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Waiting to see him again was like the anticipation before she’d walked into the gallery and viewed The Dusk of the Gods for 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 was able 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 about emotions and physical 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.

On her way back from the village, dusk painted the clifftops in drowsy watercolors.

She had an anxious, horrible thought that perhaps Alastair was unwell again, that he had gone back to the hospital in Driftsea.

But as she stepped out of the shadowed woods on the path to her cottage, she heard the sound of a car.

It came, unhurried, along the road. Familiar and beetle-black.

Marcus drove and Alastair sat in the passenger seat.

He was reading a book, his body turned toward the window, as though trying to ignore the presence of his father.

When Lark saw his face, she bit the inside of her cheek so hard that she tasted blood.

She watched as the car drove toward Saltswan. Then she hurried home. Her brothers were still at the mine. Lark went to her room and took out the letters she had written to Alastair. She piled them into a stack and tied it together with a long red ribbon from her dresser drawer.

Before she could change her mind, she set out across the cliffs.

Saltswan was quiet and still as Lark went through the iron gate. She remembered how it had been locked when Alastair brought her here, how they had to climb over. The windows watched her approach the house. She shivered, though the heat was summer-thick, warm and cloying.

The front door—broad, enameled wood—was between twin panes of glass that were decoratively frosted, blurring her view inside. An iron bell hung beside the door, gleaming and untarnished, with a silken length of rope hanging down from its center.

Lark thought of Marcus Felimath, the way he’d torn her wreath from Alastair’s head and cast it away like it was poisoned. He had always ignored her on the rare occasions he came to the cottage to speak with Henry and Oberon. But if he answered the door, they would be face-to-face.

Fear knotted her stomach. She could still leave without ringing the bell. But the days were slipping past. Soon summer would be over, and she would be on the train back to the city. And Lark knew that if she lost her nerve this time, she’d never be brave enough to come back again.

She couldn’t make herself pull the bell rope, to set the noise of it striking through the air like an alarm. She raised her hand. Hesitated a moment, knuckles pressed soundlessly to the wood, before she managed to knock.

Silence drew out. Lark narrowed her eyes at the frosted panes of glass beside the door, trying to make out the shift of shadows, an outlined silhouette. But nothing moved. If she hadn’t only just seen Alastair and his father drive past, she would have believed the house to be empty.

She was about to knock again when the sound of footsteps came from within.

Slow, unhurried. Finally, the door opened partway.

Alastair looked out at her. He kept one hand on the frame as he stood in the opened space, as though barring her entrance to the house.

He looked her up and down, unsmiling. His eyes were cold.

“What are you doing here?”

Lark took a step back. She peered at him, confused, the tone of his voice throwing her off-kilter. The door had opened to reveal not her friend but this new, stark stranger.

Her fingers tightened against the letters, making the paper crinkle.

She was suddenly, overwhelmingly embarrassed about the fact that she had tied envelopes together with a ribbon.

She wanted to tuck them behind her back, but it was too late.

Alastair had already noticed. His eyes narrowed toward the bundle of envelopes.

“I was worried about you,” Lark finally managed to say.

Alastair arched a brow. “Why?”

“Because I haven’t seen you…” She trailed off. He was watching her so coolly, as though she were a stranger who had come to deliver a telegram. Something impersonal that linked them not at all. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

Alastair tugged at a sleeve, smoothing down a minute wrinkle in his cuff.

Lark noticed for the first time that he was dressed as formally as Marcus had been at the bonfire, in tailored wool trousers and a starched shirt.

His shirt was buttoned tightly all the way to his throat, the collar fastened with a glinting silver pin.

“And,” Lark went on determinedly, “you just told me how you’ve been unwell. So I—”

His eyes narrowed at the mention of his illness, and he gave a flinch, as though she had stung him. He tugged a hand through his hair, letting out a deep breath. “I haven’t been unwell. I’m busy. That’s all.”

Quiet expanded between them, a palpable thing.

Lark fidgeted with the ends of the ribbon tied around the letters.

She had always thought herself sensible, not someone who took risks.

Growing up beside the wild sea, she had learned when to step back from danger.

And now there was a small, still-sensible part of herself that told her she should leave.

