The Sweetest Dark (16 page)

I'd climbed out the window at Blisshaven. I could still feel the slick cold glass against my fingertips, hear the squeak of the frame as I'd hefted it open.

Smoggy air on my face. The empty dark. My body feeling lighter and lighter, lighter than air.

I had tipped into that emptiness below, and then—

“Eleanore.”

I opened my eyes, just now realizing I'd closed them. Sophia had her hand on my sleeve.

“Watch it,” she said, quiet. “You're about to make a hash of yourself.”

I looked down. I had climbed atop the low barrier between two merlons and was balanced at the rim of the stone. The tips of my shoes poked out over a dizzying drop, black leather against faraway boulders and a viscous, surging sea.

No smog. No darkness. The violence of the surf below me was clear as crystal.

I came back to myself in a sickening rush. My stomach lurched. My knees buckled. My fingers clutched at the stones.

I moved my left foot, then my right, slinking down again to the safety of the roof. Sophia released my arm.

Bloody hell. I'd nearly done it, I'd nearly stepped clean over that edge—I'd
wanted
to—

“Tedious lecture,” Sophia murmured while gazing at Tilbury, who was still rhapsodizing to his captive audience about the joys of medieval life. “But hardly worth ending it all, I would think.”

“Hardly,” I murmured in return, when I was convinced my voice would not break.

A frown creased her perfect brow; her eyes skimmed my frame. “You know, for a moment there, it almost looked like you were … smoldering.”

That caught me short. “I beg your pardon?”

“Like you were smoking. Your hair—your neck and hair– blurring into smoke.” Sophia shook her head once, hard. “Never mind.”

“I—”

“It's all this wretched wind and salt, no doubt. I cannot wait to graduate from this pile of rocks, I swear.”

She walked back to the cluster of the other girls. They parted and reabsorbed her into their midst without seeming even to notice.

...

It wasn't until we were leaving that I saw it. The lesson was concluded, and Mittie's shivering had finally started to look real. Tilbury opened the access door and there was a short, ladylike tussle to see who would get through first, but I waited. I wasn't sure how my knees felt about creeping down those corkscrew stairs just yet.

The clouds had thinned sheer overhead, transforming the sun into a hard silver disk. It lent a peculiar light to the limestone, blurring some crannies but heightening others, and when I gave a final glance back to the merlon I had first touched with my hand, I detected a faint tracing there that I hadn't noticed before.

It was a single word carved along the side, where it was not readily visible. The lettering was scripted, even graceful, although stone meant to withstand the ravages of a catapult must have been damned difficult to incise.

Just as I had perceived the flicker of thoughts behind Gladys's eyes, somehow, inexplicably, I understood that this word had been meant to serve as a final admonition, engraved as deep as desperation could manage into unyielding stone.

The word was:
Don't.

...

What if, that moment in the grotto when I asked Jesse if I was crazy, he had answered
yes
?

What if all this persistent strangeness about me, all the dreams and songs and the wicked voice, was not the product of mysterious magic but merely my own mundane insanity?

No such things as dragons. No such things as boys made out of stars or girls going to smoke.

I would do anything to avoid being imprisoned again. I would absolutely lie or cheat or steal.

Perhaps I would even kill.

I would kill myself. I knew that. In a soundless and static corner of my soul, I knew that.

If it meant I'd go to hell—well, it happens that there are many levels of hell, and I'd already visited a few of them.

Jumping off a castle roof would be no worse a fate.

...

I waited until twilight before attempting to find him again.

Unlike the last time I'd ventured outdoors for Jesse, I did not run through this descending eve but walked most decorously from the main doors of the castle instead. Bundled in my shawl and uniform, I might have been partaking in any one of Mrs. Westcliffe's permitted after-supper al fresco activities, like:

Strolling to the edge of the rose garden to admire the sunset.

Strolling to the edge of the orchard to admire the sunset.

Strolling to the edge of the bridge to admire the sunset.

At England's foremost educational opportunity for young women, strolling to the brink of things was allowed. Leaving the green—plunging beyond brinks—was not.

As the sunset tonight consisted of a watery gray cloak of clouds, it was not especially worth admiring. I was the only student even pretending to want to slog along the grounds.

Still, I tucked my shawl closer to my chest and glanced around very carefully before easing into the woods. I even scanned the castle windows, searching for telltale faces, but the panes all shone empty. If anyone did see me go, they didn't care enough to raise a fuss.

