Page 88 of The Light Between Worlds

Tears well in my eyes.

“You’re not coming back, are you?” I ask Ev. She looks past me, beyond the wildflower meadow to the uncharted expanse of the Great Wood beyond.

“You know I can’t. And I know you can’t stay, so I won’t even ask.”

There’s a part of me longing to deny her, to swear we can be together, and that I won’t leave her here alone. But I’m no Woodlander. Unlike Evelyn, the heart that beats in my chest is not a Woodlands heart.

“What will you do, all on your own?” I ask, because I can’t leave her without knowing down to my very core that she’ll be alright.

“All on my own?” Evelyn laughs. “I have more friends here than I ever did in our world. I will work in the gardens at Palace Beautiful with Alfreya, plant saplings in the heart of the wood with Vaya, and stand watch through the longest night with Cervus. Perhaps I’ll even convince Hector to teach me how to sail. There are a thousand things to do, and if I ever come to the end of them, I’ll just sit under the trees andbe.”

I look down at the ground because I can’t meet her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Evelyn. I never should have made you leave.”

My sister tilts my chin up so I’m forced to look at her. “It’s alright. I’m more than you think, and there’s no need to worryanymore. I’ve made my own path and I can stand on my own.”

“You’re right.” My sister stands before me now, rooted in the soil of another world, and she has always been more than I thought. She’s always been Evelyn of the Woodlands, whose heart called its way home.

But I am plain Philippa Hapwell, and my heart belongs to no particular country. It belongs instead to all the people I’ve loved. A good part of it lies here and if I leave it behind, I will never be whole again. I’d be even less, though, if I stayed. More of me rests in the world to which I was born, and it’s time for me, too, to find my way home.

“Are you ready, little one?” Cervus asks. “Shall I send you back again?”

I pull Evelyn close one last time and kiss her bright hair. “Promise me you’ll be happy?”

“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun, but the Great Wood will be a little lonelier without you. You’ll tell Jamie, won’t you? That I’m home? And Philippa—” Evelyn flushes. “There was a boy. Tom Harper. If you could find something—anything—to say, to make things easier for him, and for Mum and Dad and Georgie, too?”

“Yes,” I promise. “I will. I’ll find the words, I swear.”

A fitful gust of rain whips at us, bringing with it the smell of the forest. I cannot stay, and this is our final goodbye.

Evelyn nods, and grows solemn as Cervus steps forward. The great stag throws back his head and roars, a sound that shakes the ground beneath my feet and raises a gale that rattles all the branchesin the Great Wood. The noise redoubles until it seems the very sky will split.

But Evelyn speaks, too, her words barely audible beneath Cervus’s call as she says her last farewell.

“I thought of you and how you love this beauty,

And walking up the long beach all alone

I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder

As you and I once heard their monotone.

Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me

The cold and sparkling silver of the sea—

We two will pass through death and ages lengthen

Before you hear that sound again with me.”

When the echo of their joined voices dies away I stand at the edge of a birch ring, facing an empty clearing with rain soaking me to the skin. There’s no magic in these trees beyond the witchery of spring, of bud and leaf and new things growing, and I love their very ordinariness.

I walk back through the forest, which is alive and vital with insects and night birds and shrilling frogs. Still in the cover of the trees, I stop for a moment at the meadow’s edge and look out at St. Agatha’s, at the stone building that radiates light, and the sound of young voices singing. Their words are incongruous and lovely, full of a hope I hadn’t expected to find when the day began.

“All shall be well,

And all shall be well,

And all manner of thing shall be well.

From heaven and earth the refrain doth swell,

All manner of thing shall be well.”

When the song dies down, I step out of the woods and into the world.