Page 37 of The Light Between Worlds

I tighten my grip on his arm. God help this boy, but he’s tethering me to the world right now and I can’t let go, not after holding out for so many years. Still, I’m a Woodlander, and I have my pride.

“Tom, you don’t mind at all? It’s not just pity?”

He stops and steps in front of me, holding me gently in place with a hand on each of my arms. “Evelyn, sometimes things go wrong for people, and they have a hard time finding their way. I know that. I’ve lived that. I’m not afraid because you’re still wandering.”

I look past him. The streetlamps are lit, and golden motes of snow drift into the pools of light they leave.

Closer than the snow, and more solid than a stag, Tom Harper smiles and puts his hands in his pockets before speaking.

“‘She can’t be unhappy,’ you said,

‘The smiles are like stars in her eyes,

And her laughter is thistledown

Around her low replies.’

‘Is she unhappy?’ you said—

But who has ever known

Another’s heartbreak—

All he can know is his own;

And she seems hushed to me,

As hushed as though

Her heart were a hunter’s fire

Smothered in snow.”

Tom swallows, and I can see his throat work. For a moment, there’s something achingly familiar in his eyes—a grief that time has never dimmed, an unknown hurt he’ll carry all his life. I recognize that look, because it haunts me from my mirror.

We stand facing each other in the light of the streetlamps, caught amid constellations of snow. There is something brighter and warmer between us than shared grief that stretches from me to Tom Harper and back again. This is the anchor holding me in place—this fearful, tenuous thing. I’ll do anything to keep from damaging it, so I turn aside instead of stepping forward.

After all my years, I’m learning to be wise.

I loop my arm through Tom’s. “We should go back. Mum and Dad will be wondering where I’ve got to.”

We walk home together, and the snow smothers less than it did before.

27

SPRING BRINGS THE MUD AND BLOOD AND FILTH OFbattle to the Woodlands, rather than green shoots and new life.

Jamie and Philippa insist on being at the southern front—Jamie because it’s where he belongs, and Philippa because she’s still doing penance. I am like every other Woodlander—ready, but still unwilling. I don’t want to go but it must be done, and I won’t let my sister out of my sight.

The Woodlanders fight like no army I’ve ever seen before—where the Tarsin forces wear uniforms and rely on precisely planned maneuvers, the forest dwellers are invisible until they strike. They appear from the trees and rain destruction on our enemies, disorienting them entirely. By the time the Tarsin soldiers get their bearings, the Woodlanders have gone.

There are still losses, though. There are always losses in war. Each evening, a party ghosts out from our hidden camp deep within the forest to retrieve the bodies of the fallen.

I watch Cervus one night, picking his way between the corpses that have been washed and dressed in green and laid out on theforest floor. Moonlight silvers his rust-colored flanks, and at every still form, he stops and lowers his head, brushing his muzzle against each fallen soul as a benediction. It’s not until I draw closer that I hear him speaking words as well—a promise to each Woodlander we’ve lost.

“A Woodlands heart always finds its way home.”

I pick fistfuls of snowdrops from among the last melting drifts of snow and set them between the cold, still hands of the dead. When we’ve finished, Cervus comes to me and lays his head on my shoulder while I stand with my arms around his neck, and the sorrow in us is so great I’m not sure who needs the other more.