“Nice to have a piece of art here that won’t get eaten,” Claire said, pressing Kami’s hand. She still wore her wedding ring. Dad was still not wearing his, but Kami knew he carried it around in his pocket.
“Thank you for bringing up eating,” Kami said. “We were promised cookies if we came to help. I intended to come and help, and as it’s the thought that counts, I feel I’m still owed cookies.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Mum.
Kami was going to be milking this “changed you back from stone” business for baked goods for a solid decade. That was the kind of person she was. She accepted this truth about herself.
“Are you people still not done?” asked Lillian Lynburn from the door.
Ten looked warily up from his book, but when he saw her doing nothing more than pulling off her black leather gloves, he returned to the story. Jared had given him the book, and promised him there would be explosions. Kami was not sure how many explosions Edgar Allan Poe would really provide, but Ten seemed to be enjoying it.
In the meantime, Lillian was looking speculatively at the mural. Kami saw her lift her hand. With sorcery, the mural could be done in ten minutes.
“I see you, Linnaea,” Jon called over his shoulder. “Don’t even think it. I have eyes in the back of my head, and all my eyes have artistic vision.”
“ ‘Linnaea’ is not a name,” grumbled Lillian, but she lowered her hand.
“It is a name,” said Jon. “I looked it up.”
Linnaea was the name of a flower, also called the twinflower. Kami knew it because she had seen pictures of all the flowers Jon was painting: call-me-to-you, daisies, goldeneye, wild daffodils, Lazarus bells, honeysuckle, and burnt orchids in the deep woods and by the shining lakes, nestled into the hollows of tree roots and trim gardens alike. Twinflowers were pearl-pale bells with lilac hearts, two flowers growing from a single fragile stem.
The woods in the heart of town. Kami thought it was a lovely idea for a mural.
Lillian walked over the floor to Ash, who caught her hand as she went by. Lillian smiled and let him keep it, pulling herself up on a stool and regarding the mural with a critical eye. Kami was prepared to bet that either criticisms or more offers of magical help would be along in less than five minutes. She was prepared to bet a lot, if she could find any sucker who would take it.
She never found out.
There was another tap on the door.
“Oh, good,” said Mum, disappearing into the kitchen. “Another Lynburn.”
“Hi, Mrs. Glass,” Jared called after her.
“That is how I shall always greet you from now on,” Angela informed Jared, without opening her eyes.
Jared stayed standing in the doorway, hands on either side of the doorframe. It was almost summer, almost too warm for his battered leather jacket. There was something about the set of his shoulders that she thought looked tense.
“Kami,” he said. “I came to ask if I could talk to you outside.”
Kami looked around at her friends, at her family, for a hint as to what she should do. Her treacherous friends and family stared innocently and unhelpfully back. “Yes,” she said at last. “All right.”
They had not been alone in weeks. Kami had thought that it was because there was so much to be done, to be rebuilt, to be arranged, and then she had started to wonder if Jared had been avoiding being alone with her.
Now they were alone, and Jared did not seem to have much to say to her. There was no statue in the square any longer, her mother revived, Matthew Cooper and all his history gone. Jared paced silently in the sunlit square that was left.
Kami watched him. Jared looked up, and visibly nerved himself.
“Here’s the thing,” said Jared. “I thought it was obvious. I thought it was embarrassingly obvious, but—when we did the ceremony I saw your mind, and I saw the way you’ve seen the past few months. When you told me we were going out, I went along with it. You were calling me silly names, it was clear you weren’t as serious about it as I was. I figured you could see that I would have taken anything you would give me, and you thought I was kind of ridiculous and desperate. But you didn’t, did you?”
“No,” said Kami. “I felt like I had to bully you into going out with me. So no. I did not think you were the pathetic one in that scenario.”
Jared bit his lip. “Then I’ve been messing up everything, the whole time. Well. That shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is. I didn’t realize how I must have seemed, to you. I’m sure I’m going to mess this up too, but there is one thing I thought was more obvious than anything else. There is one thing I thought you knew, and if you don’t I have to tell you. I am utterly in love with you. I’ve been in love with you my whole life. I’ve been in love with you your whole life. I don’t know how to live without being in love with you, and I don’t want to know.”
He held her gaze for that long, then looked down at the cobblestones.
“I don’t want to sound like my father. Like either of my fathers. My feelings aren’t more important than yours. I don’t want to act as if they are.”
“You never thought they were, not really. You didn’t think anything about yourself was important at all.”
He had thought his life was worth so much less than hers, so much less than Ash’s. But he had decided to live without them if he had to. She was so glad they had all lived, but she was glad to think of his decision, even now. She was reassured and warmed by it, by how far he had come.
“It’s cool,” said Jared. “I think I’m awesome now. So awesome. You should definitely go out with me.”
Kami laughed and hesitated, leaning against the wall and watching him, his Lynburn profile outlined against gold stone and a summer sky. She was not sure if now was the time to act.
“I always thought that you could never love me,” said Jared, and his voice was stark, not self-pitying, just stating facts. “Not really. Nobody ever did but you, for so long, and you weren’t real. I thought nobody real could love me, and then you were real, and I still thought that. I resented you for not loving me, and I tried to accept you not loving me, and I am so sorry I hurt you. I hardly even believed I could. I don’t ever want to hurt you again. And I can accept you not loving me, but I had to tell you how I felt. I want to love you, and I want you to love me back. I came to find out if that could ever be possible.”
Jared hesitated, as if hoping for an answer, but when he did not get one he plunged desperately on.
