Page 85 of The Light Between Worlds

Jack hesitates.

“Will you?” he asks after a moment, and there’s something unspoken in the question.

He’s not sure I’ll come back. On the inside, he’s started to wonder if I’ll vanish—if one day, he’ll turn around and I’ll be gone. And I lived through that sort of wondering for enough years that I hate to think of another person feeling it.

Leaning forward, I put my arms around him and hold tight. After a moment, he does the same.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. I’m on the brink of tears because there’s a slow tug in my bones that feels terribly like goodbye. It’s a pull that began with a three a.m. phone call, and it’s been building ever since, made stronger by painted forests and drowned girls and stags in Trafalgar Square. “I promise I’ll come back to you.”

I need the words to be true, but they taste of ashes on my tongue. How many promises have I made and broken?

“Good,” Jack says, and clears his throat. “Because I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

I push away, wide-eyed. Jack grins.

“Philippa Hapwell, when you get back, will you... go to dinner with me?”

I shake my head and smile, though my eyes are damp. “What, that’s it? I thought you might ask the other thing.”

“Well. I don’t want to frighten you away.”

I haven’t kissed him since the night he brought me here. I’ve been ever so well-behaved, but I kiss him now in earnest, with a promise on my lips—the one I’ve already spoken, that I’ll come back, that this leaving is only for a little while.

But when we’ve said goodbye and I sit on the train, watching the glorious spring countryside fly past, I’m cold enough to freeze the woods for a hundred years. And because of where I’m going,because I’m on my way to confront Evelyn’s ghosts, I permit myself to recall a day I hate remembering.

Evelyn and Jamie and I are on the beach, beyond the woods below Palace Beautiful. It’s an overcast afternoon in midsummer, and the surface of the sea is alive with rain, a mosaic of ripples glinting grey and blue and white.

Ev walks barefoot by the water’s edge, a smile on her face. The war with the Tarsin Empire is won. She has grieved for our dead and her tears are spent. A calm lies over the kingdom, and even Ev’s dreams of Venndarien Tarsin’s death have begun to subside.

But I can’t lay hold of the peace she feels, at least not in this world. We were born elsewhere, and while Evelyn may have all but forgotten, I’ve never stopped remembering. Even Jamie is growing restless. There is an urgency in me now the Great Wood is safe, to get back home. To return to that night of sirens and shelling. To pick up our story where it left off.

Jamie and I have made a decision, after weeks’ worth of conversations stretching past midnight. It’s time to go. All that’s left is to tell Evelyn, but for once, I can’t find the right words. I’ve known, since the first week we spent here, that this place means something to her it doesn’t to Jamie or me. That it will break her heart to be torn away.

What can we do, though? We can’t possibly leave her behind. I barely remember the child she was in England. I can remember myself, and Jamie. I remember our parents, our house, that other war. But images of Evelyn in the Woodlands always come to the forefront when I try to think of who she was back then. It’s so much easier to see her here, and that frightens me.

Ev comes up alongside me, silent on bare feet. Of the three of us, she’s the only one who’s learned that trick, of walking the Woodlands way. She puts her arm through mine and we watch the waves sighing onto the shore.

“He’s here,” Jamie says from where he waits a few yards off, hands in his pockets, rain glinting on his fair hair.

I’m meant to have warned Evelyn, and it’s cruel that I haven’t. I look one last time for a way to explain, but there are still no words for this within me. They all fall empty and flat, leaving me hollow. I haven’t felt so bleak since I came within an inch of betraying the Great Wood.

Cervus is coming toward us on the beach, and our time here is running out. Perhaps this will be better in the end, to tear the plaster off all in one go.

Inside me something aches and aches, and I wonder if it will ever stop. I reach out and hold tight to my sister’s hand because I can’t fathom going home without her, but can’t imagine her anywhere but here.

62

GOOD TO HIS WORD, JAMIE’S WAITING AT THE STATION.The road to St. Agatha’s is a verdant tunnel, trees overhanging the laneway and filtering the late afternoon sunlight into motes of soft green. I can barely tell where I am, if this is the English countryside, or if we’ve driven into the Great Wood itself.

“Drive a little more?” I ask when we’re close to the school, because the service won’t start for an hour and I’m not ready, not yet. Jamie turns off down a side road and we carry on through the countryside, over hills and past sheep fields until the shadows grow long and the sun rests in the boughs of the tallest trees. When it can’t be put off any longer, we crunch down St. Agatha’s gravel drive and Jamie parks near the dormitory.

People are already filtering into the refectory—girls in uniform, adults in somber clothes, St. Agatha’s faculty. I wonder if our parents are here yet. I’m sorry for leaving them, though I’m not sure I could have borne it if I’d stayed—I’m sorry for so many things.

Jamie and I step through the open doors, and it all feels as mournful and final as I’d feared. Candles burn in the wall sconcesand at the front of the room. Chairs are set up with white ribbons tied to them. There are photographs of Evelyn on a table at the front, and someone—Georgie, I suspect—has carefully written out half a dozen Teasdale poems in curling script on heavy paper.

When the first vaguely familiar girl approaches me, I can feel the person I was at school falling into place, stifling me. She’s careful, collected. Every word and gesture calculated to hide the real Philippa from sight, and to ensure my defenses are unassailable. Trouble is, I haven’t been that Philippa for months, and I’m not sure I can be her again. I smile and nod and excuse myself, ducking out of the refectory just as the Curmudgeon calls for everyone to be seated.

I walk a little way, still in view of the door but far enough from the trickle of late arrivals, and lean against the building’s cool stone wall. I’m not surprised to find Jamie already outside, though it does surprise me to find him smoking.