I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.
I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.
I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.
I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.
I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.
I shall not wander the school grounds alone at night.
x 100.
• • •
Days of rain. Days and days of rain, and nights, too.
It put the castle out of sorts. It forced everyone indoors all the time, not just the spun-sugar girls but the maids and menservants and teachers and everyone.
The only people I ever glimpsed mud-spattered from the weather were Hastings and Jesse, who drove the Iverson wagons on and off the island, because the food had to come from somewhere. Should the rains never cease and the fish flee and the sea rise to flood the earth, we’d have nothing but soggy herbs from the kitchen garden to sustain us. It was a tad too easy to imagine my fellow students resorting to cannibalism—they definitely appeared the type—but it seemed to me a dire prospect. I had no doubt most of my classmates would taste like vinegar.
Naturally, preparation for the duke’s party consumed them. Even the girls too young to attend gossiped and sighed over the notion of dancing in Armand’s arms, and bickered over which of them would make the best sweetheart. Sophia and her band of merrymakers, who were attending, pretended they had much better things to do than worry about one single, provincial little party, even if it was being hosted by a duke. But it was all they talked about, anyway, outside class.
Outside class, I sat alone and dreamed of anything but the party.
Outside class, I sat and dreamed of the coming night.
At night, every night, I was no longer alone. Whatever time we could spare, whether it was hours or just minutes, Jesse and I met in the grotto, and we practiced my Becoming.
That was how I had begun to think of it privately. Becoming, capitalized. I still wasn’t certain what I was Becoming. I tried to hold on to the image of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. That seemed safe enough.
I’d never seen any picture of a dragon, however, that looked anything like a butterfly. Less wings; rather more teeth.
The small, sleepy hours of early Saturday morning found us seated, as we usually were, on the upper slope of the grotto’s embankment. We had blankets and food and water—no wine—and the soft, antiqued light of Jesse’s lantern bathing us in amber. I endeavored with my entire heart not to think of these stolen moments as anything romantic. Jesse was not courting me. He was not wooing me, certainly not as I’d heard boys usually did, sending girls posies or poems or buying them sweets or taking them to the theater. He didn’t attempt to kiss me even once.
We met like this because he was teaching me to Become. And yet every night I sat there opposite him on the blankets and looked at his attentive, handsome face and I thought, This is our wooing. This is our Becoming.
I’d had no luck with going to smoke again. During school I tried so hard to stay … as myself. But later on, down beneath the castle, when I did try to dissolve, it simply didn’t happen.
There were times when I felt ready to burst. My skin felt shrunken, my heart hammered in my chest. I was so close. I willed myself back to that moment at the brink of the roof; I willed the fiend back inside me; I willed the voice to come to life …
… and, nothing.
The tide came in. The tide went out. Nights alone with Jesse in this haunted, sparkling cave, and all I had to show for it were dark smudges under my eyes and a constant chill I couldn’t seem to shake, even during daylight.
I didn’t ever speak the words aloud, but it wasn’t going to happen, I knew. And I couldn’t blame it on the weather, or the stars, or my uncertain age. Deep down, what prevented the Becoming was purely me.
Because, deep down, I was afraid.
It was selfish and cowardly and low, I admit it. Certainly there were people beyond my cloistered world who were suffering far worse terrors than my own. The Tommies forced to live and die in mud trenches, for example, or the townsfolk trapped beneath the deadly zeppelins—I had smelled them