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though she saw it all for the first time ... knowing that it
was not reality, but her own perception that had changed. Two saltwater tears
slipped down the sides of her nose, and fell thirty feet into the bay. She
heard him pass behind her toward the gangway without slowing.
    “Sparks!”
She turned, putting herself in his way. “Without a word ... ?”
    Sparks
backed up slightly.
    “It’s all
right.” She straightened her face, managed with some pride to speak as though
it were. “I’m not a sibyl yet.”
    “No. I
know. That wasn’t why—” He broke off, pushing back his knitted cap.
    “But it is
why you’re leaving.” She couldn’t tell, herself, whether that was a statement
or an accusation.
    “Yeah.” He
looked down suddenly. “I guess it is.”
    “
Sparks
—”
    “But only
partly!” He straightened. “You know that it’s true, I’ve always felt this
pulling me, Moon.” He faced northward, toward Carbuncle at the back of the
wind. “I have to find out what I’m missing.”
    “Or who?”
She bit her tongue.
    He
shrugged. “Maybe.”
    She shook
her head desperately. “After I come back from my initiation it won’t be
different, we can still be together!” / can have both, I can—”It can be like it
always was again. Like we always wanted it to be—” not even convincing herself.
    “Hey, boy.”
The voice rose from below, breaking into echoes off the jetty wall. “You
coming? The tide won’t wait all day!”
    “In a
minute!”
Sparks
frowned. “No, it won’t, Moon. You know that. “Death to love a sibyl ...”“ His
voice faded.
    “That’s
just superstition!” Their eyes locked. And in that moment she knew that he
shared her understanding of the truth; as he had always known, and shared,
everything: It would never be the same again.
    “You’ll be
changed. In a way that I can never change, now.” His fingers whitened on the
rail. “I can’t stay here, stay the way I am now. I have to change, too. I have
to grow, and learn ... I have to learn who I really am. All this time I thought
I knew. I thought-becoming a sibyl would answer all my questions.” His eyes
darkened with the new emotion that she had seen first as she came back to him
there in the hidden cave, on the
Choosing
Island
. The thing that
envied her, and accused her, and shut her out.
    “Then go,
if that’s really why you’re going.” She challenged the darkness, afraid to
retreat. “But don’t go out of bitterness, because you’re hurt, or because
you’re trying to hurt me. Because if you do you’ll never come back.” Her
courage broke. “And I don’t think I could stand that, Sparkie—”
    His hands
came up, but as she reached out to him they dropped to his sides again. He
turned away, shaking his head, with no forgiveness or understanding or even
sorrow. He moved to the gangway, started down the ladder.
    Moon felt
Gran come up beside her, watch with her as
Sparks
dropped to the boat’s cross-deck where
it rose on the water to meet him. He disappeared into the cabin on the broad
platform that joined the double hulls, and though she kept watching he did not
come out on deck again. The deckhands cast off the mooring ropes, the crab-claw
sails fell jingling down the masts and filled with moist wind.
    The fog was
lifting as the world brightened. Moon could see as far as the channel leading
to the open sea, and she watched the trader’s catamaran grow smaller as it
angled out into the bay, reaching for the gap. She heard its engines start,
once it was well away from the Summer docks. At last it reached the channel
entrance and merged with the wall of fog, snuffed out in an instant, like a
ghost ship. Moon rubbed at her eyes, her face, wetting her hands with mist and
tears. Like a sleeper waking, she turned to look at her grandmother, small and
stooped with sorrow beside her. She looked beyond her at the silhouetted nets
and winches along the dockside; the ancient, sea worn storage house at the foot
of