He nodded, piecing together the narrative. “So you came here—started traveling, studying elsewhere—to escape.”
A high, harsh laugh. “More or less.” Kayu shrugged. “The night I refused the marriage, I stowed away on a ship. I didn’t care where it was going. It brought me here, and things…” She stopped, swallowed. Another flash of rapid thought behind her eyes, calculating, tallying up what she wanted to reveal. “I did what I had to do. Took shelter in the Temple. My memories of my time here are not kind.”
His older sister, Amethya, had been married to a man his parents chose. But he’d been kind and funny and handsome in addition to being immensely wealthy, and Raffe knew his family wouldn’t have consented to the marriage otherwise. He couldn’t imagine sending someone he loved to marry a person he knew was dangerous. “And your father… he still doesn’t know where you are?”
Her chin ducked; she tucked her hair nervously behind her ear. “Even if he does,” she murmured, “it doesn’t matter. He can’t touch me.”
The words could’ve been full of bravado, but the way she said them was almost regretful. Raffe nodded, arms crossed. “It’s hard, being somewhere that holds bad memories,” he said. “I understand.”
“Do you?” Still so soft, so quiet. But Kayu brushed past him without a backward glance.
When they topped the dunes again, Fife and Lyra were standing by the fence, talking quietly. It seemed they were playing some kind of game—Lyra would point to a plant, and Fife would name it.
“Threader moss.” Fife sipped from a steaming cup of tea in his hand—he’d found the kitchen, apparently. Lyra’s finger moved, pointing to another variety of moss clinging to the fence. “Queenscarpet.” Another, this one on the ground and dotted with blooms. “Mermaid hair.”
“I hate it when they name real things after pretend things.” The mask of a sunny smile and easy laughter had slipped back over Kayu at some point between the harbor and the dunes, the mask she’d been lacking since they stepped onto the shore of the Rylt. She rested her arms on the fence, leaned over to see the plant in question. “It seems inconsistent.”
“Unless mermaids are real?” Raffe mimicked Kayu’s stance, though he kept careful distance between them. “Honestly, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“If they are, I don’t know about it.” Lyra bent down and plucked one of the blooms she’d pointed to; small, pale blue petals drooped from a green stalk. “Maybe they’re just too smart to leave the sea. Things seem much more complicated on land.”
“What with the maidens to save and the plagues that need breaking,” Fife muttered beside her. She bumped him with her hip and stuck the tiny flower behind his ear.
Kayu’s eyes flickered between them, bright and full of questions. “Are you two…”
Raffe’s brow lifted, his gaze slanting her way, then back to Fife and Lyra. The two Wilderwood denizens looked at each other, an unspoken conversation.
“Well,” Fife said, putting down his tea and cocking a brow at Lyra. “I love you. But you know that.”
“And I love you,” Lyra replied. She reached up, adjusted the mermaid-hair flower so it brushed his temple. She looked back at Kayu, shrugged. “I’m not one for romance. Or sex, mostly. But we love each other. Always have.” She gave Fife a wry smile. “Always will, at this point.”
“To my great chagrin,” Fife said. But he reached over and threaded his fingers through Lyra’s, soft and easy.
That was the only mark of connection between them, solid friendship and clasped hands. No kisses, no signs of romantic love as Raffe knew it. But it seemed like Lyra and Fife ran deeper than that. A different sort of love, one perfectly tailored to them.
Raffe was feeling very out of his depth on love as a concept lately.
The four of them stood in silence. Down on the beach, a gull cawed.
Kayu straightened, dark-bright eyes turning from the moss to Raffe. An unreadable expression crossed her face, somewhere between hope and vulnerability and steel. “You coming?”
And even lost in a haze of thoughts about love and things he didn’t understand, Raffe caught her meaning, the question behind the one she asked. A need for comfort, for something warm, for a place to not think for a moment.
So when Kayu started toward the Temple, a particular kind of determination in her gait, Raffe followed and knew what that meant.