Mistwalker

SEVENTEEN Grey

I’m ready. Everything is ready. I climb to the lantern gallery just as the beacon switches on for the night. The gears grind, the light hums. It charges the air, not quite like lightning, but full of portent all the same.

The tune from the music box keeps winding in my head. It seems a sign. I’m ready for Willa; she’s ready for me. I’m certain, because she’s thinking of me again. Though I look to the glow of souls all along the shore, all of them out of my reach, there’s only one that looks back.

My anger is shed. My frustration. I’m not Susannah and Willa is not me. I have nothing to tempt her, nothing to recommend myself. But I master the sea. I stand above it, timeless, immortal. I never leave it, and it never leaves me.

This curse will not be a curse for her. It’s her dream. She won’t suffer the solitude of the waves. She’ll embrace it. I have all of this for her. The ocean, eternal. It will always be hers; she’s longed for this magic. Today and a thousand days from today, she will be the Grey Lady, and she will savor it.

There’s no one to hear me, so I laugh. I lean into the wind and let the ribbon slip from my hair. My heart opens and beats; I’m exposed to moonlight and the rush of surf all around me. Soon I’ll walk on that side of the water again. I’ll see faces, hear voices, cut myself shaving. I haven’t bled for a hundred years, and I never would have imagined this: I’m looking forward to it.

I am.

To pain and pleasure, to soup sometimes too hot. To nights sometimes too cold. To breathing. To a body that’s fully real, subject to time and injury and whim. This strange almost-life that I have doesn’t suit me at all. But Willa’s made for it. She’ll flourish in it. Just her and the water and all the time in the world.

That’s all she wants. It’s evident now. Her room is untouched, just as she left it. Nets for a canopy, boats for decoration. Shutters thrown open to the sea, and the slightest bit of magic hanging in the window, incongruous with the rest. There she is, solved and neat. Her destiny in a little turret chamber, her truest heart revealed.

“Come, Willa,” I say.

The sound is lost in the cry of sea birds and the twist of the wind. I have no faith that she hears me, but I believe, truly believe, she feels that call. She’ll come back to this island, and back to me—not with starry eyes but with purpose. I have everything she wants, and I’ll give it to her. She need only ask.