1
Fi
darkness pressed in around Fi like a cold frost, making the hair stand up on her arms and stealing the breath from her lungs. She blinked, unable to tell whether her eyes were open or closed. Everything was just blackness. The smooth stone floor was like ice under her bare feet, and she shivered in her nightgown, wrapping her arms around herself. She had a feeling that if she could see anything, her breaths would be white clouds in front of her face. The silence was so oppressive it echoed like a ringing in her ears. Fi squeezed her eyes shut, trying to get her bearings and figure out where she was.
A sharp tug on her hand made Fi’s eyes spring open. She looked down to find a shining golden thread looped around her fingers, glowing over the Butterfly Curse mark on her palm. The thread spiraled off into the gloom like an invitation. Fi lifted the golden string and began pulling it in, hand over hand, following the unspooling thread deeper into the blackness. A pit of dread opened in her stomach, gnawing at her insides as she went on. She had a feeling she had been here before. She knew where this path ended.
Fi began to run, her bare feet slapping against the stone. The golden thread was so light it felt like nothing in her hands. Something rattled ahead of her, concealed by the dark. Fi gripped the thread like a lifeline.
Suddenly, she was face-to-face with two gleaming red eyes. The darkness shrank back as a bone creature surged up in front of her, spiral horns rising from its bleached skull. Its spine was a twist of disjointed vertebrae, and its arms were ropes of sinew ending in jutting bone claws. It was a monster with red eyes—but still Briar’s eyes.
The creature seized Fi by the arms, those sharp claws so long they dragged against her back as its massive bat-like wings unfurled above her. Its red eyes burned like fire. They were so captivating it took Fi a moment to notice that the end of the golden thread disappeared into the empty space in the creature’s chest, where its heart should be.
Terror made everything slow down—the shiver in her lungs, the clench of fear in her gut. Fi was frozen. The skull face was close enough that she could make out the tiny imperfections around the eye sockets. Close enough to kiss. A thrill of horror slid through her as the skull tipped toward her, but in the end, the creature only lifted one gruesome hand, clutching the golden thread.
There was a voice in her head suddenly—Briar’s voice.
Where does it lead?
fi shot up from the nightmare, panting and sweating. She scrambled to her feet so fast she knocked the chair she had fallen asleep in to the floor. Her hand slid across the battered desk, scattering papers and quills as she blinked the dream away. It took a moment to recognize the things around her: the small, round room of gray stone, her lumpy pallet on the floor, the arched window that let in the only light.
Suddenly, Fi needed air. She stumbled over to the wide sill, perching carefully on the edge and digging her fingers into the rough stones. There was no glass or shutter on this window. Cold sweat had made her blouse damp under her black vest, and the breeze chased goose bumps up her arms. It was a warm, sunny afternoon, but there was always a chill here, in the Spindle Witch’s tower.
Fi looked out at the landscape she’d studied a hundred times. High, dark mountains ringed the valley, their slopes so steep it looked like they’d been shorn away. A dead forest lurked at the base of the tower, which wasn’t so much a building as a jagged spire of stone piercing the heart of the valley, sheer and unyielding. Instead of carefully smoothed arches and polished flagstones, everything in the Spindle Witch’s tower was narrow and rough-hewn, and the doorways were so low Fi had to duck to get through them. There were only three rooms, stacked on top of each other at the very tallest part of the tower, all the windows facing the same direction.
There were no stairs to the base of the tower—no way out at all, except the same way she’d gotten in: Briar.
Briar. Just thinking of him made Fi’s heart stutter. It wasn’t the first time she had dreamed of the bone creature bound with golden thread. She was sure it was Briar, but she was less sure whether he was really in the dream, trying to tell her something, or if it was just her mind tormenting her with her worst fears. She wouldn’t be surprised. This place was enough to drive anyone mad. She had only been here a few weeks, but it already felt like an eternity.
Fi leaned as far as she dared out the window, searching for movement below. The forest around the tower was long dead, the bristling white trees calcified like stone. It reminded her of the Forest of Thorns, but where that had been a knot of oppressive black, the trees around the tower seemed to shimmer, their branches thick with delicate golden threads that danced in the breeze. The whole valley glittered like sunlight on the top of a lake.