Twilight is the best time for Fay trickery, or so I'd read. Not yet all dark, the last brief luminance of the sky fighting its inevitable death. Shadows that seemed to reach out and snatch at you; rustlings behind trees too near for comfort. Wisplights blinking off and on in the distance. Birds skipping from crown to crown of the blackened trees, calling,
Farewell! Farewell!
in full-throated, mournful cries… .

Gooseflesh pricked my skin, and it had nothing to do with the cold. But I was not going to be afraid of these woods, not for any reason. These were the woods that led to Jesse, so I would not be afraid.

From far away, the false thunder of airships and bombs began, a short shuddering of the air that rippled through me, but feebly, like the echo of an echo.

I walked a little faster.

In the end, it didn't matter. By the time I found Jesse's cottage, twilight had faded into ordinary night, and Jesse wasn't there.

I knocked anyway, in case I was wrong. Maybe he was muting his music, like before.

The door swung open on silent hinges. No lock. No candles lit inside.

With my hand on the jamb, I took a half step forward into his home, breathing in the scent of him, subtle cinnamon overlaid now with pinewood and soap and coffee—and something else. Something that smelled very much like grass, sweetly pungent but fading rapidly.

My fingers found the bump of the cat's-eye knot. I traced three long circles around it before turning about and leaving.

My path back to the castle looped toward the stable. I looked askance at its plain stone sides in the distance, the light leaking through the planks of the doors to lay stripes across the dirt. It appeared dollhouse small next to Iverson's walls but in reality was likely large enough to keep horses for an entire manor.

No Jesse-music emanating from there, either, but the sweet grass smell of before billowed up and over me in waves.

Hay. Of course.

From across the yard I heard the slow, restless snufflings of very large penned animals, and the softer footsteps of someone who was likely more human-shaped.

The top level of the barn had windows of glass set back beneath the rafters, like those of a home. A figure moved behind one of them, thickset and hunched, a cap atop white hair. Mr. Hastings. He saw me and paused, then curled a hand at me from behind the glass.

Enter.

The wind puffed and the fringe of my shawl began a flutter; it seemed that as the air swept by me, the animal snufflings grew more agitated.

The gnarled hand beckoned again, more impatient.

For the second time that day, I thought,
Bloody hell.

Chapter Eighteen

What he wanted, Jesse knew he could not fully have.

The logical part of him, the serene and celestial part of him, accepted that. She was too young; she was untested. She didn't understand what was to come.

The enchantment threading through his every atom—tissue, bone, sinew—understood that and was strong enough and bright enough to make allowances for all those things.

But he was more than enchanted. He was a man, too. He was born of dirt, into a world of chaos and lust, and that was also his heritage. And the man in him didn't care about her tender young years or that she had no idea what she could do or what she would have to give up to do it.

The man in him just wanted. Purely wanted.
Burned
with want, exactly as he had from the moment he'd watched her walking toward him that night across the train station lot, manifest at last.

Behind tonight's mask of clouds, the stars whispered to him, cold and insistent:

she is yours and not. forever to be yours, forever to be not.

Right.

It was why he'd stayed to muck out the stalls after today's journey into town, even though he and Hastings had done it yesterday. Even though it was well past dusk and he'd declined the shared supper of bread and stew that Hastings had offered, and the thought of retreating home was just that. Retreating. He wasn't fit company for aught but the horses and the stable cats, who endured his ill humor well enough.

Going home meant darkness, and bed, and precious little to distract him from his own thoughts.

Placid Abigail flicked her tail at him when he ventured too near with the pitchfork. The tangerine tom, which had no name, hunched low on the crossbeam separating the stalls, following Jesse's every move with slitted orange eyes.

The Germans were bombing again tonight, miles up the coast. He wondered if she was hearing it, too, then pushed the thought aside, concentrating on the arc of the iron tines, the span of the ash handle against his palms. Hay mounded up, moved. Mounded, moved. Abigail's hooves like black crescent moons against the straw.

forever yours, forever not.

Pain began to gather between his shoulder blades, a welcome thing, knifing lower down the path of his spine. He was breathing harder, immersed in the earthy aroma of manure and alfalfa and the greasy bite of the smoke curling from the lanterns. He wished absently for a kerchief; drops of sweat began to sting his eyes.

He didn't need Abigail's sudden stiffening to know that she was there, nor the tom's swift desertion.

The stars announced,
here, here she is,
and he didn't even need them to know.

Jesse knew she was there because, very simply, his pain vanished. His irritation with himself and the world: vanished. And as he straightened and turned, all the star-brightness within him flared into that
want
again.

