Page 99 of The Gods of Chaos and Chance

They stayed around the fire until it had died down to glowing embers.

They’d scorched the earth but the grass would return.

Aleksey had a feeling that Light Island always had a way of preserving its secrets.

It was a bad time to glance up at the glass dome nearly ninety feet above them. For a dying bonfire, it was reflecting surprisingly brightly in the diamond-patterned glass.

* * *

Although they had a few hours on the motor launch the next day and a drive to Dartmoor to acclimatise, Aleksey felt a sense of total dislocation from his ordinary life as he arrived back at the glass house in Devon. Their savage Eden had changed more than just his outward appearance.

He had forgotten just how beautiful the valley was. It was the second week in June and every single flower and shrub was at its best, spring’s lush rains enhancing the rich peat in which they grew. The stream was swollen and had filled Lake Aleksey so that Benjamin Falls spilled in a torrent over the clapper bridge. Horse Tor was covered in emerald bracken, its evocative scent intoxicatingly sweet.

The house was flooded with light from early dawn through to late evening. They woke to sunrise on the tor and fell asleep to a river of stars above their heads.

Aleksey opened his eyes one morning after they’d been back a week to find the other side of the bed empty. He glanced at the clock. It was just gone ten. Ben appeared from across the swim lane walkway, sweating heavily and stripping out of a running top and shorts. He chucked both at him and continued naked into the shower.

Life had, it seemed, returned to normal.

When he got out to the kitchen, thinking pleasantly about marmalade, he discovered Molly coming in, Sarah inevitably trailing in her wake. Molly was pulling a tiny wheeled suitcase in the shape of a unicorn. She was wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown and little slippers which resembled the fur loincloths he and Ben had fashioned—before their makeovers.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m coming for my sleepover. Daddy promised I could have my first one tonight.’

‘It is…ten minutes to eleven. In the morning.’

‘I have important things to do.’

He repressed his smirk. Sarah didn’t approve of children being snarky and constantly attempted to get her small charge to be meek and mild, presumably to resemble the man she idolised. Aleksey was more than happy for Molly to resemble himself.

He invited Sarah to make them both a cup of tea and trailed after Molly into the suite Ben had given her.

She began to unpack her essential items. ‘Raddybum is going to spend the night with Babushka. He said she would miss me.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Sarah’s going to pray.’

‘Is coming to spend the night with us that bad?’

She frowned a little, arranging all her soft toys where she wanted them on the bed, but didn’t reply.

‘What’s that?’

She turned and brought the object over and climbed into his lap.

‘Uncle Tim gave it to me for my new room.’

‘A treatise on ethical hypocrisy?’ As usual, he didn’t get a reply to this. Instead she began to carefully unwrap the small parcel, peeling the sticky tape carefully so as not to rip the lovely paper. In some ways, Aleksey realised with a smirk, she didn’t resemble him at three at all. It contained a photo in an elegant frame shaped to resemble the mainsail on a yacht flying down the wind. Engraved beneath the picture, on the polished metal it read:Star of the Sea, You Are Shaped By Where You Come From.

‘What does that mean, papa? No—I’m holding it. You’ll get sticky fingers on it.’

The irony of this was beyond his ability to comment on.

‘That is what your name means. You are Molly: Star of the Sea.’

Aleksey studied the photo. It was a picture of two men on a boat, taken slightly into the sun. One of the men he recognised, one he did not. Ben, obviously, he knew. He knew him from the inside out and in all ways one man could know another. But the other man puzzled him. He was just as tall as Ben, but he had startlingly blond hair, highlighted by the sun behind and ruffled by wind, the strength of which was evident in the sails behind him. This tall, blond man was laughing. Although his eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses, his whole face was illuminated by the pleasure of the moment.

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