“Zill!”
Thali’s voice is too far away for her to care. Entangled in the dreams (the nightmares) of her childhood, of the old meeting hall overfilled with worshippers and the strange deep ocean scent (visitors, you must call them visitors) from the back pews, she whimpers and tries to roll over.
“Fool girl.” An older woman’s voice, this time. “You gave her too much, and if she—”
Zill’s aching head thumps the floor as someone begins shaking her. That someone has grabbed a handful of fabric at her shoulder, though she can’t remember what she was wearing last, or how there could possibly be that much to grab.
But she’s going to puke if the shaking doesn’t stop, so she finally opens her eyes.
Zill doesn’t recognize her surroundings immediately. She has only been here once before, on her sixteenth birthday. Sweet sixteen and never been freaked so thoroughly in her life. She’d never looked at her mother and the other six Pushy Broads the same way again.
And that had been only the first Oath of Hydra.
Zill blinks once, twice, and the blur above her resolves into Thali’s worried features. She’s got some twisty gold thing (diadem, Zillah) around her forehead, holding back her dark hair. The rest of her is swathed in ceremonial draperies—just like the ones she’s wearing.
“Come on.” Thali offers a hand up. “ We don’t have much time. The service is almost over.”
Confusion washes over her as she stumbles to her feet, tripping on folds of heavy fabric. Upstairs, she can hear the last rising choruses of the Samhain-rite. It’s been over two years since she last joined in—almost long enough to heal from a language never meant for human throats. Or minds.
But that’s not where she is tonight.
The private chapel (Hydra Mother’s fane) under the meeting hall is smallish, barely large enough for a few plain benches and an altar. She still remembers to glance away from the altar. Candles flicker in iron sconces along the walls, revealing seven robed women—including Thali—waiting for her to clear her head.
The seventh, still half in shadow, is her mother. Her mother as she has only seen her once before, with the high-spiked diadem of primacy settled on her white hair. First of the Seven.
Eldest of the Seven, too. Even candlelight is unkind, and Zill finally sees what she has struggled to ignore: marks of change in every feature, from protuberant eyes to lipless mouth to neck folds disappearing into fabric. Her mother’s form underneath is bent and subtly twisted, already becoming something other—
“I know.” Thali grips her shoulder. “I wasn’t prepared, either.”
With her free hand, she passes Zill a goblet. It’s made of sea-gold, the same metal shining all around her in the diadems and ornaments of the Seven. Another gift of the communion being celebrated overhead, on this night when barriers between worlds and dimensions flicker.
Zill’s fingers clench around the stem.
“Sometimes it helps,” says Thali. “But you’ve got to drink it now.” Her voice drops. “Your mother… she can’t weave the gate any more. And it only opens out from this side.”
Something clicks in Zill’s mind at last.
It had happened last winter, though Shrike Harbor’s only hospital hadn’t called her immediately. A mini-stroke, they’d said. Her mother had come into the emergency room on her own, been evaluated and treated, and left on her own a few hours later. Against advice, but nobody in town would have stopped her.
What this has to do with weaving—or gates—Zill has no clue.
But Thali’s expression makes her drain the goblet in three bitter gulps.
By the time she hands it back, all the candles have greenish halos. Her breathing is ragged, and her heartbeat makes it hard to hear the women around her as they escort her through an open door (was it open before? was it even there?) to the right of the altar.
Just beyond that door, the space expands into a cavern. Or a sea cave—though it can’t be, this far from the ocean.
Her ears say otherwise. The salt air resonates to the same gray waves she noticed on her way into town yesterday. She and the others are walking over water-smoothed stone now, their bare feet damp. There’s a lingering scent, too, one her memory skitters away from.
Then she sees the mouth of the cave.
The roiling translucence that fills it is less sea mist than hallucination: there are no waves beyond it, no rocky shoreline. Only the ocean’s depths. A few spikes (spires? towers?) of unknown architecture rising from even deeper lend a dim fluorescence—
“Y’ha-nthlei.”
Her voice, or Thali’s? Either way, it is not a question. As the goblet slips from her fingers, Zill turns to face her friend.
“I still don’t understand why I’m here. Whatever Mom did… with that… she never mentioned it to me.”
In the dimness behind Thali, the diadem of primacy flashes as her mother shuffles forward.
“You already know what you need to. It’s in your blood.” The corners of her lipless mouth twitch up. “Your Mason blood.”
She gestures left and right at the cave walls. As Zill struggles to focus, thin lines of light manifest and begin twisting themselves into half-familiar symbols. Diagrams. Patterns that reach into places she could never make her advisor understand even existed—
“The Keziah formulae.” Her mother’s hushed voice.
Then Thali’s, and all the others.
Zill sways on her feet, reaching out with both hands for the patterns now detaching from the stone, shedding symbols in their wake. Physics plus math plus magic. They make more sense than any blackboard equation, pure and certain. Obvious. So damn obvious how they run between here and elsewhere—
“Yes.” Seven voices in the shadows.
Unimpeded by chalk, Zill’s hands move freely through the shining patterns, weaving and revolving them. Helping them synchronize with unseen counterparts. Quantum entanglement, but there are no tangles here. No flaws or knots in the pattern now opening before her in the mouth of the cave.
At first, she barely hears the footfalls at her back.
Then their scent (deep ocean strangeness turn your eyes away now) washes over her, and her fingers move faster. As she feels the last of this pattern (this gate) mesh with its partner on the other side, her blurred gaze drops to the cave floor. She keeps it there as the visitors pass through, still chanting some phrase of the evening’s rite. A reminder of their communion with the congregation; that all here are of one blood and one destiny, deathless.
After the last has crossed, she is still staring down at the wet stone when a hand fastens on her shoulder.
“Turn around, Zillah. Lift your eyes.”
When she does not, cannot, comply, the grip tightens to pain. “Turn around, daughter. See me.”
Her mother’s features have changed beyond words—almost beyond recognition. Below the sea-gold diadem, eyes clouded with more years than she ever suspected meet hers. Zill struggles not to turn away, even when her mother lifts the diadem from her half-bald scalp and extends it towards her.
Those hands against her own are damp and cold and slippery. And webbed? Zill’s fingers curl back reflexively, but her mother lifts the diadem higher.
Glittering in the cave’s watery light, the object suspended above her head is distinctly misshapen. Oblong. Unlikely to fit any human skull, let alone hers. Yet her mother is lowering it now, clamping it onto her forehead with a strength she never—