CHAPTER 39

Reasons to Stay

The bakery had not changed. Flour dust still collected in the corners of the windowpanes. The door still had a cracked lower edge where unwary customers stubbed their toes on the threshold. Archer smiled. He’d stumbled through the doorway too, the first time he’d come to the bakery.

Riki nudged him. “Go in already.”

This time he didn’t trip.

Annabel sat behind the counter, weaving knots into a set of counting strings. Her golden curls were tied back with a blue ribbon that matched her eyes. “I’ll be with you in a moment . . .” But when she looked up, her voice died away on her lips. Her eyes filled with tears as her gaze passed over him: his neck and shoulders, his hands flecked with scars, down to his feet and back up to his face. The counting strings cascaded from her fingers as she rushed out from behind the counter and flung herself into his arms.

Automatically, Archer’s hands went to her waist, and it was as if they’d never been separated, they fit together so perfectly.

Because even after all this time, he knew her. He knew her shapes and the smell of her hair. And from the way she clung to him, he knew she knew him too.

For the first time since coming back, he felt like he was home.

Dashing tears from her eyes, Annabel released him. “Calvin,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many . . . Every time someone walked through that door, I thought . . . for months . . .”

By the windows, Riki stood with her hands behind her back, watching them delightedly.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You have nothing to be sorry for.”

Archer winced. He had everything to be sorry for. But that part of his life was walled up inside him, and he could never share it with her.

He could feel her studying him, assessing his differences. He shifted his weight. “You look well.”

Annabel pursed her lips. Taking a step closer, she reached up to cup his face in her palm. He almost leaned away, but didn’t.

“What happened out there, Calvin? You’re—”

She’d done this, exactly this, so many times before. He remembered the pressure of her fingers, the pillows of her hand, her skin silky with flour.

“Different,” he finished for her.

“Yeah. But not as different as you’d like everyone to believe.”

He caught her hand and brought it down. “How’s Aden?” he asked.

Annabel stuffed her hands in her apron pockets. “He’s fine. I guess you heard . . .” She glanced over at Riki, still beaming at them from the windows. “I waited for you. I waited. But everyone was saying . . . Even your mother . . . They talked about you like you were already dead.”

“You don’t have to explain. I was dead.”

Drawing a curl behind her ear, she tilted her head at him curiously.

“I came back, though.” He smiled. “This girl, Sefia, she—”

“A girl?”

“Sefia,” he repeated. “She saved me.”

For a moment Annabel looked unsettled, but she composed herself quickly, courteous as ever, smoothing her expression with a smile as she peered out the window. “Is she here?”

“She didn’t come.”

“Oh.”

“He says she’s pretty,” Riki added unhelpfully.

Archer glared at her.

But Annabel just smiled as she sashayed behind the counter again. “He deserves a pretty girl, I think. Can I get you anything? Are you here for your usual order?”

Riki nodded as Annabel pulled loaves from the shelves. “And a cake! For Calvin.”

“Of course! Dad can whip one up by tonight. I’ll drop it off myself, if you like.”

“You don’t have to—” Archer began.

“It’s no trouble.”

At the same time, Riki nodded eagerly. “Why don’t you stay for dinner too?”

Annabel blushed. “Oh, I couldn’t—”

“Sure, why not?” Archer said.

They looked at each other, confused.

Then she laughed, and her laughter reverberated inside him, shaking loose the dusty corners of his memory. How comfortable his little life had been. An apprenticeship in the lighthouse. A family. A girl at the village bakery. Would it be so hard to make this his life again?

“Okay.” Annabel finished pulling bread from the shelves. “I’ll tell Aden I’m busy.”

“Why don’t you invite him?” Archer asked.

With an exaggerated sigh, Riki loaded the loaves into their basket and headed for the door.

Annabel flattened her hands on the counter. “He usually works nights at the tavern, but I can see if he’s available.”

“Great.” Archer began counting out coins.

She laughed again. “I am not taking your money, Calvin Aurontas. It’s not every day a boy comes back from the dead.”

He backed up to the door, fumbling for the handle. “Should I pick you up?”

“I’ll be perfectly safe. It’s not like it was . . .” She trailed off. “Actually, if Aden’s coming, he’ll want to catch up with you.”

“I’d like that.”

