“It’s a symbol for the sort of men who’ve never had to fish to eat, and who would board a steamer only if it were one of style. You were born on a boat, you know.”
Every muscle in my body went rigid. “What?”
“Not a boat,” he corrected himself. “A steamship. A big one.”
“Jesse—”
“Aye, I got that from the stars. But that’s all they’ll say of it. Believe me.”
I lay there, my mind spinning, trying to make sense of this gift I’d been so casually given. Trying to seize hold of its enormity.
I knew something about my past now. I knew.
A steamship! I’d only ever seen adverts for them in the papers. They were huge, sharp-edged iron monsters topped with funnels big enough to swallow whole homes, far too massive to dock anywhere near London. They had names like Mauretania, Lusitania, Olympic.
So I hadn’t spent my entire life in the city, as I’d thought. Once I’d known the ocean and at least a port town.
“Water dragon,” Jesse whispered. “If you don’t accept the duke’s invitation, people will talk.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“I know you don’t. But it’s not merely you who will be affected by this.”
“Really? You like Armand so much?” I heard the skepticism in my voice.
His chest expanded on a long inhalation, lifting the upper half of me with it, since I had draped myself over him. “Star adores dragon. Although I wouldn’t say I adore him precisely, or even like him. It’s more that … now that you’ve come, now that his powers are awakening, I’m connected to him. Like brothers, almost. And we don’t get to choose our families.”
“If you say so.”
“We’re in a bubble here, Lora. The island, the school, even the countryside. We’re all encased in a beautiful bubble, and the war seems far beyond our ken. But it’s not. Anything might happen. It won’t hurt to have Armand on your side, no matter what comes.”
“On our side, you mean,” I said sharply.
“Yes. That’s what I meant.”
I chewed on my lip. “I wish …”
He waited, no sense of urgency in his body or his breathing, only his customary, contemplative peace.
I tipped my face to see him. “I wish all this was over,” I said. “I wish there was no war and that I wasn’t in school. I wish I didn’t have to do what everyone else says and that we could just … be. Together. The two of us.”
… us-us-us …
I don’t know if he heard the question beneath my tone, if it was as blazingly obvious as I feared it was, or too smothered to detect. But Jesse lowered his lashes and met my eyes; he looked much more like himself now than he had a few nights ago. Clear gaze, golden glow. Summer storms behind the green.
“We’ve all the time in the world,” he said, and bent his head for a kiss, one of those sweet drowning ones that filled me with nectar and honey.
I hoped it wasn’t a guess, but I didn’t have the nerve to find out. I wanted too badly to believe him.
• • •
I walked into my room the next afternoon following tea and realized at once that it had been violated.
Not that you could tell by looking. It looked just as it should: bed made, furniture dusted, floor swept, pitcher of clean water. Everything looked right.
But it wasn’t.
I stood poised at the doorway, my eyes reflexively searching for what they couldn’t see. Sight didn’t help; my other senses did.
The air feathered a chill across my skin.
It tasted of chemical perfume, of jasmine and sugar.
And the music of my tower had changed. Gruffer, coarser, a cry of warning rising from the golden buttercup and oval leaf tucked in the armoire, taken up now by my cuff—but the circlet of roses was silent. In its place wavered a thin new song, one I’d heard only once before.
I crossed to the bureau and opened the drawer where I had stored the circlet, stuffed behind my stockings …
… and pulled out instead Mrs. Westcliffe’s green sapphire ring.
“Well, sod you, too, Chloe,” I muttered, and clamped my fingers hard around it.
I raised my chin, closed my eyes, and listened. She couldn’t have been here that long ago. I’d been gone only an hour, and her syrupy scent still polluted everything. She’d taken my brooch … where?
Downstairs. Its song came to me high and faint.
Not the wing housing my fellow students. Not the teachers’ wing, either, which was a relief. And she hadn’t taken