“I said once that my idea of happiness is to always be with you, and it is. I’m always going to think of you as the source of everything. To me, the sun rises and sets on you. You make all things true. I am in love with you, and I cannot imagine being in love with anyone else. It would be like becoming someone else. Your name was the first word for love I ever knew.” He broke off, and set his jaw, looking frustrated. “I don’t want to talk like Rob, saying that you owe me something because I love you, or that other women are worthless because I’m not in love with them. Love isn’t some kind of debt. That’s not what I mean.”
“I know,” said Kami. “You always thought Holly was great.”
“She is great,” said Jared. “And beautiful. She’s like a star to me, something bright and lovely seen from another world. She’s someone else’s sun. That’s how all other girls are to me. You’re my sun.”
It was a nice recovery.
“Your courtship method of arrogance, self-loathing, and then telling me how beautiful other girls are is pretty unique,” said Kami. “I like it. I don’t know what that says about me.”
“You like it?” Jared asked, with a shy glance up at her.
“I’m glad you told me the truth.”
“That’s all I intended to do,” Jared said hastily. “I don’t expect anything from you. That was what I’ve been trying to tell you. I want you, but I don’t need
you to give me anything you don’t want to give. You existing in the world is all I need.”
“I’m glad you told me the truth,” Kami repeated. “Because I have something to tell you now.”
Kami straightened up from the wall and looked into his eyes, those pale clear eyes, like mirrors, like pools.
She had not only worried that he did not love her the way she wanted to. She had not only loved and longed. She had spent so much time worrying that accepting love, becoming part of all the love stories, would trap her in some way, change her into someone weak, someone she did not want to be. But she realized now that she had been narrow-minded, considering a love story as a lesser story, a story that might make her lesser to be part of. She had always thought she needed to be in control, but now she found she did not want to put any limits on herself at all. She wanted to be the person she was, and not the person anyone, including herself, had ever thought she should be. She had thought a lot lately about making all the love stories her own, of telling them her own way.
He had told her everything she had been hoping to hear. She hadn’t been sure how Jared felt, though she had hoped, because Ash had loved her when he was bound to Jared and not before or after. But what was between them was complicated and often painful and priceless, terrifying to risk. She had not known what to call it, for so long.
She had not been sure, but she had hoped, and planned. She had planned this. She had asked Ash to help her spend the last of their linked magic to build a barrier, the highest, strongest barrier she had ever built. To hide the link that Kami had not broken.
She brought the last barrier between them crashing down. She felt the link between them flicker and wake to life, like waking the woods except that it was just them, being marvels to each other.
The sky turned upside down for a moment, so they were falling into vivid blue. The gold of Cotswold stone blazed and embraced them, and Kami turned as Jared turned, moved with his movements. She felt his joy running through her like a river through parched lands, bringing everything to life. She felt her waist beneath her hands as he did, at the same time as she savored the sensation of his hands resting above her hips, moving to slide up her back. He bent down and kissed her and she knew his hunger and his longing, and knew he could feel hers. She knew which was her, and which was him, and being linked meant they could share, meant they had forged a blazing path and could meet in the middle, close, close as other people did not wish or dare to be, as close as they could get.
“So you do …” Still, after all this, Jared hesitated, hardly daring to believe. “Do you love me?”
Kami tipped back her head and laughed at him, felt her laugh running along his bones, delight mirrored back to her and back again. The sun hung above them like a silent shining bell in the sky. She opened up her thoughts and let him see it all, the story of her love laid out before him as though written in scarlet and gold.
She said: Read my mind.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my lovely editor, Mallory Loehr, and to Chelsea Eberly and Jenna Lettice; my wonderful copy editor, Deborah Dwyer; Jan Gerardi; and the whole great team at Random House Children’s Books.
Thank you very much to Kristin Nelson and everyone at NLA for everything, forever.
And thank you to Ginger Clark: so sorry to torment you like I have!
Thank you to Venetia Gosling and Ellie Willis and Gail Hallett and the team at Simon & Schuster UK, for every stage of the Lynburn Legacy series! And to Kathryn McKenna and Sophie Stott for combining their publicity powers.
Thank you to Robin Wasserman, Maureen Johnson, Malinda Lo, Delia Sherman, Cindy Pon, Paolo Bacigalupi, Josh Lewis, Ally Carter, Jen Lynn Barnes, Leigh Bardugo, Karen Healey, R. J. Anderson, Saundra Mitchell, Kelly Link, Cassandra Clare, and Holly Black. Thank you for your support and your excellent faces. Especial thanks to Holly for the poem. She knows the one. (The suggestion that I should say “Thanks to all the jerks who got me through this!” was, as you can see, noted.)
Thank you to my Irish friends—I love you and by the time you read this will be missing you. Hello to my UK and American and Australian friends!
Thank you to Chiara for Con Dau, where I got the edits for this book, but more importantly where we were friends for twenty-two years. Here’s to twenty-two more, bestie.
Thank you to my family. Sorry for making fun of you on Twitter all the time.
I never knew, until this series, that I could torment people I did not know, lay waste to their dreams, blow holes in their ships, and drink their tears.
I regret nothing.
I hope you feel the same!
About the Author
Sarah Rees Brennan grew up in Ireland and then moved to New York and London, where she wrote her first book, The Demon’s Lexicon. She never had an imaginary friend as a child, but she returned to Ireland to write about all the imaginary friends she has now and hopes you like them. Visit her at sarahreesbrennan.com or follow her on Twitter at @sarahreesbrenna, where they cruelly stole her last “n” and she will have vengeance.
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