CHAPTER ELEVEN Now

I bite my lip until I taste blood, clutching my hand over the receiver to stifle any sounds. A shiver drags down my spine as I wait for the conversation to continue.

But the voice that answers Alastair—tense, angry, slick as poison—is not one of the Salt Priests. It’s Marcus Felimath. It’s been years since I’ve heard him speak, but his icy, arrogant tone is unmistakable.

“I gave you very clear instructions on how to deal with the Arriscanes, and you promised that you’d carry them out. Clearly, you have not done as I asked. How do you think that makes me feel, Alastair?”

There’s only silence from the other end of the line. Finally, Alastair answers his father. “Disappointed.”

“Correct. I’m disappointed.” Marcus bites out each word with disgust. “I don’t like to be disappointed. Particularly not by my only son. You said the Arriscane family’s debt would be handled in a matter of days. Now you tell me I’ll have to wait for the salt harvest.”

Alastair swallows audibly. “Well, I made a mistake.”

“There’s no such thing as a mistake. Only your carelessness.”

I listen, helplessly, as Alastair is berated by his father. Thinking of how he refused to forgive the debt. How he claimed he had no choice, that it was his duty. This is what he meant, that he’s answering to a man who speaks to his only son like he’s holding a razor at his throat.

“I’m sorry,” Alastair says, and his voice is so quiet, so small, it makes my chest ache. “I know this isn’t what you planned, but I will take care of it. I promise.”

“I don’t want your promises. I want you to do as I ask.” Marcus’s tone has gone calm—unnaturally so—like the lull before a storm. But I can sense the veiled threat beneath his words, the promise of violence. “Even your idiotic sister could do better.”

“No,” Alastair says quickly. “Leave her out of this.”

“Have you reminded her about college, like I told you? Honestly. I ask so little of her. A small contribution to this family. Yet she can hardly add two sums together.”

My teeth clench, and I feel hot with protective ire. For Camille, being forced into a life she doesn’t want, and for Alastair—in spite of all the ways he’s hurt me, there’s no joy in this, hearing him brought so low by his father’s cruelty.

“Why don’t you let me take over the accounts from Camille?” Alastair offers, with a forced carelessness in his voice. A defense, I realize, against Marcus, who would surely seize hold of any sign of weakness or emotion like a fox would leap upon a hare.

“No. I want her enrolled in the postgraduate course before the winter term.”

Alastair draws in a measured breath. Finally, he says, “I understand.”

“You’re pathetic. I ought to have drowned you at birth.”

I clutch the phone, looking desperately out into the hallway where countless Felimath relatives stare down at me from the gallery with their accusing, painted eyes. It’s as though time has been spun back. We’re at the summer bonfire, flowers strewn at our feet as Marcus drags Alastair away from me.

I want to cry out, interrupt this awful moment, find a way to make Marcus stop. On the other end of the line, Alastair’s voice quavers, a notch of fear creeping in through his guarded tone. “You can trust me, Father.”

Marcus sighs again. “Don’t think I can’t hurt you just because I’m not there. I’ll find a way; you know I will. And if I have to come back and tend to this myself, you’re going to regret it. Both of you.”

Dully, Alastair responds, “I understand.”

I want to be anywhere but here, but I’m unable to move, to do anything except stand frozen, clenching the phone so tightly my knuckles ache. And then Marcus Felimath, with his voice like a whetted blade, tells his son, “I love you.”

He ends the call, the line disconnected with a click. I let out a shaky, ragged breath that echoes hollowly into the receiver. There’s a sound, as though my exhalation has reverberated back to me. A voice—Alastair’s voice—drawn taut as a wire. “Lacrimosa?”

I slam down the receiver in horror. From above, I hear heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. I rush out of the sitting room and go back through the unlit halls, almost colliding with Alastair as we both reach the entranceway of Saltswan at the same time.

“I didn’t—” I begin, then fall silent, realizing that his cheeks are wet, his lashes matted. He’s been crying. “Alastair, I’m sorry.”

It feels as ineffectual as my words to Camille as we stood before the photograph of her mother, Romilly Felimath, her gaze already fixed on her new life. I take a step forward, but Alastair turns away from me in wordless fury.

