Page 15 of The Light Between Worlds

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire.”

I know these words. I’ve known two worlds’ worth of songs and stories and poems, but these lines I hold very close. Tom’s voice trails off as I pick up the last three verses.

“And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.”

We sit for a long time without talking and watch the rain until our tea goes cold, and I am enormously, unspeakably glad to have found someone I can be silent with.

That night, long after Tom has gone back to St. Joseph’s and I’ve been subjected to merciless questioning from Georgie, I lie in the dark and fall into a dream that is half remembering.

Grey sand. Grey sea. Grey sky.

The entire world has been washed clean of any color, and the waves beside me sigh a melancholy song.

I stare out across the fathomless expanse of the sea, to the invisible point where it ends and the sky begins, and when I look back, there he is, coming along the beach. In dreams he’s always more, somehow, than he was when I knew him. His split hooves leave deep impressions in the sand that fill with salt water, and he is everything bright and good distilled into a single point of intolerable light. A storm is not fiercer; an avalanche is not wilder; when he fixes his eyes upon me, I drop to my knees.

Words rumble up from his rust-red chest. The sea grows louder and his voice is overcome by the sound of waves and rain.

I wake filled with loss and longing. There is a grey ocean inside me that weeps and sighs. But when I turn my head, moonlight streams through the crack in my curtains.

For now, at least, the rain has moved on.

10

AT LONG LAST, WE’VE COME TO THE END OF OURjourney through the Great Wood. A thin rain is falling the day Hector stops in a grove of pines, at the lead since Cervus left us following the lighting ceremony in the valley.

“We’re nearly there,” he says.

I nod solemnly, as does Jamie. Philippa only sneezes—she’s caught a cold, and looks worse off than the rest of us. Hector leads us through the pines until the soil grows sandy beneath our feet, and beach grass sprouts between the pine roots. Suddenly, the trees stop, and we step out onto a spit of sand.

Before us is the wide and restless sea, stretching to the horizon, and a long beach runs away to the north and south. Waves murmur against the shore, and rain sighs onto the sand. Philippa pulls her blanket up over her head and coughs.

Southward, perhaps a mile down the beach, a sheer grey cliff rises from the forest. A castle perches at the summit, grey, too, with vines softening its edges. Trees grow up between the curtain walls and thekeep, and a pennant flies from the highest point, stitched in green and brown and blue.

I’ve seen castles in our world surrounded by barbed wire, with tanks and armed men in their courtyards. I watched them from train windows while speeding past on my way to yet another term of school, or another unfamiliar house with its own strange smells and rules. To see this place, alive and inviting, with its proud flag flying and smoke curling up from its many chimneys, makes me so glad I ache.

“Palace Beautiful,” Dorien says as Hector leads the way toward it across the shell-strewn beach. “It was built long ages ago, in the years before the Wood. We use it as a meeting place now, when all the councils come together or on high days. Between times, Alfreya and I run it as an inn, so that those on their way through the forest can be sure of a warm bed to sleep in at least once along their way. It’s as close a thing as we’ve got to a capital.”

“A warm bed sounds like heaven,” Philippa croaks, and I have to agree. These woods may be magic, but I’d love a chance to be clean and dry, with a roof over my head to keep off the rain.

Vaya appears in the shape of a girl. She hurries on ahead, taunting me with that chiming laugh of hers, and I can’t help it. I grin and race after her across the sand, the sodden blanket around my shoulders flapping like another small standard.

A narrow stone stairway runs up from the base of the cliff, curving around through the woods, so that it’s as if we’re climbing among the treetops. By the time we come out into a wildflower meadow at the pinnacle of the cliff, I’m breathless, both from my run and from excitement.