The Sweetest Dark

by Shana Abe

  His lashes dropped; his smile grew more dry. He ran a hand slowly along a crease of quilt by his thigh.

  “All I want,” he said quietly, “is to talk.”

  “Then pay a call on me later this afternoon,” I hissed.

  “No.”

  “What, you don’t have the time to tear yourself away from your precious Chloe?”

  I hadn’t meant to say that, and, believe me, as soon as the words left my lips I regretted them. They made me sound petty and jealous, and I was certain I was neither.

  Reasonably certain.

  Armand’s smile briefly grew wider, then vanished. His fingers moved back and forth, playing with the dips and peaks of the crease.

  “Where did you learn that piece?” he asked. “The one you played on the piano yesterday?”

  And there it was again expanding between us, that electric, ill-defined challenge that felt like danger. Or excitement. I knew his question wasn’t casual. He might have been a selfish wretch, but I wasn’t the only one who’d get in trouble if we were discovered. It was Visitors’ Day, after all, and he could have easily cornered me at the tea. If he’d felt it necessary to sneak all the way up to my room to ask me about the song, it meant he didn’t want anyone to overhear.

  Perhaps that might give me the advantage.

  I remembered how his face had looked when I was finished playing. How white. How shocked.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  The shrug again. “Just wondering.”

  “Really. You’ve skipped your lawn tennis or duck hunting or whiskey drinking or whatever else people of your sort do all day, only to come all the way out to the island to ask me about the piano piece. Because you were just wondering.” I pushed away from the door. “Coming here to kiss me would have been more believable.”

  “Well, it was second on my list.”

  “I’m not intimidated by you,” I said, blunt. “If you’re hoping I’ll turn out to be some pathetic, blubbering little rag-girl who begs you not to ruin her, you’re in for a surprise.”

  “That’s good.” Lord Armand met my eyes. “I like surprises.”

  We gazed at each other, he on the bed and me by the door, neither of us giving quarter. It seemed to me that the room was growing even more dim, that time was repeating the same ploy it had pulled in Jesse’s cottage, drawing out long and slow. The storm outside railed against the castle walls, drowning the air within. It layered darkness through Armand’s eyes, the once-vivid blue now deep as the ocean at night.

  Beyond my window the rain fell and fell, fat clouds weeping as if they’d never stop.

  “Nice bracelet,” Armand said softly. “Did you steal it?”

  I shook my head. “You gave it to me.”

  “Did I?”

  “As far as everyone else is concerned, yes. You did.”

  “Hmm. And what do I get in return for agreeing to be your … benefactor?”

  “The answer to your question.”

  “No kiss?” he asked, even softer.

  “No.”

  His lips quirked. “All right, then, waif. I accept your terms. We’ll try the kiss later.”

  I sighed. “I made up the piece at the piano.”

  He said nothing, only stared at me.

  “Truly,” I said. “I made it up. Right then. It’s …” Now I shrugged. “It’s just something I do.”

  Armand cleared his throat. “You’d never heard it before?”

  “No.” I took a step closer to him, frowning. There was something odd going on here; the power between us had shifted. I felt it, that danger feeling fading and something new growing in its place.

  Something like fear.

  “Had you heard it before?” I asked, startled.

  “Of course not. How could I have, if you just invented it?”

  “Yes,” I murmured, not taking my eyes off him, exploring that odd new energy between us. “How could you have?”

  He came to his feet. “It’s only that my mother used to do that sort of thing. Invent songs like that. It was her Steinway, in fact, a wedding gift from my father. Yesterday you—you gave him a start, I suppose. Gave us both a bit of a start. Bent over the keys like that, your hair all tumbling down. You really resembled her.”

  “How old were you when she died?”

  He pulled on his coat, spattering water on us both. “Around three.”

  “Oh,” I said carefully. “But you remember her playing?”

  “I s’pose so.” Shoes on, the tie shoved into his pocket—Armand turned to face me and, just like that, I knew I’d lost him. His gaze had gone cool and his smile faint. He was entirely a lord once more.