Opening the door, Archer and Riki turned to go, but before they could leave, Annabel came out from behind the counter and caught him by the arm. He tensed, but she drew him into another embrace, whispering, “I’m glad you’re home.”

Her curls brushed his ear, his cheek. “Me too,” he murmured. And he was surprised to find that he meant it.

•   •   •

When Archer returned to the bakery at dusk, Annabel had changed from her apron and flour-dusted dress into a skirt and blouse. A glint of green shone in her hair.

For a second he thought it was a feather. But no, it was just an enameled pin.

“No Aden?” he asked.

“No.” She avoided his gaze. “He couldn’t come.”

As they walked, they exchanged talk of what Archer had done that day, the people he’d seen, how the bakery had been, even some news of the war and the reinforcements being funneled from Epigloss to her sister city, Epidram, in the east.

But about halfway there, Annabel’s walk slowed. She sniffed.

Archer recognized that sound, had heard it dozens of times in the past, when she burned her hand on the ovens, when her grandmother had died, when one of her favorite love stories ended in tragedy.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“It’s my fault. If you hadn’t snuck out to meet me, you never would have crossed paths with those horrible impressors.”

He passed her a bandanna to dry her tears, the same one Horse had given him when they’d parted ways in Jahara. Sefia had one just like it.

“I loved you,” he said quietly, frankly. Then, “I regret a lot of things, but not that.”

Annabel gave him a searching look, but when he didn’t add anything more, she looped her arm through his. “I loved you too,” she whispered.

Together, they walked the rest of the way to the lighthouse, and at dinner, it was almost as if things had gone back to normal. While Annabel chatted gaily with his family, who welcomed her to the table as if she were one of their own, everything seemed easy again. She smoothed over wrinkles in the conversation. She didn’t probe him for answers when he went silent. She accepted him with the same unquestioning trust she’d always had.

Soon—too soon, it seemed, for all of them—Annabel had to return home. In comfortable silence, she and Archer walked back along the trail until they reached the jungle, when she sighed happily. “I’ve missed your family.”

Archer cocked his head at her. “Don’t you see them all the time?”

Annabel trailed her fingers through the undergrowth beside the path, the backs of her nails tapping softly against the stiff leaves and autumn flowers. “I did at first, after you disappeared . . . But then your mom found Eriadin, and Aden and I . . .”

He looked away. “Right.”

“You found someone too, didn’t you?” she asked. “Sefia?”

Found her and lost her. He nodded.

Annabel gave him the simple, curious smile that used to make him spill all his secrets—who’d given him a black eye, what he’d gotten for her birthday. But he was not the boy he’d been—now his secrets were deep and painful.

But he wouldn’t think about that. He wasn’t the chief of the bloodletters anymore. He was someone different, he told himself, someone who wanted to stay.

“Why isn’t she here?” Annabel asked.

They stepped from the path, wandering through the trees until they found the cliff, where they could see the village of Jocoxa along the eastern curve of the bay.

“It’s . . . complicated,” Archer said.

Annabel sat down among the sprawling roots of an old tree, which made a sort of bench near the edge of the bluff.

“With her, nothing was ever easy,” he continued. “Not like it was with—”

“Us.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Except there is no ‘us’ anymore.”

“Could there be?”

He looked out toward the village, where the lamps glowed yellow through the curtained windows and the sailboats bobbed softly at their moorings.

This had been home once. Could it be again? If he could forget Sefia, the bloodletters, the guilt, the violence, the way his longing for it remained kindled even now, like a candle flame floating in the vast black ocean?

“I don’t know,” he said.

Annabel bit the inside of her cheek. “I didn’t invite Aden tonight,” she confessed.

“I figured.”

“You did?”

Archer chuckled. “You haven’t changed a bit, Bel. I can still read you like a book.”

“Like a what?”

“Sorry. Nothing.”

“Where is she, Sefia?” Annabel asked.

He sighed and sat beside her, placing the empty cake box between them. “Deliene, I think. I don’t know for sure.” Again, he felt the absence of the worry stone at his throat.

“Do you want her to come back?” Annabel pleated the folds of her dress, not daring to look at him.

“Bel . . .” he began.

She leaned over, mimicking him. “Cal . . .”

He almost didn’t say anything. But he must not have been as immune to her charms as he thought, because the wall inside him cracked. “That’s not my name,” he said, surprised to hear the truth on his lips.