The ground beneath the trees was blinding white. For the first few days, Fi had thought the valley was full of bleached rocks, or maybe crusted in salt or some other mineral. Then she realized the truth. The entire valley was carpeted in the bones of animals, years and years of skeletons layered over each other. The only creatures that lived in the forest now were the crows, the dark blotches of their feathered bodies stark against the glittering woods as they laughed and called to each other, pecking at the bones.
Fi’s fingers clenched the windowsill. Briar Rose was perched in the highest branches of a skeletal tree below the window, staring up at Fi. The great juts of dark wings curved from his back, and his ivory horns gleamed in the sunlight, but he was still mostly Briar, not yet the skull monster she saw in her dreams. Desperately, she traced the pale skin of his face and the vee of his neck with her gaze—still flush, still real. Still alive.
Fi swallowed down his name. For the first few days, she had screamed herself hoarse calling for him, praying that she would see some spark of recognition in his gaze. He never so much as stirred. Fi was beginning to worry she might never see her Briar again. And yet every time she sought him out, he was always looking back at her, gazing up at the window, following her every movement with his empty red eyes. It was the tiny spark of hope she held on to late at night, when the dark tower seemed to close in around her and it was hard to remember why she was doing this.
Fi’s hands curled into fists. She stepped back from the window, forcing herself to look away. Briar was why she had allowed the Spindle Witch to take her to this bleak place, why she spent every day poring over Camellia’s book and code. She had to deceive the Spindle Witch into thinking she was working for her—at least until she found a way to save Briar Rose.
It was the biggest gamble Fi had ever taken, and the one with the worst odds. The more she found out about the Siphoning Spells the Spindle Witch was after, the more Fi was sure she could never be allowed to get her hands on them. The devastation she’d wreak would be incalculable—for Briar’s people scattered across Andar; for Fi’s partner, Shane, out there somewhere; even for her home kingdom of Darfell.
Guilt roiled in her gut at the notion of what she was risking, and a pang of longing seized her heart at the thought of her own family in Idlewild. She imagined her mother in the garden, clipping the last summer stalks of her golden orchids, while her father wandered the yard with his hands clasped at his back, forever obsessing about the drooping tomato plants. So many lives just like theirs hung in the balance.
Fi took a deep breath. What was done was done. The only way out of this—for any of them—was for her to follow through and figure out how to stop the Spindle Witch.
She turned back to the room, stepping around her pallet and a stack of clothes in a basket, plain blouses and pants that Fi traded out beneath her vest. Her old, tattered glove lay at the bottom, torn and discarded. Sometimes the sight of the Butterfly Curse on her tan skin surprised her; she had become so used to the black glove. But there was no one to hide from here, and no one to hurt.
The Spindle Witch had laughed at the mark when she had first seen it—such a tiny thing, she called it. Fi had never felt smaller or more insignificant than in that moment, listening to the Witch laugh away the curse that had taken everything from her. Why did the Butterfly Curse only seem to be able to hurt the people who didn’t deserve it?
Her small cabinet held a jug of water, a string of dried jerky, and a knot of hard bread that only the Spindle Witch could replenish. Fi had no idea when the woman came and went from the tower, only that sometimes she was there and sometimes she was gone in a cloud of beating black wings.
The desk was a mess from when Fi had jerked up from her nightmare, and she winced, realizing Camellia’s precious book had fallen to the floor. She scooped it up, smoothing the bent pages. The book had fallen open on a picture of a girl with golden hair staring longingly out the window of a dark tower.
The book Camellia had hidden away was a collection of children’s stories. Fi recognized most of them, like “The Ghost in the Well” and “The Girl in the Forest of Wolves,” but these were ancient versions, all of them with dark, unhappy endings. Instead of trapping the ghost in the well and escaping together, one child pushed the other to his death in order to replace the lid. The brave huntsman fought the wolves of the forest to save his true love, only to find they were actually the missing villagers under an enchantment and he had slaughtered them all. It cast a sinister pall over the folktales of Fi’s childhood, like she was seeing the dark seeds at the centers of the stories.
Over the last few weeks, word by word, she had pieced together Camellia’s code, but she was starting to think that wasn’t the only secret Camellia had hidden in this book. There were notes scrawled in the margins, too, all of them surrounding one particular story: “The Eye of the Witch.”
Like the rest of the stories, this was a particularly bleak telling, but with every word, every faded illustration, Fi had become certain of one thing. The Spindle Witch was the girl in the story, and this was the tower she had been imprisoned in.
