The Light Between Worlds

We sit for a long time without talking and watch the rain until our tea goes cold, and I am enormously, unspeakably glad to have found someone I can be silent with.

This is, after all, my own peculiar magic--whatever circumstances I find myself in, I always land on my feet.

Wherever I am, wherever my feet are planted, that is where I will make my life. I won't withdraw or put up walls. Every day is a treasure, every chance meeting a gift, and I will treat them as such until at last, my Woodlands heart finds its way home.

I'm still as stone, arms wrapped around myself to hold my breaking heart in. These stories always end the same way.

I am falling into that dark place, where I don’t belong to one world, or two, but none.

Tom shifts in place. I'm drawn to this thoughtful, quiet boy, and to the calm at his very center. I'm still studying his profile when he turns to me, his freckled face serious. "I don't think anything could stop me from liking you, Evelyn. And we're all a bit frayed around the edges, aren't we? It doesn't surprise me and it doesn't frighten me, finding out you're only human like the rest of us." He reaches out and takes my stinging hand in his own, twining his fingers through mine. I will never move again. I will live and die here, content for once in this world to which I don't belong.

Terrible things happen in all worlds, little one! But every tree and every leaf in the Great Wood would have to burn before we allowed such things to break us.

I am made weak by time and fate, a grey spirit of yearning in desire. I am not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven. That which I am, I am. I don't know who I am anymore.

Terrible things happen in all worlds, little one. But every tree and every leaf in the Great Wood would have to burn before we allowed such things to break us.

I'm only a Guardian, Cervus says. I am here when a Woodlander's journey begins and when it ends, but I have no control over what lies between. Philippa stills. Her shoulders set. If that's true, what did you mean when you promised we'd find our way home? What all Woodlanders mean when we speak of homegoing. That if not in life, then at last in death, your heart will find its true resting place.

Gather your courage, little one. Keep it close in the days ahead.

I’ve seen this world. There’s nothing in it I want anymore. Everything I’ve ever had, I left behind.

But I don’t know how to live in this grey country-how to find the light and shadow when they all run together so.

I’m at the edge of the map again. I seem to live there, only making brief forays into familiar country

I sit by the rushing water, a patchwork girl, pieced together from bits of pain, all of them a different shape, a different colour, a different sort of unhappiness.

After half a year, I’m already beginning to forget that world-the food, the clothes, the manners. And I want to forget. I throw myself willingly into learning Woodlands customs, in hopes they’ll erase the memories of a home that was never home, where I was shuffled between strange houses and school like a piece of unwanted baggage.

The emptiness of the bunker haunts me still. Five and a half years since we last cowered in its dark interior, listening for the low growl of approaching planes or the muffled reverberation of nearby bomb strikes. Five and a half years since something inexplicable happened in the midst of all that darkness and waiting and fear. The truth haunts my brother and sister, too, I know. Poor darling Jamie, who works so hard and never quite feels he's doing enough. Poor lovely Phillipa, off in America, running from our past. As for me, I refuse to be pitied. I refuse to be anyone but who I've always been: Evelyn Hapwell, teller of truths and walker of worlds, friend of the Woodlands and enemy of tyrants, beloved of Cervus, the Guardian of the Great Wood. The words Cervus once spoke to me are emblazoned on my bones, writ large across every inch of my skin. A Woodlands heart always finds its way home. Your words, Cervus, not mine. No matter how many years pass, I plan to hold you to them.

We respect each other's need for distance, Georgie and I, and so I don't go after her--she always wants time after something like this, to scribble down new lines of her own verse. No one's ever allowed to read it--not me, not even Max. I suppose it's Georgie's way of wandering in the woods.

Like Philippa, Max bulids her kingdom wherever she is, no matter how difficult it may be.