"Thank you for bringing me out here."
"I should be thanking you,” he said. “You solved my drainage problem.”
"Yes," Cori agreed, briefly meeting his gaze. "But I meant for bringing me to the moors." She turned and looked out at them, the vast pewter sweep of the landscape under the white sky. "I think I shall be sorry to leave them."
Then do not leave Acklan. Stay forever.
"We should go back," he said instead, because it was wise.
"Yes," she agreed. But she stood for one more moment, looking out at the moors, and he stood beside her and let her have it, because he would have given anything to stay right there with her and never leave.
But then they walked back toward the castle in the grey morning light, and the curlew called somewhere above, and the cool breeze moved through the heather. Through it all, James kept his hands in his coat pockets and his thoughts to himself, which was harder than it had been the day before.
He suspected it would be even more difficult in the days to come.
Corridor, East Wing
Acklan Castle
"You told me to climb it," Cori said the same words she’d been saying since she was seven.
"I told you to climb to the second rung," Cait replied, parroting the same words she’d been repeating for years. "Whatever you did above the second rung was your own decision."
"You told me to go higher."
"I said no such thing."
"You told me to higher and then you ran."
"I ran to get Papa because you were already climbing and there was nothing else to be done about it." Cait pushed open the door to a cozy sitting room and went in. " You had already passed the third rung before I had said anything at all."
"Because you told me to,” Cori explained. Again.
"Corinna."
"Caitrin."
Cara looked up from where she was sitting beside Emma Atherton near the fire, assessed the situation in approximately one second, and said, "Cait told you to climb it."
Cait turned to stare at their oldest sister. "I did not."
"You absolutely did," Cara returned pleasantly. "I was watching from the deck. You said, ‘Go on,’ and then you pointed upward."
"I was gesturing," Cait said.
"You were gesturing upward," Cara said.
"In the general direction of the rigging," Cori added the important part, the part Cait never acknowledged.
"At the sky," Cait said firmly. "I was gesturing at the sky. It was a fine day. I was making an observation about the weather."
Miss Atherton, who had been following this exchange, pressed her lips together as though to hide a smile.
"The sky," Cori repeated incredulously.
"It was a particularly fine sky," Cait said, with great dignity, and sat down in a window seat.
Cori sat beside her because the view of the moors called to her, and she’d been trying most of the day to make sense of a series of thoughts that would not leave her. The walk with James was still with her, as was their exchange in the garden that morning. She had a feeling that there was something she was missing with him. Something large and meaningful. But she could not put her finger on what that might be. Then there was the way Mrs. Fairleigh had assessed her the night before. That memory hovered around the edges of Cori’s mind as did the fact that she knew – just as she knew Cait had told her to climb that rigging when she was seven – that Cait was keeping something from her now.