Camellia must have figured out the Spindle Witch’s true identity and left this book as a message to Briar, but Fi wasn’t sure what it meant. The girl’s real name wasn’t in the pages, and the whole story was written like a fable. Had the girl in the story really eaten her twin, or had she just survived when the other baby didn’t? Had she killed her mother, or had the woman died in childbirth? As someone who studied history, Fi knew better than to put much stock in the specific details of old stories.
On the other hand, this valley was filled with a sea of bones, and Fi had nearly been devoured by the Spindle Witch herself. Her hand rose unconsciously to her neck, remembering the golden thread twisted around it and draining away the life inside her. It wasn’t hard to imagine the Spindle Witch as a monster locked away for the safety of all.
Fi rubbed at her eyes, frustrated. She’d read the story so many times the words practically blurred when she looked at them. Camellia’s vague notes were no help. On one page, long golden hair was circled twice, and on another, Camellia had underlined devouring life, with the word Time? scrawled in the margins. Maybe it had meant something to Camellia, but it didn’t mean anything to Fi.
At least not yet. She needed more information, and there might be a way to get some.
Fi glanced behind her at the aged wooden door, her eyes flickering up to the ceiling. The whole valley was quiet, with no birdsong, no animals, no rustling leaves, just the howl of the wind and the irregular screech of the crows. Most of the time, it made Fi feel like she was losing her grip on reality, but it also meant she’d learned to recognize all the sounds of the Spindle Witch moving around the room above her: the sharp footsteps, the scritch of a pen on parchment, even the little hiss and whir that meant the Witch was spinning. Right now, everything was silent.
There was one place in the tower Fi had not been yet. The room at the very top—the Spindle Witch’s room. If there was anything to be found, that would be the place.
Fi didn’t wait. She didn’t want to give herself time to rethink this. She glanced briefly at her rope with the metal ring, which was coiled around one leg of the desk. She passed it, grabbing a single sheet of stiff paper instead. If it came down to a fight with the Spindle Witch, Fi had already lost. The point was to be smarter. Fi folded the paper between her hands with a sharp crease.
She opened the door cautiously, stopping again to listen as she looked up the curving staircase. It was so steep and the steps so narrow it was almost more like a ladder, and Fi often had to hold on with both hands when she climbed down to the small washroom below, the ice-cold water pumped in from a cistern.
Fi turned the other direction, climbing slowly and silently. Her heart thudded dully in her chest like it was beating through a block of ice. This wasn’t the first time she had climbed to the door at the top of the tower, but she had hesitated each time, afraid of what would happen if she was caught. The Spindle Witch wanted the code Fi had memorized and whatever it led to, but Fi wasn’t foolish enough to think she was anything more than the most convenient means to that end. That could change fast.
She forced herself to go on. The way things were going, she would have to give the Spindle Witch the code soon, anyway, and then she would become just as expendable.
This was why Fi hated gambling. Her brain incessantly fed her worst-case scenarios one after another, threatening to paralyze her.
She stood before the Spindle Witch’s door, staring at the flaking wood. Dread settled over her shoulders like a cloak. Fi shook it off.
It’s just like a ruin, she thought, steeling herself. Keep a level head, and you can figure your way out.
The last time she had come up these steps, Fi had studied the door carefully enough to know that there was no lock on the tarnished handle. Instead, it seemed to be held shut by a hook slid into a ring on the other side. That was what the piece of paper was for. Fi lifted the folded sheet, pressing her fingers along the crease to make it crisp. Then she slid the stiff paper between the door and the frame, under the hook. She lifted it up carefully until she felt it tap against the hook.
If she yanked up with all her might, she would just rip the paper, but Fi knew how to be patient. She raised the fold, tapping at the hook little by little and working it loose. Her palms were sweaty and her shoulders tense when the piece of metal finally popped free. Fi stuffed the paper into her pocket, turning the handle and pushing the door inward slowly.
No tripwire snapped, and the figure of the Spindle Witch didn’t loom out of the shadows. There was just the soft swish of the door closing behind her, and before she was ready, Fi found herself walking into the heart of the Spindle Witch’s tower.
