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“I’m sorry,” Lark said, her hand flat against the polished wood. “Please don’t be angry with me.”

Damson opened the door. She regarded Lark with bloodshot eyes, her cheeks wet with tears. “Promise you’ll write.”

“Of course I will.”

With a sigh, Damson had pulled Lark into her arms and hugged her tightly. “I’m going to miss yousomuch.”

Now, back home in Verse, Lark struggled to slough off the clinging guilt. Damson was her best friend, and Lark felt like she had failed her. When yet another guest asked, “And how is school?” Lark excused herself and went out into the garden.

She stood by the bonfire, side-on, one cheek hot from the flames and the other cooled by the wind. It was the beginning of summer but the nights were still mild. Especially when, like now, the wind blew down from the northern seas. There was a large basket of flowers near the fire, offerings to Therion that would be burned later. Lark began to braid some of them into a flower crown, weaving purple oxeye daisies with strands of shore grass and laurel leaves.

She was still there, her fingers threaded by flowers, when Alastair Felimath stepped neatly across the breakwater. He paused when he noticed her, and with the sound of the waves at his back and the night sky behind him, it was as though he had just emerged from the shadowy sea.

“Hello, Alastair,” she said, and her voice felt small against the sprawl of night and the crackle of the flames.

“Hello,” he said.

Lark watched as the firelight picked him out inch by inch as he drew closer. It was the first time she had spoken to him since that day beneath the arbor, when she embraced him and he pulled away. Now, she approached him slowly, overtaken by shyness.

She thought of all the letters she’d written to him but hadn’t sent. How she’d checked her student mailbox religiously, hoping to hear from him. Until this moment, she hadn’t even realized he was back at home. A quaver of hurt filled her as she wondered if, perhaps, he had changed his mind about writing letters.

“How was it, traveling with your father?” Lark asked.

“I haven’t been with him. I was…” Alastair plucked at his sleeve. “I’ve been at the clinic in Driftsea. I only arrived back here this morning.”

Lark remembered how Alastair was often sick when they were younger, and would be absent from school to recover. Camille would take extra notes home for him from their classes and complain to Lark how their father kept them apart in separate wings of their house, because Alastair was so contagious.

Now, in the light from the fire, she could make out the lines of fatigue on him. The angles of his features and the shadows beneath his eyes. She was overcome by a sudden, reckless urge to take his face between her hands and gently rub at those shadows with her thumbs, as though they were ink stains that could be wiped away.

She clenched her hands into her skirts and forced herself to remainstill. Managing a smile, she said, “If only I’d known you were there, I could have sent all the letters I wrote for you.”

Alastair laughed. “I wish you did. All I had taken with me was one book. I read it so many times I could probably recite it with my eyes shut, now.”

“It’s like the notebooks all over again. We never did get to exchange them.”

At her mention of that long-ago gift, Alastair’s cheeks colored darker than the heat drawn by the fire. Their conversation lapsed into uncertain silence. Lark thought of the letters she had written at school that were now tucked inside her suitcase. She had intended to hand deliver them to Saltswan, but in this moment, the thought of Alastair reading them made her want the ground to open and swallow her whole.

She fidgeted with the flower crown, tucking in a final stem. She turned the circlet around in her hands as she looked down at her bare feet, at Alastair’s polished shoes, which were dusted with sand from his walk on the beach. She wanted to step closer to him, but it was impossible. The space between them may as well have been wide as the entire north ocean.

“I’ve missed you,” Alastair said finally, his voice so quiet it was almost hidden beneath the crackle of the fire, the sound of the waves.

Lark, in a fit of impulsiveness, set the wildflower crown onto his hair. “I’ve missed you, too.”

Then the door of the cottage opened, releasing a spill of lantern light. It glowed against the darkness of the garden. The sound of voices, which had been a muted hum, now rose to a louder pitch as the gathered crowd began to emerge from the house.

Henry was leading the group, carrying the talisman made of dried kelp and swan feathers that was to be their bonfire offering. Oberon walked farther back, immersed in conversation with one of the harvest crew. And at the rear of the crowd was Marcus Felimath.

He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with the same gray eyes and dark brown hair as Alastair. They looked very alike, but Lark could not imagine Alastair with such a carved-marble aloofness as his father, even when he reached that age. Marcus watched the crowd with faint distaste. While everyone else was dressed in summer clothes, he wore a severely tailored suit, a cravat knotted doubly at his throat.

“I didn’t know your father was here,” Lark said, as he stepped out into the yard. “Did Camille come, too?”

Alastair didn’t reply. Lark glanced at him, and saw he’d gone tense and pale. His teeth pressed hard into his lower lip as he looked from the cottage to the darkened fields. “No,” he told her, eyes still pinned to his father. “She stayed at school.”

Tentatively, Lark laid her hand on his arm. He was drawn taut as a strand of wire. “Should we leave?”

Alastair blinked at her. He hesitated for a moment. Then nodded, tersely. “Please.”

Lark led him away from the fire and out to the fields beyond her cottage, into the sprawl of wildflowers that grew alongside the narrow path. Neither of them spoke until they were far away from the crowd, close to the border of the Arriscane woods. The noise of voices dwindled, and the light of the bonfire softened to amber shadows.