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Oberon shifts beside me. “There were rumors that our family once knew a ritual to speak with Therion,” he whispers, a rasp of shame in his unsteady voice. “Dad told us about it, before you were born. We never gave it much thought until after he died. Then Henry and I tried the ritual, together, a handful of times. But Therion never answered.”

“Not until tonight.”

He exhales, a desolate sigh. “We never should have done it.”

I stare up at the ceiling, thinking of the emptiness of this room, of all the rooms around us. Our whole cottage has been hollowed out, and I can feel our connections to this place—where generations of Arriscanes have lived and died—dissolving like a sugar cube in hot water.

“Do you really think that Therion would restore the mine if I went to live with him?”

Henry lays his hand on my back. “Enough,” he orders, an echo of what Oberon said to us in the caves. “We’ll discuss this later.”

As I fall into a troubled silence, I let myself picture how it would be to go into Therion’s world. To dwell with him in the chthonic realm for every salt season, for the rest of my life. To be his bride.

I know the ways of marriage: betrothal rings and veils, promises sealed by a kiss. Two lives entwined in a single existence. Everything shared, joy and sorrow. It’s a form of trust I’d never thought to give another, because the only people I have ever loved in that way, first Alastair, then Damson, had turned that closeness to a weapon.

How might it be, though, if I were wed to a god? I force aside my fear and think of Therion’s amber eyes, how his voice echoed through the cave. When he took me to his world would it hurt, or would he draw me with him as gently as dipping beneath the surface of the sea? My breath held, my limbs heavy, the two of us borne away by a waning tide.

And what he offered… it could fix everything. It could fixme. It’s a terrible thought, but once it rises I can’t let it go. If I were Therion’s bride, I would be more than the girl who Alastair Felimath refused to love, more than the girl who lost the future she worked so hard for. I would save my family from ruin.

My eyes shutter closed and I sink into a clotted darkness, tucked between my brothers. At Marchmain, one of our first lessons was about the golden ratio in art, the magic thirds that divide paintings into ley lines that can be read for hidden meaning. There was a grim symmetryin my own life: Henry, Oberon, and me. The trio I had once formed with Alastair, myself, and Camille.

And now my existence looks to be divided in the same way. There’s our cottage at the clifftop, windswept and barren. Then the mine, with the hollowed veins, the salt all vanished away. Then, beneath a gauze-thin border I had never known could be crossed, the chthonic world.

Where Therion waits for me.

Then

Marchmain Academy, when Lark arrived for her first term, felt like a painted world. Especially in autumn, with the trees all gold and scarlet and the scent of woodsmoke in the air. Her single dormitory room overlooked a wide green space of lawn bordered on one side by a sprawling grove of elms.

Those elms were, to her, somehow wilder than the other plants in the city, the neat hedges and the street trees that grew inside protective circlets of iron fencing. Whenever she felt homesick—which was more often than she liked to admit—she would go into the courtyard and wander between the slender trunks and pretend she was back in Verse walking in her very own woods.

Those woods were one of the things Lark missed the most, along with the seashore and, of course, her brothers. She tried to write to them, using stationery bought from the school bookstore withMarchmain Academyand an inked drawing of the school’s main building printed on it.

But though there were many things about the city that she could tell them she loved—her little room with its eggshell-colored walls, walking in the courtyard, the pastries from the café district near the river—there was so much she didn’t love, as well.

Marchmain hosted a week of orientation parties, but Lark, fearing she would be behind the other students who had all come up from theprestigious schools in Gardemuir, spent her time in the library instead. She passed her days with a pile of books, trying to read as many texts from the first-year syllabus as she could.

Lark was the only student from Verse. The others were from Astera or similar busy southern towns: all sandstone buildings, factory smoke, and wide, paved streets. Everything felt so different from her classes in the one-room village school. She sat quietly at her desk, too shy to cut in and add her voice to the group discussions. The other girls offered their thoughts and ideas so confidently, even when they hadn’t read the assigned text.

Afterward, as the room emptied, she listened to their easy chatter, while drawing curlicues in the margins of her notebook and wishing she was brave enough to join their conversations. These moments were the worst, because then she would think about Alastair and Camille. Their trio, and the time after her thirteenth birthday, when she and Alastair became new, tentative friends.

She missed them even more than she missed her brothers. At least she could send letters to Henry and Oberon. But Camille’s strict, secluded boarding school in Trieste allowed no mail except from family members. And Alastair was traveling with his father, visiting so many places that there was no reliable address for Lark to use. They wouldn’t be able to write to each other until he and Marcus were back in Verse.

The first month of term was celebrated with a special lunch: sandwiches made with strawberry jam, platters of iced cakes, an enormous silver samovar of tea. Lark stood in the refectory with her tray. The noise of eager voices and the clink of flatware filled the room, a cacophony of sound. Her cheeks were hot as she walked around the large dining table, searching for a free place.

She was just about to sit down in an empty chair when the girl beside it laid her hand on the seat with an apologetic smile. “I’m saving it for my friend. Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Lark murmured. She felt suddenly like everyonein the room was staring at her. Clutching her tray, she slipped out through the side door into the cloister between the refectory and the white-walled commons building. The door closed, dampening the noise of voices, and she sat on the edge of a low stone wall with a sigh.

As she ate small bites from her strawberry jam sandwich and sipped at her cup of tea, she took out her notes from that morning’s Art Appreciation class. With a newly sharpened pencil, she diagrammed a golden ratio over a photostat copy of Ottavio Caedmon’sAnnabel by the Sea.

Her plate was empty by the time the bell in the clocktower rang, chiming out notes as delicate as the autumn sunlight that glazed the building’s sandstone walls. Lark returned her tray to the refectory and tucked her notes back into her satchel. Then she set out for her next class.

Despite her awkwardness at lunch, excitement hummed in her chest as she made her way to the seminar room. This class was one she had looked forward to ever since she enrolled. Gallery Practical—where students spent an hour in the city gallery, a stately building on the same block as Marchmain.

This was where Caedmon’s muralThe Dusk of the Godswas housed. She was going to see it, in person, for the very first time.

As she passed through the ivy-fringed gate of Marchmain’s grounds and out onto the tree-lined sidewalk, it no longer mattered that she was homesick. That she was awkward and lonely. Soon, she would be standing before Ottavio Caedmon’s most famous work, close enough to see the individual brushstrokes.