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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Now

I step into the phone booth outside the general store. The glass walls are salt-fogged, like the windows of the buildings in the compound, and I feel as though I’m in the chamber of a grimy, echoing seashell.

The bored-looking girl in the store who sold Camille our tea and pastries earlier only offered a bemused expression when we asked if she knew where the Salt Priests had gone.

Laying down the paperback book she was reading, she told us the cult members rarely came into the town.

Whatever they were doing out at their compound, she preferred not to know.

Now, inside the telephone booth, my hands shake as I drop coins into the slot and lift the receiver. Unfolding my brothers’ telegram, I dial the typeset number. The phone rings several times before the hotel receptionist answers. “Good afternoon, this is the Evelyn Hotel.”

I’ve left the accordion-style door folded open, and a gust of scouring, brine-scented wind blows around me, pulling at my hair. “I’d like to speak with Henry Arriscane, please.”

There’s a click, static, and the call is transferred. From the other end of the line comes Henry’s voice.

“Lark!” It’s the same bright way he answered in the rare times we spoke on the telephone while I was at Marchmain.

My chest aches, my ribs pressed tight against my heart.

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. When I don’t respond, Henry’s voice sobers.

“Is everything all right? We’ve been expecting to hear from you. ”

And then, like I am a lock and a key has been turned, I begin to speak, words spilling out so fast it’s almost like someone else has made the sounds. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

“What truth?” he asks, tone edged with wariness.

“Henry, I know what you did, you and Oberon. I know what happened the night I was born.”

Silence echoes between us, then Henry swallows audibly.

Born is such a strange term for it—a child made of blood and magic, washed from the sea.

When Oberon burned all the photographs of Ariel and Oliver Arriscane, was it from grief, or because he and Henry—my creators—didn’t want me to realize there was no record of me in the family before that night when I arrived on the shore?

Tautly, Henry says, “You’ve been snooping in the attic.”

His voice is harsh with anger. This is how he responds when he’s cornered—with outrage before anything else. The ache in my chest intensifies. “You’re not denying it.”

My brother sighs heavily, and there’s a sound of matches being shook from a box, the flick of a flame being struck.

I imagine him standing in the hotel room, lighting a cigarette, scowling as he exhales a plume of smoke.

“We always intended to tell you. But then… as time passed, we realized it would be easier if you didn’t know. ”

“Easier for who ?” I snap. “You and Oberon, so you could send me away to my betrothal without ever having to explain?”

He muffles the receiver with his hand, and I hear his voice, indistinct, speaking to someone in the room. Then Oberon comes on the line. “Lark,” he begins, but I cut him off.

“You lied to me. Both of you.” My face is burning; I’m trembling and furious, on the verge of tears. A sob aches in my throat but I force it back, swallow it down.

Oberon tries again. “Lark, please, just let me explain. When our parents died, we were only a little older than you are now. We were orphans, we were in debt—we had no idea what to do. Then we found the mirror hidden in the attic. Dad used to tell us a story of an ancient hero who used a mirror to speak to the gods. It was a folktale, nothing more.”

“Like Naiius,” I murmur, feeling very far away. “The hero in The Neriad , the Tharnish poem about the gods.”

“Yes. Something like that, I suppose.”

I lean my cheek against the side of the telephone booth, feeling the press of the grimy, salt-stippled glass. “So, you found the mirror, and decided to what, play out an ancient folktale?”

“I guess that’s one way to describe it. We got hopelessly drunk and took the mirror into the tidal caves. And when Therion answered our call, it felt like a miracle.”

I close my eyes, remembering Camille, Alastair, and me calling to Therion in the woods.

The bitter scent of smoke and the taste of stolen wine.

How it felt to lose control, to be swept away.

I can imagine how my brothers felt on that first night.

The terror and wonder of falling into the dark, landing in the presence of a god.

“We didn’t understand what it would truly mean, even when we agreed to perform the ritual he gave us. Therion wanted someone to be his for the rest of their life; it was all so abstract, until we saw you rise from the sea. We didn’t know how much we would love you, Lark.”

Oberon breaks off, his voice choked. I realize that he’s crying.