“That’s always been your name,” she chided him.

“Not anymore,” he said, holding her gaze, needing her to believe.

“That’s okay.” A smile dimpled her round face. “I don’t mind getting to know you again.”

He buried his face in his hands so he couldn’t see her bright-eyed earnestness anymore. “I don’t think you’d say that, if you knew.”

“Knew what?”

And because he couldn’t resist her, even now, the wall he’d so painstakingly built came crumbling down. “I’ve killed people, Bel,” he began, and once he started it was like he couldn’t stop. It all came flooding out of him, all the things he’d tried to keep hidden, all the things he’d tried to forget. “I’ve killed so many people I’ve lost count. Some because I had to. Some because I wanted to. Some because I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. I couldn’t stop. I’m afraid I still can’t. I’m not Calvin anymore. I’ll never be him again.”

“I know,” Annabel said, so matter-of-factly, he looked up, surprised. She bit her lip. “I mean, I didn’t know all of that, but I knew you weren’t the same. How could you be? But I still believe in you, whatever you’ve done, whatever your name is now.”

He swallowed. “Archer.”

“Archer, then.” She extended her hand. “I’m Annabel.”

He took it.

“Nice to meet you.” She leaned in, and for a second he thought she was going to kiss him, and it scared him, because he wanted it. Missed it. Longed for it. Although he could not help thinking of Sefia and their last kiss on the cliff, with the wind buffeting around them.

Wild.

Complicated.

Thrilling.

Instead, Annabel kissed him on the cheek, her soft pink lips lingering on his skin. And he wanted so badly to turn, to put his mouth on hers, to gather her up in his arms.

Maybe that would drive out his memories of Sefia. Maybe that would help him let go. Maybe if he kissed Annabel, they’d slide back into the love they used to share, simple and straightforward. Maybe with her, he wouldn’t need walls, and he could be all the different boys he’d been, all of them at once—the lighthouse keeper, the animal, the killer, the captain, the commander, the lover—and maybe . . . maybe he’d finally be home.

But he didn’t.

Annabel leaned back suddenly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No, it’s okay.” He touched one of her curls.

And it was. Things weren’t simple between them anymore. But maybe, one day, they could be.

They got up, wandering back along the path to the village until they reached Annabel’s door.

“If you need time, you have it,” she said, toying with her keys.

“Aden?”

“How could there be an Aden when there’s even the slightest possibility of you?”

He embraced her. “Okay,” he whispered, and he almost believed it.

•   •   •

On the way back to the lighthouse, there was a rustling in the shadows. Archer tensed. For a second, he was fifteen again, and his kidnappers were upon him—the snapping of branches, the quick scuffle of feet, the dark shapes lunging out of the jungle. He felt the pinioning of his arms and the burlap sack being thrust over his head, heard the sound of his own voice against the fabric, begging for help.

But he wasn’t that boy anymore. His nerves sang. His senses opened up. The sounds were sharper; the shadows darker. The world was new again—urgent and perilous and beautiful.

How he’d missed this.

He was weaponless, but he didn’t need weapons. He crouched in the darkness, waiting, as the rhythmic clopping of hooves reached him.

“Who’s there?” he called.

“Chief?” Frey’s voice, soft and high.

The white spots of paint on Aljan’s dark face seemed to glow like eyes as they rode out of the trees.

The tension eased in Archer’s limbs as he stood. “What are you doing here?” He couldn’t keep the note of disappointment out of his voice.

“I didn’t want to come, but it wouldn’t have been right to keep this from you,” Frey said.

“Keep what from me?”

“Hatchet is in Epigloss. He’s working security for a tavern by the docks.”

Archer’s fingers went to the scar at his throat. Hatchet—stout build, ruddy skin, scabbed knuckles.

He’d killed Oriyah.

He’d turned Archer into an animal.

“He’s just one man. You don’t have to come,” Frey said. “You can stay here.”

In the dim light, Aljan looked eerily like his dead brother. “Or, if we leave now, we can make it by tomorrow night.”

Archer’s hands curled. There were so many reasons to stay—his mother, his cousin, his grandfather, his aunt and uncle, Annabel, Annabel, the girl he once believed he’d marry if only they’d had more time together—and only one reason to go.

In the distance, he could have sworn he heard thunder.

“Let me get my horse,” he said.