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