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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Now

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.

Each morning, 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 from The Neriad in 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 turn the 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.

My brothers are happy in a way I’ve not seen them in the longest time. Henry drinks too much wine and tells foolish jokes that make everyone laugh. Then he throws the last of his cigarettes into the bonfire, and announces he’s giving them up for good.

In the arbor, Oberon is talking to another man around his age, who seems strangely familiar, though I’m sure we’ve never met.

They’re bowed together in a hushed, intimate conversation.

When Oberon catches my eye, he beckons me over to introduce us.

“This is Nicholas,” he says. “An… old friend I haven’t seen in a long time. ”

Nicholas smiles shyly at me, and I remember the hidden photograph. He’s older now, his hair cropped close, two silver rings in one ear; but there’s still the same pleased, boyish cast in his expression as there was in that picture.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I tell him, and even in the firelight I can see that Oberon is blushing.

As the evening draws on, Camille and I walk out into the fields. We go through the Arriscane woods, our path lit by the full moon. We go to the edge of the cliff and climb down the narrow ladder.

The ocean lies flat and still, reflecting a second, blurred moon, as we reach the base of the cliffs.

The salt has drawn back from the lower entrance to the mine, unveiling the corridor ahead.

We go down together, our hands clasped, lighting our way with the same flashlight we’ve used to read The Neriad on our sleepless nights at the beach.

When we reach the altar chamber, the brazier is already burning.

The room is all amber light and dancing shadows, the air smells of smoke and pollen.

And it’s a riot of flowers: drifts of them piled in the corners, cascading over the floor.

Camellia and pear blossom, oxeye daises and delicate spider orchids.

It’s as though every flower that bloomed and fell throughout the spring didn’t rot into the earth but was brought here instead.

At the heart of the space, Alastair lies asleep on a bed of greenery. There’s a circlet of laurel branches on his hair. His cheeks are dusted in gold. He stirs awake as Camille and I enter the room. He sits upright, regarding us with wide, dark eyes. His mouth tilts into a disbelieving smile.

“I’ve dreamed of you, so many nights,” he says. “But this—this must be real.”

I tumble forward into his outstretched arms. Petals crush beneath my knees as I drag Alastair close, kissing him, feeling the heat of his mouth.

He tastes of honey, of chthonic liquor, of brazier smoke.

His fingers knot into my hair, map the line of my cheek, the curve of my jaw.

He clutches me tighter and buries his face in my neck, exhaling a shuddering breath against my skin.

“We’re real,” I tell him between feverish kisses. “I promise, we’re real.”

He draws back, his smile more certain now, and reaches for Camille. As he embraces her, I notice his eyes are gray—solely gray, the color of storm clouds. I stroke his cheek, smudging the golden paint with my thumb. “Where is Therion?”

Alastair looks down at his hands folded in his lap, his knuckles dusted with pollen. “He is gone. But only…” He hesitates, touching his face, where bloodied tears once welled at the corner of his changed eyes. “Only until the next salt season. Then he will return, be within me again.”

I remember Therion’s suggestion, when I asked him to possess me, that it would perhaps be a reversal of our original promise. That he and I would share a consciousness in the mortal world for the salt season, that afterward he could leave… for a time.

But now, it will be Alastair to whom he returns.

He looks at me, reads the troubled expression in my eyes. Gently, he clasps my face in his hands. “I don’t regret it, Lark. That I’ll be bound to him like this, forever. That he and I will always be connected. Because it allowed me to save you. You are his bride, and I am his body.”

“And you,” I tell him, feeling as eternal and true as lines written in ancient poetry, “are simply mine .”

When we emerge back to the hidden beach, the moon has turned orange, as though it has absorbed the light from the bonfire flames. We walk to the end of the pier and stand in silence, looking out at where Camille and I watched the swan boat burn.

Alastair turns in a slow circle, his arms outstretched. Then he pauses, glancing down at the water with a glint in his storm-gray eyes, all longing and delight. I think of him at the beach, the first time I saw him alone, standing at the edge of the ocean, as though he drew strength from the waves.

The sea is an earnest threat. And it’s my birthplace, my blood, my heart. Wherever we go after this night, we will always be tied to the shore of Verse.

With a grin, Alastair holds out his hands to me and Camille. For a moment, the orange moonlight is captured by his gaze. A flash of amber like swan’s eyes, god’s eyes. The lingering promise of what—and who—waits for us at the next salt season, at the new cusp of spring.

Alastair leads us to the end of the pier. We stand in a row, and then, in unison, we take a deep breath.

Together, we plunge into the sea.