Everything after that had been a blur. I remembered marching straight out. Pretty sure I passed Robin, think I said something to him, didn’t remember what. Spirits, I hoped it wasn’t too bad. Of everyone I’d ever known, he was the only one to have never done anything to deserve a single bad word from me. I’d found my dorm, found my bed, yanked the curtain closed around the alcove so hard that a couple of its loops snapped, and when Holly came in and yammered to Grove about plans for Frostfest, she very tactfully didn’t try to include me in the discussion. Good move on her part. I was ready to kick something.

  I slept early. An avoidance of necessary studying will do that to a guy. And though I swore I’d do it by candlelight in the serenity of the early morning before anyone else was awake to spoil it, I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t care that I had classes today. The Glade called to me, and I went to it like a hungry rat to a bakery.

  As cool daylight washed over the clearing, I sat and chewed on berries and contemplated. And this was definitely a contemplation, not a rumination: I worked things over, they didn’t work me over. A cloudless midday rolled through and I double checked the mushrooms I’d sourced before spearing them on twigs and setting them to roast over a little campfire, lit not by an age of toiling and raw-scrubbed hands, but by a spark of the arcane. As I waited for them to cook, I wondered again if anyone could ever use that same power to heal, what healing even meant, and how it seemed to be different for everyone.

  And what Robin had said about fear. Because the remedy for fear couldn’t be bravery, but healing. Bravery meant coping with the fear, it meant withstanding, it meant resisting our deepest emotions. If that’s all you ever did, nothing gets easier or more comfortable, you just get used to it being so hard.

  So why did Omen balk at the idea of taking as long as he needed to heal up instead of frolicking back to the same fields that nearly killed him once already? Why was he so desperate to put the brave face on? Or Kaspar with his inferiority over being second in anything, or Robin with whatever shocked him on the morning we woke up together. Always so insistent on plastering the brave mask back onto their face after any temporary lapse. And me myself with, well, everything. If taking off the mask had become so uncomfortable, had healing itself become a fear?

  The brave mask had to drop for any healing to happen, just the same as unwinding a bandage to apply the medicine. It seemed to leave you in a state so vulnerable, it felt shocking. But it was only in that vulnerability, raw and open and exposed to the fear we could barely even look at without the protection of the brave mask, that we could actually address what we feared. And when the thought came together like that, it made sense why it was so hard to do. Why I only ever felt able to do it way, way out here.

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  Such a pleasant place as it was, with the idyllic island in the babbling spring centered around the fresh little yew sapling, barely taller than me but already sprouting some aspirational buds for the year to come. I’d been chilly on the walk up, still refusing to touch anything Kaspar bought me, but even in my old cloak the Glade was placidly cool. A comfortable afternoon as the brightness slowly chased a moon low over the surrounding treetops, a few birds twittering as they nested among them, clumps of snow dropping as they came in to land. My fingers laced around some snowdrops in the undergrowth, and maybe the world wasn’t as bad as it sometimes seemed.

  There was always hope, if you knew how to find it.

  *

  And as the world dimmed, I wrapped up snug and headed down. Down the odd little aspen-lined steps from the sanctuary. The bladed edges of the world at the bottom of the hill path weren’t quite so sharp anymore. I no longer felt like a hunted beast. The morning’s snowfall had glacified through the day so I skated most of the way down, a whistling breeze at my back. Landed on my ass twice and my tail once. Glad no one was around to see. And I was so focused on not bumping ice again, I almost slid right past it. The light in the cottage window.

  I snagged a fencepost, creaking and crackling in the cold, steadying myself on the slope. Over the snow-blanketed garden of perfect foxgloves flickered a light in the window. Small, narrow, but very definite. It wasn’t abandoned. I had to shake the gate twice to break the ice holding it shut, trudged up the pathway, the snow pristinely smooth and twinkling. The crunch echoed, the door getting nearer. I placed a hand on it, a claw tapping the woodwork. Drew in a deep breath and the cold soaked my organs. Thought of Omen and the life we could one day have here. Closed my eyes. And knocked.

  And waited.

  Waited more.

  Waited longer.

  Knocked again. Nothing.

  Still nothing.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  “Excuse me? I was – admiring your flowers.”

  Not a whisper.

  I waited.

  I tried to keep waiting.

  I really did.

  But then.

  My hand on the door.

  My fingers around the handle.

  The lock clicking open.

  With a breath.

  I stepped inside.