That if she stayed and continued to speak with cold-eyed Alastair Felimath, she would sorely regret it.

But another, more stubborn part of her remained fixed in place. She stared at him, as though she could puzzle out from his features what had happened, how the boy who gave her a book of Caedmon’s sketches, who held her hand, who whispered her name so breathlessly in the field had become like this .

Biting her lip, she forced herself to ask, “Alastair, are you… angry with me?”

“No.” His answer was mild, truthful. There was no anger in him, and that was even more unsettling. The way he seemed so unbothered by all of this.

“Then have I done something wrong?”

He looked past her for a moment, eyes fixed on the seascape behind where she stood.

His brows creased, and then he let out a deep breath.

“It’s not that you’ve done anything. It’s only…

I’ve been thinking. We’re very different people.

It didn’t matter so much when we were children, but now I’ve realized how much it does matter. ”

Lark clutched the letters against her chest. The red ribbon trailed down from her hands like spilling blood.

She felt as though the Alastair who wore her wreath and hid with her in the field had vanished.

Perhaps he never existed at all. He was only a dream that she had constructed in the midsummer twilight.

“I thought we were friends. At the bonfire, you…” She swallowed the rest of her words, her cheeks burning, as he shook his head.

He sighed, casting her a solicitous look. “I want to apologize.”

“For what , specifically?”

“For giving you the wrong impression. We were friends. But just because we were thrown together as classmates, as neighbors, doesn’t mean I want to continue that now.

” Alastair pressed his lips together, mouth drawn into a taut line.

“I’m sorry, Lacrimosa. I have more important things I need to focus on. ”

He was nonchalant, but his words resounded in her ears as though she’d been struck.

I’m sorry, Lacrimosa. The flatness of his tone, the uncaring way in which he spoke to her—suddenly she saw, as though unveiled, who Alastair had always been.

A bored, wealthy boy who now no longer wanted to associate with a girl like her—a miner’s daughter who lived in a little cottage rather than a grand, named house, whose dead parents owed his father money.

It unstuck her, and she was suddenly all in motion. She wrenched the red ribbon from the bundle of letters. In a messy, clumsy rush, she shredded the envelopes into a confetti of scraps.

“Letting me think we were friends is only one of the myriad things you should apologize for, Alastair Felimath.” Her eyes began to sting, and she blinked rapidly, refusing to let the tears fall. “I don’t ever, ever , want to see you, or speak with you, again.”

Lark threw the torn paper on the ground at Alastair’s feet.

He watched the pieces scatter without reaction, then stepped back and began to close the door.

She turned away before it shut, running from his house with the ragged sound of her sobs filling the air.

Grateful for them, because then she couldn’t hear the snick of the latch, Alastair closing her out of his life.

She ran all the way to the beach below her cottage. Sunset bled over the waves, red as a ribbon. In the cliffside cave where her family kept their altar to Therion, Lark hid. She sat on the cool stone floor and buried her face in her hands, and she cried.

It was night by the time she emerged, drawn to the lights of the cottage like a moth from the dark.

Oberon was in the kitchen. She could see him at the stove, still in his work clothes with dark streaks of the salt dust on his shirt.

She wanted to run to him, wrap her arms around his waist, bury her face in the scent of sweat and salt, and tell him everything.

Instead, she wiped the tearstains from her cheeks and forced herself to breathe evenly.

If her feelings for Alastair were felt raw and tender before, now they were unbearable.

And however much she craved the comfort of her brothers, the ache of vulnerability, the desire to curl into herself, was fiercer.

“There you are,” Henry said when she came into the house. He was flushed from a bath, his hair still damp. “Where have you been?”

“I went walking and lost track of time,” Lark replied, her head down, as she slipped through the kitchen and went onward to the hall. “I’m going to wash my hands, then I’ll be down to help with dinner.”

She went upstairs before either of her brothers could reply. In the bathroom she washed her face and pressed a damp cloth to her swollen eyes. She brushed the knots from her tangled hair.

“Damson was right,” she told her reflection, her fingers clenched tightly around the handle of her brush. “You should have stayed at Marchmain. Then none of this would have ever happened.”