Page 37

I take the journal from Alastair’s hands. I draw in a deep breath, knowing that this choice means danger, knowing it’s the only way. “I want to go to the Salt Priests.”

We drive through the night, going north, to the remote and windswept upper reaches of Verse.

Camille and Alastair take turns at the wheel, one sprawled out across the rear seat to rest while the other drives.

It’s been years since I was inside a car, and I watch the scenery blur past the window with a mixture of thrill and terror.

Feeling like I have slipped into a dreamworld, the same as the strange purple-hued forest where Therion spoke to me.

The Salt Priest compound is at the far end of the Verse peninsula.

The road follows the clifftop, a winding dirt track above the endless sea.

Sunset turns the fields to blood, our skin as orange as the eyes of a swan.

It draws a path across the surface of the ocean until the water gleams like satin.

“What are we going to tell them when we arrive?” Alastair asks from the rear of the car. He and Camille exchanged places awhile before, and until just now he has been asleep. “Not the truth, I hope.”

I bite my lip as I try to think. “We can say we’re university students from the city. And we’ve come to make field notes for our theological project.”

Camille snorts back a laugh, and Alastair pushes himself upright, leaning into the front of the car to scowl at her. “It’s a good idea, Camille.”

She waves a hand in protest, still laughing. “It is! It’s perfect! I just—truly, it’s the role you and Lark were born to play. Two scholars, dedicated to the pursuit of archaic knowledge.”

“Perhaps if you spent more time studying, you’d have passed your mathematics exam,” Alastair says tautly.

“No thank you. I don’t want to spend my life doing account books for Father.

I’m going to travel the world.” Her voice turns dreamy, and she reaches with one hand to open the window, her other still on the steering wheel.

The cooling nighttime air spills in. “And you will both come with me. We’ll sail across the ocean in Lark’s swan boat.

We’ll go to every city that has Caedmon’s paintings in their galleries.

We’ll visit every bookstore and buy so many books that even Alastair won’t be able to read them all. ”

Alastair rolls his eyes, but there’s no heat in it, only their familiar rhythm of teasing. “It’s not my fault the only thing you’ve ever bothered to read is an atlas.”

“I also read music scores, for the piano. And magazines.”

As I listen to them both, I can’t help but smile.

It’s the first time we’ve spoken of what things might look like once all this has passed.

It draws me like a lure. I remember Camille’s vehement promise that the world had limitless good to offer, that she would claim it for me.

Right now, I can picture it so clearly—galleries and unfamiliar cities and the three of us, together.

I want it, this new unbridled life where anything is possible.

I want to be more than a girl made for a god, more than the girl who Damson rejected, who was expelled from Marchmain.

Who felt she needed the approval—the permission—of an institution to be worthy of her dreams. I want to explore the world with Camille and Alastair, for all these wistful adventures to become real.

We drive on in silence until the land is cloaked by heavy darkness, an enormous starlit sky and only the tunnel of our headlights to reveal the road ahead. It’s hard to imagine there’s anything here except for us, driving through a world painted by ink.

I think of Alastair, the summer after the ill-fated bonfire, being taken along this same road with his bruises and scars, his broken arm.

This is the northernmost part of Verse, bordered by the vast North Sea.

It feels exactly like the sort of place where a man like Marcus would hide his son, so his abuse would not be discovered.

It feels exactly like where a cult would gather.

At daybreak we reach the isolated town that is the nearest settlement to the Salt Priest compound.

We’re at the end of the peninsula, and the land is flat and marshy, fields of sagebrush replacing the tall cliffs of lower Verse.

The air smells of salt and brine, with an organic undertone like the forest floor. Like old things turned to rot.

On a hill beyond the town is a tall, narrow building—all gray stone and slate tiles, bordered by a wrought iron fence.

“That’s where I stayed, last time,” Alastair says, and though his expression is guardedly neutral, I can feel the edge to his voice, the rawness of hurt that still lingers.

In the back of the car, Camille is asleep.

I reach out to him across the seat and take his hand.

His thumb traces over my knuckles. Our clasped hands rest on his knee.

He lets go, fleetingly, to change gears as the car slows, as we enter the single main street of the town, then he holds my hand again.

We go on like that, neither of us speaking, just the shared warmth pressed between our palms.

Camille wakes with a yawn as we pull into a small paved area surrounded by low-lying trees and an empty sagebrush field.

The town where we’ve stopped is so small it could hardly be called a town.

Aside from the clinic where Alastair was sent, there’s a handful of dwellings and a general store, its windows unshuttered and a coil of smoke rising from its slender chimney.

When we get out of the car, the air is still.

There’s a bite to it, hinting at the icy plains that lie on the opposite side of the sea.

The Frozen North, where the people I grew up believing were my parents died.

Everything is dimmed by a lowering cover of clouds.

It feels as though springtime never reached here, that everything is caught in an eternal gray winter.

Camille gestures toward the store. “Should I ask for directions?”

“Go ahead,” Alastair says, his eyes still fixed at the tall shape of the clinic, now little more than an outline in the hazy distance.

I watch Camille as she goes inside. The door has a bell hooked to the top; it rings discordantly as she enters.

Alastair starts to pace in a wide, restless circle.

A film of shell-grit dust stirs up from the ground, pasting itself to the toes of his shoes.

I follow him as he goes to the treeline, where the sprawling branches of a pine block our view of the clinic.

The wind through the needle-fine leaves sounds like a voice whispering incomprehensible secrets.

As we stand together, side by side but not touching, Alastair sighs heavily. “I never thought I’d be back here,” he says. Then, eyes downcast, he adds, “I’m such a coward. Even now, all I want to do is turn around and go back to Saltswan.”

I lay my hand on his arm. It aches to look at him, to see the sorrowful hue of his expression.

