through me as she moved, made sounds. I knew I was blushing.
“How did you get there!” I said. I went to the window and reached through the bars and clasped both her wrists.
Her little mouth was all sweetness and laughter. Her hair was a great shimmering mane around her face.
“I climbed the wall, of course,” she said. “How do you think I got here?”
“Well, go down. You can’t come through the bars. I’ll go to meet you.”
“You’re very right about that,” she said. “I’ve been to all the windows. Meet me on the battlements above. It’s faster.”
She started climbing, hooking her boots easily into the bars, then she vanished.
She was all exuberance as she’d been the night before as we came down the stairs together.
“Why are we lingering here?” she said. “Why don’t we go on now to Paris?”
Something was wrong with her, lovely as she was, something not right . . . what was it?
She didn’t want kisses now, or even talk, really. And that had a little sting to it.
“I want to show you the inner room,” I said. “And the jewels.”
“The jewels?” she asked.
She hadn’t seen them from the window. The cover of the chest had blocked her view. She walked ahead of me into the room where Magnus had burned, and then she lay down to crawl through the tunnel.
As soon as she saw the chest, she was shocked by it.
She tossed her hair a little impatiently over her shoulder and bent to study the brooches, the rings, the small ornaments so like those heirlooms she’d had to sell long ago one by one.
“Why, he must have been collecting them for centuries,” she said. “And such exquisite things. He chose what he would take, didn’t he? What a creature he must have been.”
Again, almost angrily, she pushed her hair out of her way. It seemed paler, more luminous, fuller. A glorious thing.
“The pearls, look at them,” I said. “And these rings.” I showed her the ones I’d already chosen for her. I took her hand and slipped the rings on her fingers. Her fingers moved as if they had life of their own, could feel delight, and again she laughed.
“Ah, but we are splendid devils, aren’t we?”
“Hunters of the Savage Garden,” I said.
“Then let’s go into Paris,” she said. Faint touch of pain in her face, the thirst. She ran her tongue over her lips. Was I half as fascinating to her as she was to me?
She raked her hair back from her forehead, and her eyes darkened with the intensity of her words.
“I want to feed quickly tonight,” she said, “then go out of the city, into the woods. Go where there are no men and women about. Go where there is only the wind and the dark trees, and the stars overhead. Blessed silence.”
She went to the window again. Her back was narrow and straight, and her hands at her sides, alive with the jeweled rings. And coming as they did out of the thick cuffs of the man’s coat, her hands looked all the more slender and exquisite. She must have been looking at the high dim clouds, the stars that burned through the purple layer of evening mist.
“I have to go to Roget,” I said under my breath. “I have to take care of Nicki, tell them some lie about what’s happened to you.”
She turned, and her face looked small and cold suddenly, the way it could at home when she was disapproving. But she’d never really look that way again.
“Why tell them anything about me?” she asked. “Why ever even bother with them again?”
I was shocked by this. But it wasn’t a complete surprise to me. Perhaps I’d been waiting for it. Perhaps I’d sensed it in her all along, the unspoken questions.
I wanted to say Nicki sat by your bed when you were dying, does that mean nothing? But how sentimental, how mortal that sounded, how positively foolish.
Yet it wasn’t foolish.
“I don’t mean to judge you,” she said. She folded her arms and leaned against the window. “I simply don’t understand. Why did you write to us? Why did you send us all the gifts? Why didn’t you take this white fire from the moon and go where you wanted with it?”
“But where should I want to go?” I said. “Away from all those I’d known and loved? I did not want to stop thinking of you, of Nicki, even of my father and my brothers. I did what I