice.

Fig opened her mouth to speak but felt something cold against her throat. Something sharp. She pressed her lips together. The snow fell harder, harder, until it flooded her vision white, then black. The woman dropped her hand. The cold enveloped her completely. Fig breathed through her nose slowly to resist the familiar shooting pain in her lungs from the chill, thin air of the mountain. She followed the pain outward, outward, until the blurred edges of her dreams shattered.

She was kneeling somewhere hard with her hands behind her back. There was a rough fabric over her eyes, and something itchy shoved in her ears. She felt the vibration of many feet moving around her.

Strange hands removed both intrusions roughly. She squinted into sudden light and braced against strange chatter.

A single, clear voice rose above the din. “Speak, stranger.”

Fig blinked until the world cleared. A large monkey sat before her, a twin of the statue but with a face red like cherry flesh and hair gray like smoke. It took a puff from a long, wooden pipe. Out of the corner of her eye, another monkey held a sword to her throat.

“Your passenger has been ejected,” the first said. “Defend yourself, or die.”

Her mind whirred. The monkey had a face like a man, spoke like a man, but was most certainly an animal. Her mother had told her stories of these animals that looked like people, but certainly none of them spoke.

“Were you aware of a witch wearing your skin?” the monkey pressed. The chattering of more monkeys all around her grew louder. Even if she could get at her knife before the sword at her neck sliced through, she could not possibly fight them all.

“Yes,” she admitted, surprising herself. She regretted it immediately. Surely, it would be safer to lie. But the monkey’s strange, unwavering glare intimidated her to truth. She shivered.

“Why?” the monkey demanded.

“I am looking for my sister.”

“You do not care for your own sister?” The monkey stared at her with disdain. “Could not pass our trials on the force of your own spirit?” She looked above it to see another set of statues, the same woman and monkey, this time their hands over their mouths.

“We’ve never met,” Fig confessed. The blade before her did not waver. She felt sweat form on her brow.

The monkey scoffed. The chattering increased in volume. “Name who you seek.”

“The occultist Iraya,” she declared. Her heart pounded.

The sword in front of her dropped an inch. She saw the monkey to her side look between her and the speaker, then hoot in some language she did not understand.

The speaking monkey’s wide brow dropped further. “Get Madam Akane,” it ordered. Two monkeys peeled off the edge of the circle, running oddly on both their arms and feet.

The gathering of monkeys whispered, shuffling in the snow. Fig’s knees ached from kneeling on rock. The head monkey folded his legs and beheld her wordlessly.

Fig had no way to know how much time had passed before the two messengers returned, flanked by a harried woman. The woman ran down the slope of the mountain on sandals made from tall wooden platforms, one of her hands holding up the curve of her styled hair. She wore a long robe like the statue woman with a wide piece of fine fabric around her waist.

“Slow, slow,” she begged. “Some of us are old.”

The monkeys did not interrupt their gait until they rejoined the circle, jumping up and down on their hands and feet. The woman took a few gasping breaths before adjusting her robe and coiffed hair.

“Madam Akane,” the lead monkey spoke, bowing its head. “Your ward has a visitor.”

“Oh?” The woman looked at Fig, eyes wide. She searched her face for something she seemingly did not find. “And she failed the trials?”

“She cheated,” the monkey spat. “Sleepwalker.”

“Asleep,” Madam Akane whispered, then clapped. “Ah! Have you been having strange dreams?”

Fig nodded, her attention on the sword. Perhaps with the woman here her captors would be distracted and she could escape.

“What do they taste like?”

Fig looked up in surprise. “Sweet, like spun sugar.”

“Relation?” the woman asked the lead monkey.

“Sister,” it said venomously. “Or so she claims.”

“Hm.” The woman stepped forward, her hand on her chin. This close, Fig could see streaks of black in her gray hair. She examined Fig more carefully. “I see.” Madam Akane turned to face the crowd of monkeys. “I take responsibility for her. She may enter on my word.”

The sword dropped. The watching monkeys whooped and hooted before dispersing back into the wood. The lead monkey did not take its eyes from Fig. “Are you sure, Madam Akane?”

“Yes, Jigo,” she said warmly. She rubbed its shoulder, thick with fur.

The monkey bowed its head again. “If she becomes a problem, I will take care of it personally.”

“Thank you.” She bowed in return.

The monkey called Jigo disappeared into the trees. Fig watched the last of the others retreat behind it before looking at the woman.

