Page 7

As soon as the mirror is hidden, water rushes into the cave, cascading over the floor.

It foams around our ankles and gutters the brazier, plunging the space into darkness.

The tide has never come this high before, this far inland.

Henry surges toward me through the rising, frothing waves.

He gathers me up into his arms, the way he did when I was small.

As he carries me out of the cave, I feel his heart thundering against my ear.

I struggle, trying to get down, but he stops me with a warning glare. “Don’t.”

The tide has filled the grotto, and the water is past my brothers’ knees.

As we hurry out toward the beach, waves strike against Therion’s altar, soaking the ends of the velvet cloth and washing the shells into disarray.

I cling to Henry, and Oberon wades beside us, the hem of his coat dragging and sodden across the surface of the sea.

Outside, the night is stark and endless, a clear sky and fragments of moonlight on the ocean like shattered glass. When the waves rise around us, Henry lets me go and we swim until we reach the breakwater. My knees scrape against the stones as I clamber across, tumbling to the flower-covered path.

Henry catches hold of my elbow, helps me to my feet. In an unsteady progression we stagger toward the cottage—my arm wrapped around Henry’s waist, my fist knotted in the fabric of Oberon’s coat. Once we’re back inside, my brothers lead me into our parents’ old bedroom.

Their room is tucked beneath the stairwell.

I used to sneak inside to play dress-up with my mother’s clothes and jewelry, or to curl on the window seat with a lapful of magazines.

But now the room is almost completely empty.

The dresser, with all my mother’s things—the silver hairbrush and the velvet jewelry box and the carved porcelain swan—has been taken away.

Only a bare mattress remains, covered by a faded cotton sheet.

Seawater drips from our clothes. Our skin is gritted with sand. But my brothers tuck me right into the bed and collapse on either side of me. I’m aching, nauseous, my hair laced with the bitter scent of smoke and my ears echoing with the voice of a god.

“How did you do that?” I close my eyes and press my hands to my aching temples. “You spoke with him. He was real.”

It’s as though I’ve been awoken from a vivid dream only to be told that every impossible thing I saw was true. We burn our tokens and we give our thanks. But for all the devotions that we offer to Therion, our two realms are always separate. At least, I thought they were.

Tonight, my brothers have unmade the rules of the world. They’ve reached into the dark and drawn out a god. Therion was a distant creature of seasonal bonfires and altar offerings, yet he looked into my eyes and spoke my name.

And he demanded that I bind myself to him, forever.

Oberon shifts beside me. “There were rumors that our family once knew a ritual to speak with Therion,” he whispers, a rasp of shame in his unsteady voice.

“Dad told us about it, before you were born. We never gave it much thought until after he died. Then Henry and I tried the ritual, together, a handful of times. But Therion never answered.”

“Not until tonight.”

He exhales, a desolate sigh. “We never should have done it.”

I stare up at the ceiling, thinking of the emptiness of this room, of all the rooms around us. Our whole cottage has been hollowed out, and I can feel our connections to this place—where generations of Arriscanes have lived and died—dissolving like a sugar cube in hot water.

“Do you really think that Therion would restore the mine if I went to live with him?”

Henry lays his hand on my back. “Enough,” he orders, an echo of what Oberon said to us in the caves. “We’ll discuss this later.”

As I fall into a troubled silence, I let myself picture how it would be to go into Therion’s world. To dwell with him in the chthonic realm for every salt season, for the rest of my life. To be his bride.

I know the ways of marriage: betrothal rings and veils, promises sealed by a kiss.

Two lives entwined in a single existence.

Everything shared, joy and sorrow. It’s a form of trust I’d never thought to give another, because the only people I have ever loved in that way, first Alastair, then Damson, had turned that closeness to a weapon.

How might it be, though, if I were wed to a god?

I force aside my fear and think of Therion’s amber eyes, how his voice echoed through the cave.

When he took me to his world would it hurt, or would he draw me with him as gently as dipping beneath the surface of the sea?

My breath held, my limbs heavy, the two of us borne away by a waning tide.

And what he offered… it could fix everything.

It could fix me . It’s a terrible thought, but once it rises I can’t let it go.

If I were Therion’s bride, I would be more than the girl who Alastair Felimath refused to love, more than the girl who lost the future she worked so hard for. I would save my family from ruin.

My eyes shutter closed and I sink into a clotted darkness, tucked between my brothers.

At Marchmain, one of our first lessons was about the golden ratio in art, the magic thirds that divide paintings into ley lines that can be read for hidden meaning.

There was a grim symmetry in my own life: Henry, Oberon, and me.

The trio I had once formed with Alastair, myself, and Camille.

And now my existence looks to be divided in the same way. There’s our cottage at the clifftop, windswept and barren. Then the mine, with the hollowed veins, the salt all vanished away. Then, beneath a gauze-thin border I had never known could be crossed, the chthonic world.

Where Therion waits for me.