Chapter 21: The Tears

Marnie's POV

I do not remember dying.

I remember a note, low and enormous, coming down through the water.

I remember being lifted.

Then something hot and wet fell on my face, and another, and another.

I opened my eyes and coughed up half the harbor.

I was lying on the planks at the end of the pier, with a hundred lanterns shaking above me.

Lachlan knelt over me with his hair streaming and his arms burned raw.

He was crying.

I had known him for eight days, and I had never once seen a tear fall from those gray-green eyes.

Now they ran down his face and dripped off his chin onto my collarbone.

Where they landed on my skin they were warm.

"Marnie," he said. "Marnie. Marnie."

"You're crying," I said, and my voice came out a croak.

"I know."

"Does it hurt?"

"Terribly," he said, and he laughed, and more tears fell.

One of them landed in my open palm and rolled.

It hardened as it rolled.

It stopped, round and white and shining, a pearl the size of a pea.

I stared at it.

"That's yours," Lachlan said. "I have never given one to anyone. It is the first."

"I thought my tears and my song belonged to Garrick now."

"They passed to him when your heart stopped." He wiped his face on his wrist. "They came back when I wept."

"Why?"

"Because a tear taken is nothing. A tear given is a tear given. Tilda reminded me."

He turned his head.

Tilda sat propped against the tank with Aggie's slicker around her, gray and shivering, with a crab man holding her upright.

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