was a cavern with glimmering seawater as most of its floor, wet limestone walls streaked with minerals and moisture, and rivulets of crystals twinkling in the uneasy light like fireflies. Man-made columns, eight of them, broke the waters, reaching from seafloor to ceiling. They looked colossal enough to support the weight of the whole island.
The slate-colored light was shining up from the water. A half-moon wedge of day blazed a brighter gray against the far wall, where the top of the sea met the top of the cavern entrance and air still got through.
The tunnel had ended in a wide, cut-stone embankment that fronted the salt water. Centuries of restless tide had lapped its edges smooth as glass.
As with the castle and it secrets, a long-dead someone had thought up the scale and bones of this space. Someone had discovered the grotto and constructed the rest, hauling in the rounded blocks for the columns, swimming down to the unknown bottom of the cavern to anchor the base of each. Someone had labored over every inch of the glassy embankment beneath my feet, using minds and hands and tools to ensure evenness, stability.
Many someones. Generations of someones, perhaps.
Except for where Jesse’s palm met mine, I felt clammy with cold. The weight of all those spirits in the air seemed to press down on me, pushing into my skin.
“You’d moor your boat here.” Jesse used the lantern to indicate the column closest by, exposing eerie, ring-shaped stains of rust marking a row down its side. “You’d wait for the tide to go nearly all the way out at night, just high enough so that you could still row away in the dark. By the time anyone in the castle noticed you, hopefully their ships would be beached, and you’d be far enough gone to find safe harbor. Or at the very least be beyond the range of cannons or crossbows.”
“Jesse,” I said, and he turned around.
I wanted to address what had happened last night, our kiss, my fainting, him carrying me back to the tower. There was a weight in my chest that felt like an apology, although I didn’t know how to phrase it or even if I should try. There were too many layers of truth between this boy and me, obvious layers like, I don’t even know you, and layers more subtle, ones that whispered, I’ve known you forever.
I let our arms stretch out into a bridge between us. The flowered cuff crooned its pretty song. And what I said was, “Am I dreaming this?”
He hesitated, then shook his head.
“Then”—I swallowed—“am I crazy? Have I gone truly crazy?”
“No, Lora.”
“But how … how am I a dragon? How are you a starman?”
“I don’t think of myself as a starman, exactly,” he said soberly, though I sensed he wanted to smile. His hand released mine, the bridge broken; he moved to hang the lantern on a shiny new hook dug into the wall behind us. “I was born here, on earth. Not even far from here, in fact. Just over in Devon. My parents died young, when I was only five. Hastings is my great-uncle and he took me in, and I’ve lived here ever since. But I’ve always known what I am, as far back as I can remember. I’ve always been able to do the things I do. The stars have always spoken to me.”
“And you … speak back to them?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“But not to people.”
“No. Just to Hastings, and to you.”
A shiver took me; I crossed my arms over my chest. “What do the stars say?”
“All manner of things. Amazing things. Secret things. Things great and small, things profound and insignificant. They told me that, throughout time, there’ve been only a scattering of people like me, folk of both flesh and star. That even the whisper of their magic in my blood could annihilate me if I didn’t learn to control it. That I’d crisp to ash without control. Or, worse, crisp someone else.” His smile broke through. “And they told me about you. That you were born and would come to me when the time was right.”
“Did you summon me here?” The muted echo of my voice rebounded against the firefly walls: here-here-here. “To Iverson, I mean?”
… mean-mean-mean …
He didn’t answer at first. He looked at his feet, then walked to the edge of the embankment and squatted down, raking his fingers through the bright water near the toes of his boots.