AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I jump. Kartik shows himself from behind the pulpit. “Forgive me,” he says with a sheepish smile. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
He looks as if he hasn’t slept in days. We’re quite the pair with our long faces and shadowed eyes. He runs a finger across the back of a pew. “Do you remember the first time I surprised you here?”
“Indeed. You frightened me, telling me to close my mind to the visions. I should have listened. I was the wrong girl for all of this.”
He leans against the end of the pew, his arms folded across his chest. “No, you’re not.”
“You don’t know what I’ve done, else you wouldn’t say that.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
It seems to take forever for the words to travel through the wreckage inside me. But they do come, and I don’t spare myself. I tell him everything, and he listens. I’m afraid he’ll hate me for it, but when I’ve finished he only nods.
“Say something,” I whisper. “Please.”
“The warning was for the birth of May. Now we know what it meant, I suppose,” he says, thinking already, and I smile a little because I know this means he’s heard, and we have moved on. “We’ll go after her.”
“Yes, but if I so much as dip a toe into the magic, I fear I’ll be joined to Circe, to the Winterlands. That I’ll go mad as I felt last night.”
“All the more reason to stop her. Perhaps she hasn’t bound Eugenia’s power to the tree just yet. We might still save the realms,” he says.
“We?”
“I’m not running away again. That is not my destiny.”
He slips his hand under my chin and tilts it up, and I kiss him first.
“I thought you stopped believing in destiny,” I remind him.
“I haven’t stopped believing in you.”
I smile in spite of everything. I need his belief just now. “Do you think…” I stop.
“What?” he murmurs into my hair. His lips are warm.
“Do you think, if we were to stay in the realms, that we could be together?”
“This is the world we live in, Gemma, for better or for worse. Make of it what you can,” he says, and I pull him to me.
After the weeks of excited preparation for the masked ball, Spence is rather like a balloon that has lost all its air. Down come the decorations. Costumes are packed away in tissue and camphor, though some of the younger girls refuse to give theirs up just yet. They want to be princesses and fairies for as long as they can.
Others, ready for the next party, badger Mademoiselle LeFarge for details of her upcoming wedding.
“Will you wear diamonds?” Elizabeth asks.
Mademoiselle LeFarge blushes. “Oh, dear me, no. Too precious. Though I was given a most beautiful pearl necklace to wear.”
“Will you honeymoon in Italy? Or Spain?” Martha asks.
“We will take a modest trip to Brighton,” Mademoiselle LeFarge says, and the girls are deeply disappointed.
Brigid taps my shoulder. “Missus Nightwing is calling for you, miss,” she says sympathetically, and I am afraid to ask what has provoked her kindness.
“Yes, thank you,” I say, following her beyond the baize door to our headmistress’s solid, staid sanctuary. The only spot of color is on a corner table, where wildflowers spill over the boundaries of a vase, dropping petals without care.
Mrs. Nightwing motions to a chair. “How are you feeling today, Miss Doyle?”
“More myself,” I say.