Fi honestly didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t this. It looked like a child’s room—or at least a prison that had held a child. There was a small, half-sized bed in a metal frame crowned with polished knobs and a tattered blanket that looked more like a spiderweb. On the pillow lay a twisted burlap sack in the shape of a doll, with large button eyes and a jagged smile that had clearly been cut and resewn. There was also some kind of pattern or writing on the wall, low to the ground.
Fi knelt to get a better look. It wasn’t a message at all. Instead, Fi ran her fingers across childlike drawings carved into the stone. Crosshatches and grooves showed where careless little hands had scraped something dull and metal over and over into the hard rock.
There was nothing special about the pictures themselves. They were just like the ones Fi had scratched into the dirt with sticks, mostly rabbits and dogs and other animals, but there were hundreds of them, painstakingly scored into the stone line by line. Fi’s stomach did a little flip-flop as she thought of the monster born in the shape of a girl, locked in a tower. How many figures were carved into the walls—hundreds? How many years would it have taken a lonely child to carve them? And could it really have been the Spindle Witch?
Fi traced a crow with an over-wide smile and then stood up with a shiver. She didn’t have forever to look around. A spinning wheel sat by a large open window so tall Fi thought she could stand upright in the frame. Beneath it lay a basket brimming with tangles of gold, which Fi assumed was unspun thread. There was an armoire on the other side of the room, and next to it a vanity with a tall rectangular mirror.
She headed to the armoire but was distracted by the movement of her fractured reflection in the mirror. The glass was scarred by long cracks that ran its entire length, splintering her image into an unsettling patchwork. Her broken reflection turned with her as she moved toward the vanity.
Only three things sat on the smooth surface: a little dish stained the deep red of the Spindle Witch’s lips, an ancient brush with a tarnished silver handle, and a gleaming pair of scissors. There was something important here, Fi thought, her hand hovering over the scissors. This was a clue, and her brain was desperately trying to put it together.
She reached up to tug on her ear, distracted. Dread slithered through the pit of her stomach, a foreboding feeling she couldn’t place until she realized that her reflection hadn’t moved when she did.
Fi’s head shot up. Her reflection was gone, and there was someone else in the mirror.
A figure with dark brown hair that fell around him like a tangle of spider threads sat on the other side of the vanity. He reached out, almost as though his hand would stretch through the fractured glass. “You have something of mine,” he whispered. A strange smile twisted his lips as he lifted his face just enough for her to make out his features. One deep green eye fixed on her, the other closed under a crisscross of scars marring his tan face.
Fi leapt back, adrenaline pounding through her veins. Something of his? Even as fear prickled her skin, her mind was whirring. The man inside the mirror—could it be . . . ?
Then, all at once, the man surged forward, his long hair wild, his face so close his scratched-out eye reflected in every crack of the broken mirror.
“Get out,” he warned, his expression dark and sinister.
Fi felt as though those words had knocked the breath out of her. She stumbled back.
“Get out!” the man said again, and this time something slammed into her, like a gust of wind that hurled her backward.
A gasp ripped from her throat as she plunged toward the wide-open window. She tripped over the basket, and the backs of her knees hit the edge of the rough stone sill. She made one last desperate effort to catch herself, grabbing at the edge of the window as her back arced over the dizzying drop. The high wind whipped at her hair, and she felt like a thread as thin as the one from her dream was all that held her up.
The last thing she saw was the dark-haired man smiling in the broken mirror. Then she felt phantom hands on her shoulders, shoving her out of the tower into the empty air.
Fi screamed, but the sound was swallowed by a sudden cacophony of crows, black wings beating in a thundercloud as all the birds in the valley rose at once. Her body seemed to hang in the sky for one impossible moment, and then she was falling, careening headfirst toward the bone-covered ground far below. Black feathers filled the air. Fi’s chest clenched so hard that her heart must surely have stopped beating. She squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to see the crash.
Then there was a rush of air around her, and her body jerked as she stopped falling, something sharp digging into her back. At first, Fi thought she’d been impaled on one of the skeletal trees. Then she recognized the feel of the arms around her. Her eyes shot open. She surged up, exhilarated, desperately searching the face of her savior, hoping to meet beautiful blue eyes.
The pale face above her was slack—empty eyes bloodred. The calcified forest rose around them. Briar had caught her scant inches from the ground.
