CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
era retreated to the stairs to wait the memory out. LukeS found her there a few minutes later. He stopped in the darkened hallway, studying her, then stepped closer, raised a
hand— —and prodded her cheek.
She laughed, smacking his hand away. “I’m real.”
Luke smiled. “Can’t blame me for checking.”
“No, I suppose I can’t.”
He leaned against the opposite wall, hands in his pockets.
“I missed you earlier.”
Her heart thumped unsteadily. “Why?”
“Turns out I’ve grown accustomed to spending the hours of nine to midnight on the same sofa as you.”
Had he been drinking? Was he high on magic mushrooms?
“Have you been drinking?” Sera asked. “Are you high on magic mushrooms?”
“No. Well, no to the mushrooms. Yes to the drinking. Ish.
Does Matilda’s apple cider count?”
“Considering that woman makes her apple cider strong enough to intoxicate a rhino, yes, it definitely counts.” Sera had never seen Luke after anything more than a couple of
pints at the pub, so this was most intriguing. “So you missed me?”
Luke rolled his eyes. “I’m not saying it again, Sera.”
“Well, I didn’t miss you. On account of having been asleep during that time.” She frowned, thinking about it. “But I
think I would have if I’d been awake.”
His mouth twitched. “Thank you.”
“I’m here now,” she pointed out somewhat unnecessarily.
“It’s after midnight.”
“You don’t look like you’ve turned into a pumpkin yet.
Come on, I’m hungry.” She clambered off the stairs and went to the kitchen. No ghosts in sight.
Luke followed her and watched with a dubious expression as she pulled a tin of condensed milk, a packet of rich tea biscuits, a bottle of dark rum, and three peaches out of the cupboards. “Andthat’s going to make you less hungry?”
“You’ll see. Can you get that tin open for me?” She arranged biscuits over the bottom of a large ceramic dish, breaking off pieces to make them fit. She sliced the peaches and layered them over the biscuits, then added a second layer of biscuits on top. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking there’s not enough fruit and far too many biscuits.
But you’re wrong. This is the perfect biscuit-to-peach ratio.”
Absently licking sticky fruit juice off her thumb, she looked up to see Luke watching her, eyes dark, a muscle ticking in his jaw. Her heart fluttered wildly, like a bird in a cage, and she couldn’t resist licking her thumb again.
Luke’s voice was like gravel. “I’m pretty sure you got it all.”
“You don’t look at me like that very often. I’m making the most of it.”
That made him laugh. “God, you’re a menace.”
“I do my best.”
Sera stirred a splash of rum into the condensed milk, drowned the sliced peaches and broken biscuits in it, and found some double cream in the fridge to pour over the top.
“And now,” she said triumphantly, holding out a spoon, “we get to eat it.”
Luke took the spoon in the manner of a man resigned to the hangman’s noose, but like everybody else who had ever had the good fortune of catching Sera when she was in a rum, biscuit, and peach sort of mood, he was instantly won over.
They made decent headway through the bowl of boozy, sugary deliciousness before Sera finally worked up the nerve to say, “Thank you. For what you did earlier. For staying with
her.”
“Her? You mean you?”
“That’s not me anymore.”
Luke studied her from across the table, a furrow between his brows, absently turning his spoon over and over in his fingers. “What happened that night?”
Sera fidgeted with her own spoon, just to give her something to look at that wasn’t him. “Clemmie and I had a row. A proper, raging, screaming fight. The inn was empty.
No guests. Jasmine was at a weekend-long dressmaking workshop at the Medieval Fair. It was just Clemmie and me, and my head wasn’t in a good place, and she just wouldn’t stop. Why hadn’t I got my magic back yet, why wasn’t I trying harder, was I sure that there were still holes in the night sky, did I really expect us both to spend the rest of our lives stuck here with about a thimbleful of magic between us —” She broke off, sighed. “Like I said, my head wasn’t in a good place. It hadn’t been for a while. I told her to leave me alone and to stop acting like I owed her something, and she said I did owe her, actually, because she could have kept
quiet about the resurrection spell and she didn’t, and we shouted at each other some more, and eventually I said that if I everdid get my magic back, thelast thing I’d do was break her curse. That didn’t go over well, obviously, and she said she’d go find someone else to help her and she’d only stayed here as long as she had because I was alone and pitiful and she’d felt sorry for me, so I told her that yes, she should go, and she shouldn’t ever come back…”
Luke listened to this without interrupting, and when she finished at last, he said, gently, “Did she go?”
