Page 21 of The Light Between Worlds

“Walk with me?” I ask. He nods.

I take him to the hills overlooking the sheep fields. A part of me wants to take him to the birch ring, but I can’t, not just yet. There’s too much of who I am there, and tonight is about who I’m trying to become.

We sit together on a hillside, and I keep my hands out of sight. The skin stretched across my palms and fingers is blistered and unlovely, even under the silver moon.

Tom leans back and surveys the view with a contented sigh. “Isn’t that a picture?”

I hug my knees to my chest and rest my chin on them. It is. It’s beautiful, even though the trees are voiceless and there’s no water spirit in this happy little brook. The sheep below are just mute animals, and the dogs that guard them are clever but not clever enough to speak. This world is asleep, and no matter how many times I’ve wandered and wondered and spoken and sung, I’ve never been able to wake a single thing.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m asleep, too, lost in a dream I can’t escape from.

But at the same time, there’s a piercing beauty to this, to being out in the cool night air surrounded by the smell of meadow grass and the sound of the brook. The moon that shines here looks just like the moon did in the Great Wood, after all, and I have a friend beside me. This is a good dream.

Be bold, I tell myself, even as I feel my courage begin to flag. I snatch the last threads of it and speak before I can lose my nerve.

“I pulled the nettles up on purpose,” I say, wishing the words back almost before I’ve spoken them. “I knew what they were and I was paying attention and I should have worn gloves, but I did it anyway.”

I stare out across the sheep fields. It isn’t the first time I’ve done something of this sort, and it probably won’t be the last. Now Tom knows, I’m not sure what he’ll do.

“I don’t always like who I am.” I steal a glance at him. “I don’t expect you to either, but I wanted you to know.”

Tom shifts in place. I’m drawn to this thoughtful, quiet boy,and to the calm at his very center. I’m still studying his profile when he turns to me, his freckled face serious. “I don’t think anything could stop me liking you, Evelyn. And we’re all a bit frayed around the edges, aren’t we? It doesn’t surprise me and it doesn’t frighten me, finding out you’re only human like the rest of us.”

He reaches out and takes my stinging hand in his own, twining his fingers through mine.

I will never move again.

I will live and die here, content for once in this world to which I don’t belong.

It’s nearly midnight by the time I return to St. Agatha’s and slip through the back gate. When a dark shape looms up before me, my hand reaches for a knife I no longer wear. I can never shake that instinctual motion, and it’s a wrench every time I discover how helpless I am in this place, how spineless and biteless and unsure.

“Nah then, Miss Evelyn, I only waited up to make sure you got back safe and sound.”

Hobb stands stooped in the shadows with a steaming thermos in one hand and a pipe in his mouth, wrinkles seaming his age-spotted white skin. I shake my head as my heartbeat slows and steadies. “Hobb, you scared the wits out of me. You should be in bed.”

“Says the pot to the kettle, Miss.”

I roll my eyes and he chuckles like an elderly and mischievous owl before handing me the thermos. Expecting tea, I swallow without hesitation, only to have the honey sweetness and whiskey kick of a strong hot toddy burn down my throat. I muffle a cough in mysleeve and elbow Hobb in the ribs—gently, because he’s grown frail and slow in the last few years.

“If the Curmudgeon ever caught you plying students with your home brews, you’d be out on your ear.” But I take another sip of the potent concoction, slowly this time, letting it linger on my tongue until I taste lemon and cinnamon.

Once we’d settled into the Woodlands, Jamie and Philippa and I used to drink spiced mead on winter evenings, next to one of the enormous fireplaces in the great hall. We’d listen to Dorien, Alfreya, and Hector go over briefings or battle plans or budgets, though on rare nights they’d set aside their work and just talk. I loved those nights best—the ones on which we’d speak of a future that might never come. We’d plan journeys to the singers’ school or the western mountains, and expansions to the beach market that drew ships from across the world to the spit of sand below Palace Beautiful every summer. Hobb’s hot toddy tastes like those long ago, faraway evenings.

I tuck my arm through his, and we walk back across the overgrown field to the tiny, tumbledown cottage. When we’ve said good night, I watch Hobb totter in through the door and the breath catches in my chest. I never had a chance to watch Dorien grow old. I didn’t get to grow old myself in the company of Vaya, who’d still be young and lithe long after I’d gone grey. We were taken away too soon, thrown back into this world where I was barely more than a child again, caged in an unfamiliar body.

I can’t. I can’t think of this. I mustn’t. I need to be present, be in this world. Though years have passed since we were called, I’ve never yet learned the trick of life here. But I’ve fought every day, inthis battle that’s taken more from me than any war.

The truth is, I’m tired. I’m so very tired of the fight. I slip in through the front door of the dormitory and return the key to its hiding place under the fern. It’s late—no light gleams from Max’s room. I ghost up the stairs in my stocking feet and slide into bed fully dressed, where I fall into a sleep plagued by dreams.

Grey sand. Grey sea. Grey sky.

Cervus comes toward me on the beach.

14

“DON’T TOUCH THOSE,” DORIEN WARNS.

I glance up and wipe a hand across my face, leaving tracks of dirt. Jamie and I are Downhill, as the Woodlanders refer to the group of clearings on the woodward side of Palace Beautiful’s rise. Each clearing is planted or set to pasture so that as you walk through the tangle of the forest, you’ll come suddenly upon neat wattle fences, a shed, and half a dozen goats. Or a network of raised beds, with scarlet berries ripening on the vine. Or a field of leafy mounds, promising vegetables come autumn. At the center of each clearing is a little stone well tapping into the groundwater beneath the Great Wood’s floor. It’s very charming, and Dorien nearly bursts with pride each time I tell him so.