Chapter 24

twenty-four

One daythey’ll write songs about how much I despise Isolde Laurence.

Which is impressive of me, given that I haven’t even met her yet, but I detest her. She’s marrying the man I love, most importantly, but also she comes from some kind of plutocratic banking empire, and she has a degree in art history, which is the most pretentious horseshit I’ve ever heard of.

I know my West Point education came with a literal sword, but still. Art history? What the fuck.

And now, as I’m driving a rented car along some low, green cliffs to get her and escort her to the yacht, I’m looking at my destination nestled above the sea: a manor house of white stone, wide and symmetrical, with tall windows and a circular drive. The lawns around it are a deep green and as neat as a blanket rolling down to the cliffs. On my flight here, I searched Cashel House online and found that there’s been a manor house on the site since the twelfth century. So that’s Isolde Laurence, then—a pointless degree and a family seat that predates the invention of the chimney.

All of that and she has to take Mark away from me too.

I pull up in front of the house and take a deep breath as I park.

Stop.

This isn’t like me—or it isn’t how I used to be. The prom king who liked going to Mass just to see everyone, the sort-of-suburban, sort-of-farm kid who loved bottle-feeding the rejected lambs at dawn. I used to meet everyone with a smile on my face, with a hum in my throat. I didn’t resent people solely because they were wealthy or had the attention of a certain kink club owner.

And now here I am hating a girl I’ve never met—jealous of her just like I’ve been jealous of Sedge for daring to know Mark better than me. Just like I’ve been jealous of a maybe-dead-man whose picture is in a bedside drawer an ocean away from Lyonesse.

There is something alive about the hatred at least. A breathing inside the jealousy. When I first came to Lyonesse, I felt like a puppet of myself, a collection of traits without anything deeper to animate them: alertness, discipline, longing, regret. A shell of dried sinew and bone and no heart. I feel now. Even if it’s misery, obsession, jealousy, I feel them all, and no matter how awfully things have turned out, I can’t doubt that Mark had something to do with that.

That when we locked eyes in that library at Morois House, he poured life back into me, however primal and desperate.

I turn off the car and get out of it with a new determination to be?.?.?.

Well, if I can’t manage kind, then at least fair. At least polite.

Even if it’s only for Mark’s sake.

Resolved, I make my way to the front door, and I’m about to lift the heavy knocker—a dragon’s head with a long, iron tongue hanging from its mouth—when the door swings open.

In the instant before I see her, I see that there’s a man in a robe and skullcap standing behind her. I see that the interior is immaculately designed with parquet floors, jewel-toned walls, and a wide, curving staircase.

But all of that melts away, the whole world melts away.

There is only her.

There is only her and she is perfect.

She’s wearing slim red pants and a white blouse unbuttoned to just below her collarbone, exposing a long, pale neck. Her hair is blond, almost pearl-colored, and it’s pulled back into a low chignon, not a hair out of place. She’s too young to be dressed with such contained sophistication, I think, but maybe that’s the difference between rich people and regular people. Regular people dress in clothes to get them through the day. Rich people dress like someone’s coming to photograph their house for a magazine at any moment.

It’s her face that stops me, however, stops my thinking, my speech. When I’d searched her and her house online—a moment of weakness on the plane, brought on by too much champagne and also memories of the last time I’d flown with Mark—the pictures of her had been few and far between. Mostly on her father’s arm at social events involving Laurence Bank, and one recent shot of her in her graduation gown and cap. But she’d been only half visible in those images—a silhouette, a quarter-profile. I’d gleaned a narrow nose and delicate jaw and little else, enough to decide all over again that I despised her for being blond and pretty and wealthy and everything that, when added together, made Mark Trevena’s bride.

But in person, she’s—

It’s not only that she’s beautiful; I’ve seen beautiful people before. I’ve witnessed symmetrical features, statistically average distances between the eyes, nose, and mouth; I’ve beheld bright eyes and ruddy lips. Those are common and everywhere, but this, Isolde Laurence, seeing her, it’s like—

It’s like the first time I helped birth a calf and it blinked up at me with giant, black eyes while its mother licked it clean.

Like coming home from my first deployment to see the blown roses crawling up the side of the farmhouse, stupidly soft and oblivious to everything but the summer sun.

Like the Carpathian forest, snowy and frozen and still, sparkling under a pink sunrise. Breathless and beautiful when everything else was scarred with tire tracks and hand-dug graves.

That something like her exists when there’s misery and cruelty and war?.?.?.?it’s almost painful to see, a grace I’m not worthy of witnessing. The feet that nudged corpses to roll them over should not be the same feet which step closer to her; the hand that was pressed against Sims’s slick and pulpy neck should not be the same hand still lifted to rap the knocker on her door.

