Eventually I reached the main doors. I fancied they’d be locked, but I’d try them anyway before searching for another way out. If nothing else, the windows of the front parlor had looked promising.…
Yet my hand closed on the wrought-iron latch and it gave at once. It seemed a fairly shocking lack of security, but I reminded myself that this wasn’t the city or anything remotely resembling the dodgy streets of St. Giles. Who would bother to venture all the way out here for thieving? We were an island of leftover pin money and probably miserly teacher salaries.
If anyone wanted to steal anything, they’d have better luck simply walking straight into the shambles of Tranquility, where they’d have their pick of priceless, neglected things.
I opened the doors a crack and squeezed through.
My hair swished back over my shoulders. My face lifted and I breathed deep, as deep as I could until it hurt, and then let it all out in a rush. I raised my arms above my head and stretched hard, wind whistling through my spread fingers.
Freedom smelled of wild waters; it glimmered in a path of stars above my head. Freedom tasted like sea salt on my tongue.
It was another amethyst night, like the one when I’d first arrived. There was that long streak of Milky Way, bright in its cloudy curve, but the very heart of the sky was a purple so intense it was closer to jet.
The castle and the woods and I—the whole of the earth—lay bathed in its fey, colored beauty. We were soaked in purple night.
I bent to shove my feet into my boots, hitched up my skirt, and ran.
The green had been shaped by human hands, so it was easy to cross. Wide and smooth, it had been designed to showcase lovely young ladies moving sedately into their well-polished futures. Only when I reached the first shaggy trees of the forest did I have to slow, and even then not by much.
The woods felt instantly better, safer, than Iverson’s lawn. Secrets could live in here, tucked between tree trunks, hidden in the boughs, and no one would ever see. Secret things, secret hearts, could open up wings and thrive.
Shadows swallowed me in slippery black. The air took on a richer, loamy note. The ground crunched with leaves, and ferns slapped at my shins and knees, painless. I splashed through brooks and left footprints in peat. Crickets called in time to my stride, a steady chee, chee that never broke.
I was running swifter than a hart, swifter than even the advancing night, because that was outside the forest and everything surrounding me here was enchanted, as I was. I didn’t know where I was going, but it didn’t matter. Sooner or later I’d run out of land, and then I would turn back.
But I began to slow before that happened. Not because I was tired, but because I realized I was coming close to something, and although I was sure I’d never been here before—I hadn’t, not to this part of the isle—I knew I was getting near to where I needed to be.
Where I’d come out tonight to be.
By the time I reached the cottage, I was walking. I was following a path that seemed like a whisper, a bare impression in the earth, the slightest break in woolly grasses bounded by huge, gnarled birches and beeches and mossy logs and flowers that I could smell but not see.
There was a single candle lit in the front window. The door was open and the way stood empty, exactly as it always was in my dreams.
I slowed to a stop, a little winded still, engulfed in the perfume of wildflowers and the fragrance of the candle, paraffin, and smoke.
Go on, urged the fiend, pushing hard from within the cage of my chest. We’re not afraid.
So I finished the last of the whispering path that led to Jesse’s door.
I knew what awaited me beyond. The dreams had shown me so many times before that, when I ran my fingers along the frame of the doorway as I passed, I found the protruding knot that was always there, a cat’s-eye shape at the height of my shoulder. When my feet met the rug beyond the entrance, I didn’t have to look down to see that it would be red and sage and teal, a design of intertwining vines ending