Sera nodded. “I thought she’d just stormed off, like she often does after a squabble, and that she’d be back any minute. Then it got dark, and it got late, and she didn’t come back. There was this sort of shiver in the house, in the magic, and Iknew she’d really gone. And everything she’d said about how pitiful I was, everything I’d already been thinking, it just grew and grew and, well, you saw the rest.”
“And you were alone,” Luke said quietly.
Sera looked up at him then, attempting a wobbly smile.
“Yes. That’s why what you did, when you stayed with her…”
She swallowed. “It feels like she’s not alone anymore.”
Silence crackled between them, the seconds stretching into minutes, and Sera couldn’t look away.
“I…” Luke started, and stopped.
When she couldn’t bear the silence any longer, she said, “Clemmie was gone three days, but she came back.
Obviously.”
His eyes searched hers. “And you?”
“I changed,” said Sera.
“Did you? I mean, yes, you changed, but the way you talk about it…” He shook his head like two and two weren’t adding up to four. “You talk about it like all those other Seras
aren’t you at all, but how do you know that? How are you so sure you’ve left them behind?”
“I didn’t,” Sera said at once, sharply, sharper than she’d meant to. “They leftme behind.”
The sharp, jagged edge of her voice echoed through the kitchen, and when it was gone, when the words had come out, it was like every blade of grass, every breath of wind, every old, creaky beam in the inn had gone completely quiet.
She’d never said that before. She’d never even thought it, not really, not in those words, but it was true.
They left me behind.
“Sera,” Luke said, rough and quiet.
Her feathers prickled at once, sharp and spiky, and maybe he could see that because he stopped. She shook her head. “I don’t…I…” It took her a minute to find the words.
“When I was seven or eight, everything was possible. Then I became Albert Grey’s apprentice and I gained this huge, dizzying, limitless world at the Guild, but I also lost something. He took little pieces of me, to keep me small, to keep me smaller than him. Then Jasmine died and I lost something else. My magic. My future. That belief we cling to as children that death’s something that happens to other people, not to us. And that’s what it’s been like ever since.
Like little pieces of me keep chipping away, bit by bit, and each time something goes, that version of me dies.
Sometimes it’s big things that do it. Sometimes it’s small, stupid things. A dead great-aunt. A leaky roof. Exile. Ugly posters at the pub. Lost magic. A fight with a friend. It’s like the world gets just a little less magical each time, and I get a little smaller. And every time I close my eyes, there’s a huge, dark emptiness where the stars are supposed to be.”
She was saying too much, but maybe she’d put too much rum in with the biscuits because she couldn’t seem to stop.
There was a lump in her throat, but no matter how many times she swallowed, it wouldn’t go away.
“My name is SeraSwan,” she said. “My magic is a galaxy. I belong in the sky, but I stopped being able to fly.
And maybe that would have been okay if I could have become a creature of the earth instead, but this world, down here, it doesn’t want me. The posters in the pub remind me of that. The Guild reminds me of that. It feels like I’m drowning. Which is a funny thing for a swan to say, but it’s true. The earth doesn’t want me and the water could drown me, so I don’t belong anywhere anymore, and the ghosts remind me of that more than anything else. I talk about them like they’re not me because they’re not, because they left me behind, one after another, and each time, they’ve left me smaller andheavier, and heavy…” Her voice cracked.
“Heavy things can’t fly.”
Luke stared at her, stricken. “You really don’t see, do you?”
Her feathers were still prickly, still ready to cut anything that got too close, but she searched his intent arctic eyes, remembering that just an hour ago he’d made her see an old, terrible memory in a completely different way, and she wondered if maybe, just maybe, he could do it again. “What doyou see?”
He gave a short, quiet laugh. “I don’t think you understand just how many times over the past few weeks I’ve wished I were more like you.”
“Why would you—” Sera caught herself, bit the rest of the words back. He’d listened to her, after all. Yes, it sounded downright ridiculous to her that someone likehim, who was incredibly intelligent and fiercely protective of his small, spirited sister and unexpectedly kind and extremely capable
when goats ran amok, would want to be more likeher, but the least she could do was listen too.
“I don’t want to speak for Posy, or make assumptions about what she’s thinking,” Luke said, running his fingers over the old, worn grooves in the wood of the table, “but it always seems to me that she doesn’t care about what other people think of her. She hasn’t yet let the way other people have treated her change her. She’s so completely, extraordinarily sure of who she is and just lets herselfbe that person. I mean, is it annoying when she wakes up between the hours of three and five in the morning and wants to tell me the name of every single animal in that farm app she loves so much? Yes, yes, it is. Do I sometimes find myself just alittle unenthusiastic about pretending to be a dragon and chasing her up the stairs for the five hundredth time in a row? Yes, yes, I do.”
