by Shana Abe
“And you … speak back to them?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“But not to people.”
“No. Just to Hastings, and to you.”
A shiver took me; I crossed my arms over my chest. “What do the stars say?”
“All manner of things. Amazing things. Secret things. Things great and small, things profound and insignificant. They told me that, throughout time, there’ve been only a scattering of people like me, folk of both flesh and star. That even the whisper of their magic in my blood could annihilate me if I didn’t learn to control it. That I’d crisp to ash without control. Or, worse, crisp someone else.” His smile broke through. “And they told me about you. That you were born and would come to me when the time was right.”
“Did you summon me here?” The muted echo of my voice rebounded against the firefly walls: here-here-here. “To Iverson, I mean?”
… mean-mean-mean …
He didn’t answer at first. He looked at his feet, then walked to the edge of the embankment and squatted down, raking his fingers through the bright water near the toes of his boots.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” he said softly to the water. “Both infinite and finite, human and not. I’m of comet and clay and the sparks of sun across the ocean waves.” He sighed. “I know what it’s like to doubt yourself, to comprehend that you’re so unique you’re forced to wonder about … everything. But, yes, I called you to Iverson.”
It made dreadful sense. It actually made far more sense than anything anyone had told me so far. More sense than the notion that an orphan girl, a girl so mentally damaged she’d been institutionalized, would somehow find herself accepted into the finest finishing school in the kingdom just because there’d been an opening.…
I understood then that from the moment I’d heard Director Forrester first utter the words, I’d been invisibly balanced along a razor’s edge, waiting for everyone else around me to snap to and realize what I did: The entire situation was preposterous.
“You did this?” I moved to Jesse’s side, gazing down at the crown of his head. “All this, me and the school, and the bombs—”
“I only called you. The universe arranged the rest.”
“And the war,” I continued, abruptly queasy, “my God, the war. Are you saying that you and I are the reason for that?”
“I’m saying that the true nature of our world is for matters to arrange themselves along the simplest of paths. The war happened, and you came here because of it. Through it. We all slide along our destinies, Lora, and the war is how you came to slide to me.” He stood and flicked the water from his hand. “I’ve been calling you since the day you were born. Every day. Every night. If I dared to praise any single consequence of this tear between nations, it would be that it brought you to me.”
I was surprised to discover myself suddenly sitting on the stone floor, my tailbone aching. Luminous water sloshed before me, up and down and up, and I had to look away.
Then Jesse was there, his face close to mine.
“You don’t eat enough,” he said, frowning.
I covered my eyes with one hand and let out a laugh; I couldn’t help it. “I agree.”
“Your metabolism isn’t ordinary, especially now. You burn energy at a much higher rate than regular people. You need to consume more.”
“Perhaps you’d care to inform Mrs. Westcliffe,” I suggested, still hiding my eyes. “If I attempt anything beyond two paper-thin slices of cake at tea, she looks as if she’s planning to throttle me in my sleep.”
“No,” he said, decisive. “I’ll do better than that. Hang on.”
I drew up my knees and rested my head on my crossed arms, listening to the sounds of Jesse and the sea, both of them moving in small, mysterious ways beyond the red of my lids. When he returned, he was carrying manna in a woven reed basket: a round loaf of flour-dusted bread, a block of orange cheese, and a bottle of liquid, corked and greenish-dark.
He settled beside me and broke open the bread, handing me a chunk.
“Have you had wine before?”
“No,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Try some now. Just a sip. You’ll feel better.”
He uncorked the bottle and handed it over. I smelled cherries and sugar and something like chocolate. Mindful of what had happened with the whiskey, I tipped the bottle to my lips and touched only the tip of my tongue to the liquid.
“Sorry there’s no water. Next time I’ll bring some.”
“This is nice,” I said. I took another swallow. It was red wine, not green. It tasted like nothing I’d ever had before.
“I thought you’d be hungry. I packed this last night, so the bread might be stale.”
“No, it’s delicious.”
And it was. All of it. The cheese, as well, every last tangy speck. I ate like I was famished, like I hadn’t put away a heap of kippers and bacon a few hours before.
I held out the last hunk of bread to Jesse. He refused it with a smile, so I ate that, too.
I suppose that would have sealed the deal, were he Fay. I’d eaten his food and drunk his wine, and if he offered I’d gladly have taken more.
Fay or fateful stars, same difference. I looked at him and thought, Now I’m surely yours.
But I didn’t say it aloud.
“I thought this would be a good place,” Jesse said. He had drawn up his knees and wrapped his arms loose around them, like I had, gazing out peacefully at the water. I could feel the heat of his side so close to mine, as if he radiated it. As if the golden light that lived under his skin was really a fire, banked now but steady. Eternal warmth.
“Good place for what?”
“For you to find yourself. Your true self.”
I didn’t respond.
“You’re going to have to do it sometime, Lora. I can help you with it. Some of it, at least. It’s going to happen whether you will it or not. Better to plan ahead now, don’t you think?”
