Chapter Twenty-Seven
Carrying a basket of tomatoes, Kiela picked her way down the cliff stairs. The sea breeze was playful today, dancing through her blue hair and tickling her neck. All the pink roses were in bloom, and their scent was heavy in the air, tinged with the ever-present scent of seaweed that had been soaking in the sun. She remembered her father had hated that smell— overcooked salad, he’d called it—but she thought it smelled wonderful. It smells like summer. With the cloudless blue overhead, it was hard to believe that anything awful could ever happen here.
Like what Larran’s father did.
She reached the beach and, shielding her eyes, looked out toward the end of the jetty. Bryn, Eadie, and Ulina are wrong. He doesn’t need me. He had his merhorses. He had friends. He knew nearly every islander. She wasn’t anything special to him.
Out in the waves, Larran rode on the back of a golden merhorse. Spray flew all around them, sparkling in the air. He was turned away from her, but she saw the shape of his shoulders and the muscles on his arms as he steered Sian into the breaking foam of a swell.
Kiela drew a tomato out of her basket and held it in the air. She didn’t know if the merhorse could come out of the water—did they beach themselves like walruses? How much time could they spend out of the water? Did they like it? She’d have to ask Larran, after she convinced him there was nothing between them and therefore she wasn’t ruining any potential future by fleeing. Or . . . maybe she should start with questions about merhorse behavior.
She heard him shout, startled, as Sian charged toward the shore.
He saw her a second later, and she couldn’t help but smile—he was smiling, his hand raised in a wave, as Sian leapt through the waves to the shore. Kiela kicked off her boots and waded into the shallows. She’d worn her favorite of her mother’s old island dresses, the one with the soft white bodice and a blue patchwork skirt with silver thread. She hiked her skirt up to her knees to keep the silver-ribbon hem from being soaked. Today the water was as warm as breath.
Sian plucked the tomato out of her hand and then stuck her head into the basket. Kiela laughed. “Sorry, is it okay—” she asked as Larran said, “Thank you for bringing her a treat.”
“Thank you for—” She cut herself off and glanced at his house. “For yesterday.” It was safer to not be more specific than that.
“She’s not here,” Larran said firmly. “We never . . . That is, she was never in my bed, except for that first night, when she was unconscious, but after she woke . . .” He repeated, “She’s not here and hasn’t been here for a while. I just want to be clear about that.”
He hadn’t welcomed her back, and she wasn’t sharing his bed. He’d chosen Kiela’s side, despite the fact that she’d clearly broken the law and endangered all her new friends. “Thank you,” Kiela said again, as if those two words could encompass everything.
“Of course,” he said, as if those two words explained everything.
They stared at each other for a moment, while the golden merhorse rooted through the basket. She huffed, snorted, and munched with so much enthusiasm that Kiela started to laugh—until Sian grabbed the basket with her teeth and tried to yank it off Kiela’s arm, knocking her off-balance. Kiela yelped.
“Sian, back!” Larran barked as he lunged forward to grab Kiela before she could tip.
The horse-fish tossed her mane, whickered, and raced off into deeper water.
“I’m fine,” Kiela said, regaining her balance without, thankfully, splashing into the water this time. I should bring spare clothes every time I come to visit. Except this could be her last visit.
He hadn’t released her arms, and she didn’t want him to.
Staring up into his eyes, Kiela tried to think of all the words she’d planned out on the walk through the greenery and down the cliff stairs. She was going to remind him that they hadn’t known each other long, even if he did remember her from years ago, and that they didn’t know each other well. She wasn’t ending anything because nothing had ever begun.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes, fine, of course.”
“After yesterday. Are you all right?”
He was looking into her eyes so intensely. She gazed back. “Yes.”
“Is Caz all right?” he asked.
And with that, she couldn’t say any of the words that she’d wanted to say. That question—the fact that he chose to ask about her best friend, the fact that he genuinely cared as he waited for her answer—it undid her.
She rose up on her tiptoes in the wet sand and kissed him.
He froze, his lips motionless and his eyes wide open, as if he hadn’t expected this—how could he, when she hadn’t even planned to? She nearly pulled away, but then he was kissing her back, suddenly, as if he’d snapped awake after a thunderclap.
He pulled her closer, and the seawater from his chest soaked through the fabric of her dress. She didn’t care. He tasted like the ocean, and his lips were warm.
The kiss ended. But he didn’t pull back. He was only an inch away, and she was still breathing his breath. He was looking at her as if she was all that existed on the entire island.
“I came to tell you that I have to leave,” Kiela said.
“What?” Larran said.
She took a deep breath and took a step backward and then another step until she was out of the water and on the sand. It was easier to think when he wasn’t so close. “I said I have to leave Caltrey. With Caz. And Meep. Because we can’t stay.”
He blinked at her as if her words were in another language. “Why?”
“Because I’m a librarian.”
“Oh.”
She wanted to kiss him again. It was odd how much she wanted to—she wasn’t used to her lips telling her brain what to do, but she wanted to feel his body against hers, and she wanted his hands to touch her.
He frowned. “So, why?”
“Because I’m also a thief and a liar.” Kiela made herself take another step backward, farther away from him, and then another toward the shore until she was standing on the pebbles beyond the touch of the waves. “The emperor was thrown from a window—not by me. I didn’t have anything to do with that. I’d never even met the emperor. Saw him once, in a parade, or at least his ship—twice a year, he’d parade through the canals of Alyssium, and this was while I was at the university and usually I’d remember to stay late to study so I wouldn’t have to navigate the crowds, but this one time I forgot and . . .” She took a breath. “The night the emperor was killed, there were fires. The library began to burn. Everyone else had already evacuated, but Caz and I . . . We fled when it began to burn, with as many books as we could save. The only place I could think to come was here. Home.”
