Page 48 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

“Before I left. It wouldn’t have taken much. Just a key stowed in the apiary. The key that led me to the relic.”

“But there is no relic!” snapped Dorian. “There’s no blog post and no relic.”

“But there is,” I said, taking it out of my pocket.

“What the hell?” whispered Dorian, leaning in to get a closer look.

“This atrocious thing is the relic from your blog post?” asked Lexi.

“That’s impossible, though,” said Finn. “We told you, we never left a blog post.”

“No,” I said, smiling. “But I did.”

Lexi slapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh shit.”

With mixed emotion, I set the artifact on the table. “The problem is, I don’t know what it means.”

We all stared at it, and I could sense a wave of excitement coming from Finn, his eyes alight with the possibilities this puzzle presented.

“Okay,” said Aspen. “So you left the blog post yourself, but then you locked the path that led to the relic until after you’d gotten your identity back?”

“I think so, yes.”

“But why lock that path?”

Finn was pacing now, and behind his eyes, I could see he was making connections. “Whatever this means, it’s something you couldn’t comprehend until you knew you were Isabelle again.”

I picked it up and shook it, and again there was that rattling sound. “Have any of you ever seen it before?”

They shook their heads, but then Lexi nodded. “I think I maybe remember you with it. I think you said you’d gotten it in town.”

“So this isn’t an ancient artifact?” I rattled it again.

“Honestly,” said Lexi, “I have no idea what it is.”

I looked closely at the excessively large eyeholes in the figures.

They were just large enough to roll something up and slip it inside.

I looked over at Finn. He kept saying that there were certain things I couldn’t know ahead of time because they might break me.

But what if instead, I broke something else?

I stared at the relic for a moment, its ludicrously shaped figures, its poor craftmanship, and then, with force, I smashed it against the coffee table, breaking it into shards of thick clay.

“Jesus!” Aspen screamed, and Dorian jumped back, shielding his face, but I wasn’t going to let myself be distracted. Combing through it, I found what I was looking for—a tiny piece of paper rolled up like a scroll.

Unfurling it, I smiled. Aspen was right. It showed nine images, and accompanying each one were two Latin words, Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature:

Glycyrrhiza uralensis

Angelica sylvestris

Mentha spicata

Mandragora officinarum

Aconitum lycoctonum

Caulophyllum thalictroides

Ferula silphion

Ephedra aspera

Albizia julibrissin

It was the key to the recipe.

“Holy shit,” I said, shaking with excitement. “This is it.”

Dorian stood behind me, peering down at the symbols. “I don’t understand. What are these?”

“The code to the widows’ keys. All I have to do is translate them and I’ll have my recipe.”

My heart was nearly in my throat as I scanned through.

Just as Aspen had predicted, the ingredients from my letter were listed, but there were only two of them: angelica aligned with the disintegrating square and aconite with the crescent moon.

The box with the X was something called Glycyrrhiza uralensis, and the S was Ferula silphion.

Ferula silphion. Oh my god. I looked up at Aspen. “This is silphium, isn’t it?”

Aspen took the slip of paper from me and stared at it before meeting my eyes again, a smile playing on her lips. “It certainly is. Holy shit,” she whispered. “Isabelle, I think we found our hoopoe’s blood. Hoopoe’s blood is silphium.”

The problem was there were only three ingredients in my recipe, but I’d drawn four symbols.

For now I decided to ignore the Glycyrrhiza uralensis and to just focus on finding the entry that contained the aconite, angelica, and silphium.

When I’d located it, I put my finger on it and showed it to the others.

Desolate Earth, Vibrant Moon, Vibrant Sea

From darkness, the night birds take flight. They reach the mountain just before dawn. An unexpected passage.

“Night birds,” whispered Finn. “Like you and Paloma.”

“Okay,” I said with a smile. “This is definitely it. I just need to make something with these three ingredients and then drink it like that night in the woods, and I think that should help me remember. I think that’s the final step.”

But Aspen looked less certain. “Aconite is really toxic. Like, deadly.”

“I know, but I’m sure this is right.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Something is wrong. We don’t have enough information. We have the ingredients, but we don’t know the order, and the order will determine the spell.”

“Spell?” said Dorian through uneasy laughter. “Is that what we’re doing here?”

“The root of pharmacology is spell,” I said. “Isn’t that right?”

“We could try a few permutations and see which works,” offered Lexi, but Aspen shook her head.

“That could be dangerous. Already we’re dealing with a very poisonous plant.”

“What if you just included the Glycyrrhiza uralensis?” asked Finn. “We have to assume you drew it for a reason, right?”

“What is Glycyrrhiza uralensis?” I asked Aspen.

“Licorice root. Usually it’s treated by dry-frying it with honey.”

“Why would I want to add licorice root to the formula?”

A slow smile spread across her face. “You were modifying it.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you didn’t want to die?”

“What?”

Aspen nearly sputtered her words she was so excited.

“This is brilliant. If you took aconite alone, you almost certainly would have poisoned yourself—potentially fatally. But herbal formulas can always be modified. Aconite is highly toxic, right? But for centuries, honey-fried licorice root has been used to reduce the toxicity of aconite. Isabelle, you modified the recipe to detoxify it.”

“Do you have any down here?” I asked, and as I reached out for her hand, she grasped mine with equivalent excitement.

“Of course. It’s a common ingredient.”

“This is it, isn’t it?” I asked, my heart poised somewhere between excitement and terror.

“You ready?” she asked.

I nodded.

It was time for the night birds to take flight.