I stared down at the twill covering my knees. I stared hard at the tufts of wool that poked out here and there, the sturdy, diagonal weave of brown over brown.
“We can meet down here on weekends or after your classes. We might consider the woods, too, but there’s always the danger there of someone passing by.”
“Doesn’t anyone else ever come here?”
“No. People say it’s haunted.”
I looked back up at him.
“By a single ghost,” he explained, the corners of his lips lifted. “A very gentle one. I’m sure she won’t mind sharing the space with us.”
“I—I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking.”
“Either way, does it matter? I told you you’re safe with me, and I meant it. The grotto is perfect for us. It’s secluded but still open enough to hide something … large.”
“I don’t understand. What is it you think I’m going to be able to do? I’m just a girl.”
“To begin, you can stop thinking of yourself as just anything. I have a word for you, one I want you to keep in your heart.” Jesse unlocked his arms and turned to face me fully, holding me in a gaze that resurrected that shiver of before.
“Drákon,” he said.
And I knew it. I knew that word, even though I was positive I’d never, ever heard it fall from anyone else’s lips.
Drákon.
If the beast inside me had still been raging, it would have sucked on the word like Jesse’s sweet cherry wine. It would have gotten drunk on it.
“That’s what I am,” I said, as the truth of it rolled through me over and over, riding that cherry-wine crest. “That’s what we’re called. My—my kind.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know that? How do you know any of this?”
His hand lifted, a graceful palm cupped toward the ceiling, toward the universe we could not see beyond water and rock.
“Is there a word for you?” I asked.
I glimpsed a dimple in hi
s cheek with his wry new smile, one I’d never noticed before. “Jesse.”
“That’s it?”
“Do you prefer starman?”
“No.”
Jesse, star-bright. Jesse Holms. Jesse-of-the-stars.
I heard myself say, “Are you going to kiss me again?” and realized, horrified, that maybe I was the drunk one.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Er … soon?”
“I hope so. But not right now.” He climbed to his feet, reached out a hand and pulled me to mine, looking down at me ruefully. “Next time I’ll definitely remember to bring the water.”
• • •
God, he hated tea.
Armand Diego Lorimer Louis stared down at the steaming liquid in its cup, wan brown with little chewy bits of leaves mucking about near the bottom, and came to the conclusion that it was actually more than he could bear to lift the cup to his lips to drink.
There was lemon or cream to add to it, if he wished. Sparkling white sugar. All of it set out in silly little china containers painted round and round with podgy, smirking cherubs.
But nothing helped tea. It simply was what it was, which was boiling hot and flavorless.
Tea was the beverage, Mandy thought, of dreary, civilized people. People who would never lie without guilt, never steal without reason, never fornicate anywhere but in their own beds. With the curtains closed. In the dark.
He shouldn’t have stayed. He should have gone home after leaving her room. Truth was, his hair was mussed and his cuffs were damp and she wasn’t even present, and now here he was trapped beside Chloe yet again, suffocating in her noxious perfume. Pretending to listen to her natter on about a dress or a hat or her new gloves—it was always a dress, a hat, or new gloves; all right, and sometimes shoes—with his spoon gripped so tightly in his hand that his thumb and forefinger had gone white, and the tea bits whirling about in some awful, endless pattern, everything the same, every day the same, just as it always was. Just as it always was going to be.
He had a swift and utterly lucid vision of himself in this position in thirty-odd years. Loathsome tea, hot steam, silver spoon, and fifty-year-old Chloe seated opposite him talking about clothing, because to her it was categorically, absolutely, the most fascinating topic on the planet.
Besides, of course, herself.
For an unflinching instant, Armand wished with his whole heart that he were dead.
Then, at the very edge of his perception, something changed.
He glanced up.
She was passing by the doorway, walking with that fluid, nearly animal grace that no one else seemed to capture or even notice.
He was given four steps of her.
One: She moved from the hallway shadows into the light cast from the parlor. He saw her illuminated, drab colors gone bright; her skin alabaster, reflective; her hair tinted pink and gold and pink again.
Two: Her gaze met his, finding him past all the other people crowded inside the stuffy mirrored room, dying by inches and taking their tea.
Three: He was paralyzed. He couldn’t move, couldn’t smile, couldn’t nod. He was pinned in the gray of her eyes, a prisoner to their piercing clarity.
For an unflinching instant, Armand felt his heart explode like a firework, and the future seemed unwritten.
Then four: Eleanore looked away and passed the doorway. He was stuck with tea and dresses once more.
Chapter 17
We drank, of course, at the orphanage.
We were crafty about it, or at least tried to be, and nearly universally tight-lipped regarding the specific whens and wheres and whos. Rules ensnared every aspect of our lives, Blisshaven’s rules and our own, which were tacit and far more savage. From the time we were old enough to understand what gin was, we procured it and drank it. Anyone suspected of being a snitch tended to end up in the infirmary, usually missing teeth.
