Page 13

During her first summer home from Marchmain, Lark’s brothers hosted a solstice bonfire. The salt season was underway and the harvest crew—a smaller group than she remembered from previous years—joined the people who had been invited from the village.

Lark wore a pale dress she had found in her room.

It was one of her oldest ones, loose as a nightgown, because she had left most of her newer clothes back in her dorm, filling her suitcase instead with books.

Now, as she stood with her brothers to greet the guests, she felt strange and shy as she answered questions about school and the city, and if she’d made any new friends.

In truth, she was conflicted. All through the year she had looked forward to being back in Verse.

During the day it had been easy to ignore her homesickness.

She spent all her time with Damson, at meals or lessons or in the gallery.

In the evenings after class they would lounge beneath the courtyard elms, drinking tea as they shooed away the mosquitoes.

Or they would go down to walk beside the canals, pointing out which riverside apartments they would choose to live in.

Her first year at Marchmain was a time of gilt-framed paintings and clothbound notebooks. Fingers smudged with ink and photostats of her favorite artworks pinned to her walls. Sitting in the window of her dorm room at golden hour while Damson brushed her hair and pinned it up with a ribboned bow.

But each night Lark’s homesickness crept back.

As though it were a nocturnal flower that bloomed only in the dark.

It was worse when classes broke for exam revision.

Alone in her room with piles of notes and highlighted photostats, she would lie on her bed and stare up at the ceiling, her brothers’ letters rustling beneath her pillow.

As the moonlight shimmered over her and the Canticle bells chimed, she counted the remaining days of term on her fingers.

After their exams were over, though, Damson asked Lark to stay at Marchmain. Cheeks flushed, eyes downcast, she had explained, “I always room at school during the holidays. My grandmother is too busy with her work; she doesn’t want me bothering her.”

Lark reached for Damson’s hand. Her friend had often spoken about the grandmother who raised her, a stern and distant woman who had sent Damson away to boarding school as soon as she was able.

“My brothers have already bought my train ticket,” Lark said, because all her other reasons—how much she missed Henry and Oberon, and how badly she wanted to be at home—felt like salt in a wound.

“Stay here with me, Lark. We’ll have the entire campus practically to ourselves.”

Lark bit her lip. Then, brightening, she offered, “Come with me, instead. My brothers would love to meet you.”

Damson frowned and pulled her hand away from Lark’s grasp. “I’d rather be alone at school than surrounded by another family, reminded of what I don’t have.”

Lark felt torn and guilty, wishing she could somehow exist in two places at once.

That one version of herself would go home to Verse, to see her brothers and swim in the ocean and sleep in her old bedroom with Eline, her toy bunny, which she had been too embarrassed to bring with her to school.

While the other version remained here, to roam the empty halls of campus with Damson like a storybook orphan.

“I have to go home,” Lark said. “But I’ll write to you every day, I promise.”

The last days before she left drew out in a frostbitten silence. Damson, withdrawn and cold, kept mostly to her room. They’d disagreed before, but this was nothing like any of the short, fleeting arguments they’d had, which were mended as quickly as they began.

On her final evening, with her suitcase packed and her alarm clock set for the early train, Lark went to Damson’s room. She knocked carefully on the closed door. She could hear the sound of movement inside, and a gramophone record playing a mournful, instrumental song. But Damson didn’t let her in.

“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 you so much.”

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 remain still. 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.”