The Deepest Night

“Good afternoon, ma’am.”

That night before dinner I visited the library. It was mostly deserted, only a trio of ninth-years at a table poring over a fashion magazine stuffed with drawings of coy, smiling debutantes in viciously expensive gowns.

I sent them a look; they returned it. None of us spoke, and they all went back to cooing over the gowns.

I had no interest in magazines, at least not in any of the ones Mrs. Westcliffe deemed suitable for proper young ladies. I’d come for a book I’d noticed in passing not long ago, one of the few books here that wasn’t about housekeeping or sewing or the care of husbands: Charts of the Principal Cities of the World, Including Railroad and Telegraph Lines.

It was large and heavy, with a jolly thick layer of dust along the top. I hefted it from the shelf and dropped it onto the nearest table, earning me another look from the trio, which I ignored.

I flipped through the pages. Buenos Aires, La Paz, Havana, New York. Cairo, Dakar, Cape Town, Riyadh, Angora, Budapest … Rome, Paris. London. Glasgow.

I squinted at the Glasgow page, which was indeed cobwebbed with lines representing every railroad and telegraph line imaginable. I turned to the previous page, which showed the city as a dot in the big, flat map that was Scotland.

Callander was inked in there, a speck on the page. It wasn’t even in southern Scotland, as the headmistress had claimed. From what I could tell, it was much nearer to the middle. Far from Wessex. Far from the impeccable Iverson School for Girls and the eligible youngest son of a duke.

I studied it a while longer, trying to measure the distance with my fingers, but all I could figure was that it was hundreds of miles north of where I was sitting.

Hundreds.

I rifled through the pages again until I found Prussia (principal cities: Berlin, Konigsberg). I didn’t know exactly where Aubrey’s medieval prison-ruin would be, but honestly, it hardly mattered. Prussia was huge and impossibly remote. Past England and the Channel, past all of France and Belgium, too. It made the distance to Callander look like a jaunt to a neighbor’s house.

I slapped the book shut, sending motes of dust aloft and forcing the trio to coo even louder over the absolutely dreamy smocking on a plaid taffeta dinner frock.

You’re waiting for the moment I Turn into something more than just smoke. You’re waiting for Lora the dragon.

Lora-of-the-moon, Jesse used to call me.

It’s not yet. But soon.

Chapter 7

To my great astonishment, the graduation ceremony was to take place out-of-doors, upon the wide, open green of Iverson’s front lawn. It was a picturesque enough setting, with the cerulean sky and trimmed grass, the rose gardens framing it all in pathways of flouncy bright blooms. Even the animal-shaped hedges looked nearly benign. But out-of-doors meant the sun, and the sun meant parasols, a bobbing sea of them above the audience in their wicker chairs, a handful more held by those of us stranded in our row upon the makeshift stage.

A patchy breeze tugged at the trim of our formal uniforms like a fussy toddler wanting attention.

The trim was black lace. Every inch of our formal uniforms, in fact, was black, because they’d been dyed that way about a month past to honor the death of our school patron’s eldest son.

Which meant that I was clad in the most stifling outfit imaginable from neck to toe, perspiring and miserable in the heat of the day, for no good reason. The breeze wasn’t strong enough to cool, and the parasol I’d been handed before being ushered up to the stage was also made of lace. I sat dappled in fiery sunlight.

“What a silly to-do,” Malinda was grumbling. As ever, she’d been seated at my side. “When we’ll be seeing all these same people at parties as soon as next week.”

“Some of us will,” Lillian corrected her, with a smug glance at me.

“Yes, I guess this is something for Eleanore to remember. You will remember it, won’t you, darling Eleanore? When you’re back with all the other sad, tatty orphans in your sad, tatty orphanage, mucking about in the Scottish slums?”

I gazed at the parasol sea before me, dark shade hiding porcelain faces, fans undulating, diamonds flashing. Silks and linens and hats and feathers. Servants weaving through with lemonade and champagne.

Not a single snatch of conversation I’d overheard had been about the war. It was all who had seen whom where, and when, and whom they’d been with, and what they’d been wearing.

“Oh, yes,” I said softly. “It would be quite impossible to forget such a magnificent display of affectation.”

It took Malinda a moment to untangle my sentence. Then she straightened, her cheeks going pink.

“Well! I like that! Here you are amid your betters, and you have the nerve to say something like that!”

“I have the nerve for rather a lot of things, actually.” I turned my head to hold her eyes. “You’ve no idea.”

“I don’t doubt it!”

“You seem indisposed,” I said, darkening my voice. “Indeed, darling Malinda, I fear you’re horribly ill.”

It wasn’t nice of me. I know that. But sometimes the best way to fight nastiness is with a good, sharp dose of something even nastier.

I turned away again as she began panting, pulling at the collar of her shirtwaist.

The very first row of the audience held the most important people, I assumed, because Mrs. Westcliffe was there, and some old men in fine coats, and one young man in particular at the end of the row, dressed in black like me, but with a starched white shirt and a dove-gray waistcoat and tie, and a ruby ring that wasn’t his on his right hand.

Like everyone else, Armand’s face was obscured by the shade of his hat. Unlike everyone else, however, I felt him staring at me. I could always feel it when he stared.

Malinda began to make small mewling noises under her breath. She sounded distressingly like a sick kitten.

I leaned in close. “You’re fine,” I said, and went back to gazing out past the parasols.

I hadn’t been able to tell Armand about Scotland. I’d smoked to his room twice since that night, but he’d never been there; I thought it likely he hadn’t been at Tranquility at all. I’d hoped it meant he’d gone to London, as he’d said, and sold my pinecone.

I had no intention of mucking about in slums any longer, not in Scotland or anywhere else. If Westcliffe wasn’t having me back next year anyway, there was no point in doing what the government or any of the adults ordered me to do.

I would take my money from Armand, purchase some decent traveling gear and a ticket to Someplace Else. I would empty my chest of gold into my suitcase, board a train, and not look back. Never mind Westcliffe and Armand and Jesse and the Splintered Sisters of the Holy Whatever. Not only was I magical, I now had means. If I desired to disappear, no one would ever find me.

After I was settled somewhere, I would think about—think about—rescuing Aubrey.

If Jesse truly expected me to risk my life for a stranger, he could damned well come to me in a dream and tell me so himself.

This is what I remember from the momentous 1915 Observance of Graduation at the Iverson School for Girls, Wessex, England:

Westcliffe taking the stage for her welcome speech, which was about—surprise!—the virtues of modesty