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Seren knew all too well about that vision. She had been thirteen. She and Deryn had been grounded over some absolutely nonsensical thing they had done to get in trouble. To this day, she could not understand her mother’s reaction—or overreaction—to them pranking their asshat classmate.

They had been sent to their rooms, no TV, no books, which hurt by far the most. Ceridwen had been at college, her repeated phone calls to ask their mother if she was needed for the casting of the circle disturbing the otherwise quiet house. Rhiannon had been out; Seren had assumed that she had been with their mother.

And then in the silence of the house where two teens were grounded in their rooms, the front door blew off the hinges and every other door proceeded to follow. Seren remembered jumping from her bed, where she was pretending to be doing her English homework assignment, and diving out of the way of the heavy wood.

Deryn had already been sprinting down the stairs toward the entrance where Victoria stood in her pajamas and a robe, untied and torn, barely hanging from her shaking shoulders. Disheveled, her face tearstained. Seren would never forget the sight. Her fingers were bloody, as if she had ripped the doors off their hinges with her bare hands. Victoria looked at them with unseeing eyes before she screamed.

“Elizabeth!” The name rang loudly as the destruction settled on the deathly still house. Seren looked up, expecting to see their mother coming down, already hearing the retort, the anger at having her home wrecked, but nothing was forthcoming. Not a speck of dust moved, and Victoria called again, only this time there was an edge to the name, a tinge of something that years later Seren still heard in her nightmares. A foretelling coming true.

“Elizabeth!” Loud, desperate, Victoria was suddenly in motion, bursting into the kitchen and through the back door and into the small patch of the forest that lay behind their home. Seren felt Deryn smack her on the arm, and they took off after their aunt. She remembered wondering how Victoria, who was so much older than they were, moved so fast. What had been driving her?

Seren thought of the wild chase through the darker forests of the Sky Blue Cliff, so far from the Viridescent where their mother had usually cast their circle. She remembered running and wondering about that one small detail, that one small incongruence, because wondering why her aunt was standing, bloody, in the middle of her house was incomprehensible. And so young Seren ran and tried not to ask any of the questions she was so dearly afraid to ask.

But no matter how far and how fast they ran, Seren, beating Deryn by a breath to the ashes surrounding the newly cast circle on the Sky Blue, Victoria reached the edge first, all but diving off it, all but throwing herself off the stones, screaming and crying, her arms coming up with Rhiannon, who was bruised and so out of it, practically catatonic.

Seren remembered helping her sister off the edge. Seren remembered being afraid to look down. Seren remembered knowing with absolute certainty what she would find if she did.

Amidst the wind, the storm, the crying, the shouts from Deryn, the screaming—surely from Seren herself, Victoria was prostrate on the ground, holding the unmoving Rhiannon, her eyes bright with a mad sort of light. Seren clung to Victoria then, feeling her beating heart, her expanding chest with every breath, and heard her quiet murmur.

“I had a vision, Elizabeth. I had a vision.”

Seren blinked, and the past receded. She was back in her aunt’s little kitchen, watching Ceridwen cover her face with her hands, no doubt her mind returning to the exact same memory. Her eldest sister might not have been there, but this story—this vision—had been discussed, obsessed about, put up like an old parchment to see if the light might crack some ancient code long buried in the words of their aunt, in the images that passed before her eyes as their mother was flung from the Sky Blue Cliff.

And twenty-two years later, Seren watched as Victoria carefully lifted a cooked piece of French toast off the pan, setting it on a pretty, blue-edged plate displaying their family crest, and wondered: Why now?

Victoria gave her a long look, as if hearing her unspoken question, and set the food in front of them.

“Because it’s time.”

She touched Ceridwen’s shoulder as she exited the kitchen.

4

LARK, DROWNING & SAVING

Consciousness returned in fragments. First, the sounds. Somewhere close to her, voices spoke in low tones, the cadence foreign to Lark. It wasn’t that she’d never heard people conversing quietly; it was the fact that she could specifically understand the words, and none of them were entirely pleasant, and yet the tone did not alter, did not rise, did not become imbued with malice.

The older woman, Victoria, Lark’s memory supplied, was not having whatever the younger voice was telling her. It could’ve been either of the two women Lark had met before passing out.

Ceridwen was the one she had mistaken for an angel in her fatigue fugue. Well, nobody could really fault her. Her sheer physical perfection was off the charts. How did she just walk around without being stared at by hordes of onlookers? Lark wanted to roll her eyes at her own lack of sophistication.

“Do you really think these people will ever think that you are smart or equal to them? Be grateful there is someone who takes care of you, who will always find out⁠—”

The voice in her head—her mother’s voice—interrupted her train of self-recrimination with the subtlety of a hammer breaking a glass pane. Lark shivered, the cold memory, of her mother standing at the entrance of the girls’ room in their old house on the bayou, just looking at her, wordlessly letting her know what would happen if⁠—

Another voice— younger and lower and lighter, somehow brighter and tender yet much more dangerous because of it—broke through the nightmare turn her own thoughts and memories had taken.

Crowhart. Crowhart.

She remembered hearing the name. In her childhood fevers and in her lonely wanderings on the swamps, where the ghosts of the marshes walked with her. She had heard the name whispered, intoned, adored. Lark wanted to say the name out loud. She wanted to feel the sounds in her mouth.

Somehow, she knew right away it wasn’t Ceridwen Crowhart that her childhood ghosts had whispered to her about.

Seren.

Victoria had called her Seren. Tall, muscular, sharp like an axe, features so cutting they would surely leave anything that touched them in tethers, and… handsome was the only word that fit. The voice of the woman, Seren Crowhart, should’ve been frightening to her. Should’ve been intimidating, the power behind it, the clear command—Captain of the Fire Brigade—and yet the self-deprecating smile, the soothing quality of it, like cool water over a fresh bruise, along with those dimples⁠—

Lark opened her eyes and nearly jumped off the bed.