The cream-colored back of his shirt is like a smudge of mist against the darkened house as he storms to the door and flings it open. He charges outside, slamming the door behind him.

I should find Camille and ask for her help. The last person Alastair wants right now is me. But it feels like an even worse betrayal of him, to run off and tell his sister what I just heard.

Alastair’s overcoat is hung on the wooden rack beside the door. Before I can change my mind, I snatch it up and make my way out of the house.

---

The front garden is empty, the wrought iron gate swinging ajar. There’s no sign of Alastair on the clifftop path or in the fields. Then the call of a swan, high in the air above the ocean, catches my attention.

The first time I saw him alone was on the beach. We were still children as I walked to meet him at the edge of the water, where he stood with the sea lapping at his bare feet, his hair snarled with salt. A selkie kept too long ashore.

I clamber down the narrow, sloping track to the cove below Saltswan. There’s a storm building far offshore, clouds blanketing the horizon. As I reach the sand, distantly I realize this is where I awoke, the night when I lost time. I pass the same empty tide pool that cradled me. An unlaced pair of boots have been cast aside by its edge, each trailing a discarded sock.

Out where the shore drops away and the water turns deep and indigo dark, Alastair Felimath floats on his back. His upturned face has a look of steadfast calm. He’s framed by the white lines of the riptide, but he doesn’t fight as the current pulls him away from land.

I call his name as I hurry over the rocks, skirting tide pools that catch my reflection as a passing blur. Standing above the crashing waves, I clutch his coat to my chest. He’s reached the smoother sea now, where the pull of the current dies away.

Deftly, he flips onto his front, and begins to swim parallel to the shore. No one from Verse is a stranger to the ocean, but I’ve never seen anyone move through the water the way Alastair does, with an unafraid, dogged strength that matches the force of the sea.

His arm curves up, angled and elegant, and he cuts through the waves with practiced strokes. The sea parts around him as though he’s a knife. I follow along the shore as he swims to the far end of the beach, where the rocks give way to a narrow, sandy inlet. He dives beneath the rolling waves, surfacing just as I’ve climbed down to the water’s edge.

He comes from the sea as the waves foam around him. His dark hair is against his cheeks in whorls, and he looks as sleek as a seal: fierce-eyed and vitally alive. He’s breathing very hard, and I can see his chest rising and falling beneath the fabric of his shirt.

I stare at him, torn between dragging him into an embrace and shoving him back into the sea. “If you wanted to avoid me, there are better ways than flinging yourself into the ocean.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” Alastair shakes his head, droplets flying loose from his hair. Crossing the sand, he clambers onto the rocks and collects his boots, then makes his way back to the cliffs, leaving behind a trail from his waterlogged clothes. “I come here to swim whenever I need to clear my mind.”

A wave breaks on the narrow beach, and I scramble to higher ground just before it can wash over my shoes. I follow Alastair, walk toward the cliffs. His shirt has turned translucent from the water and is plastered against his skin. I can see the angled points of his shoulder blades against the fabric. I have a sudden, wretched urge to lay my hand between them, and feel the shift of his spine against my palm.

By the time we reach the fields, my cheeks are flushed, and my heart is beating so loudly that I can hear it over the crash of the waves and the rising wind. Alastair sinks down onto the grass, his legs outstretched, his face turned moodily toward the sea. I sit beside him, leaving a careful distance between us.

“Swimming through a riptide seems like a dangerous way to clear your mind.”

He lets out a mirthless laugh. “This is where I learned to swim. Camille, too. Our father carried us out into the water and let us go.”

I stare at him, horrified, thinking of Marcus Felimath’s threat. I ought to have drowned you. “Alastair, that’s awful.”

“He’s hard on me because he loves me.”

I lay my hand in the space between us, my knuckles barely touching the edge of his knee. “He threatened you. That isn’t love.”

Alastair folds his arms, drawing up his shoulders as though to protect himself from my sympathy. “I don’t want your pity, Lacrimosa.”

