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Lark,

Whenever I returned home, growing up, I felt I couldn’t breathe until I was back on the beach, until I’d plunged beneath the waves. The sea is an earnest threat, and that made me feel safe, even amid the violence of a riptide.

And you—you make me feel the same.

For so long I envied you: Your bravery, your family. The way they loved you. And you have swept me up like the strongest current, pulled me far from the shore. I feel safe with you, as safe as I do in the depthless sea. I would follow you anywhere.

I know it’s unsettled you, to learn you were made of blood and salt, destined to belong to a god. But I cannot imagine a more fitting origin for you than to be born of the sea. You are a force of nature, as wondrous and eternal as the wildflowers and the storm clouds and the pattern of the tides.

You make me believe I can be all the things I once thought impossible. And though I doubt I will be brave enough to give you this letter, I cannot let these words be unwritten.

I love you, Lark. I have loved you from the very beginning.

Yours, always,

Alastair

I stare out at the sea, envisaging the seal-sleek form of a boy swimming dauntlessly through the waves. Then slowly, I fold Alastair’s letter and slip it back inside his book.

I imagine him here, with me, dripping and breathless as he emerges from the water. It aches, how much I miss him, but I know with all the truth in my foolish heart that this is not our end. It’s merely a pause—an indrawn breath taken and held before the plunge into a depthless sea.

I putThe Neriadinto my pocket and take out another item. Slowly, I unwrap the obsidian mirror. With the edge of my fingernail,I carefully pry loose one of the shards, and wrap it inside the cloth that had covered the broken glass.

At the very edge of the jagged rock shelf, I look down at the waves, indigo deep. I take a breath. I draw back my arm and throw the mirror far out into the water.

It sinks swiftly, vanishing beneath the waves.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREENow

Camille Felimath has a bedroom tucked beneath the eaves of Saltswan, a tiny space that, once upon a time, was used to store trunks of winter clothes. It still smells faintly of the dried herbs that were pressed between the garments to protect them from moths—lavender, wormwood—alongside the familiar, syrupy notes of her strawberry perfume.

Her unmade bed has a pink eiderdown quilt crumpled at one end, a half-finished game of cards laid out on the sheets. The room is a litter of unfolded clothes and piles of magazines, empty teacups, drying bouquets of flowers set into water glasses. The mess is charming; it makes me love her even more.

The single dormer window faces away from the sea, revealing a view of the fields, the road, the distant woods. When I look outside, that road feels like a reminder of how wide and endless the world is, how much there is still to explore.

The view is the first thing I notice when she brings me into her room. The second is the enormous cartographer’s map pinned to the opposite wall. It’s marked all over with lipstick-red blots of ink. “All the places I want to visit, someday,” she explains.

I spend the salt season with Camille, living at Saltswan. Eachmorning, I wake at dawn and walk along the clifftop path to my cottage where my brothers wait for me. I drink strong black tea with the rest of the harvest crew. Then we all go into the mine together. Henry, Oberon, and I work alongside each other. Sometimes we talk, but mostly we’re silent, allowing the rhythmic sound of the salt being carved to form the soundtrack of our days.

The veins are so rich that we only harvest from the highest chambers. The corridor to the lowermost level remains closed, sealed off by a thick crystalline wall that’s as smooth as an obsidian mirror.

At night, I climb into bed with dirt beneath my nails that I can never scrub clean. My whole body aches, my skin smells of salt. Camille and I curl together in her bed. As I fall asleep, she kisses my neck, combs traces of salt dust from my hair with her fingers.

I welcome the fatigue that weighs my limbs because it means my mind has no space to consider anything but blank, dreamless sleep. At least, most of the time. But some nights the dreams creep in.

We seem to dream in unison, and when I open my eyes, still calling Alastair’s name, Camille will be reaching for me, tears on her cheeks, whispering, “I thought he was home; it felt so real.”

On those nights, we leave her untidy room and slip out through the moonlit halls of Saltswan. On those nights, we go down to the beach.

We walk past tide pools and rocks, until we reach the farthest edge of the shore. This is where I cast Therion’s mirror away, where I found Alastair’s letter secreted between the pages of his favorite book. With our skirts tucked back, we sit with our bare feet dipped in the sea. It’s always cold, even as spring grows hot and languorous, that slow drift into summer. The water is like ice against our skin.

Using a flashlight to illuminate the pages, we read aloud, taking turns to recite fromThe Neriadin our clumsy, imperfect Tharnish.

We drift back to Saltswan as the night fades around us. Camille’s window catches the morning light, and the first hints of daybreak turnthe sky to watercolor. We lie down with our wind-tousled hair and our lips tasting of the sea. Memories fill the space between our bodies.

And sometimes, I am almost certain I can feel him there. Alastair. A third presence amid our kisses that are flavored by salt and tears, our heartbeats, our tangled limbs.

When the harvest is over, my brothers host a bonfire to celebrate. We all make flower wreaths for our hair. Camille and I cast offerings for Therion into the flames—dried flowers, passages copied from poetry books, a map of a distant city. They burn quickly, the sparks caught and carried upward on the summer-warm air.