She grinned and moved off to find some refreshments.
The moon shimmered across the water, its cool rays blending with the warm firelight in a discordant blaze of colours: fiery reds, oranges and yellows, tinted by the blue-grey of the night sky. Alice sat on the riverbank’s edge, her shoes skimming the rippling surface. It was calm here. Peaceful. If she concentrated, she could fade out the distant folk music and hear instead the gentle shushing of the river and rustling of the bushes as water voles and mice scurried through the undergrowth. Moths flitted past and crickets chirped their rhythmic mating call, and she breathed it all in, revelling in the small taste of nature parcelled up inside a busy city centre.
She took another long sip of her drink, rolling the flavours around her mouth. Barley and juniper with an illogical hint of banana. She’d never been especially fond of beer, but somehow the flat, cloudy sahti was growing on her. Or maybe it was the mellow sensation in her limbs and the pleasant warmth in her stomach that she enjoyed. She stared into the depths of the river Crane, thinking no particular thoughts. Somewhere further down the bank, a handful of couples hid in the shadows, hands entwined, savouring the magic of midsummer; she was perfectly alone, and she was . . . okay. More than that. She was very okay. Midnight had long gone, and she’d seen no face reflected in the water – no great love, just herself, smiling and tranquil. And maybe that was as it should be. Why shouldn’t she love herself first? Why shouldn’t that be the magic of midsummer?
She sighed and stared into the water.
‘I love myself,’ she murmured. She grinned lopsidedly, and laughed at herself. ‘And why not?’ she added, emboldened by the tingling in her head and the taste of juniper on her tongue.
She lurched to her feet, her shoes slipping on a weaker chunk of soil and scattering mud into the river. She loomed over her smiling reflection, the tumbler of beer raised as though in toast.
‘I love myself!’ she declared.
‘And they say the story of Narcissus is a myth,’ drawled a low voice over her shoulder.
She whirled around in shock, sloshing sahti over the grass. Her heart gave one great thud – and everything stopped. The music, flowing water, the songs of crickets and warblers, the flittering moths . . . Everything evaporated. Everything but the tall figure standing on the riverbank, white shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, his dark hair overlong and choppy, falling almost to his jaw, and green eyes watching her calmly. And that glorious nose, like something carved from rock or minted on Roman coins.
‘Crowley?’ she breathed.
He stepped closer, the familiar scents of burned pinewood and cloves engulfing her, causing a small shiver to run down her spine. She stared up at him in wonder. He was here. Really here.
And then – suddenly – he wasn’t.
The weak soil gave way beneath him and he landed with a mighty splash in the river Crane.
Eyes wide, Alice watched in stunned silence as Crowley struggled to his feet. His sopping white shirt stuck to his skin, almost transparent, and the sleeves had begun to unravel with the weight of the water. His black trousers were slick as oil, and somewhere in the murk – wedged in silt on the riverbed – were his scuffed boots, utterly waterlogged. Every part of him was drenched, even his hair, hit by the spray that had fanned up on his crash landing.
‘Oh,’ she said at last.
Crowley shot a stern glance at the water, as though to chastise it for its insolence. It was this that tipped Alice over the edge. A helpless splutter burst from her mouth and her shoulders began to quake. She folded at the waist, creased with laughter.
‘Oh Crowley . . .’ she managed. ‘I can’t even . . .’ She trailed off, unable to speak, her stomach cramping.
He waded to the bank, planted a boot heel on the soil and hauled himself from the river. He stood before her, soaked to the bone, his clothes hanging from his lithe frame while droplets slid down his face, sticking wet tendrils of hair to his cheekbones. The water trickled along his collarbone and under his shirt, and as she followed its path with her eyes, her laughter died as quickly as it had started. Visions of Fitzwilliam Darcy emerging from the lake at Pemberley in his white underclothes superimposed themselves on the riverbank and she swallowed thickly. Bloody BBC. Bloody Jane Austen. Crowley raised an eyebrow and she bit the inside of her lip, using the sharp sting to jolt her to her senses. Absence might have made the heart grow fonder, but it didn’t heal it – not quite – and standing with him now, the lies he’d once told her, the hurt he’d caused, all came rushing back.
