When Kara opened her eyes she was staring at a sand-colored sky splotched with dark brown. Her head felt heavy. Where am I? How did I get here? Beneath her fingertips the ground felt strangely smooth, the air as musty as the bottom of a well. Kara heard a steady scratching, the sound of quill on parchment, and slowly pushed herself up to see what was making the noise. The ground, as impossible as it seemed, was cream-colored paper, and across it the words Where am I? How did I get here? were in the process of being written. Kara recognized the neat, steady penmanship, the stubborn flourish on the hanging tail of the g.

It was her handwriting.

What is this? she wondered, and the three words scratched themselves into the ground as she thought them. Kara tried to touch the letters but they were located just beneath the paper ground like veins. Her two earlier thoughts began to glide away as though caught on some unseen current, rising over a slight hill and then slipping out of sight.

She remembered.

Safi pushed me. I’m in the Well of Witches.

These new thoughts scrawled themselves into the ground, followed by an additional one: TAFF! Kara jumped to her feet—too fast!—and the world spun for a moment. Her brother was lying next to her. He groaned as he got to his knees. No doubt he was suffering from the same disorientation as Kara, but other than that he seemed fine.

“My head,” Taff said, rubbing it with his knuckles. “Safi pushed me. Did you know she was that fast? I didn’t know she was that fast.” His face flashed with anger. “I can’t believe she did that!”

Kara watched the words I thought she was my friend! etch just beneath the ground. The handwriting was Taff’s, a childlike, blocky print.

“She is your friend. She was trying to keep us safe.”

Although Taff didn’t reply, Kara read his next thought: But who’s going to keep her safe?

“She’s on her own until we get out of here,” admitted Kara. “But she’s a strong witch, and an even stronger girl. I wouldn’t underestimate her.”

“I guess you’re right,” Taff said. And then, shaking his head in surprise, added, “Wait! How do you know what I’m thinking? Are you magic again?”

Kara showed him the words on the ground, and explained, as best she could, what little she had learned. Taff proceeded to waste several giggling minutes making the ground inscribe random thoughts such as Mashed potatoes! and My shoe is leaking! and Yellowglobbyflowything!

“Are you about done?” Kara finally asked.

“Absolutely,” Taff said, but his true thoughts spilled across the ground: I’ll just do it when she’s not looking.

Kara raised her eyebrows.

“Nuts,” said Taff. “This might not be as much fun as I thought it would be.”

Behind them a huge rose-colored wall towered into the sky, cutting off any travel in that direction. Kara ran her fingers along its surface, which was strangely wet to the touch.

“It feels like the cover of a grimoire,” she said.

“And the ground and the sky are like pages,” Taff said. “What does it mean? Are we inside a grimoire?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t like it.”

“My toys!” Taff exclaimed. “I took the satchel off because it kept banging against the gears! I still have my slingshot, but I left everything else in Sablethorn! Can we go back?”

“I don’t think so.”

She pointed to a black rectangle on the wall, the same size and shape as the door through which Safi had pushed them. It looked as though it had been burned into the surface.

“Safi closed the door,” Taff said. “Just like she said she would. The twins can’t follow us now. That’s good, at least.”

“In a way,” Kara said, “but Safi forgot one thing. Now that she’s closed the door, how are we going to get out of here after we find Grace?”

“You’re right,” said Taff. “For all we know, that could have been our only way out. We’re trapped!”

“There’s always another way,” Kara said.

She held Taff close so he couldn’t read her frantic doubts.

Although they seemed to be walking on paper it was as sturdy as regular ground, and Kara quickly got over her initial fear that they would fall straight through it. The land, for the most part, was blank and featureless, punctuated only by a series of paper-thin walls that were ten times the height of the children but as easily pushed over as a page in a book. Taff took great delight in this. Everything was the same sandy hue, and Kara quickly found herself hungering for the colorful variety of the real world. The utter sameness of this place was dizzying.

They came to a small waterfall that emptied into a narrow river. Instead of water, however, light-brown pulp the consistency of quicksand fell over the cliff. Paper trees lined the shore, and there was a small patch of flowers carefully folded like origami.

“I bet this used to be beautiful back when it was Phadeen,” Kara said. “Before dark magic corrupted it.”

“Just like the Thickety,” Taff said.

Kara nodded. Beneath the ground she saw, in her own handwriting, Does magic ruin everything? The words slid into the pulp and vanished in its currents. She saw other words floating there. They had been written in dozens of different hands, the letters linked together like a line of toy rafts: How come she gets to be a Whisperer and I’m stuck here on the barge? Trina claims she’s been through a Burngate but I don’t believe her; her tail is almost complete—won’t be long now before she becomes one of them.

“What does it all mean?” Taff asked.

“It means we’re not alone,” said Kara. “The Well of Witches is gathering everyone’s thoughts.”

“Why?”

“Not sure. Maybe the thoughts are feeding it somehow?”

“It eats thoughts?”

“Imogen ate memories. It’s not much different.”

“But Imogen was a person. Well, sort of a person. This is a place. It’s not alive.” He threw his hands into the air. “Unless it is alive. I give up.”

“The important thing right now is to find Grace as quickly as possible. Any ideas?”

Taff shrugged his shoulders. In the distance, the lower half of the horizon darkened to a familiar rose color. “Look,” he said. “There’s another wall, just like the one we came out of. It’s so tall—I think it touches the sky, or at least what passes for the sky here.”

As Taff talked, his thoughts continued to flow in a steady stream about various other topics: How can we be walking on paper? Where are they going to take Safi? This place is nothing like a well. What did that glass globe in Sablethorn do? Kara’s hair is a mess. What happens if there’s a fire?

