“Yes,” Rhys said. “As do I. I want to save us all. You. Me. The ghosts of my family.”
She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing at the book.
“Yes,” she managed.
He opened the cover, the hinges complaining softly, like the creak of an old woman’s joints. The first pages were half text, half diagrams: shapes that were not quite circles, not quite chains; lines that beckoned the eye and then refused to let it rest. Marginalia marched in a steady, exacting hand—Latin, Aramaic, a smattering of crabbed English. The more Isabella looked, the more she felt the press of meaning, as tangible as a palm at the base of her skull.
Rhys turned the pages, pausing on a plate where the two semicircles nestled, not married but yearning toward each other. Between them, a slim figure was sketched—no name, only a notation in the margin that made Isabella’s skin prickle. Conduit. Voluntas, duplex visus.
“Willing,” she translated, breath thin. “Two who…see.”
He exhaled, the sound like something he had kept caged. “Yes. Two halves joined, two seers joined. One must be a willing conduit. Not a sacrifice, the text is clear on that point. Not blood in a bowl. Willing consent. The gate is not an instrument. It is a pact.”
“The gate,” she repeated, throat tight.
He met her eyes and did not look away. “To passage. To crossing. The grimoire calls it a way of easing what clings. It lets what’s bound pass through, if those who stand at the threshold can bear the weight of letting go.”
“The serpent eating its own tail,” Isabella murmured, thinking of her conversation with Mrs. Abernathy when first she had arrived at Harrowgate.
Rhys sent her a questioning look, then his expression cleared with understanding. “The circle that devours itself eternally.” He paused. “We will break the circle and free them.”
“Your family,” she said.
“My mother. My brothers.” He was silent for an instant. “I hear them, but I have not seen them in years, not truly. Once, long ago, I saw Ned by the pond, his pinafore caught on a reed, his hair slick and dark. Will sat by my bed the first week I was home, more shadow than boy. They are caught in what was done to them, and she drinks the little strength they have. I must end their suffering.
“Every turn of the wheel in this house is a grindstone. I will not have them ground down any further. The grimoire says two willing halves, two who see, one of them a conduit who consents. It does not promise ease. It does not promise safety.” He swallowed. “But it promises an end.”
“For them,” she whispered.
“And perhaps for me. Perhaps for you as well, my Isabella. I want to be clear on that. If you choose to do this, you are choosing danger.” He squeezed her hand. “You have carried your seeing like a sin. I would be quit of making you wear it like penance.”
Somewhere far away a pipe sang, one thin note. Isabella looked down at the page again. Voluntas. Will. Choice.
“You think I am—” She broke off, because the word that wanted to come felt too much like vanity, too much like doom.
“I think you are what the gate requires,” he said. “And I will not ask it of you unless you ask it first of yourself. If the answer is no, I will find another way to break her without breaking you.”
Another way. She didn’t believe one existed; neither, by the flicker of pain in his eyes, did he. But he offered it because he would not coerce her, not even with desperation on his side.
Papa’s words from that long ago morning rang in her thoughts. It is not safe. You would open a gate that can never be closed. One that might well swallow her whole.
Choice blooming like a bruise. That was what this felt like. It hurt because it was real.
She let her fingertips skim the curve of brass. The cold of the metal went through her skin, down to bone.
“If the gate opens,” she said, careful with each word, “and they pass…what happens to us?”
He didn’t look away. “We stand in a door between grief and what comes after. The text says it takes strength… endurance. There will be a pull. One of us must bear it while the other steadies. When it is done—” his mouth tipped, wry “—it does not promise ‘happily ever after.’”
She almost laughed, the sound strangled. “But we might wake in a quiet house. Imagine.”
“I do,” he said, and for a breath his face was a boy’s, sunlit and unscorched, before the years and fire marked him. “Every hour.”
The words lingered between them, heavy as grief, bright as hope. And beneath both lay a warning: if they failed, there would be no second chance.
For a heartbeat, she only looked at him, struck by the image of the boy he must have been and the man who had survived.
