Raine's gaze snapped to Aspen's mouth. A smear of cream sat there where Lyra would have wiped it away before Raine could lift a hand. Raine's hand lifted half an inch from the table, then dropped so quickly her knuckles hit the wood.
She looked at Quinn after that. Her expression did not beg all at once. It started in her lower wings drawing tight through the chair-slits, and then at the thumb leaving its raw knuckle. Her eyes stayed on Quinn's face, wet and fixed, as if Quinn had one hand on a door Raine needed kept shut.
Quinn shook her head once. Small and final. Her mouth softened after, too late to make the refusal kind. Raine's hand dropped into her lap.
"Alright. Stand up," Quinn said.
Aspen looked down at the dreamcake still pinched between her fingers. "Where are we going?"
"Nowhere. Unless you've learned better standing while seated."
Aspen set the dreamcake down and pushed herself up. The chair clicked softly behind her as her wings slipped free of the back gaps. The other brushed the polished edge and corrected itself before Aspen could. Raine watched the movement too closely.
Quinn came around the table. She stopped close enough for Aspen to smell bitter leaf and the dark of wet moss, then held out her palm. "Arm."
Aspen's fingers twitched toward the two-finger shape Raine had wanted, then flattened. She gave Quinn her wrist.
Quinn took it with three dry fingers beneath the pulse and turned Aspen's arm toward the mushroom-light until the skin almost went translucent. Sap-lines braided under the pale skin, thin as threads near the hand, thicker as they climbed the forearm, each pulse lighting a fraction after the beat in Aspen's chest.
Quinn tapped one glowing vein with her nail. "There." The line under Quinn's nail brightened late, like it had to be asked twice.
Aspen watched the blue answer the touch. Quinn's finger followed the vein upward. Wrist to forearm. Forearm to the soft bend of the elbow. Up over the sleeve, where Aspen felt the path continue even after she could no longer see it. Quinn did not need to look. Her finger moved as if the route had been drawn on every body she had ever tended.
She stopped over Aspen's chest. Not over the necklace. Lower and left of the center. The place beat once. Oh. It's the heart?
"The Cridh is what beats in here," Quinn said. Her thumb stayed on Aspen's wrist, keeping the proof where Raine could see it.
Then why would she ask if I had a literal heart?
Quinn's finger lifted from Aspen's chest. She moved it outward instead, past the chest and shoulder. Into the open air. Into the warm nothing. The space did not move, but Quinn treated it like it had a surface.
"And here."
Aspen stared at Quinn's finger. Here? Her brain tried to make that word useful and failed. Heart in the chest. Fine. Weird blood, okay. She cocked her head. But what?
Quinn's lips twitched. "There it is."
"I don't want to ask something stupid."
"Then don't ask. Look." Quinn took Aspen's wrist again, not by the pulse this time. Her fingers closed around the joint from above, dry thumb pressing lightly over the place Raine had checked before. Then she led Aspen around the table toward the nearest mushroom on the wall.
This mushroom's cap was low and faint blue, thin at the edges, with little pale fibers stitched into the wood around its stem. Someone had tied the fibers in a pattern small enough to be maintenance, not decoration. The sap-light moved inside the mushroom slowly, not in veins exactly, but in soft branching threads that gathered near the center and faded toward the rim.
Quinn pointed at the cap. "Don't know if you've noticed this before, but raise your hand near it."
Aspen looked at the mushroom. "How near?"
"Near enough that it notices."
...Is it alive? Oh well, of course it is. That was stupid. Quinn waited. Aspen cringed and lifted her hand. At first, nothing happened.
But as her palm grew closer, the blue inside the mushroom thickened on the side closest to her palm. Not a full glow, more like the cap had inhaled. It did not come all the way. It considered her. The little threads under its skin brightened by degrees, leaning toward her hand until the cap's soft edge bent out from the wood. A bead of sap gathered at the stem and held there, round and trembling.
Aspen's wings stiffened. "It... moved."
"Aye."
"It literally moved."
"Aye."
"W-Why can it do that?"
Quinn pulled Aspen's hand back before the cap could lean any farther. The mushroom dimmed almost at once. Then Quinn raised her own hand to the same place. Same distance. Same angle. Palm open, fingers loose, wrist steady.
The mushroom answered like it had been waiting for permission. Blue climbed through it from stem to rim, and the light touched the wrinkles in Quinn's palm.
Aspen's wings hung slack.
Quinn lowered her hand. The mushroom settled back into its hollow, light folding inward thread by thread. "Cridh begins in the chest, but it does not stay shut in there." She touched two fingers to her own sternum, then held them out toward the mushroom's dimming cap.
"Cridh is not the sap in your blood. Sap carries, answers, and remembers." Her fingers moved to Aspen's wrist, where the blue lines still pulsed beneath the skin. "But that's all it does. The mushrooms reach for those whose Cridh carries farther. They know what has enough weight to pull them into their next shape. They want to change."