Abigail backed up hard, knocking into the stone wall. He set the pitchfork aside and placed both hands on her to soothe her, looking past her to the stable doors.

Lora stood uncertainly at the entrance, her arms and torso shrouded in a wrap, one foot cocked back behind her with her toes in the dirt, as if she meant to turn and bolt at the slightest sound.

So he didn't say anything. Only looked at her, helpless, yearning.

Zula, Abigail's foal, began to snort and stomp. She kicked at her stall door, once. Twice. Like a cue in a play, a pair of distant explosions echoed it.

“Those dreams I've had,” Lora said, beneath the increasing clamor of horse and bombs and door. “The ones where I come to you at—at night. Were they truly dreams?”

her time is coming, her time, the sacrifice. tell her.

Jesse turned his face away so she couldn't see what lived within him. He gave Abigail a final rough pat, grabbed the pitchfork, and left and latched the stall.

“Come on,” he said, walking past her, tossing the fork behind the trough outside. “You can't stay here. Come with me.”

The stars approved, a swelling chorus of sound that he could not have blocked from his ears any more than he could his own heartbeat.

destiny along this path. delight both dark and bright.

A concept so cerebral as
destiny
wasn't what lit him to fire inside.

Delight, though. That was another matter entirely.

...

“I started to dissolve today. Into smoke or mist or something.”

We were walking away from the castle and the stable and Hastings's view, enfolded nearly at once by the soft charcoal dark. I didn't see the need for subtlety.

“Did you?”

If Jesse was surprised or appalled, none of it was revealed in his tone. He didn't even glance at me, not that I could tell. His pace didn't falter.

“Yes,” I said firmly. “Atop the roof of the castle. At the very edge. I was—I don't know how to describe it. I was almost in a trance of sorts. I had climbed out to the edge of the battlement, but I didn't even see it. In my mind, in my memory, I was back at the orphanage, back during this one night when I was much younger, and I …”

“You what?” he asked, still undisturbed.

“I jumped out the window there. From the top story. I
jumped.
” I heard the doubt in my own voice and hurried on. “And there was only the courtyard below me, not even a dirt one but one made of cobblestones. I'm
sure
it was real—but I never got in trouble for it. And I wasn't hurt. I don't even remember how I got back inside.”

“How do you know you almost went to smoke today?”

“Sophia saw it, though she thought it was an illusion. She stopped me just before I—” I shuddered despite myself. “Before I jumped again.”

“I see.”

I bit my lip. “I think it was real. That time at the orphanage. So I need to know if it was also real with you.”

We'd ended up next to a hedge pruned to resemble a loping hound. In a few weeks it would probably come into ferocious bud, but tonight it was skeletal, all bare branches and thorns.

Jesse was staring at me; I felt it, although I didn't raise my gaze above his chest.

My dreams of him had been so … intimate. The thought that they might have been more than dreams both excited and mortified me.

I reached out and touched the nose of the hound, pressing the pad of my thumb into a thorn. Behind us, Iverson loomed, a monolith dividing the wind and clouds.

Jesse shoved his hands into his pockets. “What do
you
think, Lora?”

A flash of irritation took me. “I think that I asked you first. And I'd appreciate a straightforward answer, if you please.”

“Do you hear them? The bombs?”

“Yes, but—”

“Do you smell the burning?”

“What burning?”

“From the bombs,” he said patiently. “From the fires they're starting in the towns.”

I started to shake my head. My lips began to form the word
no,
but then I hesitated. I became aware that I
did
smell something, something faint and horrid. Acrid chemicals. Singed meat.

The
no
strangled in my throat.

He nodded grimly, reading my face. “It's not supposed to be like this, you coming into your gifts in stages. But, then again, you're exceptional in every way, Lora Jones, so perhaps the regular rules don't apply to you. I don't know. And I don't know if what happened to you at the orphanage was real, but from what I understand, when you transform fully—especially the first time—there is a price to pay.”

“What do you mean? What price?”

“Pain,” he confessed, on a hard exhale. “I'm sorry. There's always a sacrifice for every gift. It's … it's rather a rule of the universe, really. You were granted a great gift, so your sacrifice will be great, as well. That ensures the balance of all.”

I recoiled from the hound, balling my hand into a fist against my stomach. “Well, what manner of pain? I mean, how much?”

“A
great
gift,” he emphasized, low.

“Oh.” I was abruptly short of breath. “Of course.”