  “It’s been most delightful, Miss Jones. Let’s do it again sometime, shall we?”

  I let him walk past me, swing open the door. He peered into the gloom of the stairwell before slipping down the first few steps. At the fourth step he paused, looked back up at me, and lowered his voice.

  “Where did you get the bracelet?”

  “Good-bye, Lord Armand,” I whispered. “Try not to get caught.”

  I closed my door. I pressed my ear to the wood and remained there another whole minute until I heard him moving off, quick footfalls that faded into the more constant patter of the rain.

  • • •

  Jesse was not at home. I knew that without venturing even an inch into the sodden woods.

  After Armand had left, I paused only long enough to remake the bed and blot up the water his coat had left on the floor. It was while I was doing that—on my hands and knees, my hair popped free of the measly two pins to tickle my neck—that I realized I was being surrounded by a new song.

  Jesse’s song.

  It rose around me in a lilting cadence, became a caress along my body, an invitation, our own secret code that echoed and repeated, and every single note meant come find me.

  I stood and pushed the hair from my face. I crossed to my window to gaze down at the rainlit green, searching the fingers of fog that curled against the animal hedges and flower beds. The long, wet span of grass bereft of students or staff or too-early Sunday guests.

  He definitely wasn’t down there. He didn’t seem to be outside at all. So … he must be somewhere within the castle.

  Come find me.

  My heart began a harder beat; I felt tingly, almost anxious.

  Come.

  Very well. I would.

  I put on my oilskin, just in case. Then I went to answer Jesse’s call, sliding as carefully into the stairwell shadows as Armand had done a quarter hour before.

  Downstairs, the maids were kindling batches of light, moving from lamp to lamp with their waxed-paper tapers to ward off the day’s dull chill. We’d entered that numbed, dragging stretch of hours before Sunday tea and after church, when Iverson’s genteel young ladies tended to wander off in their individual clusters to genteelly shred the characters of anyone beyond their circle.

  Each year had claimed its own location, I’d learned. The older girls usually headed outdoors to brave the tame wilderness—and relative privacy—of the gardens, while the younger ones liked to remain ensconced safely inside, closer to the promise of biscuits and cake. On days such as today, however, all the girls in all the years recognized that they were made of spun sugar: Rain would surely melt them into puddles. Everyone was forced indoors.

  The front parlor was out-of-bounds until four, so they’d draped themselves throughout the other common rooms instead. As I passed the library, I glimpsed Chloe and Sophia standing and chatting by the fire with every evidence of civility. But Sophia still had her cat’s smile, and Chloe’s cheeks were still red.

  Perhaps it wasn’t so unpleasant to be without a family, after all.

  I moved past the doorway without either of them noticing.

  Jesse wasn’t with any of the other girls, anyway. He wasn’t in any part of the castle that I’d yet explored. The more I walked, the more I understood that even though I had gone all the way
down to the ground floor, he was still below me somewhere, in the bowels of the keep.

  I didn’t think students were allowed below the main floor. I knew the kitchens were there, as were most of the servants’ quarters; the professors and Mrs. Westcliffe had their own aboveground wing on the other side of the castle. No one had ever specifically told me not to go below stairs, however—probably because a true Iverson girl would never, ever dream of mingling with the help.

  I could always say I’d gotten lost. The pillars of the world would hardly collapse. The sky would not shatter. I was barely a hairbreadth away from being the help myself.

  The only entrance to the lower level I knew of was down at the far end of the main hallway. I lurked by the sole painting there, gazing up in apparent fascination at the portrait of a man in a tatty fur coat with what seemed to be a dead weasel wrapped around his head. He stared back at me with a cold smile I recognized very well.

  Olin, read the little plate screwed into the frame, 5th dk Idylling.

  Like brown hair and lunacy, it seemed hauteur was passed down the family line. At least the current duke was a finer dresser.

  A pair of maids holding spent tapers swished past. The servants’ door opened; the maids went through; light and voices and the blue-smoke sting of lit cigarettes boiled up into the hall until the door shut behind them, and it was just me and the dead-weasel duke once more.

