Page 20 of As Many Souls as Stars
She took a delicate step over a puddle glazed with grease. ‘Not particularly.’
‘Your father,’ Peter said, striding thoughtlessly through the puddle. ‘Surely you miss him?’
Cybil heard Christopher’s voice once more, muffled by his office door:I will do what must be done.
‘Not overmuch,’ she said.
‘You are angry with him,’ Peter observed, and his voice was… deeper and yet also softer; it had a strange resonance that felt almost comforting.
Cybil leaned a little closer to him, gripping his arm more tightly. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Usually, Cybil would have declined to reply at all, let alone reply honestly; but there was something curiously compelling about Peter in that moment, the way his fingers had come to rest lightly on her own, the half-lidded, inviting look he was giving her from the corners of his eyes. Cybil had never felt desire for any man—this was, perchance, the first time she had even come close to doing so. That realisation disarmed her utterly.
Iwantto talk to him, she thought.To unburden myself, if only this once.
She said, words hushed as if speaking a secret: ‘He hated me. He hated me because I am—wrong.’
Peter stopped and turned to look at her. They were by the gate now; the light was so dimmed from the clouds that torches had been lit, and the flickering light made Peter look different: more angular, more ethereal. ‘Wrong?’
‘I…’ Her throat closed up, and she swallowed, suddenly hesitant. A raindrop fell on her cheek. She swiped it away. ‘Sometimes, I look at the shadows,’ she said, ‘and it is as if they are looking back at me.’
Peter cocked his head.
‘What if they are?’ he asked.
Cybil was trembling. She opened her mouth to respond—to deflect, as she always had; to deny, as she always had—but something stopped her from speaking.
In the brief moment of silence her hesitancy created, the rain whispered its disapproval against the thatched roofs of Ipswich. Cybil became distinctly aware of the emptiness of the woods outside the gate, and the vastness of the country surrounding them, and thesolitude of the Hall’s grand rooms awaiting her: the untrodden carpets, the unoccupied chairs. That place was a dollhouse. She had spent her life inside playing make-believe, hoping that someone would reach their hand within and pull her out.
Cybil turned and crouched at the edge of the gate, where the grass had grown long. She opened the door of the hedgehog’s cage, and it was gone in a streak of brown and black. Cybil never could have kept such a creature as a pet, regardless of a passing fancy: her curse would have led it, no doubt, to some cruel end. Still, she allowed herself a moment of sorrow for her loss before she turned back to Peter.
‘I have made you sad,’ he said, frowning slightly.
‘I am not sad,’ she replied. ‘Or—I am. But I think I am angry, also.’
‘Why?’
‘I grow angry when I feel sorrow,’ she said. ‘I grow angry with myself, because I feel as if I do not deserve sadness. Is that lunacy, do you think?’
He approached her until they were face-to-face, her skirts brushing his boots. He raised a trembling hand and pressed it against her cheek. His thumb caught the corner of her mouth; it was cold and damp from the rain. Cybil was so startled by this that she did not react, but stared at him blankly.
‘You deserve all of it,’ he said. ‘Sorrow and fury. The beginning and end of all things.’
His palm against her face was like ice, and his eyes were dark and wide. Cybil opened her mouth to reply—then she paused. His eyes had been blue before, had they not? And had his accent not been broader, his smile more innocent?
There were a dozen explanations that would have made more sense, a thousand ways that Cybil could have rationalised it to herself; but once she recognised the resemblance, it felt impossible to ignore. It was as if his was a face that had fractured, and now all she could see was the crack.
‘Richter?’ she said.
Peter froze. His hand dropped away. The affected openness of his expression loosened, his features becoming crueller and colder.
‘Itisyou,’ Cybil said, horrified, and in response, Peter’s jaw unhinged. Shadows began to pour out of his mouth and pool on the ground; the darkness bled from his eyes, blue irises swivelling wildly in their sockets. Cybil was too scared even to scream; she scrambled backwards, stumbling over an uneven paving, and scrabbled to standing just as Peter’s mouth shut again.
His eyes rolled back into his head, and he fell to the ground, unconscious. Meanwhile, the darkness at Cybil’s feet began to pool and swirl, coalescing into something tangible. She could hear a sound muddied by rain, but there all the same—the shouting of people from the way they had just come, all of Ipswich witness to the shadows that were reaching for her.
Cybil turned and fled.
