The Sweetest Dark

Chapter Twenty-Three

Monday dragged on. The lack of sleep I’d been accumulating over the past week or so was creeping up on me. I fell asleep in my chair during Vachon’s lesson in the ballroom, listening to Caroline struggle to add some brio to her Rossini.

She wasn’t succeeding. With Vachon tapping his wand hard into his palm, she repeated the same passage again and again, and the world went fuzzy and my head dipped down to my chest.

I awoke to my classmates’ giggles and monsieur’s wand whacking me upon the shoulder.

At least he hadn’t hit me across the knuckles. I fancy it was that he didn’t want to risk bruising them; the duke might ask for an encore any day.

I staggered through the rest of my classes. I took notes; I conjugated verbs. I sketched pomegranates and limes in fat, crumbly strokes of charcoal on Bristol board and earned a word of praise from Miss Swanston, who seemed to think my simple lines were the product of modernist inspiration, instead of I just want this done.

I listened for Jesse’s music, which came to me finally during supper, floating up from beyond the windows of the dining hall. He would be standing out there in the dark, I knew. Standing in the moonlit gardens, looking up at the glass.

We had no better reliable means of communication. Paper notes could be intercepted; I might get caught at any time whenever I tried to sneak to the grotto or out to the green. But if Jesse was near enough for me to hear him, I could understand him. Intricate music, dulcet music, his silent symphony moved from brio to lullaby with such effortless beauty, Vachon would weep. And every bit of Jesse’s song was meant for me, a one-way message only I could receive.

Tonight it said, Rest, love. Sleep.

That seemed a fantastic suggestion. But I decided to drop by the library before I made my way up to my tower.

The truth was, despite what I’d told Sophia yesterday, it was the one place I tended to constantly avoid.

Imagine a man crawling through a desert, dying of thirst. He needs water; his parched dreams are of water; only water is going to save him.

And then at last help comes. A bloke walks up to him and says, “Sorry, chap, no water for you. But here’s a lovely glass of powdered sugar. You can have as much as you like!”

Books had always been my lifeline. Even at Moor Gate, they’d offered me books to keep me biddable, and I’d plunged into worlds I’d never guessed existed. Fiction or fact, it hardly mattered; books transported me beyond my own mental borders. Maybe they even helped preserve my sanity. What there was of it.

Iverson girls were not exactly encouraged to dream beyond their borders. There’d be no tales of amazing submarines or folklore of the Fay found here. Mrs. Westcliffe didn’t even subscribe to a newspaper.

However, if I wanted to read about needlework or making cheese, I had my pick.

I don’t think I was the only one unimpressed with the selection. After supper, the library always filled with students, most of them from my class and Chloe’s, but all they did was sit around and play games and chat about things like fashion and boys until curfew—until I would have been blue in the face with boredom. Usually a teacher or Westcliffe sat with them, I suppose to ensure no spontaneous moment of meaningful conversation erupted.

It was yet another part of life at the school in which I would be considered an interloper, and on any other night I’d walk past the library entrance without a second thought.

But …

Armand had mentioned that he had a book of peerage at Tranquility. All these blue-blooded girls mucking about: I thought it a good chance Iverson might, as well.

Perhaps I could riddle out the mystery of Rue and Kit. Perhaps I could find them before Armand did.

Perhaps … I could find my own family somewhere in there.

It was a notion I’d not allowed myself to surrender to until now, but it had been boiling inside me for hours, bubbling up against the thin wall of my resistance. It was feverish and stubborn and full of absolutely stupid hope, so of course I’d tried to ignore it.

Armand was a dragon. I was a dragon. Armand’s genealogy could be traced. My genealogy …

We might be related, even distantly. I didn’t have any familial feelings toward him, really, but for the first time ever in my memory, I had a place to start.

The library itself was just as anyone might picture a library in a castle would be, jammed with tables and overstuffed chairs, long and very tall, with shelves and shelves of books that reached so high—at least two stories—that there were sturdy wooden ladders affixed to hooks on every wall. The ladders were on rollers, and the hooks attached to brass rails, so in theory one could slide from one end of the room to the other without having to descend.

In practice, though, we were forced to climb down again if we had to move over even one shelf. It was tedious and likely yet another reason why there wasn’t a great deal of reading done in this place.

Somewhere up there, shelved away, might be the answers I sought. There might even be some forbidden Poe or Wilde or Stoker hiding amid the many uses for pigs, crouched back in the shadows and hoping for the light.