And these eyes which just two weeks ago watched blood spill around the still-warm bodies of Mark’s attackers?.?.?.?these eyes should not be looking at Isolde Laurence now. At her own eyes, dark green with a hint of blue, like the sea lapping at the cliffs below her house. They should not be looking at her ever-so-slightly crooked front tooth or at the freckles dusted faintly across her cheeks. Or her full lips, with their sharp edges and unusually shallow cupid’s bow, lips fixed in a permanent pout.

I can tell from the careful way she holds herself and the lift of her pointed chin that she probably thinks she’s never pouted a day in her life. The thought almost makes me smile, and then like a clap of thunder, I remember where I am and why.

I’m not here to stare at Mark’s future bride like she’s my own personal revelation. I’m here to bring her home. To him.

“Hello,” I manage to say to her and the man behind her, hoping I sound normal and not like the sight of a person I’ve never met before has my breath stuck in my chest. “Mr. Trevena sends his regrets that he can’t travel with Ms. Laurence himself to Manhattan. He’s asked me to escort her instead.”

Her eyes flicker like she’s trying to place me. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe we’ve met,” she says.

Oh shit. Right. “My apologies, I should have introduced myself right away.” I extend my hand for her to shake, which she takes, and the shock of her warm skin against mine is enough to punch the air from my lungs once again. But despite those delicate, slender fingers, her handshake is as strong as a soldier’s. There are calluses on her palms and fingers too.

Must be all that art history.

“I’m Mark’s nephew-in-law and bodyguard,” I say. “Tristan Thomas, at your service.”

Her eyes dip down, her lashes resting on her cheek, long as a doll’s, gold as the ring on her finger. How did Mark never mention her, never speak of her? If she were my fiancée, I’d talk about nothing else, think of nothing else.

I almost can’t blame him for breaking my heart now, seeing her.

“It’s lovely to meet you, Tristan,” she says, and I absorb how enchanting her voice is. Not quite accented to my ears but almost, a faint crispness to her consonants, a small lift to her vowels. I saw that she went to school in Manhattan despite her father being English and her mother Irish, and so she doesn’t sound English or Irish or American.

She just sounds rich.

“This is my uncle, His Eminence Mortimer Cashel,” she adds, because of course there is someone else here with us, watching me with blue-green eyes that don’t entirely match each other. I have the simmering worry that he can see the effect Isolde’s having on me.

“Hello, Cardinal Cashel,” I say with a nod, and then step back and gesture toward the car. “We should go soon, Ms. Laurence. I think our captain is hoping to get out of the harbor before dark.”

“Yes,” she says. Her throat moves over the open collar of her shirt. A swallow. I wonder if she’s nervous about sailing.

Her uncle breaks into a smile, revealing a gap between his two front teeth. It’s so cheerful and kind that I feel reassured and it’s not even meant for me. He pulls Isolde into a fond hug. “I’ll see you soon, my child. Have a safe voyage.”

I spy two suitcases just inside the hall, and I make myself useful by slipping past the familial goodbye and grabbing the luggage, walking them out to the car with the gravel crunching under my feet. I hear Isolde and her uncle murmuring together, and when I look back, he’s making the sign of the cross in front of her. Blessing her for her journey, I think. I am Catholic in the same way that I’m good at singing—something I was born with and am happy enough to exercise if the situation calls for it—but Isolde seems to be really, really Catholic.

I think about her marrying Mark, about Lyonesse and the rumors of the priest he killed, and then give up trying to make it all make sense. The only route to sanity with Mark Trevena sometimes.

Isolde comes over to the car, her shoulders straight enough to measure the horizon against, and I wonder if she’s uneasy around me. Something that would have sounded ludicrous to Before Tristan but that I’ve noticed happens sometimes with After Tristan. I forget to smile; I forget to relax my body.

Even if I feel safe, I’ve forgotten how to make other people feel safe too. A little ironic, given my job.

I make an effort to be Before Tristan now, smiling at her as I open her door and then smiling at her uncle, who returns the smile and gives us a small wave.

“I like your ring,” she says, before I shut her door.

I look down at the black and silver ring on my index finger. “Thank you,” I say. “It was a gift.”

I don’t say that it was a gift from her future husband, pressed into my palm seconds before I left Lyonesse. Mark’s eyes flashing as his strong hands brushed over mine.

Wear it if you want, he’d said. Just know that I want you to.

“What does it say?” asks Isolde now, making out the faint etching of words along the band.

“Quarto optio.”

“Fourth option?” Isolde translates from the Latin, looking puzzled. “Why?”

“I have no idea,” I say honestly. Just like I have no idea why I’m wearing it. Except that I’ve always liked when he’s given me pain, and so seeing this ring on my finger—the finger for clubs and guilds and alma maters and not the finger for marriage—bruises me deeper than any binder clip or ruler ever could.

I shut her door, and I get behind the wheel, pressing the button to start the car. And then we’re rolling down the gravel drive to the road and to the harbor.

And then to the sea.