  Jesse’s song sparkled louder, so beautiful and wanting, it felt like an ache in my bones.

  Come, love.

  I glanced up and down the passageway: I was alone. I inched toward the door and put my hand on the latch.

  “No, not that way,” murmured Jesse, close enough that I felt his breath on my temple.

  Chapter 16

  “A francba!”

  I jumped back, smacking the wall, and knocked into the portrait, which clattered heavily and began to tilt. Jesse, very near and very swift, reached out and steadied us both, one hand on the frame and the other on my shoulder.

  He was a genie, a wizard, a boy who’d materialized from nothing but cigarette smoke and shadows, because he had not been there a second ago.

  “All right, Lora?” He waited for my nod, then used both hands to straighten the painting. “What did you just say?”

  “What?” My heart was still pounding. I’d flattened a palm over it, pressing back the fright.

  “Just now. You said something in a foreign language.”

  “No, I didn’t. Did I?” I dropped my hand. “Where did you come from?”

  Jesse stepped back from the duke and his disturbing attire—properly aligned once more, still smiling down at us bloody cold—and faced me, too tall and real and solid to have simply appeared from thin air.

  “You’ll find this castle keeps many secrets, some ancient, some not.” His fingers clasped mine, instant warmth. “This is one of the oldest ones. I’ll show you.”

  He stepped back again, and again, pulling me with him all the way to the wall, only the wall wasn’t there any longer. A gaping black space was where there should have been stone, where there surely had been stone when I’d first crept down this hallway.

  One final step, and the darkness consumed him. His voice floated out to me.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not,” I replied, irritated that he’d guessed the truth. I made myself follow without him having to pull. “Of course I’m not.”

  “Good. There’s a landing here, feel it? Hold on while I …”

  We had paused just inside the wall, standing almost chest-to-chest. He shifted against me, his arm reaching past my head, and without any noise at all the wall closed up again, sealing us inside—what? I didn’t know. The innards of the castle, I supposed. It smelled like rats and dirt and rotting wood. It smelled like a crypt.

  Jesse struck a match, held it to a lantern hung on a hook behind us. Yellow brightness bloomed.

  We were in a tunnel. On a rickety wooden landing in a very narrow tunnel that plunged down and down into the depths beyond the light. There were stairs going down it, too, just as rickety, as clear an invitation to this is a bad idea as anything I’d ever seen.

  Jesse grabbed the lantern, holding it up high. “The early defenders of this land built the fortress to withstand all manner of attacks. But they were men of short lives and brutal deaths, and they knew that nothing was ever foolproof. So the walls of Iverson are hollow. There had to be a way to get the castle folk out should the invaders get in. A secret way.”

  “All the walls?” I asked, shocked.

  “No, not all. But many.”

  “Is that how you manage—”

  “Yes.” His arm lowered. The lantern burned between us, painting gray and gold along the contours of his face; he sent me a sideways look. “Not the walls of your tower, Lora. Rest easy. You’re truly alone up there.”

  Yes. Until His Right Royal Lordship decides to show up again.

  “Does Mrs. Westcliffe know?” I asked.

  “Not that I’ve been able to tell. It’s possible she knows about them but thinks they’re sealed up or filled in. Some are. In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen any footprints in the tunnels, besides my own. I don’t think even Hastings knows about this. At least, not about all of it. He knows about the grotto, of course.”

  “The …?”

  “Come on. It’s why I called you. You’re going to like it.”

  He took my hand again, and the honey-sweet pleasure of his touch mingled with the thrill of fear that was skittering up and down my spine. The combination was nearly unbearable.

  “You called me,” I whispered.

  “And you came,” Jesse Holms answered, a green-eyed glance back at me, a half-smile that dissolved my bones. Then we were moving hand in hand down the rotting plank stairs.

  I seethed with questions. I was ready to burst with them, and at the same time I was focused on putting one foot in front of the other, avoiding the gaps in the planks, trying not to examine too closely the rot in the wood or the thick pitch black that yawned beneath us. I could not smell an end to it. We might as well have been descending into the center of the earth.