She took a deep breath in a bid to release the tension in her chest.
‘Mr Darcy did it better,’ she said.
He huffed out an irritable breath and strode past her with all the grace and dignity he could muster, his boots squelching in the grass.
‘You’ll catch pneumonia!’ she called after him.
He flourished a lazy hand in the air . . . and exploded in a blast of flame. Alice gasped involuntarily and staggered backwards. Engulfed in a fireball, the heat blistering, Crowley merely paused and ran a hand through his hair. It lasted only seconds. Alice blinked in shock as the fire spent itself, the last flames dwindling on the collar of his shirt before winking out.
‘What . . .’ she started.
‘Evaporation,’ he said in an amused tone.
She watched him, her eyes tracing every inch of his face. The atmosphere thickened, the levity in his tone burning away under her inspection. Crowley. Here. All this time fighting the urge to see him, to forgive him. How had Sasha and the others managed to when she couldn’t?
She took a deep breath.
His chest stilled, like a man awaiting the executioner’s axe.
‘I need another drink,’ she murmured, tramping past him and vanishing into the shadowy grove.
The bonfire had been fed since Bea had hurdled over it, trebling in size and casting a warm glow across the musicians and dancers. The music stopped abruptly, and as Alice padded across the grass, her footsteps seemed thunderously loud in the silence. Head still buzzing with sahti, she paid for another and stared into the fire, clutching the glass like a lifeline.
Crowley weaved through the crowd until his eyes found her. Standing side by side, they said nothing. Inches lay between them that might as well have been kilometres, and neither seemed to have any words that could bridge the gap. They watched the musicians, who were stepping away from their instruments and gathering closer together. Crowley’s elbow brushed Alice’s. She tensed and took a swig of sahti before placing it in the grass; she wanted no more of it clouding her decisions.
The musicians had formed a quartet. One of the women nodded at the others, and they began to sing – a cappella, voices accompanied only by each other. It was a quick, jaunty folk tune. The singers’ voices jumped in and out of the song, creating a percussive rhythm. It was both strange and wonderful – or wonderfully strange, perhaps. And soon, her smile broadened as the tempo picked up and the melody grew more complicated.
Crowley turned to her and raised a sardonic eyebrow. Then he bowed and held out his hand, long fingers urging her to take it.
‘You can’t be serious,’ she said.
He gave a wry smirk and twitched his fingers. ‘Deadly.’
She stared at his hand for a moment, and shook her head. ‘I can’t dance.’
He rolled his eyes, then took her hand and spun her into his arms with a gasp.
‘Crowley!’
The crowd had begun to join in with the beat, couples in the waltz position dancing in neat steps across the clearing. The demanding pace increased and a few broke apart and began to clap the beat from the edges of the glade instead.
He spun her away from the bonfire and she laughed at the landscape smearing past her vision. She was very aware of his hand on the small of her back, of the feather-light touch as he guided her around the clearing, his movements sharp and practised.
‘How did you know I’d be by the river?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘Sasha told me you’d be here. I’ve been wandering for an hour, searching for you.’
His chest vibrated with his words, and she felt a small thrill of anticipation at their closeness. But she sensed the danger: it would be so easy to get swept up in the music, the scents, the heady magic of midsummer.
‘Crowley . . . I can’t forget,’ she said after a moment.
‘I know,’ he murmured. ‘But if you’ll let me, maybe I can give you new things to remember.’
They changed direction, and she lost her balance. He pulled her closer. ‘The song is called the Ievan Polkka,’ he mouthed into her ear. ‘Eino Kettunen composed it in the 1930s.’
Faster and faster, the rhythm increased. Around her, couples danced with light half-steps, a complicated pattern of leg crosses and turns, and Alice had no hope of keeping up. Every misstep brought her feet down on Crowley’s toes, but he only caught her with a laugh and spun her away. They danced through the shadows, following none of the synchronized shapes made by the other dancers. Spinning quarter- and half-turns, whirling her with a gentle pressure on her waist, gliding left and right and smoothly forward and back again. Step after step, after step . . . and then the song ended. And he was staring down at her, not smiling, his mouth no more than a line, but his eyes glittering with humour and something that made her stomach twist and her mouth dry.