“Apologies for the cold welcome.” Madam Akane extended a hand to help her to her feet. “Those we watch over are vulnerable. We must be vigilant.”

Fig did not take her hand but stood. “Do you often kill visitors?”

“Only those without the proper intentions,” the woman replied. She regarded Fig from beneath dark lashes. “Do you have proper intentions?”

“I am here for my sister,” Fig insisted. She tried to keep the nerves from her voice. She sensed these people would not take kindly to her desire for information.

“Then all is well,” the woman decided. “You may call me Akane. Your name?”

“Fig.”

“Nice to meet you, Fig.” Akane bowed, and Fig copied the gesture. She turned to walk back up the trail she had run down, her steps now even and delicate. Fig followed behind.

“Your sister is an unusual guest here. What have you been dreaming?”

Fig considered deceit, but decided the truth of this would not hurt her. “A seer named Clover visits me in my sleep. She knows Iraya. I believe she cares for her quite deeply.”

“As I thought.” Akane smiled. “I’ve met this witch myself.”

“You have?” Fig asked, incredulous.

“It was a long time ago. I was a young woman then.”

Akane was older than Fig’s mother. How old was Clover, really?

“We find many seers under our care. Their magic is,” Akane paused, “exceptionally taxing. A seer’s first vision is unpredictable, often confusing. I believe I was one of the first whose dreams she visited. She told me that years in the future I’d come to find my purpose in this place, and an occultist would need my help. I held the vision of Iraya, sprawled in the woods, in my head for almost twenty years.”

Fig staggered in shock. “I had no knowledge of this.”

“I think of Clover often,” Akane mused. “In my remembering I’ve forgotten almost everything about that dream except the taste.”

“She’s never mentioned you.” Fig scowled.

“Pity,” Akane laughed. “I’ve always felt quite special.”

Fig resolved to question Clover more thoroughly upon their next meeting. She had not only risked Fig’s life, but withheld far more than she shared.

For now, Fig would have to question this odd woman. She felt for magic and found none other than the subtle thickening of the air. Magic like the dove’s settled over everything. Though she was no longer cold, each of her movements felt heavier, as if she were wading through water.

“You were the one to bring Iraya here? After your dream?” she asked.

“Yes,” Akane replied. “For a long while the vision lingered in the back of my head. I pursued a position here only after the entirety of a different life. Well lived. It was years after my appointment when I felt it was time, somehow. I led Jigo and the others right to her. She had collapsed not far from the base of the mountain.”

“Collapsed?” Fig prodded.

“Near dead,” Akane sighed. “She said her name, among other things I could not parse, then fully retreated into her mind. She has not spoken since.”

The hair of Fig’s arms stood upright. Before this moment, her sister was a figment, a step in a larger plan. To speak to someone who had seen her, touched her, helped her, made her suddenly concrete. The demon’s words echoed in Fig’s skull. We’ve lost contact with her. What role had Cervus played in her state? How had she been separated from their mother? What had led her, on the edge of death, to this place?

“It took me a moment to see the resemblance,” Akane continued, looking at Fig with curiosity. “I imagined anyone who came for her would share her markings.”

“Markings?” Fig choked.

Akane gestured over her hands, chest, and arms.

Fig could picture them more clearly than the ground in front of her. She had spent her life beholding them, tracing them with her fingertips, begging for her own while her mother only laughed, then beheld her sternly. Your skin is beautiful, dear one. Better than beautiful — it is your own.

Fig blinked back tears. “Our mother has them,” she whispered.

Akane took her arm. The fabric of her sleeve, so long it brushed their hips, was embroidered with white thread.

“We have been waiting a long while for your visit.”

After one final slope, the path flattened. Before them loomed a large white gate, almost identical to the previous one except for six figures carved into its crossbeams. Three pairs of women and monkeys — hands over their eyes, their ears, their mouths.

As soon as she took in the gate, a wave of magic washed over Fig — sulfur, citrus, salt. She blinked against it, her hands covering her face. The feeling of walking through gelatinous air intensified. With each step forward the breath in her lungs became heavier, denser, pulled her down to the earth. Akane used her long sleeves to clear a path before them.

As the woman parted the air, a sprawling scale of pools appeared — more isolated water than Fig had ever seen in one place. The pools began high up the mountain, then crawled downwards in wide steppes. Waterfalls gushed from highest to lowest, down, down, over the edge of a cliff into the clouds. Steam and magic billowed so thickly Fig could barely make out where one bubbling spring ended and another began.

