“Right.”
“You’re a librarian.”
“Yes.”
“Who saved her books,” Larran said.
“I like the word ‘saved,’ but given that I didn’t actually bring them back, I think the empire might choose the word ‘stole.’ You see, I thought it had fallen. The empire. I thought the revolutionaries had taken control, and eventually I’d reach out and, if the Great Library had been restored . . .”
He stepped toward her, coming out of the shallows onto the sand, closing the gap between them that she’d created. “I think you were incredibly brave.”
She gave a hiccup sort of laugh. “Oh, yes, I bravely ran away.”
“You did.” He was serious. “You saved yourself, your friend, and you came here and saved us.”
She felt herself blushing and knew her cheeks had to be tinged purply. “Okay, that last bit is somewhat of an overstatement. I made jam and some sticky pine cones.”
“You saved Sian’s life. And I am guessing you are responsible for Meep?”
“They were an accident. But yes.” She supposed all of that was good, to balance out the bad of the theft and the lawbreaking, and he didn’t even know about the merbaby and the forest spirits. But none of that changed the fact that she’d endangered him, her friends, and everyone on Caltrey by exposing them to Radane’s investigation. “I don’t regret any of it. It can’t continue, though, not now with an imperial investigator on the island.”
“She’ll lose interest,” Larran said. “And when she leaves Caltrey, everything will return back to normal, and you don’t have to be afraid—”
“The only way it returns to normal is if I leave,” Kiela said. “If I stay and Radane realizes what I’ve done, everyone in Caltrey will be suspect. Everyone who has been kind to me will be named conspirators. And it will be worse now—the imperials need to prove they’re still in power. They’ll come down hard. Fines. Worse.”
Larran shook his head. “She won’t.”
“You don’t know that. She saw me help Sian. She doesn’t have proof yet, but my pine cones . . . And the fountain! Someone could have seen me. If she talks to enough people, the right people, if she asks the right questions, applies enough pressure . . . I thought it would be safe enough this far from Alyssium. I didn’t think anyone who’d care would come here. But she’s here, and that’s that. I have to come up with an excuse that won’t sound suspicious and then leave, before I make everything worse.”
“You want me to let you sail off and just shrug and say ‘that’s that’?”
Well, yes, she did. Or at least she had wanted that. Before they kissed. Before . . . “I don’t want to leave.” As she said it out loud, she realized how deeply true it was. The idea of sailing away from Caltrey, of leaving her parents’ cottage, of never seeing Larran and Bryn and Eadie and Ulina, even little Tobin . . . She would never have believed how attached she could become in such a short amount of time. She wanted this to be her life, here on Caltrey, in her little cottage with her garden and her jam shop, with Caz and Meep, with the mermaid and her merbaby in the cove . . . She wanted to keep helping the tree guardians. She wanted to heal the rest of the orchards. She wanted to make sure the bird she’d accidentally created from an apple tree was okay. She wanted to help that customer with the waterless spring. She wanted to try to make cherry jam from Eadie’s cherry trees. She wanted to ride Sian again out in the waves. And she wanted to kiss Larran more. Right now, please.
He’d stepped closer to her too. “Then don’t leave.”
“It’s not so simple.”
He was inches from her, not touching, but so close that she felt as if the air were vibrating between them. She barely heard the waves crashing at their feet or the gulls overhead. She wished the rest of the world could disappear, and it could be just this stretch of beach for just this stretch of time.
“Why can’t it be?”
“Because. Empire. Laws. Really terrible punishments.”
He kissed her first this time, and everything melted away as his arms wrapped around her. “Stay,” he said, breathing the word into her.
“You don’t want me to.”
He kissed her neck, light kisses that made her breath catch. “I do.”
“You don’t know me. Not well enough.”
His hands were on her back, and she’d never felt safer. If the earth fell from beneath their feet, she felt as if he’d hold her up. “I want to know you better,” he said. He kissed her ear.
“No, you don’t. I’m not friendly. I like to be alone.”
“You can be alone with me.”
She ran her hands up his neck and tangled her fingers in his hair. “That doesn’t make sense.”
