rough pat, grabbed the pitchfork, and left and latched the stall.
“Come on,” he said, walking past her, tossing the fork behind the trough outside. “You can’t stay here. Come with me.”
The stars approved, a swelling chorus of sound that he could not have blocked from his ears any more than he could his own heartbeat.
destiny along this path. delight both dark and bright.
A concept so cerebral as destiny wasn’t what lit him to fire inside.
Delight, though. That was another matter entirely.
• • •
“I started to dissolve today. Into smoke or mist or something.”
We were walking away from the castle and the stable and Hastings’s view, enfolded nearly at once by the soft charcoal dark. I didn’t see the need for subtlety.
“Did you?”
If Jesse was surprised or appalled, none of it was revealed in his tone. He didn’t even glance at me, not that I could tell. His pace didn’t falter.
“Yes,” I said firmly. “Atop the roof of the castle. At the very edge. I was—I don’t know how to describe it. I was almost in a trance of sorts. I had climbed out to the edge of the battlement, but I didn’t even see it. In my mind, in my memory, I was back at the orphanage, back during this one night when I was much younger, and I …”
“You what?” he asked, still undisturbed.
“I jumped out the window there. From the top story. I jumped.” I heard the doubt in my own voice and hurried on. “And there was only the courtyard below me, not even a dirt one but one made of cobblestones. I’m sure it was real—but I never got in trouble for it. And I wasn’t hurt. I don’t even remember how I got back inside.”
“How do you know you almost went to smoke today?”
“Sophia saw it, though she thought it was an illusion. She stopped me just before I—” I shuddered despite myself. “Before I jumped again.”
“I see.”
I bit my lip. “I think it was real. That time at the orphanage. So I need to know if it was also real with you.”
We’d ended up next to a hedge pruned to resemble a loping hound. In a few weeks it would probably come into ferocious bud, but tonight it was skeletal, all bare branches and thorns.
Jesse was staring at me; I felt it, although I didn’t raise my gaze above his chest.
My dreams of him had been so … intimate. The thought that they might have been more than dreams both excited and mortified me.
I reached out and touched the nose of the hound, pressing the pad of my thumb into a thorn. Behind us, Iverson loomed, a monolith dividing the wind and clouds.
Jesse shoved his hands into his pockets. “What do you think, Lora?”
A flash of irritation took me. “I think that I asked you first. And I’d appreciate a straightforward answer, if you please.”
“Do you hear them? The bombs?”
“Yes, but—”
“Do you smell the burning?”
“What burning?”
“From the bombs,” he said patiently. “From the fires they’re starting in the towns.”
I started to shake my head. My lips began to form the word no, but then I hesitated. I became aware that I did smell something, something faint and horrid. Acrid chemicals. Singed meat.
The no strangled in my throat.
He nodded grimly, reading my face. “It’s not supposed to be like this, you coming into your gifts in stages. But, then again, you’re exceptional in every way, Lora Jones, so perhaps the regular rules don’t apply to you. I don’t know. And I don’t know if what happened to you at the orphanage was real, but from what I understand, when you transform fully—especially the first time—there is a price to pay.”
“What do you mean? What price?”
“Pain,” he confessed, on a hard exhale. “I’m sorry. There’s always a sacrifice for every gift. It’s … it’s rather a rule of the universe, really. You were granted a great gift, so your sacrifice will be great, as well. That ensures the balance of all.”
I recoiled from the hound, balling my hand into a fist against my stomach. “Well, what manner of pain? I mean, how much?”
“A great gift,” he emphasized, low.
“Oh.” I was abruptly short of breath. “Of course.”
Stupid, stupid—how stupid that I hadn’t thought of it before, that it would hurt. Obviously it would. And then I couldn’t stop imagining it: my body bloating, mutating, into something hideous and snakelike. Something grotesque. My skin stretching shiny thin, my bones cracking and shifting and reknitting. My teeth sharpening, my