  It’s Jesse. I’m safe. It’s Jesse, so I’m safe.

  I found myself watching either the lantern or the back of his head, both shining, both slipping deep into the dark heart of Iverson without falter, even when the air began to change and smell more of salt than stone. More of trapped waters than long-dead rodents.

  Eventually I realized I could see more than just Jesse and his lantern. I could see the ceiling and walls and the outline of his body glowing an unlikely, pale slate. The stairs were revealed to look, if possible, even more rickety. Some of the planks had fallen away altogether.

  “Mind yourself here,” he said, and paused to help me over a particularly large gap.

  I could have jumped it alone. But of course I never said so.

  There was something both foreign and hair-raising about having a boy hold my hand, not only for pleasure but for protection. I had no memory of it ever happening before and could not imagine that, if it had, it could ever have been better than this: a firm grip and a callused palm, sweet honey thrills zinging from my fingers all the way up my arm.

  Because this was not just any boy. And beyond his silhouette was that growing glow that lent him a sort of unearthly halo, as if he really were made of starlight.

  “Cheers,” Jesse said, and sent me another glance. “We’re here.”

  Here was a cavern with glimmering seawater as most of its floor, wet limestone walls streaked with minerals and moisture, and rivulets of crystals twinkling in the uneasy light like fireflies. Man-made columns, eight of them, broke the waters, reaching from seafloor to ceiling. They looked colossal enough to support the weight of the whole island.

  The slate-colored light was shining up from the water. A half-moon wedge of day blazed a brighter gray against the far wall, where the top of the sea met the top of the cavern entran
ce and air still got through.

  The tunnel had ended in a wide, cut-stone embankment that fronted the salt water. Centuries of restless tide had lapped its edges smooth as glass.

  As with the castle and it secrets, a long-dead someone had thought up the scale and bones of this space. Someone had discovered the grotto and constructed the rest, hauling in the rounded blocks for the columns, swimming down to the unknown bottom of the cavern to anchor the base of each. Someone had labored over every inch of the glassy embankment beneath my feet, using minds and hands and tools to ensure evenness, stability.

  Many someones. Generations of someones, perhaps.

  Except for where Jesse’s palm met mine, I felt clammy with cold. The weight of all those spirits in the air seemed to press down on me, pushing into my skin.

  “You’d moor your boat here.” Jesse used the lantern to indicate the column closest by, exposing eerie, ring-shaped stains of rust marking a row down its side. “You’d wait for the tide to go nearly all the way out at night, just high enough so that you could still row away in the dark. By the time anyone in the castle noticed you, hopefully their ships would be beached, and you’d be far enough gone to find safe harbor. Or at the very least be beyond the range of cannons or crossbows.”

  “Jesse,” I said, and he turned around.

  I wanted to address what had happened last night, our kiss, my fainting, him carrying me back to the tower. There was a weight in my chest that felt like an apology, although I didn’t know how to phrase it or even if I should try. There were too many layers of truth between this boy and me, obvious layers like, I don’t even know you, and layers more subtle, ones that whispered, I’ve known you forever.

  I let our arms stretch out into a bridge between us. The flowered cuff crooned its pretty song. And what I said was, “Am I dreaming this?”

  He hesitated, then shook his head.

  “Then”—I swallowed—“am I crazy? Have I gone truly crazy?”

  “No, Lora.”

  “But how … how am I a dragon? How are you a starman?”

  “I don’t think of myself as a starman, exactly,” he said soberly, though I sensed he wanted to smile. His hand released mine, the bridge broken; he moved to hang the lantern on a shiny new hook dug into the wall behind us. “I was born here, on earth. Not even far from here, in fact. Just over in Devon. My parents died young, when I was only five. Hastings is my great-uncle and he took me in, and I’ve lived here ever since. But I’ve always known what I am, as far back as I can remember. I’ve always been able to do the things I do. The stars have always spoken to me.”