Stupid, stupid—how stupid that I hadn't thought of it before, that it would hurt. Obviously it would. And then I couldn't stop imagining it: my body bloating, mutating, into something hideous and snakelike. Something grotesque. My skin stretching shiny thin, my bones cracking and shifting and reknitting. My teeth sharpening, my tongue splitting. My hands and feet twisting into claws—

“Stop,” Jesse said.

I stared up at him, almost panting with fear.

“Stop, beloved,” he said more gently, and took up my clenched fist with both hands. “I've upset you, and I shouldn't have. I don't want you to dread yourself. I don't want you to dread what is to come. Like I said, you're exceptional, so there may be nothing to worry about at all. But whatever happens, whatever you face, I'll face it with you. Do you hear?”

“How can you say that? It nearly happened
on the roof
today. You can't know—”

“I
will
be with you. We're together now, and the universe knows I won't let you make your sacrifice alone. Dragon protects star. Star adores dragon. An age-old axiom. Simple as that.”

I looked down at our hands, both of his curled over mine. I unclenched my fist. Blood from the thorn smeared my skin.

“The universe,” I muttered. “The same universe that has produced the kaiser and bedbugs and Chloe Pemington. How reassuring.”

With the same absolute concentration he might have shown for turning flowers into gold, Jesse Holms smoothed out my fingers between his, wiping away the blood. He turned my hand over and lifted it to his lips. His next words fell soft as velvet into the heart of my palm.

“Those nights, in the sweetest dark, we shared our dreams. That's your answer. I was stitched into yours, and you were stitched into mine, and
that
was real, I promise you.” I felt his lips curve into a smile. The unbelievably sensual, ticklish scuff of his whiskers. “Very good dreams they were, too,” he added.

It was no use trying to cling to mortification or fear. He was holding my hand. He was smiling at me past the cup of my fingers, and although I couldn't see it, the shape of it against my skin was beyond tantalizing, rough and masculine. I was a creature gone hot and cold and light-headed with pleasure. I wanted to snatch back my hand and I wanted him to go on touching me like this forever. I wanted to walk with him back to his cottage, to his bed, and to hell with the Germans and school and all the rest of the world.

But he looked up suddenly.

“They're searching for you,” he said, releasing me at once, moving away.

They were. I heard my name being called by a variety of voices in a variety of tones, all of them still inside the castle, none of them sounding happy.

“Go on.” With a few quick steps, Jesse was less than a shadow, retreating into the black wall of the woods. “Don't get into trouble. And, Lora?”

“Yes?”

There was hushed laughter in his voice. “Until we can see each other again, do us both a favor. Keep away from rooftops.”

...

“This kind of behavior will not be tolerated, Miss Jones.”

“I beg your pardon, ma'am.”

“Students are absolutely
not
allowed outside after sundown without proper escort.”

“I'm so terribly sorry.”

“It was incredibly irresponsible of you. I had to summon half the staff to help search for you. From their suppers, I might add.”

“I never meant to—I only nodded off in the gardens, I swear. I fell asleep.”

“So you've said already. Twice. Are you ill, Miss Jones?”

“No, ma'am.”

“A sound sleeper, is that it?”

“Yes, ma'am. I mean, I suppose so. I am sorry.”

“I really must think you have no notion of the world in the least, Miss Jones. A child like you should know better than to trust the night. There are dangers beyond these walls–yes, even out here. It is my responsibility to ensure that every girl here remains
safe,
remains
healthy,
remains
untouched
… .”

“Yes, ma'am. Are … are you all right, ma'am?”

“I am perfectly well, Miss Jones. A touch of the catarrh, perhaps. Ahem. The duke is holding a celebration Saturday next to honor the birthday of his son. It is an Idylling tradition, and the tenth- and eleventh-year girls are invited every year. I am tempted—sorely tempted—to exclude you as punishment.”

“Oh?”

“But as the duke has specifically requested your presence, and since this is, after all, your first offense, I shall not.”

“Oh.”

“Perhaps he wishes you to play again. We'll see.”

“Oh.”

“That will be all for now, Miss Jones. Tomorrow we will discuss a proper punishment for your transgression. You may retire to your room now, as it seems you are in such critical need of slumber.”

“Thank you, ma'am. Good night.”

“Good night.”

...

I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.

I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.

I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.

I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.

I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.

I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.

I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.

I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.

x 100.

...

Days of rain. Days and days of rain, and nights, too.

It put the castle out of sorts. It forced everyone indoors all the time, not just the spun-sugar girls but the maids and menservants and teachers and everyone.