“What? No comments about my charming manners?”
“Er …” He seemed dazed in the firelight, watching me. “No.”
I placed the china plate on the floor. Gilt traced its rim, a ring of golden light, and the fire before us sighed and worked its way along the final orangey bit of log.
“You never told your father.” I didn’t make it a question. “About me. What I am.”
Another frowning, thin-lipped look.
“He said there’s a boy in the stars who speaks to him in his dreams. Who told him what I am.”
“A boy in the stars,” he repeated slowly.
“How could that be? Could Jesse … do that? Come to him like that?”
“You’re asking me about Jesse?”
“Well,” I said, and stopped, a little flustered. “Well, there’s no one else to ask, is there?”
Armand lowered his gaze. After a moment, he began to tap the pie plate thoughtfully with one finger. “All right. I think … I suspect it must be true. You’ve never told Reg about any of it, and I haven’t, so aside from Jesse, there really is no one else who knows the truth, right?”
I shook my head.
“There’s your answer, then.” He gave the plate an extra tap. “Unless he’s a bloody good guesser.”
“Or a bloody astute lunatic,” I countered, unthinking.
The words hung between us. I winced and ventured a look back at him, but the lunatic’s son was staring bleakly into the fire.
“I’m sorry, Mandy. I’m a moron.”
“No harm done,” he said, but he sounded just as bleak as he looked.
I tried to rally. “That means, then, that somehow Jesse really does talk to him. That everything that your father said that Jesse said is true. That Aubrey is alive and imprisoned somewhere. That I’m meant to fly to him.”
“To rescue him,” Armand finished.
I shook my head again. I didn’t dare blurt out what was I was thinking now: That is truly, truly insane.
I played with a fold of the blanket draped along my knee. I ran my hand over it, the center of my palm, thinking hard.
“No,” I said finally. “It can’t be done. I’m supposed to fly across the front? Across Europe, into the thick of the war, dodging zeppelins and bombs and aeroplanes and God knows what? I mean, we don’t even know where Aubrey’s being held.”
“East Prussia,” said Armand. “Schloss des Mondes. It’s a medieval ruin. Apparently they converted it into a prison camp.”
I stared at him, mute, and he lifted a shoulder.
“He’s a nobleman and an officer, a prisoner of war. Rules of the game say they have to tell us, just as we have to tell them about our prisoners.”
“They just—give you his address?”
“Something like that. So we can send him aid parcels. Extra clothing, food. Sweets. Cigarettes. Things to trade. Since he’s an officer, he’s likely to have some enlisted bloke as a servant, so you send things for him, too.”
I couldn’t help it; I let out a laugh. “Does he even need rescuing?”
Armand lifted his head. “I think he must,” he said, quiet. “If Jesse says so.”
And that was the end of my laughter.
“You should get back to Iverson.” He climbed to his feet. “Try to get some rest. We’ll work out a plan soon.”
Work out a plan. As if it was all going to be so, so simple.
Maybe it would be, for him. After all, Jesse hadn’t told the duke anything about Armand coming along, had he?
“I didn’t have a chance to sell your pinecone yet,” he said, walking a few steps away from me. His voice had taken on a flat, businesslike tone. “I’d meant to go up to London today, but then the wire came.”
“I understand. I couldn’t take the money now, anyway. I can’t carry it when I’m smoke.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Perhaps, if you’ve managed to sell it by graduation—”
“Fine.”
He turned in place, looking at me from across the room. I clutched my blanket to my chest with both hands and gazed back. I was suddenly, acutely aware of how attractive he was, and how very expressionless, and how only twenty-four hours ago he had asked me to marry him and I’d never bothered to answer.
“I hope there’s no trouble with it,” I said awkwardly.
“Don’t worry, Lora. No one ever gives me trouble about anything anymore.”
Except you, he might as well have finished.
The air felt heavy and sad. Even the fire seemed sad, the last, diminished tongues of flame beginning to flicker out. I opened my mouth to add something else, something encouraging or cheerful or even just a polite goodbye … but instead I Turned and flowed away.
Armand watched me go. He didn’t say goodbye, either.
Chapter 5
Before the war, I had never given a second thought to moonless nights.
But before the war, I’d never been given a reason to.
Now I had one.
For a few terrible nights a month, every month, England went dark. In London and Brighton and towns up and down the coast, windows were papered in black. Streetlights were extinguished. Carriages and automobiles combed the streets without the help of lanterns, and everyone hurried to get home before dusk. Just carrying a rushlight outside to check on the family dog was considered a foolish risk, not only for you but for all your neighbors as well.
Even at Iverson, we kept the oil lamps and chandeliers cold.
Because on the moonless nights, German airships slunk across the Channel. And they had bellies full of bombs.
With my dragon hearing I’d learned to recognize two new sounds since the war began:
Thup-thup-thup-thup.
That was the sound made by the propellers of the airships.
And: shoom-shoom-shoom.
The engines of a U-boat.
I listened for them every night before falling asleep, but, oh, on those damned dark nights when the moon went away, it seemed I was either awake in my bed or else smoke above the Channel, drifting. Waiting.
Even after the stars would whisper reassurances (safe, beast, tonight you’re safe), I kept my vigil. If I stopped paying attention, who would hear Death descending? Armand’s hearing wasn’t as keen as mine, not yet. So there was only me.
Smoke-thing, winged-thing. An injured monster who couldn’t even hold her shape half the time.
But still.
After leaving Tranquility that night, I didn’t return to my room. I floated with the wind out to sea, letting it thin me sheer, hoping it might ease the bittersweet ache that felt as real as anything solid above or below me.
Jesse was still here. Somehow, still here.
A boy in the stars.
Where are you? I wondered, mist beneath their shimmer. I love you, where are you?
safe, beast, was all I got in response. tonight you are safe.
Chapter 6
The school was awash in the news of Aubrey’s survival, but even that could not usurp the bubbly, simmering excitement of this year’s upcoming graduation. I was in the tenth-year class, the second-to-final year before we were unchained and loosed like primped and powdered lionesses upon society. So although I personally wasn’t going to graduate from the esteemed Iverson School for Girls (or, as Sophia once put it, “this wretched pile of rocks”) in about a week’s time, I was still expected to contribute to the official celebration.
Every year but mine had a single, chosen girl perform some role at the ceremony to send off the graduating class. The younger pupils mostly presented bouquets or demonstrated their curtsies. But it was Iverson tradition for all the tenth-year students to do something showcasing their own particular talents. Even scholarship students.