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Camille stretches her arms overhead. “I would ask what’s the worst that could happen, but it feels like tempting fate.” Grimly, she laughs. Then, reaching beneath the cushion of the chaise, she takes out a bottle of wine. “For tonight: This is my suggestion.”

“Where did you get that?” Alastair asks, brows raised.

“From the wine rack in Father’s study.” When he starts to protest, she waves a hand. “Don’t worry, I rearranged the bottles; he’ll never notice.”

“Tomorrow, then,” I say. It makes me shiver, the finality of this choice. I remember how it felt when I held the mirror that night in my cottage when Therion spoke through Alastair. The loss of control, the way I began to vanish, drowning beneath the rising water. I’m hot and restless, afraid to try, but knowing I have to face this.

Camille slips her arm around my waist, leaning her chin on my shoulder. Alastair opens the wine and pours it out into three empty teacups that he takes from a shelf near the window. We sit, bathed in the firelight, the three of us with our stolen wine, a silk-wrapped mirror, and our desperate plans.

The words Alastair recited echo over and over in my mind.Unstring our bones; loosen from the world.I think of how it felt to be swept up in the intoxication of brazier smoke and indigo liquor. How it will be to lose myself again, with Alastair and Camille at my side.

I know I’d rather call out the danger than wait for it to appear. If Damson showed me anything, it’s that the worst hurt doesn’t always come with open violence. Instead, there is tenderness before you’re devoured. And I’d rather summon Therion, and face him once and for all, than be haunted in this way.

CHAPTER THIRTEENNow

We reach the woods just after sunrise. Everything is eerily still: the ocean like glass, the sky cloudless. The air is a haze the color of lavender.

The three of us spent the night beside the library hearth, passing the wine back and forth until the bottle was empty. I fell asleep on the chaise, while Alastair and Camille took turns sitting awake to watch over me.

In an early hour of morning, I stirred and found myself curled between them—Camille breathing sleepily against my neck and my head resting on Alastair’s knee while he read by the firelight. He held his book with one hand while the other stroked idly at my hair, one golden tendril ribboned possessively around his finger.

Now we make our way to the trees in a quiet procession, everything somber as a ritual. We’re all dressed in light-colored, flowing clothes—Camille in a gown similar to mine, Alastair in an untucked shirt and linen trousers. All of us are barefoot, our toes pressing tracks in the mud left behind from last night’s storm.

Camille pauses beside a grove of olive trees and breaks some of the slender branches from their trunks. She weaves them deftly into three circlets as we follow the path toward the center of the woods. I take oneof the circlets from her and place it on Alastair’s head. It sits askew on his wavy hair, like the lopsided crown of a forest prince.

His eye hasn’t changed back, unlike when Therion possessed him the first time. It stays amber-bright, catching the dappled sun that falls through the trees.

At the heart of the woods is a tall, tall tree that I used to climb as a child. From the highest branches I could see clear down to the ocean, to the entrance of the salt mine. One year, Henry built me a platform of wood between the branches. The playhouse I made is still there, but ruined. The lace curtain I tacked up like a canopy is in tatters, the ends gone ragged and unraveled.

“Here,” I announce, letting the satchel slip from my shoulder. “This is the place.”

At the base of the trunk is a fairy-ringed space of earth, where spider orchids grow among the fallen leaves. I clear a patch of ground and gather enough stones to form a rough circle. In the center of my makeshift brazier, I pile dry kindling.

When I’m done, I sit in front of the unlit fire. Camille and Alastair kneel on either side of me. We lay everything out beneath the tree: the mirror, a box of matches, the silver flask of chthonic liquor that I’ve brought from Therion’s altar.

As Camille opens the flask, Alastair lights a match. The bright red cover of the matchbook is like a splotch of blood against his palm. The flame stutters out, extinguished by the wind. He tries again, then gestures for me and Camille to shift forward. With a shield of our bodies and our cupped hands, the fire comes slowly alight.

The glow of the rising flames steals all the light from the rest of the forest. Everything outside the place we sit dims to shadows. The tree above, with its platform and tattered lace, is gilded, the whorled surface of the trunk as gold as a gallery frame.

Camille drinks deeply from the flask, then passes it to Alastair. When he offers the flask to me, I wrap my hands around his ownby instinct. The same way I did with Therion on the night of my betrothal. His indigo-stained mouth tilts into a smile and he raises the flask to my lips.

I swallow down the inky liquid, tasting roses and herbs, and behind my closed eyes everything turns the color of the deepest sea. As I drink, Camille lays one of the olive wreaths on my hair. Smoke rises from the brazier.

We pass the flask back and forth, my hands against Alastair’s, against Camille’s, each touch slow and lingering. Camille’s thumb marks the lines of my palm, Alastair’s fingers trace the veins on my wrist.

My heartbeat rises, and I’m trembling, nervous. My eyes are stinging from the smoke. On my arm, where the feathers pierced through my skin, the scar begins to itch. The salt crystal on my ring feels hot as a burning coal.

Alastair unwraps the mirror and props it against the tree. Firelight shimmers over the obsidian surface and catches in his changed eye, turning it brilliant as an ember. Camille’s hand is gentle at the small of my back as I look toward the glass.

“Therion,” I whisper, and his name is like sugar in my mouth, dissolving over the taste of the rich chthonic liquor.

The tree above the flames is golden: a lit taper. The woods beyond are all whispering shadows. Gradually, the sound of the wind turns to the sound of waves. Lapping, lapping, the way they do against the breakwater when the tide is high. I stare down at my hands, tense in my lap. My skin is crusted with sand, as though I have just laid my palms flat against the beach.

The world seems to speed and slow all at once. I’m aware of the drip of dew from the branches above, how it’s turned as fast as torrential rain. The moon rises and sets a hundred times. Down on the beach, at the base of the cliffs, the tide sweeps rapidly out, then crashes against the shore in a single breath.

Bubbling streams pour in channels past us; we are on an islandbeneath our golden tree. A hare runs out from the undergrowth, leaping over Camille’s lap before vanishing into the trunk. A flock of swans fly through the woods, their wings cleaving the smoke as they pass between the branches.

It’s too much effort to sit upright any longer. I lower myself down beside the brazier. Alastair holds the mirror close to my face, angling it so I can see the surface. But I look past it, at him, as the brilliance of our fire mantles his shoulders like a cloak.