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CHAPTER ONENow

The pallid swans spear through the settling dusk, across a sky the color of bruised plums. I’m framed by their flight as I leave the station, their silent inland progression like an arrow marking my path.

Today is my eighteenth birthday, the time of year when spring takes delicate bites out of winter. There’s heat in the air, and some of the trees already have early blossoms, garlanding the shadows pink.

Today is my birthday, and like the swans in the sky I am going home.

I don’t want to be back here. Not now, and not like this. With my right arm bound tightly by layers of bandages from wrist to elbow, a healing wound throbbing beneath. With the strap of my satchel cutting into my shoulder and my suitcase dragging behind me, heavy with everything I packed in a hurry.

The train from Astera to our village station leaves only once a day, traveling through the night as it makes the slow crawl northward to Verse. I’d had to run all the way to the station, heartbeat wild as I imagined myself stranded all night on the empty platform.

I would have done it, too, staying the night in the station. Just like how I left behind all the books and clothes and things I couldn’t fitinto my satchel or suitcase. I’d have done anything except turn back and enter the grounds of Marchmain Academy again.

Now, I still feel wild and rushed, despite the long overnight ride on the train where I slept with my cheek pressed against the window. By the time I reach the border of our family’s lands, I’m sweating beneath my brother’s hand-me-down coat.

The rows of bracelets I put on over the ugly linen bandages on my arm clink and clatter as I roll back my sleeves. Inside the collar of my coat is a neat laundry stamp that saysHenry Arriscane. It’s been crossed out and replaced with my own shortened name, a messier, handstitchedLark.

Once, generations ago, our family owned all the land between the station and the sea. But by the time my mother came here as a new bride, all that was left was a single acre of woods and the stretch of seashore where our cottage sits above the breakwater. And, of course, the salt mine, where we have hewn our living from the earth for as long as anyone can remember.

The entrance to our woods is marked by a simple fence. Wire stranded between splintery posts, a locked gate. The padlock is simple brass, and when I was twelve, I painted the wooden gateposts with shells and feathers and flowers. That seashore scene made by my inexpert brushstrokes felt like a talisman. I truly believed that, while those decorations were there, no one except me and my brothers could pass.

I have the key out by the time I reach the gate, but it’s already unlocked, propped open by a piece of granite stone. Time has worn away my painting, and only faded patches of color are left. Frowning, I lift the stone away from the gate. It’s been there a long time, because there’s a deep, muddy divot beneath: filled with a nest of beetles that go scuttling away when I lift the stone.

Without my talismans, the entrance feels so unguarded. The opened latch hangs toothless and wrong. I close the gate, anchoring the stone behind it. Then, taking the ribbon from my hair, I tie it through thespace where the lock should go. With the gate tied tight and safe and closed, I’m all shut up inside the Arriscane woods, a barrier between me and the path back to the train, back to school.

The wind picks up, harsh against my cheeks and whipping my untied hair into knots. It smells of salt, and sea, and is familiar in a way that makes all my bones feel soft. If I closed my eyes I could still find my way home, even after all this time away.

It’s the first time I’ve been back in four years.

If I hadn’t been expelled, I’d be making this journey at the end of spring. My exams complete, newly graduated from Marchmain, coming home to tell my brothers that I’d been accepted into the curatorship at the city gallery.

Small and exclusive—accepting only two students each year—the postgraduate curatorship specializes in the works of Ottavio Caedmon. He has been my favorite artist since I first saw one of his paintings in a magazine: a procession of chthonic gods through juniper-green woods. At the rear of the march was Therion, the god worshipped by my family. I’d never seen him painted before, and the way Caedmon had captured him in elegant chiaroscuro made my chest ache with longing for something I couldn’t name.

When I learned about the curatorship I was determined to win a place. But that part of my future can only be a dream now.

The trees thin to windswept clifftops. A scatter of petals follows me, drifting into my hair as I leave the woods behind. There’s a paved road farther inland, but this smaller, private path is only plain earth. My leather lace-up shoes leave prints in the dirt as I walk. In the distance, our cottage is outlined against the lowering sky.

I pause for a moment, drawing Henry’s coat tighter around me. For a heartbeat, my despair falls away, and I taste a fleeting, tentative hope that I surely don’t deserve. Perhaps the salt wind and the swan calls will cleanse me, and I’ll step through the front door and find everything about me has been mended.

But when I move closer, that hope dissolves like a soap bubble. The cottage has changed so much from what I remember. It looks faded, tired, as though it wants to curl up beside the swells of the sea and fall into a dreamless sleep.

It needs a fresh coat of paint and the gutters are filled with moss; ivy drips down from the roof. A thicket of boxthorn lies close to the walls, white flowers like altar candles in the shallow night. The front garden is all weeds and unkept camellia trees that have carpeted the ground with their fallen blooms. I step between the rotting petals, wary of nectar-drunk bees. Scraps of leaf stick to the toes of my shoes.

All the windows are dark except for one, at the front, which is propped open. The sill is lined with candles. I tuck my hair behind my ears, hitch the strap of my satchel higher on my shoulder. Pressing my lips together against the gritty remnants of rouge that smudged off on my journey, I stare at the front door and wonder if I should knock.

I can make out my brothers inside, past the gauzy half-drawn curtains, their shapes as blurred as a thing seen underwater. Voices come slipping out through the open window. Henry, cold and stern, his words heavy with anger. “No. This was not the agreement we made.”

“I’m sorry,” another speaker, a stranger, answers. Their tone is flat and careless, and they don’t sound sorry at all. “We made no agreement. This isn’t a negotiation.”

I put down my suitcase on the front step and edge closer to the window, trying to squint past the candlelight to see more clearly. A piece of the boxthorn, dead and twisted, crunches loudly beneath my foot. The voices inside fall silent. A heartbeat passes. The door opens. I take a step back, the hem of my coat snagged by thorns.

Henry stands in the doorway, with Oberon—my second eldest brother, born between Henry and me—close at his heels. We all share the same features: hair and eyes the color of honey, olive skin that freckles in the summer. They’re both more than a decade older than I am. When I was born, a surprise third baby, they were nearly adults.

But right now, they look impossibly young: Oberon with his cheeks flushed and his glasses askew on his freckled nose, Henry with his lower lip bitten raw and a deep line of worry between his brows.

He takes a step back when he sees me, his mouth slanting into a frown. “Lark! What are you doing here?”

I bend down to unhook the thorns, catching my finger against the wicked sharpness. Hissing, I put my finger in my mouth. My carefully rehearsed explanation vanishes with the coppery taste of blood. A sob catches in my throat, and I fling my arms around Henry, burying my face against his chest.