The Deepest Night

“I can smell the lake,” Armand said. “On the wind. It can’t be that far. We can walk it.”

I sighed. “Can you? On that leg?”

He rose to his feet. “Let’s find out.”

It wasn’t a house, after all. It was a hunting lodge by the lake, a rustic and gloomy and conveniently unoccupied one. It took us nearly three hours to get there, Armand’s arm slung about my shoulders, both of us lurching along through the mist. I’d rewrapped his head with a bandage and done what I could for the bite marks, but truly what we needed was a place to bed down.

The lodge was certainly that. It was two stories of stacked logs and glass, a fringe of moss clinging to the northern slope of its roof. We watched it for a while before venturing too close, but there were no lights glowing inside, no movement. No scent of people or meals cooking or anything but wood and water. I supposed it wasn’t hunting season yet.

We stole forward, ducking from pine to pine, just in case. I dashed up to the nearest window and pressed my palms against its frame, but it didn’t budge.

I’d scarcely discovered a good-sized rock to break the glass when Armand murmured my name.

I looked over. He was standing at the front door, which had swung wide open.

“Sometimes the simplest solution is the actual solution,” he said.

I dropped my rock to the dirt and followed him in.

It was far more elegant inside than I would have expected. The walls were still obviously rough-hewn logs, but the ceiling had been plastered, and the furniture was ornately carved and padded and polished. Green foggy light from the windows revealed a collection of crystal goblets glinting in a hutch. A medieval-looking shield hung above the hearth had been painted with heraldry, two peacocks and a knight’s grim, gray visor. A rusted sword hung above that, fixed with hooks into the stone.

Glass eyes gleamed from every wall. There were mounted animal heads wherever I looked. Deer, boars, rams. Bears and birds.

A single cobweb, delicate as elfin lace, stretched between the antlers of a buck.

“Enchanting decor,” I whispered, because beneath my sarcasm, I couldn’t shake the chill of those dead, watching eyes.

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Armand had limped over to a bookcase, studying the titles.

“That the person who owns this place is rather too fond of murdering innocent animals and chopping off their heads?”

“That without these human masks we wear, it might easily be our heads on those plaques.”

I shivered, enveloped in a sliver of that cool, greenish light.

“Let’s find a bedroom,” I urged. “Someplace soft.”

“Lora.” He ran a finger down the side of the case. “All of these books are in German. I think we’ve crossed the border.”

German books in a German lodge, in a hushed German wood. It felt awfully real to me then, even more real than bullets or cannons. Odd, I know. But standing there in that room, in the home of someone who no doubt would happily see me dead or, at the very least, subjugated, it made me realize how very far from my own home I was now. How far we both were.

And now, without my Turn, how vulnerable.

A mouse poked its head out from a gap in the timbers, saw us, squeaked, and jerked back.

Armand swayed. I caught him by the shoulders once more; he leaned heavily against me. I spoke into his shirt.

“I bet the bedroom is up that stairway over there. Can you do it? Come on, lordling, one step at a time.”

I’d been correct. Upstairs was a series of bedrooms, and I led us to the biggest, because it was the only one with a vantage overlooking the hazy lakefront. Should anyone approach, hopefully we’d see them or hear them before they made it to the door.

If we didn’t … there was still the pistol.

The bed was enormous, easily large enough for four (which made me wonder about both the size and the inclinations of its owner). The mattress had been stripped bare, but all the clean linens and blankets were in a trunk at its foot, so it didn’t take long to make it up.

“You’re quite good at that,” Armand observed, seated in an ugly leather chair by the door. He’d wanted to help, but I’d made him sit. I was glad I had when I saw how he’d tried to hide his wince as he stretched out his leg. He reclined back and watched me work with those unnaturally bright eyes.

As soon as this was done, I was going find some water to scrub away all the dried blood on his face.

“Experience,” I said. “We suffered a scandalous lack of maidservants at the orphanage.”

“I’m beginning to suspect this orphanage of yours wasn’t nearly the utopia you’ve always boasted it was.”

“Oh, right. You know me, forever boasting about what a ripping good time it is to be an orphan.”

“It always is in fairy tales,” he said innocently.

I snorted. “Have you actually read any fairy tales? Orphans fare the worst of anyone. We were lucky they didn’t decide to roast us and eat us for dinner, come to think of it.”

“Ah, dinner,” Mandy said, closing his eyes.

Of course. One more task before I could rest. I hoped Mr. Hunter kept his larder well stocked. One couldn’t live off chopped-up woodlands creatures alone, surely.

“There’s something I forgot to tell you,” Mandy said, eyes still closed.

“What?”

“Well, I didn’t forget, precisely. But I … I wonder if it really happened.”

“What?” I said again, impatient, tucking in a corner of sheet.

“Back there this morning, back in the woods with the villagers, before everything went so wrong … there was this moment. This girl, I mean.”

I glanced up.

“And she … I could swear that as soon as I told everyone that we were dragons—hardly, I don’t know, an instant before it all blew to hell …”

“What?” I demanded, crossing to stand before him.

“I said that we were dragons, and she said, ‘Drakon.’”

I stared at him, speechless. His eyes opened. He looked up at me soberly.

“She was fourteen. Fifteen. Reddish hair. Different from the other villagers, you know? Different. Like us. And I … I couldn’t see all of her, but I don’t think she was wearing any clothing.”

“Are you saying—”

“Then she vanished. Right in front of my eyes, she vanished. Without smoke, without anyone else even noticing.”

I sank into a squat before him, my hands light atop his knees.

“Sounds like a hallucination,” I said carefully.

“I know.”

“But you don’t think it was?”

“I was struck on the head after that, Eleanore.”

“Then perhaps you heard her wrong.”

He eased back again, evading my gaze. “Perhaps.”

“And perhaps she seemed to vanish but was merely caught up in the crowd. They were rushing you then, weren’t they?”

“No.”

“Armand!” I dropped all the way down to the floor. “I’m sorry, but you’re asking me to believe that this girl, this villager in the middle of bloody Belgium nowhere, knew what you were, what we are, that she herself may have been one of us, and then, poof, she’s gone? No smoke or anything?”