“Now, the Shaes know the words. They’ve been taught to speak them all their lives. But you two are new to them.” Nana’s smile was wide and crinkly, and Scratch noticed for the first time that the old woman’s canine teeth were sharp and pointed. “Read them, but don’t say them out loud yet. Get to know them for a moment. If you just recite the words, the bond may not take.”

Scratch glanced down at the paper. The ink was a black so dark it looked like holes, deep portals through paper to flesh and beyond. She ran her finger over the print. It seemed like it should have been wet, but it stayed put, firm and glossy. She read:

I enter a room through a borrow-bought pass twixt where swiftly-sweet grasses a dew’d

With her blood in my blood tilly-tumping through vein we emerge rolly-polling renew’d

I escape my mean flesh through between-gate refresh’d and touch world through the room to explore

’Tis a gift I receive, so I promise to leave of myself when I pass through the door

“Leave of myself?” Scratch swallowed thickly. The words rattled around in her mind, pieces meant to fit but slipping away, skittering under the folds of her brain like cockroaches exposed to light. “What does that mean?”

Nana smirked, her lips newly plump and youthful. Or perhaps they had always been that way. “Come, now. Nothing is for free.”

“She always takes something,” Brella murmured. “So does the Between.”

“But it’s not always bad.” Nana planted herself on the bed. The mattress barely shifted underneath her. “You could be holding onto something. Tension. A difficult memory. Perhaps the Between could free you of a curse like that.”

She already knew the answer, but she had to ask. “And do I get to choose?”

Nana’s eyes twinkled. “Everyone loves a surprise.”

She could turn back now. She could run, scoop up James and go. But where? Back to the Royal City, where she would be hanged or beheaded as a killer? To build a new home in a forest riddled with bounty hunters? To her mother’s house, to suss out the woman’s newly discovered untruths? The only way forward was the wet and thorny path, where unknowns hunkered in inky darkness.

She chanced a glance at Brella and immediately regretted it. The woman, usually so golden and tall, was slumped and gray, her ember eyes cooled and miserably cast down. She fiddled morosely with her apron. She frowned.