Fi gaped at him, queasy from the fall and the feel of Briar’s sharp claws digging into her skin. His arms were warm where they were still flesh and horrifyingly cold where they had turned to bone, but it didn’t stop her from holding on as tight as she could, winding her arms around his neck. They hadn’t been this close since their last night together under the stars. She twined her fingers into Briar’s golden hair. The soft strands felt so familiar, but his face was an expressionless mask, his lips thinned into a frown Briar had never worn.
“Briar,” she whispered. She could have sworn those red eyes flickered to her for just a moment, but she lost him again in a beat of his powerful wings, the air surging around them as he soared back up the tower.
Her hopes of reaching Briar, at least right now, shriveled when she saw what was waiting for her. The Spindle Witch had appeared in the highest window, and she was calling Briar to her, summoning him with a crook of one long, thin finger. The Witch motioned for her pet to bring Fi up to the forbidden room, and Briar obeyed. He had still been there to catch Fi, though, and she would hold on to that.
The Spindle Witch watched their approach, her red lips pressed together under the black veil. The wild rise of the crows had been a sign of her coming back, Fi realized. The man in the mirror had pushed her out just as the Spindle Witch returned. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Fi was disoriented and shaken, but she tried not to let that show on her face as Briar flew through the giant window and set her down before the Spindle Witch. Then he left her, moving away to hover outside the window.
The Spindle Witch’s dark eyes fixed on Fi through the lacy veil. Fi couldn’t tell if she was smiling cruelly or if the natural curve of her lips just had a sinister lilt. Her mind raced as she tried to figure out how to explain what she had been doing in the Spindle Witch’s room, to calculate whether begging for mercy would have any effect on the Witch who stood over her.
“I do hope that pathetic sight wasn’t some sort of escape attempt,” the woman said, clicking her tongue. “It’s quite a fall from your window, dear, and I thought I was clear when I warned you there’s no getting away.”
Fi bit her tongue, trying not to react. The Spindle Witch must think she had fallen out of her own window. But even if the Witch hadn’t seen her sneaking around, at the very least, the hook on the door should still have been open. Fi’s eyes cut over to the door, only to find that the hook was properly in place once more.
A flicker of movement drew her gaze to the mirror. The image of the one-eyed man flashed into the surface for a moment, his finger held over his lips. Shh.
Fi’s mouth went dry.
The Spindle Witch tapped her nails impatiently. “What are you looking at?” she demanded, turning around. The man was already gone.
“Nothing—and I didn’t try to escape,” Fi said. It wasn’t hard to fake the shaking in her voice. “I just fell. It was an accident.”
If the man in the mirror had gone so far as to fix the lock on the door, then Fi was sure of it: he had pushed her out of the window to keep the Spindle Witch from finding her. But why?
The Spindle Witch hummed thoughtfully, twirling a little piece of golden thread between her fingers. “I’ll have to keep a closer eye on you, then—just to make sure there are no more accidents.” Her eyes glittered with an unmistakable threat, and Fi swallowed hard, taking it for the warning it was. “Now . . . do you have my code yet?”
“I’m close,” Fi said, her voice carefully flat. “I’ve almost got it unscrambled.”
There had been times in her life when Fi regretted not being a more emotive person. Her ex, Armand, had certainly never tired of needling her for keeping her feelings buried when other people’s were right at the surface. Right now, though, she was just grateful.
In truth, she had already unscrambled the book code and Camellia’s message. She just hadn’t worked out what it meant yet. She had to hide that from the Spindle Witch for as long as possible to buy herself more time.
“I certainly hope you’re very close, and not just for my sake,” the Spindle Witch crooned, her finger crooked. Suddenly, Fi was very aware of Briar still waiting for orders in the window. “My patience is wearing quite thin. Better get back to it, hadn’t you?”
The Spindle Witch sent Briar off with a dismissive wave, his wings heaving as he flew back to his perch in the dead forest. With her other hand, she gestured to the door. Fi hurried to escape before the Witch changed her mind.
She couldn’t help but shoot one last look at the mirror as she passed. It was empty of everything except her own ashen reflection, but she did notice something she hadn’t the first time. There was a subtle pattern of butterflies engraved along the edge of the mirror, beautiful stylized swallowtails.
Her head swirled at the possibilities of just who was hiding in the mirror, who the Spindle Witch really was, and how Camellia had expected an old storybook to save an entire kingdom. Fi had come up here searching for answers, but all she had were more questions, and the feeling she was running out of time.