Ranka stared past him, sliding her fingers over the bracelet.

“What’s that?” Percy asked, his tone uncharacteristically gentle.

“A promise.” She braced herself for some kind of pity or coddling comment. If he told her he understood, so help her Goddess, she would push him off the cliffs.

Percy stretched out on his back. “Ghosts are a bitch.”

“What?”

“Ghosts. The people that leave us too soon. The people we can’t let go of.” He paused. “You need to let her go, Ranka. May I?”

Ranka hesitated, and nodded. Her eyes blurred as Percy turned her hand over in his and slowly, gently, untied the bracelet Ranka had been wearing for five years. Her skin was paler under the leather, a thin band of stark white and free of scars. She felt terribly the same. It should have been painful to take it off. Should have been sacrilege. Where other witches had believed in a distant goddess, Ranka had only ever believed in family. Vivna, Ongrum, Yeva—they had been her prayer, her religion, the thing her heart spun around.

But her sister was gone, Yeva was dead, and this was just an ugly scrap of leather long faded by time.

“See?” Percy said gently. “No different than before. Letting someone go doesn’t mean you stop loving them. It just means you’re giving yourself permission to keep living.”

Ranka’s shoulders drooped. “How do you deal with it?”

“One day at a time. One hour at a time. One minute at a time,” he said, not unkindly. “I expect I’ll always be dealing with it.”

Ranka blinked out at the ocean, her eyes wet.

“Do you want to talk about them?”

“I’d like to talk about literally anything else, actually.”

She half expected him to crack a joke. Instead Percy closed his eyes. “When I was a boy, my father showed me what it meant to fly.”

They sat there for a long time—Ranka immobile, gripping the bracelet, and Percy telling her of his ghosts, keeping her company in her grief with stories of his own. He told her about his father, who’d seen equations in the waves that crashed against their white-sand coasts, and his mother, who could mimic birdsong so well, she’d coaxed skittish petrels to settle on her wrist. He told her of the Fire Day parades, pale orchids blooming among cypress groves, of the sandstone dueling arenas and temples built into marble cliff faces that were accessible only by air. He talked until the sun sank over the horizon, and kept talking, and when he finished, his cheeks were wet with tears.

For the whole evening, Percy talked about the Star Isles. Ranka wondered if he realized he was also talking about love.