her.
The Keeper’s robes are folded neatly on a chair and he now wears a tweed suit that was already out of fashion the last time it was worn which was quite some time ago. He is sitting at his desk, writing by candlelight. This fact makes Rhyme feel better about having taken so long, but she always knew they would wait until the last moment to depart.
“Are all of the cats out?” the Keeper asks without looking up from his notebook.
Rhyme points at the ginger cat on the desk.
“He’s being stubborn,” the Keeper admits. “We shall have to take him with us.”
He continues to write while Rhyme watches. She could read his rushed inscriptions if she cared to but she knows what they are. Invocations and supplications. Blessings and yearnings and wishes and warnings.
He is writing to Mirabel as he always has, as he has continued to write through the years she has been with Zachary in the depths, writing as though he is speaking to her, as though she can hear each word as it materializes on the paper like a whisper in her ear.
Rhyme wonders if he knows that Mirabel hears him, has always heard him, will always hear him through distance and lifetimes and a thousand turning pages.
This is not where our story ends, he writes. This is only where it changes.
The Keeper puts his pen down and closes the notebook.
He looks up at Rhyme.
“You should change,” he says, looking at her robes and her honey-soaked shoes.
Rhyme unties her robes and takes them off. Beneath them she wears the same clothes she wore when she first arrived: her old school uniform with its plaid skirt and white button-down shirt. It did not seem right to wear anything else for the departure despite the fact that it feels like wearing a past life and the shirt is now too small. The honey-soaked shoes will have to suffice.
The Keeper, seeming not to notice the encroaching waves, stands and pours a glass of wine from a bottle on the desk. He offers to pour another for Rhyme but she declines.
“Don’t fret,” the Keeper says to Rhyme, watching her as she watches the sea. “It is all here,” he says, placing a fingertip on Rhyme’s forehead. “Remember to let it out.”
The Keeper hands her his fountain pen. Rhyme smiles at the pen and places it in the pocket of her skirt.
“Ready?” he asks and Rhyme nods.
The Keeper looks around the office once more but takes nothing save the glass of wine as they move into the next room, the ginger cat following.
“Could you give me a hand with this, please?” the Keeper asks, placing his wine on a shelf and together he and Rhyme move the large painting of Zachary and Dorian aside, revealing the door set into the stone wall behind it.
“Where shall we go?” the Keeper asks.
Rhyme hesitates, looking at the door and then back over her shoulder. The sea has reached the office, lapping at the desk and the candles and toppling the broom that had been resting in a corner.
“We are past the time for vows,” the Keeper adds and Rhyme turns back to him.
“I’d like to be there, if we can,” she says, each word careful and slow, sitting strangely on a tongue she has not used for speaking in years. “Wouldn’t you?”
The Keeper considers this suggestion. He takes a watch from the pocket of his suit and looks at it, turning the hands this way and that before he nods.
“I suppose we have the time,” he says.
Rhyme picks up the ginger cat.
The Keeper places his hand on the door and the door listens to its instructions. It knows where it is meant to open, though it could open anywhere.
Waves of honey sweep into the room as the Keeper opens the door.
“Quickly now,” he says, ushering Rhyme and the cat through the door and out into the cloud-covered daylight.
The Keeper turns back and lifts the glass of wine from the shelf.
“To Seeking,” he says, raising his glass to the approaching sea.
The sea does not answer.
The Keeper drops the glass, letting it spill and shatter on the floor by his feet, and then he steps out of this sinking Harbor and into the world above.
The door closes and the Starless Sea crashes into it, flooding the office and the room beyond. It smothers the fire and the smoldering braids within it and slides over the painting, pulling measures of time and depictions of fates under