We had no money. We were given no allowance, not even a ha’penny for a peppermint stick or a cup of lemonade during our precious few outings into the city. So those who landed the gin were usually the quick-fingered older boys. The ones on the verge of something larger than themselves, with cracking voices and cunning gazes, who knew that the future rushing toward them was going to be even more desolate than their lives in the dorms. Who bonded into packs for dominance, who skulked about like hungry dogs let loose in the halls.
Who could slink away from our minders without getting caught. Who could distract a shopkeeper or pubmaster—and then run.
But even though they got their gin for free, they were still dogs. The gin wasn’t free to any of the rest of us.
As I said, we had no money. So it won’t astonish you to learn that although I’d never tasted fine wine before—or even mediocre wine or whiskey or champagne—I had tasted the raw, crude distillation of juniper berries in alcohol, quite a bit.
Jesse’s kiss, staggering as it was, was not my first.
I had learned the same lessons as most of the other girls in Blisshaven. Bargain for limits on time and body parts. Don’t let them use their tongues. Avoid Billy Patrick at all costs—grinning, vicious Billy Patrick—because no amount of gin he ever offered would be worth the bruises he left.
And never drink so much that you regretted your morning. The teachers were particularly short-tempered before noon. They weren’t likely to go soft on anyone lethargic, even if you said you were feeling off.
I had measured out my sips, my kisses, savoring the one while pretending I was someone else for the other, and in all my years there, I never went to bed intoxicated.
It was disheartening to discover myself so quickly affected by Jesse’s sweet red wine, but at least I knew the cure. I couldn’t risk the Sunday tea—especially after I’d glimpsed Armand in there, his blue eyes like flames—so I retreated to my room and slept.
By breakfast the next morning, aside from a dull ache in my forehead and a fuzzy coating on my tongue, I was more or less hale again.
Drákon.
I whispered it to my mirror-self before dressing, watching her face, her eyes, round black pupils, purple-gray irises shrunk into gleaming rings.
“Drákon,” I said aloud, and the girl in the mirror slowly smiled.
Even now I don’t think any lingering consequences of the wine were responsible for what happened that Monday. I think it was just something that was bound to be: Jesse’s all-knowing stars casting their own directions for the unruly path of my life.
• • •
“All right, then, ladies. Let’s be off,” commanded Professor Tilbury.
Tilbury was our history professor, potbellied and aged and with a voice that reached dangerously close to a squeak whenever he tried to raise it. He stood before us with his back to the large slate that had been fixed to the wall of our classroom. A single word, Iverson, had been chalked across the slate, with a long, uncharacteristic flourish of a tail completing the n.
We sat two by two in assigned rows, because the history classroom was crammed up short against the southern edge of the castle, which meant it was very narrow and unexpectedly lofty.
My chair was next to Lillian’s in the far back. From our shared desk, Professor Tilbury looked like a white-bearded gnome against the slate.
He surveyed the lot of us; no one had moved. “To your feet, young ladies! Today is a most special day indeed. Today we will enjoy a walking tour of the history of our own fortress.”
Beatrice and Stella, directly ahead of me, exchanged eye rolls.
“Sir,” said Mittie from the very front, in her most piteous tone, “isn’t it cold out for a walk? We haven’t even our shawls.”
It had dawned another overcast day, with a brisk spring wind blowing spray in fitful spurts across the channel, rattling the windowpanes. Still, pug-faced Mittie was far from any danger of freezing. She just liked to whine.
Professor Tilbury must have heard every whine before.
“The majority of our tour will be within the castl
e walls, Miss Bashier. If you didn’t need your shawl for this chamber, you will not need it for the rest of them. However, if you truly feel a shawl is indispensable to your attire, you may fetch it now. The rest of us shall await you here. Naturally, any amount of time taken from the scheduled class period by your absence shall be made up by all of you at its conclusion.”
The hour after history was luncheon. Even Mittie wasn’t stupid enough to push matters that far.
I arose from my chair, glad to be doing something besides sitting and scratching down notes, anyway. One by one, the other girls did the same.
Confident that he had made his point, Professor Tilbury offered us what, for him, passed as a smile. He had blocky yellow teeth.
“Excellent. Let us begin at the beginning. Do any of you know what this room used to be?”
None of us did.
“Iverson’s original keep was constructed by the conquering sons of Normandy. It was ruled by barons who commanded the wealth of the ports and all the fertile lands nearby.” Someone tittered at the word fertile; Tilbury forged on. “Therefore, this fortress, even from its inception, was home to a powerful, prosperous lord and his family. It also would have been home to all his knights and servants and their families, as well. A castle this size might have had several hundred people living inside it, and that is before we even begin to consider the livestock.”
“How primitive,” sniffed Caroline.
“Primitive, mayhap, but necessary. So imagine you are that powerful lord who controls this castle, if you will. Where do you go for your privacy? Where do you retreat with your family to escape the everlasting noises and smells and demands of the general populace?”
A word came to me, a word from the past. It bobbed up from the blank ocean of my memory, untethered.