Teleporting feels like somebody grabs you by the belly button, yanks you inside out, and then shakes you to see what falls out. Agnes says it tickles. Hedda says it's fun. I landed on my hands and knees in a pile of pine needles and stayed there for a while.

“Colm? Do you need a spell?”

“Nope.” I spat out a pine needle. “Save your magic. I'm great. I'm having a great time.”
She waited. Agnes is very good at waiting. Eventually the trees stopped spinning and I got up.

The scroll had dropped us exactly where I wrote, which honestly shocked me a little. The old charcoal pits were behind us, buried in weeds. In front of us was the big rock, split clean down the middle like a giant had taken an axe to it.
Tucked inside the split was a door.

It was metal, dark, and a head taller than me. Every inch of it was carved. Circles inside circles inside circles, with little lines curling off them like roots. I had no idea what any of it meant. I stared at it anyway. It was weirdly nice to look at, kind of like watching a campfire. My shoulders dropped for the first time all day.

“Huh,” I said. “Pretty.”

Agnes lit her lantern and held it up. She didn't say pretty. She was looking at the ground in front of the door. There was no grass there. Just a neat half-circle of bare dirt, like something had killed every weed that got too close.

“Colm.”

“Yeah.”

“You promised.”

“I know.”

“This counts as wrong.”

“It's dirt.”

“It's dead dirt.”

I crouched down and poked it. It was dirt. Dry, dead dirt, sure. It also smelled sweet, almost like honey. Not quite.

“The familiar went all the way in,” I said. “Came out fine.”

Agnes thought about that. “Familiars don't breathe.”

I didn't have a good answer to that. Which, looking back, should have been my answer.
“Okay,” I said. “Deal's a deal. We turn around.”

“Thank you.”

We both turned and looked at the woods. It was getting dark fast. Home was half a day's walk that way, through a forest neither of us knew, with one lantern and no scroll.

“…Or,” I said.

“Colm.”

“I'm just going to touch it. One touch. See if it's even locked.”

“And if it's locked, we go home?”

“If it's locked, we go home.”

She sighed. I decided that meant yes.

I put my hand flat on the door. The metal was freezing, so cold it stung. The second my fingers touched it, the whole door shuddered, and smoke came pouring out of every edge. Pale purple. Kind of pretty, actually. It rolled down over the rock and across the dead dirt way, way too fast.

“DON'T BREATHE IT!”

I slapped my arm over my face and backed up. My sleeve smelled like sweat and old campfire. Under that was the sweet smell again, a lot stronger now.

Thump.

I turned around. Agnes was on the ground. Her lantern had rolled away and was lying on its side, still lit. Her prayer book had landed open in the dirt.

I didn't have an escape stone. I'd never been able to afford one. If I ran over and grabbed her, I'd need both arms, which meant taking my sleeve off my face, which meant I'd be lying next to her in about two seconds. If I didn't grab her, she was lying in it.

I went anyway.

I made it two steps. Then the trees got soft and blurry around the edges, and the edges started to run together like paint in dirty water, and I had time for exactly one clear thought.

She is going to be so mad at me.

Then the ground came up and smacked me in the head.