No one paid me any mind as I made my way to the catalogue bank. I flipped through the handwritten cards of authors and titles; the only way to find something here was to know at least one of those things. The shelf number for the book would be inked in beside it, but each shelf contained about fifty books, so you had to hang there on the ladder and read every spine of every one until you came across yours.

Let it be said that nothing was ever accomplished in haste at Iverson.

I didn’t know either the author or the name of the tome I wanted. I couldn’t even remember the title Armand had mentioned last night. I tried looking under Peerage, but the only book listed there was Peerage of Royal India, circa 1835, which I doubted would help.

Yet there I was ten minutes later, perched high on the ladder of the eastern wall, perusing shelf number 229, which probably no one had gone near in decades, the dust was so deep. I found India’s peerage right away; the spine featured ornate lettering stamped in real gold foil and what looked like a sapphire affixed near the top, but it was only paste.

All the rest of the titles seemed geared toward specific family lines, especially ancient Saxon kings.

Not useful.

Below me, the tables were all rimmed with girls. And there was Mrs. Westcliffe in a chair cozied up to the fireplace, a trio of eighth-years at her feet. She had a book in her lap and was reciting what sounded like a sonnet to them. I was near enough to catch a few lines and realize I’d read it. It was one about love and a noble knight whose sacrifice for his pure maiden grants him a place of honor amid the constellations forever and ever.

Right.

I was getting filthy up here. I’d have to be careful not to touch my shirtwaist before washing my hands or I’d catch hell from Gladys about the marks.

A small commotion began at the door. Almeda hurried in, trailed by two other maids and a man in a khaki riding uniform, who had taken off his black-brimmed hat and was holding it under one arm. The chevron markings of an officer were stitched onto his sleeves.

All the girls at all the tables fell silent. I doubted anyone recognized the man, but we all recognized what he meant.

Mrs. Westcliffe found her feet. She handed the book of sonnets to one of the eighth-years and went to meet the man. They conferred for a moment, his head to her ear, and then she stepped back again and gave a terse nod. Her gaze searched the room.

“Miss Bashier,” she said.

Everyone looked around. Mittie sat, unmoving, at a table beneath a stained-glass window. A lion with a mane flaming outward like the corona of the sun pranced behind her, locked in the glass.

Sophia was sitting next to Mittie, and she finally gave her a small bump with her elbow, so Mittie got up. Sophia stood, as well, but only Mittie walked around the table and crossed the rug to the newcomer and the headmistress.

“Come with me, my dear,” said Mrs. Westcliffe, and put her arm about Mittie’s shoulders and drew her from the room.

The man offered a bow to the rest of us, then followed. Almeda followed him, the other maids followed her, and then there were only students left, staring at one another with round, round eyes.

...

Mittie’s father had worked for the office of the prime minister. He wasn’t even a soldier. But he’d been in Paris, consulting with a general there, when a bomb from an airship blew him and his hotel to pieces.

...

Two more days passed, and Jesse still hadn’t let me know it was time to meet.

Unsurprisingly, I hadn’t heard a peep from Armand, either. When a boy tells you to bugger off, it usually means he’s done with you. For a while, at least.

I leaned out my window on my third night alone and studied the stars. With some effort, I’d been able to pry open my thousand-diamond window far enough so that if I pressed my body to the wall and let the stone take my weight, I could fit my head and shoulders through to the open air.

A night of patchy clouds and moon. A night with a tinge of purple but not that full, amazing saturation of color it sometimes had. The clouds were mauve lined with platinum, drifting against the tinsel stars.

The sea sloshed against the island bridge, regular as a heartbeat. It was oddly comforting to think that it would always do that, always be like that, no matter who won the war.

But it was the stars that fascinated me. I heard them singing now. Rather, I’d always heard them singing, but since Jesse, since I’d Turned to smoke, I heard them singing to me. Before it had always seemed as if they were just another chorus in countless strange choruses troubling my life. Now I heard the words.

dragon-girl, come, come, last of the chosen, beloved of our beloved, come up.

All three times I’d Turned to smoke in the grotto, I wanted to reach the stars so badly it obsessed me. I wasn’t sure what would have happened had I escaped the cavern. Would I have gone up and up? Would I have ever returned to earth, even for Jesse?

I couldn’t say. As I looked at them now, they winked and twinkled back at me like a fiery scattering of my most bosom friends.

