my dear,” said Mrs. Westcliffe, and put her arm about Mittie’s shoulders and drew her from the room.
The man offered a bow to the rest of us, then followed. Almeda followed him, the other maids followed her, and then there were only students left, staring at one another with round, round eyes.
• • •
Mittie’s father had worked for the office of the prime minister. He wasn’t even a soldier. But he’d been in Paris, consulting with a general there, when a bomb from an airship blew him and his hotel to pieces.
• • •
Two more days passed, and Jesse still hadn’t let me know it was time to meet.
Unsurprisingly, I hadn’t heard a peep from Armand, either. When a boy tells you to bugger off, it usually means he’s done with you. For a while, at least.
I leaned out my window on my third night alone and studied the stars. With some effort, I’d been able to pry open my thousand-diamond window far enough so that if I pressed my body to the wall and let the stone take my weight, I could fit my head and shoulders through to the open air.
A night of patchy clouds and moon. A night with a tinge of purple but not that full, amazing saturation of color it sometimes had. The clouds were mauve lined with platinum, drifting against the tinsel stars.
The sea sloshed against the island bridge, regular as a heartbeat. It was oddly comforting to think that it would always do that, always be like that, no matter who won the war.
But it was the stars that fascinated me. I heard them singing now. Rather, I’d always heard them singing, but since Jesse, since I’d Turned to smoke, I heard them singing to me. Before it had always seemed as if they were just another chorus in countless strange choruses troubling my life. Now I heard the words.
dragon-girl, come, come, last of the chosen, beloved of our beloved, come up.
All three times I’d Turned to smoke in the grotto, I wanted to reach the stars so badly it obsessed me. I wasn’t sure what would have happened had I escaped the cavern. Would I have gone up and up? Would I have ever returned to earth, even for Jesse?
I couldn’t say. As I looked at them now, they winked and twinkled back at me like a fiery scattering of my most bosom friends.
There was only one way to find out.
I Turned to smoke, sifting up and out through the window.
They pulled at me right away, drew me in threads from the castle. I blew out over the liquid silver of the channel, marveling at the shrinking world, at a pod of seals darting beneath the surface of the waves. At the nests of gulls dotting the mainland cliffs beyond the island, eyes that stared and beaks that clattered.
Higher. The separation of land and sea below me was a jigsaw line of rough forest and fields edging rougher water.
yes, yes, you’re free like us! come up!
There were winds up here, brutal ones. I felt myself begin to tear in their currents and tried to duck down beneath them again, but they were too strong.
up!
This was bad. I was having difficulty holding myself together. Within minutes I’d been swept so far out to sea, I couldn’t even see the coast any longer. Everything was indigo and silver and dark, and the stars in their almost-purple heaven.
up!
I strained to obey. Attempting to slide beneath the river of wind only thinned me more; I gathered my strength and forced myself upward, becoming more like a blade than a sheet of vapor, and when I ripped free of the current I found myself in blessed calm, tumbling about until I was able to right myself and go calm, as well.
hello, sang the stars, their hallelujah chorus of lights twinkling now every color of the rainbow.
Hello! I would have sung back, a hallelujah of my own, had I a voice.
• • •
I Turned back to a girl inside Jesse’s cottage. He was in the bedroom; it was all very dark. I Turned by the pair of chairs near the back window, because there was a blanket slung over one of them and I used it as a wrap.
I stood there, feeling like I needed to catch my breath, although I wasn’t even winded.
I was wearing flesh again. I was firm inside a body, feet flat on the floor. I made a fist and pressed my nails into