The duke had fired his guns at them all. They’d retreated, thought to go to the automobile to fetch a doctor and the sheriff, but they’d stumbled the wrong way and fallen down the slope to the beach instead. All three of them. And there, noble Jesse had died.
Fact. Fiction. Likely because so much of it had happened, and because Armand’s red-eyed, stoic distress seemed so genuine, the adults around us had accepted it as truth.
Mostly.
I think if I hadn’t been discovered wearing only Armand’s coat as I knelt next to Jesse’s body, Mrs. Westcliffe might have found the whole thing easier to swallow.
Yet the official version ruled the day. And here we all were basking in it, breathing fresh sea air, warmed by the generous spring sun. Burying a hero. A far, far greater hero than anyone standing around me at his funeral would ever suspect.
Somewhere in deep-blue briny waters, a U-boat rested, filled with live torpedoes and solid-gold men.
I thought I better understood Rue’s letters now. I understood her warnings about the pain that would come with my Gifts.
I understood my sacrifice.
I listened to the vicar speak. I listened to the breeze. The birds. The sea. I watched the first handful of dirt land on Jesse’s coffin and thought with absolute sincerity, Wish it were me.
• • •
I waited until Aubrey’s funeral to steal away. It wasn’t long to wait, only a week, so I made myself tolerate it.
I paid attention to my spiders. Their remarkable webs.
Due to a loss of blood, I’d been excused from attending classes, although the professors had made an effort to extend their best wishes for my recovery, mostly by assigning me homework. It’d been piling up on the bureau. I knew I should at least inspect it, but it bored me. Everything bored me.
Let them kick me out of Iverson if they wanted. Perhaps I’d fly to the moon to live.
Lora-of-the-moon. That would be me.
I itched where I was healing. The wound to my wing was a phantom itch somewhere in the vicinity of my shoulder blade; unlike my arm, no bullet hole showed there in my human form. But that particular itch was especially maddening, because I could not scratch at it. It was always present.
The following Saturday morning, the castle emptied. I got up to watch them all go, all the ebony girls, all the teachers, most of the help. Sophia had told me the formal ceremony was to be held at Tranquility, which had a completed chapel and nice, virgin grounds for its first grave. They would be burying an empty casket.
The duke, regretfully, would be unable to attend.
I wondered briefly if his madhouse was anything like mine had been, and found that I couldn’t wish Moor Gate even on the man who had killed my true love.
I dressed—Blisshaven’s clothes, not Iverson’s. I walked like I knew what I was doing and where I was going, which was true, and I left the fortress.
It was an easy journey through the forest. The day was sublime, the kind of day reverently described in those sweeping, romantic histories of England that populated the castle library. Shafts of sunlight broke through the green canopy of trees, daubing yellow along wildflowers and butterflies and once even a rabbit, half a primrose in his mouth, staring at me with his ears high and straight.
I could smell the coming summer still, just as I had my first evening here, as I’d stepped from the train. It was warmer and lusher now, less a tinge in the air than a sultry blossoming. It traveled across the sea and laced through these woods. It slipped up my arms and neck and face and kissed me with the faintest hint of bitter salt.
Summer in the woods. Summer on the isle. I imagined it all so … full of life.
Jesse’s cottage stood deserted. I’d wondered if Hastings had come by yet—surely he had—or had thought to maybe move into it now himself from his loft above the stables. Seemed like it would be nicer than living over horses.
I knocked on the door, in case. No one answered.
The latch gave at my touch. The cat’s-eye knot watched me go in.
A shadowed place. A place of shadows. I had the feeling all the lamps in the world wouldn’t illuminate the cottage again. Jesse had been its light, the heart of these woods.
Pine, soap, coffee. Cinnamon, vanilla, rain. Scents that wrapped around me as I walked