Kara knew her brother had been gifted with an unusual intelligence, but seeing it on display here made her smile.

“Let’s follow the river,” Kara said, straightening her hair as best she could. “Keep walking against the current. The thoughts floating there now must have entered at some point upstream and flowed in this direction.”

“So our plan is to search for the evil witches.”

“That’s where Grace will be.”

“Now that we’re actually here, the idea of seeing her again scares me.”

“Me too.”

“Even if she agrees to help us, we can’t trust her. Not even a little bit. The first chance she gets—”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” said Kara.

“This is completely different than Mary Kettle. I could tell there was good in her. Grace Stone never had a drop of goodness. Even before she became a witch.”

Kara nodded, and then watched with surprise as her mind leaked a thought she didn’t even know she had into the ground.

There is good in everyone.

It slipped into the sludge and flowed away.

There was no morning or night in the Well of Witches, no paper sun and moon. Just the rose wall, growing incrementally closer with each labored step. Kara and Taff did not feel the need to sleep. They were not hungry or thirsty. These changes made traveling easier on a practical level, but they still made Kara uneasy.

What will happen to us if we don’t escape this place soon?

They followed the river of words until—at long last—they saw other inhabitants.

Kara pulled Taff behind a nearby Page—as they had started calling the easily moved walls that populated the landscape—and the two children peeked their heads out for a closer look. Dozens of girls and women worked in a forest of paper trees standing as tall as the Fenroots they resembled. The witches all wore the same attire: blood-red cloaks that would make them incredibly easy to see from a distance, especially against such a uniform backdrop. Encircling the tree closest to the children were three witches holding hands, their faces hidden beneath their hoods. At first Kara had no idea what they were doing, but then she saw the words gliding along the ground toward the trunk of the tree: Cut, chop, saw; cut, chop, saw; cut, chop, saw. Two witches sent their thoughts at blurring speed, but the third witch, her hands withered and covered with purple veins, was slower. Finally, however, Kara saw physical gouges appear in the bottom of the tree, as though an invisible woodcutter were taking an ax to it.

A few minutes after this the tree crashed to the ground.

The Cutters did not take a moment to celebrate; they simply moved to their next assignment. Meanwhile, another set of women dragged the tree away to an unknown destination. Other groups were partnered in the same fashion.

“Look at that,” Taff whispered, pointing to the ground between the trees and the river. Some of the words were slipping away from the sludge and gliding toward the trees, where they vanished into the ground. “I think the words are helping the trees grow. Like water.”

This idea made no sense, of course, but it did not make it wrong.

All of a sudden, an argument erupted among the three witches. Kara wasn’t close enough to hear the words, but the gist of it was clear enough: The young witches were unhappy that the older woman was taking so long to send her thoughts, thus slowing down the pace of their work. The argument escalated. The old witch pleaded that she would try to do better, but the younger women, arms crossed, were having none of it. The rest of the workers gathered in a loose circle to see what would happen next.

Taff covered his mouth, stifling a scream, and squeezed Kara’s arm.

A figure made entirely of paper was approaching the witches. It had the general shape of a human, with parchment skin and gangly arms and legs like thinly rolled scrolls. From its neck protruded an additional seven arms, each as tiny as those of a child.

These arms had no fingers or hands. Instead, they ended in masks.

While the rest of the thing’s body was the same flat color as the ground, its masks were each a different shade. Kara was reminded of the papier-mâché masks she had seen during the Shadow Festival, flour-hardened ghouls and goblins painted garish colors. These masks, however, were far more horrible, because they were literally the monster’s face. The one it currently wore was rust-orange with bulbous white eyes and a long snout. As soon as the creature reached the witches, however, and saw the older woman kneeling on the ground with her hands in the air, its neck arms swiveled and provided a new mask, this one a staid expression, with two slits for eyes and a noncommittal half smile.

If the first mask was for watching, this one was for making judgments.

The monster peeled a strip of paper from its own torso and the old woman, knowing what was coming, turned obediently. Attached to the back of her cloak was a large ring fitted with hundreds of similar strips. With stiff fingers, the creature threaded one more through the ring and tied it tight. Kara noticed that all the witches had these rings, though none with as many paper strips as the old woman. As she walked away they dragged along the ground like chains.

The monster switched back to its rust-orange mask and glared at the other witches until they went back to work.

Finally, it left.

“What was that?” asked Taff.

“I think it’s a guard,” said Kara. “Something that the Well created to keep the witches in line.”

“If you don’t work hard enough, they attach paper strips to your back?” Taff asked. “That’s a strange punishment.”

“I don’t think it’s normal paper,” Kara said. “It doesn’t look like it rips. Just like the ground and the sky.”

“But why?”

Kara was about to answer when someone stepped behind them.

“Fools!” a woman said. “You hide but make no attempt to conceal your thoughts. I’ve been watching them water the trees below, like footprints leading back here. I will be well rewarded when I report you to the Faceless. They might even remove one of my strips.”

“Please don’t,” Kara said. “We’ll leave right now.”

She turned around. Before her stood a red-cloaked woman with a pudgy face and pretty blue eyes.

I know her.

The woman shuddered.

“Not you!” she exclaimed. “It can’t be!” She pressed her hands to Kara’s cheeks and gazed into her eyes with unsettling intensity. “You would never be so foolish as to cast your Last Spell. Never!”

The woman’s mouth fell open as she saw the locket hanging around Kara’s neck. She grabbed it in two trembling hands and ran a thumb across the seashell embossed in the wood.

“Helena,” she said. “It’s really you.”

Kara jumped at the sound of her mother’s name, but it allowed her to make the final connection her memory needed.

“Hello, Aunt Abby,” she said.