“I’m not pitying you.” The wind catches at Alastair’s wet, tangled hair, pulling it over his face. The temperature is lowering ahead of the storm, and it makes me shiver. Alastair shivers, too. His nose and cheeks are reddened from cold. I shake out the bundled coat and drape it across his shoulders. “Here, put this on. You’ll catch a fever.”

“You sound like Camille. No one catches a fever. It’s a symptom, not an illness.”

“I can’t believe you’re arguing over semantics at a time like this,” I laugh. “You’re such a prig.”

He scowls at me. “I am not.”

“You are. An insufferable prig.”

“I hate the way she fusses over me,” he mutters, putting on the coat.

“It makes sense for her to worry about you, considering how you were ill so much when we were younger.”

“That’s why I hate it. Whenever she treats me like I’m going to break, it reminds me of the truth.”

He glances at me, then quickly away. He’s so tense: the angles of his wrists and his shoulders sharp enough that I imagine they might cut me if I touched him. Carefully, I ask, “And what is the truth?”

For a long moment, neither of us moves. Then, as though he’s afraid to lose his nerve, Alastair quickly reaches to the topmost button on his shirt. I watch, my cheeks burning, as he unfastens it, revealing his lean, bare chest. Dozens of scars are crosshatched over his ribs and abdomen. Some have faded to silver, others are bruise-dark, badly healed. The newest are above his heart, a scatter of pigmented, circular marks: an irregular constellation of cigarette burns.

“When I was five, I spilled a pot of ink on my father’s desk. He broke my arm so badly I needed a surgeon.” He gestures to an arrow-straight scar on the inside of his bicep. “After that … he realized it was easier to hide if he sent me away whenever I was hurt.”

“You mean … all the times you were sick, when your father kept you away from Camille and me, when he sent you to the clinic…”

I trail off. The images from our past are now colored in a new, horrible light. Alastair’s expression shuttering when I mentioned his time in Driftsea. The way he’d be separated from Camille inside their house, their father saying he was contagious.

Alastair dips his head in an acquiescing nod. “There was never any illness. There was only him.”

“Does he…” I hesitate. It feels too awful to ask, but I have to know. “Does he hurt Camille as well?”

“No. As much as I’ve missed her, I was glad when Father sent her away to school. It meant she was safe. And that I could keep the worst of this from her.” Slowly, he glances up. His eyes are stark, laid bare with desperation. “You can’t tell her, either.”

I pick restlessly at the strands of grass beside me, twisting them around my fingers until they snap. All I want to do is tell Camille what I’ve heard, what I’ve seen. If one of my brothers were hurt like this, I would want to know. But Alastair stares at me so pleadingly that I can’t bear to argue. “I won’t.”

He lets out a tired sigh and his gaze drops away from mine. He turns back to look at the sea. “I wish you hadn’t overheard.”

There’s a hitch in his voice, a rise of color on his cheeks. He’s ashamed. But I don’t want to apologize, because I’m glad to know the truth of how awful Marcus has been toward his son. I’m glad Alastair doesn’t need to be in this alone.

I bite my lip, shift closer to him. “It’s silly, but when I first heard you on the phone, I thought you were talking to the Salt Priest. The one from the mine. I’m certain I saw him that night in the arbor, outside of my house. What if he’s still here?”

“He couldn’t have stayed in Verse. The Salt Priests use a tincture in their rituals that’s highly addictive. If you stop taking it suddenly, it will poison you. It’s part of how they control the sect. None of them can leave the compound for longer than a few days before they start to sicken and have to return for another dose.”

“How do you know that?”

Alastair is silent for a drawn-out moment. Then he looks at me, gray-eyed and troubled. “That night in the mine, the boy who interrupted your betrothal—I know him. At least, I did. His name is Hugo Valentine, and when we met, he was a member of the Salt Priests.”

I stare at him, reeling as I set the pieces together. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Because when I tell you how Hugo and I met, you’ll hate me even more than you already do.”

The terrible softness of Alastair’s voice makes my heartbeat swoop. I tip back my head, letting the salt-scented air pass over my face. I’ve spent so long nursing the wounds he left me, hating him for the way he broke my heart. But now, as we sit in the windswept field, all I feel is longing for how things were before.

