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“Therion?”

I edge away until my back is pressed to the wall. The image twists, becoming the boy from the mine. His eyes glint as he stares at me, gaze bisected by a golden lock of hair. His lips part, shaping words that I cannot hear. He raises his fist, as though to strike the window. I cry out, but with a blink, the boy is gone.

There is nothing but the sunset-colored sky.

Tentatively, I creep toward the window and peer down. I am on the second floor; in the garden below there is only an undisturbed cluster of camellia trees and overgrown weeds.

A piercing shrill rushes up from the lower rooms of the house. I leap back from the window in a desperate quaver of panic. Then I remember: the teakettle. With a final glance at the veil—still there, still real—and the empty window, I hurry back down the stairs and turn off the stove. The house falls silent, everything like a held breath.

Sighing, I sit heavily into one of the kitchen chairs and lean my elbows against the table. My brothers have only just left and already I am imagining horrors outside my window. I want to be braver than this. After all, I’m going to be here alone for what could be weeks. The thought of that makes me shiver.

The weight of Therion’s ring on my finger is painfully heavy. I twist it back and forth and remind myself this is myhome; I am safe here. I was born inside these walls. The rise and fall of the tides against the breakwater has been as familiar to me as my heartbeat for my entire life.

I can hear it now, the hush and sigh of the sea. Waves drawing back and forth over the beach. But overlaid is another sound. A muteddrip drip dripthat comes not from outside, but from above.

When I go to the base of the stairs, the floorboards are slick with damp. A running cascade of water pours down from the landing above. Snares of kelp are woven through the banisters, and as I hurry to the second floor of the house, shells crunch beneath my feet.

I’m cut and bleeding by the time I reach the bathroom. Inside, theclaw-foot tub is overflowing, a torrent of water rushing quickly over the sides. Both of the taps are turned on as far as they can go. The faucet is a torrent, filling the already flooded bath.

I splash across the floor, the water stinging my scraped feet. It’ssaltwater—the air tastes like brine, and condensation beads against my skin like an ocean mist. I lick the taste of salt from my lips as I reach across to turn off the bath taps. The water shuts off to an aching silence. In the bottom of the tub, the drain is clotted with a mass of flowers. I plunge my hand into the icy water, shivering as my arm is submerged all the way to my shoulder.

It’s a bundle of oxeye daisies, bruised and marshy, tied together with a satin ribbon. Like one of the garlands strung up to decorate for the bonfire. I drag it out and the tub empties with a torrid moan; the water in the drainpipes sounds alive. A voice that is not at all human.

I stumble back from the bath, holding the sodden bouquet against my chest. I feel lost to the same dizziness that overcame me this morning when I stepped into the mine and touched the salt. My hands, clutched tight around the ribbon-tied stems, look as formless as mist. My fingernails are opalescent as pearls. Feathers fill the air, drifting down to cover me like enormous flakes of snow.

The world tilts and spins. I sink to my knees.

Everything starts to disappear.

Then

The morning after the summer bonfire, Lark felt as if she’d been tangled, then scraped bare and made anew. Sitting in the arbor behind her cottage, she picked scraps of petals from her hair, breathed the lingering traces of smoke, and thought of Alastair—his forehead against her own, his lips pressed to her wrist.

Waiting to see him again was like the anticipation before she’d walked into the gallery and viewedThe Dusk of the Godsfor the first time. Like standing at an altar with the rhythm of prayer on her tongue; like the weight of the hardcover book Alastair had placed in her hands on her thirteenth birthday.

And now she had no idea what to do.

In the shade of the arbor, she tried to read one of the books from her enormous summer reading list. Her gaze kept drifting toward Saltswan. It was haloed by summer cloud, all heat shimmers and sea haze. She wanted so terribly to go there, to knock on the door, to go inside that beautiful house with its secretive rooms and galleried halls. But shyness held her like a clenched fist.

Henry and Oberon were gone most of the day in the mine. Their father had taught them how to harvest the salt when they were younger, and they had taught Lark, too, as soon as she wasable to learn. Until she went to Marchmain all three of them had worked as part of the harvest crew. But this year they hadn’t let her join them.

“You have to concentrate on your schoolwork,” Henry said, with a nod toward Lark’s towering pile of books.

At the time she had been annoyed. But now she was glad they weren’t here to witness her restlessness, her continued glances toward Saltswan. The thought of telling her brothers how she felt, or worse still, asking for advice, made her want to melt into a puddle and be absorbed by the garden soil.

Henry and Oberon had always done their best to be approachable. Her first brassiere, her first box of sanitary cloths, it had all been done in the same careful, paternal way they did everything else. When Henry explained to Lark aboutemotionsandphysical changes, they had both pretended, in silent, communal agreement, that it wasn’t embarrassing at all.

But her yearning for Alastair was entirely different. It was raw and strange and personal. Lark could barely acknowledge it to herself, let alone put it into words for her brothers. So she waited in the arbor as morning dragged to noon then onward to sunset. She wondered if Alastair felt as tangled up as her, whether he was in the gardens of Saltswan with his own unread book, waiting just as restlessly.

It made her a little braver, that thought. The next day, she took a long walk across the clifftop fields to the beach near his house, book in hand, her finger tucked between the pages to mark her place. The glinting eyes of Saltswan looked down on her as she finally approached. But what she could see of the gardens was empty. She couldn’t bring herself to go past the gate.

Her days spilled into a pattern of restlessness. She swam in the sea, floating on her back, her hair like kelp. She sat in the fields and read,distractedly, as insects hummed around her, and the dry grass smelled like baking bread. When the sun grew too warm, she went into the sea caves, where the shadows were cool as an icebox.

She wrote letters to Damson every day, just like she had promised. She couldn’t tell her brothers how she felt, but in those letters to her friend, Lark could be bolder, be honest. It helped to write about Alastair in this way—their shared past, his absence, the bonfire reunion—and then fold up the pages, tuck them into their neat envelopes, and seal them closed.

She began to wonder if Alastair had gone away again, traveling back to the north with his father. But the windows of Saltswan remained unshuttered. And more than once, Lark saw Marcus driving past on the dirt road. His car was as shiny and black as a beetle.

A fortnight passed. Lark went to the village and mailed Damson’s letters. Marchmain felt like another life, a distant dream. The studious quiet of the gallery, the sluggish river, sunset over the canals, and the Canticle bells were an entire world away from Verse, with its salt and sunburn and humming insects.