33
ISLA
My flight home turns out to be as exhausting as my trip to Glace had been.
I spend my first days back in the Sky Kingdom alternately nestled against my mother who still feels too ill to leave her bed, lounging in Shoshair’s garden and regaling her with tales of my voyage abroad, and soaking my sore muscles in the Baths with my friends.
One week slips into two, and although I love every second of being home, I itch to return to the man with the glacial façade and blazing heart.
Though most Crows had already heard about my engagement, I’m still met with shrill gasps and chanted felicitations in the hallways of the Sky Kingdom or in the Market Tavern, where I spend each morning, helping dish out meals. Though I absolutely hate deceiving my fellow Crows, it oddly no longer feels like a deception.
Konstantin and I might not be mates, but we aresomething.
Something beautiful.
When I blink awake the day of my twenty-fifth year, I feel like both springing out of bed and staying put. I want to laughand weep. To lock myself in my childhood home and leave immediately for Konstantin’s home.
I get dressed slowly.
Spend extra time with Shoshair as she prunes dead branches.
Spend extra time with Mádhi and Phoeppa as they squabble—as per usual—over the appropriate amount of skin to showcase in his newest bathing suit collection.
And then I spend extra time surfing over Luce, absorbing each scraggy peak, each blade of ochre grass and fall-tinted leaf, each vibrantly-hued house, and each shimmer of serpent scales in the translucent stretch of ocean that separates Tarecuori from my current destination—Isolacuori.
I land on the little isle that used to house the Regio castle, right beside Elio’s lounger. Where usually the finely manicured lawn is crawling with swimmers wearing Phoeppa’s latest and greatest, today, it is entirely deserted. I suppose the air is a tad nippier now that September has surged over Luce, even though in comparison to Glace, it still feels like the height of summer.
“Is there a personnel strike?” I ask as I stroll up to him.
Elio rolls off his lounger, pushing up two pieces of smoky glass trapped in gold wire off his cerulean eyes. “No. Mamma wanted a day off, so she took a day off and forced everyone else to take a day off, too.”
The sun catches on the wire of what I can only describe as eye shields and which are now sunk into his short black curls like a headband.
“Spectacles,” he explains in response to my unremitting perusal. “Zia Gia brought them over the other day. They were invented to hold corrective lenses for humans with poor eyesight, but they became all the rage with the high society when Eponine’s youngest sister wore a tinted pair to a luncheon.”
“The Nebbans and their clever inventions.”
“All the coin that used to go into the military is now being given to inventors, so expectmanyinnovations.”
“We need to poach some of these inventors.”
“We, as in the Ríhbiadhs, orwe, as in the Korols?”
My ribs clench as I link arms with Elio. “We, as in the Ríhbiadhs.”
I fill my eyes with the chroma of birds, my ears with the drone of bees, and my skin with the warmth of sunrays. In that moment, Glace and my predicament feel as far from me as the wondrous afternoons Naeva, Lachlano, Elio, and I spent roaming Isolacuori, by land and by canal.
The bold stroke of color on a low shrub carries me back to the treasure hunts Phoeppa would organize for our birthdays and on each High Holiday—be they Faerie ones or Crow ones. He’d scatter sweets throughout Isolacuori, hook fabric satchels across our little chests, then let us loose.
How we’d laugh, how we’d run and swim and—once we came into our Crow powers—fly.
Our hair was forever marbled with salt, and our skin perpetually toasted. Unlike now. Although I’ve been home for almost a fortnight, my complexion is as insipid as Elio’s white linen shirt.
I rest my cheek on his bicep, mumbling, “Skies, I’m pasty.”
“Not much sunbathing happening in Glace?”
I snort. “It snows almost every day. Do you think Eponine’s inventors could create a sunlight machine?”