“Then the crates . . .”
“Spellbooks.”
“Ah.”
“I’m the rogue sorcerer that Radane is searching for,” Kiela said. “Well, sort of. At least I read through several of the books and cobbled together a few practical spells, like the one with the pine cone that heals trees, but I’m not really a sorcerer.”
He was still staring, but now she couldn’t read his expression. “You’re not.”
“Right.”
“You’re a librarian.”
“Yes.”
“Who saved her books,” Larran said.
“I like the word ‘saved,’ but given that I didn’t actually bring them back, I think the empire might choose the word ‘stole.’ You see, I thought it had fallen. The empire. I thought the revolutionaries had taken control, and eventually I’d reach out and, if the Great Library had been restored . . .”
He stepped toward her, coming out of the shallows onto the sand, closing the gap between them that she’d created. “I think you were incredibly brave.”
She gave a hiccup sort of laugh. “Oh, yes, I bravely ran away.”
“You did.” He was serious. “You saved yourself, your friend, and you came here and saved us.”
She felt herself blushing and knew her cheeks had to be tinged purply. “Okay, that last bit is somewhat of an overstatement. I made jam and some sticky pine cones.”
“You saved Sian’s life. And I am guessing you are responsible for Meep?”
“They were an accident. But yes.” She supposed all of that was good, to balance out the bad of the theft and the lawbreaking, and he didn’t even know about the merbaby and the forest spirits. But none of that changed the fact that she’d endangered him, her friends, and everyone on Caltrey by exposing them to Radane’s investigation. “I don’t regret any of it. It can’t continue, though, not now with an imperial investigator on the island.”
“She’ll lose interest,” Larran said. “And when she leaves Caltrey, everything will return back to normal, and you don’t have to be afraid—”
“The only way it returns to normal is if I leave,” Kiela said. “If I stay and Radane realizes what I’ve done, everyone in Caltrey will be suspect. Everyone who has been kind to me will be named conspirators. And it will be worse now—the imperials need to prove they’re still in power. They’ll come down hard. Fines. Worse.”
Larran shook his head. “She won’t.”
“You don’t know that. She saw me help Sian. She doesn’t have proof yet, but my pine cones . . . And the fountain! Someone could have seen me. If she talks to enough people, the right people, if she asks the right questions, applies enough pressure . . . I thought it would be safe enough this far from Alyssium. I didn’t think anyone who’d care would come here. But she’s here, and that’s that. I have to come up with an excuse that won’t sound suspicious and then leave, before I make everything worse.”
“You want me to let you sail off and just shrug and say ‘that’s that’?”
Well, yes, she did. Or at least she had wanted that. Before they kissed. Before . . . “I don’t want to leave.” As she said it out loud, she realized how deeply true it was. The idea of sailing away from Caltrey, of leaving her parents’ cottage, of never seeing Larran and Bryn and Eadie and Ulina, even little Tobin . . . She would never have believed how attached she could become in such a short amount of time. She wanted this to be her life, here on Caltrey, in her little cottage with her garden and her jam shop, with Caz and Meep, with the mermaid and her merbaby in the cove . . . She wanted to keep helping the tree guardians. She wanted to heal the rest of the orchards. She wanted to make sure the bird she’d accidentally created from an apple tree was okay. She wanted to help that customer with the waterless spring. She wanted to try to make cherry jam from Eadie’s cherry trees. She wanted to ride Sian again out in the waves. And she wanted to kiss Larran more. Right now, please.
He’d stepped closer to her too. “Then don’t leave.”
“It’s not so simple.”
He was inches from her, not touching, but so close that she felt as if the air were vibrating between them. She barely heard the waves crashing at their feet or the gulls overhead. She wished the rest of the world could disappear, and it could be just this stretch of beach for just this stretch of time.
“Why can’t it be?”
“Because. Empire. Laws. Really terrible punishments.”
He kissed her first this time, and everything melted away as his arms wrapped around her. “Stay,” he said, breathing the word into her.
“You don’t want me to.”
He kissed her neck, light kisses that made her breath catch. “I do.”
“You don’t know me. Not well enough.”
His hands were on her back, and she’d never felt safer. If the earth fell from beneath their feet, she felt as if he’d hold her up. “I want to know you better,” he said. He kissed her ear.
“No, you don’t. I’m not friendly. I like to be alone.”
“You can be alone with me.”
She ran her hands up his neck and tangled her fingers in his hair. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Sorry. You’re right.”
Kiela kissed him and forgot what she was going to say back. Something about how she wasn’t really alone since she had Caz. Something about how she didn’t want to be alone. Something about her parents or his parents or Radane or . . . “I like books too much.”
He paused mid-kiss. “What?”
“You don’t know me. So I’m telling you about me. So you’ll know me and why it’s better if I leave. I read and I forget anything else exists. And I don’t forgive anyone who isn’t careful with books. I hate people who tear out pages, who bend corners, who break the spines.”
“Unforgivable,” he agreed.
She pulled back and frowned at him. “Are you laughing at me?”
“Yes. These aren’t flaws. They’re just . . . you. And I like you. Very much.”
She couldn’t help but ask, “You do?”
He nodded. “As much as Sian likes tomatoes.”
Kiela laughed and kissed him again and again, as the waves kissed their bare feet and the sea breeze danced around them and the sun shone down—and it all felt so eternal and so ephemeral at the same time.