Akane guided her gently up a winding stone path. As they strolled closer, Fig saw cut fruits bob in the water like ducklings as red-faced monkeys of all sizes swam amongst them. Some were small like children, while the largest was three times her height. She mistook one for part of the mountain, then jumped back in fright when it raised a clay bowl as large as a tub to pour water over its head.

“Welcome to the Asylum,” Akane shouted over the roar of water. “One moment, it will be quieter ahead.”

They passed through the pools and turned a corner through a grove of bamboo. The air loosened enough that Fig could move her legs without effort. She was sluggish, suddenly sleepy.

“The monkeys prefer the hot springs by the entrance. They’re often too hot for our wards.”

“What is this place?” Fig asked, baffled. She had not known what to expect, but boiling lakes filled with animals was beyond any of her imaginings. Outside the bamboo stalks, the path snaked around large buildings of a style she’d never seen. Their walls were made of thin screens pulled between frames of wood, their roofs curved and pointed. Women dressed in the same robes as Akane moved between the buildings carrying baskets or trays of food. They smiled warmly as they passed, exchanged small greetings.

“A respite,” Akane explained. “Our founder, Dove, made an agreement with the monkeys many centuries ago. She expanded this place as a refuge for witches in need.”

“Dove like the bird guide?” Fig asked.

“Yes, the dove opals are her work as well. Your dove is in a coop ahead, if you’d like to visit her during your stay.”

Fig tried to see inside the buildings as their attendants entered and exited, but their interiors were too darkly lit.

“Witches in need?” she repeated.

“Most are Lost. Witches who have been transformed by pain, who have corrupted their bodies, who have been consumed by magic. Before Dove, they would wander the wilds in agony. Here we care for them.”

“How do you fix them?” Fig asked, her heart beating.

Akane only looked at her. The woman’s eyes drooped. “The good news is we do not think your sister is Lost.”

As they walked, the buildings became sparser and sparser. Fig heard the bubbling of more hot springs out of sight, the rocky ground around them coated in snow.

“At least, I don’t.” Akane spoke firmly, her fists clenched. “I can feel her mind stirring. The others don’t believe me.” She stopped before a building far smaller than the rest, about the size of Fig’s cottage. The older woman looked at her with hope. “You will prove them wrong, yes?”

Fig gulped, but tried to nod with confidence.

Akane seemed to accept that. She stepped onto the wooden porch that ran along the perimeter of the building and pushed its screen door aside.

The interior of the building was one large room, its floor made of some interlocked fiber.

“Hand woven,” Akane explained, then gestured for Fig to remove her shoes. “Delicate.”

Covered lanterns hung from the ceiling and bathed the room in a dim golden light. There was a bucket, faucet, and small cook stove in the corner, next to which Akane directed Fig to place her shoes. Beside them, a shelf of linens and rags. The entire place smelled of straw and soap.

Akane bowed her head towards the end of the room. At its far edge lay a low wooden dais piled with white sheets and a thick duvet. Fig stepped forward, her heartbeat pounding between her ears.

The comforter’s surface lifted and dropped like the chest of some creature. Light flickered across its surface as if it were suspended under water, deep in the belly of a river.

Each of Fig’s steps was an eternity. She felt, with the force of time ever moving, that these were the final steps of her life as it was. To approach the dais was to change the core of her being forever. A small, inescapable part of her longed to turn and run — past the fields of snow, the buildings, the bamboo forest, the legion of bathing monkeys. Run down the mountain, over the plains, through the forest, run and not stop running until she was back in her sun-soaked clearing, her cluttered home. If she never took these final steps, never sealed her fate in melted wax, she could live alone and pretend her mother would return. Pretend none of this had ever happened. Become a shadow of the girl she could have been. A sister.

And yet, none of these desires made her any less who she was. She was a girl who had lost everything, who clung to what little she had with the desperation of the deer struck by the arrow, the fox with its leg in a snare. There was nowhere she could be but here. There was nowhere she could go but to the edge of this room. To think otherwise was a fantasy.

Fig took the final step. She resisted screaming instincts to avert her gaze and instead looked down at the pile of downy white cloth. It could have been a cocoon, a grave piled with snow. A head crowned by dark hair broke such illusions.

Nestled in the comforter was a figure strange, horrible, magnificent, familiar.

Iraya.