There was only one way to find out.

I Turned to smoke, sifting up and out through the window.

They pulled at me right away, drew me in threads from the castle. I blew out over the liquid silver of the channel, marveling at the shrinking world, at a pod of seals darting beneath the surface of the waves. At the nests of gulls dotting the mainland cliffs beyond the island, eyes that stared and beaks that clattered.

Higher. The separation of land and sea below me was a jigsaw line of rough forest and fields edging rougher water.

yes, yes, you’re free like us! come up!

There were winds up here, brutal ones. I felt myself begin to tear in their currents and tried to duck down beneath them again, but they were too strong.

up!

This was bad. I was having difficulty holding myself together. Within minutes I’d been swept so far out to sea, I couldn’t even see the coast any longer. Everything was indigo and silver and dark, and the stars in their almost-purple heaven.

up!

I strained to obey. Attempting to slide beneath the river of wind only thinned me more; I gathered my strength and forced myself upward, becoming more like a blade than a sheet of vapor, and when I ripped free of the current I found myself in blessed calm, tumbling about until I was able to right myself and go calm, as well.

hello, sang the stars, their hallelujah chorus of lights twinkling now every color of the rainbow.

Hello! I would have sung back, a hallelujah of my own, had I a voice.

...

I Turned back to girl inside Jesse’s cottage. He was in the bedroom; it was all very dark. I Turned by the pair of chairs near the back window, because there was a blanket slung over one of them and I used it as a wrap.

I stood there, feeling like I needed to catch my breath, although I wasn’t even winded.

I was wearing flesh again. I was firm inside a body, feet flat on the floor. I made a fist and pressed my nails into my palm. When I released them, red crescent moons marked my new skin.

Jesse emerged from the bedroom carrying a candle spilling wax into a holder, closing the door behind him. He didn’t look sleepy, like I’d woken him up. He looked tired, though. There were lines bracketing his mouth. His hair hung long and limp.

“I’ve been out,” I said.

“I know.”

“I listened to your friends. The stars.”

“I know.”

“I want you to finish the story now, Jesse. I want to know what happened to the Elemental after Death came to her in the desert. What was their ending?”

He walked to the chair that’d had the blanket and folded himself into it slowly, one limb at a time, as if he had to consider how it would happen. He was wearing a regular shirt and trousers and even shoes. Surely I hadn’t actually woken him?

“Where did I stop?” he asked absently.

“When she—the unraveling.”

“Oh, yes. Death had come and done his work. But in her dying moments, even as she unraveled, the goddess reached up and dragged what stars she could from the sky down to earth and sent them into the seeds of men. So that a few humans, a very few, would be born with fragments of her power and theirs. It was a gift of gold and death.”

“Death? That’s a gift?”

He gazed up at me.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Do you mean to say—are you telling me that your powers are linked to your death? Is that your sacrifice?”

“Power begets power. It requires it, too.”

“For God’s sake.” I stomped over and threw myself at his feet, just like one of the eighth-years with Mrs. Westcliffe. “Would you please stop talking like that? Would you please tell me in plain words what I want to know?”

Jesse leaned forward and touched the fingers of one hand to my bare upper arm.

“Everyone dies, Lora. I don’t mind knowing how my own death is going to come about.”

“That’s—that’s—” I groped for the right words and could only come up with ones I’d blurted to him before. “That’s completely unfair!”

“Aye,” he said, soft.

“You’ve got to stop, then! Stop making gold. Stop doing anything like that that brings you nearer to dying.”

Despite the lines of exhaustion, his lips smiled. “Breathing? Existing? Being who I am?”

I buried my face against his knees, then wrapped my arms around his legs to pin him in place. I realized then that the blanket I wore was one of the fleece ones that had been in the carriage on the very first night we’d met. It was his, not the school’s. All along it had been his, and he must have put it in there for me.

Because, even then, Jesse Holms had known what I needed.

His fingers began a glide up my arm, across my shoulder. Down my back. He drew figure eights upon me, five-pointed stars, our initials entwined.

“When will it happen?” I asked, to his knees.

“Well, not tomorrow, in any case. Or the next day, or the next. I’ve years in me yet, dragon-girl. Don’t fret.”

We stayed like that, he in the chair, me on the floor, with his hand tracing those clever, soothing patterns along my skin, until the sky began to pale and the morning larks began to stir in the woods and break into their own versions of heavenly songs.