‘Your crown has slipped,’ he said in a low voice, and she tilted her head back for him to adjust it. His fingers reached up, brushing her hair gently aside, and settled the garland in place. Then he allowed his gaze to drift lower until their eyes met. The longing in his eyes scorched her. They were so close she could almost feel the heat rising from his body.
‘Alice,’ he whispered. He lowered his head, and she raised hers, one hand clutching the front of his shirt. Inches away, centimetres, millimetres . . . His warm breath ghosted over her lips as she arched upwards to close the gap . . .
But then the ground rumbled beneath their feet and the screaming began.
Alice’s hair whipped back as they sprinted over the thick grass. Crowley’s grip on her hand was firm as he pulled her through the woods, stumbling over roots and fallen boughs and slipping on glass bottles abandoned in the grass. She lost her footing completely and crashed onto her knees.
Stampeding feet ploughed past her, the swollen crowds of people rushing to escape the island, to find safety. Without pausing, Crowley hauled her upright and accelerated, his hand squeezing hers for reassurance as thunder shook the clearing. The hard-packed soil, the ditches, the scrub and riverbank – all began to tremble.
‘An earthquake?’ she shouted.
The grass vibrated and tingling pulses shot up her legs. Her knees throbbed with the sensation and her jaw buzzed. Together, they surged across the woodland as the convulsions tossed stones and broken branches into the air. Then a juddering tremor and a crack resonated, like the mantle of the earth had ruptured, and a thin crevice opened up in the grass metres ahead.
Alice skidded to a halt, her free hand grabbing the back of Crowley’s shirt to stop him plunging into the sudden rift. Others were not so lucky; a blond-haired man tumbled past them, his eyes raw with panic, his hands grasping fruitlessly for a ledge as he plummeted into the dark sinkhole.
Another hurtled past, plunging towards the chasm – the wildflower crown seller. The woman flicked out a hand as she fell, her lips working quickly as she called on her legacy to save her. Tufts of ragweed buried in the crust shifted at her urging. The roots shot out of the soil to wrap around her waist and stop her fall. But the magic was too powerful and Alice watched in horror as she lost control of it. The roots tightened and pulled the crown seller back into the soil, her mouth filling with thick mud as she suffocated.
‘Crowley!’ Alice gasped, shoving him away from the edge to free up her hands. ‘We have to help—’
‘They’ve gone!’ Crowley shouted.
An echoing boom knocked them off their feet. Tossed backwards, Alice smashed into a fallen food table and landed face down, her nose smarting and her chest winded. Her fingers sank into the grass as she pushed herself up to her feet. Alice lurched towards Crowley, panting, and thrust a hand at him. He scrambled to his feet. Crane Park Island was fracturing in half. Branching fissures severed the ground all around them, slicing more chasms into the grass.
‘The shot tower!’ he shouted.
A scream tore through the clearing, lifting the hairs on Alice’s arms. She darted a horrified look at Crowley but he shook his head, his expression grim.
‘The shot tower,’ he repeated urgently. ‘Let me take you to safety.’
She stared at him, her bruised face streaked with mud.
And took a step back.
‘Kuu?’ she shouted, turning on her heel and stumbling away. ‘Find me the ones with unbroken cords. Find me the ones still alive.’
Her nightjar, trilling in agitation, led her back through the grass. All around her, a terrible symphony of panic and fear and terror echoed between the creaking trees: full-throated sobs and shrieks, a mumbled chorus of prayers and moans in the undergrowth.
The sinkhole. There might still be some I can help. But then the woods began to moan and she froze. There came a deep, yawning rumble, a whining rasp, and then a shuddering, splintering explosion of noise. The trees rocked. The grass surged higher as something slid beneath it, bunching the soil. Something thick and curved – the body of a python turned to wood. A tree root, Alice realized as it looped through the rifts in the ground. She stared at the devastation, the churned-up soil, the obliterated grass and tilted trees, the ruptures and cracks.