“You’ve brought me here. You’ve watched over me while I slept, and pulled me back from the dark.

You’ve followed me into another world, let Therion change you; you’ve put yourself in danger.

You’re not a coward, Alastair. You never have been. ”

He turns away from me, his mismatched eyes as troubled as the clouded sky. But I catch his face between my hands and hold him still. His lashes dip; he looses a slow breath. “If I was brave, it was only to save you.”

I trace the line of his jaw. His skin is warm, despite the cold wind. His hand goes tentatively to my waist. It feels like forever since I first touched him, that careful linking of our smallest fingers. Now our closeness is like a flicker of memory. Caught up from the past and carried here.

Alastair looks at me like I am an altar, and he is laying out shells one by one, lighting candles as he whispers a prayer.

I can see the quaver of his pulse in the hollow of his throat.

I stand on tiptoe, narrowing the last distance between us.

He is all lean strength and broad shoulders, so different from the softness of Camille.

I can feel the rasp of his jaw where his beard is growing in.

The rising pace of his heart beneath the solid plane of his chest.

I kiss the corner of his mouth. Kiss his cheek, slowly, slowly. My blood is honey, my movements languorous. His hand slides down my waist, fingers plying the curve of my hip. Each touch, each breath, is magnified, until it becomes its own small universe.

I press my lips to his temple. His jaw. Mapping a path to the corner of his eye, feeling the prickle of his lashes as he blinks.

Alastair gasps, stilted and desperate. His fingers tighten.

He tugs me closer, until we are pressed flush, all heat and helplessness.

He cants against me, his lips parted, a fever in his gaze.

“Lark.” He says my name like it’s a precious, breakable thing, and the sound of his voice turns me molten with wanting; I am all spark and wick.

He bends to me, kisses me, insistent and yielding at once.

When I kiss him back, he makes a low, helpless noise, and it hums through me right down to my bones.

He tastes of salt and bitter tea; his tongue is hot and clumsy as it sweeps over mine.

Alastair kisses me the way I wanted him to in the summer field, at the entrance of Saltswan, on all the nights when I let my mind wander and thought of him, even after he’d broken my heart.

It’s our entire history, all the pain and the tears and the missed chances, condensed into this single moment.

It’s so different from kissing Camille. She is the sunlight as it fragments over the waves and turns everything gold.

Alastair is the indigo depths beneath the surface, a riptide, sleek and ensnaring.

Kissing him feels like drinking stolen wine, like I have taken something shattered and set it back together, made it new.

When we draw apart, we’re breathless, both of us laughing and suddenly shy. Camille appears from the doorway of the store, balancing three paper cups of tea in her hands, a paper bag tucked beneath her arm. I fight the urge to smooth down my hair or blot at my swollen lips.

She passes me one of the cups, then reaches into the bag for a sugar-dusted pastry.

Taking a large bite, she looks at us both with a knowing, gleeful smile.

There’s a smudge of jam on her chin. I wipe it away with my thumb, then lick the sweetness from the edge of my finger as we leave the town behind and start out for the small, barely used trail that will take us down to the sea.

The Salt Priests live in whitewashed cottages built right beside the beach.

The walls stand out against the backdrop of sand like driftwood or pieces of bleached bone, as though the entire settlement washed ashore from the depths of the ocean.

All the windows are covered by a film of grime that makes the glass seem frosted.

At the edge of the shoreline is a larger building, with a spired roof and a clocktower.

Our shoes crunch over gravel as we walk toward its arched wooden door.

A brisk wind comes in from the sea, drawn through the spaces between the cottages with a low howl.

Aside from the wind, though, everything is silent.

None of the doors open, and nothing stirs behind the clouded glass.

I glance between Alastair and Camille. Then, my shoulders squared, I raise my hand and knock. The light glints on my betrothal ring. The hollow sound of my fist against the wood echoes through the air.

There’s no response.

I try the handle, and though I expect it to be locked tight, it turns easily. The door swings open on sleekly oiled hinges to reveal a high-ceilinged room.

It’s all plain walls and bare floors, with the closed-up feel of an attic. The only furniture is an altar to Therion built of driftwood at the apex of the room. There is no one here, and nowhere for them to be hidden.

We approach the altar. The velvet cloth is decorated with shells, smooth stones, and pieces of sea glass. No different, really, from the items my brothers and I have laid out for Therion at our own altar over the years.

But between the shells and stones are other things. A strip of lace, the end splotched by a rust-colored stain. A cut tendril of golden hair, braided into a silken rope.

And in place of a flask of chthonic liquor there is an enormous stoppered jar. It’s filled with murky water, and a grimy layer of sediment coats the bottom. A ladle is tied to the jar by a long strand of ribbon.

Silently, we file back outside. Camille walks over to the nearest cottage. She knocks on the door, peers through the window. Then she cups her hands around her mouth and calls, “Hello?”

Her voice echoes through the eerie silence, caught up by the wind that rushes between the weatherworn walls. It sounds as plaintive as a bird’s cry, like the call of the swans as they fly in their arrowed formation.

I glance toward Alastair, who stands with his arms folded, eyes fixed to the expanse of ocean—flat waves, the shore marshy with kelp. “Do you know where they might be?”

He shakes his head, mouth drawn taut.

We go past the clocktower building and out onto the beach, where tidal flats span between water and land.

Everything is grave and gray, and completely deserted.

The cliffs are lower here than the ones beside our cove, but I can see the telltale shadow of an opening at the base of them. It looks like it will lead into a cave.

As we walk toward it, though, I already know with an instinctive certainty that the Salt Priests have gone, that the caves will be empty. A shiver drags down my spine, ominous, foreboding, as icy as the reaches beyond the sea.