Varen stopped at the hand’s spade-shaped apex, and when its point swung past Isobel, their gazes again met.
His black stare both beckoned and dared, silently asking a single question: Are you coming?
Then the clock hand wheeled away, breaking their connection. Varen disembarked when the spade’s point reached the twelve. Continuing forward, he entered the foggy drifts of clouds that coasted by.
Isobel urged herself after him, and now her steps came more steadily. Because she thought she finally knew what it was he was doing. He was provoking her, challenging her to join him on another ledge—another cliff.
We’ll get our revenge, Pinfeathers had warned her. Don’t you forget that.
The Noc hadn’t been talking about Varen’s revenge on her, Isobel realized. He’d meant Varen’s escalating need to exact vengeance on himself.
And what better way to do that than to deny himself any chance of escape from the prison of his own mind?
Isobel arrived at the outer rim of the clock and waited. When the minute hand swung her way, she leaped aboard, throwing her arms out to her sides for balance. But she wavered anyway, managing the ride with far less grace than Varen.
Through the pane of the clock face beneath her, massive gears twitched and spun. The low clunking of the cogs vibrated through her entire body, reminding her how much of a dream this wasn’t.
She jumped when the numeral twelve entered her view and, stumbling, her momentum carried her forward into the clouds and onto the spire.
When she looked ahead, she saw that, like another grim fixture of the palace’s forbidding architecture, Varen now stood at the pinnacle of the horizontal steeple. Where one more step would have sent him plunging.
The Ultima Thule, Isobel thought grimly.
“I know what you’re doing,” she yelled out to him over the howling winds.
He glanced back at her. Though he said nothing, he lifted an arm, opening his palm toward her.
“You’re trying to prove to me—to yourself—that it can’t be done,” Isobel went on, stepping forward. “That you can’t be saved. That you don’t deserve to be.”
Venturing farther out, she took care to place one foot directly in front of the other, treading the steeple’s tapering point as she would a balance beam.
Varen watched her without speaking.
Isobel kept her eyes fixed on him as well.
Though she refused to look down, spindly sideways spires spiked into her lower periphery. Somewhere past them, a swirl of movement and the distant roar of waves alerted her to the presence of the white sea.
But Isobel pushed the thought of raging waters aside and, through the strands of her whipping hair, did her best to maintain focus on Varen’s outstretched arm.
One inch at a time she shuffled nearer, and when she came close enough to place her palm in his, Varen’s hand clamped like a trap, fastening tight around hers.
Isobel winced, but she did not try to pull free.
“After everything,” she said, “I think I finally realize that . . . if you believe you can’t be saved, then of course you’re right. Because I can’t force you to listen. And no, as badly as I want to—and Varen, I want to, more than you’ll ever know—I can’t be the one who saves you. Only you can do that.”
A flicker of confusion knitted his brow, and Isobel sensed it was because he was trying to banish her with his will, to cause her to disintegrate like he had done to her astral form in the mirrored hall.
“But there is one thing that I can do,” she whispered, twisting her hand in his fierce grip so that she could thread her fingers through his. She took his other hand too, and tilted her chin to find him scowling at her, his eyes stony but uncertain.
That uncertainty was the thing she’d been waiting for.
Because she needed only the merest of cracks in his fortitude, for his guard to lower for the smallest instant, in order to play her final card.
“I can prove to you that you’re worth saving.”
Isobel clamped down on his hands. In the same instant, she envisioned the clock face and the rows of bloodred windows shattering in unison.
A hundred thousand shards burst upward with an earsplitting smash.
Transforming, the tinkling splinters became a throng of origami butterflies.
A hush of pink paper wings filled the air like the whispering of a million voices, loud enough to drown out the cry of the winds, the crash of the sea.
The butterflies swept toward them, funneling around the place where she and Varen stood, flittering to create a living curtain that sealed the two of them off—blotting out the tower, the steeple, the drop, the very sky.