Then it began to slow. A curtain of stunned silence fell across the island, a collective intake of breath as the vibrations diminished, the chasms stopped expanding and the trees stilled. It was over. Something brushed her arm. Crowley.
She stared at the devastation, her throat tight and her pulse racing.
‘Whitmore’s been trying to keep it secret,’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘But the Summer Tree is growing.’
They waited. An hour? Two? They waited until Alice was sure that Bea was safe – with the chancellor – and Tom, who had left with a woman hours earlier. They waited until they could no longer bear the quiet sobs and soft, pleading moans. Caked in dirt, they had moved brushwood aside with a snap of fire, and fallen trees with the sweep of a hand. They had searched for the lost until their voices were hoarse and their feet were numb.
When the Runners had arrived in their navy tunics, shining gold buttons and polished shoes, then they had left. Reuben Risdon had been there – commanding his men to help those who were conscious before attending to the silent ones. His shocked eyes had found hers across the clearing, and she had been too stunned by the night’s sour end to take her measure of him. A tangle of silver hair and sharp eyebrows, his face was pale as he examined the scene. His fingers had crept to his pocket to retrieve a tin of snuff tobacco, and he had clutched it like a security blanket, barking orders left and right.
‘Coram House,’ she murmured to Crowley, her bones aching and her mind numbed. She didn’t want to be alone. She needed to be with her friends. ‘I want to go home.’
Crowley’s eyes glittered, and he reached for her hand.
The showerhead blasted her with needles of hot liquid, sloughing the mud off her damp skin. She tilted her face into the spray, eyes closed, allowing bubbles to gather at the corners of her mouth. Wash it all away, she urged. Wash the stains on her soul clean and scrub her mind of the night’s events. She turned up the heat, the punishing sensation of boiling liquid easing the tension in her muscles. Her skin was pink, her palms and soles wrinkled, when the water finally ran clear. She turned the dial and the water cut off, a few drips splattering the back of her neck. Crowley had given her one of his old shirts to wear. It smelled of him. A pang of discomfort tightened her stomach as she slipped it on.
She didn’t want to be with him. But Go
d, she didn’t want to be without him either. Maybe Sasha was right. Maybe it was time to let go of her pain and try to move on. In all the chaos and the terror she’d witnessed tonight, Crowley’s hand was the one thing that had kept her steady.
‘It was just . . . awful,’ said Alice, her tone expressionless.
She sat on a kitchen chair, her knees drawn up to her chest and Crowley’s shirt pulled down over them. The fire flickered in the grate but she was cold with exhaustion.
‘Risdon was still commanding the clean-up operation when we left,’ said Jude. He looked drawn. His usually tanned face was wan, his stubble grown out too long, and his blue eyes, usually brightly inquisitive, were now dulled and bleak. He tapped the arm of his wheelchair as though the repetitive action might bring back some order to the world.
Jude and Sasha had burst through the door of Coram House an hour after Alice and Crowley had arrived, and a brief, frantic comparison of the night’s experiences had left them lapsing into longer and longer silences as the hour wore on. August hadn’t returned at all, and although they knew he hadn’t been at Crane Park Island, no one knew which of the other festivals he’d attended. Crane Park Island was the only one with fatalities and serious injuries, so he was safe, at least.
‘I need to go to bed,’ said Sasha, standing abruptly. ‘I can’t keep . . .’ She shook her head, shot one last look at Jude and trudged from the kitchen.
‘We should all probably . . .’ Alice started.
Jude nodded, but no one moved. They stared into space for several moments longer, each lost in their own thoughts. The soft moans, the whimpers . . . Shaking herself, mentally and physically, Alice finally slipped off the chair and stood, wrapping her long sleeves around her chest. Crowley’s eyes were on her back as she left, concern creasing his brow. She would never sleep tonight.
Red hair rippled in the wind. Jen. Alice spun towards her – but she wasn’t there. Distant laughter echoed across the moors. Alice turned again. Gone. Red hair always at the corner of her eye, always disappearing when she reached for her. Alice looked down. Her bare feet were nestled in frosted grass. Crystallized tendrils between her toes. The floor began to rumble. The grass shook violently and she stumbled.
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