I look at him, this sea-drenched, solemn boy. With his wet hair and stark gaze, he’s like some oceanic creature that ought to be captured in delicate strokes of paint. And it feels like instinct, like breathing, to reach for him, to take his hand. So I do.

He goes terribly still, as though my touch is a danger. But slowly, he relents, his fingers curling tentatively over mine.

“If I promise not to hate you,” I ask, looking down at our joined hands, “will you tell me?”

Alastair’s mouth tilts into a sad smile. “It all began the summer you came back from Marchmain, the night of the bonfire. Father always hated how close Camille and I were with you. But when he saw us together, and he realized how I—” He looks at me, then quickly looks away, a flush creeping over his cheeks. “You were my best friend, Lacrimosa. And he knew how much I cared.”

I tighten my grasp on Alastair’s hand, feeling the prickle of unshed tears behind my lashes. For a fleeting moment, the salt air has the scent of bonfire smoke.

“He told me to end it,” Alastair goes on. “Break her heart, completely, he said. So she’ll stay out of your life. I refused, at first. But eventually I gave in.”

I look at the scars on his skin, the healed-over cuts, the cigarette burns. It aches, to imagine Alastair as he was then, the boy who hid with me from his father on the night of the bonfire. Trying to stand up against Marcus Felimath and his brutality.

“You didn’t mean it?” I whisper, my voice catching in my throat. “Those things you said to me…”

He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean it, but I said it all the same.” A tear slips down his cheek. He scrubs it away with his sleeve. “After you left that day, I was so angry with my father. I shouted at him, called him weak, pathetic, told him it was petty, how much he hated your family. He struck me; I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my arm for the second time.”

“Oh, Alastair,” I breathe, caught by the cruelty of it, by my rising helplessness.

He turns his face away, closing his eyes against more tears. “The clinic where I recovered was near the Salt Priest enclave. That’s where I met Hugo. It took me a long time to heal, and we got to know each other while I was there. He’d sneak away and meet me on the beach. I didn’t expect to have feelings for him. Not after—” He pauses, avoiding my gaze again as his blush deepens. Everything that lies between us feels like a battlefield, all churned mud and senseless ruin.

“Then,” Alastair says, “I asked if he’d run away with me.”

He looks bereft, stricken with guilt. I shift closer, so our shoulders are touching, our joined hands resting on my knee. “I can understand why you wanted to trust him.”

“I was ready to let Camille face the brunt of our father’s anger, to walk away and never look back. What kind of wretched, heartless person does that? Especially after the way I treated you.”

“It doesn’t make you heartless to crave safety.”

Alastair laughs harshly. “In the end, it didn’t matter. On the night I was supposed to meet Hugo, my father came instead. Later, I found out there’d been an anonymous message at the clinic, warning them that I was planning to run away. I never did find out why Hugo betrayed me.”

“Did you know he would be there, on the night of my betrothal?”

“No. What I told you was the truth. Camille and I were worried about you, so she followed you to the altar. Later, I walked away from the crowd, saw you in that strange boat, and saw Hugo going into the mine.”

“And so you came after him. You saved me.”

Alastair closes his eyes in a slow blink, as tears spill down his cheeks. “Lacrimosa, I know it doesn’t make up for it, but I’m going to help you with Therion—if you’ll let me. We’ll find a way out of this. I’m going to keep you safe.”

I cup my palm against his jaw, wipe away his tears with the edge of my thumb. He bows to me; our foreheads press. Then we are both moving toward one another, and I am holding him; he is warm and trembling in my arms. It’s just like the night of the bonfire, time spun back, and I wonder if it can be mended, all these wounds between us.

Alastair has bared himself to me, shown me his scars, told me things that even Camille doesn’t know. Everything feels delicate, like a ribbon of new silk. But in this moment, I am as fierce as an ocean storm, as unstoppable as the violence of a rising tide.

I frame his face between my hands, and the spilled ink of his hair trickles over my fingers.

“Yes,” I manage to tell him. “I want your help.”