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She heaves over the pot again.

“That’s not true.” She pants through her queasiness. “Think back to when we first decided to start working together. How did I feel back then?”

I search my memories. Those first years all blur together, but I vaguely recall a glimmer of hope, a thread of something good. “No. No, I never even appeared to you in my physical form. You didn’t feel anything for me.”

“But I did. I admired you so much, and I thought that you would understand me.”

We didn’t know each other for very long before we made our deal. I took advantage of the hours when I was allowed on the surface by finding ways to numb myself to what I was experiencing. “I must have been such a disappointment.”

“No,” she says, but I can tell she’s fighting a yes. “I understood that you needed to cope. I never held that against you. But I never got to know the real you. I still don’t know the real you.” She sits back on her heels. “What is this place? How is this your home? I always thought you were trapped in our realm.”

“That’s what people wanted to believe, so I let them.” My stomach gurgles, and I pull the pot over to me, heaving violently. When I come up for air, I tell her the truth. “I’ve never been to the fae realm. I’m not even a faerie.”

Her mouth stretches in disbelief. “What?”

I hear her clearing her throat while I lean over the pot again, and I push it over to her just in time.

“Let me tell you about this place first,” I say. “Fae magic used to flow freely to the continent before it split into the Heartbreak Isles, but this lighthouse marks a rift where we can still feel it. Some people–like Orla and my mother before her–can even hear messages from the other realm.”

Nausea wells so suddenly, I have to take a break and just breathe through it.

“My mother was the lighthouse witch for a very long time, channeling fae magic to heal and protect the shores of our quiet village, but her long life and long hours were isolating.” I lift my hand toward a glazed pot on the bench holding a single blue tulip. “She became so lonely that she bought an aether bulb from a trader visiting from Corstylia. He told her it would grow into a wishflower.”

“A prince gave me one of those as a gift once,” she groans. “What a silly gimmick.”

“They are, usually,” I agree. “But she planted that bulb with love, and every day, she’d read it stories, and every night she’d water it with her tears. For ten years, she tended to it and always made the same wish–for a child with moon-spun hair and wings made from the sky itself. A child who could make themself as big or as small as they needed to be. A child who could walk through air and flit about the world like a zephyr.” A tear drips from the corner of my eye. “One day, it bloomed into a tulip, and when it opened, I was inside. My mother plucked me from the stamens and named me Tommelise.”

“Tommelise,” Cordelia repeats. “You used your real name as a moniker.”

“I did. I prefer Zephyr, but I wanted you to know the name my mother gave me.” I hum through a wave of nausea. “My persona as the professor wasn’t completely fabricated either.”

“You’re really an educator?” She pokes my shoulder, prodding me to keep going.

“No, but after Orla came along and showed more interest in my mother’s craft, I felt I could leave the lighthouse and explore the realm. I was studying hydrography at Gentrilly’s royal university when the Queen’s War broke out.”

I scratch my fingers along the cold ground, searching for relief from this awful feeling.

“A group of air faeries recruited me into helping others find their way back into their realm. I gave them a fake name and a fake story because I knew how important it was to make sure nobody could ever trace me back to this place.” Cordelia pats my back as I shiver, but I know she’s suffering through this too. “Near the end of the war, I was captured after I dropped my aether in an attempt to move a dying friend.”

I’m still shocked that I pulled Cordelia into my aether. In my desperation, I accomplished what I failed to do back then.

Thank the gods for that.

She rests her chin on the edge of our makeshift sick bucket. “I always wondered how my father’s guards caught you. My guess was iron, but I was wrong about that, apparently.”

“No, not iron. Just a moment of vulnerability.” My wings flatten against my back. “One slip-up, and I was stuck in stasis for ten years. Mother and Orla had no idea why I’d vanished.”

“That’s why you went to the sea-witch.” She whimpers pitifully. “You wanted to go home to them.”

“Yes, I thought she would lift your father’s curse, and everything would return to normal.”

“But that didn’t happen, did it?”

“No.” I remember landing on the sill of my mother’s window after my visit to the sea witch. Her bed was made, the curtain blowing in the wind. “My mother had passed away the year before I was pulled from stasis.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says, her sympathy creaking through me.

“She was already weary from her centuries of work here, and my disappearance broke her heart. When she left, Orla became the new lighthouse witch.” I take my turn over the pot, the memory churning my stomach. “Cosette had already given me the task with the rune keys by the time I realized my life would never be the same again. I tried to avoid it for a while, but I saw what happened to anyone who failed to uphold their end of a deal with her, the tragedies that befell the people around them.”