Sera smiled in spite of everything. “But?”
“But I’ll take it,” said Luke. “I’ll take it because it means she’s stillher. It means she’s not disappearing inside herself, she’s not putting miles of empty, frozen space between the real Posy and other people, she’s not goingquiet.”
The penny dropped. “Like you did?”
He shrugged. “I was loud and excited and too much of everything as a child, but I learned very quickly that it was much easier and that my parents liked me much better when I wasn’t some. So I did as I was told, and I was careful about what I said and what I did and how I behaved, and eventually, I didn’t even have to try very hard anymore. I put so much cold, empty space around myself that the Tin Man thing wasn’t exactly unexpected.”
Sera scowled. “I thought we’d agreed the other apprentices were colossal fuckwits who had no idea what they were talking about and who probably ought to have
actually readThe Wizard of Oz before trying to be clever.”
She shook her head. “You made yourself into what you needed to be to survive, Luke. There’s nothing wrong with
that.”
“I don’t want Posy to have to survive.”
“No, of course not,” Sera agreed, emphatically. “Like you said, though, she isn’t just surviving. She’s happy. She’s herself.”
Luke laughed without much humour. “No thanks to me. I spent nine years of her life doing the same thing I did for almost twenty years before that. Giving in instead of fighting.
Retreating instead of standing my ground. Resigning myself to the inevitable instead of resisting.”
Sera was incredulous. “Isthat what you think? Luke, hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe the reason Posy hasn’t yet changed is you? You didn’t have anybody when you were her age, but she’s always had you. Hasn’t it occurred to you that maybeyou’re the reason she’s still herself?”
He shook his head. She had a sudden, peculiar, upside- down sort of feeling and she wanted to laugh because if he, who could see right throughher, had not seen this about himself, how much had she, who could seehim as clearly as if he were glass, not seen about herself?
“You’re the one who took her to the Guild because you wanted something better for her,” she said. “You’re the one who brought her here because the Guild wasn’t right for her.
You’re the one who’s still here even after your mother’s visit today.”
Luke’s jaw tightened. “That went about how I expected it
to go.”
“Meaning?”
“I think her exact words werea place like this is going to make Posy even wilder and unrulier. I said that was fine by
me.”
“Posy is not unruly,” Sera said crossly.
“I know that.”
“I know you know that. That’s my point. What happened
after that?”
“We argued. I won.”
“Is that so?” said Sera. “You won? In other words, you stood your ground?”
“I did that because ofyou,” Luke growled, standing abruptly. He looked down at her, furious, and she couldn’t help thinking he looked like he wanted to either shake some sense into her or kiss the sense right out of her. “That’smy point. You fight. You fight everything. Everything you just told me, about the night sky and the lost magic and the drowning, is a story you tell because you think it’s about how small you’ve become, but whatI heard was a story about how you’re anythingbut small. You fight. You were fightingtoday, out there, for Posy, when you told us you were the gargoyle of this castle and you had to look out for us.That’s why I stood my ground.”
She would turn those words over and over later, like they were the most unexpected of treasures shining in the dark, memorising them, taking them apart, learning them from every angle, wearing them smooth with the pads of her thumbs. She would hold the words close, feeling her way around the unfamiliar edges of them, and later, much later, she would think that she didn’ttotally agree with him, and that he was giving her too much credit,but, and this was the important part, she would notice she didn’t feel quite so small anymore.
But that would come later, and was future Sera’s epiphany to have, because right then, at that very moment, present Sera was a little tipsy, and it wasvery important that
she stand up too, and stomp around the table, and flatten one palm against his chest, right over his hammering heart.
And smile, and say, “That doesn’t feel like tin to me.”
His eyes widened, ink darkening the icy blue with a hunger that matched hers. He reached for her hand, like he wasn’t even thinking about it, like it was a reflex that came as naturally as breathing, and held it in place on his chest.
And anything could have happened next, anything at all, but whatdid happen was the back door opened, and Nicholas stumbled in after what must have been a rowdy night out, whispered a drunken “Shhhh!” as ifthey were the ones clattering about in historically inaccurate armour, and tottered out of the room again.
Sera was tempted to be annoyed, but then it occurred to her that she was emotionally overwrought, not especially sober, and was wearing old, holey pyjamas that gave her all the sex appeal of a moose on Benadryl, so maybe Nicholas’s interruption was for the best after all.
