“You—what? You come back to watch?” His past self flung out his arms and his wings. “Is this what you wanted to see?” The depths of his misery were achingly plain.
“This needed to happen, Daniel.”
“Don’t feed me those lies. Don’t you dare. Have you gone back to taking advice from Cam again?”
“No!” Daniel almost shouted at his past self. “Listen: There is a time, not so very far from now, when we will have a chance to change this game. Something has shifted, and things are different. When we have an opportunity to stop doing this over and over. When Lucinda at last might—”
“Break the cycle?” his past self whispered.
“Yes.” Daniel was beginning to feel light-headed. There was one too many of them in the room. It was time for him to go. “It will take some time,” he instructed, turning back when he reached the window. “But maintain hope.”
Then Daniel slipped through the broken window. His words—maintain hope—echoed in his mind as he took off across the sky, deep into the shadows of the night.
NINE
SO WE BEAT ON
Łuce found herself balanced on a splintery wooden beam.
It creaked as it tilted slightly to the left, then creaked again as it eased very slowly to the right. The rocking was steady and ceaseless, as if the beam were attached to a very short pendulum.
A hot wind sent her hair lashing across her face and blew her servant’s bonnet off her head. The beam beneath her swayed again, and her feet slipped. She fell against the beam and barely managed to hug it to herself before she went tumbling down—
Where was she? In front of her was the endless blue of open sky. A darker blue at what must have been the horizon. She looked down.
She was incredibly high up.
A waterlogged pole stretched a hundred feet beneath her, ending in a wooden deck. Oh. It was a mast. Luce was sitting on the top yard of a very large sailboat.
A very large shipwrecked sailboat, just off the coast of a black-shored island.
The bow had been smashed violently against a cluster of razor-sharp lava rocks that had left it a pulverized mess. The mainsail was shredded: tattered pieces of tawny canvas flapping loosely in the wind. The air smelled like the morning after a great storm, but this ship was so weathered, it looked like it had been there for years.
Every time the waves rushed up the black-sand shores, water sprayed dozens of feet up from the crevices in the rocks. The waves made the wreck—and the beam Luce clutched—sway so roughly she felt she might be sick.
How was she going to get down? How was she going to get to shore?
“Aha! Look who’s landed like a bird on a perch.” Bill’s voice broke over the crashing waves. He appeared at the far tip of the ship’s rotting yard, walking with his arms extended from his sides as if he were on a balance beam.
“Where are we?” Luce was too nervous to make any sudden movements.
Bill sucked in a big lungful of air. “Can’t you taste it? The north coast of Tahiti!” He plopped down next to Luce, kicked out his stubby legs, stretched his short gray arms up, and clasped his hands behind his head. “Isn’t it paradise?”
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Nonsense. You just have to find your sea legs.”
“How did we get—” Luce glanced around again for an Announcer. She didn’t see a single shadow, just the endless blank blue of empty skies.
“I took care of the logistics for you. Think of me as your travel agent, and of yourself as on vacation!”
“We’re not on vacation, Bill.”
“We’re not? I thought we were taking the Grand Tour of Love.” He rubbed his forehead, and flinty flakes showered from his scalp. “Did I misunderstand?”
“Where are Lucinda and Daniel?”
“Hang on.” He hovered in the air in front of Luce. “Don’t you want a little history?”
Luce ignored him and scooted over toward the mast. She stretched an unsteady foot to the highest of the pegs that spiked out from the mast’s sides.
“Don’t you at least want a hand?”
She’d been holding her breath and trying not to look down as her foot slid off the wooden peg a third time. Finally, she swallowed dryly and reached out to take the cold, rough claw Bill extended to her.
As she took Bill’s hand, he pulled her forward, then off the mast entirely. She yelped as the wet wind battered her face, sending the skirt of her dress billowing around her waist. She shut her eyes and waited to plunge through the rotten decking below.
Only she didn’t.
She heard a throosh and felt her body catch in the air. She opened her eyes. Bill’s stubby wings had ballooned out and caught the wind. He was supporting her weight with just one hand, carrying her slowly to shore. It was miraculous how nimble he was, how light. Luce was surprised to find herself relaxing—somehow the sensation of flying was natural to her by now.
Daniel. As the air encircled her, the ache to be with him overtook her. To hear his voice and taste his lips—Luce could think of nothing else. What she wouldn’t have given to be in his arms just then!
The Daniel she’d encountered in Helston, however happy he’d been to see her, had not really known her. Not the way her Daniel did. Where was he right now?
“Feeling better?” Bill asked.
“Why are we here?” Luce asked as they soared over the water. It was so clear she could see inky shadows moving underwater—giant schools of fish, swimming easily, following the shoreline.
“See that palm tree?” Bill pointed forward with his free claw. “The tallest one, third from the break in the sandbar?”
Luce nodded, squinting.
“That’s where your father in this life built his hut. Nicest shack on the beach!” Bill coughed. “Actually, it’s the only shack on the beach. The Brits haven’t even discovered this side of the island yet. So when your pops is off fishing, you and Daniel have the place mostly to yourselves.”
“Daniel and I … lived here … together?”
Hand in hand, Luce and Bill touched down on the shore with the soft elegance of two dancers in a pas de deux. Luce was grateful—and a little shocked—at how smoothly he’d been able to get her down from the mast of the ship, but as soon as she was firmly on the ground, she withdrew her hand from his grimy claw and wiped it on her apron.
It was starkly beautiful here. The crystal waters washed against the strange and lovely black-sand beaches. Groves of citrus and palm trees leaned over the coast, heavy with bright-orange fruit. Past the trees, low mountains rose up from the mists of the rain forest. Waterfalls cut into their sides. The wind down here wasn’t as fierce; better still, it was thick with the scent of hibiscus. It was hard to imagine getting to spend a vacation here, let alone an entire life.
“You lived here.” Bill started walking along the curved shoreline, leaving little claw prints in the dark sand. “Your dad, and all ten of the other natives who lived within canoeing distance, called you—well, it sounded like Lulu.”
Luce had been walking quickly to keep pace, balling up the layered skirts of her Helston servant’s clothing to keep them from dragging in the sand. She stopped and made a face.
“What?” Bill said. “I think it’s cute, Lulu. Lulululululu.”
“Stop it.”
“Anyway, Daniel was a kind of rogue explorer. That boat back there? Your ace boyfriend stole it from George the Third’s private slip.” He glanced back at the shipwreck. “But it’ll take Captain Bligh and his mutinous crew another couple of years to track Daniel down here, and by then … you know.”
Luce swallowed. Daniel would probably be long gone by then, because Lucinda would be long dead.
They’d reached a gap in the line of palm trees. A brackish river flowed in swirls between the ocean and a small inland freshwater pond. Luce edged along a few flat stones to cross the water. She was sweating through her petticoats and thought about stripping out of her stifling dress and diving straight into the ocean.