I feel sick, awful, as Henry takes the receiver from him and continues the story.

“In the boat, you cried so loudly that it echoed from the cliffs. But when I lifted you out, you curled against me with so much trust . Like you already knew we were your family.”

I struggle for a way to respond to this, but I have no words; I’m fighting back tears.

“We went to Marcus Felimath and told him our parents had died,” Henry goes on. “And he offered us another loan in addition to their debt. We decided to take it, to see if we could make things work without… without giving you up.”

“Then the next salt season came,” Oberon continues, his voice rasped by tears.

“You were just starting to walk, to say our names. And I—we couldn’t do it.

We couldn’t send you to such a fate, commit you to Therion forever, when your life had barely begun.

We agreed to wait until you could decide for yourself.

And we couldn’t tell you the truth—our agreement, the debt, your birth—because we wanted you to have a normal life. ”

I laugh, incredulous. “A normal life—after you wished me up from the sea, and were counting down the days until you told me I was betrothed to our god? I suppose it was a relief when I went to Marchmain, because then you didn’t have to lie to my face every day.”

“We were trying our best ,” Henry says sharply. He takes a drag from his cigarette; I hear the crackle of the coal through the line. “We wrote to you, and we waited for you to come home in the term break. We missed you.”

I close my eyes, trying to shut out the rise of memories—how I’d slept with their letters beneath my pillow, how I fought off my homesickness while I spent my days with Damson before everything soured between us.

I know how the story goes from here. “You sold everything you could. You managed to cover the debt. Until Alastair took over from his father.”

I look to where Alastair is waiting for me with Camille, near the general store.

Camille is sitting in the car with the window opened, Alastair leaning down to speak with her.

At the sight of them both, fresh tears fill my eyes.

I turn away, staring at the blurred glass wall of the phone booth, forcing myself to stay held together.

“When you found us that night in the tidal caves, we were asking Therion to change his mind,” Oberon says. “But then you went back to him and agreed to be his bride.”

“I suppose in the end you got what you wanted, then,” I tell my brothers. I feel as hollowed out as one of the shells laid on Therion’s altar. “It was my choice to go to him after all.”

“Lark,” Henry says, and he’s crying, too. “Lark, we’re so sorry.”

I can’t remember the last time Henry ever cried.

He’s always been so stoic and calm, the opposite of how my emotions rise and fall like the tides.

He and Oberon were just boys when they went to Therion and made their promise, boys who were orphaned and afraid.

I feel so betrayed by the secrets they’ve kept, so lost for how to parse out the fact of my birth alongside the way they’ve raised me and loved me.

“I need to know how to undo it,” I say. “The promise I made to him. If there’s a way to unbind myself from Therion.”

I hear one of my brothers trying to gather his breath, steady it beneath the sobs. The other, blowing his nose. There’s a long, troubled silence and finally Henry speaks.

“Lark, sweetheart, I don’t think you can.” His voice is foggy with tears. It’s so strange to hear him like this, so undone. He sounds like a different person. “You were born from his magic, and you’ll always be connected to him. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a life of your own.”

My fingers tighten around the receiver, gripping it so hard that my knuckles crack. I’m numbed, like I have plunged beneath the coldest waves of the North Sea. I’m too distant to even be furious, like I know I should. I feel as though I’ve witnessed my own death.

That’s exactly what it means , I want to tell Henry. Yet somehow I can’t form any words.

Oberon comes onto the line. “We only have a few more days to finish organizing the crew,” he says, “and then we’ll be home.”

Behind me there is the sound of footsteps as someone approaches the telephone booth.

I turn, expecting Alastair or Camille. Instead, there’s a boy—dressed in patched trousers and a fisherman’s sweater, the strap of his canvas satchel slung across his chest. At first I think he’s a stranger.

Then my whirring mind sets the pieces of him together—the angle of his shoulders, his height, the glint of his blond hair.

I clamp my hand around the mouthpiece of the phone as I gape at him. “Hugo?”

Hugo Valentine pushes his blond curls out of his eyes. He dips his chin in acknowledgment.

“Lark,” Henry says questioningly from the other end of the line. “Is everything all right?”