Aspen looked at the mushroom. The cap was still faintly brighter on the side Quinn had faced. The blue in her tongue remembered dirt. The smell of hay kept through rain. Bitter medicine. A root cellar opened in winter. Quinn's name had not been a sound. It had pressed itself into Aspen's mouth with shape, weather, use. A whole person condensed into taste.
Not personality. Not soul. No, that sounded too human to her, too easy.
It was the chair shifting forward before she asked. The silk remembering hands. The mushroom leaning. The room making little adjustments around a person because ignoring them would take more work.
"It's reacting to..." She stopped. Presence sounded fake. Spirit sounded worse. Heart was already taken and apparently not enough.
She looked at Quinn's bent shoulders, the thorn-dark pins in her hair, the dry fingers that had known where every pulse and scar belonged. The old woman did not fill the room loudly. She filled it the way roots filled soil.
Aspen swallowed. "Weight?"
Quinn's smile came slow. "Aye, close enough for a first bite." Then she looked back at Raine. She did not explain. She did not say, 'See?' She only held Raine's eyes and lifted Aspen's wrist to the height of the table, just enough for Raine to refuse to look and still see.
"No smell," Quinn said. "Still, the room answered. As it does for you."
Raine's fingers tightened around her dreamcake. Cream squeezed out between them and bled along her knuckle. She looked at Aspen's wrist. Then at the mushroom. Then down at the table. "I see."
"I'm sorry," Aspen whispered. She hated that it was still the first thing her mouth knew how to make. Raine looked up. Not at Aspen's wrist this time, nor the blue veins Quinn had lifted like evidence.
Raine looked straight into her eyes. The contact lasted one moment too long.
Then her face began to close. Her mouth pressed flat, hard enough to whiten at one corner. Her chin tucked, but not far enough to hide the tremble. The skin beneath her eyes tightened until the wetness there had nowhere clean to go. She set the crushed dreamcake down without looking. Cream stuck to her fingers. She wiped them once against her skirt, missed half of it, and stood.
Her wings slipped free of the chair-gaps too carefully. One edge caught on the polished wood. She stopped, freed it with two fingers, and did not look back at Aspen while doing it. The motion was practiced enough to hurt. Then she walked to the curtain that opened to the outside. The proper triangle faced them. The hollow one waited on the other side, asking the watchers not to lean through.
She pushed through fast enough for the fabric to slap against the wall after her. Aspen watched the triangle settle back into shape. Three lines pointed up. The correct side for being seen, and the side that Raine had just left.
The Rooci watch over us. The thought came with Quinn's hand-circles over her eyes. Child spyglasses with no joke in them. Invisible things looking down through mushroom light and carved wood and whatever counted as sky here.
Did they watch that? All of that?
Aspen stared at the triangle. That seems unfair. The thought was too small for what it meant. Her eyes stayed on the curtain. Did God pick this?
Or maybe not God, but the Rooci. Same question with a worse vocabulary. She had not believed hard enough for this to feel like betrayal, which somehow did not help. What decided this should happen?
Why did I have to be put in this body? It's cruel. It's too perfect to be anything but planned.
"Do they just watch?" the words escaped her.
Quinn was quiet behind her. Long enough for Aspen to hear Raine's dreamcake cream drip from the table onto the floor.
No mushroom pulsed.
Quinn sighed. Not annoyed. Not tired exactly. It was a careful exhale through the nose, one hand moving to the table edge and gripping it until the knuckles showed bluish-pale beneath old skin.
"Guess it's about time you learned something of the Rooci."
Aspen turned to her. Quinn was already looking at the curtain Raine had gone through. For once, the old woman did not move immediately. Her eyes stayed on the fabric, on the tiny place near the lower edge where Raine's wing had dragged moisture across it. The mark was already drying. One thumb rubbed at the side of her own palm, slow and practical, as if finding a splinter there would be easier than deciding what kindness cost.
Then she straightened.
"Come."
She walked to the outer curtain, but she did not pull it open. Aspen followed. Quinn lifted one corner first. Just enough to look through.
The motion was almost insulting in its restraint. The woman checking whether a wound had room to breathe before bringing another body near it. Her shoulders stayed angled so Aspen could not see past her. Her bent frame blocked the gap completely.
Aspen waited. Quinn's eyes moved once outside. Left. Lower. Then farther out. Her mouth tightened, then eased by a fraction. "She's gone to your home." Quinn paused. "Or well, the last Hermit's home."
She let the corner fall. Her hand stayed on the weave for another second, fingers spread on the upright triangle. Then she looked back at Aspen.
"Careful now," she said softly.
Not like Aspen was fragile. Like Quinn knew exactly how much pressure old wood could take before the split ran through it.